Yesterday morning I observed you
From my living room
Via my drone
Tee hee hee
You sat at the cafe table for two
With your eight year old son
And gazed lovingly into your smartphone
Tsk tsk tsk
I left my soft warm perch
Braved the cold stairway and sidewalk air
And beat you to death with my selfie stick
Tee hee hee
Somewhere in this room exists the kernel of our mutual betrayal
The faded breath of the fantasy, the faint trace of a dream for one who should have never slept in our bed
I don’t know who encountered it first nor how nor why nor why we can’t find it now
But the silent whisper in our minds still echoes and a seething hate is born
So that every mistake one makes in the dishwasher or with the clumsy toothpaste cap
Escalates into napalm blasts sprung deep from our diaphragm, seeking, soon finding the targets back deep in the soul
I agree with you that I’ve lived my entire life as a midlife crisis
Yet nothing prepared me for our slow grinding agony, our actual crisis at midlife, our soap opera better mocked when it appeared on tv or in the tabloids
There will be no ponytails or Porsches
Until this is all over
Sadly the end feels as elusive as this kernel we hope to find and squash out
We know somewhere in this consciousness it’s done but we require the planting of that actual seed
The suffering of emergence, the revelation, the mutual deaths of our pride
It’ll be the last thing we ever share. And there’s respect and closure and real life in that
Help me end this with you
How do I tell you this class picture day
Some will not make it through?
How do I encourage you to hold them now
Every last yucky one of them
Carve them deeply into the folds of your mind
Produce high fidelity remembrances of the joy you now share, despite the unsure jabs you throw and absorb, as you stutter-step-stumble to find some sense of place in this wild order of things?
So when that moment comes long from now
Not so long
To crack the covers of the album
Or however one does these things these days
To encounter your hair and missing teeth and sloppy clothes again
You can enjoy those now gone
Again as real as before, or nearly so
Because, my boy, some won’t make it through
More than you’d imagine
In the blink of an eye
Today, I encountered topacio althaus for the first time. She regularly sets up a small table and typewriter at our local farmers market, with a sign asking for a topic and a price, promising a poem at the end of the transaction.
My sister-in-law approached ms. althaus with a financial offering and a suggested topic of our young children: brother and sister and cousin, one of them a newborn, one three, one four. Here now is the poem that resulted:
I too took up the challenge of the topic and created the following on my phone:
I made no money.
A good day for poetry.
And berries:
Yes yes and please more yes
Tell me again how old I am
Whisper wrinkle free how irrelevant my culture has become
Yes yes and please more yes
Join me in this haze of conventional whiz dumb
And allow me to wring my worried hands over your imminent decline
Attending the ascendance of your lost generation
Yes yes and more please yes
Throw up any barriers you can young man
My convalescing mates will gladly dance that most removed of dances
And chant that invocation of phantom castes
Yes yes and more please yes
If you’re paying attention you will come to realize in fleeting seconds there is this ease to tapping the deep trenches of pain
In such a moment the moods can shift and the cool crisp happiness of a cloudless and hopeful Fall morning will chill further so that the bright disposition is revealed to mask a wet muddy sadness
Maybe not depression but certainly a deflation and a slowing
A drifting into subtle agony begging one to succumb further by the breath
Instinct – if I’m listening well – tells me not to run from this or coat it in a Teflon gloss
Instinct says stay here for a spell, the tilt is trying to tell you something
Well instinct I’m ready to receive whatever it is on this plate before me
But please let’s make it quick
I have a meeting I need to get to and in business there is nothing worse than a gloomy colleague and yes I’m hoping for a raise so I don’t want to be that guy, if you know what I mean, the late guy all depressed and weepy. Ug.
I’m waiting
I’m open
I’m in
How do those words feel falling from your mouth?
These ideas you’ve scoffed so long and now own?
How far removed from the orbit of your soul do you find yourself today?
Has the reality of the failure begun to set in?
Or have you just accepted this dry wrinkle your days have become?
Let the humorless warm bath of rigid frigidity soak in?
And is this all just okay?
You fuck.
You mother fuck.
Feeling good?
Proud of yourself and this language, these narrow thoughts in which you’ve jailed your imagination?
May you always remember the late night you gazed up from the earth and felt profound irrelevance and omnipotence all at once, the understanding you possessed in that instant.
May you never forget how you have forgotten that!
We have our schtick cold
Elevator pitches practiced in the car
Eloquent confidence fragrant and profound
Sly wisdom blasting for the mirror
Until we’re caught and cut
Off guard to dodge the newborn unexpected thrust
Sputter to parry
Spittle we’re buried
Done, lukewarm, and done
Generally speaking, this brownish-red mole right here on my left shoulder, just here on the deltoid, kept me awake last night from 11:50pm to 4:20am with anxiety.
It’s ironic because it’s the very same mole I worried about earlier that day, and you and I both know that.
Needless to say.
Specifically, all the people who participate in the broader medical field and who discuss issues like these and other issues frighten me.
I’m paraphrasing but my doctor said these exact words that I recorded in my iPhone, “Get that mole removed now!”
Fortunately, it’s malignant.
bah
