Midnight Sounds in NOLA

Contemplating moving back to New Orleans

The balance between love and fear weighs in me like a scale

The old Greek kind with the counterweights fashioned in court rooms

The houses are called shotguns and my mind pictures firearms 

The decision to purchase or not plays on the newscasts

The safety training courses and permits wrestle with the trust into the streetlights

Rational actions know that fathers with alarm monitoring

Electronic drafts from their bank accounts can compute the minutes

Of deciphering false alarms and home invasions, the futility is thick 

Nightstands with boxes under quick-access combination with a clip of bullets

Insert a cell phone grabbed calling 911 for understaffed NOPD

Budget cuts, taxes, population diaspora and reflux, bars on the windows and doors

Iron fleur de leis gates and un-illuminated signs in the garden district

Of surveillance cameras beamed to the internet  

The fear and the love battle it out like rival gangs of drug dealers of cocaine and religion

Peace and hungry bellies and school systems where the toilet paper is locked up in cabinets

Distributed by the teacher in open acknowledgement that a young man has to shit

And he and his classmates are not trusted to cram the commode with paper

If the rolls were left out in the open, got to have a permit and an enforcer  

The potholes of Lakeview and Gentilly roll and devour all sorts of jacked up rims

Removed in the night like kicked in doors and sporadic pop-fire

The city has a three-day a week paper praying to the Saints for special exceptions

I think about men coming through my backdoor with bad intentions  

The length of time a father hears a noise and thinks of his daughter sleeping

The inevitable scream of her diagnosing the anomaly and her running for daddy

The layout of the shotgun home wrecks about my hippocampus into weighing the reach

Cell phone, hand-cannon or daughter or nothingness or blood or I did not ask for this 

I think of a shadow face and unloading if I can transplant victims into a workable alternative

I think of dead children, choices mothers and fathers make in medical facilities

I have no qualm and I will make a mother or father childless if that is what it takes

Elections are truncated into either or, him or me, love or fear 

To avoid the monsters is not to be an angel and to become part of the monster is not be a devil

The blur of phantasmal roles we allocate among the walking-dead is a spectrum of life

With the lies the sage point out to take out the f for a portion of the truth

So this is what we do to enjoy the parades

A rant: Remembering my mantra

I think of the human beings born with a congenital heart defect.  I think about the child’s parents facing the words from the physician.  I think of the doctor’s family in the comparison in her own mind as she visualizes husband or wife and or daughters or son that currently exist, previously existed or only in her dreams.  I think of these iterations of people thinking.  

I think of the child growing past the hurdle of immediate surgery detected by the abnormal murmur detected in a chest, listened to and followed by such worry.  The worry would come in waves of a tide.  Did he wake up this morning?  Will I wake up tomorrow?  Will she make it home from school?  I think of progression from toddler to junior high to high school to the potential of a graduate program.  The abnormal potential stalks like a debt collector.   

I think of the child born in Somalia with the same ailment pricked by death's stinger with a bullet, famine, some divergent variation never knowing the cardiac abnormality and parents weeping unnamable tears.  I think of the drug wars and the slaveries of poverty, Brazilians in sugar cane fields, Indians in Bhopal.  I think of Haitians on one side of an island and European and American tourists flocking to Punta Cana on the other.  I think of the minds of Afghani children bartering opium fields, militant caves and the breasts of their mother.  I think of a Chinese couple creating an anchor baby in California, flying back to avoid a one child limit and a link for their daughter to go to an American university.  I think of cell phone factories and crimpled hands and bowls of rice noodles.  I think of South African Aids children and the distance between their daily thoughts and my consideration of the performance in my IRA.   

I think of in vitro fertilization and abortion deliberations between couples or women alone over coffee cups.  I think of Honey Boo-Boo and NPR competing.  I think of oil-slicked pelicans, DDT, global warming, hurricanes and a man throwing his cigarette out his Hummer in traffic next to my idling engine at the red light.  I think of an all you can eat Golden Corral buffet and  a coworker getting his stomach stapled and how he dared not go swimming at the company pool party held at his estate.  I think of people’s obsession to get every possible tax deduction, but going through the drive through at McDonalds’ in pick-up trucks hauling nothing, but themselves.  

I think of the statue of Jesus over Rio de Janeiro.  I think of the walls in Jerusalem.  I think of the mountain entrances in Jordan.  I think of le Notre Dame in Paris.  I think of an unnamed field at day and at night seeing a chess board of stars above, the time it took for that light to get here and the spots in the greater darkness and the light that did not.  I think of before the bang.  I think of Texas school board text book debates.  I think of the power of trusting the greater number of thinking Muslims of the world, the misunderstanding of the Western World and realize the power of love of family, of child, of parent to the beating hearts and the arrogant ignorance of weaponized drones and assumptions that a parent does not want the same for his or her child as the shadows of time zones shift on the sun’s reception angle on our infinitesimal planet.  

Mothers and fathers would tease themselves in dreams of Faustian bargains to trade places or the blessings of what others outside those beeping hospital rooms would deem problems worthy of worry.  Fears of social ignominy or isolation weigh against the equilibrium of not death, but the specter and realistic plausible scenarios of death tapping on the window pane entering at banal hours over the years of palpitations of a child’s defected heart.  

I think about my mantra, “It could always be worse.”  Sometimes I forget.  Tonight a friend of mine reminded me.  I think of these blessings of security, of structural moorings.  Chaos may sit out there like a dragon’s maw prepped to spit blazes, but my current nemesis is apathetic boredom drenched in the acceptance of glacial evolution of logistics.  This is a laughable pittance to such comparisons.  

When I think of my children, I think of the childless.  When I think of my prison time, I think of those encountering such dreaded diagnoses and the lips, ears and minds pondering what is to be.  When I think of occupational quandaries, I think of the honest work I have to do for the collective.  When I think of bank statements I think of those in greater debt and the trail of thoughts to make such trades.  

When I think of the silence, I pour into the songs of Johnny Cash and when the man comes around.  I think of Otis Redding and his plane ride.  I think of bullets and Sam Cooke and John Lennon.  I think of the barrel Kurt Cobain elected.  I think of Woody Guthrie and Joe Strummer.  I think of Springsteen and Bob Dylan.  I think of this time I have left to ponder and most of all to move forward and do.  

I think of ambition and apathy at battle.  I think of the patience to embrace hope and love and not push all those who dare to approach with open hands to take their words with hunger and comforting reciprocation.  I think of the clogged drain of thoughts I have previously debated in solitary.  The journey is not in the judging, but in the release of self.   

I think of the hobos and fascists.  I think of Woody’s train rides and harmonica.  I think of the forest and my father and his father and the deer.  I think of my mother and her books and her body that she refuses to surrender despite its mutiny.  I think of the determination of my brothers to see such beauty in the arts and I dare to claw my variation out of solitary into community.   

I may not venture at a time of my choosing.  I may remain like a meditative monk and at peace with the immobility of body for the freedom of a mind that cares not for metric distance, but of intrapersonal universal contact.  I am in the now independent if I embrace such journeys or not.  

I think of the chest of the child awaiting surgery.  Elevating and descending before he waits for the anesthesia that he knows there is a considerable probability that he may not awake after the injection.  Lives balance in such fear and love.  There is a love of participation that so many have every day and yet to fall into the despair of not choosing, of not seeing we cloak it in the fear of torn down houses, not by tornadoes but by a man’s own hands.   

We may bulldoze the walls, the pictures, the memories of who we were as if we stopped there.  We park in a past of broken fenders and deflated tires.  The jacks and transmissions are traded for wails at the moon and busted fence boards and punched-through sheetrock.  We take happy pills and damn the resilience until we burn the whole pile in effigy of a person we no longer wish to be, but cannot escape from.  

I care not for such self-destruction and so I repeat my mantra with love of self.  I do not think of the damage blanketing the others.  I think of the others shaming me with their self-love.  I think of the others like Steve Gleason with ALS fighting with No White Flags against the inevitable and inspiring a city, the world, his wife, his son; not to be a super-hero, but to show the power of love over fear.  

I repeat my mantra to recall the challenges of others, not to beat myself down, but to inspire what is possible in the super-organism of our collective.  It is in some ways I am speaking to myself through them and such I will speak to myself as I speak to the others.   

I am past the illusion of perdition, of bartering with the Lord for a palatable version of existence.  I am born in meditation and a body I will cherish with patience.  I will carry a grand patience like a banner in my own operating heart.  Each beat, each pulse, each raise of a leg, lift of an arm or turn of abdomen is the very possibility of productive humanity challenging me back in the self-love of knowing what I am blessed with the capability to bring forth for this fleeting indefinite allotment. 

I remember my mantra with a smile.  I may tell the tears and speak into the silence.  I am sharpening the blade in which I will combat the demons from forgetfulness.  My mantra is not to see the universe for its coldness, its depressive damming horror or to see war with its open maw devouring the hearts of good fathers and mothers, no.   

My mantra is for recollection that we are all interconnected in peace and love and what love truly is.  Love is active.  Love is the gravity beyond physical existence achieving the equilibrium of what we are behind these flawed organs and somber shells.  We are drawn by it, whether we can name it or not like our feet pulled back to the Earth.  Some resist confused in its magnetism electing war, anger, isolation, ignorance, judgment, and demands for justice through myopic paradigms.  I seek liberation to act as a conduit for this gravity to pull and be pulled, open and aware usurping the distance which exists beyond our five senses.  

This is my time.  This is our time.  Now is a pinnacle of decision only trumped by the next now in cascading escalation of adulation for the foundation of the cumulative choices over every face gone before us and sharing with us in the present.  We have the now and so in today I have all I need.  There are borders.  There are segments, but I dare say, “It could always be worse.”

Rant: A career in Psychology

I often debate with myself that I should have elected psychology as a college major.  My level of interest in intrapersonal dynamics far exceeds any dalliance with accounting.  At the crossroads of choice I found my gender and pragmatism trumped the indulgence of placating human weakness.  I saw the construct of psychological counseling as flawed, superfluous and gaudy with delight.  The very core capabilities within myself that would probably lead to my immense aptitude for such a career led me to devalue the framework of it as beneficial to our collective.  

I have been an introvert since birth spending hour upon end wandering the catacombs of my own deliberations and considered the avenue that others requiring another individual or team of individuals in assisting them in navigating such coffers of identity and ration was like trying to sell water next to flowing river.  This isolation of contemplation kept me from seeing that which one finds facile is not necessarily common and is in all probability the greatest demarcation for the lost to uncover a compass within one’s own rations.   

The shadow of additional college debt in context to my undergraduate scholarship and the perilous unknowns of funding for graduate school placed a constitutional mandate into my personal definitions of gender.  I saw manhood constricted and defined by self-sufficiency.  After mistakenly dabbling in engineering, accounting felt like the most conservative and pragmatic of skillsets about the kingdom of elections.  I understood my path through this world would most likely be a solitary one and if I had any hopes of managing such a trek or to sustain another traveler in my caravan my own self-sufficiency was paramount.  

I now am over a decade into a career devoid of the subjects of my greatest intrigue: the human mind, our universal connection, and the context of deliberations.  I find the irony numbing that the very path of finding another traveler and the collateral damage of bonding provided by what I assumed was an asset has and is my greatest emotional and financial deficit.   

The option of changing my career into the corridor of psychology still sits like a financial hellhole and an emotional jubilation.  The educational debt and lost salary required combined with my escalation of commitment and investment in what I and a great number of members of society would consider in accounting to be a premium option, leave me stoic and resigned to construct financial statements, audit data, and opine on the validity of historical financial performance.   

This leaves me hungry for writing poetry and exploration of the psychology of mankind.  I am parched for spiritual equilibrium diving down into the depths of depression, madness and visualizing what is and is not pertinent to our existence.  I so often considered myself incapable of performing as a counselor because of these divergent compulsions and have only in my age seen that it is these divergent aptitudes which are in fact the precious rarity to support my endeavors.  

For so many years now I have sat at the financial mercy of the vindictive whim of another.  My career has been mummified before my very eyes in this rural sarcophagus.  I know what the recruiters and the employers imply and confer from my career chronology.  I see the weakness and lack of inspiration in the sterile environment to interact with fellow economic thinkers.  I so often feel death arm-wrestling with boredom around me.   

I plead to satiate my body with knowledge that is alive and prosperous, but in this economy the need and deprivation is so expansive the avenue for self-fulfillment is, as my former wretched-Catholicism taught me, of prominent importance to repress.  I have lived under the mantra of it could always be worse.  The repetition of this addiction left to the cul-de-sac of my own head has left me depraved and worse.  I am awash in an ocean of apathy.  

The cities, the roads, the faces are blanketed in nonsensical nothingness.  The oblivion of futility is such a dangerous mask, yet I am prone to wear it and affix it like a pair of goggles to see what I know to be beneath as fanciful, beautiful, horrid and splendid admixed in this bountiful psychology that I so rarely get to interact.  I hunger for the deep caverns of emotion, of thought, to simply listen.  I could be a horse at journey’s end drinking from an unending troth with an insatiable thirst to listen to the dilemmas and debates of others.  To be able to assist them in the process would be like getting paid to send oxygen into my lungs.  I would have such joyous blood.  

Yet I sit here in this limbo, not myself, not anyone of note, but an accumulation of this calculus of why that then and why this now and the dollars sit like madmen gangsters for a man obligated in debt to the mob.  I know what must be done, what may be possible, but is not likely. I know what those who would like to love me would have me do.   

I see the house-mothers on television having Doctor Phil tell them how a stay at home mom is three jobs or some bullshit.  I call that life, a choice, not a bonus round or contribution.  I know its trappings, blessings and tethers.   

In Gen X we all must work; there is no escape from this economy.  It is a leviathan of reckoning.  I see the jobless psychologists buried under their graduate degrees and the health system cutbacks to pay for the retiring Boomers and private health insurance fascists.  I see it even clearer with my damned accountancy studies and macroeconomic visualizations.  I see why we are on our knees and why we will continue to cry for breadcrumbs.  I see death gripping the necks of the oblivious panic gentlemen and ladies of indulgence.   

For now I have reduced my focus to location to end this Sisyphus rolling in my rural perdition.  I am trying and contemplating, but aware so aware of the ladders of man.  The doom of beginning, of choosing for every step up requires an equal step down and an additional step up any other assent we ever hope to achieve.  Career is of such a lower priority in the debates of my mind in comparison to the other wars.  I only mention it now as a morsel of torment.  For what would I be without these denotations; numb so numb, so comfortably ignorantly numb.

The Madness

I have been dreading writing this poem for a while

The sentiment has been lingering about my shoulders

Wrapping the abdomen clenching as a check on my flesh

To consider who I am, what I am doing, what I want  

Human faces appear to me as interchangeable molecules

Blurred and dispersed, forming and un-forming

Fashionable fabrics and threads adorn façade vehicles

The contents, the passengers seem so inaccessible 

The gluttony of height, width, length and time entwine

Like packaged manifestations of a cinematic matrix

Fuzzing out into the source code of knowledge of contemplation

What is one thinking, planning, chosen, choosing, wanting inside the bubbles? 

The school of organisms shifts and slides across irrelevant parameters

Of continents and newscasts playing out a pantomime of chivalrous autonomy

As if the super-organism is answering beyond the discretion of any one input

But all, yet none, yet all, but none 

I am wading here in this ghastly silence bracing tongue to speak

Daring the certitude to expect feedback, exchange as if a man speaking to God

Claiming saints or devils will reciprocate such luxuries of correspondence

As placeholders or emissaries of a universal connection tethered

To our misguided notions of good or evil  

I see the rattling haughty laugh of significances baffle the whelp upon my chest

The stiffness crouching on my deltoids with a larynx echoing through a black hole

Daring to defy such gravity as if the volume from there to here were subject to distance

The meters and roads, ears and skin all disintegrating in awe to the true expanse 

I see the calculations, the accusations of insanity throttled at my rib,

Set to challenge life as we know it to be documented by goat-men and eyeballs

The abundance of tactile and visual structures is dwarfed like that of the countless galactic stars

To our sun to our subset of planets to the infinitude of rocks and gaseous spheres

Beyond our perception; this differential is pitied to that of the absence of all physical existence  

To grasp at that which haunts me with such ubiquitous obviousness

The pulling apart of the cellular netting of my hands, the blood, the limbs

The collective of human noses, ears, mouths, the nail beds yanked out into not dust

But placeholders as conceptual prisms to shelter that which is relevant  

Wherein the paradigm of time can rest to offer the illusion of choice

In a prism worthy of love itself; that I choose to love my brother; my sister chooses to love me

We are dancing, in such we default to these bodies, but once transcended in the thoughtful identity

Find them unnecessary and our hours of fret feckless immaturity 

So in the Olympics of gathering acquaintances into comrades or lovers

I have been debased for a prerequisite vocation to forge the highways of the calling

I have failed repeatedly as the bodies and the voices appear so redundantly identical

On the peripheral, I can find no entry point of conversing  

The depths, the shallows, the roots are held like covered caverns

As mountain after mountain appears like solid rock and the spelunking into the darkness

Is of great interest, put the rock itself standing out, rising from the desert

Appears in vast flatness in sand or water the Atlantic and the Sahara exchange roles

In irrelevant tomorrows and yesterdays and so rarely in todays  

I have less then twenty-five todays in my thirty-four years

Such a pittance in the collection, and yet I mock the allotment

Knowing the count is assumed to be so near its end, taking not for granted

But wanting so very much the birth of the now to access that which is the brightest extract  

Of that which I detect as in the essence of existential equilibrium

Floating in peace, dangling in excruciating simplicity apart and dissolving

In the elimination of so much of this blasphemous extraneous commotion

The impertinence soaks into the skin of the parade goers and I am dumbfounded  

I know not what the discernible segmentation between this or that

The pleonastic repetition is deafening counting down my senses into nothingness

Just a prosaic plane in concept, but battering me with stimulation of what cannot be held

Taunting me like deceased authors tormented into madness writing at me from their graves 

Who faced the same demon, knowing now what they knew then in parcel smidgeon

Released to the recognizances of imagination freed from this doorstop body

And left to wander in that which interconnects so damning these petty allegiances

Held here for sport and fear of perdition or vengeance from the rat kings and queens  

A pox on such blindness; I prefer a divergent variety of sight, damn the assumption of retinas

Damn the digits on the pen or the salty-bitter on the tongue; I am tasting indulgent sanity

For once and I am crying out for discourse, that someone else dare

Call out the naked emperors of what is this life magnetically ecstatic 

The people are dancing, dancing bathing in it; I see them out there

So often drenched in its bounty, yet knowing not how to elucidate with specified eloquence

The interdependent other is shining like a beacon on our common-dwelling

I want to enter and find my tongue stolen, my arms truncated, my ears lopped  

I am gasping; I am screaming behind this screen for the recognition of the preposterous

Defamation we do to ourselves and our grand felicity so close, yet the disparity between

Knowing the caverns exist, yet not how to enter them is the madness of

Voltaire, Spinoza, Clemons, Einstein, Hitchens, Nietzsche and

I dare to think it has caught me too   

The Bounce House

The doughy biceps on the other dads in the room sit like spongy bags of marshmallow

You can see the number of car seats they have tethered with latch systems

In their lax frame of jaw and ruffled golf shirts

The acquiescence in the lines of sight link to their wives like leashes

Peeping out permissions on where he can help here, when he can conduct discourse  

The button up short-sleeves of the uncles in the room sans progeny

Is denoted in the circumference of upper-arm displayed

The tight hair, the grin used on Friday and Saturday nights

For sleepovers of the other kinds, gleam in his teeth as he bites into pizza

Ordered for the kids by the birthday-girl’s mother 

Sunday in January, I am at a bounce-house party for the nine-year old friend

Of my own third-grader; this is a daddy weekend

Daughter is off bounding with the inflatables and the Justin Beiber soundtrack

In the warehouse of non-New Orleans bounce 

I am writing in the corner of a fold-out table next to the twenty-two other adults

With my notebook and pen adjacent to my covered Kindle since I was out in public

I am reading my Hitchens, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for a Non-Believer

The patch on Samuel Clemons’ true thoughts of the life of a Fly is enlightening  

The mothers keep handle on the stack of presents, the obligatory fruit tray to keep conscience

The bags of blue or red Doritos, two-liter lemonades and charcoal-hued Coke

The ice cream and the Kool Aid squeeze pouches and the water for the moms

A grandmother peels the skin of a grape for her progeny’s progeny coming in for rations  

The other adults curb behavior as the underling enters and then exits

I am the only parent to bring my own supplies of thought to get through the two-hour window

Rather than staring at strangers and confetti painted on the concrete walls

I read, I write, occasionally spoke, but all together unconcerned with appearances 

Hour one ends the pack of kids returns for the sugar and grease bounty

The moms had set the purple plates and paper cups in rows which are quickly seated

In sequence of BFF’s and social squawk, one chair is shifted to fit the quiet one

Kids ask kids to spell I cup 

Pizza munched, powered-tortilla chips and then the lights go out to a candle confection

Nine, Nine, Nine, dad bungles the photo as he went to flash after the flame was blown

Darkness and utters excuses to the watching wife 

My kid’s BFF’s mom who knows my kid’s mom better than she knows me asks,

Leaning on the side wall (as I am the only adult still seated on my outpost)

“Did you braid her hair like that? I was going to say, ‘Man that’s pretty good’

I told her that her mother did last Friday.  I did take her to the Mardi Gras parade yesterday with her friend.  I am from there.  She says, “Oh, me too.  My husband is from here though; he’s so scared to go down there.”   

Five minutes earlier the lead-mom came around asking for pizza, her and her adjacent co-stander declined interest.  They were walled-in by two-other moms.  When the space came open, they each snuck over and slid slice to paper-plate.   

Hour-two winds down to a measure of eye contact with my daughter as she is retrieving her shoes after it was socks-only on the inflatables.  The children are dispersing.  I remind her to say her goodbyes.  She gives hugs.  We return to our car.  We talk.   

She asks me if we can go to the library.  I know the library is closed on Sundays.  It is church day where we live.  She wants to get a book about nature. 

I stare at the passing trees on the interstate and introduce the concept of photosynthesis.  I talk about the blueberries from Chile in our refrigerator.  I hold up an ink pen in my right hand and tilt it on a consistent vertical angle and explain the hours of time as our planet revolves around our sun how the intensity of the sunlight hits the northern and southern hemisphere at greater or lesser proportions depending on which part of the revolution our planet is experiencing. 

I am holding on this January. 

A rant: Choices and Sidetracks

(I wrote this while watching the other adults in a party room at a bounce house while my daughter was playing at a friend’s birthday party.) 

We do not choose the nation we are born into; no more can we choose our genetic line, disposition to disease, aptitudes, or impediments.  We are genetic byproducts of the accumulated coital decisions of ladders and ladders of conjoining specimen.  The results cascade into the fibers of the capability we utilize.  The framework of what we so often misconstrue as self is entirely random to our conscious choice, yet linked to the burden or gift placed in our palms.  

For morality is only partially learned.  The playground of choice is most entirely internal.  We may be shifted, marketed to believe the hells or heavens of our home life to subvert this autonomy.  Despite the wreckage one must wade through, there is always another or has been another or will be another with a more arduous journey.  It is not the elevation of lowest or highest upon this ranking of difficulty, but the recognition that the potential for our initial placement or slide upon our journey to occur or have occurred that is crucial.  

These bodies and descriptions are but mirages truncating our search to be enveloped in our amorphous possibility burrowing into our identity.  When we release our beings from such latching facades we enter a joy and somber humility of processing true happiness, true pain and true empathy. 

The sidetracks become not a pacing away, but dissolve into opportunities for sight of who we are, of who our brother or sister is, of how we can bear witness.  This is the grand platform of acquaintance and the exit hall from estrangement.   

We greet in this. We find pliability of definition, universality and peace in the dance of stomachs and minds escaping the confines of this day, century or eon.  We peel back our conceptual iteration of learning as if revealing a fresh nuance to ourselves is creation.  This is but vision of what always was, witnessed by our allowance of intrapersonal freedom to see he as me and she as him. 

This is the salty-light of time curing the animal muscle of vitality, of one being fueling another conceptually and completely anew in the nutrition of a singular notion of the now.  In this speck we are in a ballet of self holding self, exchanging the lead, gender, limb and physical relation of species to be universal creatures.  Crawl within you to find me.  We shall be this way together, dancing.

A rant: fishing

I feel the old ache of wanting a comfort.  Love has been such an enigma of faces.  I tend to define being loved as being needed.  Being needed does not encompass love, but let us say it is a mandatory subcomponent of love.  If one is not needed, then certainly one is not loved.  

One can be wanted.  I have felt wanted to a degree, but then looking back I feel like I was probably more a convenience.  My go to analogy is if I was to screw up, to say ruin our finances, or be unfaithful to some measure of trust on a level to be debated, I have never felt and cannot wrap my mind around a sense of assurance that anyone would have fought to keep me.  This is a troubling contemplation to define my sense that I was worth fighting for.   

I am a man that in his mind refuses to set the hook in the fish.  The action seems manipulative and all together opposing the definition of love itself.  I am a feckless fisherman of sorts, fishing without a hook.  I guess I do not believe in hooks.  Whoever I am to be with should not need a hook to form a partnership.  

I am, I guess, bread stuck to an apparatus absent a barb floating, waiting for an aquatic animal to hang around, to nourish on what I have to offer.  If she is to leave then that is the other’s choice.  I am also a fish swimming searching for a barb-less woman.  

All this motion of non-pursuit, pursuit, I do not want.  I never have.  I want personal disclosure, facts and parties to know themselves well enough to judge if that combination is worth their time.   This thinking the logical part of the brain with chemicals has its absurdities that torment me.  Sometimes I wish the waters of the ocean could drain away and we could sit naked conversing with each other.  Is that not the inevitable end result of the happy?   

Thinking of Brian Wilson and the Glory of Pet Sounds

(Warning this poem may ruin the nice/cute misguided impression you may have of the Beach Boys' music.  Once you listen to their songs this way you will never be able to go back.  It is like opening the window and then it is impossible to un-hear or un-see.) 

Is it weird that with every Beach Boys song I think of Brian Wilson stalking a girl that either only exists in his head or who refuses to ever talk to him again after he broke into her bedroom and serenaded her only to be cold-cocked by her father and dragged to the curb or worse her father wasn’t there?  [I know these are not original thoughts.]  

Just take their masterpiece Pet Sounds.

1.      Wouldn’t it be Nice a pedophilia Lolita fantasy as if the only reason this girl doesn’t want anything to do with him is that she is a freshman in high school. 

2.      You Still Believe In Me, after all he has done to her he tries hard to ignore what she wants him to be and cannot help how he is when she’s not around.  There are also bicycle bell sounds in the back of this song. 

3.      That’s Not Me, a guy who is clearly dependent, hung up, afraid, and clingy.  What woman actually has a relationship with such a wussy sack of estrogen?  He’s going to the city to clearly stalk a woman because she ran away to get away from this lonely psycho. 

4.      Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on my Shoulder) I see Brian Wilson with the fearful body still alive wrapped up in his basement, duct tape over her mouth cuddling with his abduction, just wanting her to listen to his heart. 

5.      I’m Waiting for the Day  Wilson imagines himself as the “friend” to sweep in after the “bad boyfriend” broke her heart.  This is clearly a fantasy as this has never happened in the history of male-female dynamics as assuming the role of the wussy sack of listening has ever produced female to male attraction.  In real life her boyfriend was a decent guy, who was a little bit of a bad-ass and Wilson sat at home obsessing. Yeah he is sitting back and watching.

6.      Let’s Go Away For Awhile  Clearly another abduction fantasy song like a dream sequence inside Wilson’s twisted Buffalo Bob-like fantasies.  If this had lyrics, it really could have been played in Silence of the Lambs instead of Goodbye Horses.

7.      Sloop John B , Wilson is drunk at sea dumping the body after a bender.  He had to kill her grandfather as well or possibly this is his name for her real boyfriend as an older male-figure.  Wilson feels trapped and is trying to convince himself he just had to do the deed.  The police are on his tail.  Corn is also another word for meth in this song.

8.      God Only Knows, Wilson is clearly remorseful after all his misdeeds and has to re-rationalize his obsessive love.  Like most weak men he is turning to God and contemplating suicide as his individual worthlessness is overwhelming when considering the absence of his girl who clearly tried to leave him in his mind after all the restraining orders did nothing to help.

9.      I Know There’s An Answer, After calling the girl’s home sixty-seven times in a twenty-four hour period taking on several alternative personalities to try to get through the pre-caller ID firewall, Wilson is wondering what made the girl so defensive.  He refuses to give up.  He has to find the answer.  He knows his way is better.

10.  Here Today, He is seduced by spotting new obsessions, how it starts his obsessive abductions in hotel lobbies, joy-riding in his convertible, beaches and school cafeterias.  Today it’s here and tomorrow that perfect target is a mad-downer in his basement headed for a boat ride.

11.  I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, Wilson is on the verge of suicide thinking about how all his thoughts are meant for another setting for what he can barely hold in his head anymore.  The inspirations he can no longer handle and looking for a place to turn with no one to help him with what goes wrong, his sickness, his sadness and his imaginary loves.

12.  Pet Sounds, Wilson is turning far into psychedelics to answer his madness.  Regular women start to appear as his prior obsessions.  The worlds of was and is, are intertwining.  The obsessions are now his pets, the caged murmurs muffled screams from his processing facilities, which don’t have to really exist, but occupy his deranged beautiful mind.

13.  Caroline, No, Poor Caroline has her hair chopped off.  Her languid bloodless body sits limp and pale in his arms dead.  He loved her and refuses to let go of the dream.  The dogs (pet sounds) are barking, the trains are stalking him at the end of the song.    

14.  Hang On To Your Ego, Wilson is battling to hold onto what he has left of a self, a repressed morality of knowing what he is doing is wrong.  He knows he is guilty. He is reassuring himself that what he did was not so bad.  

Now Brian Wilson only gets credited with writing eleven of this songs, but it is clear that the Beach Boys are using Pet Sounds as Wilson’s public confession for his guilt and no one takes his darkness as criminal, simply as a beautiful humanity so close to the horribleness that love can turn some people towards after being unable to process loneliness in a healthy way.  If you ever were misguided into thinking the Beach Boys were about Surfin’ USA, my 409, or Fun, Fun, Fun, well those were cover ups and stalking grounds for Wilson’s insatiable appetite for imaginary relationships.   

Yes, the darkness in Pet Sounds is why this is a top five album of all time and anyone that doesn’t see that and just sees a nice happy high school dance, well the veil is now lifted.  After thinking of the Beach Boys in this way I was never able to listen to any of their songs without this darker-twinge as the actual intended setting.  Now you are burdened with a similar curse. 

Good Vibrations (I love the clothes you wear and the way the sunlight plays upon your hair.)  

Happy listening.