A Fortnight of Years - 20150908

September eleventh approaching fourteen years like two weeks of media inundation

Recycled zombie dust storm metropolis desert fumigating the haughty scale

Of Tom Wolfe’s bonfire decadence and Ayn Rand’s innovation towering like an anti-Mecca

I did not know what Wahhabism was, Al Qaida, or the rancor of a paper tiger unfolding

Wet-eared to corporate America rescaling with Enron pissing puppy yellow squirt shit

On the newspapers in the Arthur Andersen kennel I was twenty-two breathing in the miasma

The epoch of airplanes whirling hijacked kamikaze in the Pearl Harbor of my generation

I still believed in Jesus

The rebarbative zeitgeist slung jingoism to the airwaves

Conspiracy theories and panicky church-house drunks fizzy-lifting drinks

For glass elevators and ceilings busted like an asbestos piñata of innards and lawn-mowerish ash

Rictus reactions to popcorn screen crawls munching a guess how many kernels in the bag death-count

Old Testament wrath and Muhammad mutton retribution to the Shepard

Stupporous like a prolonged epileptic fit into year fourteen still misunderstanding Pakistan 

I go back to a peristaltic moment in the guts of women and men peering busted windows

From high enough to know there will still be some thinking between the release of feet and the ground

The squeamish debate of burning alive and leaping suicide

I think of the faithful, the legally bound against self-murder

As if god was watching promising an eternity of burning if one elected to forgo

An interminable enfilade of minutes to scorch dermis engulfed in flame for the jet-fueled air launch into the New York sky         

What must it take for a human being to decide, “This is the better option.”

I imagine the true fear is not the ground, but the falling, the vulnerable knowing you are falling absent Parachute or remediation, but to close eyes or stare the concrete and open the maw to bite rock

The truly damned are the indecisive; those debating jump or burn and suffered both

Tumbling in charring bombardier frying in some god’s holy chrism

Faith like an anchor to paradise or perdition guided the acrobatics of the day    

20150906 Backbone

Some nights the bones of your back crawl out

Like a malcontent centipede of vertebrae tickling the Titanic

To evacuate the subway train of chugging subterranean

The beast is hungry for a vertical spine and all this supine positioning

Belly to the sun bulging in a U button to the sky god

Daring the bastard to “Just do it.  Take me you fucking sadist!”

Makes the standard bearer of the body a refugee

The bony shrapnel taken for years mushy clogged in disks

Is embarrassed that the eye shadow of a photograph could make the mind

Fret about appearances as if all this dancing was not an illusion

The straddle-step “Where do we go from here?”

The whetted tongue to dare ask for a drop of water in this lake of sand

The gall to scald this skin in the rays of a friend’s death to camouflage a busted heart

To conjure sympathy to swallow the eviction with want rather than resentment

A spine can only take so much before the jellyfish coagulants bubble out the blood stream

Seep through the dermis into the eyeballs and melt the façade into a pathetic lump

Writing and wanting or expecting or hoping or dwelling or recreating reality

To just get by, to tread water for a phantasmal shoreline in owl feathers and redwoods

Harboring a siren that is indifferent but willing to devour a carcass if given the opportunity

This spine will have none of that, slipping ship before landfall

The postmark and send signal and sonar without the chiropractic play-toy

No, there is no kindness there, only scary as was told and ignored

For such fallacies of hope and dreams and turtle foolishly stretching neck

The world slumbers and wakes sot in amnesia to forget the raw ache of love

Hear not the siren song for she was never singing, only the crash of rocks

Fishing for foolish invertebrates too slow to evolve in tidal pools

Swishing the origin of all life: the strive to connect, to be seen in form

To witness and be witnessed

Close your eyes my son for there is no one up or over there to see you

Only the echoes of blackened shadows    

20150904 The Liability is Void

I do not owe you anything

No measure of my love or affection should be predicated on debt

For if so the fissure will only be a disservice to both of us

I am whole

I am beautiful and know that the foundation of me is not defined by my mistakes

Or the pain I have endured or caused, but by the autonomy of my divine celebration

I am a gleaming intrepid beacon bellowing New Orleans

Every day from here on forward I will not sink into that pit

That lonely trauma is a bola wrapping my ankle like a devil’s tongue lasso anchor

I am magnanimous bombastic survivor emitting the luminescence of the now

Defined not by the tenacity to perpetuate, but the tenacity to be

To embrace this moment with possibility like a smiling gaze soaking the audacity to exist

I exist platypus-like swimming, breathing, and laying where it is home

In the nest of choice breathing, being in the breath

Loving as I so choose 

20150901 Buddy Pope

Release from Pope Francis the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy is on like priests to twelve year old boys.  The release for the Promotion of the New Evangelization is a marketing campaign straight out of George Carlin’s doorway of Planar Indulgence forgiveness in Kevin Smith’s Dogma.  The letter mentions pilgrimages to the Holy Door open in every Cathedral.  The Door of Mercy is open at the Jubilee Churches.  Buddy Christ is alive and well people.  Got to up the numbers; the gray hairs are dying off and without let’s say women who have sex, homosexuals, or divorcees, the men in dresses would have no one left to play with as they hand out the god cookies. 

The opportunity for great amnesty is here for those who still want back in the good pile before god smites like heathens like a mofo.  According to the pope Francis you can get your dead friends and relatives in on the act.  “In the great mystery of the Communion of Saints the merciful Face of the Father will free them of every remnant of fault and strongly embrace them and all you have to do pray them back into the good pile even if they never gave a fuck or didn’t want to be in it.  We can pray them back into the flock under these new doorway specials like a retroactive coupon.  Well isn’t that some shit; even if after I die my former Catholic stamped at baptism ass might get yanked back to the yoke Christ if some random person were to pray me back in if I happen to croak during this one-year only window Jubilee.

Now get this the headliner of the festival, the big stage Metallica-esque thunder guitar, Pope F says forgiveness can’t be denied for those who seek it but because some priests are assholes and refuse to forgive abortion peeps he has conceded discretion to the priests.  Wait what?  He has conceded discretion?  So wait so first he says it’s bullshit to not forgive, then pimps what amounts to some water cooler bulletin encouragement to quit the pompous judgmental shit they shouldn’t be doing anyway, and still tells these faith-overlords it is still in their discretion over ‘those’ who have procured (abortion) who are contrite. 

I would assume ‘those’ implies men too.  The media might use the word women, but fuck isn’t that the biggest bullshit as if a man is not always involved.  The great patriarchal scape goat of oh it was her choice and so in this mythical world of sin there is not another made up linked chain of culpability for reality.  It’s all crazy, but nah the biggest bullshit is Pope Argentina doesn’t say you have to forgive if you even want to call abortion a sin.  Abortion is not mentioned in the bible.  To call abortion murder is a matter of question and the question is not is the mass of developing cells a human, because we kill people all the time and those killings are not a ‘sin’.  So fuck if a priest knows how to sort that pile.  I don’t know the environmental, birth control, and homosexual commentary by Pope F have been better, but this is chock full of some marketing bullshit. 

All I know is if there are some banished angels making their way to New Jersey to walk through the forgiveness arc we are all fucked.  Alanis Morissette couldn’t save David Foster Wallace, but maybe she can still save the world.  Fingers crossed.

20150831 Punch

Sometimes what we need most is a punch to the face,

Firm, jarring, dental dislodge,

Proboscis violet flushed and hung like a red umbrella. 

The numb shock of where did the rocket fist generate

Launched out of the vestibule of errant fury

Hirsute knuckle aligned wrist to radius and ulna bashing

Twirling tornado of agendas as if blame had a god damn thing to do with it

That moment sinking in the black haze dissipation

That it was your own clenched ego holding on to the past

Huddled digits booming in across the bow

Throttling round the revolution of the planet a year later

Cataclysmically to release your fingers to let go

By breaking their grip upon the nutty confines of your cranium 

20150830 The Day After

I do not have joy.  There is a lightness that is missing, has been for years.  It is not a person; it is not anything it is sentences I can hardly formed like a mutism frocked in threads of stutter to attempt to form the breaching decay of explaining the smiles I do have to mask the ones I do not.  Sometimes I see the type of laughter or rejoicing or feral unadulterated joy rampaging off lips so that teeth look like rapturous predators wolverines of ecstasy capable of devouring the pittance I can muster in a quarter of a lick.  The quick way as an amuse bouche to breakfast tempting morsel of a happiness vacuumed crumb like in the nook of a grin manifested hourly for tourist quotidian the way a professional furry costume of Goofy does at the mouse palace in Florida.  I can’t smile, not the way I want to, just released because I need you.  Whoever you are if you even exist I need you.  My battery has been left uncharged for too many years and I need to plug into the current I was intended.  It makes it worse that I felt like I met you and all of them just bask in the silent boundaries of me numb to wanting any of them because why, why would I want to embrace anyone who will only eat me alive, morsel by morsel grinning in joyous rapture ear to ear. 

20150829 Katrina 10

I went to the K10 on the levee this morning for yoga with New Orleans.  I was not sure how I would feel leading into today I repressed, not wanting to open my eyes.  In the moment of the morn I stared into the sun a bit.  Here are some words I wrote before and after a practice with some fellow humans. 

Pre yoga

All pushed too much into a capsule of time as if life was not an extrapolation of the antimonies of doing and being fluxing in dance.  I remember the heat drowning in the cacophonies heart bellowing the boundaries reestablishing the wan of chaotic disbursement assurances that entropy ruled the wager.  The still-grind technology of man’s grip of toes against the floor that Orleans was New Babylon falling.  The tide of slavery cresting in broken levees mold-spore diaspora speckling shock waterlines undulating tumult.  The bodies stare boldly shim-sham glue shingles swirling like eye brows shaven off bustling wildly as if to stare into that face one has double-take.  The prompt of this is human wanting to be seen, but struggling for the foundational construct of assumption.  The trades of tears and laughter piercing packets of eggshell licked to index fingers reassembling above the water.  The fragments inundated, fissured, and drunk, cackling to be fearless.  This city is not fearless.  We cry daringly like turtles bolting green necks to be in the moment of now seeing the sky ready to eat us alive singing to the clouds anyway.   

Post yoga

Some days are the waning, this is a day of wax, burgeoning palpable from the caked tone of ache faith in the acceptance that no one is ever ready.  The sunrise stalks in a blind battalion lemon drop tongue film roll flipping suggestions for grain or sugar at the wake to stow in catacomb ant hills.  Preparation absent readiness, some days cycle not in mastering distance between a then and in now, but acceptance that there has, is, and always only a now. 

I lay my body to the work of the mat, gray neon flower unfolded across fresh cut New Orleans levee grass.  Bodies in a gird perpendicular lines, this ego’s chance askew 42 degrees facing the CBD across the Mississippi.  Coast Guard and tugs moving the water. Sun glint side angle into triangle humming like bees in breath.  The poetry of witness, ants scour trails pitons into skin bites and tickles sparkle in the darkness.  Eye is closed tasting the darkness on tongue, savoring the decade in stitches of mulch, wandering in river breeze.  I am on their turf, the space of dreamed hills flushed and reborn, timeless carried stillness in absolute motion, boundless dirty on dry levee. 

___

I wrote this in my notebook watching the water.  I read Marrero a collection of poems by Kataalyst Alcindor from beginning to end quietly soaking in the pace.  I met a woman named Sherry and a gentleman named Aziz.  Talked, real conversation, both about philosophy, being human, writing, art, a good start to a day of letting go, evolution.