Waiting for Krewe Du Vieux January 31, 2015

Fleshing out the purple-haired marvels of gaunt Mexican wrestling masks

Amongst the gruff tow-truck drivers of Decatur

Cleaning the way for Krewe Du Vieux

Flashing yellows kneel on the corner of Governor Nichols in front of Angeli’s

Rickshaw trike rolls passenger-less

Rollick in the filling balconies

Nawlinz Where yat cab evacuating honk of the pre-traffic

EMS paramedics in an ASAP black and gold tiny hero

Porkpie hats and skull shirts

Viking helmets pierce the draining sunlight as six thirty p.m. approaches

Beginning of the beginning of the satirical walk-walk parade of Mardi Gras 

Bicycles chained to a lamp post, I am seated in a sea with my notebook

Girl guitarist in red and white checkered yoga pants strums

Bodies pace as twenty-something frat-boys yell at NOPD po-po

Tiger-striped trench coat in a cowboy hat

S.U.V. with 25 inch rims blaring Phil Anselmo’s Walk

Smoked out Cheech-van with blackened windows pasted peace stickers

City tow-truck with the authority of a vulture

Minivan from Minnesota passenger seat marmish blonde with fingers over her lips

Vaping genderless dandelion tokes

Pink feather headdress in pink leggings and a gray top chugs NOLA blonde ale

Ignatius-Reilly mustache king pedals a bike in camouflage

Hipster in black eyeglasses paces a stereotype almost too trite to write

Plastic sword bearing Texan bachelor party-attendee sits next to me on the curb

Asks, “What time this gets started? Somebody told me they throw dildos.”

Rainbow Brite in drag bellows an, “Arrggh therrr!”

Ronald-McDonald haircut septuagenarian mama slowly alone in refined bewilderment

Gutter-punk totes a broom handle with a rope tied to a two foot wide tub

Like a twenty-something Huck Finn a few blocks from the Missisip

Guitarist in blue flowered skirt and a trucker hat unloads a wooden stool,

Two dogs, two guitar cases from a navy Ford pick up

Glistening pancake makeup painted-on mask with a lion’s tail

A Jew-fro holding a plastic cup draft beer skateboards

Dragging sight from left to right monitoring the fill-in

White feathered cowboy hat in blue and red sequined jacket

Two black NOPD officers whoop whoop da sound of the police

A NORMI: National Organization of Remediators and Mold Inspectors pickup follows

Cheers from the balcony fratboys in beads

Blonde dreadlocks in need of a shower leashed to a Catahoula

Grandma smacking gum in passenger seat of a Lincoln

Handle bars high to a silver disco-suit with a porn-stash smoking a cigar

Chicago Bears Urlacher jersey

Quasimodo no-neck lurching in flannel

Silver-haired Euro’s holding a hotel-lobby map in tight-shaved German locks

Bachelor party guy’s friend has finger-less skeleton gloves, fedora with blinking penises

Chant of “USA, USA” storms for fifteen seconds

Red, white, black, and yellow squared clown man in a green beard

Stands as the bear to his yellow licked partner with a rubber-chicken shafted parasol

Shoes have bulges near the toes, sparkling silver straps across laces

Gray-haired tobacco veteran paces Gandolf-like with a carved wooden cane

Domestic vendor rolls a mobile digital picture-printing cart

Parks next to my squatted curbside escritoire

Pulls out a camera to start shopping photographs

“Watch out butterfly!” is yelled to a roller skating hatched caterpillar in glitter wings

Two African angels float together holding hands

Fuchsia wigged pig tails in an Acura

Gray pants in splattered house-paint forms a prism of finger prints

Herd of tall men in non-costumes looks too sober for the pussy they will hunt later

Two Harley Davidsons blare Beyoncé in club-leather jackets on matching maroon

“Amy, Amy, Heh!”

Green suspender cigar yells, “Eric, Eric, That is where everybody is though..”

Wheelchair smokes a cigarette in a black malt liquor bike helmet

Mouthing red-faced to a too-nice Fugazi shirt thirty-something

Holding her saggy-tit Golden Retriever’s leash

Wheels grunts, “Go, Go, eh, go yuh,” as canine starts to bark

“Keep a helmet on,” chimes from the bachelor party,

The besotted rolls

Sailor captain hat asks to have the entrepreneur take his picture

With trench coat princess in golden buttons and a Gucci scarf

Air is colder, thinking about pulling an Abita Purple Haze can from my backpack

Might need to piss, I don’t want to have to piss in this

It is all too beautiful

Bicycle rolls lined with blue stream of lights across the frame

Kabuki full-face paint in white girl dreads on a cell phone

A double-beer can hat in front of Fiorella’s Café with six-feet of bodies

The first under-ten minor in an hour passes as the stench of urine wafts

My lips begin to shiver over the Bukowski “Love is a Dog from Hell” book

I am using to balance my notebook

Wearing my, “Only New Orleans is real. The rest is done with mirrors.” T-shirt

My brother gave me, he’s doing a show at One-Eyed Jacks tonight

Think I’ve been around too many people already today, not sure if I can muster

Camera man rolls away his cart from the open trash bag next to my lamp post

Hear a walking drum beat and a horn like grasshopper leg rubs of the French Quarter

Superman socks with little calf-capes in an America shirt and matching head band

Pull my hood up as the breeze rises

Burger-King crown in full golden-applied glitter adorns a grandmother’s cranium

Gutter-punks in bed-roll backpacks, leather boots past scuffing, water-flask and a banjo

Vampire couple crosses in front of a Brother mouthing that too-loud volume

Of seeing too-many tourists snapping cellphone pics

I think I might be the only seated human in several football fields of street

Most seemed paired with either alcohol or a conversationalist’s balancing weight

Puppy dog pajamas blue mask orange stocking cap from Utah

Six-foot five Panda in flowing red cape with a Superman triangle on his chest

“USA, USA, USA” chant versus “CAN-A-DA” rages in the corner

“Shut-up Canada” ends the tussle in a whimper with a Coors light can

Here it comes a purple gorilla on a tricycle with mobile E.D.M.

My legs are starting to cramp

Fawkes mask in a Pat O’Brien’s hat

Don’t tread on Me flag waves, “USA, USA” returns

From steampunk Hermes in a wing-eared cowl with ear flaps

Brown goggles with black rims holding a spear

Green afro puffs in sprinkle glitter eye shadow sounds

Krewe Du Vieux is arriving with a Bamboula rhythm, stand, close the pages

Except for floats of note

Krewe Du Vieux Begs for Change

Kama Sutra Twister with Kali sodomizing a dog-male

Dick-starter campaign

Seeds of Decline

Dr. Aiken’s GMO organisms with bulbous testicles filled appendages

Spermatozoa on hand held poles that Joe said looked like Snork heads

Hobo Sex

Penetrate Cuba

Ass Extinction

Common Whore Curriculum

Common Hard Core featuring the Simpsons and McDonough 69

Broke from Change on the national debt

Freak-show American Whore Story

50 States of Gay with a rainbow map of U.S. and a carousel of Supreme Court Justices

Happy Mardi Gras 2015

White Privilege: what is the role of the white liberal

I think it is imperative that well intentioned white liberals in the path of attempting to understand and participate in prospering a greater manner of equality and justice in the evolving social reality of people of color that it is a prerequisite to start from a place of foundational structural ignorance.  There is a base of knowledge that no matter what I personally witness, no what I read, no matter who I speak with, no matter who enters my family, no matter the racial identity of my children, no matter who my friends are, the white skin my genetics afford me provide a separation from understanding the basic reality of any manner of the systematic struggles of people of color I would attempt to participate in addressing as an ally.  I think that mental step back acknowledges the precipice of white privilege I stand on.  For many people in a white privileged position that same ignorance of what alternative derivations of a racial reality encompass on a lifelong basis precludes them from understanding the depths to which white privilege exists and how it affects our country and the globe.  That is one of the biggest problems with the Republican Party. 

I think the role of an ally after listening before speaking in most public forums is to be vocal in certain private ones.  I have heard the most racism in my life in all white environments, where I knew the shit being said would not be said if there were a person of color present.  Some of it overt, some of it an insinuation or a comment that hurt me and I was torn between pointing that shit out or letting it be.  I think the greatest role of the white liberal ally is to speak in the alcoves of the problem where people of color are absent by the nature of the cowardice of the actors of overt and more subtle racist, sexist, and homophobic intolerance in these almost purely white environments.  The passive allowance of such comments to keep people comfortable is a huge part of the problem.  Personally I find it to be primarily a generational issue more prevalent in older whites.  Those moments when I have called people out on shit, I know that was my time to speak. 

When I go to poetry readings; that is typically not my time to speak on race or attempt to assist the ‘cause’.  I may write on a global level or a macro level, but rarely on a personal level, because I don’t know and I never will know.  I have thoughts but the ignorance I carry by the nature of my privilege in a European colonized America that terrorized and enslaved people of color to create massive amounts of wealth precludes me from getting a place at that table to speak.  As a white man I feel like white men get everything handed to us in this damn world.  Look at Congress, you have a sea of primarily white men dictating the laws on women’s reproductive rights and on basically pretending white privilege and its cascading effects on our educational, economic, healthcare, domestic security, infrastructure, and social systems don’t exist or if they do exist they downplay them. 

Why because at the root every human knows racism is bullshit birthed out the fear of having someone else who they do not identify with be in power.  So people have traditionally picked others who look and pray like they do to be in charge.  This is a vastly inefficient form of governance and explains most of humanity’s problems.  The evolved path is to a level of human empathy that transcends our physical reality for a spiritual one that transcends religion, government, gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity for a common interconnected humanity as a part of the universe daring to capture what we are as beings, not the petty crap we argue over for the short time in these bodies. 

White people have been fucking over black people for centuries.  When you have shit like the murder of Michael Brown, the quicker flinch in the reaction of the white cop probably comes from some buried sentiment in the white consciousness that in a scenario where the only obvious differential variable a police officer evaluates is race; that white cop’s fear surfaces and factors into his crime. 

There is an underbelly of fear that affects American politics that somewhere white people in government encourage racist systems to perpetuate because they feel guilty about the history of slavery and black equality might surface prospering a manner of recompense paid by the ancestors for the sins of the progenitors. 

That sin is felt in the nature of bearing such white privilege.  It is born in the cascade of the foundation felt in the way even a white-face transported into America in 2015 has a layered benefit a multi-generational black American is not afforded.  That disparity is as a white liberal where I sense the palpable macro-level fear in America which prevents much of the intimacy of having an honest discussion on race and the systematic changes still required in modern times to address the nature of what humanity has created weakening ourselves by embracing that level of human empathy to transcend our physical reality for a spiritual one that recognizes what we truly are.   

Tommy Girl

So this thing with Tom Benson (the owner of the New Orleans Saints and Pelicans) is going down and I had this vision.  {Rita the granddaughter is suing her grandfather Tom for cutting her out of the will and being the new owner of the teams and is instead putting his new wife (not Rita's mother) as the post-death owner.} So here is the outline of kind of two ideas one involving the plot of Tommy Boy and the other involving the Pope.

Parallel the current lives of the rich and football geriatric of Tom Benson as Brian Dennehy marrying his Bo Derek in a scheme to get his money with Rita Benson playing Tommy Girl.  Somewhere should be the Ray Charles dance at the wedding and fat girl in a little dress.

So in this version Rita gets screwed to try to save “her money”, but instead of going where Tommy Boy goes before the death of poppy-Tom, Benson gets this idea through Gayle that Rita is no-good trying to oust her Cinderella step mother style but instead of giving Gayle all the money he goes with the Pope to save his soul for being a fucking billionaire who wants to get into heaven after deep reflection on a pile of money.  Maybe he can see a Jesus or Pope smear in his caviar or bird shit on the hood of his Mercedes. 

So Tom screws Gayle over too and in exchange for the Pope coming to New Orleans and being the new head coach or defensive coordinator for the Saints or maybe praying over Tom on his death bed. (I don’t know there are options)  Plenary Indulgence comes to mind.  Like the Pope would sit down and have a discussion with Tom (I guess the Pope would sort of be the Rob Lowe character) The point is somehow Benson croaks and the Archdiocese of New Orleans or the Catholic Church gets a billion and the team.  

The closing seen is parishioner’s kneeling paying for their season tickets in the collection basket at church in those little pre-printed envelopes or something like that.  Priests start wearing Saints gear.  Also that big sink that looks like you should piss in it in the Dome bathrooms should become a holy water font.  Touchdown Breesus.  There is material to be had.  I wish my vision to be made into a movie or skit or something.  I don’t care enough about Tom Benson and his life to write it, but I had this idea in my head and I thought I would put it out into the universe. 

Harry Potter Rant

"Without Hermione, The Boy Who Lived would be dead as shit."  I’ll have to save this for my daughter.  I think Hermione is her favorite character of all time.  Harry basically bungles his way through and Hermione saves his ass over and over using his orphaned crutch as an excuse for having it hard boo hoo.  My favorite characters in the whole series are Severus Snape and Luna Lovegood. 

Snape; the dude is misunderstood, gets treated like crap by a standard of male-beauty he just doesn’t fit into, falls into a spiritual connection with the love of his life he never gets over as she falls for some braggart fraternity boy asshole who she ends up marrying.  Then Snape has to watch over the orphan keeping that dude’s progeny alive undercover where everybody hates him.  He does this all for the connection he had with a dead woman he morns in his heart.  Maybe it is not healthy or wise, but it is heroic, poetic, and beautiful and the most god damn interesting dynamic of the whole series. 

Luna should have a much bigger role.  Luna is in tune with the universe, probably listens to cool music, and is a badass who does her own thing, a punk rock beauty that probably grew up to have awesome tattoos and wisdom beyond found in simply paying attention to what other people don’t.  Luna is a quiet introvert who doesn’t get caught up in other people’s crap, but stays true to her unique self.  Hermione is cool, she’s clever, and studious, but she really isn’t the rule breaker Luna is.  Give me Luna.  Luna and Severus that’s where it’s at.  

http://www.buzzfeed.com/danieldalton/boss-witch#.uqp2WBDJja

Why I Have Never Done Drugs

Why I never elected the path of experimentation

Marijuana, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, acid, shrooms, nicotine

None of it

I was born with a teacher

My older brother was two years elder

Parental attention and his lack of affection for me

Dictated to be his opposite

At thirteen he took the grass road

Blanketed depression, aggression and with it a codependency

On the social nuances David Foster Wallace places in Infinite Jest

A relationship formed, which in my peripheral view

Knew the boy in me at six absent of playmates was cognizant

Older brother was unlikely to embrace a teenage version of me

Based on a difference we each saw between us which would not shake out

Until we were each out in our late twenties post Dr. John’s Gris Gris

I knew on a fundamental level drugs required some kind of social network

A threshold of people this introvert had to meet or interface outside

The silent understandings of monotonous civil commerce

A minimal level of social decorum was involved to acquire said criminalized substances

Which it was not legality which deterred my acquisition, but rather the social legwork

Isolated and never entering into arrangements I could not handle entirely under my control

Drugs represented a monster behind a wall, even if I could somehow fake being social enough

To arrange a distributor the nuance of what to snort or smoke or imbibe

at what increments of the Decimal system

Was entirely problematic without at least one other to keep watch on what my body

Would inevitably fuck up and over indulge

I knew as a writer I had a problem with addiction

The veil is very thin with me between what the universe is and where I rest my thoughts

Withering that like oiled time on a condom was asking to become an indentured vagabond

To waste into the oblivion of a fully absorbed self restriction in a labyrinth of mania

I would require habits of adaptation that in all ways I could not see gorging on the insular

Other drug users would have friends to smoke out with; share the moment to fuck into debauchery

I knew it was me and a keyboard, a bottomless pit of a bedroom floor writing and clawing

Into the universe like a mole blind and the drugs were only going to numb my hearing, my taste,

My smell of everything I had tried to hold to avoid falling off the ledge and doing something stupid

As a sophomore from high school upward of taking the bait of suicide and sleeping long

I knew I could never keep a gun in the house for the same reason

I will never trust myself; I have seen the demons prowling empowering me and fetching

Like Aids cunts drooling to bed me in lusty rampage

I know what is on the other side of the door with drugs

I have seen a parallel life where I choose different and festered as a junkie

Milking the moments of sobriety like polar ice caps melting into the inevitable extinction

Sometimes I feel like I already lived it in here clunking around tripping over paraphernalia in my dreams

Stepping on syringes, tying arms, and licking spoons

I have seen what simple pot can do to a man’s mind

The stairwells and the street jaunts of reactions to a being completely gone

Not knowing the day, the gender, the events, just lost grabbing in repetitive motions with fingers

As loved ones watch hoping the person that normally inhabits that body returns

That these drugs can counteract those drugs in time before organs laugh

The financial drain, the having to meet new people, the carcinogens screwing with my down-dogs

The loss of hope that the whole damn thing might change me for the better

That I might enjoy it, might leap out the falling airplane

And an untested false parachute is still better than no parachute

When it comes to bargaining for outs when you have lost faith in change, in growth

In the stasis of the worst of all predicaments: a man forgetting his life is his for living

Like drugs could be a kick-starter jumping the engine lottery ticket Chinese democracy of one

Sensible in the mind at that time falling from the sky eyeing the ground

Like a gapping maw ready to be eaten and a body just wants to be numb first

Go out in the stardust from which one came blazing so that the bastard has nothing to chew

No body left in the shell; he sucked out all the taste for himself

The body stripped like a mortgage traded for a Lamborghini left unlocked in the ghetto

Uselessly destroyed in the excavation of a bank account for a thrill ride

Because the impending smash is inevitable, the crush, the hopelessness to do a fucking thing about it

I saw that mouth in the ground from eight years old

What the bits in the teeth gnashed of what it would do to me if I slipped

What I wasn’t strong enough to resist without absolute principles of declination

The former Catholic in me gets an erection at the denial

Always did like god might pay attention for five minutes in the old days

Denial felt comfortable like the never made me special, like I had a power

Like a M to an S to take pain, to take isolation, to make my own drugs in here

In the factory of veins and whisper nerves barking at all hours

To wrangle those monsters like a warden and keep the prison riots to a minimum

Maybe a few burned mattresses got to the typewriter

Maybe a few people looked at me like Quasimodo

Fuck ‘em I had my own drugs; I didn’t need theirs; I could survive like this

Never knew if I could survive like them; their crutches looked like pikes to me

My head would be up there and severed before too long their way

I’d do it myself just give the words as payment; no Hunter S. Thompson day trips

My art would be a tip to the dealer gone just sunk because all I had was an authenticity

That what was in me was a pure strain, unadulterated universe pumping

The fear in me kept the waters flowing; the fear of the monster I could be

Aware of how disappointed I would be as a moderate sensible junkie

I did not want to be a functional drug user; I wanted a train wreck

The saddest act would be faking it; sitting there able to say no

And doing it anyway; giving into the hoard out of boredom

Because I thought the art was gone; there was nothing left to write, to make, to find,

To meet and play with in the silence

If I ever got there and had that powder, that vial I know I’d go; I’d just go

Like a know-nothing idiot I wouldn’t ask for help; no one would notice

I’d be a opossum mashed on the interstate waiting for the buzzards to meh

The next poem is what keeps me alive

So I have never taken the lighter or the wander to see if I could be social enough

To meet a proper proprietor knowing my kin could get me in that door in a second if I had asked

Now he’d probably be like don’t fucking dare; don’t start, just try another path

The kindness would win; back then I don’t know the kindness would probably have had a different answer; to bond in the deep end

Now it’s all about the next poem baby, that’s all I need for now

20150115

The man said, “Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it.  Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it.  Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.”

I have been trying to digest this massacre in contrast to the events in Paris in context to my past writing on the Meme and Dr. King’s birthday today. (1/15).

Two thousand humans in Nigeria, a dozen in Paris, terrorism, murder, shameless evil and disparate global reaction; why racism, classism, money, The Meme.  Boko Haram indiscrimatly razed human flesh like a slaughter house and over three thousand structures.  These are probably low estimates.

Boko Haram wants an Islamic state forbidding Western society.  Assholes in Paris killed cartoonists for mocking the sacrosanct.  World leaders marched with almost four million people in the streets of France.  This was a multi-cultural solidarity, but it was primarily a white-washed solidarity as Europe risks the scent of Nazism rising to persecute Muslims in a twist of what America and Israel do to the state of Palestine in modern Germany and France.  Traditional racially and predominate Christian homogeneous European nations are having their social and political systems rattled by the nature of diverse influx from immigrants shifting the preponderance of that homogeny majority.  The Arab Spring from Tunisians sailing into Italy like Cubans into Florida to the spectrum of Syrians flooding Turkey at the root is that people want what they think they are comfortable and that is a lack of change and a preservation of power consolidated into people who look and pray like they do.  

The coverage, the response, of the divergent values the Meme places on a human life is so blatantly evident if the juxtaposition of fields of dead black bodies and an office of a few white ones getting canonized treatment with a t-shirt campaign, which although important, feels sadly just like another thing white people have stolen from black people at the moment.  Michael Brown and Eric Garner were murdered by police, whether that is a form of terrorism that is a debate to be had, but if we want a world where we really believe all lives matter, that black lives matter on equal footing, then disparate global reactions to these two events cannot be inversed to the heinousness of each event. 

The Meme says what happens in Paris could touch white people, could touch the safe European homes the Clash once sang, commerce could be affected.  The Meme cannot have that.  The Meme is pro-religion but the dominate religion in that country and segregates different rules in the superfluous-human natural resource extraction countries the Meme uses to maintain global dominance.  Nigeria is treated as a natural resource depository by the Meme, so the lives of the two thousand count less than the twelve by the Meme.  It’s the program, the globe is not even shocked.  It’s crazy and sad, but it’s not surprising. 

Fundamentalism will cause our extinction if left unchecked.  Any being that thinks a book or a badge gives him or her a carte blanche for violence is our extinction staring us in the face of our group failure of empathy.  Martin Luther King’s birthday was today.  (1/15)  I wonder what he would say.  Would he would tell us to breathe, to march, to sing?  Would he look at Congress and the privilege so many white citizens of this world wear like armor immune to the realities that he gave his life to foster empathy and love in recognition of what humanity could be.  We are still so much a work in progress.  Events like this just so how far we still have to go. 

Pink Lipstick

I know the playlist, if a woman wants to talk to a man

She’ll contact him, display a mirror of appreciation; even a sliver of glass

If that is all the time she has to gleam; silence is rarely oversight

Timing sets tones

Like a flute blown reverberating in a subtle echo

From introducing a man and a woman evaluating interplay

Legs facing the other on rotated barstools

Eye contact prolonged in the nets between staggered soliloquies

Amuse bouche of who a person is

Whetted lips from Springsteen to South Carolina

Bleeding off Jesus for a cosmopolitan exploration

Rushing into NOLA like a rambling rose from hotel California

Posturing Los Angeles to Paris, New York to Milan

Asking if she wants to get to know, to see what might be, and No

Lingers in the effrontery of effort expelled

To write an email like a salad plate, an unanswered phone call, an unrequited text

Three crows and so the disrespect to not be straight-forward crimps

Like a shrill sterility into his ears

Not her fault exactly that this is the third time in his recent memory

Women seem to feel it acceptable to let silence do all their talking

Absolutely fine in declaration to desist contact, but certain manners of recognition

Of what it takes for a man to display effort; to attempt to expose a piece of himself

To facilitate a possibility that she is exempt from the groundwork of a simple no thank you,

Given the paramount nature of civility in maintaining positive connections in her career endeavors

The planning in his hands and she stares him away like a plastic wrapper into a recycling bin

Appearing like she has no idea on what to say to this platypus

Writer in a business suit, punk in poetry, single father in a theater

Where his time is but an illusion of expressing he does not date often

Does not put himself out there where he does not see potential or the hint of a romantic

Underneath what modern shrapnel will do to an ambitious woman

So when he has an evening bearing even a modicum of promise  

He would like to believe the politeness of adult digested retort

Was a fundamental cache of recognition for a man attempting to be human

Because he’s just tired of rudeness of women treating vulnerability like poison

Ready to be surprised the other way and not be that certain kind of fool

Thinking romance is not childish or that gut reactions explain a Spotify society

Flipping channels until all development is auto-tuned past being in the present

Letting a gumbo warm on a burner until the roux has a chance to disperse

So that when lips hit the broth the tongue can speak from experience

She smelled like a walk-in closet romantic under the Prada sense of silk and pearl

Daring to make room for a man under an avalanche of shoe boxes, power suits, and Co Co Chanel

Like in a sea of heirs of for-appearance sake there was something tender

Wanting to slip petals of an ovule to navigate global waters

That a second passport at customs was occasionally possible to become accustomed in daydreams

To mark a stake of what it took to start to stir in this melting pot of bourbon

To present an image of a mother not in the picture and a father passed

Inking her own cartography on oceanic maps

To venture stepping beyond the ledge in entrepreneurial leverage in Louboutin’s red bottoms

To have a legion of faces like a sundial of time zones in a phone and where is her bed;

What city tonight and she reminded him of Nellie Bly

Around the world in Manolo Blahnik’s wandering who she was

If he would get a chance to talk to her on a Valencia shore taking a breath with a glass of cava

As the waves lapped a Mediterranean coast kissing ancient grapes

Just a passing thought, but he’s a poet and sees human passions like raindrops in the Bywater

That never have to materialize to make a subtle smile creep in

Like the scent of whiskey and orange to two anti-chocolatiers

Finding a whatever in a wherever for a platform of undefined  

Winking at the beauty of a person for exposure like film found in grandparents’ cedar chests

That there was a flash of genuine hinted in mutual respect fizzling into 

Imagining there is little way a woman in public relations does not realize a man calls

So he takes little doubt the lack of motion intentional to convey

So it is, just to say I wanted to try to play with a fellow explorer

Maybe not as far as the other side of the ocean, but tasting a tide

Knowing sometimes opposites can be like fire, primal, and burning hot blue

For however flash, Epicurean, and wild 

I saw a glimpse of that between us

Ripping a few layers of fabric

Drinking thankful for the vintage bottle while it lasted

So it is, impolite vinegar 

The Dilemma of our Divinity

There is a pit that gargles want

Plaque-coated sunlight blackened back into potential

The light that shown the outline of specificity upon a face

Detailed a key to match one’s lock

The shadows of egoism cast in a kiln of the analytic

Brightening as if the curves of this other’s body house

A soul of amalgamation with the universe

The taste of which will unravel mysterious in one’s self

Like puzzle pieces under adolescent mattresses recovered

Placed with the fortitude of mind-hive that if submitted into the gaps

Would clarify the image of time’s preceding dance

To have a life presented with such crossroads interpreting

The silences, the horrors, the pleasantries like beacons in the must

To be in the only iteration that could produce this table of now

To press this piece into this aperture to display this mural

That somehow divinity breathed in the application

Forcing the mind to contemplate

Should one let go of all input / be independent of thought

Allow no want; the immediate release of attachment

As if in the introduction preference is sorrow’s potation

One is to breathe untainted

To exist hopeless, appreciating what is to the absolute

To ask and be joyous in the declination by the beloved

For the self is perpetually attuned to the universal meter

So that no event can raise or lower joy one is muted like a laugh in the belly of the cosmos

Sparked in dispersed outer space flashing for stardust 

So is the dilemma

To be hardy whole of self impervious and transcendent

Or to

Invite the vulnerability of a frail human love

Daring to be not divine but to feel so alive as to need    

Pressed Tin

Some days the idea of you is a character I want you to murder with reality

But I know I have to do it;

I want to convince myself my error is unrecoverable with the solidity

Of faith in myself that love was as boring, arbitrary

Like in one shift slash of the blade all romance in me could bleed out

I could see the fantasy of hope shrivel in parched relinquishment

All the lines you told me you could never cross

Who and what you are, the selfishness, the cruelty I could believe you

I could divest my being of your taste marauding my spiritual compass

Pointing at you like a cradle of which I came

As if Gaea came and made you from spit and mud slicked you into silken awe

Of willow trees and lotus flowers floating into my consciousness

I want the ambrosia to be a snuffed scent I can no longer recollect

A body rolled under railroad wheels pressed like tin

Empty from this organic prison for a time of methodical metallic logic

That a man needs not; impervious like an armored arachnid tinkering steps

Not with heart, but with oiled engine ticking iron

Flex the stinger, ready the thrust of memories eradication

This battle with the universe to show a man the belly of a star

Bursting before his eyes and then demand him to un-see it

Rake the unction of hope back into the shadows

Take away the dynamic he has waited such decades and make him think he is a fool

Crawl him into the eons of silence and send him whirled back into the maze

As if his life will never be united, so close and the proximity, the gravity just amplifies the pain

That he hoped so, that he wanted so

Teetering there with his mouth on her nipples suckling like a boy

Pressing his genitals like a maddened pantheist seeing the universe pulse in the darkness

Possibility echoes and all he wanted was for her to say she heard it too

Like he was not drenched in the insanity he cannot escape

Drowning in metal bricked zinc from the sky pounding in copper rain drop sheets

Flattened in the garden of the inanimate seeing time wiz

Thinking he had nothing left to lose and plummeting the reasons in the fire

She set with him watching her behind her walls seeing him melt away 

Writing Where I Am

Everything exists on the ledge of the present

To be in the moment is the only platform of existence

As if everything that occurs could not have ever been or ever be

But in now

The grips to craft the clay of the past to mold a future self acceptable to ego

Are at the root of suffering distancing the liveliness of consciousness

The constant boxing match to find completeness in this universe

Through our conception of another providing the faith in ourselves we lack

Lifts love’s sail as the image holds in the mind

Only to limp, foil, and crash as the ideal wanes into what the other never was

Revealing our ego’s lack of embracing what we are

As part of the whole sent to be, to use this partitioned illusion of self

To act in the present as our current fleeting arrangement

Daring to acknowledge the eternity reverberating in the divinity flashing

That volition fluxes to let go of blame, guilt, anger, depression, and fear

So that we may love ourselves as the universe and with this passion love all we encounter

These are the challenges of the turnstile

As the choice of egos collide foul and sweet, congruent and incomplete

To sense a true breath of the universe is shocking as absolute presence

The awareness of all that surrounds is pulsing as the is

We dance in this meter while we hear it, we sing as this melody while we breathe it

The adjoining of beats lifts individuals to entwine in the cosmic ballet

In ending the ego must not attempt to hold, control, or linger

One must accept the authority of the now

Communicate the desire of volition and let go completely or suffer the lash of countless loves

Wanting at the moonlit steps of authenticity’s aroma,

For to see the interchange acknowledges the universe

To hunger for the specificity tasted imprisons oneself in the cage of the ego

As if one needed; as if one was not complete

In harmony with the all; as if one needed to ever need

The soft touch, the recognition of presence by a beloved

These are the wages of human frailty paid in labors most intimate

The rapture of eternity and a conscious being’s time flirting with preciousness

As if time and individuality were not illusions

Daring us to drink the wine of the ego

To see the totality through the prism of the self

The art, the dance, the painting, the poem, the film, the play, the song  

Created and vibrating in the atomic theater ricocheting through eons

At peace that the tragedies of suffering washing the banks are but

A single reconciled moment in all that ever is like the vision of a universal consciousness

Reading a page shifting eyesight from letter through word to letter

Soaking in a present that appears to move, but never does

The page, the sentence, the word, the letter are a constant

A singularity exploding with only the prestidigitation of our ego’s outstretched hand

Attempting to grab the fleeting moment; gone, always gone

In always in, never a platform for control, but in release of thought

Freedom from the manacles of perfection’s untouchable surface

Radiance is most closely sparkling in simply being in the is

For in this I accept

There is no me; there is no you;

Only this whole reverberating

There is no justice; there is no peace

There is only that which we do to ourselves

Pulsating like an experiment we do unto us dancing in the now

Rationalizing consciousness itself as to why we ever started choosing

Over the flatness of that which we are outside of existence

As parts of us depart and return into and out of others and our self

We are writing where we are so that we may find ourselves

In this there is no suffering; there is a grand empathy beyond

Acceptance in the collective understanding our current form for what we are

In this human limitation shifting to be listening in the now