Mr. Ghost Balloon

Apparently there is a manufactured sycophantic addition to the throng of crapulent holidays named “Boss’s Day”.  Unaware of this I arrived at my desk to find a four foot tall metallic floating ghost shaped and visaged balloon tied to my desk chair after lunch stamped with a post it note reading "Happy Boss's Day" under a gaping ghost-maw smile.  The pod of helium was retained for a week and then released on the roof top of the parking garage lofting between a set of three power lines.  I avoided knocking the power to the building into a ghastly purgatory.  I read the following at a ceremony for my coworkers, as like the great wizards before him, the happy prince lofted over Lake Pontchartrain into the great beyond.  

Dear Raccoon Family,

Please take care of Mr. Ghost Balloon as you spawn your next litter in his ghastly latex foil clutches.  May your labors be bountiful as you scavenge through America’s trash cans.  If you are to happen upon a cat, may you find common ground before resorting to a urine-marking war.  Such conflict may soil the dignified and felicitous history of Mr. Ghost Balloon as he ascends like so many Party-City veterans of joyous helium into a well-deserved celestial retirement. 

Sincerely,

Former human family of Mr. Ghost Balloon

End Space

If the world or one’s life is to end

Every human should have a human \

Every person should have a person

The logistics are suspect, but the illusions comforting

The assumptions of betrothals and conceptions

Life splintering into entrails of thought

That each mind has a space to imagine a face, a body

To cradle as the world disintegrates atomically

I still put you there

The shunts truncated and the roots hold in the autumn

Sun clouded and maligned that the passageways of glaciers melting

The inferno smelting the flesh clutched like a raft

Through these oceans of blindness keep crying out to a lioness

Of blue skies and purple sheets knowing so little beats indiscriminant

Matriculation and employment shift and the devils of Texas blurt

Obscenities like the whips that drive slave ships

To the definitions of making-a-living knowing neither of us chose in each other

Or the children or the stance that this was sustainable and yet in this crucible

As I bear to burst the manacles of extrication of a decade at sea

I would choose you to be that person

Currents and obstacles and I wanted the simple drive of midnight

To fall asleep in arms of straw and brick mortared in the skin of forget

The blood on the floor and the rubber in the driveway shredded in marks

That we ever had a chance as if angels or devils exist

So we are drawn to argument and the tangent becomes perpendicular in the cross

The black and the white fade into the fog of where ships harbor

America seems so distant in the apocalypse, but I dreamed about you again last night

Knowing I need another face, spark, driveway to imagine 

Dispassionate Zero

I am not ok, no matter how many times you ask

Inquiring only reminds me of the futility of wanting, trying, doing

Do not ask about me; let me die like armadillo innards

Strewn and viable for the carrion

I am exhausted and the closest replica of an antidote is love

To which remains an enigma as the sentiment is reciprocation

Rather than a numerator offered over null

So that the universe implodes when computing above a void

However fractional concern bears a percentage to be flipped like a multiple

Into a logarithm that bears value in times of extrapolation, yet when starkly neutered

By the dispassionate zero rather than even the loving in hatred

That concern was a predecessor for one to matter so in the line to the other

To flip the absolute valuation of a numeral other than nil 

Into an urge to be something variant than infinite apathy soaked into opaque ambivalence

Die, live, believe, to reside in the castigation of a non-look, the banishment of history

Eradicated in the mirror midnights of blackbirds flown into the epoxy of forget

So that memories are fed vampire-blood like rain drizzling through lips

So that death is spun into a web of the living and that progress is regress

Breathing is decomposing; the days were accounted previously so that each

Is consumed like an island castaway’s ration knowing death previously occurred

Oblivion is no sanctuary and hope is oblation to a nonexistent deity as atheism is mouthwash

Swishing into incisors as synthetic as any notion a man every had that he ever felt love

Returned like a volley of what it means to offer a human a margin of error in forever

That to extract such would be the vital organ of knowledge so that life forces redefining 

Or even the idea in a moment, a single-instance of requirement that one would fight

One would protest the cessation as to why a lover was befitting the notion of loved

In an equation with a voided denominator and a numerator redefining the basis of being

Into a split fraction of self so that a piece remains null so that the remainder can function

Season Shift

The shift change comes and the plant smoke does not

The fumes raise the charcoal gray of Monday morn

Daughter nervous in the fleeting images of home

Wandering as if walls of father are eroding into the muds

Of another hurricane squalling in from the Gulf

A Friday evening Saints’ contest to see the levees gush come the work-week

Cock crows across the triad to see parents and child deluged in mold

The specks still wrestle in the questions

Of what is to happen; the façade, the moorings, the bayou and the railroad

Pathways and shingles pitched at the apex of elementary expectations

To know that normal is an illusion beguiled in the psyche of assumptions

Certain pressures burst the luxuries of ignorance to spill worry about the living room

The pictures flip off the walls so that the screw anchors, patched, painted over

Are still visible to the next family that inhabits the domicile

The wall surface as a whole stood aback and drank with the fire of faith

Converting from beverage to steam into the loft of wishful desserts

Ambrosia with the blues and greens of an aquamarine bedroom in New Orleans

Imaginary until tangible and ethereal until frangible for the next move

To which father attempts to find a face that feels like home other than merely hers

So in she sees her oedipal complex steaming in the buffet tray

To be her father’s female and him in the alcove of where her mother left a vagabond

Hoping he would abscond his child for the distorted image of court and hometown

For out to sea with his four children, three atoms in the breeze and the living-one like a buoy of barter

So that maybe he will do the deed in a dark place where no words can see

The moving, the furniture, the Indians in the summers and the Palestinians in winters

The Jews in the autumns and the Aborigines of spring, the year revolves; he is nothing,

But loneliness, existing in a dissipating memory where prayers are a jester’s tongue

His family sits in a circle of theists turned desists in diluted atheism

He attempts to explain space-time and the round table talks about spirits and light released

Pains of a people clinging for hope in the water’s breeze coming in like shelter in the storm

The whiff of a changing season where the natives are not extinguished

Exterminated in the incoming faith

Rice Patties as September Ends

I saw what my father’s eyes looked like staring at death ten years before I was born

My younger brother sat in a hospital emergency ward behind walls monitored by doctors

Thought about by my parents and me

Mother on her way to the social worker’s office

Father stares back at me saying I did not want to go to Vietnam

Tears seeping, shaking, glaring tangential to me as if back in time of a high school bedroom

Thinking about the effects of smoking marijuana, music, and a life with my mother

Juxtaposed and a way out from Agent Orange and the Viet Cong gong

Sounding off in an electrical apprenticeship, hard wiring for hard work

Three kids later and almost forty years and leaking out in a waiting room

Death peeking at the obliteration of my existence through my father out in a rice patty

Like his father seeing the man next to him shot to death in the Philippines

Grandpa was feeding a machine-gun ammunition, now slipping behind the barrel

To make non-existent other men’s children, as if the bullets were anti-spermatozoa

Canceling out family trees like Monsanto round-up to the roots to complement

The defoliation pumping up a stock-price in the tangerine-dream skies

Shifting the cellular make-up of gonads and prisms of the Purple Heart hanging on my grandmother’s wall

And my father’s father dead at fifty from the metal-shrapnel in his body leaching into Alzheimer’s

Wandering around Westwego Louisiana searching for apples in a drugstore with the pharmacist

Calling my grandmother, “Joe’s over here again.” And she says, “Thanks for getting that for me.”

As she loads him back not knowing the word of what to call the price a man pays for his country

Flag over the casket and my father the third to pall-bear the class that he did not have to go

He did not have to go and so, we are here in this waiting room as lives attempt to consume

Tomorrows borrowed from another’s choices, the universe speaking in the whispers

Of just how quickly the wind can call a boy to say he is seventy-seven years old

Depending on how one is counting or today is October 31^st or December 25^th

To know the moment when you thought, you thought you had time to see the sunrise part

The nights of dreams of becoming husband, father and living further than the older

No man should have to watch his son be laid to dust, screaming inward and the hallows eve is numb  

The words retreat into lucid thought that time is melting into a thaw

Certitude that a man must find sufficient rest to do sufficient work

Provider, farmer, writer, painter, singer hands on the wire, the pen, the brush, the string

Generations telling the I and love and you of uncertainty shining as September ends