1/3 Fewer H's in the word Shhhh

"Love is on top, fucking pain"
- Frederick Seidel

I hate packing a suitcase.  There it sits, it’s great zippered maw open, awaiting my wrinkled trash.  Tomorrow is the day.  One more X on the calendar.  Did you know this Monday was National Best Friend's Day?

Me neither.  But apparently it was.  My question is, what about people whose best friends live in other countries, is there an International Best Friend's Day, or can you celebrate that on the same day as the other?  

Or do you have to pick a best friend in the Nation you're in at the time?  

Or does this holiday mean that we have to be best friends with our country for a whole day?

 "Hey 'Mur'ca, how 'bout I buy you a beer?"

RBI1991Apollo: My National Best Friend is Pakistan

Dmmsqdmn3.1: Shhhhh……... 

Dmmsqdmn3.1: You don’t just blurt something like that out. 

Dmmsqdmn3.1: In front of little girls. 

RBI1991Apollo: Girls?

Dmmsqdmn3.1: Girls or women.

RBI1991Apollo: Little Women? Francis Hodgson Burnett?

Dmmsqdmn3.1: I literally do not care Larry.  

This reservoir has been running on empty for decades.

DMM is out of damns. He hasn't had one damn to give since Bush was reelected.  Or elected for the first time, depending on who you ask. How you ask it.

·         “How would you ask it?”  Someone in the crowd yells without looking up from his phone.

I’m glad you asked.
First, put down you phone.  And second read a book.

I read a book.

Ok a book review.

But it described an author's prose as "neo-Mephistophelian singsong"

Isn’t that nice?

·         “You’re stalling.”  No one is laughing and the clock is ticking.  The suitcase awaits.  You are trying to find a successfully hipster method of measuring and tracking time.

            Remember when you were moving and you read that the neighborhood was “decidedly hipster” and neither of us knew what that meant but we liked the sound of it?  Well, I liked the sound of it.  Turns out it was me.  I was hipster.  I was hipster before there were hipsters.

God is unemployed and, even after the end of the recession, probably, at this point, still unemployable, not getting up off the couch next to a couple two cans of Dr. Pepper.

·         “But God is love,” he says in his best Ben Stein.

Fuck it.  Love is a battlefield.  Fuck it.  John Mayer was right.  So was Gord.  Love is a curse, love is a first, love is as bad as or worse…

But it’s because our hearts are made of fire.

Forget the signs on the wall, forget the prayers.

Close your mouth, stop the rain.  I am the mountain. 

·         You are the radio song. 

Our poor decisions are the road.  Our pasts are burning tires. 

This moment is a city. 

No, this moment is a rodeo.  And now that moment is a rodeo replay.  Not quite eight seconds.

My sadness is the color of the moon.  Your joy is the sun.  I put my sadness on an island, and it’s citizens started emigrating to the city.  Now I am homeless and sleeping on the streets.  I don’t know what is best represented by the streets. 

Who can be sure of anything?  Put down your phone.

Condoms in the outfield.

Condoms in the dugout.

How frangible, youth, on the eve of graduation.  Jump those fences.  Pack your bags.

"The darkness doesn’t descend, and then it descends so quickly it seems to seize you in burly arms. 

I’ve been waiting all night to have this dance. 

Stay, it says. Haven’t touched your drink."
-D.A. Powell

Adz, Blur and Om

"Things are not always what they seem, nor are they otherwise."

-Well-known Zen Adage

The heat is palpable. You can see it throbbing the air, waves of distortion rising up in tandem on the horizon, the edge of every vista like bubbles of boiling batter, are we in an oven? 

Walking inside, into the slough of AC. Soothe is the word. It wetlicks my skin, like a balm I guess. 

What is a balm?

A weird old word.

Where does that leave us then? Finger wading stacks upon stacks in the office. An avalanche of rejection.  A glare on the wallclock’s number 3.  Maybe it doesn’t say three…  I am thinking about your cheek.  A kiss on that tender blush. Like an apple.  The fleshy lines of your arms…

Where does that leave us then?  Not where but when.  A long time from when we started. 

I did not walk here all the way from the airport to listen to myself talking.
I came here to watch you.
I came here to watch you all.
To see you listening.
Listening to me talk.
Talk without thinking…

Parking lot snowbank remnants beneath the springtime stars, “it's open mic night muthafuckas!”

Remember? 
 

No, you weren’t there.  Maybe even I wasn’t there.  My head was elsewhere. Yes certainly.  Was I walking home? Dusty boys playing by the side of the road. I check online. Weather in GoogleMaps is always fixed. Is that old home still there?  Where was it exactly?  Streetview.  I was leaving work. What was that job?  Did I drive or take the train?  A plane, a boat? 

I seem to recall
air fanned by a flock of hands,
the cats flanks flecked with burrs,
veiled windows, lit by sunset, or streetlights…
the smell of wood floors and coffee grounds,
the smell of lost causes, the taste of boredom
your Jacobean mouth…

Remember? 

Am I my own vision?  Yes most certainly, but how am I stretched beyond it? 

And what is it beyond my own vision?  Heat, for sure, the lines all rubbing together but beyond that, what name this stage, this set, a wind from other oceans we hadn’t known, the codenames of lost continents. 

What is this place called?  Not where but when.  The camera clicks, flash a light.  What do I see?  When did we enter?  Let's give it a name to say when it starts.  How should we stay? The points aren’t fixed.  

Like a starlit lake in the midst of San Francisco.  Midst or mist?  
The moon was late tonight.
Tonight I touched the dry warm skin 
of the building
because the night is the cure
the cure is the beginning

 Let me through.

The streetlight glare on the digitalclock number 3.  

Everywhere blurry hot and halogen.

My ideas no longer ideas
just two fine French doors you live inside
like I live inside this promise
like we live inside dreams
the best dreams where you did not yet exist
Yet not where but when
when inside I knew 
knew you in the universe
the universe would create you eventually
and the universe would continue to burn,
A dream fire fueled by a heart’s promise.


Or youth.

I was the lithe flower then and now I am the fat fruit. I am ready for a fall.  I am ready to fall apart.  I am ready for the seed somewhere within me to spring.