A Poem for Three Voices

Setting:  A Maternity Ward and round about

FIRST VOICE:
I am slow as the world.  I am very patient,
Turning through my time, the suns and stars
Regarding me with attention.
The moon's concern is more personal:
She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse.
Is she sorry for what will happen?  I do not think so.
She is simply astonished at fertility.

When I walk out, I am a great event.
I do not have to think, or even rehearse.
What happens in me will happen without attention.
The pheasant stands on the hill;
He is arranging his brown feathers.
I cannot help smiling at what it is I know.
Leaves and petals attend me.  I am ready.

SECOND VOICE:
When I first saw it, the small red seep, I did not believe it.
I watched the men walk about me in the office.  They were so flat!
There was something about them like cardboard, and now I had caught it,
That flat, flat, flatness from which ideas, destructions,
Bulldozers, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed,
Endlessly proceed--and the cold angels, the abstractions.
I sat at my desk in my stockings, my high heels,

And the man I work for laughed:  'Have you seen something awful?
You are so white, suddenly.'  And I said nothing.
I saw death in the bare trees, a deprivation.
I could not believe it.  Is it so difficult
For the spirit to conceive a face, a mouth?
The letters proceed from these black keys, and these black keys proceed
From my alphabetical fingers, ordering parts,

Parts, bits, cogs, the shining multiples.
I am dying as I sit.  I lose a dimension.
Trains roar in my ears, departures, departures!
The silver track of time empties into the distance,
The white sky empties of its promise, like a cup.
These are my feet, these mechanical echoes.
Tap, tap, tap, steel pegs.  I am found wanting.

This is a disease I carry home, this is a death.
Again, this is a death.  Is it the air,
The particles of destruction I **** up?  Am I a pulse
That wanes and wanes, facing the cold angel?
Is this my lover then?  This death, this death?
As a child I loved a lichen-bitten name.
Is this the one sin then, this old dead love of death?

THIRD VOICE:
I remember the minute when I knew for sure.
The willows were chilling,
The face in the pool was beautiful, but not mine--
It had a consequential look, like everything else,
And all I could see was dangers:  doves and words,
Stars and showers of gold--conceptions, conceptions!
I remember a white, cold wing

And the great swan, with its terrible look,
Coming at me, like a castle, from the top of the river.
There is a snake in swans.
He glided by; his eye had a black meaning.
I saw the world in it--small, mean and black,
Every little word hooked to every little word, and act to act.
A hot blue day had budded into something.

I wasn't ready.  The white clouds rearing
Aside were dragging me in four directions.
I wasn't ready.
I had no reverence.
I thought I could deny the consequence--
But it was too late for that.  It was too late, and the face
Went on shaping itself with love, as if I was ready.

SECOND VOICE:
It is a world of snow now.  I am not at home.
How white these sheets are.  The faces have no features.
They are bald and impossible, like the faces of my children,
Those little sick ones that elude my arms.
Other children do not touch me:  they are terrible.
They have too many colors, too much life.  They are not quiet,
Quiet, like the little emptinesses I carry.

I have had my chances.  I have tried and tried.
I have stitched life into me like a rare *****,
And walked carefully, precariously, like something rare.
I have tried not to think too hard.  I have tried to be natural.
I have tried to be blind in love, like other women,
Blind in my bed, with my dear blind sweet one,
Not looking, through the thick dark, for the face of another.

I did not look.  But still the face was there,
The face of the unborn one that loved its perfections,
The face of the dead one that could only be perfect
In its easy peace, could only keep holy so.
And then there were other faces.  The faces of nations,
Governments, parliaments, societies,
The faceless faces of important men.

It is these men I mind:
They are so jealous of anything that is not flat!  They are jealous gods
That would have the whole world flat because they are.
I see the Father conversing with the Son.
Such flatness cannot but be holy.
'Let us make a heaven,' they say.
'Let us flatten and launder the grossness from these souls.'

FIRST VOICE:
I am calm.  I am calm.  It is the calm before something awful:
The yellow minute before the wind walks, when the leaves
Turn up their hands, their pallors.  It is so quiet here.
The sheets, the faces, are white and stopped, like clocks.
Voices stand back and flatten.  Their visible hieroglyphs
Flatten to parchment screens to keep the wind off.
They paint such secrets in Arabic, Chinese!

I am dumb and brown.  I am a seed about to break.
The brownness is my dead self, and it is sullen:
It does not wish to be more, or different.
Dusk hoods me in blue now, like a Mary.
O color of distance and forgetfulness!--
When will it be, the second when Time breaks
And eternity engulfs it, and I drown utterly?

I talk to myself, myself only, set apart--
Swabbed and lurid with disinfectants, sacrificial.
Waiting lies heavy on my lids.  It lies like sleep,
Like a big sea.  Far off, far off, I feel the first wave tug
Its cargo of agony toward me, inescapable, tidal.
And I, a shell, echoing on this white beach
Face the voices that overwhelm, the terrible element.

THIRD VOICE:
I am a mountain now, among mountainy women.
The doctors move among us as if our bigness
Frightened the mind.  They smile like fools.
They are to blame for what I am, and they know it.
They hug their flatness like a kind of health.
And what if they found themselves surprised, as I did?
They would go mad with it.

And what if two lives leaked between my thighs?
I have seen the white clean chamber with its instruments.
It is a place of shrieks.  It is not happy.
'This is where you will come when you are ready.'
The night lights are flat red moons.  They are dull with blood.
I am not ready for anything to happen.
I should have murdered this, that murders me.

FIRST VOICE:
There is no miracle more cruel than this.
I am dragged by the horses, the iron hooves.
I last.  I last it out.  I accomplish a work.
Dark tunnel, through which hurtle the visitations,
The visitations, the manifestations, the startled faces.
I am the center of an atrocity.
What pains, what sorrows must I be mothering?

Can such innocence **** and ****?  It milks my life.
The trees wither in the street.  The rain is corrosive.
I taste it on my tongue, and the workable horrors,
The horrors that stand and idle, the slighted godmothers
With their hearts that tick and tick, with their satchels of instruments.
I shall be a wall and a roof, protecting.
I shall be a sky and a hill of good:  O let me be!

A power is growing on me, an old tenacity.
I am breaking apart like the world.  There is this blackness,
This ram of blackness.  I fold my hands on a mountain.
The air is thick.  It is thick with this working.
I am used.  I am drummed into use.
My eyes are squeezed by this blackness.
I see nothing.

SECOND VOICE:
I am accused.  I dream of massacres.
I am a garden of black and red agonies.  I drink them,
Hating myself, hating and fearing.  And now the world conceives
Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.
It is a love of death that sickens everything.
A dead sun stains the newsprint.  It is red.
I lose life after life.  The dark earth drinks them.

She is the vampire of us all.  So she supports us,
Fattens us, is kind.  Her mouth is red.
I know her.  I know her intimately--
Old winter-face, old barren one, old time bomb.
Men have used her meanly.  She will eat them.
Eat them, eat them, eat them in the end.
The sun is down.  I die.  I make a death.

FIRST VOICE:
Who is he, this blue, furious boy,
Shiny and strange, as if he had hurtled from a star?
He is looking so angrily!
He flew into the room, a shriek at his heel.
The blue color pales.  He is human after all.
A red lotus opens in its bowl of blood;
They are stitching me up with silk, as if I were a material.

What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?
I have never seen a thing so clear.
His lids are like the lilac-flower
And soft as a moth, his breath.
I shall not let go.
There is no guile or warp in him.  May he keep so.

SECOND VOICE:
There is the moon in the high window.  It is over.
How winter fills my soul!  And that chalk light
Laying its scales on the windows, the windows of empty offices,
Empty schoolrooms, empty churches.  O so much emptiness!
There is this cessation.  This terrible cessation of everything.
These bodies mounded around me now, these polar sleepers--
What blue, moony ray ices their dreams?

I feel it enter me, cold, alien, like an instrument.
And that mad, hard face at the end of it, that O-mouth
Open in its gape of perpetual grieving.
It is she that drags the blood-black sea around
Month after month, with its voices of failure.
I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string.
I am restless.  Restless and useless.  I, too, create corpses.

I shall move north.  I shall move into a long blackness.
I see myself as a shadow, neither man nor woman,
Neither a woman, happy to be like a man, nor a man
Blunt and flat enough to feel no lack.  I feel a lack.
I hold my fingers up, ten white pickets.
See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks.
I cannot contain it.  I cannot contain my life.

I shall be a heroine of the peripheral.
I shall not be accused by isolate buttons,
Holes in the heels of socks, the white mute faces
Of unanswered letters, coffined in a letter case.
I shall not be accused, I shall not be accused.
The clock shall not find me wanting, nor these stars
That rivet in place abyss after abyss.

THIRD VOICE:
I see her in my sleep, my red, terrible girl.
She is crying through the glass that separates us.
She is crying, and she is furious.
Her cries are hooks that catch and grate like cats.
It is by these hooks she climbs to my notice.
She is crying at the dark, or at the stars
That at such a distance from us shine and whirl.

I think her little head is carved in wood,
A red, hard wood, eyes shut and mouth wide open.
And from the open mouth issue sharp cries
Scratching at my sleep like arrows,
Scratching at my sleep, and entering my side.
My daughter has no teeth.  Her mouth is wide.
It utters such dark sounds it cannot be good.

FIRST VOICE:
What is it that flings these innocent souls at us?
Look, they are so exhausted, they are all flat out
In their canvas-sided cots, names tied to their wrists,
The little silver trophies they've come so far for.
There are some with thick black hair, there are some bald.
Their skin tints are pink or sallow, brown or red;
They are beginning to remember their differences.

I think they are made of water; they have no expression.
Their features are sleeping, like light on quiet water.
They are the real monks and nuns in their identical garments.
I see them showering like stars on to the world--
On India, Africa, America, these miraculous ones,
These pure, small images.  They smell of milk.
Their footsoles are untouched.  They are walkers of air.

Can nothingness be so prodigal?
Here is my son.
His wide eye is that general, flat blue.
He is turning to me like a little, blind, bright plant.
One cry.  It is the hook I hang on.
And I am a river of milk.
I am a warm hill.

SECOND VOICE:
I am not ugly.  I am even beautiful.
The mirror gives back a woman without deformity.
The nurses give back my clothes, and an identity.
It is usual, they say, for such a thing to happen.
It is usual in my life, and the lives of others.
I am one in five, something like that.  I am not hopeless.
I am beautiful as a statistic.  Here is my lipstick.

I draw on the old mouth.
The red mouth I put by with my identity
A day ago, two days, three days ago.  It was a Friday.
I do not even need a holiday; I can go to work today.
I can love my husband, who will understand.
Who will love me through the blur of my deformity
As if I had lost an eye, a leg, a tongue.

And so I stand, a little sightless.  So I walk
Away on wheels, instead of legs, they serve as well.
And learn to speak with fingers, not a tongue.
The body is resourceful.
The body of a starfish can grow back its arms
And newts are prodigal in legs.  And may I be
As prodigal in what lacks me.

THIRD VOICE:
She is a small island, asleep and peaceful,
And I am a white ship hooting:  Goodbye, goodbye.
The day is blazing.  It is very mournful.
The flowers in this room are red and tropical.
They have lived behind glass all their lives, they have been cared for
        tenderly.
Now they face a winter of white sheets, white faces.
There is very little to go into my suitcase.

There are the clothes of a fat woman I do not know.
There is my comb and brush.  There is an emptiness.
I am so vulnerable suddenly.
I am a wound walking out of hospital.
I am a wound that they are letting go.
I leave my health behind.  I leave someone
Who would adhere to me:  I undo her fingers like bandages:  I go.

SECOND VOICE:
I am myself again.  There are no loose ends.
I am bled white as wax, I have no attachments.
I am flat and virginal, which means nothing has happened,
Nothing that cannot be erased, ripped up and scrapped, begun again.
There little black twigs do not think to bud,
Nor do these dry, dry gutters dream of rain.
This woman who meets me in windows--she is neat.

So neat she is transparent, like a spirit.
how shyly she superimposes her neat self
On the inferno of African oranges, the heel-hung pigs.
She is deferring to reality.
It is I.  It is I--
Tasting the bitterness between my teeth.
The incalculable malice of the everyday.

FIRST VOICE:
How long can I be a wall, keeping the wind off?
How long can I be
Gentling the sun with the shade of my hand,
Intercepting the blue bolts of a cold moon?
The voices of loneliness, the voices of sorrow
Lap at my back ineluctably.
How shall it soften them, this little lullaby?

How long can I be a wall around my green property?
How long can my hands
Be a bandage to his hurt, and my words
Bright birds in the sky, consoling, consoling?
It is a terrible thing
To be so open:  it is as if my heart
Put on a face and walked into the world.

THIRD VOICE:
Today the colleges are drunk with spring.
My black gown is a little funeral:
It shows I am serious.
The books I carry wedge into my side.
I had an old wound once, but it is healing.
I had a dream of an island, red with cries.
It was a dream, and did not mean a thing.

FIRST VOICE:
Dawn flowers in the great elm outside the house.
The swifts are back.  They are shrieking like paper rockets.
I hear the sound of the hours
Widen and die in the hedgerows.  I hear the moo of cows.
The colors replenish themselves, and the wet
Thatch smokes in the sun.
The narcissi open white faces in the orchard.

I am reassured.  I am reassured.
These are the clear bright colors of the nursery,
The talking ducks, the happy lambs.
I am simple again.  I believe in miracles.
I do not believe in those terrible children
Who injure my sleep with their white eyes, their fingerless hands.
They are not mine.  They do not belong to me.

I shall meditate upon normality.
I shall meditate upon my little son.
He does not walk. &n

CHAPTER ONE

My geographic movements during the past year could be called “A Tale of Two Couches.” So as June draws to a close, I assume the position here again on Couch California. I am back in Hemet, the place the smug among us call Hemetucky--as if there was nothing a couple of Mint Juleps and a **** of Blue Grass wouldn’t cure. It is the year of our Lord, 2014: so far an interesting year for women. There was a woman who wore socks to bed. There was always my long-time, here today-gone tomorrow, long time companion, currently teaching somewhere remote on the Big Rez, a southwestern Navajo concentration camp near the 4 Corners.  Next, there’s my current object of affection, that fine and frisky lady from The Bronx by way of Bernalillo--currently at home in Laguna Beach, Orange County. Trixie: my main squeeze at the moment.

And now, completely out of the ******* blue this afternoon, my cell phone rings and it’s ******* Juanita--my all-time favorite woman, Juanita Mi Favorita de La Quinta--a Coachella Valley town and desert wadi, extending its lucrative winter tourist season to become a significant, year-round retirement venue and a robust service economy feeding off it.  Juanita arrived there in the late 80s, in middle of her early forties.  She was unemployed, homeless, just a suitcase to her name and a two-year old toddler in tow. Her parents were there, as was her Aunt Peggy.  Juanita was always Peggy’s favorite niece, her favorite child, actually, Peggy herself being childless, never married.  Aunt Peggy put her maternal instincts to work on Juanita Rodriguez, her Sister Rosalia’s second favorite twin daughter.

Maria, Rosalia’s first favorite daughter, Juanita’s twin sister—MARIA: lives in Newport Beach and acts as an extra in many commercial ads shot in southern California and elsewhere, an irony never without sting for Juanita. “Que lastima!” Poor Juanita: as her would-be Hollywood Movie star aspirations disintegrated over the years, along with her unrealized lower expectations to be TV star, and even those semi-glamorous modeling gigs at trade shows and fairs—the elephant’s graveyard of the acting profession—failed to materialize, and now her celebrity habitat shrunken even further, to that sporadic but consistent mockery of stardom, I refer to any would-be thespian’s ignominious one-celled visual protozoan: The Extra Call List.  And—*******-- what happens next? Juanita’s sister Maria starts getting these parts, starts getting hired by filling out a ******* postcard, starts getting paid to look good in the background. *******: no professional education or instruction, no agent, and no need to **** off both the producer, the producer’s cousin Morey, the director and the director’s wife’s huge Golden retriever, Genghis--actually a mighty handsome animal--or needing to spill $4K on that Derma-brasion, Juanita inflicted on herself last year.

Juanita, as you already know, was the second favorite daughter and the second favorite twin of the family. She became the third favorite child in her three-child family upon the arrival of her slick baby brother Nico-- the Golden Child, who grew up to be a glib Merrill-Lynch stockbroker, office and residence, Beverly Hills 90112.  (Enter forcefully into the narrative, His Nibs himself, Sir Nicodemus of Hollywood, Juanita and Maria’s baby brother Nico. He speaks: “Excuse me, stockbroker my ***, as it says in a 11 point Rockwell Boldfont, right here on my gold-leaf embossed business card: Senior Large Capital Investment Counselor.”)

No, Juanita had a hard time just treading water in that Cleveland shark tank. And though she lacked nothing in the cuteness department, she had this one fatal flaw, namely, the gift of ***** and sass and a reflex to speak truth to power. Juanita: rejected by Rosalia as a threat to her hegemony as Boss of the Girl’s Club, was cast adrift on a tempestuous childhood cruel Montserrat sea, out there on the briny deep . . .  
                

                                      



High Seas: where many a tuna has a Sorry Charlie moment: “Star-Kist don’t want no tuna with good taste; Star-Kist wants a tuna that tastes good.”

Finally, Juanita is rescued, taken aboard the Good/Soul Aunt Peggy—that wayward bark Elisabeta Rodriguez, home-ported in Southside, Chicago, Illinois—the rescue at sea performed in classy, rather low-key manner; no Andrea Doria drama, but understated:

{Camera One, Helicopter above, zooms over turbulent ocean surface. Peggy, an oasis of calm, aboard the raft Kon Tiki with Thor Heyerdahl and his crew, floats by, whispering, “Going my way, Honey? Climb aboard. Have a homemade oatmeal cookie and a small glass tumbler of Jack Daniels.” Okay, no, that’s not fair. Sure Aunt Peggy drank, but never got round to offering you a drink until you were well into your 30s. Let’s just say she offered you a warm glass of milk, the mother’s milk deprived you by your mother, her sister Rosalia. Dear Aunt Peggy: a seasoned survivor herself, flawed by early childhood deafness and grotesque speech.  Yet, she had refused to settle for life in an asylum. She made a go at life.  She learned; she prospered; she flourished. And when the time came, she was there for you in the Coachella Desert, there for her feisty niece Juanita Ann.  Aunt Peggy: a loving spirit personified, became Juanita’s special confidant and counselor, her personal cheer squad of one. Juanita, of course, a former cheerleader herself--an early hint of greatness to be sure, a highlight, perhaps the highlight of her life, shown off every Halloween, still celebrated at American high schools each Fall. She is the Principal’s secretary at a huge suburban high school in Indio. Each Halloween, if the date falls on a school day, Juanita arrives for work wearing that scrupulously preserved, vintage 1966 cheerleader uniform, looking real foxy still, snug now in all the right places. Eternal Truth: Juanita has always and will always be good looking. Life with Juanita is perpetual “ooh la-la.”

So, I am on the couch that afternoon, reading more of Gramsci’s prison notebooks, specifically the philosophy he calls “Praxis.”  Completely out of the ******* blue, Juanita calls me on a RESTRICTED phone, as I said, Juanita, a torch I’ve kept burning for years, flaring up like a refinery flame--oil still very much in the present energy mix--hope springing eternal as they say, and instantly my mission in life is rekindling our lost love. Juanita’s conceived her mission prior to her phone call:  using me to keep her son from being whacked by the local Eme--the Mexican Mafia—that ethnic-pride social club that the RICO-squad-- using family tree socio-grams and other expensively-printed graphics, the one RICO keeps trying to convince us is some sort of organized crime conspiracy. The Mexican Mafia: like everything else practical and utilitarian in this world: THAT’S ITALIAN! And, if you are starting to sense a bit of ethnic chauvinism on, between & below the lines, you are barking up the right tree.
                                                           ­     
      
                                                            
(AUTHOR’S POST-SCRIPT EDIT: And, an ad for dog food right here? Not the best choice of sponsors, perhaps, at the moment. Juanita was far off from the ****** ***** that start looking not half-bad at 2:30 in the glazy morning, not anywhere near those beasts you find lingering in the airport bars you usually frequent near closing time on Saturday nights. No, I remind you that Juanita was all “ooh la-la.” In my next printing—and my Lord, there have been so many, haven’t there, Paulie “Eat-a-Bag-of-****” Muldoon? I will change out the Alpo ad, plugging in a spot for Aunt Jemima pancake syrup or Betty Crocker whipped cream, you know, something more apropos.)

Juanita, I really must hand it to you. You showed the greatest staying power, year after year as I moved further and further away from La Quinta, California. Juanita: you embraced what was good in me, ignored my flaws and strengthened me with your love for so many years. As far as you and Peggy, I guess it was a case of the “apple not falling far from the tree” one of many endearing Midwestern metaphors you taught me.  Peggy taught you, taught you to be kind and then you taught me. No matter what bizarre venue I pulled out of my ***, you showed above-average staying power, continued to visit me wherever I went, Casa Grande & Buckeye, Arizona, Appalachia, West Virginia, and even Italy, when I thought I’d try Europe again after so many years.  With each move, each time, Juanita renewed her commitment to the relationship. Meanwhile, I continued to test her, quantifying her dedication, undermining her sense of mission to disprove my worldview on the expendability of women. Surely, you know that one: the unreliability of women, women who disappear without saying goodbye. That old deeply etched conviction to never get attached to a woman, any woman, based on the empirical fact that women have been known to suddenly die, a fact seared into my still tender metal by the surprise death of my mother on 11 January 1962.

1962. It was already an insecure world, to wit:  The Cuban Missile Crisis. Nikita Khrushchev, in his time both Dr. No and Dr. Evil, namely the Premier whom we Baby Boomers saw as Boogey Man of All Time (Although Putin is showing potential, lately)—the Kennedy ****** (what else could you call it?). All these events scary, whether or not I got the chronology right . . . I remained on high alert for any threat to my delicate adolescent psyche.  My mother-Rosa Teresa Sekaquaptewa-died at 2 o’clock in the morning, screaming in agony while apologizing to my father for not having his dinner on the table when he walked in from work that prior afternoon. She’d already been in bed since noon, attended by two of my aunts--both my father’s sisters--who loved their Hopi sister-in-law, Rosa.  Also present was Lafcadio Smirnoff, M.D.--last of the house call medicine men--a dapper, mustachioed, swarthy gentleman, misdiagnosing her abdominal pain as a 24-hour virus, while she bled out internally for at least eight more hours, her whimpers alternated with screams, well into the wee hours of the morning.

I was upstairs in that dormer bedroom listening to her die. An hour later, Father Numb-nuts of Our Lady of Lourdes Parish teleported in, beaming directly into my bedroom from the parish rectory.  Father Seamus Numb-nuts, an illuminated Burning Bush . . . not quite the bush I ‘d conjured at other times, so many times alone with Gwen Wong, ******* Playmate of the Year, 1961, one of Hefner’s hot centerfolds. No, give me a ******* break, you momo! Whacking off is the last thing on a libidinous, adolescent guinea’s brain when his mama is being tortured and killed by God. Even Alexander Portnoy, Philip Roth’s early avatar would have drawn the wanking line at that unforgettable moment.

No, perhaps what I’d had in mind was The Burning Bush Golf Course where so much of Fletcher Kneble’s political mischief and government shenanigans got cooked up. You remember his books, some of the Cold War’s finest: Seven Days in May, Vanished, etc.

Or better yet, perhaps the greatest political slogan of the 20th century: “STAY OUT THE BUSHES!” Thank you, Jesse. “Thank you, Reverend Jackson,” I slip into my Excellence in Broadcasting mode, my very own private Limbaugh. Announcing my on- air arrival is El Rushbo’s unmistakable, totally recognizable bass line bumper, courtesy of Chrissie Hynde’s Pretenders band mate, guitarist Tony Butler: Dum, dum, dum-dum, Da-dum, dum-dum-dum-dum-da-dum-dum. Single, “My City Was Gone” by The Pretenders
Rush Limbaugh Song– YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=SScW9r0y3c4

I become Reverend Jackson. I emerge from the vapors, an obscure abyss of deep family pangs and disappointments, ever-diminishing public relevance and fade to black (no pun intended) and media oblivion. The only thing left is that line:  “STAY OUT THE BUSHES!” You will always own that line, Jesse--true political genius (to wit: Rainbow Coalition) Jackson that you are, despite El Rush-Bo’s virulent anti-Black animus, his predilection to mock you, Al Sharpton, Corey Booker, Barack “Hussein” Obama, and any other professional ***** in America. Isn’t it time someone came right out and tagged Mr. Limbaugh as the Father Coughlin of our time.

Meanwhile back in The Bronx, enter another man of the cloth:  It’s Seamus Numb-nuts, making one of his many well-documented spectral visitations, his splendiferous miracles and wonders. How much longer will the Vatican ignore this humble Bronx priest, this epitome of Sainthood; this reverent man, lacking only the stigmata for a unanimous consent vote? Quote the Numb-nuts: “God Works in Mysterious Ways.” An old standard to be sure, but a lovely, all-purpose bromide for explaining why evil exists in our world. Needless to say, I was underwhelmed; I lost God at that moment, consequently shooting myself in the foot--metaphorically-speaking-condemning myself to an unshielded life, life OUT THE BUSHES!  I went forth into the world without God, without that handy divine crutch, that Andy Devine metaphor for when one’s legs grow weary: a puff of smoke, a reverb twang and a nasty frog croaking “Hi-ya, Kids. Hi-ya, Hi-ya. Hi-ya.”

   Andy's Gang - Pasta Fazooli vs. Froggy the Gremlin - YouTube
► 3:55► 3:55
www.youtube.com/watch?v=H35odPm7b3w Aug 8, 2012 - Uploaded by jmgilsinger
Froggy the Gremlin -Tuba ... Andy Devine (Aug 24, 1952)

Life for me became lonely and purposeless. And probably explains my susceptibility to military discipline and a subsequent career in clandestine government service. In 1968--the very day I turned nineteen, September 25th of that year—that fateful day when I should have shot myself in the foot—literally not metaphorically--earning that coveted 4-F physical rejection, a draft deferment to be desired, that 4-F classification of unfitness for duty, a necessary loophole in U.S. conscript service law.  The Draft: last used during that great commonwealth Cold War purge, that culling out of the unwashed, uneducated children of immigrants, that cut-rate, discount, lower socio-economic ***** bank—the only bank where after you make a deposit, you lose interest, to wit: most Black, Hispanic and Poor White Trash parents.  We were cannon fodder, many of us got to be planted at Arlington and other holy American shrines, still wrapped in black or olive drab leak-proof body bags, doing our generational bit to strengthen the gene pool left behind. A debt, some would say, we owed the country and, given the sorry state of the global wicket, increasingly an obligation to the species. And if I had to predict an outcome, Fascism in America will arrive riding the white horse of the environmental, anti-nuclear Bolsheviks. One could argue that Communism has moved so far left on the political spectrum that it’s now the far right.  Concoct a legislative policy goal, accomplish it legally as the bill becomes Law, signed by the President, endorsed and blessed by The U.S. Supreme Court, the highest court in the land.

To wit: “Three generations of imbeciles is enough?” declared Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., an Associate Supreme Court Justice at the time, buttressing a majority argument harnessing the power of U.S. law as a legal means of purifying the race.  When euthanasia failed to win over American hearts and mind, the Federal Government played the war card again and again. Vietnam: undeclared and therefore unconstitutional--except for that Gulf of Tonkin ******* resolution. Vietnam: a cost-plus eugenics project, if ever there was one, although responsive, of course, to the needs of the Military-Industrial Complex.  ******* Ike: he warned us against Fascism in America. As usual, we ignored the man in charge.

Eugenics? Why didn’t the government just put all the retards on the stand, as John Frankenheimer did in Judgment at Nuremberg, a crafty Maximilian Schell humiliating a feeble-minded Montgomery Clift?  Why not, make everyone face a public tribunal, forcing all of us to testify in court, exposing our many substandard and borderline substandard cerebral deficits?  Why not force everyone to demonstrate just how ******* dumb we are, using some clever intelligence test, something l

The tired, old cliché –life is short—is probably more accurate than I would care to admit. With wry amusement, I have to admit that overused saying can be quite a joke to me, for I’ve heard it said way too many times, quite at the level of nauseam. Often times, I think the opposite, that life can be pretty **** long when you are not satisfied with it.

I am now at the age which I once thought was getting old, just having another unwanted birthday recently, turning forty-seven last month. As a girl, I thought anyone who had reached the age of forty was practically decrepit. Well, perhaps not, but it might as well have been that way. Forty wasn’t flirty. Forty wasn’t fun. It was far from a desirable age to be, but at least it seemed a million years off.

Surely now, life is far from over for me. Yet I must admit that I am feeling that my youth is slowly slipping away, like sand between my hands that is impossible to hold onto forever. Fifty is over the horizon for me, and I can sense its approach with a bit of unease and trepidation.

It is amazing. Many people still tell me that I am young, but even in my thirties I sensed that middle age was creeping up on me. And now I really am wondering when my middle age status will officially come to an end and old age will replace it—just exactly what number that is anyway. If I doubled up my age now, it would be ninety-four, so my age bracket cannot be as “middle” as it once was.

When we are children, we often cannot wait until we are old enough, old enough to drive when we turn sixteen, old enough to vote when we turn eighteen, as well as old enough to graduate from all those years of school drudgery, and old enough to drink when we turn twenty-one. I can certainly add the lesser milestones—when we are old enough to no longer require a babysitter, when we are old enough to date, when girls are old enough to wear make-up, or dye their hair. Those benefits of adulthood seem to validate our importance in life, nothing we can experience firsthand as a rightful privilege before then.

Many kids can’t wait to be doing all the grown-up things, as if time cannot go fast enough for them, as if that precious stage of life should simply race by like a comet, and life would somehow continue on as before, seemingly as invincible as it ever did in youth. Yet, for many people, after finally surpassing those important ages and stages, they often look back and are amazed at how the years seemed to have just flown by, rushed on in like a “thief in the night” and overtook their lives. And they then begin to realize that they are mortal and life is not invincible, after all.

I am one of them.

When I was a girl, I did not have an urgent sense of the clock, certainly not the need to hurry up to morph into an adult, quite content to remain in my snug, little cocoon of imaginary prepubescent bliss. It seemed like getting to the next phase in life would take forever, or so I wanted it to be that way. In my dread of wondering what I would do once I was grown. I really was in no hurry to face the future head on.  I pretty much feared those new expectations and leaving the security of a sheltered, childhood, a haven of a well-known comfort zone, for sure, even though a generally unhappy one.

Change was much too scary for me, even if it could have been change for the good.

At the age I am now, I surely enjoy the respects that come with the rites of passage into adulthood, a status that I, nor anybody, could truly have as a child. I can assert myself without looking like an impudent, snot-nosed kid—a pint sized know-it-all—one who couldn’t impress anybody with sophistication no matter how much I tried. Now, I can grow into an intelligent woman, ever growing with the passing of age, perhaps a late bloomer with my assertiveness and confidence. Hopefully, more and more each day, I am surrendering the fight in the battle of self-negativity, slowly obtaining a sense of satisfaction in my own skin.

I have often been mistaken as much younger than my actual age. The baby face that I once had seems to be loosing its softness, a very youthful softness that I once disliked but now wish to reclaim. I certainly have mixed feelings about being older, glad to be done with the fearful awkwardness of growing up, now that I look back to see it for what it was, but sometimes missing that girl that once existed, one who wanted to enjoy being more of what she truly had.

All in all, I’d much rather be where I am right this very moment, for it is all that I truly can stake as my claim. Yet I think of the middle age that I am in right now as a precarious age.

As the years go by, our society seems ever more youth obsessed, far more than I was a child. Plastic surgeries are so common place, and Botox is the new fountain of youth. Anti-aging creams, retinol, age defying make-up—many women, including myself, want to indulge in their promises for wrinkle-free skin. Whether it is home remedies or laboratory designed methods, whatever way we can find to make our appearance more pleasing, and certainly younger, is a tantalizing hope for those of us who are middle aged females.

Is fifty really the new thirty? I’d love to think so, but I just cannot get myself to believe that.

Just ask my aches and pains if you want to know my true opinion.

Middle age women are now supposed to be attractive to younger men, as if it is our day for a walk in the sun. Men have been in the older position—often much older position—since surely time began. But we ladies get the label of “cougar”, an somewhat unflattering name that speaks of stalking and pouncing, of being able to rip someone apart with claws like razors, conquer them and then devour them. There is Cougar Town on television that seems to celebrate this phenomenon as something fun and carefree, but I still think that it is generally looked at as something peculiar and wrong.

Hugh Hefner can have women young enough to be his granddaughters, and it might be offensive to many, but he can still get pats on the back and thumbs up for his lifestyle. Way to go, Hef! Yet when it comes to Demi Moore married to Ashton Kutcher, a man fifteen years younger than her, it is a different story. Many aren’t surprised that they are divorcing. Talking heads on television have pointed out, with the big age difference between them, that their relationship was doomed from the start. Other talking heads have pointed out the double standard and the unfairness placed on such judgment, realizing that it probably would not be this way if the man was fifteen years older.

Yes, right now I have middle age as my experience, and that is exactly where I feel in life—positioned in the middle between two major life stages. And they are two stages that I don’t think commands any respect—childhood and old age.      

I’ve been to my share of nursing homes. I helped to care for my father, as he lived and died in one. I had to endure my mother’s five month stay in a nursing home while she recovered from major surgery. I have volunteered my time in hospice, making my travels in some nursing home visitations. So I have seen, firsthand, the hardship of what it means to be elderly, of what it means to feel like a burden, of what it means to lose one’s abilities that one has always taken for granted.  I’ve often witnessed the despair and the languishing away from growing feeble in body and mind.
There is no easy cure for old age. No amount of Botox can alleviate the problems. No change seems available in sight for the ones who have lost their way, or have few people that can care for them, or are willing to care for them.  

I think time should just slow down again for me—as it seemed to be in my girlhood.

I am in no hurry to leave middle age.

Eternity is closed !
- come back another day with
flower smears for eyes and sincere
passion on your
palms          (weathered)

I need another Russian Doll -
Princess to frequent curtains
fashioned from fire & lead
equaling out to crimson folds
which mysteriously call to
the mystical hierarchies of
imagination

Silent requirements signal beneath the steps
which welcome
one (a stranger/
an Ibis-Beak cane & dark coat
stamped with August rain)

They arrive unexpectedly, as if to play the game
of cliches, they carry promises fashioned in foreign ports
tapping my knee
instead of my shoulder
having only known or recognized
entombment
                               (there is no hyperbole which lacks within
                                Nature's haunted heavens)

My strange visitor leaves / glass umbrella
in hand / to privacy / our brief interaction begins & ends with simple eager undertakings implemented
in the afterword  

What is in another's contemplation of me?
whiling in manifest Theosophy -

- Thought form -
Primal child-rage / whisp of violet smoke &
inksplotches abolished, mutually panting.
Our decorated
four-legged hunter
has arisen and impatiently
craves for the Earth to partner at last with
the Sun

..The Sun a blazing dime
I can smell crispness
in the air

Began at dusk and led us here swiftly.
Along with the wind springtime
blew in new found forms of folly.
Invested in life vests to
rid the sleeves for my heart
To beat upon.
The moon show through
pale blue.
The air reeked of butterfly
winged exhaust pipes.
The ins and outs of
Seasonal rotation.
Life and death as one.
To illustrate landscape stretches
created from scraps of string.

Silence

Says a million different

Things.

Watching a multitude of human
beings from a distance.

I’m distant

from any sort of recognition.
What’s an honor when
the honor is expected
spread evenly among a crowd
of strangers expecting
Futures.

Silence

Says I’m as unique as
classes of identical robe wearing
shower goers;
As unique as uniforms.

Birds know no boundaries
when it comes to bravery
trying to communicate

something to me,

as part of me worries
for their safety.

Freedom is beyond me.

Intuitively,

Silence

Speaks with me.
She's telling me
silent was the bravery feathers
upon impacting the tires packed with pressure
ready to burst at the seems
silent was the bravery upon bursting at her seems
in the rear view mirror I see
wing feather constellations
painting a reality portrait for
me.

Silence

tells me selfishness

is the root of everything.
Silence

tells me mystery

is the beneath the X marks
of all the treasure maps I
painted repeatedly.

Silence
soothes
me.

In a distant land, far beyond the time we know now, there lived an ancient people who knew in their bones of a past outside memory. Things happened over and over; as day became night night became day, spring followed winter, summer followed spring, autumn followed summer and then, and then as autumn came, at least the well-known ordered days passed full of preparation for the transhumance, that great movement of flocks and herds from the summer mountains to the winter pastures. But in the great oak woods of this region the leaves seemed reluctant to fall. Even after the first frosts when the trees glimmered with rime as the sun rose. Even when winter’s cousin, the great wind from the west, ravaged the conical roofs of the shepherds’ huts. The leaves did not fall.

For Lucila, searching for leaves as she climbed each day higher and higher through the parched undergrowth under the most ancient oaks, there were only acorns, slews of acorns at her feet. There were no leaves, or rather no leaves that might be gathered as newly fallen. Only the faint husks of leaves of the previous autumn, leaves of provenance already gathered before she left the mountains last year for the winter plains, leaves she had placed into her deep sleeves, into her voluminous apron, into the large pockets of her vlaterz, the ornate felt jacket of the married woman.

Since her childhood she had picked and pocketed these oaken leaves, felt their thin, veined, patterned forms, felt, followed, caressed them between her finger tips. It was as though her pockets were full of the hands of children, seven-fingered hands, stroking her fingers with their pointed tips when her fingers were pocketed.

She would find private places to lay out her gathered leaves. She wanted none to know or touch or speak of these her children of the oak forest. She had waited all summer, as she had done since a child, watching them bud and grow on the branch, and then, with the frosts and winds of autumn, fall, fall, fall to the ground, but best of all fall into her small hands, every leaf there to be caught, fallen into the bowl of her cupped hands. And for every leaf caught, a wish.

Her autumn days became full of wishes. She would lie awake on her straw mattress after Mikas had risen for the night milking, that time when the rustling bells of the goats had no accompaniment from the birds. She would assemble her lists of wishes, wishes ready for leaves not yet fallen into the bowl of her cupped hands. May the toes of my baby be perfectly formed? May his hair fall straight without a single curl? May I know only the pain I can bear when he comes? May the mother of Mikas love this child?

As the fine autumn days moved towards the feast day of St Anolysius, the traditional day of departure of the winter transhumance, there was, this season, an unspoken tension present in the still, dry air. Already preparations were being made for the long journey to the winter plains. There was soon to be a wedding now three days away, of the Phatos boy to the Tamosel girl. The boy was from an adjoining summer pasture and had travelled during the summer months with an itinerant uncle, a pedlar of sorts and beggar of repute. So he had seen something of the world beyond those of the herds and flocks can expect to see. He was rightly-made and fit to marry, although, of course, the girl was to be well-kept secret until the day itself.

Lucila remembered those wedding days, her wedding days, those anxious days of waiting when encased in her finery, in her seemingly impenetrable and voluminous wedding clothes she had remained all but hidden from view. While around her the revelling came and went, the drunkenness, the feasting, the riotous eruptions of noise and movement, the sudden visitations of relatives she did not know, the fierce instructions of women who spoke to her now as a woman no longer a young girl or a dear child, women she knew as silent, shy and respectful who were now loud and lewd, who told her things she could hardly believe, what a man might do, what a man might be, what a woman had to suffer - all these things happening at the same time. And then her soon-to-be husband’s drunk-beyond-reason friends had carried off the basket with her trousseau and dressed themselves riotously in her finest embroidered blouses, her intricate layered skirts, her petticoats, even the nightdress deemed the one to be worn when eventually, after three days revelry, she would be visited by a man, now more goat than man, sodden with drink, insensible to what little she understood as human passion beyond the coupling of goats. Of course Semisar had prepared the bright blood for the bridesbed sheet, the necessary evidence, and as Mikas lay sprawled unconscious at the foot of the marriage bed she had allowed herself to be dishevelled, to feign the aftermath of the act he was supposed to have committed upon her. That would, she knew, come later . . .

It was then, in those terrible days and after, she took comfort from her silent, private stitching into leaves, the darning of acorns, the spinning of skeins of goats’ wool she would walnut-dye and weave around stones and pieces of glass. She would bring together leaves bound into tiny books, volumes containing for her a language of leaves, the signs and symbols of nature she had named, that only she knew. She could not read the words of the priest’s book but was fluent in the script of veins and ribs and patterning that every leaf owned. When autumn came she could hardly move a step for picking up a fallen leaf, reading its story, learning of its history. But this autumn now, at the time of leaf fall, the fall of the leaf did not happen and those leaves of last year at her feet were ready to disintegrate at her touch. She was filled with dread. She knew she could not leave the mountains without a collection of leaves to stitch and weave through the shorter days and long, long winter nights. She had imagined sharing with her infant child this language she had learnt, had stitched into her daily life.

It was Semisar of course, who voiced it first. Semisar, the self-appointed weather ears and horizon eyes of the community, who followed her into the woods, who had forced Lucila against a tree holding one broad arm and her body’s weight like a bar from which Lucila could not escape, and with the other arm and hand rifled the broad pockets of Lucila’s apron. Semisar tossed the delicate chicken bone needles to the ground, unravelled the bobbins of walnut-stained yarn, crumpled the delicately folded and stitched, but yet to be finished, constructions of leaves . . . And spewed forth a torrent of terrible words. Already the men knew that the lack of leaf fall was peculiar only to the woods above and around their village. Over the other side of the mountain Telgatho had said this was not so. Was Lucila a Magnelz? Perhaps a Cutvlael? This baby she carried, a girl of course, was already making evil. Semisar placed her hand over and around the ripe hard form of the unborn child, feeling for its shape, its elbows and knees, the spine. And from there, with a vicelike grip on the wrist, Semisar dragged Lucila up and far into the woods to where the mountain with its caves and rocks touched the last trees, and from there to the cave where she seemed to know Lucila’s treasures lay, her treasures from childhood. Semisar would destroy everything, then the leaves would surely fall.

When Lucila did not return to prepare the evening meal Mikas was to learn all. Should he leave her be? He had been told women had these times of strange behaviour before childbirth. The wedding of the Phatos boy was almost upon them and the young men were already behaving like goats before the rut. The festive candles and tinselled wedding crowns had been fetched from the nearest town two days ride distant, the decoration of the tiny mountain basilica and the accommodation for the priest was in hand. The women were busy with the making of sweets and treats to be thrown at the wedding pair by guests and well-wishers. Later, the same women would prepare the dough for the millstones of bread that would be baked in the stone ovens. The men had already chosen the finest lambs to spit-roast for the feast.

She will return, Semisar had said after waiting by the fold where Mikas flocks, now gathered from the heights, awaited their journey south. All will be well, Mikas, never fear. The infant, a girl, may not last its birth, Semisar warned, but seeing the shocked face of Mikas, explained a still-birth might be providential for all. Know this time will pass, she said, and you can still be blessed with many sons. We are forever in the hands of the spirit, she said, leaving without the customary salutation of farewell.
                                               
However different the lives of man and woman may by tradition and circumstance become, those who share the ways and rites of marriage are inextricably linked by fate’s own hand and purpose. Mikas has come to know his once-bride, the child become woman in his clumsy embrace, the girl of perhaps fifteen summers fulfilling now his mother’s previous role, who speaks little but watches and listens, is unfailingly attentive to his needs and demands, and who now carries his child ( it can only be a boy), carries this boy high in her womb and with a confidence his family has already remarked upon.

After their wedding he had often returned home to Lucila at the time of the sun’s zenith when it is customary for the village women to seek the shade of their huts and sleep. It was an unwritten rite due to a newly-wed husband to feign the sudden need for a forgotten tool or seek to examine a sick animal in the home fold. After several fruitless visits when he found their hut empty he timed his visit earlier to see her black-scarfed figure disappear into the oak woods.  He followed her secretively, and had observed her seated beneath an ancient warrior of a tree, had watched over her intricate making. Furthermore and later he came to know where she hid the results of this often fevered stitching of things from nature’s store and stash, though an supernatural fear forbade him to enter the cleft between rocks into which she would disappear. He began to know how times and turns of the days affected her actions, but had left her be. She would usually return bright-eyed and with a quiet wonder, of what he did not know, but she carried something back within her that gave her a peculiar peace and beauty. It seemed akin to the well-being Mikas knew from handling a fine ewe from his flock . . .

And she would sometimes allow herself to be handled thus. She let him place his hands over her in that joyful ownership and command of a man whose life is wholly bound up with flocks and herds and the well-being of the female species. He would come from the evening watch with the ever-constant count of his flock still on his lips, and by a mixture of accident and stealth touch her wholly-clothed body, sometimes needing his fingers into the thick wool of her stockings, stroking the chestnut silken hairs that he found above her bare wrists, marvelling at her small hands with their perfect nails. He knew from the ribaldry of men that women were trained from childhood to display to men as little as possible of their intimate selves. But alone and apart all day on a remote hillside, alone save for several hundred sheep, brought to Mikas in his solitary state wild and conjured thoughts of feminine spirits, unencumbered by clothes, brighter and more various than any night-time dream. And he had succumbed to the pleasure of such thoughts times beyond reason, finding himself imagining Lucila as he knew she was unlikely ever to allow herself to be. But even in the single winter and summer of their life together there had been moments of surprise and revelation, and accompanied by these precious thoughts he went in search of her in the darkness of a three-quarter moon, into the stillness of the night-time wood.

Ah Lucilla. We might think that after the scourge of Semisar, the physical outrage of her baby’s forced examination, and finally the destruction of her treasures, this child-wife herself with child would be desolate with grief at what had come about. She had not been forced to follow Semisar into the small cave where wrapped in woven blankets her treasures lay between the thinnest sheets of impure and rejected parchment gleaned surreptitiously after shearing, but holding each and every treasure distinct and detached. There was enough light for Semisar to pause in wonder at the intricate constructions, bright with the aura of extreme fragility owned by many of the smaller makings. And not just the leaves of the oak were here, but of the mastic, the walnut, the flaky-barked strawberry and its smoothed barked cousin. There were leaves and sheaves of bark from lowland trees of the winter sojourn, there were dried fruits mysteriously arranged, constructions of acorns threaded with the dark madder-red yarn, even acorns cracked and damaged from their tree fall had been ‘mended’ with thread.

Semisar was to open some of the tiny books of leaved pages where she witnessed a form of writing she did not recognise (she could not read but had seen the priest’s writing and the print of the holy books). This she wondered at, as surely Lucila had only the education of the home? Such symbols must belong to the spirit world. Another sign that Lucila had infringed order and disturbed custom. It would take but a matter of minutes to turn such makings into little more than a layer of dust on the floor.

With her bare hands Semisar ground together these elaborate confections, these lovingly-made conjunctions of needle’s art with nature’s purpose and accidental beauty. She ground them together until they were dust.

When Semisar returned into the pale afternoon light it seemed Lucila had remained as she had been left: motionless, and without expression. If Semisar had known the phenomenon of shock, Lucila was in that condition. But, in the manner of a woman preparing to grieve for the dead she had removed her black scarf and unwound the long dark chestnut plaits that flowed down her back. But there were no tears. only a dumb silence but for the heavy exhalation of breath. It seemed that she looked beyond Semisar into the world of spirits invoking perhaps their aid, their comfort.

What happened had neither invoked sadness nor grief. It was as if it had been ordained in the elusive pattern of things. It felt like the clearing of the summer hut before the final departure for the long journey to the winter world. The hut, Lucila had been taught, was to be left spotless, every item put in its rightful place ready to be taken up again on the return to the summer life, exactly as if it had been undisturbed by absence . Not a crumb would remain before the rugs and coverings were rolled and removed, summer clothes hard washed and tightly mended, to be folded then wrapped between sprigs of aromatic herbs.

Lucila would go now and collect her precious but scattered needles from beneath the ancient oak. She would begin again - only to make and embroider garments for her daughter. It was as though, despite this ‘loss’, she had retained within her physical self the memory of every stitch driven into nature’s fabric.

Suddenly Lucila remembered that saints’ day which had sanctioned a winter’s walk with her mother, a day when her eyes had been drawn to a world of patterns and objects at her feet: the damaged acorn, the fractured leaf, the broken berried branch, the wisp of wool left impaled upon a stub of thorns. She had been five, maybe six summers old. She had already known the comforting action of the needle’s press again the felted cloth, but then, as if impelled by some force quite outside herself, had ‘borrowed’ one of her mother’s needles and begun her odyssey of darning, mending, stitching, enduring her mother’s censure - a waste of good thread, little one - until her skill became obvious and one of delight, but a private delight her mother hid from all and sundry, and then pressed upon her ‘proper’ work with needle and thread. But the damage had been done, the dye cast. She became nature’s needle slave and quartered those personal but often invisible

Three days, is what the HR rep said, somewhat sheepishly,
As if she was fully aware that boxing up one’s grief
In a span of a few dozen hours
Is a matter of wishful thinking
And certainly she sympathizes
(Indeed, as she speaks,
She spreads her hands in such a way
As you half expect doves to come forth in full flight)
Empathy being their stock in trade,
But the law and the handbook say three days,
And then you need to have your head
******* back on and looking forward.

Eventually, the mail brings fewer envelopes
Marked with embossed flowers
And subdued and tasteful stamps,
The usual flow of solicitous inquiries,
Pre-stamped and pre-sorted,
Inquiring as to your credit needs,
The condition of your windows and siding,
Resumes apace, and more than once,
In fits of inappropriate black humor and frustration,
You scribble, in bold thick strokes of a marker,
The addressee no longer resides at this location.

You return to nine-to-five,
Though your ghosts keep their own hours,
Stopping by to visit on their own schedule alone,
Prompted by the tiniest of things:
The dog scampering to its feet in a hurry,
As if someone was at the door,
The discovery of a long-unused pitching wedge
Standing expectantly in the back of the closet,
A song from long ago which was beloved
When you lived in the pairing mandated by Noah
Before you entered the shadow world of ones and nones.
Sometimes you give into the giddy madness,
And rise to waltz around the room,
Careening about unsteadily, clumsily
As you have yet to completely master
The difference in weight shift and distribution
That is required of a solo act.
The timing of these visitations
Often disrupts your schedule and sleep patterns,
And you think that perhaps tomorrow you’ll call in.

Visiting my grandfather in the hospital

     started out as an innocent trip.
     He only needs to stay a few days, they said
     but then it all went downhill.

     I soon learned that I was the light.
     I was to bring joy into the dreary room,
     despite breaking apart on the inside.

Visiting my grandfather in the hospital

     meant crying before entering his room.
     It meant wiping my tears and throwing on a smile:
     a smile that would calm everyone’s nerves.

     It bonded us beyond any other relationship.
     Your hugs are the best medicine, my grandfather said,
     and I never again came or left without an embrace.

Visiting my grandfather in the hospital

     became almost a daily routine.
     I did everything I could to make him smile
     only to drive home in tears.

     Never once telling a soul
     what I was going through,
     bearing it all on my own.

               Visiting my grandfather in the hospital
               may have seemed hard at the time,
               but laying him down to rest
               was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

Some art and poems— our strokes on paper

And walks among green mountains and sea,

On weekends of a friend visiting, time tapers,

Simple riches, words over ales, wine and tea.

grabbing her by throat hair he holds gun barrel to right eye with free hand she edges fingers into boot pulls dagger plunges it into his heart

i didn’t mean to do that i meant to do this

i’m trying to figure out how other people deal with disappointment of old age i guess they arrive at some settlement some settlement that eludes me

very few figure out meaning of their lives until it’s too late then become detectives trying to figure out whys if you wake up tomorrow you’ve got a shot at new day no one in this world knows what might happen

i believe people can do change maybe not their nature but spiritually emotionally intellectually psychologically i recognize change within myself i did could now never commit acts different from who i was more scared sensitive hopeful pure honest longing for love probably i sound corny all i want is mutual love adoration in way it was easier when i was thoughtless i got ***** i don’t know

poet must face every conceivable fear terror no matter how despairing risk walking away from table without chips

there are good people and bad people sometimes good people make bad mistakes sometimes bad people make smart choices

for decades he lived knowing no one valued him except his family collecting his paintings reading his works praising his efforts his entire career an inside job

her graying disheveled hair muddy smudged apron raw arthritic fingers she cooks meal washes dishes a million trillion dishes thankless life mom what’s for dinner

some people see it all coming plan invest i never saw any of it coming i never imagined

the sickly smell of grandpa’s farts lingers in room nauseating family

he held shivering abandoned puppy in arms she whimpered repeatedly he swore in that moment to protect her stood by his promise until he buried her

wild wolf chases him growling snapping nipping at ankles tearing jeans biting drawing blood he runs

pitiable old men everyone knows old men are impotent jokes with no pack to punch just harmless peevish impediments what good are they what purpose do they serve get the ******-freaking out of the road old man

riotous advancing mob overcome military police

sharing yoga class old man attending his skin thin as parchment bled i cleaned his blood from mat every class until he died

after puncturing her maidenhood reaching ****** he strokes head of 8 year old daughter good girl good girl daddy is so proud

skin him alive skin him alive little girl asks what’s different about poetry from standard writing grandpa answers i have no answers

not possible yet happening gradually suddenly amidst bribes bargaining lies government collapses citizenry unleash in anarchy yearning for change

Mom’s fogginess i sense it beginning in myself possibly inherited will i become like Mom there’s no one looking out for me Mom i’m looking out for you

after 30 or 40 years life is over don’t believe what they tell you

when i’m dead what will they unearth in my personal effects writings paintings letters emails bookmarks internet visitations or gossip accusations from those still alive probably allege another selfish decadent fool squandered resources missed opportunities misses the mark

maybe in 5 years i will live in New York City London Paris Tokyo Tahiti  with beautiful wife who will spread her buns want me to **** her grab my ***** at least once a day

there is a star in north sky that shines i understand you looking away when pain gets too great please look into my eyes when throbbing subsides

don’t make it any harder than it has to be please find it in your heart to forgive me i am so sorry

yup i’ve got cash guns friends in Canada Mexico Netherlands France first let’s make a run for the border  then later think about a boat

oh yeah one last remark ******* haters bigots greedy ******* all you big city fat cats small town big fish fearful suburban housewives over-cautious grannies gangsters politicians real-estate lawyers moneylenders fraudulent priests ******* all you movie actor phony smile celebrities cliché skinny jean cowboy boot rock stars all you left-wing right-wing tea-party outer-space inner-space freaks ******* i can’t don’t know how to explain myself ******* all

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

Let me explain.
This poem is about sleeping, dreaming,
the failure of my inadequacies in poetry to heal.

Three years after its birth, it is exactly what I am feeling this day.
It is long rambling and you won't stay for the whole movie.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Erudition is perdition,
dreaming in words, accursed,
death to the visionaries,
release from visitations
of over-staying, unwelcome guests,
Johnny Cash, Jesus,
Forefather Jacob, Bobby Dylan
and their whiny,
smug-smiled missives
on behalf of the
all knowing, dream invader powers,
who
just-happens-to-be-know-it-alls.

These guys,
sub rosa angels,
electioneering,
hand shaking  
you into dreams
that make you wonder              
unceasingly  

I have renounced chants n'
dreams that
wander                              
meaninglessly

so if there is no
repeal of the stupification
of the human condition,
just invent words that  fool
willful and mostly please
nobody

don't ask and don't tell,
then we can agree
that a life,
its peculiar
Hallmark Card of grief,
cannot be
disambiguated

yours is yours,
different from mine,
single poems cannot solve
multivariate equations,  
un-blow mind sensations
that circumnavigate my mind    
as I edge along the
borderline tween the
United States of self-realization,
and a State of Mexico
drug-induced, seductive and
self-administered pat down,
a colorless, tasteless, dreamless
evening in the company of
a rest-once-and-for-all,
sleeping pill

Repudiate yourself,  
privately you
hyperventilate,
but others willing to borrow
those surfeit of rapid
misunderstood breathes,
stored in brown paper bags,
that will be divided
most ingeniously by the
Misappropriation Committee
for wordy oxygen tanks,
desperate for refilling

Recant, Renege,
Renounce, Repeal,
Repudiate, Retract,
I herby foreswear
all previous poems, please
Return them

Back, send them,
so, I can end them,
desist any new arrival of vaniloquence,
direct 'em to  the trash box of inconsequence

My wrongful w-rightings
are now cashiered,
my cool is in mourning,
my plateau is flat but
upsided downded,
words drownded,
both sides now, spring silent

Tried to swim to safety,
to Spanish Harlem
but no hablo espanol,

In Miami, they done me in
for the crime of
insufficiently thin,

In Ghiradelli Square
they deemed me too blond
not 'ciscan enough
yet, in Frisco fairness,  
done deported me,
making me to choose
tween Los Angeles and/or
Orange County

So, poet poseur, where you gonna run too?

My better half sleeps,
my left half weeps,
so conditions normal.

Satan laughs,
offers me ***** or poetry,
knowing full well that having
foresworn, addictive wordmongering, liscentiousness
that a single letter
would stupor me into a
drunken poetry slam at
St. Paul's Church,
into Satan's collection box
of wordy sinners,
where lost souls, ex-poets,
prevaricate
vainly, in hopes
that anyone will let them
transubstantiate
in order to avoid their
expiration date
on Stub Hub

surrendered the master key,
turned in my ID badge,
opened inner sanctum no more,
poetry boy is ratiocinated,
peril dispatched, swear that I've
excommunicated the voices
determined to disintermediate

the compromise I've reached,
help is contraindicated,
ex-officio is my new grace state

please, devices decontaminate,
otherwise, poems disintegrate,
excoriate them, don't wait,
to disassociate'em, insufficient,
remove them from hard drives,
yank'em one and all!

let the diet begin,
no more food for thought,
no more dreams
wrought and recorded,
permit the ambient calm
of the still of the night
that engulfs,
to harmonize with the flatline
dreamless sleep that the
mind monitor machine
etchingly, quietly records

let hours of research
be rewarded,
by my imbibing the product of
laboratory pharmacological
fine tuning

***** S.,
what outrageous ego
let me suppose that in
mine own words,
I could improve upon
your lovelies,
with now bland homilies,
recitations of my anomalies

What id sexed my brain,
was I completely insane,
to imagine that I could
improve upon:

"and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the
thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to,
'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd.
To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream:
ay, there's the rub"

Finished: Nov 27, 2010 4:44 AM

“…knowledge of the beginning and the end, and of that all-pervading Reason which orders the universe in its determinate cycles to the end of time"
- Marcus Aurelius's definition of the sage

*I’m starting to think poets are bleeding ink
Longing for true understanding, an oath on the stand
Mentally sinking in quicksand, trials never finish
Fear of diminishing quicker than our escape plan

Seeking wisdom in time for our demise,
and as we're writing our words, our fears are in disguise
Intricate word-weaving, we’re prisoners of the moment,
spilling ink on the paper and anxious for our atonement

The dream of a dreamer’s quick to take him places
A limbo of the unknown, and filled with many faces
Endless deliberation with the jury of the mind
Furious and made in a hurry, truly “one of a kind”

But truthfully one of many, and so it’s up to you
Live an Epicurus life, happiness is a truth
Patient examination of nature is natural
A masterful snap of the mental camera is factual

The sage’s knowledge of reason is unilateral
Theory of forms and as Plato had put it
It’s reason you see before you that offers spatial relationships
Properties seeming apparent - hope you relate to this

Believe nothing you hear and half of what you see
Our fears are found in the lines written by you and me
So keep the words coming, never stop pursuing wisdom
Enlightenment of the soul towards a new beginning.

the doctor cautioned me…

no rough S?x my boy, your coeur très ancien,
ain’t up to the task, in fact, i urge you to forgo
the goings on you love to write about, leave them
words on the page, six to eight inches (!)  from the
tippy part of your…nose; for distance makes the heart
grow fonder, life longer, when you ticker gets that
‘lost that loving feeling’, keep it lost for now, cause
I no longer make home visitations and cancelled,
I did, the refills on your ****** scrip, keep your loving
confined to the twenty six alpa-bets, so you grow
old, well, alive, cursing my name repeatedly with
a strong *******, and I’m sure He’ll be listening,
cause I know He appreciates a **** good poem!

Reading about the paranormal,
The unknown,
Hearing of ghosts and spirits --
It hurts.

The otherworldly
Stirs up the painful memories
Of you.
I'd rather feel
Horror and fear
Anything else but this.

The demonic
The satanic
Can do little else to me
That you haven't already done.

Ghostly visitations,
Hauntings,
UFOs and their merry little abductions --
They all remind me of you
Still lurking my nights

When people trade stories
About aswang and demonic possession,
Cattle mutilations in the middle of nowhere,
I get chills
Thinking of you.

You are as inscrutable
As the Works of the Old Men
As the Nazca Lines
As the Coseck Circle.
Deciphering the Voynich Manuscript
Is nothing compared to the puzzle of you.

Listening to UVB-76
Max Headroom
The Bloop
Rebecca Black
Makes more sense than listening to you.

Unmask Jack the Ripper
Explain the Toynbee Tiles
Solve the Taman Shud Case
And I can solve you.

It's far less taxing, really
And more merciful on my limited cognitive faculties.

Bring me the Mongolian death worm
And Spring-heeled Jack
The Wandering Jew
The Dover Demon
And the Am Fear Liath Mòr
Before I decide
That sympathy and love
Are more that mere legends
Roaming the windswept wastes
Of your icy, shriveled heart,
Closer to reality than cryptozoology.

Abandoned cities and colonies
Only remind me of how abruptly and senselessly you left,
Leaving me a decrepit mystery of ruins

You believed in Atlantis
I said it was Plato's illustration --
His Republic,
Like Augustine's City of God.

Perhaps this was why our Atlantis
Sank to the ocean floor --
We were just good on paper.
Or maybe we started slaughtering
Noble half-breeds and changelings wholesale
Out of a misplaced sense of pride,

Or our union was unholy
And rankled the senses of the Sovereign
Who deemed it an offense
And thus condemned it,

Or perhaps this was an act of mercy
The equivalent of what Lovecraft said
The most merciful thing
Is the inability of the human mind
To correlate all the ******* he encounters
And has to deal with
On a daily ******* basis.

That the solid waves of mindfuck,
Pushing and heaving like tides,
Emanating from little ole you,
Would have finished off
Whatever was left of my mind.

You believed in ******* everything
But us.
Lost continents
Fox spirits
Psychometry
Were-boars
The ******* occult
No problem
All that which science cannot quantify nor qualify
You embraced
Yet you ran from me
And into the arms of another.

You claimed to be an empath
So tell me
How do I feel
After what you did to me?

You tell me.

And isn't empathy
Supposed to make people more compassionate?

The **** is this, then?

These stories
Of yetis and apparitions
Poltergeists and precognition
Used to intrigue and thrill me as a child.
When I grew up
I started ignoring them.
You put meaning back into the whole thing,
However insipid.

I was a skeptic.
You walked the line
Between the physical and supernatural
At least
If what you said is to be believed.

You were nothing but a specter,
Luring another hapless soul
Out into the barren wastelands
With a *** of stew,
Just beyond reach,
To its doom.

You're nothing but a ghost
Of an angry girl
Murdered by the cruelty
Of your parents and the church
And now I'm one of your victims.

Now as I start to see
Faint vistas of the supernatural,
They start to run
With memories of you
Until I can no longer
Distinguish one from the other.

So I'll ignore the glimpses
Of lurid phantasmagorias
And lock myself in
My world of letters and literature
Of armlocks and flying elbows
Of video games and liquor
I will pretend your world never existed.

Please, please keep out of mine.

plea of oddities: bring the tinkling back
its bell lies silent


1.
Existing (not entirely) alone
entertaining itself with nightmares witnessed from long ago
It waited and waited
until the neighbour-orb grew to a level sophisticated enough
to house that lovely assortment of fine specimens.. of females
       that flock of dusted-crystals so long dreamt of
       that mould of sensibility, that plug of warmth
       that banner of softness
which all mirrored the opposite of their ways


2.
they fled in quiet-rebellion from inhospitable hands of the boor-males
altogether, in a ship.. down into the bowels of their breaking planet
subtleties long abandoned by the barbed-wire handling of  rough hands
these gentles could take no more and *uncoupled themselves for good
burning, like the bridges behind them
               they disconnected and slid into a nether-sphere

When the males woke in stupor to find them gone
                 they flipped and fed in anger
and with access to goodness gone and unplaced voracious appetites
It decided to encase them.. in a giant glass-jar, preserving them in ire
until the time was right.. like a tea awaiting perfect steeping
In stasis, they remained for what seemed aeons
the glass-jar which held this army of men, was reduced
became small, like a coin.. which Foog summarily swallowed
and waited . . .  


3.
The sun turned its face in blank-horror of severe sights
                                                               splayed across the surface
forests shrank to toothpicks and died
         blue seas curled and dried
                                 meadows melted to greyish slush
every flying creature lost gravity and got ****** away, too high..
                                                        into harsh deafening-holes
when the tall sentries of oxygen.. twisted and became wiry-distorted
the sky sank and folding itself up.. hid in a black corner
                               behind the crumbling mountains

Foog hid beneath a crater made of ice, on the dark side of said planet
and once every millennium
        it felt the colliding-smack of a passing planetessimal
and it swore that somewhere, somehow..
        that punishment awaited new life

So, it shut its senses to the bay of life
       while hankering viciously for the scream of warm blood
The bell-jar inside, silent and
                        also somehow.. obscenely waiting in its oblivion



4.
Then, came Earth spinning round in flourish.. oh, the day on hand
Yet, veryyyyy far away.. an eye slowly opened
                      / /  roused by the smell of fressshhh life . . . / /



5.
A popping sound and the bell-jar was birthed from a slit on its forehead
It looked nearly quizzically at this odd creation beneath the silent-glass
this assortment of creatures trapped in the folly of Foog:
                                                                ­     oh, shall I, or not?
A cosmic joke, almost.. with so few revisions
The lid lifted and with proportion righted once more..
                                they came, oozing out in droves
Roaring from their milleniac-slumber,
                               crazed in half-remembered wounds
But alive with burning-purpose - - to find the equivalent
of
those soft-crystals

To melt the iron.. inside.



(unsolicited but self-warranted visitations:
camouflaged abductions.. secret prodding..
subtlety re-learnt.. poverty rehashed..
Fugue in a glass bell-jar.. unleashed)  



But alas, when sweet-sounds are closed again
see at whose smart-hands calamity befalls Life
Yet.. who are ultimately the ones
picking up the pieces after devastation wrought?




st, 27 march 2014

It was September when you closed your eyes.

The trees were verdant and fat,
Their boughs abuzz with the fluttering of birds;
The warmth of pre-autumnal breezes, pale and whispering:
“Alive, alive,” as the breath in your lungs.

I rarely contemplated your absence
Not for lack of trying, I assure you
It’s just hard to miss something you never really had
Not altogether impossible, but difficult, nonetheless

I could not miss you as my tongue
Could miss the taste of sugar sweet;
As my hand
Could miss the hand of a lover fair;
As my mind
Could miss the dulcet caress of poetry
Poignant and soft;
But I could miss you still, blood of my blood
As your presence should grace my thoughts faintly
Like some spectral invader---
A sometimes patriarch beguiled.

I dreamed of you the day mother informed me
Your eyes had finally opened.

The trees had worn thin by the time of my visitation
I could see them rapping between your blinds,
Scratching the glass in a hallowed colloquial,
The language of arboreal appendages fading:
“Alive, alive,” but just barely.

It was October.

Your days and dreams and dalliances
Compartmentalized into a series of sterile routines:
The steady drip of morphine
Into your veins;
The turning of your body,
In bed,
At the passing of each half day;
The fluids vacuumed,
From the hole in your throat,
At a quarter till every hour.

Your body became a clock, defected
Feebly measured in the perfunctory gasp
Of your heart’s meticulous monitor

It was just a week shy of November, and you were waning.

Haunted by those seventy-one years,
Long-lived, painfully slow,
Taunting you from the fraying end,
Of an agonizingly short rope---
Seventy-one years, and all it took
For the months to drop, skittering away,
Was the blink of a bloodshot eye.

It was October, but it should have been September.

That ruddy, porous grin,
The bullfrog blues of your grandfather’s smile,
Now made far and few between
By your unabashed lassitude,
By your hesitance to meet the gaze of another,
By your impatience at the sound of voices,
Talking about you like you weren't there.

You were a big guy, I noticed
I never realized how much so until I saw you
Laid up and sprawled unnaturally upon a hospital bed
Little more than an invalid,
Unable to lift a finger, even to catch
The choking, viscous saliva that would dribble,
Infantile and unbidden down your chin;
Unable to speak.

The catatonia fooled you, unbeknownst,
It pried the words from your swollen mouth
With skeletal, sable fingers,
Leaving penitent ghosts in their wake
So that your lips were moving, muttering,
Pressed with the phantom vocalizations
Of what half-formed apologies needled their way into your mind;
Of what no sounds produced
You even tried to tell me you loved me---
Though the affections never quite came to fruition,
I felt your taciturn ruminations, regardless.

I suppose that was a start.
You were near an end.
But it was a start, nevertheless.

Inhabiting the mere space of a windowpane
Inside of yourself as you were,
Your eyes remained outgoing:
At times they contained boredom,
At others longing or contempt,
And within those murky depths, I swear I recognized
The unshakeable, abject face of terror.

So much change for so little provocation:
The leaves outside, they rustled;
Cars continued their coming and going on distant highways;
The soothing azure of the day dampened,
Corroded by the cold, unrelenting hand of a changing season;
Gradually, the sun rose and fell.

It rose and fell:
(Your chest) rose and fell.
(Your face) rose and fell.
(Our hearts) rose and fell.
It always stayed the same.

And in your vacant, unwavering gaze,
Always something different:
The deathly vestige of repentance,
Folded between the window’s shade;
The laughing, lilting silhouette,
Of days forever passing;
And you, unmoving,
In that hospital bed,
A sharp juxtaposition to your caretakers
And their mock celebration:
“Alive, alive!”

But those saintly visitations of shadow and climate
Rapping against the window,
Waltzing across the far wall of your antiseptic prison,
They bespoke celebrations of their own,
Callous facts you knew all too well:

“It’s October, Tom. Autumn is here.
And you shouldn’t be.”

If you hear endearment in the plea
leave the echoed sigh of sympathy
and come with your libretto lungs
and lips of red zephyr absolution
to purify the black coughs of cumulus
evaporating the enclosure
of my satin-threaded fetters

A failed emblem of security
in solitary journeys

Come and lay your mortal coil
of seraphic incarnation
next to my imprisoned vessel
of corrupted humanness
Slow my palpitating hourglass
of ashen peace-of-mind
with organic visitations of
your marble maze shrines
Here I can placate my warped
direction with the porcelain decor
of your serene skin

Angel

Wrap your light around my being
like the sun around an icicle
then release me long enough
to euphemise the darkness in me
from de-light to silhouette enlightenment

Hear my plea
muffled by annulled identity
Be the angel
hiding in my boiled
satin threads
and reveal me

O broken and battered beatnik!
My tormented kindred spirit!
  I offer you a hundred lifetimes of my self-condemnation
  How can I deny finding portals to your spirit and soul with such ease any
longer?
  Only now how to reach you out on the physical plane...

Kick down my door painted black so I may crumble in your ****** arms like a poorly constructed sand fortress, sobbing salty tears of regret, wiping snot-nosed drivel onto your cotton-wool blended Ceredigion suit

I'm sorry!
I'm sorry!

Let me explain the truths of my hesitant trust, battered and bruised -- like affectionate kisses on the cheek with open and closed fists
and childhood neglect turned adult isolation -- like visitations in dank bars with hitchhiking mothers

Let me tell you how I closed my eyes as they saddled up to the roulette table,
Licking their wintery chapped lizard lips, and
  rubbing together their sticky hands
Placing their lucky chip
(free with the price of admission!)
On bets
Red.
    Black.
        Odd.
             Even.
I tried to rig the loaded ivory ball to fall on odds Green, Double Zero
house's edge
                                                              ..­.but...
Momentum lost,
Screams muffled as I saw them
  parade in celebration
Blowing trumpets and twirling batons,
  taming dancing bears in crinoline tutus

What have I done!?
What have I done!?

Punish me no more as I cower in my remorse!
Remove this needle from my tongue!
So I may provide the unheard voice in your narrative gap
When I found you alone, in an empty theatre, heaved there by a
  force so Divine
Never could I have conjured up a Love so true!
  Ohhhh! The tears!

Let us construct resolutions of brick and mortar placed
  hand-over-hand
Become co-conspirators and together
  build parallel neural pathways in our
       Meta-Mind
Our synaptic impulses firing in unison as
One
  neurotransmitter
We'll scribe the words spoken in real time
  pulling inspirations from our restful dreamlands
    coiled together in fetal spoons

I am here!
I am here!

Please grant unto me my only request,
allow me to hermit here awhile in this new warm home where I feel safe       and happy and fearlessly blissful
A quiet refuge
   most needed to rest my Self
Away from siren squawks that
   deafen feather-tufted ears
I may venture out for the news or for weekend browsing in local record         shops, but
      here
is where I reside and come home to you each night
Keep my literal words as a gift only to you
(But please paint dazzling murals with abracadabra brushstrokes, with every colour!)
Do not pass around my sacred scripts of our lore (we've been warned)
My trust is the most honourable endowment you could recieve, please cherish it as you so deserve
Give this unto me and I will give you
           an
        infinite
        well of
       musings
         and a
         legend
            for
            the
           ages!

I love you!
I love you!

O broken and battered beatnik!
Tortured kindred spirit!
  I offer you a hundred lifetimes of my devotion
  Your spirit and soul my course of navigation!
  Using compass and stars, meet me
  Wandering cautiously out on physical plains

I love you!

It was just ordinary colors in my wife’s clothing but it was similar and it was the effect of
Touching another item that I had purchased for her when our lives first began together it was
soft plaid again like when they say earth tones but this was light purple pink and green it was a
Pant suit and with her white turtleneck blouse she was a knockout in this single memory a life is
Flipped through pains joys indescribable happiness how she made me feel as she stood there in
That mall for some reason white always brought a special glow to her skin transfixing the heart
Not speaking registered adorable there are grand moments of romance but there to is the most
Precious visitations through the simplest means everything stands still and lets her stand
Out and shine God saw it first when he created the majestic pine then underlay it with brown
Soil the exactness of perfection I already wrote about how she looked on the back side of Oahu
Again the shade in the foreground white sand the carpet the preferment the palms created
Overhead and then out to the water’s edge the bright sunlight the turquoise surf edged in
White she strolled barefoot letting the waves roll in and splash over her feet and she had on
These bright red shorts and a white shirt with a red emblem on the front she was stunning
What a blend of paradise and the embodiment of love post card picture perfect a touching
Breeze caused her hair to flow out and away my heart rode on this dream wave truly Venus the
Goddess of love was in attendance again my heart was applauding without outward expression
It was in private conversation with my soul the swells in my heart rose as high as those rich
Green sea side cliffs it was renewal it was remembrance why I loved her so then at the country
Club back home in California at Christmas she wore this sheer black dress we had our picture
Taken in front of this great tree that was flocked she wore her hair in a perm perfection beamed
From her face she stole the show the dazzle of Christmas lights my heart rode the chilled cold
Night wind when we waited for them to bring our car it was the feeling of waiting for a carriage
Over head the stars twinkled in the crisp winter night air I just included you in a short journey of
How it feels to love my wife why because we all need to find our way back to the central and
Most important place in our life it happened for me just by the sight of a familiar color this also
Pertains to the immeasurable treasure that we have here in our homeland what can prompt us
To revisit and appreciate all that we have in marriage in God and country this truth is and will be
Told in different forms of sacred memories just open your heart and mind and enjoy yours

And you get to witness the destruction of mankind
The manifestation of violence
The rise of crime
The chemically induced joy that deteriorates the mind
The cancerous legions on the soul that no doctor can find
The shaman surgeon with the power to freeze time
The emotionally famished family that uncle sam left behind

The monotonous chime that causes the suits and ties to burst into reanimation
The unmovable path of the bullet that kills without hesitation
The murderous gang-banger dining in hells kitchen with no reservation
The chains that bound the vagabond with no visitations
The gruesome violence on the silver-screen that is met with joyous elation
The exchange of video entertainment for a basic education
The deterioration of the young minds that's given little concentration
The beautiful flesh but empty soul that makes a living through fornication
The ****** spoils of war that leads to mental devastation
The death of good-will with no justification

And you will not witness death but morale genocide
Not of a specific person, but of certain values that are impossible to hide
And with only one man to confide, they will continuously choose what is not right
They will put down their crucifixes so they will have more hands to fight
And only for the wicked reasons will they unite

And you will witness them as they witness you
As you teach of accountability, as you lecture of love
But you will often be met with a deaf ear
But do not give up on those ideals that you hold dear
Because if you look to the edges of the earth, and then gaze above
Ask yourself: Where do I want to be when it is time to be judged?
But despite our ideals our conscience decisions proves the prophecies true
*We will be the death of mankind

How will we progress today?

Will we risk life attending Mosque,
Or have an affair with our spouse's boss?

Will we take the dog out for a walk,
Step on a landmine, use plastic straws?

Perhaps we'll play with our kids today,
Or call Amber Alert, wait scared, and pray?

Will we defy with a righteous tone,
Or leave, tails tucked, like a dog with his bone?

Will we gauge goods for our Vegan menu,
Or show distentions as millions do?

Will we drive around town for cheaper gas,
Or choose pickings from picked-over trash?

Do you sling eggs and sausage for sub-minimum wages,
Or attend visitations in a MADD rage?

Will you tee off at eight, or do a spin class,
Or sit solitary watching a sandless hourglass?

Did we place our script with the shiny drugstore,
Or wade across to Jordan's fair shore?

Will we question the teacher at our kid's school,
Or play Avatar falling off bar stools?

Did you set a reminder on your AI phone
For chicken delivery to your suburban home?

Will you lift copper tubing from construction sites,
Proclaiming your station gives you right?

Do I recline in my La-Z-Boy for a nap with a book,
Or teach someone to live with a line and a hook?

Will you take out your family,
Are you last on your list,

Will you reciprocate a handshake
Or raise a gloved fist?
Our words can't bind all our wounds;
Few are born with silver spoons.
We're not wrapped in silk cocoons.
A metamorphosis is coming
To this world of gloom,
A rousing street flight,
That can't come too soon.

Pradip marks the slow disappearance of faces in the market,
unknown yet familiar and thus important to the senses,
for our eyes crave continuity, comfort reassuring that time,
even time that robber par excellent, still provides some comfort
to our souls, in its own way, even the faces of strangers in familiar places are road markers, bookmarks, that even the known unknown offer a measure of solace, as we traverse the old familiar places
of daily life.

it must be remedied. some of you know that I make not idle promises,
that my promises to be there are effected, for I am affected by the
repair of the world in little, measurable manners, so the iCal calendar
modified with a Visit Pradip++, a new addition…

and on the way there
are few more exotic places where poetry grows that
will require some
layover visitations…

only time in its theiving secretive ways stands between me and
you denied grasping arms, taking the measure physical of a
beating heart
and river-wide smile,
maybe even I’ll practice with a trip to
remote foreign places, which they speak
the languages of poetry too,
Snake River, even Iowa!

olp/n.n.

Yes, there were flowers and wreaths,
Black dresses, suits, and ties,
And you were shown the place
Where she would lie beside those
She never knew, beneath a stone
Like so many others, the words
Would be chiselled, the flowers placed,

The prayers said, the visitations frequent,
At least at first, but there was that element
Of unrealness of it all, like a surreal painting
Or play, as if all were small bit actors
In some awkward part, genuine in their grief,
In the hurt and loss felt, in the agony
Of the one lost, but feeling it odd,

That she, whom all had loved,
And seemingly blessed by her God,
Should be one moment here and full of life
And laughter, but then be silenced,
Struck dumb, have eyes closed, ears sealed
And stuffed, her limbs stiffened, her hands
Cold and still no longer to hold or bless

Or caress or heal, her heart no more to beat
Or feel, her brain no more to think
Or be the home of thought, and those
Features that all remembered well
In her face, should be gone, and only
Memories left to fill some small part
Of that emptiness within, that huge dark space.