Puddles at the End and Beginning - 20151231

Staring at the rain puddle type of day, New Year’s Eve

Slack jawed gape-hole of what was this that drove through here

The brilliant tongue daring the capital T truth of the matter

As David Wallace might offer, the manifesto of the everlasting gobstopper

To trammel net tacticians herding schools of consensus and nonsense

Comingling and making out long enough to stimulate arousal

In the augmentation of expectation and polarity jostling

Like a burlesque dancer’s tangled legs and an accountant's

Testing the boundaries of art and logic, science and dreams

To pose hypotheses and laughter that what feels good and is good

Might converge, words in the family-sized serving platter

Passed around the table might suffice for now, in the moment

The dangling bewilderment and distraction of discussing the parade

Of intermittent consistent depression or addiction or masturbation patterns

Or the need to be at work on time or not that tad bit level of antiauthoritarianism   

Creaming over the warm pile of mons pubis and phallic head

That grand bit behind the scenes of why anyone is interested in hearing

What anyone else has to say or pushed that millimeter towards novelty

Over that line of monotony carbon-copied serving tray utensils

Hand to mouth motions wrote and pelted with the boom-boom of midnight firecrackers

Sending star-streams like purple dragon spit willow trees bleeding out the night sky

Star wars enlivened and chatting enthralled and emboldened to be a human being

In a moment with another human being rather than sequestered in that god awful pit

Of depression or ache-gravy pasted in that lack of will to even want to be around anyone

The tone-deafness to the celebrations where alcohol becomes priority the brouhaha

Touchscreen of being somewhere to numb the sensation away in besotted drink-binge

The paradoxical headroom of New Year’s Eve recollecting as much and as little

Of the solar revolution that was for the one approaching on some secular arbitrary photo-op pit-stop

That instead of taking the damn pocket-phone snap-selfie the self came to be

Using four hands and two mouths to say I love you peering all eyes into a puddle floating there between

Gleaming and brilliant striking the tone-gong of the universe  

Why it is so Hard to Meet People;

I think you might be hiding just like me

Wrapped up in an onslaught of thinking too much

Being personal and intimate insulated jargon of intellectualized insulation

Artistic and universal pull of time stitched into meandered patterns

Repeating in months and days dotted with obligation

Good soldier professionalism to commitments and outer-rim projections

To get this done on this pace, but for the most part

Day dreaming ghost-faced puff-headed waltz

Only-asking moments, engaging from time-to-time

In piecing that veil to be with all types of people on occasion

But no one too-much, that propensity to be present and not present

In the clover fields of other people seeing you, but you’re not there

There but not there scattered in between the meditations of the sky-fall

Ceiling to floor glances about rotating vortexes of color and Kandinsky squares

Rocking lines swallowing sunsets and guitar cases strumming hours

Until the brain swells and commands the factory to shut-down

To be owned as a vehicle in the moments where time is chauffer

Driving the object a head abides whether we are choosing to is up for debate

Here stubborn-blood and stowed skin, how to behave in the hours given

The year and the worry of the old years and the old phrases

That make a heart just shiver and compact itself into a stow-away

Truck-box in-route to Cincinnati or Phoenix or rising in an icy-desert

Brambling through swamp-grass and coffee full of tears and wondering

If there will ever be someone to share this cup with before the check comes

The sign off the tip for the great big adventure, if one had known

If one could have avoided all those pothole distractions clunking up chalk-teeth speech

Wasted days saying the something-else that fills up pots of regret-suds

Soaking the debris and the fall-apart entrails

Not so much worried about what it/I look like

Just walking, being, breathing, the stillness in the motion, the acknowledgment

Of what one is, the great-big-bite

Kind of if you think about it; everything else tends to fade silly-like

Compared to that;  

Fireflies

The idea that someone could be happy to see me is apocalyptic

The entire section of the universe I have been raised or rooted to branch out from

Is based on the notion of antipathy, aversion, and at best apathy, indifference

But to look forward to, prompt or incentivize the presence of my being

Is cataclysmic glacier-melt, volcanic-ash upheaval

The fault-line quake juggernaut foot-stomp flash-dance

The hurricane twister-competition drink-the-flask freeze-up

On stage center spot-light freak-out paralysis

I can’t move in such sands.  I don’t know how.

Wasn’t built to or asked to navigate the idea of being requested,

Sought or appreciated to abide

Deer in flash-bulb moonlight truck stops abruptly to patiently allow crossing

Mine is the world of the unanswered phone call

The week long waiting and swallowed recognition of what silence amounts

Resignation of diluted want dripping callow impetuosity into meditative Bourbon

The toxic draught lacquered lozenge for the esophagus

Mine is the twenty page conversation with myself

Recycled into fifty or seventy page iterations over revolutions of the sun

Attempting closure in doppelganger volumes asking for a moment to hold court

Knowing the phases of the moons, the dark shadow hollow cores

The never return ring, the banded stone at the side of the sink without comment

The blank screen, the cavernous mailbox

The pittance drips to an ancient stomach

Blatantly eviscerated chin-up machinist turned pan-handler

This is done knowing parachutes are illusions

I never packed one or asked anyone to jump with me

At the start of life one startles already falling

It all depends on perception: the ground, the clouds, the others

Debris or not debris

Recognizing the smack potential in flashes then submerging back into daydreaming

I keep my eyes open, all of it, at once

Which leads me to feel like a narcoleptic voyeur of somnambulists

Occasionally garnering moments of clarity pondering who is really asleep

The art, poetry, music, social-zoology cosmos in complete stillness

When granted perspective of the vibrating oneness

I am amazed with the idea of anyone happy to speak with me

Because it entertains the idea of what real is

Of what a moment is; that I am in one with another being

So it is; to be in

The fall out the sky, the sleep or awake, the texture of the surface

The impact unveils as colorful and magical

As dissolving into the universe and us just being here

Like two smiling children on a log watching fireflies

Let us be here

You and I

Palette’s Disregard

I am somewhat afraid to write this poem

The thought of breathing in the vividness of solidifying the memory

Of a woman, of abandonment, of the that is all there will ever be

It is a rakish form of smeared oil paint love

First we met, your chest and neck were covered

Wrapped in mild winter’s armor, cosmetics nil

You and a paper tea cup, hair pinned up

Texted instruction-map from the rear of the establishment

To outside the doorway to meet me, sight

In my sky blue dove shirt diffusing bombs

Salutations and a line to tell me of your migraines

The medicated injections and hospital stays

Your body attended to other adult’s children in feaux-Louisiana snow

Now here with me eliciting reaction to your confessional vulnerability

At the impetus, sentences before sentences, as if a warning of repetitive false turns

In white precipitous carpet that falls like winter in spring so that nothing has much time to grow

The bastard chilling wince of the throng rattle vein grip upon a body

Of why one may wish, but not be able, the absolute in expectation of the go-on without me

Nature of the member of the party with the wounded knee, stuttering in-step

Apologizing preemptively for that which is reactionary

As if for me to turn my chin to see you hold the liquid vessel in your palms

And find you beautiful, plain, water-like, as you are, sequestered and yet naked

Setting terms, attempting to inform me why I will inevitably wish to desist 

As if effort, empathy, or endearment as a manifestation displaying strength were alien

To the mathematics of your ears, impossibilities in the infiniteness of what might be

Computing in my houses in the currency of how I paid for my voyage to arrive

Standing next to you in that line, humans breathing on the liquid ceiling of water and leaves

Testing when to touch lips with the state of matter presented evolving vapor and flavor

Tea and not alcohol, here and not there, and I think of potential triggers and comfort

And being of such and seeing you to feel safe, to know me better and divulge elements of personhood

Familial interactions and you speak of an aunt’s leukemia at nine survived to a life of disability

Dot, narcissistically denying label of grandmother to henpeck her daughter to serve her other daughter 

Caregiver, demands, parent’s divorced, two half-sisters

Father architecture school in Arizona after parents met at Butler University in Indianapolis

You followed him to be a Wildcat in art, taught at Clark and Chalmette

Confronted the administrative harangue of football coach solidarity grade-change orders

The skill-set focus of discipline minimizations fractal-like peppering a self-portrait

Of what it means to be a woman, an adult, in equal-footed membership with generations

Without birthed child or matrimonial ceremony in forbearer Baptist testimonies

To shrink you, to reduce the sauce by half and by half, concentrated artistic beauty

Maybe you see it, maybe you don’t, I have not looked upon you long enough to know,

But in the steam off the surface of the cup I could see your fortitude in your loveliness

A body tested to choose to create, to dissuade sublimation, to be solid in who you are

An artist in substance, molding a clay of flesh and spirit delinking from the raucous mobs

A hospital stay, a mother came, and an aunt died while your life-giver was attending to you

Migraine addled and the independent spark of a decade in New Orleans

As a woman has a right to choose and dots have to move or be repeated

From periods into ellipses truncating the repetitive platter of one’s life as a simulacrum

Of where one came from into what one will be and to live as you are painting

Is blasphemous to Dot and a one bedroom apartment and yoga, a dog, and the 264 color box of crayons

Smells glorious and the sound of paper-box cracking heavenly gates 

Disciplines of teacher does not so much talk, but shifts,

Tips a student in perception based on where the student is

The malleability of space, of what can be, independent postures

Of my own fears of avoiding narcissists and smelling the genuine in a first hug

In the lingering pheromone of you wanting to talk more, continue upon a table

I had a cranberry apple tea

The time in-between the distance-dancing, the deciphering non-responses

Texts and missed call notifications balancing with the policy of parents, nanny

To other’s offspring restricting correspondence yet in the window’s aperture

There is still the bewildering wisp of silence fluttering moth wings through the light

Shadows in the flaps, disclosures and netting, mosquito buzz saw camouflage

Decoding offers and circumstance, soccer games and Schrodinger’s feline

The speed of you, the slow reveal and what comfortable or safe or ready to speak

Appear like, knowing the trepidation of these ledge words, to offer as a man echo 

The statements of feeling overwhelmed and unable to talk, exhaustion

Me pondering what it is like to be in your body, the suggestion of a walk, a cup, a yoga mat

Cartographer’s sketching of a monkey’s café, balance and wellness

Veins derail the track sink the ache of your head into a knock-out shot

Empathy offered and I made this time to get to know you better

So this is what I wish, pearls of honesty suspended in this string of time between us

A well of sadness in being unable to do the things you want; to look ahead

And reminisce in the lost connections snipped in cannot go or do or be

The idea of your head in my lap, my hands to rub your skull,

I pictured you there, a would-have into a make-it-so sleep

Into the life spawning tiny nugget-shells of time we never foresee, but explore

Being present willing to be liquid, to shift in the availability for the form you are able to take

For this moment, the state of your body, able to drive again, calling me; I answer hopeful

Gathered supplies in the available time to cook dinner in the event you might have wanted

Someplace quiet to sequester, away from the brighter lights of a magazine into the colors of my home

My space, my frames and words, the aromas of my kitchen emulsifying herbs, oils, and plants

Seeds for you, here in the bottle of pinot noir you brought for me to open, us to share, imbibing

A moment on a sofa, fabric, arms, conversation meandering into a silence

And the sky fell a liquid ceiling all-at-once, the deluge insatiable

Of first kiss into hands gripping arms, mounding legs, neck firmly molded into palm

Bodies arousing flush from an orchestra of words into all this silence on fire

The inferno of passionate drive from first kiss into pouring into another human being novel

Allaying two years of my fears and the would-not go decisions and the abruptness

Felt like lightening permission to be, could feel of what you wanted, the tossing of fabric

The directions to a stairwell, the steadying tie of hand to locate bedroom passing art’s enamor

The tsunami of two condoms, four to six eruptions on each the come fast and hard on top

The arousal of peeling back layers of foam on the ocean, the heated caldera in the heights

Gripping arms, spreading vulva, penis, and arc of my hips as your favorite spot to sketch

Thighs to head massaging later, noticing you, being in the night, giving space

Head abuzz with the dimming down of old fears about sex and abandonment

In the morning you have to be to work and the arousal is flush, still in the bulging sensation

To ride awoken hard and still turned on, inside you again and this hesitancy to feel safe, this battle

Where I want to give in and not sure what is real, what is accessible, I leave it there, held 

Feeling the vibrations of your body these extreme polarities of pain and pleasure

From the prior afternoon syringe into this morning medication,

The clock ticking and I see you walk to your car

Wondering if I will ever see you again, knowing I shouldn’t imprint the past upon the present

Yet I am here past Christmas, another string of non-response texts scattered dare-be innocuous

Like rune translations predicting exactly that

The stumbling block of why

Hope shrinks back into the crevice of your self-doubt preservation or maybe uncouth decorum

To not dabble in how you might appear for sake of what you know you need

So it is, a placement of that long numb ache conversation

I have had before, but in the uniqueness of these throes

You have painted this picture in my poem

A taste I warned my palate not to savor for your palette’s disregard 

Balancing Constellations

The calluses have seeded the habit

To no longer write poetry about a woman

Until the equilibrium shifts to assume that stoic silent

Floating mist amalgamating why of non-response

Is more solid than vapor and will soon enough plummet

This see-saw of leverage modifying the fulcrum

Of presence, non-presence into departure

The quietude of exit stage left, the erasure monologue

Sometimes texted-out, email, others nothing, never spoken

Gotten it down to an unanswered pair of phone calls

Two is enough to discern, if a woman wants to create distance

She simply does, no explanation, elaboration, beyond the bare sky

The cosmos speaks enough, the smaller infinities and the larger infinities

Dabbling up on the canvas, steaking in lunar maps like Cassius to dear Brutus

Applying blame between the constellations and the observant players

The bladed gut-wrench seizure of finding air so precious in the magnanimity

You want to see what happens to all the people you knew while living after you die

Especially the ones you loved, still love, maybe even might have loved

As if in one of these paths all that never was, also came to be as all possibilities

Exist at once in the theater of time’s illusion so that to love one is to love the universe itself

To document that act of concern of determination of non-concern of loving or non-loving

The guillotine finality of it all in acts of allowing another human being to be alone

In the fallow pool of expectation of communication or non-communication, of purpose

Of inclusion or exclusion to this petty fortresses battened with scab-years and soliloquies

To say, “I don’t know, but I want to try, to attempt speaking, being present, awakening before you.”

These gorgeous nude carnal thrusts bursting in bonded flesh are interrogative sentences

Licking the masks off, sugary and sand-tongued to carve away the beaches of this world

The microscopic seashells baked on top of our forms until the contents of the sun-bellies

That birthed us fuse, humbled and mesmerized by the opaque audacity to be in a single moment

No longer about skin, by being-hood luminous and balanced to talk in the ancient

Seeing constellations from the star’s perspective, glowing connected, making the lines vibrate

In these arms to yours, in the silence this could all be painted there, I could have seen it between us

Alas I know what it is like to hear that expectation hardened into assumption into time’s conclusion

Reality has a way of speaking without need of saying 

Quotes from The Fault In Our Stars by John Green

I read this book this afternoon before I plan to share it with my tween daughter.  Cancer, love, appreciating the moment, the dangling rationalization of purpose, fairness, capriciousness in life, the mortal coil, fate, god, tasting the tip of the spoon from the pot.

I thought I would share a pair of quotes:

“I can’t talk about our love story, so I will talk about math.  I am not a mathematician, but I know this: There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1.  There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others.  Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million.  Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.  A writer we used to like taught us that.  There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set.  I want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got.  But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity.  I wouldn’t’ trade it for the world.  You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.”

“I felt that I owed a debt to the universe that only my attention could repay, and also that I owed a debt to everybody who didn’t get to a be person anymore and everyone who hadn’t gotten to be a person yet.”

Gum Tissue

Central incisor implant metal protrudes, unveiled by the millimeter daily

As pink gum tissue blackens corroding fleshy placeholder

Into that open look upon a canyon, the leaping haunch

Contemplating biting into suicides maw

Eat and being eaten all at once

For a curtain upper lip protecting that Darth Vader smile

To peer, breathe agoraphobic casting net crimping

A body to pull into itself so that the skin obliterates

The pressure of the universe tightening

Repeated attempts to decipher the illusions of intimacy

Connection, being, witnessing, presence, immortality in recognition

Of being seen, of seeing

The surface itself disintegrates

In all the buzz-saw julienned ventricles of Walmart

The cobblestone plastics for infant savior’s revelry ales

Inebriating meditations into fast forward commands on time

Illusionary mermaid swishes wanting fuck-lore shimmering scales

Hulking lycanthrope growl pornography posturing gym memberships

The tail fins and the fur molted like powdery raven feathers

Whizzing across the edge of the gorge pelting corneas, teeth, and ledges

Resting hesitant temperamental for a sun blade to slice the fortitude to sustain

Clear-cut fleshy atonement broken-mountain diatribe condemning the lot

The grain-alcohol bathtub of besotted clarity for the blob distraction

The something-to-do of it all

Tongue grazes over the gum-line feeling death lick the memories

Of the first time the whack came, the childhood psychology lessons of loss

Permanence and social awkwardness blockade mouth up here talking

To the vultures, scorpions, and dust-mites ferrying the recycle

Knowing by millimeter the inevitable unsustainable nature prevails 

Apathy

…

The disinclination of the counterpart

To allow a conversation to be a conversation

Like the tug of war rope dropped leaving a limp flag

Not even tied to a center point, no nucleus developed

Random scattering of electrons dissipating cloud

Self-destructive of relationship being a living entity formed

Between the active investment of a duality of parties

The gravity defunct in all this pensive hypothetical

Piano keys pounding melodious impossibility

Beating chords unstruck and dissonance muted

The apathy of no concern to emulate an argument

The molecule of protest to be concerned to froth above indifference

The caulking in an unsealed window, air meandering between

A feckless thermostat projecting numbers, intentions

Of what one may hope the environment may feel like

Knowing the regulation is a nest of wires disconnected

Pushing buttons on a robotic box, infertile change, barren womb

Vasectomy snip-snip in the night knowing and not knowing

The circulation of potential draining in an omnipresent dissipation

Careening into a bizarre notion of god, of plans, karmic situational rationalization

To justify the flake-out non-response, the unanswered texts or messages

Like communication is fertilizer and silence is the only method of weeding

Of starvation by apathetic sterility, the austere truncation

Incapable of mixed emotion as if there was ever a droplet

That this end mattered or had value, that a duality was even present for an inkling of drops

Congealing on the tip of a vein mapped to a heart, directions, turned-around

Vagabond type hobo network of thumbs-up interstate love songs

Praying on the kindness of a kernel of blind openness that this face was not blankness

The space between atoms in the universe, the flow place, but rather the landing

The threshold gathering of matter, of gravity’s conflux accreting in the emotional language

To challenge the logical into what empowers being 

Gambit Aspire

There is this game for hope

For that platter of consciousness available to place resonance

The spark of expectation that feeling of depending on another human being

To be present, to desire to be present, that kernel of volition

That wisp of existence teetering in the brink of the universe

Determining the fated ekes of trial and consequence

One to want, to expel energy to create artistic investment

To forge the metal of skin emulsified like living vinegar and oil

Drizzled in flecks of minutes dampening the humility of hope

To see the mixture as possible, as an application of momentum

The caked isolation softens, grit and flour crust creaming into roux

That a being is able to relax into the farther side of planetary exploration

The darkness bleeds into lightness so that a soul can take the streams

Of night into the audacity of day that glaring origin-story sort of naked

To go boldly walking into haberdasheries and bistros

Adorning scalps and whetting palettes upon the moistened bud of worlds

To lick the act of being present with austere bodacious honesty

To believe that every moment holds a constant key to open the immortal portal

To simultaneous swallow and be swallowed in a ubiquitous maw

One is also jawbone and jawed, savored and savoring

Tasting the sweating butter of hope that this swirling Meuniere

Darkening in that space approaching but never tangent to burnt

Swirling golden secret garden blooming that beings could believe together

In the act of choosing, to say let us be here, let us do, let us goad fate

The knife’s edge, blade, trigger, at helm offering the apocalypse

If left to the click switch of alternative decision, the bloody perilousness

The dauntless eyes hope-glazed and resolute to be in direct contact

Pinnacle of human, of being alive, of choosing

Follow up on Confederate Statues - 20151219

I have had, participated in, or heard quite a few discussions this week about the Confederate monument removal in New Orleans.  The subject of institutional racism and white privilege have come up in many.  This video does a good job of outlining some of the disproportionate access to governmental programs over the foundation of America to the present day based on race that mathematically affects the starting point and cascading access to capital wealth enjoyed by generations of American families on a macroeconomic basis. 

What does that have to do with statues?  The removal of Confederate statues as tax-funded symbols of what the Confederacy fought for: the continued ownership (capital wealth) of black people by upper-class white people was as a primary motivation economic.  The governmental sponsored catalysts to aggregate wealth to formulate the middle and upper-middle classes of America primarily involving access to ownership of real property and employment have been vastly disproportional in a cascading set of leg-ups emblemized in the term white privilege.  The empathy for America to utilize the potential of our population has and still requires systematic adjustments to access to capital, employment, education, housing, etc. that recognizes what white privilege is not only from a moral sense but a mathematical economic one. 

So these notions of post-racial America, of welfare-shame despite the statistics of more participation of white people on food stamps than any other race, of disproportional sentencing lengths and conviction rates for similar offenses in the criminal justice systems, of what it means to be the son of a son of a son who had a head start and one who did not, come down to empathy.  Yes we as a nation can make some legal measures to legislate discrimination based on race, but it is in individual empathy and love that we will truly evolve and reach the maximal potential as a global human society.  That empathy requires us to shed ignorance on how we got to the moment of now and transcend the limitations of words like white Christian or black Muslim, not to participate in the platitudes of Obama’s Democratic keynote convention speech in 2004 that this video references, but to discuss white privilege and systematic racism without the ‘My family never took a handout. We worked for everything we have.’ default reactionary rebuttals that fail to recognize the arch of American history that tints the very way one has been perceived in general society and the likelihood that one’s progenitors were or not afforded a similar advantage when seeking access to capital or capital producing mechanisms. 

It is not about guilt or a personal you can have my seat at the table now; it is about doing the math and obliterating ignorance so that we as a nation do not rally to candidates or policies that rabble fear in the now based on racial or religious lines that kindle the fires of the past that produced these economic and social hindrances to our nation’s potential.  We cannot build a wall from Mexico or ban Muslim immigration or tint the view of inner city crime or ignore who is being shot by police at greater rates and why; we must understand how we got to now.  We must understand institutional racism, fascism, xenophobia, what Sam Cooke Sang about in ‘A Change is Gonna Come’, what Bob Dylan sang about in Only A Pawn in Their Game,’ and we must choose how we go about our daily life, how we vote, and how we recognize the mathematics that affect our daily lives.  Rather than reaching for the low branch of rhetoric, we build systematic changes in how capital is accessed and distributed in this country based on empathy of what is best for the total population.  This requires the obliteration of ignorance of why keeping things like Confederate statues or flags up in a major American city hinder that empathy.  Maybe with that empathy we can evolve our healthcare, educational, and criminal justice systems to be more efficient and effective for all Americans.  

Tim Wise Video