Sunday, June 21, 2015

Grace

Dust settling
Noise, diffused
Quiet cascades, controls
Consumes.
What do you hear, in the quiet of your room?
The sound of loss,
From those you left?
You've hushed your conscience even, I think
Crowded out the curiosity of how they now look
With a thick, thick blanket of shame.

I knew you once
Even in your difficulty,
You moved with feeling.
Crippled in that fork-in-the-road
Where your detour knocked you dense.
Nothing in your pocket ever mattered, save the grace in your hard-working hands.

Bruised forever, I think
By the void of your loss.


Momentary Blips.

Archive.
Pound after pound of Archival thought
Knee-deep ink
To rid myself of claustrophobic thinking
I surmise, there is a trade occurring.
Here, on a desolate plane
No eyes intending discovery
Just the plain, seeking simplisticism.
And if the word won't heed-
Make it.

Tolerate the intolerable
I do it every day.
I taste cleanliness, the freshness of which
Exfoliates my innards, depleting monastic tendencies.

But I do love this life, amidst the loss of visceral pleasure.
It is okay to behoove of what I know I am giving up.
And sometimes, 'okay' is a word that I can look in the eyes
And crave less.

In between these momentary blips
Patterns are forming.
Gesticulating (word- adored) among revolutionary Gods
That impugn the 'by and by' with their 'just out-of-reach' energies
Outlines, bold and profuse with muscular definition
Weakening - never, in the interim of fluctuating interplay.

How lucky is this life to have been gifted
Masculine mentors, at the virtual ready, channeling through their utility
Their absentee care and cognizant charity
The few words blown softly into my iron sternum
Softly, gently, taking intangible black holes, and
Filling them with warm, unshaven care: expectation-less, effortless
Whole, in the most twisted, inexplicable, nonsensical sense.

The vat between the worlds that I frequent, and the one I inhabit
Is a vast, protected, barricaded, obstacle course of defeat.
I locked myself away here when a broken rudder and a map turned sour
Had torn themselves into ten pieces, shattered beyond repair
What to do with the headless house that soon lost its arms?
Retreat.

Retreat, repair, recalibrate, reconstitute, reconvene, recoil.
Rid myself of the river and its condescending backwater.
Bilking the warm forearms of trust and security.
The hour wanes from happy morning towards gratified solitude
But before I can get there, I must taste again, the belch of decay

I tread lightly here, and still, the sinking in of thigh-high mud made of shit
Cloys and sucks me further, punished for wandering too close to such fire.
I know better than to allow the unaffected portion of my steam-rolling resolution
To meander too closely to cliched holidays that will always singe, given half the chance.

Roam away, directed by the strength of arms that clench a future
Built of the trust of self, without the intrusion of apologetic ineffectiveness.

I have to keep walking forward, further into this hapless set of circumstances
In time, fruit hanging nearby, ripened and joyous
Can be eaten in sunshine, nourishing days to come
Profuse with laughter and even melancholy joy
Consoling the weakened fighter,
Robbed one last time, of tools worth losing.

Astute in direction.
I will live to see the fields I dream of
Dancing under the softened fingertips
Of these hands that go so long without the warm palm of a partner
To call each other home.

And for now, that is okay.
Okay.

I am aware of what I am trading.

..and I continue to trade for more of the same.

Monday, June 15, 2015

The Ending

I fell asleep in the sun,
Warm air held me
Safe, relaxed, contentedly dreaming
It may have been years before I woke
Woke to this time where the shift now
Blares, at a rampant pace.

Who was I in that decade-long nap?
Underscoring the worth of self
And it is not so much that I neglected
As I chose to prefer the needs of the beloved.
I gave enough to recover from,
Day after day, happy- even, to have
Parceled out inner consolation

I traded moments of long rest
With the rushed flick of an elbow
Clicking around the blurred boundaries 
Of the dark.
Motioning this tired right wrist
To maneuver about the soft strokes
Of hushed and silent inspiration;
Coagulated ambition
Blocking the glut of production
The robbing of what would have been right
Quantified by the payment of understanding.

This judgement of self is brash, unacceptable
In time I've come to know this,
In more time, I'll come to know it better
Having already begun the cumbersome process
Of forgiveness of the now- If I live long enough...

TS Eliot's garden, brimming with regret
Lautrec's wasted grease, lost in drink
The closeted sexual perfection of EE Cummings-
'Cum on, with a name like that...?
What have I learned from these poignantly controlled brothers' of mine?
To tighten my seclusion, choking more oxygen?

Fuckin' idiot.
Best do some living, before the ending kills itself.

Thursday, June 4, 2015

Nourish

What, do I ponder, is it that I need, to move?
To shake, spin, swirl, swerve, sway, swivel
Away from all that I serve, in the interest of self-preservation?
What is a world without restraint, refrain, reconstitution?

There, that transitive verb: reconstitute.
Adding water so that I may be made anew?

Madness

What more can I take, to take away from this developing cocoon of need?
I roam, off kilter, avoiding the spin-out of lost control; and why
Maybe I need this madness in my life.

Wisdom

There is an order to the way things are done around here
Innate is my intuition and execution of these orders
I fathom the indisputable method and relinquish my resistance.
Leaning in to the way I unfold, I intuit the scheme that Is;
As though the boney, kind finger of a woman in her nineties
Reminds me gently to flow in the direction I know
Offering tidbits of sense among the nonsense
Through the cumbersome stills of deja vu.