Lay My Body Down

Sunday sipping my Hawaiian java,
the world’s end is hallmarked this weekend,
like hash marks on a old fashioned
wood ruler,
and unrequested and unbequested,
heady voices demand a retelling,
even a tallied
recounting
of 2023
the year I almost blew it.

took some pics, even a video,
of my-internals, and pronounced me
nearer my god than thee,
I was precisely, scientifically,
97% almost dead,
said the occultist
said see you tomorrow
for a haircut and a nip and tuck
upon thy heart

strangely,
I was of good cheer,
not fully comprehending my walk on the edge,
and
strangely,
never gave it too much thought,
which for a poet,
is just plain weird.

But this Sunday,
as I lay my body down,
thinking about “deadlines,”
all missed,
and are all still, cursing me,
residuals of 2022 & 2023,
which are carry on baggage
for the next trip through the
door of
2024

and these words come jumbled and
we are out of time to sort
them better than this,
but
as I lay this body down,
one last time,
on the ruler’s edges edge,
the last hash mark nearly touched,
and almost
equidistant from this year and the
unmeasured blankness of a clean white sheet
of Next!

<>

a good ole saying, a good ole lyric,
“lay my body down”
invokes image of spring water
a brook wash~flowing
over the shell of man
clothed in white linen shroud,

water of clarity crystalline,
taking a tour~trip with an itinerary
of (must-see!) sights,
cracks and crevices,
slats, slots and slits,
apertures and orifices,
groans and worry lines
accumulated this nearby past,
my body’s own poem

<>

but I recall W.H. Auden’s words
about the revitalization quality of water,
and I decide to
baptize myself,
like recommissioning, retrofitting
an-old ship

(though I am a serious jew,
who knows nothing of this rite)

“But fortunate seemed that

Day because of my dream, and enlightened,

And dearer,

water,

than ever your voice as if
Glad—though goodness knows why—to run with the human race,
Wishing, I thought, the least of men their
Figures of splendor, their holy places.”

<>

in some places, you can follow the dotted lines,
on my physical container;
man-made marks from
exploration of my body,
now understanding these lines and holes
are a schoolboy’s
long division’s remainder,
(always annoying)
bits & pieces of him,
looking for a surety that one can
yet call it home,
one more year?

<>
my interstices,
tween the manmade decorations
of medical foreplay
and the cri de coeur
of my mental anguish,
are life reminders,
I am
alive and still hurting,
BUT

could be worse.


enough.

<>

walking the feeble line
——————————

there is a name for what is witnessed nearly nightly,
common ****** and/or scientific, when I awake circa
3 AM,  and the entire sky is overhung with a stolid,
calmly, ponderous inverted ******~single, sky-filling cloud,
with  faint, ragged line of far distant of didactic, urban and natural light, an imagery what s presumably the end of the world insofar as far as the human mind can interpolate the faraway mystique, for our
modern eyes see but cannot necessarily comprehend  the enormity and the simultaneous limiting granularity of the night horizon,
when it is
just outside through the clear glass, this enormous fog that is indescribable, an overwhelming, inconceivable conception that our ancestors took for granted as a natural demarcation of everything physical,
of our world’s entirety.

3:47 AM when the semi-roused mind bids the entirety of me
to awaken, ascertain the mystery of the sky and the sounds of rushing water within the confines of the cottage, both
which have no earthly reason to be simple, self-explanatory.

the parallel of external state to body internal,
comes first to mind when I creakily stand,
to better understand
the grandeur vision seeing, and the noises
so localized hearing, that a time/body disorientation disorder
is the sole explanation for my disrupted feeble state of mind,
physical and mental, occupational hazarding
  of my confused existence.

are you still here?
are u coming along with me on this journey?

amazing, if yes is your cognitive reply!

is this a poem, an essay, a plaintive wail for a general infirmity
that is irreconcilable with facts and the imagery of a mobile
man, who yet dodders and toddles, when stumbling stiffly through the fodders, them open spaces of his mind, and his physicality,
both stumbling erratically like that sort of
out there, sort of not,
feeble line in the sky,
and the feeble line inside him of a shuffling old man he knows or recognizes not, hence the title of the poem, created in a millisecond of cellular cognition, whose explanation, exploration
and expiation of his existence needing some kind of sensible
interpretation.

edging past 4AM, WITH NO answer for anything clouding through the rivulets of the mind, he summons up the time
in memoriam summary of all men, for all essential existence,

it is what it is,

that neither satisfies at all but just sufficiently,
that he could put down the imagined pen, pull the cover beneath the chin line, letting sleepy reign over him once more,
and perish the thought,
he will do it all over again,
tomorrow some twenty four hours hence, thankful the murk
of clouds prevents him from seeing
a battlefield of stars, which

too, comprehensively incomprehensible to the feeble
line he hopefully, is yet then still a straddle.

good night you boon companion,
meet you on the other side
of the line, which is what lines are for, a demarcation between
you and me that we welcome, to cross wordlessly and word fully,
and shall do, as is our due, again,
soon enough.

g’night!
4:26 AM