of abiding

When I Met Death - Right Away, Great Captain!

Sand flung easily away from the man’s shuffling feet. He walked as he had a few minutes earlier, on the concrete; shuffling in black, orthopedic shoes. His eyes were intent upon the ocean and he moved like a plump piece of driftwood that, once washed up on shore, was now being pulled slowly back by the retreating tide. Sand was not part of his world, not something worth acknowledging.

He wore a green t-shirt and a brimmed cap, out of which escaped numerous tufts of wild, gray hair. It matched his beard. They were some old married couple that had grown to look indistinguishable; taking on gray and grizzled like personality traits.

The man drifted along with a small piece of fluffy detritus that had been bound to him by a long, shiny strand of seaweed. The fluffy piece barked and peed on landmarks when the sea’s enticement would ebb for brief moments.

In the old man’s back pocket, stuffed inside his wallet, his driver’s license read, “Morris Gants”. It had expired two years ago, sixty-eight years after he had washed up on shore, naked and crying.

i have a name.
at this moment,
a plastic chair carries most of my weight.
its slightly deformed structure passes
the burden onto the earth, with
great effort. it bears
exactly the weight i give it.
some of the letters on my name tag
have faded through paper to stain my skin.
this chair is green.
it will always be faded green.

a sparrow hops around the corner
with two of his brothers.
he is wearing a crown of gold
and twisted grass.
the grass sticks up
high from his golden crown.

he carries a spear, and is
otherwise naked to his feathers;
brown, grey, rust.
they are painted on his body
with the texture of bristles
passing wisely through thick oil paint.

his smile shines with sunlight.
it is not a smile of the face only, but
of the overwhelming mirth of his spirit.
his soul smiles.
it is generous.

he uses his spear to fence
with a crumpled piece of yellow paper.
it balances the weight of his joy.

he doesn’t wear a name tag.
he is not a bird;
he is the bird.
he is his name.

his brothers are sparrows.
they are always hungry,
searching for scraps.

magic is the unseen.
it is the reality that embellishes
what our hands can touch.
our spirit is familiar with magic.
he sings to the man
who has seated his identity in the mind.
he makes lyrical and painted appeals
to solemn marble columns that yield
no ground in the temple of truth.
what those pillars don’t remember is that
they are not so old and venerable as they think.
they are clothed in hereditary patina, but
they are built on fields of dreaming and wild flowers
who had the most brilliant laughter and
could spend entire sunny days
fruitfully preoccupied with right this moment.
their bright eyes were so joyfully distracting
that time itself would lose track of its journey and
pool at the roots of these present sages.

black feathers flash in granular flecks of light;
there are so many black feathers.
they are flung from dancing bodies.
their sweat is their light,
falling from feathery bodies like rusty little stars.
full of mass and tiny;
nuclear reactions
no longer able to hold up
the ceilings of cathedrals,
falling in upon themselves
until they are holes in space,
feeding on every light with insatiable hunger.

these young black birds dance,
their hands are still full of so much light.
it seems like there is more than enough.
their dreams tell them,
there is always more than enough.

black holes spend their lives pulling at light;
they never shine.

i got nothin’ in these fingertips
& all the minutes in my brain have run out

skateboards are this summer’s bare feet, y’all

it seems favorable
to forget
the best ways of doing things
because things spurn that
kind of classification;
they hate to be included
in brown, brittle best.

when you forget
the best ways
then there’s just
the way
you’re doin’ it

isn’t that so delightful?

who patrols the edges
of bristles
scraping paint on porous canvas?

i once read a man write,
a thing isn’t necessarily a lie,
even if it didn’t necessarily happen.
the man wrote it,
but he used another man’s voice
and my hand never could hold
his hand
no matter how far back i was born
but he was real
maybe he still is.

myth is the deepest places
of our most valuable pieces.
the voice calling myth fantasy
and the mind thinking fantasy
unnecessary
has his head up his ass;
another man said that last part
and then a bunch of others
thought it worth saying
more than that once.

i feel shitty decisions
drained from my veins
by smiling hope.

you stage
the best right-nows

if someone writes something once a day, and is observed in this behavior by an interested or uninterested observer (so interest has nothing to do with it; and i know that digital letters are easily done away with, but sometimes it’s best to just push on), it could easily be surmised that some sort of program has been joined upon; some sort of poem-a-day-for-a-month, some kind of PADFAM, or even a national poetry writing month (though this surmising could be quickly dismissed with a google search and the discovery that this month is not july [well, this month is july, but the NaPoWriMo is in freakin’ april, yos]), and possibly a written-tidbit-of-the-chrono-unit festival (WTOTCU Fest’). so, anyways, the point being that this surmising would be wrong and, interestedness re-involved, would well expose the level of general interest in said someone (i said “someone”, right? no, remember, i’m not going back to check; there’s no going back—too many words have come before to give up now).

sometimes desire whelms the heart of man
to very near the verge of over,
and this man desires to write something
when he should be in bed
and his eyes are long past brimming
with pollen grains
or at least the sensation thereof
did you catch that?
it’s like a simile or something.
what if similes were smiles? or smiiles?

this week i think i discovered the difference between story and allegory. then i betrayed myself by writing something and erasing it. at least i betrayed a past version of myself, who, it could be argued, is not really me anymore. though, he does seem so dashingly similar.

have you, personally and historically, pinpointed the moment when something naturally comes to an end? have you then witnessed further ventures into this past-the-end place? never does good come of it. though, i do often enjoy reading lists of other books offered by the publisher.