Flying/falling/Failing/defying

Everyone wants to fly.
Not as many by way of cannon fire.
As a child I had the pleasure
of seeing an unemployed batman
take to the sky. Not as grim crime fighter
but half-clown satyr. Knowing
only too late the man who dawned
the cape was desperate to feed his family
after falling from grace like a half-known satire
about Icaris. How the spotlight tanned the skin
pulling at the edge of a proud smile – his mask slightly askew.
A pause. Perfect posture. Then a bow. More
a hero in that moment then the imagination
of countless children. Myself included.
Whoosh. Wham. That was our batman.

 

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Summer 2017

For the soul, it is not unlike putting on
an ill-fitting wet bathing suit.
Admittedly, avoiding nudity is important
but there has never been something more uncomfortable.
For a time it was fashionable to be glib
about politicians, but not for survival
not as a defacto principle of disbelief.
Now, opinions are forced like chubby thighs
against wet synthetics over-spilling awkwardly
from what should otherwise not be spectacle
or sport. Graceless, not unlike distasteful comments
made to shun and exclude. I just want to swim.
The throbbing undulation of water drowns this out
and relaxes the demand of gravity.
Yet, here we are in the desert with pool toys
and ill-fitting wet bathing suits expecting
something other than discomfort.

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End of Business

Addicted to checking things off,
the list was a hangman’s prerogative
at the whim of her hungry highlighting.
Sufficiently succinct to the point of practical
purposelessness I’m perpetually surprised not to find paradox
at the end. Turtles composed of “check thing off list”
repeating all the way down
like the tyrannical march of time she meant to save.
Told, if not taught, to do this she can’t find
the cure in the disease. End of business only means
another list. One for you. One for me.
For me never standing out makes
the highlighter seem like a head rub.
A guess that is what they mean
when they say “those two deserve each other”.

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Mukbang

It occurred in the middle of a long satisfied slurp
A moaning Lisa’s smile, bent to form a hole
where pan friend noddles dance like charmed snakes.
Enigmatic – underminingly coy – enough to know
that these aren’t fakes and that the reduced sodium
soy isn’t magnetic – but staining. Pollock in motion
peeling back shrink wrap while adolescents across the ocean
come of age under harsh florescence. Eyes straining
but pragmatic, try to digest where it all goes.

Nobody asks Marcel. But he knows.

On the subject, the Sublime is the awe of
being confronted with the mundanely normal
becoming grotesquely exaggerated. She bends
like Dali’s mustache for the countless thumbs
of the unknown connected. And as time
extends its red march, the maw slows,
and it occurs at the end of a long satisfied burp.

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#,#,#

Some hear the pound, pound, pounding
of their heart confirming their life.
Such metaphors sting the rickety
piping of a noble 17th century colonial
trying to push against a nighttime
decline. The uneven hobble
of expanding warmth frightening children
in the cacophonous choir of inflexible
wood frame structure straining the wind.
Howl. Whistle. Crack. These words
have no place in our understanding of the heart.
Instead these blunt aggressions –
thump, beat, and pound. That is what meat does,
isn’t it? So name it this way. But when the twilight
of the age of meat dawns, don’t come to this haunted
colonial and cry tragedy against the gentle tyranny
of a ceaseless whirring fan. Against its coldness.
Against its calculations.

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Meditations on the Age

Caught longing for a more complex time
I was quickly reminded such moods were anathema.
Worthy of prescription.
Punished by conscription
Into a war of pretending to be something easily defined.
What happened to renaissance men
battling until exhaustion just to find
one person to provide succor against
the tide of mediocrity, and in that initial rivalry
finally reclining in the tender grasp of friendship.
In this age, we are the informed
but ultimately uninspiring
participants in labeling and categorizing endless
mundanity. It is not that bad. But that is perhaps the worse part.
In all the cold barren scarred tundra faces
that slump there is something clean.
Something sterile and safe.
Something desirable about a time whose only virtue
is how nice it all is. The word every person lands on
when they can’t say anything else.
It somehow hangs on the vaguest definition of compliment
but in a way that only serves to undermine
the complete lack of qualities in our frozen landscape.
A nice day for a nice people. A nice age.

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Mistaken Identities

Rewind to find
a start to which we affix
this place – where we are who.
Hope it sticks.

The body is only part of us
if we love or hate it.
Otherwise no – it cannot be our who.
Hope we can sate it.

The me that is free
is too good to not be true.
But the plant that grows has roots.
Hope its you.

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By Any Other Name, Take Me

I was told,
growing out if not up,
that you can’t make your own nickname.
But in madness reborn
who hasn’t?
What we play is life.

There cannot be two
of you
In the actors guild.
Of course you can
then
but otherwise no
it won’t go.
So I strut, occasionally,
upon the stage
to legitimize my name.

Build.
Tower mine. Tower mind,
up if not out,
brick upon brick
word upon word.
And in those dreamy clouds
what we play is life.

 

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Personifications

Birds sing, brooks babble, and trees sway
while the ax chops.
Hunks of tree flesh dance in a slight wind
and stick to the dewy bark
of a thing called man.

Sticky sweet blood runs.

Somewhere a blinking monitor
remembers the key strokes
regarding Marxists capitol
and Foucaultian power.
These heavens bear down on the man.
A sun too bright, a salvation too far removed.

A double helix composed of turned pages.

The forest howls at the loss of a friend,
a child, a mother, a brother, a life extinguished.
Here in the pulsing womb of creation
all falls silent when the slight wind dies.
The clockwork devil, unlike fire and trembling earth,
pauses to adore work and creation
before eloping with the corpse.

Imagine, now the future.

The thing called man and wife adoring
their things called son and daughter,
who like hurricanes blow aimlessly around
the cabin the thing called man built for them.
Unlike fire and trembling earth,
they pause to adore work and creation.
Not unlike bird, or brook, or tree
but for the ax hanging over the fire place.

 

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Save the Phenomena

 

The child creates stories in the sky.
Wonderment burning like the endless
see of juggernauts.

Paper lanterns.

Folded, like endless cranes and twinkling
in the exact way that chimes sound.
The incomprehensibly tiny
made insignificant
by the perspective of an ant
on a blue marble swirlie.

And inside the black hole
compresses this infinite moment
into a dense core that even
memories can’t escape.
The fabric of her eyes bends me
even now.

Strings. Not unlike music.

My paper lantern heart vibrates
when she calls, like Mars
in retrograde. As if someone
out there is tracing
with a finger only to find
the rest of reality falling behind.

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