Sunday Evening Musings

I

Sometimes the day is discarded 

like a dirty dish rag, scummed and mildewed,

draped over a broken-leg table tray.

Or maybe the tossed wrapping paper

having wrapped an unwanted gift.

I regret the forlorn emptiness this day

may express, this neglected song

singing major notes in a minor world,

mocked at their naiveté - how can art

be bright and loverly

in this shit-ass world

they may haughtily say.

Why is Beauty so mistreated?

Why is Pain so often given to her

as her only lover, blue and grey

with tarnished cuff links?

I pick up dirty dish rags, sniff them

like an ancient god, sniff that dirty

life with a longing and a lust

only naked bodies in snow

can capitulate to.

I want to use that rag to wipe my ass,

throw it back in the face

of the one who dismissed it so

effortlessly. I can laugh

I can hit a ball, shoot a clay bird.

Let her who has ears to hear, hear.

Or she? Gender qualms are such a human

narcissistic obsession - yes that pronoun is

denouncing your worth, you should retaliate

with all the overcompensating testosterone

you can muster.

I know: oppression is real.

Reality is oppressed and suppressed,

translated for the lowest common denominator.

Yet the dirty rag lingers in the air

in slow motion, like Trinity of The Matrix.

There may be no spoon, but free will subsists

in the gutters and the golf courses,

the gutters of the beautiful golf courses,

so green, so cared for. But

they're golf courses...for whiny rich people.

Yes. And they're beautifully manicured

by the green artist making $35,000 a year.

Landscape architects draw the course

but the work is done by Karl's laborer.

Not far removed from the bourgeois Labrador,

fetching slobbery toys of their own making,

subjected to their putative master's

oh-so-kind frolicking.

It's a shame the world is so unknown,

so uncertain. μυστήριον is a wonderful glimpse

of lapsed happiness, but something

in some slight moderation of known

unknowableness would suffice

for the flicker of learning, for

the mystique of growth -

the yellow-green light that seeps

through a setting forest. I know

we need something not to know.

But we need some things to know.

Some things that put us certainly in

our context, our world, our battlefield.

Why are we fighting and for whom? I feel

I need to understand

the mother

who drowns her 3 children

in a scalding bath.

II

Poetry is dying and I'm not strong enough

to resuscitate her. She is gasping

like a hooked fish, lusting and flopping

for the oxygen lurking in brown water.

I cannot bring her back to our poetry-

impeached world. But there are those who can.

Jonesmann is one. The entirety of his words

condenses into an algaeic lake of suggestion

creativity and craft. You may learn

of the Germanically named Markus.

Listen to him. Il paroliere meglio.

Billy is another.

The visible breath of the drunk

in the snowy world is a sight

worth sipping on, no matter how mixed.

(I hate metaphors so I mix them)

I like to grasp at my cold breath

the way an acid tripping frat boy

grasps the invisible girl he met

at last night's bar, then fatly calling

the operator, asking for the number of the

"beautiful blue-eyed girl

I met tonight."

Snow is corporeal silence,

still and soft - like a woman's breasts:

thoughts quietly freeze.

I like to lick the falling snow

with my hot tongue also, lustily

encircling the frozen air.

Lust is a wild horse desperate to buck

and fuck all your muscled whips

and breaking ins. He sees and inhales

the beauty and scent of the brandished

woman - but we are so sophisticated

we ostensibly debate the honor of

Socrates and Jesus until our hearts

fail, until our eyes plead

for one more vision of the heaven

and hell of the blossom of a backyard

ghost orchid, so mundane and so perfect. 

So right with the word.

The world really is a word, Λογος,

a remnant of creative power,

of creative will, creative knowledge -

not gnostic or subliminal or esoteric

but the plain knowledge of the birds and bees.

Words fly and cogitate and habitate,

sometimes sleep under the

star-eaten blanket of the sky,

cozy and warm.

(pardons to Hulme the Master)

Words may wander the world

walking like the recent dead,

abrogating attrition and stomping over

the long words of the long dead ancients,

cozy but not. I like to lie in cozy beds

under cozy blankets but the words of the world

are not so innocent and not so warm

when they fiercely create

our embodied ideas from nothing

but brotherly hate. 

I want to write a poem.

A poem that matters to someone.

A poem that matters to the wordy world.

Yellow lines and red lights constrict 

My thoughts.

Yet these words seep out -

Seeping out of a mind with a self-imposed

traffic light regulating the hormones and

synaptic firings in dull fermentations.

I forgot the meaning of the eucharist

until I found my way along a smoky road:

a smoky, drug laced road

that should have slapped me in the face

and turned me away.

But the word will not leave you on your own.

The word, the Λογος, wills more than emptiness.

III

A vacuum may limit horizontal exchange,

but eventually it collapses.

Or so it seems.

Logic is as diversified as pop music.

Philosophy cannot replace our hearty lust.

A dish rag lives in the sink or the machine.

Useful or rejuvenating. I should be so lucky.

Forced.

I need a quarterback to hop on his feet,

point toward the end zone while mouthing the words

“Yes, this is your path and your way.

Your way is not the way of duplicitous

enervation.”

Todo es mintera en este mundo.

Todo es mintera la verdad.

The words just plopped into my head,

courtesy of Manu Chau.

The bourbon is done, as am I.

Forked.