How the ship went down

He wont go in, I asked him.
He said it is too c-c-cold.

It is February, someone said.

I thought it was warmer here,
that's what you said,

Spoke the brother man
I just met,
he then looked at
me.

He pretended to be misled
by the change in latitude.
Lightly making light
of this ceremonious process.

I looked around
for any familiar
faces.
The sun setting
cast a candle glow
on all of them.

The wind picked up
random pieces,
stirring us
salt and water
with mixed drinks.

Fifty-five and a half million lives lost
every year-two dozen ships sink.

"Relatively," I confessed,
unrelated to any
body.

And we were oceanside
all together,
a family,
not mine but with me doing this rite,

the ships sailed back to the harbor,
we all watched the pterodactyls pass
hugging the shoreline,
then seagulls in vees
watching us hug back.

We saw him now
scale down the riprap,
clutching the carved wooden box
in his left hand,
the waves rushed in to
meet him first

and he did not look back at us
looking over the edge
once.
He would not hear
the group of us
cheering
this man, these two men in the sea

fighting to stand,
fighting to let go
the sand, the ashes

and I saw that he was sobbing.
Silently, softly,
his shoulders shook
against the crisp horizon
in the last light
of that day.

He would have wanted it that way
is all his golden child could
grasp onto long enough
to say...

(This evening now gone,
peaceful bones, now resting deep
I thank the tide
for the grainy souls
it keeps
moving us
to live
without
wasting any more time)


Painting by William Bauly Lithography by Sarony, Major & Knapp [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Making myself scarce

When the door latches,
when it is only me
in this shrinking body,

when all I must do
is what I must,

when I start to feel lucky
I must be blessed,

when I am rested
I think of aging,

when I am tired
I remember dying,

when I wake up
when I reach for a pen,

I am alive. I am living.



Image credit Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, 1840 self portrait in[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Eurydice got jaundice

Be cause
the slight sulphuric smell
whisked off the top
by the cool purple night
sent signals, scented
words artists understand
as beckoning

-It is safe to come out Now-

And,
as far as frequency may go
undetected
and we hope to scatter awe,
                       curiously as
indiscriminately as dreams
Do.

Why choose these
creators, creatures,
to translate such dark
thoughts to bodily form,

two birds on one stone
already shared the whole sky

what more could be said...

How could feeble eye
capture any more light
with one small grounded
sol

such as
belief in something more there
may be, brighter than this thought
could scatter its spotted array
today
sketched out in perse ink.

Dried pens and then,
bruising egos bright,
all of this goes garish yellow,
away and tinged
in tangibility, catagorically,
and it is no longer clear,

How
my fellow man,
plans to capture
all of this
so beautifully.

The artist listens
to brilliance breathe regularly
in deep starlight strokes and matches its
rhythm. and tries to remember
every thing that has ever been created
for arts sake.

It is reason enough
to wake.

Artwork by John Roddam Spencer Stanhope (1878) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Busy going down the drain with Eddy

Start here and get this over with
will you-so we can move on
with more of the same

wistful wants.
This two
let pass...

First things first,
get 'em on deck and in a row-
orderly, nice and tidy, see

things get done this way-
or do they, I pray
we are not just

tilling our rich soils
like Voltaire-infertile,
infantile and bored,

whereby garden side

resides this musing man
who gets lost with no plan-
hence without direction.

I reckon.

That is not you. This is not us.
We no longer grow our food.
Despite the growing bellies

thick with cancer,
bloated and blurred
in fact, it keeps us busy

wondering what happened
with all these weeds.
We were supposed to be a-
mazed, we can grow.

A lie, a labyrinth,
a temporary structure
lay in the dirt.

We were pulled in one direction,
despite resistance, like cancer
this was no choice,

but diagnosis.

There was only one direction,
it was a-
head.

On second thought
there is no good place
to begin to make it

in sphere

we are contained,
consumed and thereby
recreated

it keeps us busy.





Image of artwork by Lodewijk Toeput [Public domain], Pleasure Garden with maze, (c. 1579-84) via Wikimedia Commons.

Is this bliss?

Fleeting moment to
day to pass by happenstance
and happen to say




















Painting By Daderot (Own work) [Public domain or CC0], via Wikimedia Commons.

super-natural and extra-ordinary

Most mistake
miracles for
just coincidence,
which is ironic

as a rule,
coincidence is when
the obstacle is dissolved entirely
just solutions remain

concentrated ad-mixtures
of luck and faith, a coupling
tangled making waves
turbid in the wake

hours
that cannot count stars
that doubts itself
clear enough

for the common kind
of man to consume
as pure prophecy
by numbers.

It is possible,
it was more than probable
that this kind
was a miracle
of just willful
coincidence.


Painting by Jean-François Millet [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

I Swear I was Stuck

So there I was
wedged or nestled
too snuggly-

No,
it was not ennui or an-
other excuse or
heaven forbid,
Newtons energetic projections
about inertia and what not

bottomed out.

It was some other
matter unseen,
pokey, a bit rigid
and there is me,
in the mid-hole,
grinding out granite--damn it-
maybe more like banded agate--shit-

trying to say
things and this like, as in,
better be, another way,
by wiggling, leveraging
without a write word in
edgewise

seems heavy
when you carry it around forever.

Remember the conjecture
about the speed of falling great
egos?

No? Me neither.
I suppose nobody knows
the right thing any more

than what was left alone

to make it move.
The words have escaped me.

Now I am free
to stay stuck--
(in) stupid silent protest.




Portrait by Franz von Stuck, c. 1900 in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.