Your intellect will not figure out anything for you here.
Your surrender will.
The poems – the Bukowski “don’t try” moments – benefit from the releasing and giving up.
The bean counting and the keeping score suffer.
What am I?
Right now, I’m a coffee drinker.
And I’m a morning nobody.
Who could I be today?
A smiling face for some – a lovely conversation.
A caring connection to a stranger.
A reinforcement to someone who already knows me.
One who literally follows the light – looking for beauty scenes all day.
What am I missing that’s wonderful?
What am I passing up?
I can be re-organizing the bean counting for this character.
I can survive this storm of floods and sunshines and dullness.
I can thrive in a barren landscape.
I can be a bug in a petri dish.
A protozoa, a rat, a Jerusalem beetle.
I have eternal, unchanging truth.
I have a dead skeleton within me.
I have color in grayness.
I have bone that talks to me.
I have experts dying to tell me what to do.
I have ancestors smarter than myself.
I have offspring geniuses.
I have all of it.
I contain it all.
None contains me.
Life force screams through me always, and I’m busy preventing it.
Thinking you’re some sort of outside god preventing anything is the farce.
The life force roars through, and you pretend to put your hand into its stream.
You dip your hands into the mud and think you’ve touched a planet.
And maybe that’s it.
Maybe it’s about pretend.
Imagining.
What can you do with a pile of nothing?
What absurd dance can you do for all?
What performance for no audience?
Performing for the only one who notices.
Falling into something can be sublime.
Into love.
Into water.
Into confusion.
Into a batch of words.
Into paints and a canvas.
Coming out someone different.
Coming out somehow furthered.
Falling into taste and temperature.
Into the flesh of another.
Into a light and the ringed waves beyond it.
The splashes of energy coming off of a silly light bulb.
Where do the days go?
Except with etchings on the face.
An absorbed man sees time carved out on his face.
A woman tries to stretch away the lines.
The sun laughs at them all.
Their houses will be rubble.
Their faces will flee to ashen winds.
And man tries to intimidate his brother with tales of weather.
Of scorching faces, of heart attacks, of frozen days ahead.
The macro planet freezes us out, then the space system throws rocks our way, and we love them as they pass.
Streaks of light with heads and tails.
Cataclysms – the ones that hit and take away eons of “progress.”
A reset, however, the most lovely of deletions.
Could apocalypse be ultimate beauty?
Ask that of the man who dies.
Does the dying man embrace his end?
Does the dried flower lament its living days?
Why do the pigs scream at the abattoir?
Perhaps nothing to be feared on “another side.”
Maybe screaming like a toddler not wanting to leave a playground so glorious.
Throwing a fit – knowing a place with food and play is desirable.
And a place without desire might be boring.
A toddler scream.
A not wanting to go home.
A longing for a slop yard to be missed.
All the flavors to be tasted again.