Buoy

I can hardly stand; head is bobbing like a buoy

Off the neck, sawed off like a shotgun, half-departed

Fog-filled Monday, morning is pondering the grave of Woody Guthrie

All these papers on my desk could burn into the numb

Nothing left to start the week with, apologies in the bin

Smoked the purpose I had in a fury of strands

Traction, pedal faster, tumor of yesterdays claws in dirt-blood

Forming concrete mixing the dust must

Harden sometime, so I guess this morning is it

Wanted more time, don’t we all, in the end, it is never enough

Mother says, “Son, you think you know everything, but you don’t.”

Son says, “Mama, I don’t, but no one is offering answers?”

Give me a cross and an emaciated wonder-kid baring ribs and souls

Saying look what he did, for me, for us, for all time I see none

I see nothing, feel nothing, sense nothing, and when I did

I look back on it like a highway to a ditch on a drug trip

Hallucinating happiness for a closet case of emperor’s stitching

Oohing and aahing at the fabric until Santa Claus tilts the children’s scales

Another drug, another lie and all I want is truth

Books can be dangerous, but I am still reading

And you can say, “Oh my lord, yes you do.  Son you don’t mean that.”

Tell me to believe and you crush the last part of my heart

Brother, tell me I’d be a horrible therapist, you’re probably right

Never understood a damn-soul in this world, I’m just trying to start and end with me

Somebody has to understand me and rather put my faith in science

Boundless time, concentric universes, thinkers, ration

Then the gut-stripping, mind-ripping realization that God does exist

Never have I pondered a thought so cruel

The powerful ambivalent to the powerless, hungering for justice yet doing nil

I rather shed pursuit of or traditional definition of justice, conclusion as a destination

Rather than a reverberating end in itself, subtract such notions of happiness

As if the self is relevant or even exists in the now

I volley we are as always beyond the limits of volition so that I prefer to see

Life as it is rather than what scroll-writers dictate it to be to appease the succession of kingdoms

Give me no kingdoms; give me no kings

Give me no scale; give me no gilded-rings

Give me no solace; give me no faith

Wipe the illusion of something to look forward to

For the glory of a now, empowered by time disguised as a day

This waking and sleeping, this counting, this waiting, this learning

This feeding, this reproducing, this costumed dance parading around love

Call the ballet of nature, the hull of the ship’s ego an interconnected one

Give me the wage earned and given away, for it is always given

Give me the food grown and fed to the animals, for it is always eaten

Give me the dreams of energetic for doing, for energy is always transferred

Give me the love for truth, for it is true whether witnessed or not

Sometimes I feel like I want to get in a fight

I missed out on the anger of my teenage years

I missed out on the fucking up of my twenties,

I did the fucking up my thirties in my twenties,

I am doing the fucking up of my forties in my thirties now,

And I just want a chance to go back and get those twenties back

Maybe I could have avoided all of this or learned something

Or found something, somebody to watch fail with me

Side by side decay and do we die, the pointlessness wanders through the room

With a name-tag no one reads; I keep searching through all the faces

All I see are faces playing games, fooling their bodies into manufacturing activity

Something to do in the meantime, truncating asking questions, being so declarative

Mother sees me as one of those, as if her son ever uses periods

I’ve been an interrogative since birth and I do not think anyone has ever felt like an answer

Punctuation periods everywhere and all I gather is that periods do not exist

Religion, careers, possessions, traveling, reading, writing, nature’s gaze, music, on and on

None of it will ever be a declarative and it is not meant to be; it can not

I am at peace with that, and so much of my struggle is finding peace with others calling the others

Answers and shutting my mouth as that child standing observing the parade of emperor fashion

I would rather be a disconnected buoy watching it all; anchored to nothing, being inquisitive

To wherever time takes me