Panic (Planact)

 Panic for breakfast.  Great gangs of panic parading right around the corner. Panic the paragon of forward warnings. That muledeer panic bolts into the road. Panic at a distance, panic at arm's length.  Panic at the lack of pastels in my palette.  Cold panic flapping for the sake of critical reverberation.  Panic for the playful. It could kill you, panic.

Waiting for the double-play at the cobwebbed end of the bench. Observing, at my privileged remove, the flow and counterflow of animal chemistry, breathed youthfully as a roar in the dark park. Smells of sweat and leather. It's not that I don't believe in what Eliot called the inadequacy of the liturgy (language), it's that I don't believe in the adequacy of my vocabulary." Undisciplined squads of emotion lounge and unionize while I say the same five or six things every day by rote, slipping into a black blanket of unarticulated grammatical abrogation.

Panic! And no, not the Ocutbrian powdered horror variety neither. No siree. Panic and it's vast sums of hoarded cash. Ready panic the YA fiction paperback about basketball, seaside hookups, and levitation. Newly optioned.  The parliament of panic and its purgatory of prickled prose.

With age comes weariness, and it's twin dimpled sibling obligation. Oblivion beckons like a fruit pie.  I offered to go elsewhere. Mexico, Greece, the in-laws?
With age, delight us in the illusory spectacle of memory, the artist tracing smoke in the wind. There's wisdom written in that wind, but I wave it away.
Perhaps we are right to dismiss the wisdom of age, for is it not but a pretense? Hard-earned wisdom tells me to dismiss that which once had the ability to delight me, and to dismiss my once-easily delighted self as well. The parched memoirs of Chateaubriand and his palavars with history. Was he meant to be there or was it happenstance and luck?  The chevron streams: the sea swallowed another mile of coastline this century.  I would nap, but there's so much to do.

Why panic? and wither though?  Woah Panic, wooah now girl. Unleash the lethal unknown, you never can tell, panic. Panic, uncaring and noble, precise and on  point. On the phone with a practiced expression of hauteur and repugnance. Panic, ye foolish spectacle. A sheath in the stockings, a bird on the wire.  I don't want panic's snadow anymore. Panic's power is a party I shan't attend.

Caramel in the cooking, I can still delight in slight sweet deviations from the recipe. Can you?  Of course you can. Do you ever consider what people thought about great work before there was a consensus that it was? His eyes upturned, he presented themselves for inspection. That's younger man's shirt, George. Instructions garbled.
Do you ever feel like the bulk of your twenties are spent trying to unconsciously incorporate within your own being the level of day-to-day risk that civilized society deems acceptable? He said "man I don't care. The universe is not smiling at you.  Embrace the insouciant indifference and you'll be better off." He took a salacious bite of bagel then and looked pleased with himself, his smile serene.

The cylinders and conduits of panic in extremis, inappentant, indisposed. Beware the hallmarks of existential panic within your own household, y'all. Pink noxious penetrating tendrils of poisonous panic. Panic containing your heart's tendermost song. Let quickening panic know, I'll be going now. Panic's betrayal of the dream.  Panic: admit one (not valid for special events). Panic such a nice group of people.

In a darkened place we yearn, we grasp for the light, this is not new, or news, and yet and yet those who find the light often fail to leave it shining for others to follow. Like maritime direction, look up not down, for the path below may change minute by minute. Heed my warnings.  I forewarn and foretell and forestall and forgive. Be calm and know. The body, the hands, the faults, are deserving of patience under heaven. Forgive the leaver and the left, forgiven for get thee a lone, find love and give it all away. You're welcome.  Shh.

hngr xmtr s7

Boy Oqay that's what I thought boy oh boy was that a mistake. But how I was I to know? How was any of us? And lest we not rock down the strange metaphysics of worry and doubt I'll detour shall I a brief digression to explain further: It was June, yes;m, the week after mother passed and I was staring into a veined-stone ashtray when the cobbled ground suddenly vaulted up as if on a fulcrm into the azure sky and I found myself staring through throbbing blinkered eyelids at the navy blue scrubs stretched taut against the robust outer thigh of an EMT named Kimberly asking rather measuredly if I was alright and if I could hear her. Yes.  Yes, I suppose so. They offered to take me to the hospital but I demurred, thing is, I had a date with a woman and I was excited to secure her into the cathartic acquaintaince of Chekov's Cognac.  Fate fashions it's own. That date was cancelled, postponéd, reschedulmont. Here we are in April, Here we are in June, Here we are July 13 gone all too soon. "So you fainted?" CJ texted, southern belle emoji. I guess you could call it that says I, attiring myself rightly in genuine shirt with collar to draw attention away from my bloated lower chin. "And then?" we're waiting from happy gilmore emoji And then whose thighs these is I think I know. "Did you know her?" No. No tie neither nor do I don the Vans, I brandish the bowlers shoes because the smell the least bad and dig the nice pants out from the zanzibarian backwater recesses of my closet.  Seventeen months, gosh. Not prepared but whisked. The lights off upon arrival. Do I have the right date and time? Wherefore art thine embers in the engine of endurance? After an hour and she ain't shown I texted CJ I dunno asked to stop by since by my calculation his apartment was close-ish. "Sure" BeourGuestLumiere.gif Cut to purusal of his record collection, lots of DMB and REM, he said "I gotta say, I'm sorry about your mom." "Yeah." Strange. By being in space there with him I realized then that that stick-up-your-ass way about him-  that way I didn't like, in person -- was mostly projection, and had in fact entirely gone away while our relationship had gone virtual. He broke out the booze and I protested meekly that I wasn't drinking and a minute later his twelve-pack was gone and a minute after that I was suddenly on the floor again, CJ there with that salubrious tube and a worried look on his face, Zepelin rocking on the hi-fi. A bruise on my head this time. A quick query online yielded to the dubious bent of bad blood pressure so burdened with this suspicion I fried, the following morn a packet of porkchops for breakfast. The daylight outside greasy on the trees, I chewed and sent some texts and thought of my parents, so tempermentally opposed, hurtling like a stop-motion feather, towards a deep pock of ambivalence, me. Oh boy, I wondered, remembering meals with forced conversation. The more I wondered the quieter the phone became. Strange, I wondered when I'd decided to forgive them both, I sat there alone, smoking. Boy Oqay that's what I thought, oh boy but was  it any a mistake? How I was I to know? How is any of us?