Lovely thoughts are shackles.
They invoke what even the microscope
omits from the commentary
Well-prepared cups of tea on Sunday afternoons
The dragging of fountain pens retracing ornate loops.

Each a relief from the threat of whatever crisis interred
by the quiet of a room
The practical, the indulgent, without progression.

The contemporary pastoral
is to be found
Amongst old boxes
of  boy's adventure paperbacks
and girl's glitterworn and broken hairbrushes
Shooting the mind off to tragedies
whirring still away at even further distances.

Memories, like sentiments
when copacetic
Provoking always the invasive link
the dependent, the pathetic.

A picture of a doomed ship in storm
Hung on the red carpeted wall of a restaurant

A jar of olives
left untouched
for decorative purposes
in the old grain store
which now serves unfiltered coffee
and plays loud but pleasing music
'til 6 p.m.

What I have spoken of are McGuffins.
The mind distracts.
Yes, the mind encounters,
we discover, we make lists.
But if you can remember
minutiae, try then to remember
History is the repetition of revelations.
The reel does not cut off.

In short,
don't congratulate
Yourself about life
until you've at least seen the nursing home.

Positivity is a wave
which sweeps the surface;
laps at my feet
to then melt
like i did at my mother's
by the fireplace in winter,
then disappear
much like the fireplace
and her warm feet.

Anxiety also lies close to the shore;
it is the wave that throws itself
against the rocks.
I am the rock.

There is a fair bit of you in every garden of my life.
Truly, that is nothing extraordinary, you should know it as objectively as I do.

Nevertheless, there is something I’d like to clarify:

When I say "in every garden”,
it is not only in relation to this of now,
this of waiting for you, of hoorah! i found you!, and ******! i lost you!,
and found again, and hopefully stops there.

Nor in regard of you suddenly telling me "I’m going to cry”,
then with a discrete lump in my throat "well go ahead”.
And then a graceful invisible rainfall arrives to assist us,
perhaps the reason the sun rises unhesitatingly right after.

I’m not just referring either
at the day-to-day fluctuation of the stock in our little decisive complicities,
or that I could or believe I can turn my deficiencies to victories,
or of you to bestow upon me the tenderest gift of your most recent despair.

No.
The situation is more serious.
When I state “in every garden” I mean to say that in addition to that sweet cataclysm,
you are also rewriting my childhood,
that age when one utters "grown up” and solemn phrases,
and the solemn grown ups celebrates them,
and conversely, you think of it irrelevant.

What I mean to say is,
you are reassembling my adolescence,
that time when I was an old man full of insecurities,
and contrarily, you know how to extract from there,
my germ of joy and consciously spread it.

What I mean to say is,
you are stirring my youth,
that vain vessel no one took hold of, that proud shade no one got close to,
and you on the other hand knows very well how to shake it
until the autumn leaves start falling
till there is nothing but the flesh of my triumphless truth.

What I mean to say is,
you are grasping my maturity,
that mixture of stupor and experience,
this unknown horizon of fear and certainty,
this relentless faith on my questionable strength.

As you can see, it is serious,
extremely more serious.
Because with these or different words,
I mean to say you are not only,
the dearest girl you are,
but also the splendid and cautious* women that I love and have loved.

Because thanks to you E, I have understood,
(you’d say it was about time, and with reason),
that love, is a beautiful and generous bay, that lightens and darkens as life goes by,
a bay where ships arrive and break away,
they arrive with blossoms and presages,
and they part with krakens and storm clouds.
A beautiful and generous bay where ships set down and then leave,

But E, you, please don’t leave.

You still don't get it, do you?
I don't like your godly love
Or godly flowers
Or godly proposals
Or godly weddings.

*******
I don't like anything that is
godly.

Call me in the middle of the night
at 3 AM, perhaps
call me and talk to me about
your dreams and nightmares
and fears and dreams back again.
Introduce me to your demons.

I would love that.

The air is incredibly thin.
I can’t breathe, and my
hands are shaking.

When I was a boy,
a playmate hit me
in the head with a
glass ashtray.

In an instant,
my father had snatched
the boy up and carried him
****** outside, suspended
by one ankle.

I’ve heard also,
stories of my great-uncles
two brothers, run out of
Saint Louis County
because they’d fought in and
been banned from every tavern
on both sides of every main drag,
of every township therein.

Maybe that’s where this
comes from.

There is a fire inside that
most days is only embers,
but stokes far too easily into
infernal inferno.

The grey mush in my skull is
jacked into some electricity
with jumper-cables made from
too many sour thoughts,
a fierce depression, and
huge piles of self-doubt.

Gladness, contentedness,
feels like fraud, like failure,
like not leaning into it sturdily
enough.
Like not staring into The Abyss hard
enough.

It feels like obscenity to
not see conflict,
to not rail against
some dark thing,
some enemy.

In doing so
is found the ability to
feel like
enough.

But,
what
is
enough?

*

-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications; 2016

We all have different handwriting.
There are people, graphologists, who dedicate their entire lives, to understanding handwriting. A singular letter formed, can let them see into a persons mind. It can bring to light a persons inner thoughts, emotions, views on the world && themselves. Despite the fact that several charts are created, identically, of the proper formation of each letter, no two people write the same way. We all see the same chart, && create something else entirely.

If that alone, does not show you how individual we all are, how each of us distinctively perceive the exact same thing, than I don't know what will.

Stop trying to be like everyone else,
when you were born to be you,
because you,
are something special.

Silence
Silence was key,
That's the only way she could be,
That's what they taught her to be,
That's what she needed to be,
She needed the survival,
She needed the head space,
She needed the long lonely nights trapped in her head,
She needed it for her sanity,
Her silence was to be the death of her,
Her silence caused her ending,
She never allowed words to leave her mind,
So she drowned in the feelings she hid.

I brought your favorite flowers again
Tulips blue and yellow
Laid them down before you
Adding to all the rest

You’re running out of room
It’s starting to look more like a garden
Than a grave

I would stop bringing them
But I don’t feel that they are enough
They don’t convey the amount of how much I love you
And that you are missed