Joel, just so you know

I have it on good authority that our heavenly poets
are always near exhaustion, as the clean air, and the
distraction-free life gives one inspiration by the unending,
poetry the common language in the babel up above

but to be sure they see our messages and scrips, I forward them upward via Messenger, from down here to their seemingly inactive page, but don’t you poet, disbelieve me, they may not be able to send or reply to you via Fedex Direct, but they are receiving just fine

So I send them poems just so they’re knowing that they are
still on my mind…right Joel?

or do I say,

Write on Joel?

those of us in the middle muddle,

do not know from sides, boundary lines,
drawn by others, right-sided, left-leaning,
mean nothing to us, who seek something solid
upon to rest, when the clarity others profess,
more than evades us, even escapes us, and
the muddles of life seem to require simplest,
middling answers that are unacceptably refused
by grail seekers whose cause for cause, means
cause to cost others regardless, for regard for
the middle is disdained, by two-sided posts,
the know nothings, and the know betters

irony of irony, the rigidity of imposition makes
me more adrift, more aimless, and the task of
meandering through seems almost holy, for the
obstacles of society, requirements of modern life,
are so damning, wild expectations superimposed,
truths not just hard to find, almost indiscernible,
so I lay my pen down hard, awaiting for the
whatever-while, for to return, to go walking with
only the simplest grids to guide, meanderings in
general directions, ahead, always ahead, keep moving,
keep touching and when optimism returns,

I shall be relieved
once more,
I shall be released
once again,

good words will be caught,
released, returned back
into the atmosphere so
they will grow in size by
the very act of sharing



undated
————————————————-


Everyone must leave something behind
when he dies, my grandfather said.
A child or a book or a painting or a house or
a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.
It doesn't matter what you do, he said,  so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.  The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime. ~Ray Bradbury

(Book: Fahrenheit 451)

“I will always remember you”

raise you hand if honesty
yet lives inside your muscle
memory of brain, of heart,
there is no one here who hasn’t
uttered them fool lying words

with difficulty we struggle to up
raise faces and places, moments
and images no longer mirrored
within the frontmost places of
our recollection, that searing then,
itself scorched, lichen+moss covered,
our greatest pains, pleasures sworn
allegiances to these razored inflection
points, now scoured by rusty hazes,
and we wonder what has become
of us, what we valued so to savor
as forever memories, their names
gray lady shrouded, and there is
no internet site to aid in self-recovery,
for our selfish selves have been altered,
time, new loves, guilt and other stuff
intersect with mind’s eyes and no mas-
more synapses paths instant linkages

I know you will vociferously argue but
it is almost physical, our shame at losing
them and ourselves, in the morass that
time digs daily deeper for what grieves
us is that losing as the end rushes to close
our story, makes us pick up pen and finger
scratch as best we can inside the lines on
our faces that are/had proofs, witnesses,
that once, we were there at the places,
whose names are no longer mapped any

where, so deep, no archivist’s submersible dare
fathom those fathom’s darkest we would need
to explore without the possibility that we
might implode if we sunk so far to rip apart sea
forests we knowingly, secret-planted to coverup
her memory, the words spoken, the oaths
and promises, we swore, for instance, simply
by saying, “I will always remember you”

p.s. and my self-shaming so great, that my
asking for forgiveness is buried so fast, it
may, not ever been real, just another fiction


Jul  6th, 8:36 AM,

The Show


I awake circa two AM to observe an Earth under siege.
Fearsome blasts of lighting lightening unceasing,
illuminate a sky that is divided into two; a grey white
boundary-less blob of cloud, bolt pricked in a steady
but random pattern for at the least the hour since I was
awakened and a blackened horizon lining defining the land of men.

I debate my choice of word; at some point I slip from the bed to
relieve myself for such is the age of burden I currently occupy;
but my fingers disobey wanting to write relive myself,
to assure myself, that I am, will be, a surviving witness to an awesome and terrifying spectacle, noting the appropriate dueling nature of “awesomeness” for it brings a joyous awe and a paralyzing fear with equal measure, but without any trace of forcible distributive equity.

The lightening is fulsome; sometimes well hid above in a
single whiteness that is the very definition of singularity,
without cue, but within, Z shape bolts of comic book proportionality.

Here’s the rub! All this demonstration is done in a complete,
comforter (!) of silence. The house periodically rumbles its
machinery, whether in fear, or because it must mechanically
do so in the same manner we breathe, or simply to alert me
that I frail human, am at the mercy of the skymaster above,
and the manmade array of pipes, compressors, big apparatuses pinstalled in the earth below to serve until they don’t, and then
we must service them.

The silence is amazing for it is total and domineering and absent thunder. The Show occurs in the largest venue available, the Bay,
but the well behaved audience makes no sound, not a whit,
no coughing, sneezing puncturing or punctuating (reader’s choice) the eerie quiet of a speechless world that cannot speak, as if its larynx was removed, but it’s eye were restored to the age of 20/20.

Well over an hour, closer to two, the demonstration is concluded
and we return to the supine, neutrally, even emotionless, for the gamut and gauntlet we have survived dry and in safety has
concluded and the thick picture window did its job admirably.

Wait Now, a pockmark of bursts in the absence of all light, the now blackness has replaced everything, except for a momentary pinprick of of cloud framed orange hue, a shell exploding far across the bay.

S. sleeps relatively unperturbed, until she does not; for a long minute she rattles the ship, kicking tantrum violently both legs, until the covers are disarrayed, only to fall back into a deep blue colored stage of sleep, and pulling the covers onto the custom fitted aperture neath the chin.

This secondary, receding lightening demonstration that has been taking place; as if a heavenly Lincoln~Stephens oratorical battle occurs over the nearby Atlantic of  nonstop proportion, leaving my my mind to dwell on this topic:

Resolved: This man, that pens this missive about sky missiles is a good writer, or even reasonably ok.

I am representing both sides (duh). and skip to the judges decision without further ado, for brevity is a skill I am profoundly lacking and appreciate, and the eloquence of the debaters is acutely not bad, as prideful acumen is the standard.

Sorry. Split decision, 3 -2, he is merely an ok writer.

Now past 4 AM, glance outside but once more, and there a slow slewing of dawn light emerging like springtime buds, the trees on the lawn are faintly distinguishable, outlined against a normalized, post-storm night sky full of debris EXCEPT in the not-faraway-enough-distance, a few straggler lighting bolts are yet appearing to remind me the night is indeed always awesome and full of terror, just like a good poem.

4:22 AM Jul 5 2023