…and plenty of time for reading…
2020 – 090/366 – A chair of one’s own…
2
(with apologies to Wallace Stevens and his Snowman) The Scarecrow Mutely standing in a field of fallow stubble, bending on the loam, one’s mind is a business of musing the morning sun to rise. Bold mice scurry through holes in boots, tickling would-be toes of would-be feet and climbing through knees of overalls that, overall have seen brighter days. Sparrows puff from red flannel seams-- brown-feathered breath calling to starling hands that wish to rub pale straw moths from hollow sockets that stare the stars from the sky. One has hopes of scaring someone--anyone--and listens without ears to hear all that is not there and the one thing that is.
(Four-for-one today, because I have been Presently Absent or Absently Present or.... well...Missing...and I may come up Missing again. Anyone who actually listens to all four gets a cookie...and my undying....umm...curiosity? Awe? Stupefaction?) Missing, part 1 How many times did you wake up in the night, find an empty cup and wonder where your mind used to be, your self alone and just you in the bed, and just the one bed with unfamiliar sheets, your head on a strangely scented pillow? I would have brought her there, you know, for you to hold, and not for me. You needed her more. I can see that now. I would have stood close by, just a ways, and averted my gaze; let you have your time alone as I tried not to turn to stone. Missing, part 2 I wonder--did those strange scents jar your memories and dreams toward unseen collisions with silence, that wrong kind of quiet made dense with soft specific sounds that spell a place far deeper than our well- used alphabet of ancient objects? Our limbic world just disconnects over time. Our temporal selves get disheveled. Cerebral shelves do not suffice any more. We strive to hold things in place, but see only place-holders and when age eats worlds, the words fall off the page. Missing, part 3 Do you feel the rain where you are? Is there water there in the far reaches of memory? Does time fall through the air, like brittle rime crusting the sea? Is this weather? Tenuous shifts of the tethers that tie us, each to our own place? I stand in the rain, raise my face to the falling sky as my sight becomes a part of the pale light that is left to us, and wonder how we can all be so sundered and still hold together all this madness, beauty and darkness. Missing, part 4 Are your words still with you? Did you carry your stories deep into the night and leave them like luggage on a railway platform, an age and more down silver tracks, with just the wind, the stars, and leaves like dust blowing and hissing in the dark? This silence leaves a fading mark. The thing that took you left your face in bodies unknown to you, lace filaments tracing what the eyes of others cannot see: the ties that generation takes away; the look in eyes that cannot stay.
The presence of absence
this emptiness is not a substance
or a non-substance but a thing
or a non-thing. this emptiness
has a name, a place and a form.
when we speak of it, we speak
not of emptiness but of an emptiness,
a singular vacancy that
inhabits a place, a space
in an inner landscape
like a deep canyon where
nothing ever happens any
more, not even weather.
~~~~~~~~
and this is how it happens. an empty
rumble echoes in an emptiness.
a space finds room to breathe
and the room finds space
to live again in the empty
rooms of another, and these
emptinesses are much the same.
they are filled with the same nots,
the same uneasy intervals
bound by different chords,
threads that thrum in the void,
the same void, the same un-
this-ness — the same— and these
emptinesses speak to each other
across the fullness of the world,
through the things we cling
to and avoid and we
color these things and
we build them up around
us and we call them memory
and they are never enough.
fluid
"god" is a word.
"god is dead" is three words.
Meaning is fluid, pumping
from three words
to what you believe
I believe.
“guts” is a word.
“I hate your guts” is four words.
I don’t know your guts.
My words are
meaning moving in
your guts.
“Can you taste the venom in my soul?”
I have no soul.
You have no guts
to call your own.
Venom has no taste and
no vessel.
“Guts” is just a word.
“Soul” is just a word.
“god” is
just a word.
God is just.
God is justice.
Justice is a worm.
I have worms in my guts,
God’s guts.