“You are under no obligation to remain the same person you were a year ago, a month ago, or even a day ago. You are here to create yourself, continuously.”*
Richard Feynman
<>
perhaps
you are among the many who state,
I will do things differently today!
or
amidst the few,
who actually do

most of us satisfied by our resolution,
go back to sleep and let our
daily dissolution succumbing
pleasantly ****** us into
the nirvana of familiar
repetition

We speak not of the little compromises
that satisfy for periods too brief:

denying yourself a meal,
or having just one less cuppa
of English Breakfast Tea,
Blue Mountain Java beans,
or skipping breakfast entirely
a face saving gesture to the
odyssey perpetual
of losing those friendly
five pounds that “just”
snuck aboard

<>
know that we all peer
into my famous
bathroom
mirror
conducting a head to toe review
of our very deepest buried
burdensome “to do list”
that charge you to be changed,
that discharge your guilt long lasting,
Oh, those things that truly matter

to which we,
thanks to Richard,
we reorganize and add a
first poem, the top priority
of this new mewling twenty four hours:

today,
I will continuously
wright/write
be a maker & builder,
yes, writer,two,
of
myself anew
and not copy
all that I wish not to;

here goes my first daily,
a myself poem of every new day
of my
interval upon this green Earth
a seed step tiny
to grow a forest
continuing

~for Lori,
they await you~
<>
be:
of two minds, a peculiarly human
distressing and wonderful
characteristic s~trait,

straightforward and regular,
as hu-man was intended,
or
be:
truly crackling delighting
twisty like a river bend,
with a flood plain,
defying nature illogically,
here today,
and new direction on-the-morrow,

the creativity of time
making its own best laid plans
that either wash over you,
or wash you away

what you may not be aware,
as I too, was overly innocent,
that the sidewalk cracks are mini-seas,
full of overheard words, true tales,
a depository of the stories,
of tithes of titles
beckoning, becoming fables,
left by millions of
endless passer-byes
and passer~overs,
a repository of human insights
held inside them cracks,
under cover of
thin brown line
of ***** grime, soil and ****
& history

for this ugly surficial,
environmentally rocky but semi~
solid environ, is perfection personified to
retain. restore all the power memories & glories
of those who tread upon them
in flip flops and snow boots,
spilling the detritus that is all of us,
thus,

a gold mine of poems for  asking,
a vein of jewels for simple taking,
no secret word, no library card, just a
few taps of the shoe’s soul, will kick up
the dust of disorderly unused words,
to be easily inhaled, or cab~hailed, and then
by gum, yous for the making

so walk with me, eyes open, nostrils wide,
ears keen, tongue open to lick up the dust,
impress them upon you skin,
do so!
so they be
not forgot,
nor slip away to a new street line,
and be lost again until someone else
comes along to use
what was rightfully yours
for a moment of seconds

bring your sheaf of blank memory sheets,
scribble madly for the volumes are supersized, stupendous, and you
will never lack,
wander for hope,
nor
wonder too long
for the whereabouts of that next poem,
for lives-it, beneath you,
awaiting and aging,
pry it out by by fingernails
if too well hid,
but trust an old fool,
thee best me-kind there be,

the grimy grinning grungy pallor
is the best camouflage extant,
the dust is gold, a miner’s delight,
speckles of glassine letters
sapphired and rubied,
all yours, when you fall to your knees,
and finally witness, finally see
wide eyed
a new flood plain
of satisfied tears pooling,
*****, hard earned,
falling, forming
from your own
flood plane

the raw confusion of the nucleotide fusion,
the great concoction of recombinant DNA,
when we cross over our own boundaries
and subsume, integrate, reformulate our
very selves, with inhalation complete of
another human being; the danger’s inherent,
absorbing a foreign body totally is the creation of a new being entire, vulnerable
despite the new totality of the resources of
two hearts acquired for mergence

and the rush of two different bloodstreams
now circulating, stronger by far, and equally
vulnerable to diseases never prior considered,
these tissues patches, interwoven skins, two
fabrics, silk and wool, a smooth itchy, that
makes us stronger with yet unknowns of weaknesses, and then we encounter what
cannot easily be digested, comprehended,
for even new cells split apart, and the terrible
terror of dividing division that is the side effect of integration, new subdivisions never
ever forever foreseen cause volcanic tremors
and trusting your other half is awful,
until the fear subsides

this is the why
I write of
only love poetry,
the study of this process
so poorly and powerfully
misunderstood
is the atom bomb
of the human psyche

in rivers dark we travel,
oars with cotton muffled,
for there are dangers on each bank,
and in the waters beneath
the salt and the fresh
excitingly & violently blending,
different weights
somethings fall to the bottom,
others rise to the top

and when the process is nearly resolved
(for never ending,
by default defined,
for end is a conflict
constant
interrupted by truces fraught,
fragrant and vulnerable)

this then
is living,
this physic of the
bio-il-logic process
called love,
and the endlessness
that it requires

the inconstancy
of the
constancy
of the
deepening well,
and the
redemption of
redefinition
of what is
well

<>

2:10pm
nyc
10/21/24