Fill your heart, fill it as full as you can.
Fill it with memories most warmly hued
and remember them well
in all their glorious, sweaty,
kindly brutal
minutiae.

Remember each drop,
each bite,
each individual dust
mote dancing
the still, hot, sunlit
February
Thursday.
Remember how different
places all have their own
unique elusive
smell and how
it is impossible to describe this to anyone
who has never lived
anywhere else.

Fill your heart with all those memories
of the best kind
of home grown hell.

Fill it until its tears are forced out.
Fill it against the long, cold dark of parking lost.
Fill it against mysterious hate.
Fill it against misery and mud and hard
frozen
bottle
glass
lies.

Fill it so full it can't ever sink far down.
Burden it with buoyant stories
and weigh it with
hypnotic winter flame.
These are the things of which
the cold terror to
victory apocalyptic will be born.
There are no second prizes here.

Fill it with the certainty of the worn places
where the chairs met
the table
each night.

Fill it with the truth of
the gnarled and sun-warm roots and
the indisputability of a Beetle motor accelerating and
the violent pirouette of each spring
and the ozone smell and
the way wet wood screams at the sky and
the way the sound
hits all ears the same
regardless of
their color or
what side of Line Avenue they’re from.

Remember what line you’re from
and to hell with the rest.
You must mind your own.
There’ll be water
if God wills it.

You are never too far lost if you still know
your father’s face and can still remember
getting milk from the tubes
in the
silver metal cooler
and the red cookie jar
lid as the
adults smoked at the green kids’ table
and everyone mostly had blue eyes
and red hair and there was always a phantom killer
lurking  
right beyond the only hope door
before you were ****** into the mirror
world and
*******, but
kids sure do have to make some
rough choices
before nine o’clock.

Keep remembering and when you remember,
remember even deeper
remember in yet greater detail and
practice that remembering until
you
ARE
the dust motes
the milk tube
Thursday
roots
sun
until you ARE each drop of sweat
until you ARE the phantom killer
and the red cookie jar lid
the straight line of smoke rising out
of the ashtray and
the motor and the
scream and the
ears and
you ARE all these things
and you ARE
and you can’t really say where these things begin or where
you end because you’re not sure that
anything really does end or
begin
anymore.

Beginnings and endings
haven’t much meaning after
everyone has
shown their cards and the worn places on the chairs have
met the table
one
last
time.

stumbling home
in the evening
with my breath
smelling of cheap beer
and cigarettes;
people worry,
I tell them not to;
I do this for me,
not for attention
or sympathy,
I do this to feel
more alive,
because I feel so
dead inside
and my thoughts
are racing;
drinking shuts them up
for a couple of hours
and I feel better;
I feel sick,
but I also feel
great,
like I can do anything;
like nothing can hurt me;
is this what death
tastes like?
god,
I hope so

Lactate motto naku smile.

this poem,
for my friend, who has hit the road,
in ways others only think they have done or know,
miss her firecracking wizardy,
she, the only inky reason
still talk to god,
to cover all the bases,
employ every tool and invention,
to make sure you are a-ok alright,
on the journey to an unknown destination
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Lactate motto naku smile
That is Apple talk.

My Apple language master
señor spell check,
thus advised and improved upon me,
way back on April 3rd of this year.

I wrote:
"last attempt to make you smile."

Apple translated my ginger finger snap taps
into American English as
"Lactate motto naku smile"

Stumbled on this oath, this midnight eve,
this phrase, duly nated and nested,
amidst our very long exchanges,
which someday soon,
am going to edit excerpt
as one most readable single poem,
a tribute to you, not,
that you, my traveling friend,
you already greedy got

no, just a dialogue
just a par example,
of how friendships are born,
how words lactate from each of our *******,
how relationship are birthed and nutured,
in a crazy place, where language lovers
are the nuclei of a dying breed,
once called the human place

***, back in ancient history,
way back on Sept. 29th
our first communication
tween our mutual alien races
tee hee, me wrote first
as follows

Each individual word,
was a separate message,
for such devices deserved of self-respect,
sometimes want their power demonstrated
on a stand alone basis and here that follows was how
Presented and Conceived

Nat Lipstadt  Sep 29, 2013
This

Nat Lipstadt  Sep 29, 2013
Message

Nat Lipstadt  Sep 29, 2013
Is

Nat Lipstadt  Sep 29, 2013
For

Nat Lipstadt  Sep 29, 2013
You

Nat Lipstadt  Sep 29, 2013
Only

Nat Lipstadt  Sep 29, 2013
Can a man fall in love with a name?


you permissioned me a
multiplicity of yeses,
thus began our star trekked voyage
in the stellar spatial space of the
galaxy of humanity

but part of your new trajectory,
a new orbit in a new spaceship
you champagne smashed anointed as
Mirabel

Now I know you hate my habit,
of slipping in a definition,
making the lazy reader
unself-sufficient,
but I grant, nay, take this liberty, I dew,
while in your quiet traveling disappearance time

Mirabel*
is a female name stemming from the Latin word mirabilis, meaning "wondrous" or "of wondrous beauty"

what ya know, ** **,
nothing could be fina,
than to be in your minda,
nothing more apropos,
than calling your ship in Latina,
a wondrous female beast of beauty

ok I know I go on too long
as is my wont, my nature,
but I could not shorten my course,
in any other way,
Ok,
I
Guess
I
Could
Have
Said
I miss ya terribly*

somewhat more succinctly
but what fun would that be?