chainsaw massacre
a bumblebee the size of godzilla
echoes across the lake at 6:30 a.m.
on a monday morning
a bumblebee the size of godzilla
echoes across the lake at 6:30 a.m.
on a monday morning
I used to collect baseball cards as a kid
My parents considered them a waste of time and money
Also, they came in packages with card-sized pieces of bubble gum, bad for the teeth
One card was of Dodgers right fielder Carl Furillo
He made the transition from Brooklyn to L.A.
Freshman year, Washington University dorm assignment:
I was placed in a room in what was informally known as the “Carl Furillo Suite”
Never given a reason for the designation, but I thought it was kind of cool
I returned home to find that my parents had gotten rid of all my baseball cards
Whoever got Carl Furillo’s card, I hope you got some money for it.
I think I could reflect on this one resonant syllable for the rest of my life.
It seemed a good idea at the time, with blue skies, light breeze from the north. If you can’t talk a long hike on a day like this, when can you? A pop-up drizzle, more a misty passing affair, nothing that can’t be borne. I mean it’s how it is, and it’ll come and go. And then the hard rains come, stinging at the winds’ direction, but you don’t get to quit now. You’ve traveled so far. It’s still a ways to the end, and this is the part of the journey where you’ll need each other more than ever in your life together.
I have two feeders,
filled with Hummingbird
nectar–red,
to attract birds
with wings
that would appear
to be impossible
to lift a heavy body.
Two hummingbirds
dart in from opposite trees,
hover near the feeders.
The larger male
keeps watch over his
chosen feeder,
aggressive,
attacking other birds.
In his actions,
I take the young female
to be his favorite
of the other four
or five birds that
dart in and out,
for he.
never routs her.
Watching the two birds
this morning, I remember
the two origami hummingbirds
a young student made for me,
one large and one small.
On red paper, she wrote:
Don’t forget me.
I go inside and find the three momentos.
I frame them
with this poem
and hang them on the wall
to share
with every guest
who gets up,
walks across the room
and reads the words.
Most of them will ask
about the young lady.
Respond like a cat that hates her sofa,
trespass on her laid-down-for-a-minute spoon.
Invite her for lunch, talk about yourself.
Take time out to complain about her friends.
Every time her mouth starts, make big sad eyes,
put your whole face in a little bread twist.
Ferret out her last twelve bucks. You have your reasons.
Sneeze at every moment she finds happiness.
In so doing, all blessings will be dramatically focused on you.
Every human life follows a single,
unbroken line.
The potential for life
becomes life
at the moment of conception,
growing, as nature insists,
from a single cell into trillions of cells.
From that moment, until death,
each life is a single, unbroken line.
There is no such thing in nature
as days or months or years.
The moon does not know
it is June, nor the sun
the day or hour.
Calendars and clocks
are simply things
humans made up,
for convenience.
They do not exist in nature.
Here is how precious you are:
throughout the universe,
only you can occupy
your place
in space and time.
Every choice
you make
or do not make
is felt
throughout the world,
our galaxy,
and beyond.
Why not make
good choices
instead of
bad choices?
Why not?
The universe is ninety-six percent
emptiness
and four percent
matter (us).
I need your light
we need your light.
together we can stand
against the encroaching darkness.
there is a synergy in nature–
two lights, together, shine
brighter
than two lights,
apart.
For years I drove without an oil change –
reckless, perhaps, but I was young
and life was a road trip.
Now I put statins in the tank
and have camshaft issues climbing hills.
Springs sag and fluid has leaked from my strut.
The rod’s still connected to the transmission
but the piston cranks the shaft
with less torque – the mechanic says
there’s a little blue pill for that.
The dashboard’s cracked from sun damage.
The steering’s loose, and lettering on signs
has gotten way too small.
The GPS still recognizes all of the streets
but I tell my wife where I’m going, just in case.
I do yoga to adjust the timing belt,
get serviced on the day and time
a young girl in scrubs writes on a card.
It’s not me that got old, it’s the damn car.
Good thing it was just a rental.
This is my summer body
It is also my winter body
my fall and spring body
This is my body on days when I despise it
when I feed it too much or not enough
when I look at its reflection in the mirror and wish
it did not belong to me
This is my swimsuit body
my sweatpants body
my swearing at the heavens body
This is the body that started with
my mother and will end
beneath the dirt
This is my body when I breathe
the crisp air on a
Kentucky evening
and sneeze all through a
Kentucky day
This is my body that keeps
beating, blood streaming,
while I sleep
summer body, somebody
What dead book conditions
your cultural reality, your croaking impulses,
those dark desires you deep freeze
in the recess of the cobweb mind?
Spell it. Say it. Stomp/stamp/sing
the aardvark creel of a reality
you dare to create you ripple
that quickly dives beneath
the fake calm of the ocean
of cares and culture.
Who cares how many prepositional phrases it took to get in every detail that you wanted to add because the details don’t matter now and will change by the time you finish reading this you mote in the eye of Tzara, you Gulliver in the shadow of Ball, you monster in the unfeeling science lab
of the moment
that just passed.
