Collision Insurance

There is a basis to being in a body

As a vehicle: operable or hindered

An understanding of impact

Smashing a hand or spine into contact

Alters the internal processing to become incapable

Of daily function

Breathing, heartbeat, movement

Two hundred and six bones, fibers, vessels, blood

The nature of an organized system of atoms

Posing as cells fluctuating exchange

Inside a common equation of science driven by spirit

In a swishing capsule of volition

I am

Being

Perceived self

Inside flesh

In the now cage rattled

Ball of nerves at the base of spine

Flaring unable to lift foot, torque abdomen

Without cluster bomb

In the now metacarpals shattered

Fist into stage

Titanium reconstruction

Cyborg kangaroo pouch vagabond

In the now marrow cancerous

Femur splintered cyst bust

Insurgent blood

How old do I get to be?

In the now Sudanese lost boy

Parents gunned, you are chief now

Shaking to cross a river never taught how to swim

Searching for this is safe

To breathe, to be, to add these days

What is your contribution, the mass of hours

The art, the science, the mathematics of participation? 

Asymptote

Our self-perception begins with a line of memory with birth as the vertex

A mathematical extension between some point in our past and now

The mind has no recollection of before or in likely sequence

The points leading forward in biological age from cell fertilization

The arrow time grants us reality as what is perceived

Directed with atomic transference and cellular replication

Towards inevitable decay

There is no cessation to the atomic transposition in our bones

Delineating the obvious that our atomic aggregation is a mirage

Individuality in the quantum sense does not exist

So it is our mind constructed of nuclei

Views a film strip through eyelids, skin, olfactory glands, buds, and sound waves

We amass an ammunition compound of pleasantries and disasters

Interpreted in youth through parental lens to cogitate: what is good; what is bad

The neophyte sees an arc sloping facing concave like a prone belly

To the y axis as we progress along the x   

In age the answers will come

We will find our person, our people, salvation

A time will intersect our line when the resources are abundant

To retire from labor’s struggle, meditate, or travel this planet properly

The now is stuffed with business

Lightning strikes of inspiration, Irish luck and Nigerian rhythm

Fires of Palestinian tumult and Russian pathos

The ego ponders the path of movement along the arc of the x and y

Adolescence into adulthood increases the magnitude of our undulation

We are up and down in increasing attempts at expansion tethered in balance

Nebula form and stars explode in such ways   

We apply barriers at how far our perception can unveil

Death appears an asymptote tangent to our curve at infinity

We perceive an upper and lower limit of ascent and descent

Growth at one moment if we awaken our motion is recognized as stillness

That good and bad our genetic instructions first salivated and dreaded

Are but the protons and electrons we are made in cosmic quark

Dancing as us completely still when perceived in full

We begin to see not our small life as a point traveling in a linear series of waves

But a line filled in solid, expansive, extending to the borders of our human reality

We find a place without argument

We are conscious

We are without need of this bad or good thing

We abandon the mind as a library of identity

In this another form of mathematics dissolves the barriers

Death disintegrates; birth implodes

The axes spin into a circle rotating both counter and clockwise

In constant now expanding beyond light, time, self, or space

Into that infinity we once perceived as impossible to touch

We let go of identity, want, and suffering

The entire graph of the universe is found, everyone or thing we have or could know  

Boundless, beginning-less, endless

In every atom there is balance

Breath is inhalation and exhalation

Palpitation is pulsed in presence and absence  

Fertilization is half gamete and half gamete uniting

Mirrored in the infinity of what we are

Reentering our perception by death detaching from the blinders from our human body

The mind keeps us in silhouettes

Human reality is the shadow; the image is beyond five senses

A mind calls god, a mind writes names

The mind must be abandoned to be in the now

Consciousness released is egoless love

When one is, being, let go of the mind: one is that asymptote

Bursting with all the energy and mass of the universe in balance

With everything physical reality is not 

Lightning on the Tongue

Yesterday was one of the most difficult days of my life. 

Sometimes life asks you to swallow a moment. 

For the saliva to palate the air one must remove the mouth. 

The air must pass in absent self or body or

Whatever it is one attempts to claim as pertinent

To being in the illusion that one must or needs in that moment

To control or alter the way this moment is going to taste. 

The key is to taste it, to taste if fully and completely in that instant without savor. 

Be in exactly what the other, the universe, the enormity of the swirl we co-participate is. 

Accept without search for the bud of justice or explanation on the tongue. 

Then one can swallow.

My darling the flavor of your anger with me was an old wine.

There are days of first birthday ice cream cake melting in the car,

Your mother and diapered-you peering out a Vicksburg Mississippi

Bed and breakfast door window at the winds of Hurricane Katrina

The scrounge-tongue bottom-E gas tank of Interstate 55

Contemplation of what if I have to walk you under an umbrella in this heat

To find home because every station is powerless and out of fuel.

The Dallas overtime and situated potty-training. 

The every other night monitor.

The living with in-law surveillance of the introvert.

The finger puppet show and talking the tiny plastic zoological menagerie.

The snowmen, the boast over crepes

Changing wet socks

In light the porch let in after the weight of snow downed dead branches

To fall on lines waiting there since Katrina to let go

Conversations can come like landmines

One does not know what has been planted in the road

Like a burst appendix squishing an attempt to bank poisons

The vantage of perceptions that fester and explode

In what a girl’s mouth says to a man

In what a man’s mouth says to a girl

Alcoholic causes a fight over an unclean kitchen to go to a bar

Spouse Abuse Center auditor accused of being verbally abusive

  

How and why stories of aged grape

Seeds before the young corn with big ears can taste that whisky

There is a journal I kept of our years I started when you were four

Maybe when you are twenty-five

At eleven, I acknowledge your anger

Your want of family in rural suburbia

Menstruation and your mother at a weekend work conference

I was not informed prior, par co-parenting

Of who’s attention you need and why

What you wish to comprehend and express

I think you are lashing out at me because you know how I will respond

Feel; Be a thunderstorm if you need; Strike bolts to my chest

I left you your BFF since four’s girl-scout cookies by your bedroom door

Because you refused to eat breakfast or lunch or exit

I can see the emulsion in the lexicon of your disparagement of my paternal diligence

Not ready for PG-13, but the judge Oma told you at five to envision as a pillow to hit

Because that arbiter made you spend time with your father

Mother says you are old enough now to choose at eleven

And you want to choose, maybe dinner or a movie over there

And not come here.  You want to be with your family.

I see your mother’s womb

Four months ago birthing your second younger brother

Only one in the house with a divergent last name

The crucible of pubescence emerging the chrysalis

Craving to return, to lick the syrup from the plate

Watch cartoons and train to be a mother as you help them grow

See your mother with a stroller and how much you had planned to do there

That you cannot do here.

I understand. I will let you be where you need to be.

In this season may my love be the lightning rod and the anchor

The tempest of putting away childish things     

Will shoot energy from your roots to the heavens

When they connect the plasma will burst fantastic

Let my love be what grounds you

As the sky begs you to sway

Untethered dirigible

May you know a father’s arms are always a safe place to land 

Two Birds, Two Bridges

No words on an hour car ride

The country porch to the city of potholes and levees

Daughter reads a fiction of Enemies and Endings: The Ever Afters

Father asks, “What is wrong;” I do not want to talk about it

He says, “I am here when you are ready. I love you.”

A wall in tires rolling a swamp sunset over Manchac  

The chartreuse sky begs to kiss the orange drop  

Night curves the silence obstructing the view

Dinner on Freret individual plate pizzas

Quattro formaggio for her meatball for him

Offering exchange tastes

The young altar server says, “Daddy it is Friday.”

Father says, “It is not real.”

A belief system and a world of known packed in the hours

She is away twenty six out of thirty nights

A theistic belief in a merciful god monitoring cattle mastication

Quiet in a bustling parlor, her book, his Kindle reading Eckhart Tolle

Departure concrete she struts straight into locked bedroom

Will not speak or share, but he loves her waiting for the crab to molt

Wakes to prepare her breakfast with blueberries from Chili

Hour wait, knocks, no answer, wait, noon, no exit

Up since seven she tells him at one p.m.

Fever and an army of white bodied tissue nasal discharge scatter the floor

Anger eyeballs hone crumpled a cannon prepared to fire words

Bottled and frustrated, exhausted

That to rearrange her life, spend time with her father

Represents a raven’s nest of fishing string to untie

Her family is there: two younger brothers, grandmother, friends, plans

Mother on some work weekend; Dad rearranged his time for her soccer schedule

The road and home games for a bird girl to fly

Drive Friday, Saturday, and Sunday once each cross the swamp

Sleepover birthday with girlfriends and Father says have this

My most precious time with you, I give you to be eleven

Play and sing and dance and practice your Beauty and the Beast lines

I will take you to the Saenger Theater, but you must in time

Decide what is real and not real

Take this rose of space if that is what you wish

I am a man who does not believe in saviors

There is an intractable nudity I walk

Though I may shield you

The glow emits in the starkness between two homes

I will give you Springsteen, Guthrie, Marley, Dylan

Sam Cooke, Amanda Palmer, Etta James, and John Lennon and this is the now

Yoga mat and salad station segmented manifestations

The bubbles of here in there of joy and faults

Lined fortunes and brave faces

Daughter says, “I want to leave, to go there, to not be here.”

Phone calls to former wives and current mothers

The mathematics of periods and planted seeds

Words can be like butcher blades scraping innards

Intestinal feces in production the rank of death attached to aging

Eleven and half bringing “Cars Two” and “Monster’s University” Pixar Dvds

For the ride like billboards from a home with Sprout Caillou, Thomas the Train

The juxtaposition of an inverse rebellion to be younger

As she stares in his eyes to say, “I am not ready.”

The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, X-Men, and the edge of the Batman

A war of wanting her to be older afraid like a drowning her fingers will slip

Into a hick abyss in a quagmire of lies told about him imparting

The mud thick, the candied strawberries

I do not want this.  Don’t you tell me how I feel.  You don’t know just how I feel.

Remembering sixth grade and first attractions

The introverted mechanism of wanting to hide; to avoid the creep

Daughter asking for a doll again after all had been jettisoned in the move last spring

Last weekend Sunday morning the Fly levee behind Audubon Zoo

Father’s yoga mat, daughter him and two books

A camera attempting to take a picture of her with the Mississippi River

A recollection and objection as if there were a soul thief in the lens

Father tries to talk then and she just wants to leave

He remembers impersonating a bunny with her at four in her closet

After the divorce a throbbing youngling wanting parents to not be separated

The shake words and holding her and being held

The universe in a daughter

For today I am child, For today I am a boy

One day I’ll grow up and feel the power in me

Empathy in emitting, to be, to let go

Enron, let it go; Acorn, let it go

Katrina, let it go; Dallas, let it go

In-law residency, let it go; Porch monster, let it go

Court dates, let it go, Divorce, let it go

Abortions, let it go, Custody, let it go

Painted walls, let it go, Repainting walls, let it go

Blue Morpho, let it go, Flowered back, let it go

Ran-red-light smash, let it go, Hotel job, let it go

Contraption heart, let it go

Daughter reduced to a dinner once a month, let it go

The paradox of existence is that

We are not our mind

These stores of was or will be do not exist, but on the platform of the now

Attachment against the current of volition is suffering

We hold and are held by the universe of what we are, which is love

Love is the balancing magic of usurping the illusion of time to be

To let it go to exist in an instantaneous pulse that to truly experience love

We must be our truest form absent want or fear; communicate and accept

Express but do not feign to posses

One is not bone or genetic proprietor or legal signature

Every face is the no face

Not insignificant but yes transmutable, a blurred reality beneath the non-realty

Nationality, religion, colloquial idiosyncratic mannerisms, self are mind scripts

Youth not yet strong to bear the bolt of lightning in the peel back

The alien father’s words attempting to explain to a daughter

How the birds speak to each other floating out on the Mississippi River

Between the barges and she says, “Dad there is only one.”

The acorn sits above the rocky patch behind her buttocks

The second pelican lifts wings and the two race four feet above the surface

A quarter mile apart zooming in sync towards the Greater New Orleans Bridges