March On – 3/3/15

Too much for this season active in the wind to relocate

Again tenth shift in a dozen years, cardboard boxes and u-haul trucks

Gasoline and trash bags

Attempts at self-love beautiful, poignant oxygen

Yoga, performance poetry, dodgeball

Running, moving making new comrades in an old city

Online connections and meditations

Attempting to be in the self

Love sits in the essence of being wanting to be exchanged

For maybe a breath at the surface for turtle, needed 

Summer only made me want to inhale longer

Universe is testing my lungs

Holes iced over, longitude befuddling

Coordinates to the sun again

Melt this into the stream of dare to pray

Audacious to reverberate God in vessel

Moving ache in these surroundings

Has taken all to offer calling 

Into the unknown, this wood and stone

Flesh and marrow patient holding time like a knife

Cut these ropes and not veins

Time trickling a vessel   

The not wanting, accepting volition of unchosen and chosen

Humans need to be held, be loved, vulnerability occasionally rewarded

For one not to wither hopeless, cynical, desperate, distorted

From capability into carnage

The less than single hand tally is bloody shrapnel declination

Cast as if the only worthiness inserted comes from an isolated self

So in altering that becomes a Himalayan ledge ice step crevasse

Replenishment placement of what once, maybe twice

Traumatized cruelty and irony moving however small the increase in odds doing so

For a poet to go forty years and this is all the love he can drink…

Skittish masochist ready to depart at any instant

No negotiation, no discussion, hell crushed tenacity commensurate with the coverup to the ambush

Self sufficient disposable

So when it occurs like it has in some form in the few subsequent instances

Drawn to evaluate who one is, produces and what this universe is attempting to communicate 

20150302

There is a feeling of becoming obligated, of being expected to be there for another person, maybe it is the elimination of conceptual freedom of disappointment becoming attached like a dog’s set of eyes 

always off at some distance tagging along around street corners or in the next aisle of the library squatting there, watching.  

Sometimes the idea of forging a connection with another human can feel like that to me, I would rather sever that gaze as if the idea that the other needs something that I will never be able or really want to be erodes rather than enhances the being I am meant to or desire to become.  

Some nights I fear that another may bring expectations of who I can never be, to hear a compliment from her lips becomes like an anchor.  As if to say what you feel that I am, I do not know if I am or could be that so why don’t you just go on your way to find someone else.

I think I need to spend time with this page, typing some book or poem rooted in head.  I think I need to not see you looking at me when I wake up in the morning.  I want that nudity of absence to get up when I need to or desire without confrontation of how the sounds or appearance of my physical shell interact with an observer.  I do not want that canine in the room, in the corner representing my concern that I have to be this additive version adapted to the alone that I have known most.  

20150226, a love letter

I want to indulge in offering you words as if explaining aspects of what occurred could somehow breach this layer of worry that beyond is nothing.  That this sphere I am interacting with from the inner to the external tapping like telescopic highways into the souls of the other beings I share my eternal in this temporal reality with is nothing.  That I could feel you the way I did and feel like my god the tidal wave and your reaction leading up to your departure led me to believe in the magic that this was not all in my head that a being I felt this far might actually reciprocate and offer the grail of vulnerability I have only truly imagined to materialize like this did not have to be a fleece chase. 

I thought how do things ever work out with anyone, how does the term equal investment come to pass, that the grand signaled plague to run has been aspirated into the breathing space so that continuing is toxic to that all important gameswomanship of being in need of no one.

I admit my faults and garbage bags of tumult stored in the idea that I am trying to shed in this conundrum that there is only so much even an enlightened man can grow out of alone.  I need love.  I need a body to devour me so that some of the scars don’t grow back.  I need a new body that tastes common essence piloted in eternal self.  Maybe we were lovers before and will be again, but in this here and this now I am dying for you to awaken, that these connections are not ant hills randomly packaged but meant to be startling and daring and ripping open like a seed shattering the change from orb speck into red wood.  Somewhere in the dark forest I am watching for a sprout.  Out there in that infinite possibility of iterated universe there is a sapling breaching the mirth flourishing in the realization of what love and hope and faith, and honest humanity nourish in the unknown of divine connections. 

I pray the way a man with the limited perspective of the human form offers to your flawed body that maybe you will choose the sunlight.  You will choose to develop a trunk from this tender stitched on the fabric of your eternal canvas undulating like atomic ballet imprinting a commandment to interconnect with the all.  This fire is pulsing in me and I offer you to make me explode. 

Reflex in foolishness storybook nonsense of love and veils, we can only choose.  

Packing for Orleans 20150223

Letting go, taking hand to pictures, papers, and binder

Retrieving documents out of brown cardboard moving boxes

In their fifth subsequent location since the divorce

Six years and relocated into full size black garbage can bag

Read through, perused, glanced in some cases upon extrication

But if it is not part of my daily life I do not want its physical in my presence

The binder with the details of the construction of the porch house

The window advertisement from the magazine from a decade before

Dreams in paper evidential matter to retry this case in my head

To prove it to who; our older daughter, my future person, people 

Wrote the novel wanted the tower of tales to say

Look, look townsfolk I was right, I was telling the truth

Here is the liar’s churn see I was loved once and betrayed,

Betrayed people don’t you get that carrying around my pillory

Like some Catholic taint of value through suffering equating to worthiness

Fuck that; get in the trash bag

It is in the cans now; to the street, to the landfill

The act of the anchor even in a box in a closet taped up as worthless memories

There is malignancy that did not equate to zero; the knowing I could return

To rewash in the substantiation if need be as if this time is still in the now

Sever and truncate the pages of years

Found the tooth accident, the legal docs from court cases

The birthday and anniversary cards and notes, every family picture from my grandparents

With her in it or I ever took; in the bag, don’t want one, a few for our daughter

In a separate book, for her in her room, that’s it, rest garbage, dead, no savor, no linger

Half a dozen years is enough as an option, these things must depart for the space of in

I don’t want to say to myself why are you holding this; this binder of “Our Story”

There are no collective possessive pronouns that include said people

The passive aggression, the lies, the claim of what true forgiveness is to bleed into the self

To feel there is no need to explain; there is no need to pretend the court case is present

That each day the red queen court convenes and that worthiness was ever in question

Letting go, taking hand to pictures, papers and binder; full size black garbage can to the curb

I Can Admit Now

There has been a phase in the last few years where I blocked out

The possibility that you ever loved me

To compute how you could do what you did to a man you ever loved

Seemed impossible

How could you be that selfish, that cruel, that unrelenting

I have never seen you flinch in six years

I could not comprehend how I could completely offer my being

Only to use my consciousness as fuel to disguise your self hatred

I see you in your life and I realize your flaws are what they are

Monstrous to me, compensated in a saccharine kindness to the remainder

As you wish

I have struggled so with believing that love could ever be real

For if all those moments of attempting intimacy with you

Could lead to your actions to defile and defame, how could I ever expect better

And yet now, I think I do

I see what your successors have done in response to me

I accept my inability to let go of wanting to prove to our daughter’s future self

The town’s people in some extent of what you did, of who you are

Of what I am not guilty like a flag of innocence

I need not validation in the story, in the writing, in the documentation

I need but shed these evidential purses, the papers, the photographs

The representations of what was as if that is all I will ever achieve

As some sad pinnacle

I am beyond that now built with sticky pained ink illustrated in a beauty

Only darkness knows the contrast to what a white bread life leaves to blandness

I am so much invigorated and growing now outside of such myopic petri dishes

I am embracing fear as a lover’s call, to bed with this city of ruins making connection

In the isolation the loneliness no longer bears my pursuit of vengeance

And like Monte Cristo I ascend past into the eyes of waging a war with God through the self

I forgive me for not knowing what to do, but now I know how to go to my people

As best I can block to block and breathe the deep breath 

A Mover’s Prayer

God / universe / whatever we are

Please flow through me

Help me find where I can be my most authentic self

Prospering happiness in the whole

Interconnected and personal through an intimacy

I have long sought

In turn may it be my release to shed the urge to hold on to validations

To explanations to others, to self, to dress in worthiness

Be reborn into nudity in confronting fear with a divine love

Shared in knowing presence so that I may join

What I have too long blocked in the timidity of avoiding the now

For the dubious comfort of egoic righteousness in quest of feckless justice

The stories, the words, the explanations fall to fallow soil

The muscles of awareness till the field and so in it is the root of the self into the one

Where all things grow

20150220

I feel like I left a part of me spiritually in your compact touch-up mirror.  In a streak on the glass that keeps looking at you in pull-out-a-handbag way I wish I could retrieve back into my consciousness to sever from viewing whoever you are looking at me in that self-reflective space and return into the sky blue.  I know logically I am looking into myself; I see an image distorted by waves of time in the maze in my head.  It makes me ponder spiritual elements, my internal instruments, of what I experienced with you in our brief time together than has left me changed.

I looked at you hard in those weeks.  The effort to do so was there, but the magnitude of what naturally shined out of you fissured some aspect of me like debris in a hurricane.  There is that part of me smeared like a scratched etch that has seen you in every woman I have met since, quotidian parade floats, and moments that speak to me as the universe arches its back.  I debate whether I see what I want to see, rewording nothingness into something-ness.

I am guided more by the cycles of the moon, the confluence of time’s dance than logic to try to be in the now.  That is how I make most of my daily decisions to see what the universe makes available and flow with the current rather than swim upstream.  

I am in a place of love or fear.  Fear is like an idle car in a driveway flooring the gas pedal in park.  Love is putting our self in drive.  It is near impossible for me to visualize movement in any dimension of that idea of whatever was created between us

In my inner quiet I know I am a romantic, I have dreamed in my life that if I were to be taking my last series of breaths reviewing my regrets and treasures nothing would mean or cost me more in its absence than experiencing true intimacy through the layers of love that made me feel the universe melding with what life really is.  Life has taught me love raw.  Some people get passive placid surface fit in the box, maybe in cohabitation, matrimony, predictability, most not.