Each song is like a bookmark for the book of your life’s memories.

Each thumping bass line, each crescendo and every change in voice tone of the singer makes you cognizant of a time in the past during which you identified at some level with the musician.

To some degree, the words are clearer now than they ever were; in other aspects it’s like viewing a piece of art with younger eyes.

Likely, upon first hearing the song you did not completely empathize with the message.

Maybe you envisioned yourself in their place, wondering what you would feel or do.

Often times, upon hearing a favorite song from days past anew, our cumulative experiences since last hearing the song have made it possible for us to appreciate the meaning.

Sometimes we’ve actually been through the same thing as the singer.

At this point it’s almost like having a psychiatrist there asking you how the situation made you feel.

It compels you to think back to the incident and contemplate the momentousness of the occasion.

It allows you to grieve alongside the artist, to work through the problems which persist in your life as a result and hopefully, under the right circumstances listening to music can allow us to remove the bookmark and turn to the next page.

I.* there is no thicker undergrowth than feeling. first to go is reason, everything
    else levitates into something graver than say, one foot deep  in the grave
     and the other somewhere off-tangent like an offbeat adagio zigzagging
      into slammed slalom.

II. the crush of oregano against mortar, and the clasping of a hand. carbon monoxide
      fades into air as youth takes on momentousness. take for instance this once soft
    hand like a breath of cotton in a precipitate noon: once whirling in claustrophobic
      space, this slight inch of feelingfulness is dazed into the span of *Maya windhovering
       somewhere unseen like paramours *******.

III. from the window you can feel the bluster of falsetto disintegrate at its slouched peak,
       and from where you hear it, a dance thwarts itself like a cigarette ember
       convulsing mid-air – that slow, repugnant twitch: that is you, when you first
        broke your silence in thick shrouds of disgust over strobe-lighted simian jaw.

IV. what else is there but to take this sour ocean in front of me and decode something
       the blue always means mellow but the froth of white something the tragic caprice
        of tropic: some nights, they remind me of bodies careening repeatedly; some days
                    they just are, like you, just are, like a riot and only sound, or sleep and only
          reticence, something short of wonder and terse with reply.

V. there is a cluster of harmonies flowering in my mind when the sensurround of din
        starts conflagrations in the ornate dark of ear. my limbs snake in the garden
        of plank, my shin bitten in sharp reiterations – my mind crossing the equinox
         looking for shade, or possible, a parasol underneath the crimson of rain.
           say this is the sky, this dense space when I motion both hands into a length
       not an inch could ever devour. suddenly a boy made out of a man, flustered
        in jangled arpeggios and unapologetic thought like a letter of debt opened,
         paying no heed the mind and only what the body dictates: a smash on the
    escritoire or vigorously scratching scalp, reopening scabs and watching
                old blood ooze dry like a lightweight webbed impression
  of       a    dreamy legato.

VI. the night deepens with the warmth of its black upholstery – we do not know
      when to stop and bid for home. last to go is will of force and first to arrive
     in the bleakness like a recalcitrant thought often straying outside with the
       strut of a yuppie, fervor of old haunt. i conjure an image over the cold chair,
    its steel framework thighs untouched, its four decrepit legs the foundation
       of something that refuses to admit its weakness. the very base of what would
   catch the anchorage of my gravity, the very heart of all, and the flattened back
      with a vandal that says “Soleil was here.” the liver shattering in the trance
                    of everything.

VII. night is stupor. i am the lilt of words from a rambunctious machine.         there seems to be an afterthought that separates
                       a concept of vastness and the tactility of narrow ether.
        a word is uttered in extremis - something heaven eschews
                with its bright, arrogant face.

1
Fails to realize the momentousness of the ordeal. Syntax means nothing. Delineations weak. It is all obsolescence, this one. This thing that has no name. This agreed-upon assault of objects. Its loose fizz into the air. Buildings without balconies, or balconies without height – a plunge will mean that there is only little ache left to wring out of some futurity. Arrange the furniture, you said. Take pictures of the sullen victory right after. There is no place in there but only spacious silence. Like meat before it goes into the melting ***. Like light before it reaches its tippling point. Hence, let us both agree to this once again. An end. A limit has been reached. In most days you say nothing. I wait – concealed, overwrought with time’s unloosenings. I do no waiting at all. I do wait at all – this made moment is your new retreat.

2
This is an old woe with a new name. I ask you things, you answer me endless. Endless as in quiet is infinite. There are so many places in this world fat with stillness. Feelings flatten and fall at last, here, its exoskeleton. Keep it in your drawer with your DMs. To make a metaphor out of you means I acknowledge your disappearance. To keep mum about it means I take it inside me, deeper and deeper. Do you dream of fish now? Or waves? Or the undertow you take with you, dragged in miles of feet through dunes of sand? I ask you again, and you show no signs of being uninhabited. Although there is sometimes the warmth of pressing sheens, you take them as the passing of buses – you emphasize the waning. Although this has been written, there isn’t so much writing done here. If I could be abject like say, a washrag in your home, there would be little difference made.

3
To keep myself intent is declaration. To quote otherwise the world that you breathe in, simply suppression. It is much imaginable that way, much more attainable, resolute and quick with sense. A new kind of wailing. What I want, I destroy by earnest regard. There is a paradoxical way to cultivate this thing: and it is to leave it there, thriving in a space meant to contain it, alone. Nothing will be retained – it will always be one, and never two. You believed me. I asked you again. Your answer compressed everything to shadow.

Ἀμφιτρίτη
rising out of the sea like sunshine
brilliant blue feathers
airfoils lifting you
your energy stabilizing
holographic universe
with black holes abound
******* up your endless brilliance
they’re no match
eventually you turn them
inside out
just patient galaxies
waiting to unfold
they need you
for your light
momentousness
vicissitude of seasons
hearts gravitate to you
force of attraction
terrestrial bodies are know for
special reflection
souls need to find their way
kind gentle compassionate pulling

Amphitrite

my very existence

shimmering

without you

Of Baseball, Poetry and the Human Condition




~~

From  “The Art of Fielding.”* by Chad Harbach

"You loved it,” he writes of the game (baseball), “because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about the Human Condition.

The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not."*

~~
  thus, the circle grows ever small,
binding the obvious and unblinding the oblivious

more than the mere, poetry in baseball, for both forms of art,
knowledge intuited from watching the catcher's body weave
this way and that, a dancer en pointe, arms raised in worship,
addressing the heavens with a body's broad brush strokes,
all to catch with concentrated skill, a lazy, towering popup,
climaxing oft with an exclamation point
a perilous desperation leap
into the dugout encampment of the inimical opposition

yeah, you knew that,
tho verbalizing same,
before the age of thirty,
presumed maturity,
was not an act of the sane of heart,
or the sound of mind and body melded

what you dared not admit was that the conditional principle,
was primal and not tangential, though perhaps,
some itinerant fathers foolishly mumbled incoherently
of a life linkage parallel motifs
of
that desperate beauty, the ferric magnetic irony,
that our full access pass to envisioning the finery,
imaging the stuff of our own daily creation genesis,
whether concocting undisciplined disassembled parts, words,
into a line, a stanza that froze your lungs from
the boredom of the regularity of heaving and breathing,
was in no way different
than the curvature of the boy's arm
in desperation outstretched, seeking spectacular safety for
a well hit ball of cork into a worn leather mitten and thus
confirming his humanity to the watching tribal membership

and these momentary moments of momentousness,
will live forever until we die, judged of equal stature,
a soldiers stripes, ribbons of his theaters of service,
medals of the honor and the errors of his own
human condition