Vulgata ab Aeterno

 

On the first part of the journey
I was looking at all the life
There were plants and birds and rocks and things
-America

‘I don’t have enough thoughts to fill five hundred years.’
-Katherine Rundell

"How cordial is the mystery!

The hospitable pall

A "this way" beckons spaciously –

A Miracle for all!"

- Emily Dickinson

It's been windy but here I am.  You catch me amidst my dissolution.  It's a process. Mind you, I still go bravely about my business, snatching at the familiar clutches of tedium. Traffic on the freeway, bills to pay, feeding the cat's leftovers to the birds. You know, finitude?  Tomorrow is Tuesday.  There's a mist susurranting all over the frosty ground and the dying earth seems so empty and still beneath the ringing stars as it spins lumbrously toward the dawn. One can feel a kind of rebirth on a global scale, signaled by the small voices of birds filling the silences with song.

I've been falling all apart lately and struggling to articulate the nuances as to why. Life, ever so-littered by obscure desires and ugly responsibilities has become frustratingly more jumbled, with all my elusive desires fraying. A knot of velvet, dragged behind a '99 Toyota Sienna.  An old football bobbing at low tide.  My therapist tells me that I'm so afraid of being wrong that I don't take enough leaps. She also says that I should take more naps. What to do with this dichotomy? 

While I finish the dishes my girlfriend wakes and bids me, not 'good morning' but to sweep the floor.  I can get so hung-up on this notion of myself as an elusive and gruesomely acidic sophisticate that it becomes an identity carved into stone and then she comes along and lifts that stone to the shelf, light as a paperweight. Everything in it's place.  Here I am. A rumple in her pillow to be fluffed and straightened.  One wonders what is her ultimate concern, what really drives her? What makes her think & act as she does? What's most deep and important to her?  She has coffee and all is put together again. Put to work. God bless her. She refuses to be deppressed.

She's not wrong.  It's work that's good for us, I've learned.  As the saying goes, "idle brain's a devil's playground."  And it is in the rote busy-ness of commonplace tasks that the stuff of life is fuelled to drive.  Embosom the familiar and find in it a source of inspiration and wonder.  Embrace the small, the concrete, and the quotidian and allow these to become vessels for the infinite.  You find out how deep the rabbit hole goes.  Pay attention to little habituations long enough and their invisible fissures begin to appear everywhere in the work as well as work's caesuras. Fractures and families of fractures going all the way down.

I remember an occassion in my quondam youth.  I was an introverted kid working the corners at my parent's party. The house full of manqué unremarkable people, (younger then than I am now) my parent's friends. Not good at much but good buddies for drinking and cavorting. Honkey Tonk Women may have been playing. How they treasured the sweep of those psalmic cadences.  I remember being bemused by their bird-lime pleasures while I stoop behind the vitrine or the swag curtains. Me in my vile yellow sweatpants and batman slippers, eavesdropping into all sorts of their fancy-schmancy-sounding disquisitions and letting my imagination bridge the gap between their increasingly drunken confidences and some mysterious Platonic ideal of worldly sophistication. "He told me his mom lived to be ninety-seven.  And she told him at the end 'I still have so many questions and no one to anwer them.'"
or 
"He's a pervert."
"Well, he's old an old pervert. At least he wasn't a pervert when he was younger."
"Some drugged by Coumadin, some drugged by lust."
"All old man are pedos, if you think about it... if they live long enough."

Anyway it was in this setting when I had my revelation.  Looking down on primordial earth and sun's refulgent rays of light and radiation cause random fluctuations that become chemical reaction: a blossoming cycle life emerges, rising in terraforming waves of ever-increasing complexity as older less efficient emergences submerge into decay. It is an arresting renewal that never rests, characters in continuous evolution. Voraciously, omnidirectionally, journeying like blind roots through the farctate fractures and folds of time, a living system of motion that culminates in the stratums of human culture in an ever-recycling process of transcending itself, the tidal flush of empires wash across the globe in retreats and mounting swells.

At work I was leading the class through their "Warren R." poetry workshops.  The wind was rattling the windowpanes.  'Warren R.' poems are anonymous eponymous topical poems. Everyone choses a broad controversy; (Environment, Gen Alpha, Relationship) and writes a poem about its undoing or destruction.  That's day one.  On day two small groups quickly pick apart the results in 10 minute speed-rounds. Poems are reassigned and re-written for day three.  What results are Warren R.: Environment, Warren R.: Relationship.  Say it out loud.  Anyway, we were talking about logical assuptions and the need for assertions that can't lose traction.   In response to the ideals of mathematics, one student said "think of the biggest number you can think of, and I can add one and make it bigger." 

I suddenly felt a stinging longing for the quiescent scent of rubiaceae.  "If Infinity is a number then perhaps Eternity is a condition." I posited aloud. They debated this for a bit.  If every thing is transient is anything? "Zeno’s paradoxes show that space can be divided up into infinitesimally smaller and smaller segments, so motion is, in a sense, impossible."
"That's why Aristotle banned infinity from Greek thought."

I let them go and move on to the next group.  They were googling the difference between zaftig and saftig.  One means plump and the other means juicy. I'm glad I got up today. Glad I didn't miss the bus.  You learn something new every day.

D'Mask'd Substance[s] of Dreams [and a Date]

 

"Red and a little more red"

-Richard Siken

Red letters
red_lines

It's this dream.  There's the blanket of black text on a white screen.  Some of the words change to become red. Or perhaps all the words have been red all along and it is as if only now can I see it, their true colors bleeding through. I had this dream today, perhaps not for the first time, but if I've dreamt it before I cannot remember.

Wearing my favorite jeans and wondering if anyone else can see that I'm masking. The barista spells my name with a 'y' and there is no need to correct him. On a first date one wants to walk that line between being perceived as normal, social, able to blend in, but also, able to stand-out, be special, unique.  I have opted to bring my book into the coffee shop, to show how old-fashioned I am amidst the world of phone zombies.  I sit up straight, remembering the one-word cue my mother used to prime me with: "posture!" Pretend you're civilized, not this schlub who slouches at the dinner table.  What would be the best version of myself to present?  It could be proposed that the compulsion to Stand Out is itself the mask, and if I were to take off this mask I'd be just like everybody else. Maybe, before she gets here I have time to readjust.  Behind the counter the coffee-makers are laughing uproariously, one of them almost snorting. A fresh burst of wiggly, anxious power-pop bursts through the recessed overhead speakers. The world doesn't revolve around me. They call my name, spelled with a y, and I can feel through the cardboard cup that the chai is still too hot for my taste.  The world doesn't care.

Red words
red eyes

I have this daydream where I box up all the books in my apartment and move.  I haven't decided where. Someplace green & wet and cool & alive. Somewhere where Spring is a smiling verdant surface veneer, some grand not-yet ruined city, not-yet soiled or sad and tawdry. With a handful of new friends. Night after night I could go for walks, maybe to a hotel bar, or a lamplit square with cool stone tiles across from a cathedral.  It all starts with boxing up these books. My safety blanket of language.  I daydream as my eyes skate across page after page. Dreams as the masks of  the subconscious. 

What's that old song, Frog Went A-Courting? I have been texting her for a week. She works in insurance.  You know in Tron when Flynn laughs at the program when he finds out he's an actuarial?  Don't do that.  Don't comment on her accent.  Check pocket for condoms, I stopped on the way here and bought three, and because it's always weird to just by condoms I also bought a bucket of red paint and a dish sponge, a Scrub Daddy.  She texts "am outside. let me know when you get here"  But I've been here for twenty minutes and type back "Oh, I'm already inside :-) " Should have put on more cologne. Shouldn't have brought this book. Packing for Mars by Mary Roach. What was I thinking?   She enters and gives me a hug.  Her accent is immediately noticeable. We give each other one-armed hugs.

a whole red alphabet of purpose and direction

-Quodlibet da Luz

one red planet
many giant red suns

In this dream I'm living in my old house by the lake.  It's been converted into a foster home for boys and they are very curious as to how I know about the secret door behind the bookshelf.  I show them the books my father never read, still there, and they ask why I read books backward.  I didn't know I did.  Then we take off and we are driving ten different roads and somehow all arrive at the end of each of them simultaneously by falling straight into a heart, its cataracts bursting with blood and light. It's night and I fall past a building, full of empty rooms, the lights still on waiting for someone to return, and feel the wind whipping away the sweat from my armpits and brow as I fall into the gushing tumult of the heart shouting "you've got to try this" but no sound comes out.

Occasionally the conversation gets going, things pick up, flow state, occasionally we get lost and reorient ourselves around our phones. I stop reminding myself not to comment on her accent.  "What are you reading?" 
"Oh, it's about the space program. I like space, but I could never be an astronaut." 
"Why not?" 
I think of my nascent adult nausea as discovered on the teacup rides, my propensity for idleness and procrastination, trying to masturbate while floating.  She tells me the practiced narrative of her vindictive family, I mention staying in touch with my brother but these strings pull at nothing.  She has to be going.  Another one-armed hug. Hours later I remember the Trojans in my pocket and wonder why I bother.  Sex is a strange urge.  It's persistant, but conciously so, unlike, say, breathing or heartbeats.  I box up my books, one quarter-shelf at a time.  Some of them, it occurs to me, must have red letters printed inside.  Perhaps they're hiding in plain sight.  Maybe if I squint I can see it.

read the 
red coda already

God smells like clean laundry, and collects stories that he keeps in a mahagony traveling case.  God asks me for my story and I feel a burning inside me, like this spark I've been carrying all my life, like a firefly throughout the propulsiveness of a hurricane, has suddenly become a flaming torch at the top of a lighthouse.  I tell God that the locust was imprisoned under the ground for 17 years, plotting and scheming, to only to be born without a mouth.  God laughs before I get to the end, evidently He already knows this one.

My friend left his wife and he's been real quiet lately. He came over the help me paint. One big empty red wall. I like the way the light comes in now, letting the room be what it will be.  And afterwards we watch the evening begin and he comments upon the temperature. Keeps using the words "forty degree swing." I pretend that this needs to be heard and nod, not sure what to do next, watching the luxurious springtime langorousness of the vacant lot like it was one of those Japanese gardens made only of rocks and sand so the beauty doesn't get concealed by looks. My looks, I think, have been concealing my beauty for years now.  Or possibly my ugliness. Two birds fly past and I note, aloud, that they have rings around their necks. "Well, this has been a real slice of heaven but I best be getting back," says my friend. We shake hands.  It's been a good day overall.  But I realized recently that I can't put my arms around memories. Perhaps that will be the grand prize someday, if I ever get lucky enough to get old, maybe I'll get old enough to forget all the sadness, and only remember the good.

"I'm painting a room in a colourful way, and

when my mind goes wondering

there it will go."

-The Beatles

Succumbence

 

Streamer

 "the naïve eye that loves you"

-Amy Newman

Once you watched one of Walsh's videos the others flooded your feed.  A fusillade of fluff. Much later when he was asked on a podcast about his advertising team, his budget, the strategy of it— but by then the passion had left him, he'd gained some weight, lost some skin tone — his wan smile gave one the impression that, while he was too polite to say it, the question was to be pitied for fixating upon mere subtext in something daft like a municipal art project.  He didn't really do plugs.  By then he had lost heart.

The whole endeavor had the aroma of the insubstantial, but during the height of it he was posting forty or sometimes fifty times a day.  "Hey guys it is Walsh!"  The viewing numbers don't really improve, but they didn't go down either, this only seemed to bolster his confidence.    Walsh wandered LA  winking at the camera and insisting coincidence was a lifestyle choice.  "We must, uh, parse the alchemy of the, uh, little insignficancies" he says from an overpass, winking.  The comments threads usually had several that were just emojis winking back.  Walsh documented everything, like it was journalism. As if labling the mystery would keep it from fading away.  "Let's have a drink," he says, the camera following him at arm's length, "and let the spirits flatten you out like the freeway does to the mountains."

He is Slavic. Good-looking, charisma spilling from him like pennies from a torn pocket, and prone to the occassionally intrepid turn of phrase that made you sit up and smile. There he was visiting the Mosque.  Playing tambourine in the park.  Kissing dogs, walking under the Sixth Street Bridge. Walsh tweeted "Serendipity is the only weather worth watching."  This was retweeted by TV weathermen coast-to-coast, most with a snide remark. Walsh did not seem to understand this.

His entourage of friends wasn't in on the joke either.  Notably Seth [Cohen] and Dylan.  Dylan's whole schtick was that fate was flirting with him. Via, billboards, license plates, cafe menus, his Alexa.  Alexa, for her part, did not deny this.  Seth, who had two albums out, should have been the main draw, but was relegated to a side character because of his tiresome loquacity.  He could out-talk anybody.  Walsh spent a considerable amount of time just pointing the camera at him and posting his unprompted monologues at high speed. A notable moment, turning from Seth and then returning at normal speed to Dylan who said, while playing with a self-retracting tape measure and noting dimensions of the leather sofa, "irony will reduce the tension."
A sofa company asked to use the clip in an ad campaign but later discontinued negotiations in press release in which they misspelled Walsh's name.

Enter Marissa who appeared out of nowhere, knew his secrets, and treated reality like a suggestion. Walsh was obviously smitten, his camera lingering on her while Walsh waxed poetic, "look at those hips, soft as clouds," you can hear him saying as she tacks polaroids to a white wall and procedes to draw mustaches on them.  She wasn't in any traditional sense beautiful, and her voice was low and throaty.  She tells Walsh she has no possessions and he asks for no explanation.  She knows things she should not know.  She orders coffee and doesn't drink it.

The frequency of the videos take a hit, but Walsh also adopts a more artistic bent.  More thoughtful editing, transitioned cuts to B-Roll, Marissa will casually drop a sentence that rewires Walsh's brain. You can see him looking injured but grateful. She gestures cryptically. I've watched it over and over.  It honestly makes no sense.  "It's because you fail to see," she whispers closing the door behind her.  Showing up again at the end of the clip in a new outfit, a sky blue pantsuit and a red fedora.  Everyone nods like this happens all the time.  

Another follower-on was Kelly [Atwood] who seemed to sense something was off but, like all of them, like us, can't seem to quite articulate it.  "There is this silence which keeps growing larger."  She tweets before shutting down all her socials cold, which somehow makes it more real.  Dylan laughs nervously whenever destiny is mentioned, which someone counts as foreshadowing now, watching it all back. Walsh always tags him first.

Walsh says he believes he has fallen in love. Perhaps though it is just the idea of Marissa. Maybe it's just the disturbance. The comments raises an eyebrow.
Seth: "this isn't romance, its metaphysics wearing eyeliner." Walsh asks him to explain but Seth refuses. "Explaining it would ruin it," Dylan clocks the situation instantly. 
Walsh muses "maybe to be in love is to swim in doubt.  But this means something."  Seth doesn't disagree "Yes, but not what you think."
"Meaning will not cooperate with us," Dylan ruminates as they stare at their matchas in silence. The aperture widens, as if meaning is to be revealed just outside of frame.

The city is no longer a setting; it's a conspirator. The sun comes up bright and blue. The city behaves incorrectly. The glow of rust colored glass shards shattered alongside the tracks. Palm trees leaning in ways that suggest knowledge of past mistakes.  A billboard reads Deal With It. Walsh tweets: "'it is only through the senses that we know' -Montaigne"


Marissa refuses to be defined, categorized or followed up with clarifying questions. She is shadowed by an assistant she calls Art, short for Arturo.  He has bright cheeks.  She says she likes doors and leaving through them.  Marissa becomes less present.  She drifts further from the group becoming more symbol than person, like atmosphere. Walsh keeps taking, posting, adding fuel to this dumpster fire.  "Love is strange. Like a joke told by a cop." He takes the group on a road trip to Modesto. Reading the comments aloud he notes "eyeryone keeps asking 'what does it mean?' and, hey! look at the wind in those fields." Marissa, we learn, has filed a restraining order.


In a telling coda, in one of the last videos, Seth's sister Kirsten gently suggests that obsession is unhealthy and not the same as understanding.  They are practicing their mantras and breathing into pillows. Walsh says poetically "Yeah, some people only will value when its convenient for them and in the moment you stop pouring yourself into them you mean nothing to them. I can say I see this clearly now."
"Dude stop forcing connections." says Dylan.
"Closure is a capitalist myth," begins Seth, rocking back and forth.
"Why capitalist?"
"I'm just saying, like, resolution is dishonest..."

n'existe pas por quoi

 n'existe pas por quoi

because of wrecked truck left roadside and wimpering

a root of bleached reeds, not whispering in wind

indifferences between eastern ignorance and western sin

because of year-end best-of music countdowns 

spent candle contributions at the marble altar of legacy

because of hunger for last trickles of sun on the frame

burnt hand on toaster oven— why scratch an itch?

because of sixty hour down-time from forty hour work-weeks

our contrasting opinions on appropriate beard length

a panicked Embarcadero phonecall, dysphoria mundi

because you swipe swipe swipe rather than fathom untrammeled want-talk

his face an empty stare lit by soft chips of slate light

because sometimes, despite yearning tides of labial warm, neither milk nor honey flow

when you don't pray for something you get nothing

billowing blue hills, compass trumpet, the existence of zinc

because our enemy's poisoned balm is called cute and cauterizing

right actions prove right wisdom so abandonment avoids questioning "how shall we return?"

one last bastion for perimenopausal ass lovers

graceful as deer bounding pasture fences drenched in snow

because on my riverwalk with those mooing crowds the heavens opened and out streamed a choir of white silence

because the conjurer's spree concluded via closing her book

clattering patchwork mantras, smoky city buildings with white walls, red floors

let out your whole ringtone, let it go to voicemail

post-marathon-like chuffing after a downstairs laundry haul

because I'm questioning if it counts as being naked if I am under this blanket

Bestrewn th' Scruffy Laminated Likenesses

    "Getting kinda old to appreciate new things with openess."  
    "It's just one night, for old time's sake! At the college bars? How 'bout it?"
    "I stopped going there about a quarter decade ago."
    "Why?"
    "That's when the girls started to be the same age as my friends' kids."

Why did I say 'a quarter decade ago?' What pretension.  The quest for the cool word, quiver, like a bow, or my heart catching its breath. What quagmire of digressions, quietly forgotten in the current of constant change. Truths are prisons. Change is truth.

Truth is I'll never be from here, and yet it's the subject of all these recent photographs.  Subjects elude and backgrounds elapse and what worth the hurrying man, and what value, at what cost? Further back here's one of us in Oregon, so far away and so long ago and so hard to believe that I actually don't believe it.

    "I don't remember that."
    "We went for that conference."
    "Conference? Are you sure?"
    "Are you calling me a liar?"
    "No, I'm calling the reliability of my memory into question."

Here's a snap of a pole tiny boy (who was me) and a girl (who was waiting.)  It proved intolerable. The waiting, the ill-defined parameters.  Ode to th' love I've laid astrain, the breaking apart like sticks of chalk.  Just thought I'd walk there and whistle. 

In thinking about Massachusetts and the other skins I've shed; My pale body delighted in dark thresholds, my voice softer than before as it sang expectantly. The varieties of enchantment are best hinted at through song (the birds' secret).  

    "Not enough breasts."
    "What?"
    "No, I mean, they're a great draw if you put bust 'em out up front and center."    
    "What charms we set aside."
    "No, it — It builds mood. Sets the stakes."
    "Neither music nor imaginal duplication, but division. Division, I tell you."

Here's one of fried trout and, turn the page, trembling shadows.  Under the streetlights, under the moonlight. The night represents the safe haven for secret dreams, of course. 

I say of course because you knew that. You're so smart. Of course you recognize the shorthand for broken hearts and longings.  I squint outside at the whole country as she slumbers. Have you used your darkness well? Well? Have you?

    "Fig 11."
    "Windwhipped and recalcintrant. Cloistered in his defeated boat called Victory."
    "The ships have names?"
    "No trace of her left. She became the winds she sailed..."
    "...and today some say, in that restless wind you can still hear her song. That's beautiful"

A closed book. An unclicked link.  An unscrolled feed. The truth may lay there in one of the innumerable horizontal planes of uncertainty, of longing, of...

... how strange and disjointed it is to be conscious in the world as compared to the concrete misery of, say, fear, or the unwritable impulse.  I may not be from here, but here I am, and you can't see it but I'm smiling, in italics.

 "but Nabokov laughed as he spat"
    -Bonnie Auslander

_abril_ about a bout of budbursting

 

Orchard in Blossom [detail]
(April 1889) Van Gogh

The transcendent wonder of regeneraion.  Not yet fully awake, the man pries himself from the naked entanglement when the woman mutters "the front door has blown open."  Gropes along the hallway, the soles of his bare feet unpleasantly chill on the talcum-coated floorboards, around the weathered rainments of unsorted winter laundry, past the dark portals (two bedrooms). Everything still unreally real, the early light falling in unaccustomed corners, bookshelf edge as sharp as a hacksaw, the sullen coatsleeves on the communal coatstand.  His hand on the latch now he sees the branches rising toward the just-starting-to-bluen sky, the topological intermingling of solid wood, branch and dewy dawning sky.

A new day.  Blossoming in the open air, an ecstasy of effervesence.  Driving to the city past fields of [those] high-wattage trees bespotted in tiny buds. Tiny buds shaped like hearts, opening into petals stretching as if to grasp the all of the light, each new leaf lurching out. Lurching up to leave no gaps in the shadows beneath.

Amidst the towering buildings downtown "g-d this sunlight lowkey slaps" says Pete then pauses mid-rant for breath, looking down the barrel of his big nose to the phone on which he's texting about broken bonds, shorted bonds. That big bloodhound nose that bigots have for more money. That big nose sniffing its way out from the ivy [league]. Where are we? We three, then we are joined by my sister and my nephew.  We five. I take a hand as we approach the crosswalk - keep hold after we're through. My hand is the warmer. Differences among bodies... Inside a wide-windowed coffee-house we collect ourselves from the noise and the wind, order bread and honey tea.
Sirens blare, "the surly sullen bell give warning to the world"
My voice is full of strangers. My voice is deranged with desire. Outside the starlings, confused, invisible, but audibly alive.
Cornsilk hair, she bites her lip and frowns off to the side sulkily. She has infected me, not in the sex without a condom sense, although I wouldn't put that past her.
"What are you working on?"
I pull out my notes on Jewish mysticism's concept of Language as God's Tree, ripening toward consummation, before returning to Nothing.

Slowly we perambulate down the hall lined with paintings of the long dead, faces gazing into mirrors, some curatorial sleight of hand, a show called Reflections.
"Can we go now?" asks my nephew petulantly.
So concerned with how much time will be left that we forget to use it. My sister, endowed with endless compassion, suggests viewing the fish.  "Why do they call them walleye?"
outside someone is shouting, who was it who described this city's streets as a calamity of love? The crowds swarm the vast grid of streets, the wind howls against the honks and whine of cars, lights flickering.  Where is the wind going? Wither go these unreal millions? Of course, each is as real as me, but they are all center of their own stories, as I am of mine, differences among bodies, and so the countless crystalline fissures grow in complexity, incessantly ripening as a flower stretches out to everything from nothing.

At the venue my agent has asked to meet me I am disapointed to learn that it is open mic poetry night.
Miss Kai has brought out the spring collection of blouses, and her fleshy arms burst out from this one, made of the same pimply texture of a plucked chicken skin. For months now she has been hoping I'll eschew the anonymity and publish as myself.  Cresting a righteous yawn, I narrowly catch her eye and note that she seems to require something of me, seems to be silently asking me for something, some tacid understanding perhaps.
"I won't be reading" as if it's a matter of settled opinion.  It's not exactly an elocutionary artform I practice. And routine humiliations need not substitute for daily life any longer. We're past that, some scar imprinted deep in the roots from whence we burgeon.  The arduousness of winter has ended.  

Music so loud your thoughts stop trying to yell. She takes me by the hand and we winnow past shrill voices to a hall where muffled drums through the walls like the a metaphor for imminent annihilation.  We smoke our way out, like an emotional trapdoor.

The conventions of the medieval chanson d’aventure dictate that spring is a time for communion with nature, good cheer, and lovemaking.  So candid, desirous, vulnerable, bodies meeting each other, leveling out the differences among bodies, in fits and squirts and starts, it's not perfect, but like perfection it's something worth striving for. I feel down to my toetips that I am on the precipice of great achievement.  The horizon is beginning to look like land.

"Why don't you let anyone know the real you? Are you afraid that they'll judge and hate you?"
"No, I just consist of secrets and lies." 


In the pre-light of morning, mirth returns to the old frozen playgrounds now shrouded by darkness, the burgeoning leaves emanate, life germinates, replicates.

I grope my way back to bed, slowly and quietly, in case she is still asleep. Her flowerlike softness, a dream worth preserving.

The Story of Rebirth

 "I'm going away... you will look for me.
Where I'm going you cannot come."
-Jesus

"you must approach the throne

With its back up against the wall"

-Father John Misty

One good story to tell is of rebirth. It's undeniable in its allure. Man dies. Man is reborn. It doesn't make sense of course but the sheep don't read non-fiction they read pulp romance. We know it's a good story because our comic book superheros keep coming back for more.  The ancient Greeks knew this, too, and killed-off all kinds of gods and demiurges only to cyclically resuscitate them into new symbolic glory, and because the Greeks knew it so well Saul of Tarsus (St. Paul) knew it too and boy did he run with it. And without much of a writer credit nor remuneration.  Did anyone else know that this was his contribution?  I suppose, probably. One never knows what others know.  Did you know that Bill Finger co-created Batman?

I didn't.  I guess only true devotees stay until the end of the credits. No one told me it was Paul's story, they just told me the story and I thought it was a good one.  One of the best. It's hard to replace a story like that. I won't try. Yet.

My Dad passed away this summer. My brother and I remain, a kind of rebirth, I suppose but much less gratifying a tale. We had a service in August and homilies about Heaven were given in earnest. In sad moments it sure makes you feel good, this story of life after life, and yet we must not forget that it's a symbol.  A covenant to us to continue to live in compassion and kindness and without fear or anger. That's a hard pact.  I can see why they masked it in up behind Christmas wrapping papers and Easter dinners instead.

This Halloween I'm dressing up as a man in mourning. No mask. Don't ask, or do, but you might not like to hear it.  Paul's story had 2000 years of revisions before it came to me. All I ask is you give me some time, I'll come up with something snappy.

Whither Emo Youth's Flower Come Autumn Now Upon Us

 Wait, is there ever time to figure it out? -Nate Rateliff

 Lounging in the languid allure of autumn, that early crisp stillness punishing me with profound guilt. What did I miss? All this summer, short as a day gone by. A tide of nostalgia. I decide to put on some music.  The universe decides to gift me with the most poignant soundtrack— haunting melodies that make my heart ache and my soul long for… something!  Je ne sais quoi.

"All the bells say 'too late'" as John so aptly put it.  Why struggle through my itineraries of boredom, you may ask.  Or perhaps I have met your oddly complaisant expectations.  Let us not forget the autumnal equinox is this week upon us, heaven knows, that perfect moment of balance between light and dark. How poetic! But here I am, out of balance with my inner abrogate darkness and unable to capture my essence in a few well-chosen words. I feel like I’m a stained glass, all my tools locked away, lost in a forest of feelings, wandering aimlessly, brow furrowed in a vague impression of furthering of frustration.

A rememberance: The summer before school started I took a trip through the southwest, drove through the night, and in the morning decided I was going to be a geologist. So then I had a professor who taught us there are three types of rocks; igneous, sedimentary and metaphoric. I wondered about yacht. I switched my major to anthropology. 

But oh the injustice, my belt doesn't fit. Feet hurt in falling-apart shoes. Do you yet mock? Call me Doctor Mocksman. Emo music is our classic rock.  Deep, wistful emotions that swell within me. Why can’t I just pluck the right words from the air like the leaves falling from the trees? It’s as if my brain has turned to mush, a sad, autumnal pudding unable to articulate the bittersweet beauties swirling around in the air. I listen to this music, and all I can think is, “This feels profound!” But what does that even mean? I'm here drowning in feelings yet you percieve me as but a puny puddle of vague sentiments. I'm a bright peacock without a squawk, and you see a coal-tarnished canary.

Oh, the irony! I can feel the weight of solitude pressing down, the kind that only autumn can conjure, and yet I’m left grappling with empty phrases like “sad” and “melancholy.” Thanks a lot, brain! In the car I scream, “THIS IS WISTFUL AND LONESOME!” at the top of my lungs but I hear myself sounding pretentious, foolish.  If I wasn't so dull to the world it would be infuriating!

I close my eyes and see a face looking back at me made of warm light and composed of many faces, like a collage on a stalker's wall, shifting, shifting, through nose, eclectic eyes, cheek or bearded check, mouth, foreheads, and hot, too hot to look at in the eye. But I try and see that He is us, we are Him, and We are a bright and untouchable multitude. Maybe God doesn't want us to feel alone because we don't exist.

I'm not angry.  I'm just prevaricating. In fact it seems to me I'm glad to be here. The days grow short, dream songs mingle with waking ones in vague sepia sibilance. A rememberance:  Humidity. The Subaru Outback engine shaking in idle, shrouded in heat, while we, in the back seat shake in our idyll. Apologies are offered for the sweat, warm comparisons are made, then we emerge to dress and a breeze tells me that God's saying "cool it" and I smile, my face the arc between guilt and consolation.

Sorry for the episodic irruptions.

A toast: to the castles of emotions we guard! Here’s to wanting to cry and laugh simultaneously. Is there a name for this? Let's drink.  I'll articulate it. Turn the music up loud.  Catch the wind in a jar—or better yet these falling leaves! Who cares who's singing what, stop caring about names, words, let the music wash across you.

If you need me I'll be here, withered and wrestling with desolate inadequacies, an eerie sihouette's shadow in a whisper of words I can't understand. Ugh! Autumn, you bittersweet siren! How dare you distill such conflicting feelings in me without affixing any clear liquor labels!

Tints

Maybe I'd get a Dodge Charger. That's the thought that got stuck in the craw of my brain while driving the old Chevy that afternoon to the blood plasma center to get my fifty bucks. What would that make me, if I had a Dodge Charger? What kind of people drive Chargers? I'd been given one as a rental once, leaving Chicago and headed northwest on 90 and that car could really go. The Hemi. I took it all the way out to Verne and slept through the movie at the Drive-In. How is that was ten years ago?

Crossing the overpass yields a clear view over the streets all the way to the mountains, a panoramic clarity free of fog and dust after this afternoon's rainstorm, the mountains shining like newly washed cars. Puddles in the road. I stayed home an extra hour reading by the air conditoner and drinking two of the green IPAs. I was reading a fantasy bildungsroman set in a world where people started inexplicably losing their balance and falling down and those that remained upright throughout developed a saintly semblance to the others. I'd stopped at the onset of a sex scene and driven off. Visits to the blood plasma center typically took three hours round trip and I wanted to be back in time to make dinner at a reasonable hour.

The old Chevy has a compliment of CDs, newly supplemented by some purchases at the Goodwill of Hot Fuss, by The Killers. I put it on and am transported back twenty years as I make my way into the city, marvelling, behind my red-tinted sunglasses, at the wary lanes of stand-still traffic going in the opposite direction. I roll the windows down and rest my arm outside letting the wind cool off my armpits.

I love the static fuzz at the end of track one. How did they do that? In post? What is he even singing about, gotta gotta be down because I want it all, and is it "Wally's having a smoke," or "while he's having a smoke?" Who's Wally? If I'd brought my phone I would have checked but I left it behind to charge, there's something wrong with my charger, and also to allow me time to finish reading the falling down book. Destiny is calling me. Audacious.  I never. I never. I neverrrr. Never what? Why is he repeating this?

The AC in the old Chevy doesn't work, so the rolled-down window is my only cool air.  Maybe if I had a Dodge Charger I could sit in the AC and cruise. Maybe I could meet a girl. What kind of girl is attracted to a guy who drives a Dodge Charger? Probably not my kind of girl.  I imagine her knowing a lot about cars and being compellingly coarse in social situations.  I tended to blend into the backwash, something that's been pointed out to me recently along with the advice to follow my anger instead of surpressing it. I wish I could meet someone pleasant. 

I stop the CD at All These Things that I'd Done while pulling into the parking lot in front of the blood plasma center. That would be a good song to queue up for the ride home.  The outside air feels luminous, still heavy with moisture. I carry my book, admire the newly planted trees by the condos, anticipating the sadness held in their young stickly stalks, the treacherous promise of aging there together and someday dying all in a row. Inside the cold astringent air stings there's a line that zigs and zags and I make my way to the end of it and stand uncomfortably for a few minutes looking at my shoes until another number is called and everyone takes a few steps forward and I can lean against the wall while I wait.  The world has a lot more mysteries when you leave your phone at home.  You have to read the signs, look for clues, look out the window, daydream. "Don't think so hard," says the portly man in line behind me, "you'll hurt yourself."

    "Yeah, that happens," I smile, "I get red hot."  The people here cross all kinds of demographic intersectionalities. It's impolite to stare, that's why almost everyone brings their phones and stares at those instead. I found that it's a good quiet time to read without interuption when I started coming here during the pandemic and it, for a time, became my one and only social interaction for an entire week, my one reverie within a grindingly mechanical year.  Go give blood plasma, read for an hour, stop by the store for groceries on the way home, lock the door for another 7 days.  The white robed phlebotomy staff still all wear masks, and some of them even wear face shields. On the walls the posters remain unchanged, Your Donation of Blood Plasma Saves Lives, Be a Hero - Give Plasma.  I remember looking at that same poster during the pandemic because it features a little masked boy in a cape with his arms outretched like superman and I motioned to it as a staffer prepped my arm with iodine and told her, from behind my mask, that he had his mask on wrong.

    "Uh huh," she had said.  "Tight fist please."  I had thought it was clever. I still thought so. We all shuffled forward a few more steps. The blood plasma process involves insertion of a needle, keeping your arm straight and pumping your fist at frequent intervals, then laying lax while the machine returns the red blood to your arm and retains the plasma. This process repeats about eight or nine times I think. I've never counted. It lasts, once the needle is in, a little less than an hour. It lasts enough time to read two chapter or play nine levels of Candy Crush. It lasts until they have collected 880 millileters.I got out my book.

 People kept losing their balance. People kept falling down. On the way to class, standing in line at the grocery store. It was happening to everyone. The doctors were confounded, speculating on causes ranging from dust particulates to solar magnetic polarization, but since their clinics were booked out for months the problem became a political one and that fall's election was notable for the number of candidates who fell from their platforms espousing potential solutions to the doctor shortage. It was happening to everyone and so those of us who had not yet fallen began to take on a certain aura of otherworldliness, although what we ourselves felt was a buzz of fearful precarity.

The truth was that I had fallen, just not literally. We met when we were both helping an old woman up by the bus stop.

    "I'm so sorry! I'm so so sorry!" she said repeatedly. 

"It's alright," we told her in unison.  I looked up. Eyes filled with stars, mahogony brown hair...

    It went on with broad strokes like that for a few pages, then changed tack. Just as I was confirming my disinterest the machine beeped and I was done.

       "Thank you for your donation," she said as she retrieved the needle from my arm and pressed a wad of gauze to the site, which I proceeded to hold there so she could put the needle and tubing away and grab a roll of medical tape to wrap me up.

Walking back to the old Chevy I let down the tailgait to sit and smoke a cigarette and read some more.  

 

The sky was a low and gray, oppressive. I could feel it as a pointed weight against my shoulders.  I stood at the edge of the park, hands stuffed deep into my pockets, watching people fall. There was no longer any commotion to it, people took it in stride, so to speak, silenting crumbling, getting back up, a collective resignation settling over everyone like a thick fog.

My phone vibrated and I pulled it out, staring at the screen as if it held the answers. There it was, a single text from her, the one that had changed everything: I’m pregnant. I read it again, trying to wrap my mind around a reality that was both beautiful and absurd. How could life rise up when everything else seemed to be falling down?

The playground behind me was eerily empty, the swings swaying gently in the breeze. I imagined children laughing, the sound bright and alive against the backdrop of uncertainty. But that laughter was absent, leaving only the rustle of leaves, the woosh of cars, the distant hum of sirens.

I leaned against a tree, the bark rough against my back, grounding. A couple walked by, eyes glued to their phones, oblivious to the world around them. The woman fell. The man stopped but his eyes didn't leave the screen, nor did he help her up.  What could he do? It was all so mundane now, she slowly got herself back on her feet and dusted off her phone by herself and they continued. It was like watching the last flickers of a dying bulb. I looked at my own phone again.  The text message seemed to almost pulse with a flicker of hope—a tiny life that could brighten all this gray.

Then she called out my name. She was there, her voice breaking through the haze, vibrant and real. She was running toward me, her hair catching the wind, a wild halo, I ran to meet her, to hold her. There was a sparkle in her eyes that cut through the heaviness, and for a moment, I could almost forget the world was falling apart.

“Did you get my message?” she asked, breathless, a smile spreading across her face.

“Yeah,” I replied, trying to summon a smile in return. “I did.”

“And?  Are you... what do...?” concern etching her brow.

“I... we...” I brushed the hair from her eyes, feeling the warmth of her skin, the shape of her head. “I mean, the risks...”

Her gaze held steady. “We have to believe in something, right? It might be the end of the world, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try.”

I could feel myself nodding unsteadily, the warmth of her words roping around me like a lifeline. In the midst of chaos, we would carve out a space for hope, for laughter...

Driving a different route back home, through an old town neighborhood of hundred year old homes, frequent stop signs, and small parks dotted with homeless people huddled in the shade of their shopping carts full of tarped stuff. What if I opened a store in this neighborhood. Would I be any good at interacting with the crazies, their tattooed chests and neurosis. How can one focus on the desiderata of life when distracted by so many socioeconomic problems?

How many girls are mentioned on Hot Fuss? (Believe me) Natalie, Jenny (was a friend of mine), Annie (you're a star), (Oh) Girl (someday you'll understand)... how long did it take Brandon Flowers to burn through enough relationships to fuel the lyrics for this album?

The moon makes a pre-sunset power appearance in the pink sky high above some raspy eucalyptus trees. Did you know the moon moves about an inch and a half away from the earth each year? Was it something we did? I kind of feel that I should take that fact as reflective of some kind of personal distaste for me, for us, earthkind. Earthkind is a compound word I just made up. Like Mr Brightside. 

And we don't mean to satisfy tonight 

So get your eyes off of my pride tonight 

'Cause I don't need to satisfy tonight 

It's like a cigarette in the mouth 

Or a handshake in the doorway 

I look at you and smile because I'm fine

Where did that term even come from, I wonder. Is it Brightsides or Brightside, singular? What does any of this mean? I suppose their musicality is better than their lyrics, on re-listening to this. Why did this speak to me twenty years ago? Does it speak to me now because it spoke to me then, or is there something new?

The gas station didn't have any of the green kind so I pick up two tall blue IPAs instead. Funny how the world takes on a different lustre, a new auratic sensibility, when you switch from one kind of beer to another mid-session. Outside parked next to the truck is a gray Dodge Charger. What would my commute home be like driving that? The sun is gone before is shines. Yep, I've had those kinds of days.

About a mile from I I realize that I am looking at the world through two different layers of glass, my sunglasses and the dirty windshield.  This is an appropriate metaphor for the layers I impose upon my own perceptions, I think. I need to take all these layers of glass out of my field of vision and see the world the way it really is.  What colors are there that I've been missing, what haven't I been able to see thanks to my own hubris? I should try something new. Try something old again, but really try this time.  I should see how much Dodge Chargers are going for.  I'm going to do it.  As soon as I get home I'm going to do it.

Lakeside Look Serenade

their mint withered while we were away, in the crisper drawer.  when we returned I could smell our house smell.

their bitterness may have been attractive, but the middle finger outside the bait shop was a nail in the coffin. maybe they were trying to be cute, you suggested.

their kids took down from the top shelf our token baseball. Soiled it thoroughly and failed to put it back.

A heavenly breeze kissing the trees

life's cruel twists manifest themselves, under minimal scrutiny, through neighboring windows, down that gravel path but for the grace of god... Yet we wither as winter reeds, pull the cord to withdraw the blinds.

"I am angry that I feel no outrage."
- Denise Levertov

they lifted the boat out of the lake and I imagined myself lifting it, felt the heave in my chest, the catch in my breath

they tasted a sampling of fresh local honey and I queued to try some, Pavlovian saliva accumulating at the promise of its floral sweetness

they danced to the band's groove and I noticed, from the back bench, my knee keeping time, my lips right along mouthing the words

I stand and I wait for the touch of your hand in the June night

my dance is hesitancy, my tongue untasted, my journey moored

"I've made a lot of mistakes."
- Sufjan Stevens

perhaps I need to diffuse this tension. The lake's face doesn't glitter. It's beach is a glace of indurate mud. 

perhaps I need to fill my mind. Eyes swivel to the quiescent stack of books left ajar. Swipe to refresh page.

perhaps I need sex. To feel a body fill a body. Revive the dismal flame with some brave passion fling. 

My love, do you know that your eyes are like stars brightly beaming

out of darkness, light. out of silence, sound. out of gas, walk.

"I would like to believe my dread was for the human condition
 but of course it was for me."
- Joan Didion

when we took this trip we didn't know how we were going to pay for it. Funny how life  supplies you. That's why I don't pick flowers anymore, I try to learn their names; eriastrum and bromeliad.

when we first got together you thought we were going dancing and I thought we were going to move in together. Sacrifices were made. Funny how I thought I needed the placebic validation of a woman to escape my self-imposed prison of feeling worthless, and how, now, it requires a vacation to the lake make the time to go out dancing with you.

when we watched the final dawn draw its fiery thread over the water, our last day before returning home, we were half asleep, a silver spider webbing in the window caused you to scream and I screamed too, then laughed, in atonement. It was funny.

Let us stray till break of day in love's valley of dreams
Just you and I... a summer sky 

 believe and know. forgive and grow. give and go. 

Quodlibet da Luz

 not the saints themselves but the idea of saints
or boddhisatvas if you bend that way
the cradle of santicty apendanted around your neck
a whole red alphabet of purpose and direction

look to the sky

 not the hunger of Erysichthon but the defiant key
or kitten tender consolation, pet,
knowing them ancients knew the plight, not you though,
nothing personal, well a little bit personal

through the trees

 not running the maze but the knowing how to run mazes
unlike a career in tree chromosomes, say
nothing proficuous about it, this skill of seeing shadow
ahead and intuiting the source of the light

the sun

Mute God's Torpor

I think about all that I don't understand about sex

from its venomous withholding to its fountainous lure
I think I'll make a list:

whispers whistling as the thrush,  

the roseate hue

soft curves tautened

corrugated heart beat

foul nethers, 

the addictive acridness of your beloved's smell

the fightin' urge to assert my own primacy

coarser sublunary trivialities

mute god's torpor

longeurs and mundanities, 

penetrating the musty concave fibers of distant galaxies

disconsolate blue after

wan remnants

In short

we screwed and then chatted 

disinterestedly
retired to our separate corners of the ring
to replenish and satiate our thirsts
for reddit and for tiktok

respectively

I thought

Why write a poem?  There are loads of poems
shelves sagging from the unread weight of them

I think I'll make another list:

because that folk singer died and I can't remember his name

so much to say 'bout

yr aunt's vacations, slavic ant vocations

heaven extends even unto the transactional sphere of corporations

because all I have left of my grandfather are his poems

wasps hum, roosters crow,

My folks are gone

my kids are gone

the stars remain

through these barren trees