using your inside voice

This is my voice.

Listen.

Taste it. Please.

Today it is clearer in black,
but in all honesty, I thought this first in blue,

it is true. I lapis up all that literary lazuli

and it changes when I spit it back out.

Stereo-typed, twice in Dolby.
I hear the crackle, taste the salty pixels,
it can be shocking
to play two songs at once.

Tune it. Tune your tune her to tune her in.
Try to simplify, try to translate
in other terms,
on other channels,

I have tried talking in acrylic, the accent is too thick,
I am past brushing up properly.

Some thoughts are shapeless
and cannot be conveyed

with any sociological accuracy
we can shoot in one direction

and get stabbed in the back.
All along I was here
waving words in poetic privacy

that speak aftertaste

too deep to hear
muffled in print.

Now swallow.


Painting by Pierre Carrier-Belleuse (1894) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

The top spins on top of the world

It was always about time and place.
One Geologic Positioning Series

Stay still, finding location.

The matter remained
evidently encapsulated
for posterity or hermetically.

You see,
May you live in an interesting time,
is said
in jest.

Though, making it so
makes it so
living our story this way,

nowadays
it is done
this way.

Eventually folding our pages back
into strata and pulp layers
kneading condensation
to make sense in story
smell right.

It was from the East,
the scent carried, the wind
was metallic and heavy with
dry pollen.

We can hope this time
the butterfly will navigate
independently.

It seems lately
the bees hear first
and respond quickly,

making honey with
putrescence
in time for another
Revolution.


Image of  (sketch) The color top, 1877 in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Peering inside a black hole

Imagine It,
not wholly unfamiliar.
They call it frequency
because it-
Come again...
∝

The thing to re-membering is

making new ones better by

re-cycling.

∞

Better to be broke and full of spirit
Than holy and empty of edge.
Infinite is always
prettier sounding
than eternity.

≃ 

Rote by re-verb-eration
(un)sounded like (in)sanity
Lately
No body can be quiet
And still, do nothing.
Activism and Philosophy,
Art History.

Duchamps Fountain of youth remixed

and flushed.
∡
Once upon a time,
words were deceiving
tiny dictionaries in sprawling villages
with vacuous vocabularies
that cannot find Meaning
anywhere 

you see syllables slang

instead.
∓
No entry has been admitted-yet
Non-sense pre-veiled, we guessed
inert gasses would decay away.
Nothing was there
ever before-never-mind-
better to (con)serve your energy.
★
Cool your jets,
we are all ways all most done.
♯


Artists rendering of Black Hole By Copyleft (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons.

The child contemplating comets

What color do you see?
The child asks her mother,
after reflecting-
The blue eyes take care of the oceans,
the green ones tend to grow everything
the brown, found all around,
those brown eyed bodies built the mountains
by blinking.
The child wonders what exactly
the sky sees.
Her mother mentions the birds in a vee,
points to the bees and
Honey-
The child sees no kindred spirit afloat,
she is grounded and feels pressure.
She scours around the ground
in search of relatives, by proximity,
puts them in a pencil box
after making them shiny,
and then she names them.
The child collects her rocks and hounds her mother
about the origins or babies
of granite and geode
and likes the lineage, the idea
of the clouds trapped in crystals
and how close purple seems to black.
How did the rocks, and
the sand the water get born-
She asks with her eyes squinting out at the night sky.
Were all stars once planets?
She asks that moonless night,
and feels sorry about the answer.
It will be back, her mother explains phases
and patience.
The child misses no more
and wonders what container would be good for keeping
stars. Look around, says her mother,
all that you are
is Here, touching her heart,
let the stars fall where they may...
Is that why my eyes are grey?
She remembers
as though it were as close as yesterday.


Painting by Edward Lear, The Marble Rocks (1882) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

The Quantity Quotient

None of it was good.
Others say it must be good enough
and I wrestled with it, tried to full nelson the
blue bloody life out of it
before I quit the last time.

You would think these simple words
which everyone uses every day in all
derivations of misappropriating ways,
would be something quite simple to me
whose word world
never stops flooding
the floorboards.

And I keep flailing around trying to see what will float
but the best words confound me, sunken.
And I cannot begin
to make them make something
to line up and make something.
There is no reaction.

There is no sense to this cold
natural selection, just rejection.
And it need not be the most profound, I most simply
meant to convey complexity in a novel way, some semblance
of chaos in a nutshell, since what sells is
simplicity as it offers beauty for the masses.
There is no madness in ramblings
when there is no place to get lost, and curiosity is what keeps
the clock ticking and nothing is done with
black and white shapes on white paper,
sitting there and undone
from completion
for good reason.

Twenty-four short little stories
abandoned,
seven attempts at a novel,
three keepers, one in no hurry to make it to the end,
or progress, I digress,
I guess it will all make sense later.

After eight hundred and eighty-eighty lousy poems
one word should be worth keeping
the baby in the bathwater.



By UnknownHerkulaneischer Meister, [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. 

Discovered in 1760, is one of the most famous and beloved paintings, commonly called Sappho. Actually portrays a high-society Pompeian girl, richly dressed with gold-threaded hair and large gold earrings, bringing the stylus to the mouth and holding the wax tablets, notoriously accounting documents which therefore have nothing to do with poetry and even less with the famous Greek writer.

What is thine is divine and is feline

How sweet it is!
He chose me, he did.
Lucky to be
There then
when he wanted on his wild whimsy.
A seven-year itch, though it may be.
You see, it is quite easy to
cherish thee more every day
feeling more spiritually on air
by him just being there
by choice. His voice
calls and beckons for little me
whose heart feels about to burst forth
and spill thy weaknesses all over
with emulsified energy,
found the warmth we each seek
From the sun
this is how he follows thy heat
day by day.
That is all we can do, soak it up,
sound would only muffle the space.
So we should hold silence gently
and stay in this moment, you noticed me
waiting to be saved. You made me
meet you more than half way.
And now, this is we,
joined in verse where eternity is
guaranteed and easily granted
permission to feel what is happy.
We should
be happy, now,
with our own two eyes
and keep holding on to each other
for as long as little life will keep
holding us back.

What’s mine is mine, and it is HUGE

The old 
wrinkle their brows,

raise their jiggling arms and shout about

Treason-the youth are corrupt-and abruptly adding accusations

-they all cheated!
Blame like a sneeze

spreads its tiny germ spray every which way-

They, the old, 
say, the way it was in the old days,

I remember walking to school uphill both ways in the snow. 
You don’t know

about hard work.

those blooming golden years, we feared our elders.

The old ones 
tell the youth not to speak until spoken to,

and a hard days work is good for you.

The old tell tales of poverty, the great depression of souls, the cookie cutter worker.

The old warn the youth 
to learn from their calluses.

And not act so callous or abrasive,

and then something about the bees, 
being sweet and golden, sonny or honey and save your money
where your mouth is.

The young are working smarter, these days.

More progress means more pleasure in so many ways.

The youth 
do as they are told,

attend institutions that guarantee debt and teach less interest.

The youth 
learn about the old.

The youth owe the old. 
The youth have it made.

The youth are innovators. 
The young are not industrialists or enslavers, nor fans of manual hard labor.

Because it is better now. 
The old made it so.

How do we know?
They promised

more mines will open, and more minds will close. 
And due our diligence,

they make the youth pay to clear cut seas of trees, 

frack up, suck out, spill in, roll up our fit-bits and toil all over

Again.

The old learn mistakes.
The old American Dream was just a defunct memory 
of manufacturing

*Happiness*
the old way. 

The youth capitalize on these readymades.

                        A.I. doesn’t cost overtime, or demand PTO.

Robots reject bonuses and all bribes or benefits, 

vacations are not upgrades, but memory dumps
feel good at any age. 

The youth all know, 
long florescent office hours, kill creative powers.

The old said, dagnabbit, you youth with your lazy habits

and liberal use of Free Time-You’re Fired!

The youth had already quit

listening.

The old finally retired,

near blind and deaf, nearly senseless,

by thin hair and poking chin, struggled to keep up

and it made them flaming angry

about their own fragile mortality.

The youth became immune and inspired

to change old ways,

retrofit America to Be

Come Great

for the First time 
in the making of History,

truly tiny

by popularity vote.

Painting by Jan Steen (1625/1626–1679) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. "As the old sing, so twitter the young", c. b/w 1663-1665.

Shrinking Heads

They used to call them shrinks in slang.

This was a term when I was little.
And couch time or psycho-
analysis, psyche-ologists, undoctors with talk shows
was all the rage this term, shrink, 
made me think of voodoo, a secret serum from
head doctors. But nowadays we have BRAIN,
and the human genome project, AI and h-3

And thankfully,
someone just told me
something is happening to the frontal cortex,
of the human being-being busy;
because busyness wrecks
real concentration.

It could be fake news, you choose.

Once upon a time,
I remember memorizing phone numbers.
I remember every license plate
on every vehicle in my name,
but those were just a labels

like shovel and couch, doctor or woman
and I dug in deeper and found it is true. All of it.
It is frightening.
This cannot be happening, it must be only temporary.
What does it matter if we forget-
this too shall pass as short term.

I don't know anymore.
Always being right
tends to make one go in tiny circles.

Fear was all the rage.
And instead of screaming Fire, or Liar,
the roof began to crumble under
the weight of the clodded up canvasing
sky gathering clumps in furious spouts
of dirty watercolor,
meant to stir us.

Iron bars,
lashing at the trees and they scream.
It Is
eerie, some never heard it coming

or understood what it said.
(SH, RBTL, SITD?)
Terminal. The terminal. Terminus.
Communication was the key.
And oration from alabaster towers of babble flow,
throwbacks, boomerangs and borrowed times,
did not fit all skeletons.
It is a combination lock anyway.

Radical is bad, gay is not happy, no mo FOMO,
do NOT wear a hoodie or hijab,
protest and appoint, Act Now, undemocratically,
incivility as seen on TV versus Reality,

no need to worry.
Temporary occupations are hiring the easily entertained
or unemployed tools, oft utilized by
tightening nuts down to nationalism,
and their infallible dependence.


I forgot why I came in here, I forgot these are all names.
I forgot all the names. I forgot my name. I forgot this was the same.
I forgot to go. I forgot my place.
Then it came to me,
only temporarily.

It should be powered down, rebooted, then defragged
down to one, for focus. Ahead, and swollen baubles or egos,
ergo,
what does it mean to grow smaller
over time, we cannot even wrap our head around
astronomical units, lightning years.
or by electro-therapy injections we become
shorter, shorting out, shrinking from commitment
to deep time.

Slang was just another name
for small.
All the time
shrinking.



Image By Paul François Arnold Cardon, Photograph of the French psychologist Pierre Janet (1859–1947) by Paul François Arnold Cardon a.k.a. Dornac (1858–1941).

Come again? (Hi-Q/Haiku)

You know noise is more

(sound disturbance wave signal)

than you need to know?

Photo By Scan by NYPL [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Duel-ality

Make me.

                You’ll see.

Better than

                 what you had not fantasy

or yummy treats for Pavlov’s complacent puppy.

I will sit 

             and stay-for you-master-full.

Why-I want to make you happy-

                                                     all over

ecstatic insanity. Conversely, this is pretty

good for nothing worth trading

souls, 

          never do I say.

To be

          told you I won’t, you don’t,

I can’t help it always

feeling this way, 

                          abraded when edges

won't fit, 

                   the smooth cliff beckons

my plunge.

We were

               not trying to hold on

to each others exposed roots,

loosening further what has eroded

off the bark, 

                    exposed

sap dries the heart-

                              wood.

More about

together, alone.

We could be both those

Some days plays well

                                    w/ others &

always wins 

                     by cheating.

I let him. 

Artwork credit By Internet Archive Book Images [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons.

Working up to it

We had hopes

And held on

To air

Imagine this, delicately, with your fingers.

Tell me,

Is your faith strong, rigid, cold?

When we close our eyes, nowadays,

our metronome is muffled with backfire.

It is still

So busy so

We try to think

Optimistic, or up,

But that is not doing

Anything

For lift.

We had work to do, we all knew

Sweat

Yet, we hoped it would all get done.

Painting by Paul Peel [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

(forever) Haiku

particle & wave
Light like Love; impossible
to keep-in one place...


Painting by John William Godward [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Break an egg

Lucky to be alive, I have been.

Though, you know, it is possible

for Heroes to choose wrong.

I've seen

Chance has no memory of why 

me, or some such silly magic potion.

No body's in motion.

Keeping warm, for themselves. 

Believe you me, that which we are

we were here

filling our thanks.

The people making times I was excused...

inconsequentially

conditional

to now. 

How my mother put me on the bow of a small sailboat

in rough seas as a baby,

my father ran over me in their 1969 Camaro,

a drummer man overdosed lying on top of me, 

molested by my stepdad's badmate's husband,

while his two children slept nearby

made a bottle of Advil not enough medicine 

to take the pain away, but made the swelling ego

go down 

the tank.
Man. That was the first of many lasts.

Locked up 'Crazy', thrown out into the foster ghetto,

those taught me math and theoretical calculations.

The great earthquake tried to swallow me whole,

the small town ate me alive, diced me up in tiny pieces,

to spread around liberally until I could do no more harm

tastefully.

To be

T-boned at 90, spun into a tree while driving in a hurricane, 

broken down so many times in BFE, broke and down 

in BFE, driving drunk, or high, or unlicensed, never uninsured

hitchhiking my way around, kidnapped, poisoned, toxic shock,

pneumonias, ruptured appendix, a defunct pancreas,

weary grindstone, the corrupt gall cannot stand fat, or chit chat,

for that matter

black ice, the edges

all horizon thin,

but I keep winning, if that is what this is.

I need not know why

luck is a lady

random, like me. 

Glass making

All over the place

pour, poor women and wine,

overflown lips,

she sees her particulates

in liquid stains

held over old flames.

There is no innocent steam,

the trees that finally fell to timber

under scurrying winds collecting

clay clouds, pulling out roots

by the palmful in a disintegration of states.

She seemed mad.

That insistent sun rose its entitled torch,

humming, ho-hum-mums-the-blue iris to day, to

dew, and do the birds hone a tone in

one place, canary, and crow

cemetery or church, middle C

night and gale mocking us.

She giggles at others tripping over

stone heads

and bumping toes on crosses;

no body ever saw her,

smiling some where upon

she cried upon recognizing herself

as naked truth.

It hurts to linger too long

exposed against acclimation.

We shatter in the cold.

We were always restructuring and stacking

cardboard and compressing pixels

over old times, keeping alive,

ashes and splashes

mixing and folding us back in.

This con-trap-she's in,

clearly cracking

from such extremes

of rising and falling

body temperature.

Such is life.

Photo By SMU Central University Libraries [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons.

Time Leapt

I vaguely remember arguing with an accountant
(or mathematician)
about reconciling the Years End with the Leap Second
(or loss carry overs and off-setting capital Gains)
which of course led onto greener pastures,
futures, and master plans
such as the old erratic Julian calendar,
disappearing days, the value of time;
since time is money, paid hourly,
benefits and salaries
traded for living richly-

But, I bet his figures are better than
all my Reckons added up, The ante:
don't gamble if you do not count
on losing.

We've agreed to disagree
semantically about 'Balance'
and whose 'books' are better,
whose red-what-
Whether time matters more
for some
time we've known is not a matter
of physically covering ones assets,
or stock splits-

And yet, this hiccup, jump,
an algorithmic appliance,
rounding off and ballpark-
GAP
brought us back around to black holes
(and stellar bureaucracy)
being the center of each universe,
resistance, gravity, monogamy, and
uneven solutions such as slices of pi
or other dark matters where time is converted
instantaneously beyond what we can conceive
in a mind, in a hand, in a life
time-any-thing-more
slips through the cracks,
between fingertips, spills out, tells
all to watch, wait, rely, count on,
change, coinage, patronage and no matter what-
we were never Here too long to be wrong.

Still, I will
deny any transpositional errors or leaping
to conclusions. Definitively:
broken down seconds were
never more
than
firsts.

All accounts have been settled.
The time is Now.


Painting by Nicolas-André Monsiau (c. 1800) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

A handle on mesmerism

Just so you know, we were right

to suspect any consonant

that needs a vowel to back it up.

Quintessentially; quasi, quickness, quiet,

quarks and quantum theories,

all innocent until proven otherwise.

We were correct when we assumed

gravity would keep it all together,

but neglected to factor its distributive

properties & aggressive enforcement of

simultaneous eminent domain properties,

allegedly, stayed comfortable until ejected.

We were on the right track,

until it went-left-us

dusting prints and collecting categories.

We were seekers and askers

that could spare no time to wait

for the reply. Why, we all ready

knew, light travels by choice, fades,

in the dark effervescent legacy of We

picks its photonic path of preference or

-least resistance.

We were getting somewhere

further, expanding our reach and

grasp at the fading universe

whose tension untangles energy

by itself through kinesthetics.

We were playing with electricity

and shocked to see, we were the end

that shorted potentiality

with our beautiful brevity.

We were wrong all along

about gravity and letter pairs,

the proof was static, hanging, ringing,

crushing

all in the heavy air.

Artists conception By NASA/JPL-Caltech [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. From wiki:

This artist's conception illustrates a Jupiter-like planet alone in the dark of space, floating freely without a parent star. Astronomers recently uncovered evidence for 10 such lone worlds, thought to have been "booted," or ejected, from developing solar systems.

The planet survey, called the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA), scanned the central bulge of our Milky Way galaxy from 2006 to 2007. It used a 5.9-foot (1.8-meter) telescope at Mount John University Observatory in New Zealand, and a technique called gravitational microlensing. In this method, a planet-sized body is identified indirectly as it just happens to pass in front of a more distant star, causing the star to brighten. The effect is like a cosmic funhouse mirror, or magnifying lens light from the background star is warped and amplified, becoming brighter.

Add ages

Don't let them tell you

You had just one job,

they always expected more.

They say, Just be yourself,

as though given a choice.

Stand up for yourself.

Don't believe enough is ever enough,

it is only enough.

The first bird and the last owl

awake

are equal aviators

afflicted with (chronic) fomo-curious-itosis.

Silver bullets and linings should help save us

before things change anymore.

We have nothing better to do

than keep busy, make haste and donate

to causes

we make no effect on reason

such as why the wherewithall has

deteriorated and became dilapidated into

three-wheeling metallic adages.

Don't ask. Don't listen. Don’t look Back.

Don't do them.

Reason is revived with hind-

sight. You will see later.

The Truth

will set you free

to follow your heart,

to do what you love,

to be mindful,

to forgive and forget

Thyself

and rest in peace

lying down.

Take it.

Your Time

is up.

Painting by Édouard Manet [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Decorating mud cakes

Apathy spreads so easily,

thriving amongst any localized

biodiversity.

Ears sprout in fields from yellow seas

of mono-cropping. The wind grinds down

our meals into muted mush, nourish us,

the sun glows, chicken,

adapting itself in ambiance to the best

propagation of pessimism and

immunology in world-wide webs.

Saturation is more suitable for delusional

desires by dreamers who water down rainbows

as casualty.

There is no wonder

anymore.

Where does the marrow go

when our spines shrivel...

Clouds cure any silly thoughts of happy

or stupid glee, i.e. beauty. Muddy skies slog unmixed 
clods and none bother asking why

Life continues this way.

Over our heads. 
We would never see any reason

for it coming

down

in all shades of brown and grey.
We wont look up. 

Painting By Rogers, Gilbert (MBE) [Public domain], c. 1919 via Wikimedia Commons.

Hand me downs (II)

The local train blares by

to cause alarm

although familiar, futility gains strength with steam.

With this new engineer at the helm from the rear

he calls *Attention* to his pressures and passages

as though he

the town crier knew the time

anymore.

This whine is the bell vibrating raw gravity-

                           hard to see

coming straight, near, far, coming, going...

All the rest is color coded for us,

              lights and trigger switches

are on the outside, green and red, black and blue

Stop and Go for Simons followers.

The straight path, as the crow flies,

is soft and well worn, even in the sky

                     drawing diameters

in his radii, he is right on a smooth track.

To make it back home for dinner, meatloaf.

To rely on regular things such as

weak forces, sympathy and cacophonies.

Painting by Frits Thaulow, The train is arriving (1881) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.