You promised me postcards

Photo by Neal Casal (http://www.nealcasal.com/)

You promised me postcards
from your new, far off life

And when they never came
my love began to grow

As DeSade praised his wife
the more he was alone

The way hunger only grows
When left unfed

So was my sun merely a spark
Until you closed your eyes

Poem

By grange85 on Flickr

If I Stir
for William Stafford


If I stir in the night, my love,
To write what I see on the horizon,
Please do not be upset with me.

I know it is just another dawn,
That I, too, need more sleep before it arrives.
And, yes, that not everything is waiting to become my poetry.

But in those tranquil hours
When the universe itself seems to doze
I promise you it becomes something else

The secret of the world
Observed like you
Through a lover’s grateful prism.

Found: On Death

Ben is dead.

With 50 pages left, Ben is dead. The shadow-god of Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, has died of pheumonia. The death scene with family encircled has moved me deeply.

Thoughts, naturally, of my own brood, my own memories to be.

How will I mourn? In bedside vigilance of prayer? Cornered

howls for everything that was not?

An how will others encounter themselves

in my passing?

What thoughts, once seeking me out to play,

will flicker off for some other diamond,

another hardened stone in which to see their own in a perfectly

broken brilliance? Will they cry for the one left behind, the strange refrain

that had no more worlds?

Without even trying

I turn it to me.

What egoism arises

from death.

to my brother, found in old journal

Brand New Sunny...cont.

Ah, but there. It's crossed. I've lost if I don't swoop in with an element of pop culture. As if discussion of thought and theory has to be tethered visibly to soil. Fine, I concede. Surly Bitter Brewer seconds to Rogue's Black Brutal. It's a fact to be taken as fact. Belhaven Wee Heavy cocks them both. Mixing the ideal with the earthly. It's not even the level of Baroque wordplay that might make a ramble of this sort acceptable. The demilitarized zone of intellectualism and diddling one's own grey matter. Is it onanism when one wishes to express and not merely bask in the moment of spinout jubilation?

Perhaps such a display can be forgiven if it yields something beyond the self. Those plans on the table, the ones I spoke of earlier. Those responsibilities never mentioned, yet counterbalanced with instances of more. What Gadda does in translation. What intent does to complascence. How it all seems connected to the last inch of cigar on which I draw, attempting to enjoy the taste and not the heat. Not yet old enough to glean flavor from the full range of the spectrum of heat.

This, the part that will stay mine. I speed up to leave skid marks on the moment, only to realize the lack of track upon which to run...etc. etc.



I need a week of abandon. Italy, Germany, England. Some realm far enough away that I can call it aether. Time there. Carved out of long, unadulterated stretches of the soul's hologram. Steps down strange streets taken slowly. Everything slowly. Drawing on a fine cigar. A sip. Even writing, slowly, with a fine instrument, opting speed for the aesthetic enjoyment of languid unfolding.

Italy, with my anglophile tendencies winking amorously at England. A bit off, I see, as more and more enter the bar. Local poetic champions adding a bit of charismatic dirt to their noble vitae. For some of us, the dirt is all we have. We learn to build castles that don't last the night.

Italy. It hits me like the bathroom grafitti. "Dead Carp" writting in the shape of a fish. "Screw you" which just makes me feel wanted. I have never imagined Italy beyond my reverie, yet now I plot to work there for a summer, real friends with real family who might make it happen.

What do I believe could happen? A timeless moment to carry with me like a fob back into my routine life? Something to fondle as I wince through days? A split second snatch of melody that alters the cells of the heart? Yes, I expect as much. I am still that young. To research a city's gunning legacy, and respect it with response. A fine point put to the country who puts itself forward - its major meccas at least - in a way that illustrates the Parisian Left Bank in ways itself can no longer.

For this meantime, then, I will sprint within my confines. The way I draw slowly on the final quarter inch of this 5 Vegas, Limited Edition. A smile of thanks to local liquor starburst Jay Johnson for his generosity....

~

Freddie and the Baby King of Norway

I could see his smile from behind as he hopped the last step and waddled his nonexistent ass into the bar. He was an orb of fat and back hair atop a small square of plaid boxers. An single scoop of tried jokes and b.o. I immediately wanted to call Freddie. Bulging through his once manly mane, Freddie approached the only decent looking girl in the place, who was seated close to the door facing inward to convey that old simple secret, "I am not easy. You have to talk to me first." He gave her neck a friendly squeeze more about his ability to get away with such a move than a gesture of friendship. He took up his pole position at the bar earned over the last month, paid for in half-paid tabs and requisite last call promisings, and tried to make her smile.

In my hometown in TN this ubiquitous move is found in year two of any Player's curriculum. After the paralysis before the fear of paralysis in the face of certain virginity (final exam, year one), it becomes all about the offense maneuver, judging tactics and timing. There are lateral moves that call for motion toward the confident ex-cheerleader (and subsets thereof, dependent upon her marital status, financial success and lasting popularity in the community she has no intention of leaving). A more linear advance can be made on those out of their element. With proper timing and tempo she can be laughing beside you despite your overbite and only three more drinks from eyes hard shut and gripping the door handle.

And then there are guys like Freddie. His is an effective confidence born of indifference, of admission of one's inexorably frozen fate. It is bravery before the barrel of a gun, discovering time and time again that some bullets are only deadly if you believe their bullshit. Most just hurt, and that's nothing but another tic come game time.

The resort bar is named Baby King Haakon's Bar and Grille (I couldn't make that up) having what to do with the local mythos of infant kings saved by Thorish half-brothers, epic decents down a mountain just outside the video arcade, peppered now with more mortal, but still impressive, boogie boarders. Here in the bar, it's a strange kind of beat down VFW and ecru collared visitor center. Some have ventured far to seek the firework marketing of a winter's fun pinnacled in chance adventure, family-gathered R&R tinged with the implied hope of a carnal backslide. Others are simply locals from the nearby town of Cable who have saved paycheck drippings for a chance to show spouse and kiddies Daddy ain't as bad as he sounds at midnight. More often than not the weekend getaways end up hair-splitting declarations of success, failure, and wall-mounted contentment.

I envied something in Freddie's gait, the gleam in his eye as he walked in the door. The happiness of seeing his people already at the helm, his throne, already warmed with the game. Not that being the one to pop the evening's cherry would have gotten him down. No, Freddie was the kind of returning band camp senior who relished that role too, took a repeated pride in being the one who got things going down here on the best part of the first floor by the arcade (Burn Out Champ two years running), where the real fun is should you drag yourself all the way down the hall, to Cable, to pay to play in the snow. The Packers were on, so that's all she wrote. The place was Hrothgar's mead hall after good defense of the realm, songs and swears swelling into the loyalty of small town souls to their chosen guilds. Almost medieval, just outside the urban glow of some bigger, real city.

Telemark Resort
Cable, WI
January 2008

Brand New Sunny Happy New Year

The film of the last few years has been stripped, forcing me to accept potential as it mingles with brand new life. It is as though it heard me say Enough! No more waiting. As if the world I believe had not written us off. The passing thoughts and plans of Major Accomplishment, which had been taken down and stored, are suddenly assembled on the table in front of us. Stacked in columns of Babel or flat rows of solitaire. Red king on a black queen, maybe gin. The plans before us will be weighed against time, energy, and propriety, with a thumb on the losing side of chance. With a dare and an eye on the witching fade into the future we must order them and begin. Resolve them with the Reality. Though some plans must be postponed in lieu of others, it is the zest of those chosen that will propel us forward to what we are to become and become in the world.

It's the opposite of youth, the incessant revving of the engine in neutral, the starting point from which all things at once are possible, but not yet begun. I've spent entire summers there. Wasted years more lithe than these. But then perhaps it is a necessary waste charged with making us take up the years left with more appreciation, more focus, more commitment. To move beyond the regret of what we've wasted. That feeling that must devestate us, but show us it is not too late.

O what it takes to get some of us started! A glance at one's peers, perhaps. Desdamona's jump to an overdue musicality. The steady progression of those we respect in envy. Sons and daughters reminding us the wrinkles we've earned are lines of real demarcation. Regret is too easy. The water there is perfect. Stay a while, it says, build up your potential. It is important to visit, but never stay.

Whatever the causes and metaphors, the time has come. 21st century, a few years in. The placement of my thoughts and ideas and reverie and hope into this hole for reasons only my penchant for exhibitionism understands. That part of me which whispers unsense into the dark.

to compose in miniature with the belief that, like current web design paradigm,
a minimalism in form portrays content in a glorious fountain of gravitas.
As if sans serif ascribes to each the moving of mountains.

All of this in the afternoon sun, but not without a whiff of bowel. I know enough to know my epiphanies have their price point. Even the loftiest of notions have the ability to take sudden headers off cliffs. What I would pay for the optimization needed to assure successful flight. My bougeouis crust thicker, despite my best intentions, a possible side effect of age. How much effort will it take each time to strike some healthy vein? What it really matters in the long run. It takes a multi-dimensional chart to make sense of it all, the kind used in costly presentations at the Landmark Center not over the lunch hour, but at seven with apps.

"How to Advance Successfully in Urban Stratego"
paired with Savignon Blanc.

"Speaking Effectively with Institutions of Art"
presented by the Walker. Bad martinis, extra.

Cover charge for the chimera of hope.

Crumbs: I-VI

Snapshots from a lunch at Great Waters.


I.
Pasty white men shot
Into suits
Sausages Bluetooth toward the future
Rightfully paved



II.
Stumbling gentry
Eskimo pie lunch date
With oblivion


III.
Tiny women keeping
Company with chimps
Success promised more than
This pimping



IV.
Another vagrant promenade
Every can's a hope
The leg up
Everyone else has been given



V.
In the courtyard
Predictable pop music
No one knows where



VI.
The look of refinement
How quaint the thought
What am I
But the reason