Sometimes the beautiful things of the world are just between me and God. No reason to bring Instagram or Facebook into it.

Today we go to war

Against the dogs we once loosed
Slaying the dark things that
Long ago
Held us in ******* with
Those heavy chains
A burden we could not bear

Until we were set Free

I burn the midnight oil
I eat the midday heat
I choose to be the whipping boy
I let someone else take my seat

They gather, their knives aren't hidden
They line up, fighting for the rotten crown
They kneel before the mindless routine
They don’t think twice about bowing down

We tried, but man it’s hard
We had ideals, 10 years in are they still ours?
We made our own path, for sure…but at what cost?
We didn’t win, our lives were suffering,

But at least we lived
Our death means something.

I was made for war
My hands are soft, my lungs are weak
I was made for war
I have no discipline, I live to feed my flesh
I was made for war
My mind………my mind………………
It still contains the coal
Hot, burning, aware, remembering that
I was made for war
My leathered soul, dust covered, grey still burns
I feel it whisper, because
I was made for war
Lord, Oh my Lord
Harden my hands
Open my lungs
Discipline my mind and
Teach me to starve my flesh
Because
I was made for war*.

[Ephesians 6:12-13]

When I was a kid, I could look up into the night sky and immediately pick out the big dipper, no matter where in the world I was.

Tonight there were a billion stars, crystal clear.

I couldn't find it.

I wonder what else I could see at a kid that I can’t any more.

O’er the road that takes my soul
A flickered crow, blackened load
Levies against the way I go
“Turn back” he says
“Turn left” he says
“Turn right” he says
As I struggle
O’er the road that takes my soul

O’er the road that takes my soul
I keep a tired watch
On that flickered crow
Who’s insistence guides
The careless narcosis,
On this side
Where it grows
I touch, it bites
I know I’m wrong
It eats, I accept there’s no new heights

Just the road.

It’s interesting how
Facebook is slowly turning
The fully realized emotional moments
In someone’s life
Into a hollow scroll-through that
If a sufficient blip of emotion is met
Will generate a thumbs up

.....the condemned saved from death
By the caesar’s great compassion

Here in the 21st century
People only have time for
4 lines of poetry
Just enough, squeezed into a collapsed facebook post

…Sorry, Walt Whitman.

11pm is when
my brain finally wakes up
8pm is when
I usually go to bed

Which means

I spend most of my waking days
Asleep.

Sometimes I am
Jean-Dominique Bauby
A slack face, without a hint of
The turbulent thoughts that lie
Beneath the skin

I think the root of the wonder of childhood comes from a
Malleability of perspective.
Radically prismatic shifts that
Expose dry truths through a lens of amazement,
Rightly justified
As a young mind recognizes what
Crystallized geriatrics like me can no longer see:
That the bland fundamentals of the world are truly worthy of awe.

Sometimes (such as this time)
I write the title without having a clue as to what I will type next
I suspect the result more often than not
Is a huge rat **** dropped on the page
DIAMOND STUDDED EXAMPLE:
This “poem”

Hi! I’m a hamster on a Wheel!
Gamely running on my bony little legs
[I’m getting somewhere! I’m getting somewhere!]
Every once in a while, I look left or right
See my **** and my compressed pellet food sitting in the same positions
as an hour, a day, weeks ago – and I realize:

IT APPEARS THAT I’M ACTUALLY GOING NOWHERE!!!!!!!

Which surprises me each time it crosses my little hamster brain, until I’m distracted
By my pellet food, the call of the Wheel, and other sundry carnal desires

Roiling superficially in my hamster-angst
While working the Wheel, surrounded by the detritus of my saccharine prefabricated life

I fail to notice

Outside my cage
Hands, lifting, carrying
Thousands of miles traversed
Steaming deserts
Steaming jungles
Steaming cities
Brutality, kindness, sensuality, love, hatred, atrocities, age, youth, heat and cold
All flashing by my glass shell as hands carry me towards a final resting place

Until

A jarring, toppling blast shakes my world
Tearing me from my Important Work on the Wheel
I look up, pellet crumbs falling from my mouth
Just in time to see my cage tumble from hands

Over a rail
Down
Down
Flash of blue
Flash of brilliant light
Flash of blue
Down
Smacking into a vast expanse of water
Unimaginably immense
Outside of my realm of comprehension – I mean, I’d never seen it in my hamster cage before, so why should I even expect it to exist?
What is it’s purpose?
It makes no sense!
It has no place in the world!

And as I slowly drown in the secret withheld from every hamster since the beginning of time
I take one last longing look at the Wheel, the cage, the pellets
And curse them
Curse the Deception that told me they were all that mattered

I typed this question without knowing  what the answer would be. My next sentence will be after I meditate on it for a while.

I feel like I’m on a path that honors ideals I’ve held since I was a teenager.
I feel it is far too easy to unwittingly, even unknowingly bow down to the idol of American materialism.
I have found myself kneeling at the altar more than a couple times.
A large paycheck seems to add to the fog.
Life was simpler, more clear cut, when I could barely pay my bills.

However, at the risk of overquoting (having quoted him already), here’s Bukowski again:

….then he got a bit
Intoxicated.
He bent forward, grinning
Slyly, said
“come on now, you got to admit you probably
Miss the good times you had on
Skid row, on the ***, on the road, all that."

It’s when a fellow talks that
Way, even if he’s not a bad
Sort, you know he’s never been anywhere.

Not that you have to have been there
But if you were
And once you get out
Almost everything that happens after that
Seems blessed.


I hope it never hurts to give away any possession I own.
I hope I don’t hesitate when called to do so.

[Luke 18:22-27}

Listening to talk radio
On the 45 minutes back to the castle
A daily habit
Get home
Read some political articles
A daily habit
Post a politically related video to facebook
A daily habit
Discovery: Teeth are sore from gritting them all the way home
A daily habit?
Realization: I really hate politics, can’t stand being strong armed by views clearly wrong
Conclusion: Life is too enjoyable for polarized party line talking points
Decision: Need to listen to something else besides the discharge oozing from my car radio
Action taken: Video post removed
Action taken: Walk outside with the family
Action taken: Green tea
Action taken: Klondike bar (double chocolate)

I’m now at a point where most poems go through multiple drafts
Orikaeshi Tanren wordcraft
Layer on layer of editing
Pressed together
Heated
Cooled
Heated again
Tempered
Folded transversely and longitudinally

But understand: still crude and juvenile!!
..so that these verses be misconstrued as self-adulation.
One day,
……perhaps…..
Efforts will result in the production of a
Single
Razor sharp
Literary effort.

Obliging my son with a bottled formula nightcap
Glanced over at the cover of Rachel Ray
(My wife a fan; me……not so much)

I suspect
(at as far as marketing consultants are concerned)
There is something deeply rooted in the female psych

That says:
Total fulfillment can be summarized as holding an overlarge mug of a hot beverage in 2 hands
(never one hand – that’s business only)

sitting on your couch
feet cannot be touching the floor. tucked, preferably
Added success at life can be conveyed via a thick sweater or (for the wildly tasteless) a Snuggie.

Today someone laryngospasmed and dropped to 65%
Before I opened their airway
Last week, same thing, except 55%

I’m finding myself increasingly dispassionate and unconcerned during these episodes
Externally it would appear
I’m skating by
Skin of my teeth
Brushing off increased agitation by the OR staff
Watching the patient’s life bouncing on the roulette wheel as I tilt the table
........Come on red ................

But it’s not like that. I have a plan. Always a backup. Tertiary options.
A, B,C, and [God forbid] D.
So far, C and beyond is unknown territory.
I’m concerned with my confidence. Too much?

Why is it so hard to be satisfied with standard American life?
I really mean that without any malice.
I genuinely cannot understand how so many people can live being totally satisfied with a career in sales, a nice house, and a modest amount of loans that will follow them to the grave.

Why do I constantly have to have a nagging feeling of dissatisfaction?
Or does everyone feel that, and they just cope or suppress it?  

Bukowski says it well:
“How close we all are to being nothing most of the time
And
Some of us nothing all of the time”

It’s been a long day
I’m sitting in the recovery room, waiting for a late evening case to start
The PACU nurses tend to two patients at opposing sides of the room
Familiar cacophony of sounds – monitors softly speaking, informing the staff about their charges
Heartbeat, pulse oximeter timbre, quiet respiratory alarm
It’s my 7th case, I’m starting to fade
The sounds are relaxing, soothing.
All is well
Suddenly I hear the disconjugate beeps of the two heart monitors
Draw together, until
For just a few precious seconds
These two total strangers
Completely unaware of one another
Share a pulse – their hearts beating in perfect sync – the two sounds indistinguishable

A beautifully symmetrical moment, almost lost

In the next second, as if it hadn’t happened, their hearts diverge - once more strangers
one to one another
unaware of an incredibly intimate moment shared

Sitting there, waiting for the case
I imagine
An instant in the course of history
Where, for one fleeting breath,
Humanity’s rhythm converged
Billions of hearts in time, a nerve impulse propagated across the planet
before scattering to the winds
A potent event, possibly one of many that even
In our modern world, still remains in the mystical

Cults
Have risen
Praising Thinkers
Praising those who melt all thought to Quiet
Those who take no risks propose a middle ground
All meaningless endeavors


Reality beyond our reach
As we grow, reproduce, die….a higher order fruit fly
Absorbed
By the perceived crucial nature of our role in the universe

What then, of our shared experience?
What of the revealed sacred in nature?

God speaks, transcending Thought and Quiet
Allowing reality to be understood
Providing a bed for compassion
A keystone for mercy and grace

An unattainable goal surfaces, wild and enthusiastic in my mind
Even as other unattainable goals lie
With the boot heel of my laziness on their throat
Taking in last gasps of air
They never breathed in the first place.
Nevertheless the new goal gleams, hopeful and full of life:
I will not read any news originating from the North American continent.
For as long as I can tolerate it.

Disney
Like America
Looks awesome in the brochure
But feels faded and slightly forced
A bit of a letdown after the buildup

Still
Wild eyed zealots
Sacrifice their year’s savings at the altar of the mouse
A western Hajj eulogized by matching Toy Story t shirts

I really feel
I missed an important moment of cultural indoctrination
That left me insensitive
To the draw of this place.

A surprise comes though,
As instead of the expected moral superiority
I feel a sense
Of loneliness
And societal exclusion
As I watch
An old man with a silhouette of Mickey Mouse tattooed on his forearm  
Happily
Buy a Bud Light for $5.95

What’s it like, I wonder
For people to naturally like you?
Without any effort?
To have a personality with mass that warps the social fabric
Inexorably pulling in all within reach
I, for one, will never know.

At 18
I was once called a pseudointellectual
Reflecting now, it’s true
Reading poetry publicly to shape a persona, dropped when others weren’t around
How lame
At 29
I pick up Bukowski again
Surprisingly enjoyable, but
Unable to trust my true intent
Hide the cover while reading at work
Subverting possible subconscious manipulation

Sunday at 1pm
In perfect synchrony with the rest of the United States
I will
Sit down to receive my
Re-education through television:
The prophecy of Huxley’s New World,
L’Engle’s Camazotz,
Realized.

Cultured from the same petri dish of indifference that provided the
Comfortable Wall
Of willful ignorance for Bergen-Belsen’s neighbors,
The nation tunes in to another weekend of football and half-truths.
I lead the charge.

Greyson fell asleep on my shoulder
I think a lot of street drugs
Are used
By people who are unwittingly
Pursuing the neurochemical response
Gained by a father with his relaxed 4 month

Is
The confirmation of the superstitious
The skeptics permutation of chance
The guarantee of the paranoid
The communication expected of the spiritually transcendent
The nothing [at all] for those who never penetrate the surface tension of their world

The intuitive see
An allusion to
The creeping deep synapse connecting
[thickly binding]
The breath of the world

William Blake asks, “Who can stand!?”
Every day my unspoken non-answer is “Not me.”

“WEAPONS FREE!”
The gangly teenager
Pushes greasy hair from his face and
Throws a bony fist at a smaller kid
Hitting him in the shoulder,
Years of this fetid neighborhood’s condensed detritus
Telegraphing through his rail thin frame.
In a moment of an old man’s prescience, gilded by hindsight,
I see him
Still at it
30 years later
Probably  riding that same chrome razor scooter.

We’re still alive, after all these years
Overcoming relentless assassination attempts
Souls withered, pitted from the wounds
Stubbornly dragging lifeless limbs towards the goal we set out for, bright eyed and hopeful
Years ago

I’m sleeping
Heavy creaking footsteps walk down our hall
Into our bedroom
Auditory echo of dysnchronous high amplitude waves [maybe?]
Rough hands grab my legs
Ripped out of bed
Dragged out of the tissue paper of my reality
Into dark expanse, glistening eyes turn to me

Voice  [speaks internally]:

I will eat you, one day at a time. Moment by moment I devour you

Struggle
Open my eyes
Articulating forms become dresser
Plant
Clothes on the floor

“Stop”
“You’re dreaming. It’s nothing. Go back to sleep”.

I wake up tired the next day.

Two twin boys kick the
Water meter to their apartment

Instinctively destructive

Screeching like dying crows

Before turning on each other
Over an offence only they understand

Their mother
Dressed in the same sweatpants as yesterday

Smokes her cigarette
Eyes glued to the screen of her phone

Numbing herself with its glow
For a few selfish seconds [turn to years]

The best kind of poem
Cracks stone
Letting it bleed empathy
Attaching it to the ****** of the feeling
That the author loads into verse

I just smiled at a few lines of Bukowski
And then flipped around and
Wrote this ****
Losing any sense of literary proprioception with each word I type.

Imitation is the worst form of flattery
Because
It says
“you were good enough
…to copy…….
But not to spur a new direction of creativity”