Seven New Poems For Seven Days #6 & 7: Live like you're dying


Perhaps you know the lyric, the song?

Live like your dying.
Dying caught my ear, my eye, can't imagine why.
Con-Textual emendation, Natalino style.

Live like your writing.

Yes, that makes sense...

Embrace with passion each new session
Charge every second stanza with ruminating rhythms,
Cut the wires to the air traffic control sensory tower, go solo,
Pulse each word, beat all into a plowshare, even the anger,
Even the hate, dressed to ****, in words, forgivable...

Grant the mundane, the insane, even the pain of tragedy,
You refuse so hardily to glorify, grant it and
Record it all - a moment,
A royal audience with all
Your writing parts.

No fancy footing, keep it simple.
No jesters in rain puddles,
Let images of clouds of sand
Born and perish  in other's eyes and sighs, let verbal games bedevil other
Wooden puppet princes drinking fairy ales.

Huh?

Write clean and clear,
Let the sheerest wonderment of a new combination,
Be the titillation of the tongue's alliteration,
No head scratching at oblique verbal gestation,
Let words clear speak, each letter a speck,
That gives and grants clarification, sensational.

You, afternoon quenching Coronas, white T shirts,
Sun glazes and later, a summer eve's Sancerre,
Wave gazing on the reality of rusted beach chairs,
Babies sandy naked, washed in waves of Chardonnay,
The traffic-filled word-way highways and bay ways,
Exiting at the Poet's Nook, for exegesis & retrieval.

Write of:

Body shakes and juices, skin-staining tongues,
Taking her, afternoon, unexpectedly, her noises your derring-do!
Broken tear ducts, the Off switch, so busted, write about
Real stuff.

Write not in fear of dying
Angels delivering bad news in vacuum tubes,
Write joyous, psalms of loving life,
Live like your writing,
Write like your living,
So you may die well.

i don't think that you know
what privacy means to me
i'm staying drunk in the quiet
of my safe liturgy

of thoughts because concepts
are honest and curious
they aren't gonna judge me
and that's what i need
some company with peace

but inside them i'm violent
i'm rough to the touch
i try to be silent
so i'm not caught searching
the corners for love

when every house party is about
"that idiot who said" or her "stupid makeup"
so i'm not sure where i expect to find
any sort of understanding
in these social engagements
i don't see meaning in
ripping down others just for being
in the same room as you
and minding their own business
it always makes me uncomfortable
i don't see the usefulness knowing it's
easier to call someone else useless
when you feel so

and draw your own conclusions
than admit you don't really know
it's easier to stab the surface
than to learn someone's breathing well enough
to understand the way their blood flows
it's easier to make a snarky comment on their clothes
than to sit down and get to know them

so admit it
our darkness thrives on judgement
and you will feel so much better
because once you let go of them
emotions flow through you like weather
extend your arms for once
and realize that every single person you know
knows something you don't understand yet
instead of barraging them with
the ways you wish you were better

you thought i was going
to say they weren't you

because everyone's partial
to weak knees and weak ankles
it's easier to strike the person
who opens their arms to you
even once is enough
to break them because you justify
they allow themselves to be
so breakable

and though i feel these things to be true in my gut
and want to validate every single person
i can see needs the love
i'm in need of my own breed of saving
and i'm sick of this negative engaging

i just don't have any more chances
to be so kind
as to offer you
a target

Breath evaporates, vision clouds -
I drift, it is peaceful in the deep
I no longer feel like a burden; lumbering and pathetic  

My hands are soft,
my thighs milky and unclenched
my lips barely touched

Insomnia envelops me once more and I awake: 
this body is not ready

Oh, will you ever return to me,
My wild first force, will you return
When the old madness comes to
Blacken in me and to burn
Slow in my brain like a slow fire
In a blackened brazier - dull
like a smear of blood,
Humid and hot evil, slow-sweltering
up in a flood!
Oh, will you not come back, my fierce song?
Jubilant and exultant, triumphing over
the huge wrong
of that slow fire of madness that feeds
on me - the slow mad blood
thick with its hate and evil, sweltering
up in its flood!
Oh! will you not purge it from me -
my wild lost flame?
Come and restore me, save me from the
intolerable shame
Of that huge eye that eats into my
Naked body constantly
And has no name,
Gazing upon me from the immense and
Cruel bareness of the sky
That leaves no mercy of concealment
That gives no promise of revealment
And that drives us on forever with its
lidless eye
Across a huge and houseless level of
a planetary vacancy
Oh, wild song and fury, fire and flame,
Lost magic of my youth return, defend
me from this shame!
And Oh! You golden vengeance of bright
song
Not cure but answer to earth's wrong

That glow around my head is my halo
and those bruises on my knees are from praying
that look in my eyes is the devil
and those dark circles are from sinning
That taste of heaven is from my kiss
so is the fiery heartburn

"if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or ******,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was." - Charles Bukowski