cheating life

when that day comes, officially,
maybe, anyway, someday here,
yo! made it through the pandemic,
y’all backslap and affirmatively robust
announce: dude! you cheated death!

maybe I’ll smile, maybe cry, maybe, nah, surely
both, cause we now be practiced in arts of survival,
I’ll reply the real trick is not to cheat death,
that don’t require much, just careful preparation

my file still not closed, and will be unsealed,
seen both what was done to me, what I did,
on my own, insufficient smiling, inadequate crying,
everyones imbalance cain forehead-charted

so when you examine your empire on your face,
think not you cheated death, you’re a stud,
no siree, think about how you cheated, cheated
yourself out of life, with insufficient risk taking

don’t be stupid, don’t mean going out w/o a mask,
ignoring social distancing. that’s just common sense,
what I’m talking ‘bout, taking that chance, falling
in love, and doing it again and again, before you

cheat yourself out of life...

all my poems are unique general principles

~for Helene Mendelsohn~

“A general principle never comes to life in my mind except by exhibiting itself in various special forms and in
crowds of instances for each form":  
R.G. Collingwood

each a construct - an arch-i-texture,
each a crowd of a single instance
special forum, a dialogue differentiation,
a conjugate particle,
forming up, in marching order,
a singular troop, a base case singular,
a soldier especially demanding,
“Of Me, Write, Write”

for within my insight,
a one-off sighting,
one glinting wave reflecting,
its one millisecond exactitude of existence,
reforming unseemly, a new but not!

a seemingly similar shifted shape,
but no wave is a precision repetition,
perhaps a passing familiarity
of its precedents, antecedents,
at best

an instance borrowed and paid back
to the generosity of time
for a fully developed statement of a
general principle,
even a primary secondary textual emendation,
requires a unique naming definition

being born and dead dying while you are blinking,
does not understate absolute value,
a principle exists to give absolution,
so the moments resets,
perpetually,
but its own resolution is n’err forgotten

do you see the crowd of inferences
herein contained?

the principal unique,
poem plucked from passing sun ray,
a tickling hair of a brazen breeze,
one wave, one wave reconstituting a
millennium of preceding lives,
deriving its abbreviated genealogy
of droplets of prior principles
forever reinterpreted

so I gave you back
words you knew
but in a new combination
establishing this poem,
its constituents,
as a unique general principle

there is a prior poem, new, unique
in everything

lesson #1: in the beginning, all poems on Earth were formless

on blended knee, the approaching, humility, raging, barely  
tempered by a gale force need, the forthcoming yoga pose of compose

you have urgings, mostly in a blink of an eye,
then going, gone notions, the writing is so a losing effort,
you turn the paper’s aperture sideways hoping to get an
inside straight insight,
but the poem refuses to come, the creation ******
delayed is torturous and the poem birthing, even worse

so you revert to basics to give the formless a shape,
recalling  a child’s learning that in the beginning:

“the earth was formless and void,
darkness was over the surface of the deep,
and the Spirit of God was hovering
over the surface of the waters.…”

so you insert a single sheet of 20Lb bond paper,
sliding the typewriters carriage smooth swift  
over to the starting gate hell’s bell, typewriter machine smell erotically exciting creative fluids boiling,
typing, laughing out loud, forming entree to the hinted hallway
of a womb opening to a crafting with three words:

                               in the beginning