Monthly Archives: May 2021

Coping, by the lake

I’ve been pretending
Just like you
Never comprehending
The best of you
And me
And the best of you

The years crept in
While I’ve been pretending
To understand the reckoning
To come

How are we to understand 
This simple but grand 
Grand design 
To which we’re assigned  

I’ve survived by laughing 
All my nervous white-water rafting 
Pulsing forward and mapping
The rapids snapping God’s thin wrapping
Clapping blindly along with the cohort you done trapped me in: 

Confounded corporate colleagues
Desperate despots desperately diseased
Ungrateful lovers gone to snores
Badly maligned hookers and whores
Bratty kids
Career skids
Age defeating us all
Father’s sudden fall
Blot clots dropping
My best buddy shopping
At Target
The ruin of us all
The mall, the goddamned mall 
Tear it all, tear it all
Down

May we just be
In peace
Increase our ease
Ah, consider these wild geese before ye as they float without strain or pain into the main thing, that jet-stream-thing, that thing that’s some god’s invisible dream driving all pollination, all elation, all cosmic fellation, the seedlings going deep, all sharing our
All sharing our caring hearts with one another
Consider these geese
Cease your seizing, your wheezing
And breathe
And breathe
And end
End
Pretending

American River

Stella, Rebounding

Marco is a fantastic lover
I’m telling you the hours
The sheer flexibility not only of limb but mind my my
My, my
I’m telling you we flower
Marco is a fantastic lover

Why, just look there:
The agile thoughtfully silent nimble elegance of his tip toeing out my disheveled room
Half-clad pre-dawn to attend rehearsal on time
The dentist, his accountant, or something
Well, a finer gentleman Yahweh hath never crafted
A genius so cunning with his tongue

The blinding suns of Los Angeles are massaging me in their gauzy white glow
I am nourished dear ones
I am nourished and I shall flourish and I am not blind
Just wise
Wise, my dears, to the singularity of the moment
So please
Please
Let me be

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The Process

Dusk obtains and breezes shift how?
Your eyes note the adjustment but not the transition
You’re left struggling for something to say

How to paint this marriage of devolving light and insight evolving on some canvas of noise with extant oils and powdered pigments made only of the invisible machinations of your mind

Your ears perk as this babel of birds now ebbs like the slowing chorus of corn kernels popping in mother’s ancient microwave before those anticipated movie nights, those nights of ancient anticipation

“Is this not the finest onslaught of metaphor you’ve grappled to obedience?”
Your mouth is discovered smiling
The mysterious construct of your ego, pleased
“No one will ever understand but I understand and it is good.”

Night triumphs again and you commit your fingers to the dance
Drawing letters in patterns that bind us and propel us and disgust us and seduce us
Reduce us to the frail persuadable dummies we convince ourselves we shall never be but all
All fundamentally are

Your dancing continues and succumbs to your spasm of limbs
Beating at air as if pounding the tribal drums that signal something like strength
Something like the ever-moving matter seeking a place to collide and then I guess see what happens
Like you did with the dregs of your experiments in chemistry class clandestinely stowed in the back of the locker in the slowly filling test tube which one day just might end this all
Or cohere to useless sludge
Or satisfying slime
Or simply birth
A chrysalis

You dance and you bray like a jackass because somehow this liberates you and somehow it does always work
The puzzles remain before you but the familiar frenzied fever to fill in every last empty square has taken leave
And so now you seek someone to kiss and molest and hope they molest you in return in the wild jackass abandon you just displayed on the disco floor
Perhaps the flailing inspired another who will meet your pattern and ride the waves with you to the shore
You cry to them: “What’s poison for Pete may be manna for me!”
And you laugh
And they laugh too and the wave. just. does. not. want. to. end.

Well,
That’s the dream anyway in these nights you are reminded of your persistent exposure to a vastness that cares little for your rituals yet the indifference makes the rituals and reminders all the more resonant to you 

It feels awfully good to sweat through your nice clothes and to drink the cold sweet concoctions  that provide momentum for your howling

It feels awfully good to fall in a safe soft place and surrender yourself to unconsciousness muttering an echoing refrain of our  Lord’s Prayer each heartbeat further depressing  the wah-wah pedal in this fading concert of a night well spent

To know time and duration but feel none of it as it occurs
To know
O

Come morning, you cradle coffee and stare at trees

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Happy Anniversary. Here’s a poem! Wait, this year is crystal? Oh. Oh dear…

I asked your daddy for your hand in a letter
Every warming year we got better and better
Our droughts got hotter, our floods got wetter
Like you, the moon’s a riser
Like me, the sun’s a setter
A clenched jaw in-your-face fretter 
A jilted lover’s torn-up sweater (strewn across my dorm room floor that night,  remember?)
So, yeah, we only got this rusty water in our oily red rusted kettle
And nothin’ else
But it’s enough 
It’s enough

In this calamity 
This vapid loud city
Messianic mess most definitely  
Like you, it’s real real pretty
Like me, the poetry’s real real shitty 
And barely witty 
An ugly unloved bitty
A sour off key ditty 
But it’s enough 
It’s enough

And it’s enough I say enough
Deeper than pink fluff
Softer than sand paper rough
Like you, it takes no guff
Like me, it’s besieged by stuff
Silky but tough
Tethered to you in this paper handcuff
And it’s enough
It’s enough
Cause I got you 
Yeah I got you
And

I I
Love love
You you you you you!

Mwah!

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