Category Archives: Free Form

I See You’re Speaking At (Insert Name Of Conference Here). May I Introduce Myself After Your Talk?

When I encounter you in this moment you’ve imagined but are surprisingly unprepared for, the moment your remarks are done, when you’re now eye to eye with me and those who scheduled this time to edify ourselves, you are now genuinely trying to hear my gentle inquiry and probing of your generally sane yet safely anodyne advice, I’m aware I am seeing signs of sorrow in the crease around your eyes as they squint to quell the mounting pressure of the sadness in your soul, the endless years enduring your parents’ neglect and disapproval and disappointment.

We meet at this conference and, now the encounter is occurring, you find this is what surprises you, I surmise: the thing you’ve thought about and prepared for for so many dreaming hours is taking its place in history and the sadness is telling you the history is passing you by, the great hope so surprisingly and swiftly squandered, just as mommy and daddy had feared.

I admired the you up on that dais moments ago and I must say I admire the you here now in this moment too for fighting the good fight, the naive and losing fight to put yourself outside of your own humanness and raise yourself even ever so slightly, ever so momentarily above the fray away from the riff raff and the smells – you’re judgemental, sure – but you’re trying to be good – as we stand this same ground and, yes, now you’ve found it, there it is now, you enter the realm of your more prepared remarks and the sorrow signs disappear and we exchange the time honored banalities and we feel certain we have done well, the registration fee worth every labor, and we exchange cards and head separately for the open bar.

This is a highlight moment in our careers one perhaps we’ll write about after fielding countless requests for book-length insights and wisdom, but that fate is yet to be determined, though I clearly imagine that glory-filled future as I awkwardly wave ta-ta from across the crowded lounge clutching the awkward glass of Chardonnay, another day’s work done.

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Aging Actor Agonizing As Again He Faces His Familiar Face In The Glowing Glass Of An Underground Dressing Room Somewhere Out There Tonight

Nightly I face thee to efface me
My most dear
My most somber sober friend

Hear me now
You
Who only live in light

The self is illusion
Mine, an allusion to an imagined self we collude to enjoy and endure for an hour or more
So many allusions
So many selves
So many concocted lifetimes
So many carefully crafted entanglements, each anxiety endlessly examined and fondled and absorbed and displayed
So. Much. Makeup.

It is a tedious life

The best of us are empty:
Tin barrels played upon by expert hands
Begging for meaning
Begging for another goddamned job
Begging pleas: “oh, please
Let me be seen
again and again”

There is worth, mind you, but only briefly in that moment we momentarily share
In the allusion to the unwieldy illusion we unendingly share
There is worth
Then
But soon we bow and the magic swells and breaks and the breakdown begins anew

Again to seek our mark
Find our light
Call our agent
And hope for the unwritten cue

React and repeat
React and repeat
Reacting, repeating

Tedium

Ah, mon dieu, it’s time,
Yes, the time has come
Places, everyone

Inhale
Lights out
Powder and disappear

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Love In The Present Epoch

What’s happening with me?
Maybe it’s you, do you feel it too, what’s happening with you?
Maybe it’s the artisanal wine we’ve sipped, so so good, so
Satisfying inside and so affordable too?
Maybe it’s this rain and the song that Spotify just chose?

I’ve truly never felt this close with someone, it’s like the lines have blurred
Our merging hearts caressing
You and I sitting here, legs folded, facing one another
You leaning in to me
Our foreheads touch softly, just enough so that I encounter the strength and armor of your skull but also the kindness of your mind
And perhaps your soul
Each message you’re sending so soft and clear and unique to you yet classic like memes passed down from the ancients
Our faces aglow

Gosh, it’s amazing to me
I’ve never texted like this before
I pray to some all-knowing all-powerful intelligence to let this moment never end and our batteries never die and our wifi never hiccup and our thumbs never tire

Your texts are so intimate tonight
Oh damn, that emoji really turns me on, I’m typing so fast

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Know Thyself

All I’ve known is the known darkness
The isolation from you
The loneliness of me
I suppose this has been the great tragedy, the one I’ve suspected all along
I just want you to know me

Dearest, I just want to be known
I just want to be known so someone can tell me who I am

And, my love, when you know me, it’s true: I will seek the same quiet shelter alone
Find that unused absence of light
Wallow in the lost library
Unseen, blind in the contradiction
As long suspected
In unplanned dreams
In wild lapses
Vino’s veritas

I swear it pains me, it does, dear, as if, as if it were some epic trauma
As if I had once been some exalted god on high, now fallen
Called to this earthy morass of light and dark
Ecstatic pain and agony joy

And I swear
Oh yes on my dearest breath I vow
I will always, I suspect, always blame you, blameless unknowing
Companion

Know me, dear
Mommy daddy lover offspring lord
Know me and tell me who I am

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A still life observed while enjoying an early evening perfectly warm stroll along the Boardwalk near the sea.

I nearly passed by it
Co-workers on the beach quiet
Lee kissing Lim
Burning skin in intense city dreams
These are the dreams
The dreams life is made of
The dreams it’s so good to be out of

The awe

Fists clenched still
Life presents endless cycles
Endless eruptions of fear elation anxiety
And peace
Even still
In this still, still life

Ah

It’s so good to be out of the office

Neck rolls and shoulder shrugs
Breathe in and close the eyes
Allow the peace to come and call
Leagues below
The depths the soul
The death of the soul

Ah

Fists unclenched
Eyes wide revealing it now
Ah, see them still
Life, why don’t I have this still

Soft sands soft hands
Limber lips
A melting sun

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The Unwelcomed Guest

I am enjoying this party

The perfect panoply
Perfume and personality
Casual yet clean
The right display of food
The right dosage of wine
The deep toke
A drag or two – what the heck – three!

For the first time in recent memory, I’m attending an event buzzing, content, finally alive
The conversation is easy but real
It confronts one with momentary pause, open wonder
Before tripping easily into warm laughter and a wash of well being

It’s a gentle eureka, this paradise party
Existing, it appears, in immortal splendor

Till now

Yeah – yep – knew it – I fucking knew it! – there it is
Again, the dreaded vibration
The rusted cheese grater of your voice seeping through the thick walls and dense haze of music and connection
The stale garlic of your essence invading my membranes
Drowning me in renewed disgust

Your body enters the room
Again, I find – again!- Fuck! – again? –
Yes, I’m confronted with my own empty inadequacy
My ugly pettiness and low thinking
My fraudulent membership in the tribe
Made ever more clear by this appearance at the door:
You!

Eden has fallen

Now all the warmth flows your way, the loudest honoree I could imagine
(And noisome too!)

I just don’t see it
But they do
Perhaps, were I they, I would too
But I am not they
And they – no! – Goddamnit! – they do not
They take no notice as I fade into the wall
Unseen, forgotten
Whatever happened to…

And so now the night returns us to our status quo:
Another party ruined
Another annihilation of innocent vulnerable dreams
Another pint of premium vanilla vanishing
The sad white man awash in another stale white man’s sour monologue glowing blue from the oversized plastic miracle flowing with electrons and Internet

Comfort – diabetes – dull, dull, yet certain
Rot
And pain

Thanks. Thanks a lot – asshole.

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Why I Write Poetry

I feel vulnerable and alone
Like my mom and dad didn’t love me enough.
And I’m pretty damn sure
You have no idea what that’s like.

I like things in nature.
Things like flowers and the ocean and certain animals.
And I think they are really beautiful.
Because you don’t understand how beautiful they are,
I need to show you.

I want you to think I was touched.
By God.
Or a pervert.
It doesn’t matter.
As long as I’m the victim.
And the star.

I hate poetry.
I don’t understand poetry.
So I write poetry.
See?

My wish is you will see the world through my mind and understand just how amazing I am and how hard my life has been and therefore want to smother me with kisses and money (and honey if you’re kinky)

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The Wild Parrots of Malibu

When we would roam and fly the streets
Onward weaving freedom rides, gentrifying in the wild idyll
On foot on board on bicycle
Salt kiss breezes floating our flowing limbs, our gangly hair, ill-worn cloth and nylon
The Point Dume Bombers were active and alive!
Hey, dear valley, go home, we cried
Retreat with your refuse through oven-walled canyons to the unseen hinterland
Retreat!

When we would squawk and bark the repertoire
Limited, yes and at all hours, yes
Mythologizing the day’s frolic in the sea
Where we daydreamed among waves we called our own, origins unknown and unimagined
Calls of awesome, rad, yar, outer dude!
Burning skin in quick glimpses seen
Wanting to linger across the more virgin skin
Unveiled by a quest for color or the blow of whitewash
That touch so far before us

What filled our minds but the imagined adventure and dark intrigue we gathered from the muffled drunken roars heard late in the night through poorly insulated walls of shoddy renown
Dead whales on the beach
Dead marriages everywhere fouling our neighborhood air
We’d witness TV stars at gasoline pumps, scratching desperate lotto cards
Witness that nothing is certain
No matter how high, how gleaming
Your newly-born platinum wall

When we were parrots we saw more than we understood
Intuiting lessons at the edge of a continent where the outcast and the privileged all lay claim to the intolerable beauty no one can ever let in, lest all pride dissolve back to Malibu dust
And back to Malibu sand
Madness conceived when land meets sea, when fire and water collide
As they everyday do in this thin long burg

When we were wild and knew nothing of the strangeness of death
Only the permanence of parents
Their frailty and conundrum

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