Has the Glass Melted Yet?

The big page the laughter that which is to be left you can pop that into your mouth and suck it. He is in my room and he is turned off and it has been awhile since you have been up too . What you can't do is talk and write. The yeti foot. How odd. Watch the deal as it comes. Hold steady with that which abides in your mind. Release. How many times have I said that word? The words of the mouth come quick, but the words of the finger are slow. The deal and the corner; the pastiche of the right. When it is molten, glass conducts electricity. If you take the levels that you want to operate on then you put the deal of the done behind the gimme and the stove. Not drive, not push. No sandstorms no copy no forgiveness no more annihilation of the between and betweened. Without the work of the living, what is the thing that is made? How do we pull what we have come to do from that which we do as a matter of the nature of ourselves? When all the time of being is in forming shapes that do not yet exist, is the purpose of any great matter? The words tumble out of my fingers. It is a different feeling, makes a different set of words than the words that my mouth makes and my ears make. We want to align the two because most of our communications are aural. I wonder at the depth. I look at the whole abandonment my mind makes. Wants to flee, wants to skip off and think more and better and faster and wants to win wants to win, wants to win.

Not True

“Despair, it is not true that I know you.” “It happens that I am tired of being a man.” A couple of first lines that resonate with me today. They're not mine. I want to say the first one is from Antonio Machado, but I don't have access to my library and the internet is pretty dumb when it comes to poetry. I just blew 15 minutes searching and getting sidetracked when I found Carol Muske-Dukes, who wrote a very creepy poem that I have been hunting for for a while. Didn't find that one, didn't find that first line. The second line is Neruda. Further expressions of despair need only look at the headlines. Vicious ignorant barking about health care reform. Choose your side and lose your mind with anger, then crash about how really, nothing is going to change. It's all about the money and who gets to have second and third mansions at the expense of actually caring for each other. And speaking of caring for each other, it seems so difficult for people to recognize that their lives are just as important as the rest of the swarm of life that has no voice - the dogs and cats, the plants and trees, the rodents and insects. Just as important, certainly not more, and caring for all of life does not mean sacrificing your children or your grandma, it just means that you have to be creative when problems arise. This is harder than it sounds. Easier to think only that you are important and need to have your needs met, or your favorite cause such as your child. Brrr brr harumph, I hear the mutterings of disagreement. I know it is pervasive. People are killing each other and debasing each other all over the planet. People think they have to do it or it will be done to them. Make more jobs, not more wilderness, though a job only benefits a few lives while a wilderness is life. Short sighted, self-serving. Right now I'm listening to two people talking about where to get furniture. $400 - $800 for each kitchen chair and we're not even up to the table. I have this picture in my head of two detached heads with jaws unhinged. Despair, it is not true that I know you.

It Could Have Been You

Hellenistic, you put your best foot on the polished wood floor. Beauty so broken out boards break. The smoothness comes from the legion of slaves before you bowing and braced with their full boned denials and soft tears. But you don't think of these things caught as you are in your mirrors. How they hold you harmless and return your loving gaze oblivious of anyone else. How could it be any different?
When last night there were these tears for how far you had yet to go and how you weren't going to make it onto the pillar barge, tonight there is only a living glow; you couldn't make the team heading out for the slaughter but you could set yourself up very nicely with flames and ladders of your own device.
I'll show them all you said to no one.
When it's quiet you always make the best vows.
And softly underfoot the polished glow regarded your after image with something very much like love, though if you had been watching you wouldn't have called it that. The walls, too, warmed to your passage in ways they hadn't to the thousands before. The air thickened with the moment as the murmurs trailed with rumors and admiration. No one could burn like you. No one else made such fine aroma of their flames like you. No one like you.
It was said in whispers and nuance as airy as the two toned breeze miles from here by horses and reeds in unison that your passage could not have been without that slight that so consumed you on that night. How that night had to have you pushed so far beyond by all the skinny knees and elbows of boys fighting to prove they belonged on that barge. How you had to be shoved down with your tear streaked faith broken. How you had to be stripped of everything you thought you were by that brash and heartless bang clanging their own pans louder than you thought they could. Your gentle art had to be torn from your hands and trampled and it was right that not one of them even looked at who you are, blinded as they were by their own boister and choler, their own jangle and wrestle, their own holler and wasted.
Their destiny was to perish in a loud and prideful effort for someone else and their crooked proxy of imagination. If you had made it then you would have lashed out in agony when the fire swept through, you would have called with the chorus to the gods who were too busy blasting each other with rockets and flares. You would have charred with no aroma but flesh in the sea of flesh and riot, colors of smoke and coal, colors of turned over earth.

One Liners

You find yourself
Caught that way
Trapped by sex
Endless entertainment
Cars that can't be fixed
Lawns of stains
Laundry piled
Toilet seat up all day
Television always on
Thinking about you
How you need me
That way
To remember what
You always wanted

She Listens

She went out looking for inevitable music
thinking this would be easy, like listening
to moth wings cross fields of light without
the sky getting cloudy with desire

She had in her hand a small marker of odor
she hoped would help as she made her way
through shoulders of shade in the depths
it woke as she drew closer to her desire

When she rose up across the long grass
her face aimed at the sun's trajectory
full of knowing her ears were taut
ripe to bursting with the trill of desire

Oh open to me she sped to her song
as the music of her yearning came
from leaf and shadow from secret water
to spell her with lashes of desire

She went out looking for any other
to make her haunt the valley older
to mark late heart in green harmony
the date her ears reclaimed desire

The Eddy of Keep

That unrest put some money down on Spring
called me up (used my name) with a list
heavy like the forecast and gray

You're going to have to walk some more
if you want to find all that's been hidden
because now there are a lot of leaves

I wanted to sit longer
and let what was on do me some more
because without it I feel so hollow

That unwant was growing more than predicted
and the consequences were stacked
even when the last play had been made

I kept looking for your meaning
knee deep in what used to be and caught
up in the eddy of keep going

I was holding the salt grinder this morning at the table as we talked
thinking about the Mediterranean Sea and potency and the law
and your eyes that are letting you down slowly as you age

and the fear that keeps you company that used to make so much noise
but now just rides alongside you in the passenger seat
with the name of a messiah or the absence of one

Remember when it used to make sense?
Before the brainworms set in to make their paths cross so near
the hurry of trucks mostly but some cars still want to go too

near the faces that peer out like faces you know
like snatches of meaning that want things that want kittens
and handjobs and hatchets and love when their bodies

fold here here and here and you fit into this crook but not
that one's and when the bed is cold you toss about and listen
to the off key singing pass just under your window

always now late at night where it used to be early in the morning

Chalk dust

One day (like this) I'll come back as a ghost code of myself, as if from a very dry place. The job will be done and I'll settle on the porch of you with the rich aroma of purple flowers in my hair. Out in the nether will be boxes and jars and buttons of what I used to think and who I used to be trailing like vapor in my long abandoned wake, but I will be whole unto myself.
You might think the lack of it would define me, as the absence defines the substance and night defines the day. I'm not in the mood to argue. This is good enough tonight. The mystery will watch a baseball game with his son, even if the sun has no plan to attend, and if we have nothing but a field of rain's bounty, we'll just have to soothe the child another way. Ice cream usually works. Vanilla will do just fine.