One Ounce

........

The Sadness enters from the top and descends. Then I hear, why didn't you just say that it came down like a curtain? Because there is no one way for a curtain to come down, and don't most curtains close from the sides in? No, silly, people will think of the theatre curtains! No they won't because hardly anyone goes to the theater and sees that happen. It's a cliché that means almost nothing now, so when I say “the Sadness comes upon me”, an experience that I sense as happening from the top of my head on down, I want to say it in a way that is perhaps at least a bit enigmatic. If I say it falls upon me like a curtain, your mind just blinks it out and you no longer think about it. I don't want this to be just like every other thing, even though it is, and even if it wasn't, it would be almost instantaneously replaced.

The dry smiles the translucent teeth the everything looks around and accepts statistic, I can't get my head around what it is that means anything. I am so disillusioned, I no longer want to be anything at all. One thing does not mean anything more than another, it merely is, like everything else. Would it be different if I was lying in a ditch or a gutter than standing proud and full of myself on some stage somewhere? It would for me in the moments as they happen, but they fleet and epheme. There is no last and there is no matters. I just keep doing things. I can't help but care about my world, even as I know that it has no real meaning even to me. It appears to have meaning, and seems to invite a sort of drama of passion, but there is nothing about me or my life that is the same from one moment to the next, nor different than any other. There is a continual subtle shift and shout of one thing or the next to one thing or another. I generally do the same things it seems though I do not, and there is no same and there is no different. There is just a set of stuff like a box of toys that sometimes are out on the floor and sometimes are broken and sometimes lost and sometimes just neat and tidy in a box that is never the same box from day to day which is the same and cannot be the same, even through the sameness of days. The mind filters out the differences in an attempt to reach what could be called the self. It says things like, “I am like this. This is what I do. This is who I like. This is mine.”

It's like birds chirping on the vines outside the window, or crickets. Can we tell the difference between the singers year to year, day to day? It is “birdsong” or “crickets”. It is beautiful or annoying. Or it's not there at all. I can't tell, or rather, sometimes I think I can tell and sometimes I don't think about it at all. It's what The Sadness feels like when it comes from the top and permeates the perception of the self.

Couldn’t You Get Me

Couldn't face the long walk until the glass
Couldn't tell the world before the dock
Couldn't say the work was all unveiled
or the trees that talk in the bird

Reaching for the daylight's broken half
and starting out as the best of shots
Releasing tea starved bringing in the cold
and the border is blurred by the reed

Couldn't you get me coming through between
Couldn't you wonder at the hush of ice
the steamed breath and cooked degrees
Couldn't you agree there is no end

Remember the dark that broke apart
or sheer loft eagles that dangle there
Reaching for the caught off guard of hill
before the frown and buried god

The Back Of

My hand is like a face rich with the smart smack of diorama mini figures reach for guns action drama in places the cracks ache against rivers that spread barriers open that drive across broad shoulders with question mark numbers brooding and intent to weigh choices she talks about winter and icebreak and heartfrost as if the beginning was resting easily in an open palm frond or the color of understanding could flutter like a shadow bird she wants her desire to be handheld and light that breaches the tinted pane fractures against whatever can be believed in facts that dangle of chains and wonder within sworls and ridges enmeshed in battle hurling at first meaning divined without that sharp report of moving on easily from scar to tear to hear what my face says my hand would wear here as plain but between what you know are mine what you know but that I know as mine and can't call anything else but your insistence that virtue is knowing the back of holds on tightly for clarity out of fear