awaiting the diagnosis/I need/selfish motives


yours,
that should have arrived days ago

the email silence - no different than the phone unringing,
like the sad bells of Rhymney,
those bells, asking questions
instead of singing and pealing,
so
in my yeah yeah peculiar accented english which
screams robustly in a whisper

dudewhatgivescluemein*

in a single breath, rushed as if but just one word

believe me,
my motive purely selfish
needy for a celebration
hope from a crisis avoided, originating a new seed modified,
two planted for a future spirit tree available for more than
just two poets regardless of their limited coastal biases

negative that too
a selfishness for me
cause I come willing
to exercise my
heart shoulders and arms to trim our mutualized sails,
keep our mind's eyes focused aside
towards the good bad the great in life's littlest things

I need
you to reassure me
that my own mortality,
which can only thrive,
with your poetry voice alive and
keeping track of the absurdity of the
worlds tomfoolery and lighting fast trickery
so I will be stronger longer


I need
you to make me sweet smile when you regale
with dog licking face moment tales
have to cease here for reasons evidently inexplicable

so in summary
what ere the word be,
the outlook commandeering you,
I need

~
from the anthology of the unwritten,
from the tombs of the stillborn,
where carcasses of idled titles and orphaned stanzas
do not compete for proof of life,  
and
nameless birth certificates unissued,
yellowing and wasting midst
crumbling aleph bet spawn

here
comes a poem of concession
comes a poem of summation
of a life lived, knotted poorly, not well,
worse cursed as vanilla inadequate

the satisfaction in the writing,
the gleeful breaking of the sac,
the gushing relief giving way to
the childbirth of a new moon-poem,
arrested, wrested

a single plague affliction,
the cancer of weakness,
means Pharaoh wins

the cancer of weakness
no cure, no pharmaceutical poultice,
spreads insidious; one day - pain in the remote,
your big toe, then
next you can only street stagger
begging forgiveness and the kindness of strangers
hoping for the accidental cure of touch,
the miscellany lottery ticket probability of low chance

the visible mark you leave,
a weak indentation upon a pillow,
it is the dented head, cut deep by the shadow,
shake it out and you're a disappeared one,
nothing to show,  
did someone once sleep here?

you were once upon a time
binary
a 1
now a 0 -
flip flop bottom top,
listening to Frank's "That's Life"^

my litany too long;
woeful work this business of flailing,
posting a tired-out self help love poem
ain't no cure for the falling-out-of-love
black and blue, self-inflicted bruising blues,
the wrists ache
the bones don't freak
but squeal, somebody's squeezing me

the alarm clock, a death knell,
everyone saying don't worry  
you got a proven record,
the boss's eyes twinkling
"but what have you done for me lately?"

funny

Death says
Hey, aren't you the boss?
Who shall over rule thy Dominion?
What have thy done to yourself lately?

Answer: never end a poem with a question mark @
3:06am

Of Baseball, Poetry and the Human Condition




~~

From  “The Art of Fielding.”* by Chad Harbach

"You loved it,” he writes of the game (baseball), “because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about the Human Condition.

The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not."

~~
and thus, the circling noose grows ever small,
binding the obvious and unblinding the oblivious

more than the mere, poetry in baseball, for both forms of art,
knowledge intuited from watching the catcher's body weave
this way and that, a dancer en pointe, arms raised in worship,
addressing the heavens with a body's broad brush strokes,
all to catch with concentrated skill, a lazy, towering popup,
climaxing oft with an exclamation point -
a perilous desperation leap
into the dugout encampment of the inimical opposition

yeah, yeah, sure, sure,
you knew that,

tho daring to verbalize same,
before the age of thirty,
presumed maturity,
was not an act of the sane of heart,
or the sound of mind with body melded

what you dared not admit was that the conditional principle,
was primal and not tangential, though perhaps,
some itinerant fathers foolishly mumbled incoherently
of life's linkages and motifs parallel

of
that desperate beauty, the ferric magnetic irony,
that our full access pass to envisioning the finery,
imaging the stuff of our own daily creation genesis,
whether concocting undisciplined disassembled parts,
called words,
into a singular line, a stanza that froze your lungs from
the boredom of the regularity of heaving and breathing,

was in no way different
than the curvature of the boy's arm
in desperation outstretched, seeking spectacular safety for
a well hit ball of cork into a worn leather mitten and thus
confirming his humanity to the watching tribal membership

and these momentary moments of momentousness,
will live forever until we die, judged of equal stature,
a soldiers stripes, ribbons of his theaters of service,
medals of the honor and the errors of his own
truthful, youthful and crucial
human condition