All posts by BonWagner

The Unwelcomed Guest

Free Form, Navel Gazing

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

Free Form, Meta

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

Family Life, Free Form, Love, Mourning, Youth

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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Fella. Love, Stella

Love, Stella
I found you before you found me
But never ever, ever never
Did our soft souls meet
 
‘Twas desire, our glands, 
Our oven mitt hands, 
fumbling, bumbling, stumbling:
there, there, and
there 
 
Fella
  
those nights
those nights
those nights
 
Fella
 
And then the shenanigans began 
That strange vacation
When I walked in and out but back again
Caught your commonplace sin 
The couch and cushion
Kissin’, pushin’, kissin’
 
I called you a dollar
You called me a whore
Are our lives so much better than they were 
Than they were 
Those days before?
 
Fella
 
When the wallets you wore
Were hooked by a chain
And you never even bothered
To ask my real name
 
You let your beard grow 
Like all your friends did
We called you unique
Like the tattoos your long sleeves hid
 
Fella, you ain’t got no call
Fella, there ain’t no grace in your fall
Fella
 
Maybe it’s time we break and call this quits
I’ll spend half my lifetime recovering from the feel of your zits
On my tits
Itty bitty bits
Betrayals and tricks
Ah crap!
Give me a kiss
On my sour, sour lips
My sour, sour lips
 
Fella
 
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k-paso in duh neighborhood

Family Life, Free Form, Love, Poetry
Hey Luke!
 
Look, listen:
Lou kissin
Some broad named Tammy 
 
Look, listen:
Lou kissin
Some broad named Mandy 
  
Look, listen:
Lou kissin
Some broad named Alexandra 
 
Oh yeah, Luke, listen: 
Lou pissin 
Off the neighborhood broads
 
You got Tammy and Mandy and some broad called Alexandra
Wah wah – Alexandra – wah wah 
Doopelee dupe duh dee dang dee dang dang 
 
Lou listen: 
Luke’s kissin
Yo momma in duh Kmart parking lot
 
Alexandra! Time for your streusel and viola practice 
 
Get home girl!
 
 
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in the moment

Love, Poetry

hold me close
keep watch
and remind me always
of tonight
this ease and flow
in the warm breezes
desserts we share
with no calorieeses

I couldn’t love anything more than I love you now
in this moment
I couldn’t love life, god, you, me,
nor whatever god wants to be
more
I couldn’t love history and all its agony and disease
nor evolution nor the seven seas
no, I couldn’t love them more
my cells are not equipped
the butterflies have flipped
every move and perfect breath
another step from perfect death

keep this with me
never let me forget
because at times
too many, you bet
I fear upending
the up ending
is what life has in store
forever and ever
and evermore

 

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Alarm Bells Are Ringing

Family Life, Free Form, Love

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

 

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