Posts for June 30, 2024 (page 2)

A gift deposited on my stair
A large heavy punch bowl full of sparkling crystals
Mined from rivers
The last day of the month of June

People’s got a bit of a lonesome vibe, tonight
But it is an excellent thing at times
to be an island
a chef who loves toast

Atlas, as a jar

Local and raw
Blooms of Spring

fair trade cacao

Some imagined echoes of Goth music

That thing the light does in the evening,
particularly in the kitchen
Or that moment when the leaves all pop just so much more noticeably after the summer sun
and humidity

“There’s a lot of money in meat sticks”
I said as she turned.

“Bubble!! Soap bubble’s still there.”
and so it was, tiny
hovering in one place
looking as if it were never to move.

This will not rhyme
This will not make sense
This will be a bunch of contradictions, I’m convinced
That I might self-destruct before I get to my final destination
That I ignore the hard parts and avoid the confrontations
That I constantly duck and
Dodge the conversations
That force me to confront 
This pain that exists in any event 
Remind me that this all is designed
To never ever make sense
So it’s at this point I’m convinced
That I can never be a hypocrite
Because after all this time
And this entire month
I’ve written poem after poem to give my point of view
On a world in which I feel I often don’t belong
And it’s probably from the perspective, again
Of a man left on the outside, who is now looking in
So I’ve decided
That what I can and will do is write
From my perspective each and every morning
And each night
And even though I’m at times reminded
That this shouldn’t rhyme
Or make any sense
To anyone but me
I’m thoroughly convinced
After reading a lot of your poems,
I am not alone in these type of thoughts
So for the last time this year, my Family, Friends, Fellow poets
foes and enemies
And LexPomo 2024
I’m signing off

whisper in a dark room to me / oh poem / star shooting yellow / and construct for me / some form there / when I need it most / a poem always finds me / like a conversation / I tell you / I have been grabbed / by the shoulder and clung to / found cracked poems / at the grocery store / and shined them / I have been left alone / with my sick body / and a poem / has always found me there / I sup on poems / jewel puzzle boxes / holy mana moons / dirty incomprehensible /  ciphers

It’s knowing there’s a catch 
before the fall ever begins
its calling at the end of the day
knowing there will be a hello
on the other end of the line 
so many that came before you 
took all that I had left and 
then took a little bit more 
I’m getting worn and tired 
somehow you see me through 
dig deeper into my core 
pull me to the surface 
right before I come unraveled

Clumsy in a wet suit,
Climbing down into this hole
To the sound of rushing water.
Over big rocks, 
Over small rocks, 
Backward off two waterfalls
To get to the prize: 
The current tugging
Our inner tubes along.
Pure darkness 
And thousands of worms
Glowing like stars above.

i’ve been practicing in my head to sketch the lines,
organic and uneven, of the contours the clouds will hold
tomorrow. each time i belly-flop forward in rusty trustfall
onto them, it is more aptly described as as a sinking into:
        the lack of ground that in itself grounds me;
        the notion that clouds themselves are composed
        of liquid; that to become one with a liquid,
        one must find comfort in falling through undefined spaces
        and molding into new sketched outlines.
so i stretch; i’ve reached my splits for the first time
in four years; my eyes are four inches below five-foot-two now
and with the extra quarter inch my vision sees far enough
around the curve of the earth to lock onto the words
that have not yet been etched into the dictionary, their unmuttered syllables
background noise to the hours spent half-bodybuilding in baby steps
among the heat and cardboard, earworm i’ll nurture.
say it’s a fine line between fear and excitement but both
fire up the same chemical inside; maybe two things can be equivalent
yet opposite at the same time. Maybe what we are not is, in an ambiguous way,
exactly what we are. Maybe definition is something arbitrary with the way
some new impression of meaning is felt in each stretched moment.
my (only) fear is the unknown, i am told, and i feel, and i despise,
and i dive for it in a rush too quickly to find footing
in the soft white of the clouds.                                  
                                                        are their forms themselves
not illusions? are their masses of white solid in the sky
not liquid, void of foothold or handhold at all? Is that the fear, the thrill:
        the absence of feeling’s ability to know what step may be unstable?
        the pace of liquid, to move to so many unnamed locations
        & new shapes in increments constant to the human eye?     
        the addition of a distance, the notion that for life to progress
        it must be set apart from a known and felt familiarity?
what about this melting to become, this brightening in my gut
at the sight of a shade of blue i’ve never seen before awakens me?
shakes me inside, but to restart a heart? what about this art of stretching
to reach the top shelf each shift of my part-time job to support
being a full-time dreamer makes me feel so unsteady at the top of a ladder
yet willing to fly when no ground is even in view?        
                                                                                             i’ll see how it works out,
i say, tracing in the crevices of my mind that form muscle memory
the sketches i’ve been drawing over and over at each thought of tomorrow
for the past two months. in another two, will i draw them into ink?
will i paint them, or will the dawn do that, refracting color
off the droplets of cumulus the adrenaline in me says i’ll be glad i became?

The calluses on my palms are living proof that you have to kill a part of yourself to survive.
Murder the fear, 
drag it’s body next to the skin cells and hair strands.
There’s no room for you here.
Leave an old dream to die,
$80,000 burning in the wind 
a hosed-down version of what you used to hope for.  

Deep cat-sleep rumbles,
slow, then steady, then stopped. Breath.
Then, a squeaky snore. 

I kept asking him to explain
phrases he’d say
until he figured out
my level.

“I’m at ground level with theory, man,
but I’ve played for a long time.”

Cracked open some shell chords,
vamped on “Bag’s Groove”
My improvised minor penatonic
chorus got a big smile.

“It’s cool. Not a lot of my students
want to learn this stuff anymore.”

For the first time in years,
my fingers stared impatiently,
expectantly
to my brain.