thee istsfor manity reader

Oh Holy Fog

The raga swirls about her bare white room creating eddies of sound that fill the corners and cover the ceiling with paprika and saffron hues.

A nebula forms around her head, orbits about and congeals into a pulsating gray nimbus.  She walks down the hall to her father’s room.

Her father is in a trance, and upon opening his eyes, he says: “What you do does not matter.  You are nothing but decaying organic components.  You mean nothing.  This, what we do, is nothing.  What you wait for in the future is nothing.  So stop.”

The floor disappears below and she falls through the void looking up just in time to see the world above go dark.  Her father above peers down behind an iris shutter closing. She falls through the black.  Arms stretch out of the darkness but can not arrest her fall.

She falls through an apocalyptic face in flames  — mouth agape — floating in space.  She intuits that the meaning of life is being revealed in this scene —  all is despair.

A blinding flash of white reveals that she’s now flying over anonymous cities and countryside.  She stutters mid-air and falls again.  She falls with great speed and gravity.  She can do nothing to arrest the fall.  She plunges to earth and hits the ground — and in this manner she wakes up gasping for air.

She’s encrusted in a film of the calamine lotion that was slathered on her in the emergency room last night.  She speaks automatically to the nurse in a torrent of words that waited a thousand years to be heard:

“You have to teach me to take the wind load.  I need a prayer room and chaplet next to me at all times, so I’ll rarely move.  I’m incubated and intubated.  My seizures are mine alone and I’d like you to respect that, under starry skies, and below level ground.  Try adapting, submarine-like, living in an abrupt sloped space.  I need my pillars back!  What is it that truly bothers you?  Do you flinch at roaches flying your way?  Does it concern you that youth culture will swallow you in the end?  Repent and stay quiet.  I fed the cat.  I was overtaken by the vapors when I opened the can of cat food:  Red Snapper Vesper Bits, it read.  God bless hair balls!  The cat walked out of the kitchen uninterested.  The fumes filled the kitchen and my revelation came to fruition.

I became a rice weevil.

And I kept exhorting: ‘oh holy fog,’ as the fog rose up and obscured the kitchen.  Laxity.  A  laxity of mind for which the fog was a metaphor.  A purple miasma seeped in like a cloud and nothing was self evident anymore.  There was a din, a blinding light and then complete darkness.”

“Writing gave me something to do every day.”

— William Burroughs

watch one of my found cut-up films above

Lap Dissolves

Fade In:

I don’t remember going to my first movie.  I am told it was Dr. Zhivago in the Spring of 1966.  I was 2-years-old.  During the intermission my mother was asked to leave the theater because I was running in the aisles and talking to people.  Who takes a 2-year-old to a 3-hour 17-minute movie about unrequited love during the Russian Revolution?  A 24-year-old woman suffering through the unrequited love born of a revolution 40 years later and 90 miles south across the Florida Straits.  I’ve seen Dr. Zhivago a dozen times since then — unable to thaw its impenetrable winters. 

Lap Dissolve:

There were other movies in the intervening year, those memories are missing in the folds of time, but I remember in 1967, just before I turned four, I was at the movies with my parents watching A Man and A Woman.  The man and the woman onscreen were kissing in bed, there was a flash of a breast.  I was hoisted out of my seat onto my mother’s lap; her hands rose like two moons knocked out of orbit, and pressed into my eyes — a total eclipse of light.  I heard the man and the woman onscreen moaning.  It sounded like pain at first, then something else — something foreign, something sinister?  An amour fou?  My mother clamped her forearms hard to my ears; my head in a vise now.  Insensate now.  Deaf, blind, and dumb now.  Who takes a 3-year-old to a movie about unrequited love between a widower and widow?  We left midway through the movie.  I’ve yet to see this movie through.  But my mother played the soundtrack for years, every Saturday morning, while she cleaned the house.  Love still eluding her, twisting up in fine motes scattered by the feather duster — and beyond the stretch of the vacuum hose.  

Lap Dissolve:

My grandmother dropped me off at the movies a few times when I was 6.  My parents did not know our secret.  I’m not sure what she did after she dropped me off in the comforting gloom of the Tivoli Theater.  I imagined, years later, she was meeting a man, and she was “the woman” in A Man and A Woman.  She was a widow of sorts — a widow of the Cuban revolution.  I imagined the “man” was Alberto — the man she eventually married —  in Miami on a visit from California or Puerto Rico. I remember seeing The Jungle Book on one of these excursions to the Tivoli.  On another visit there was a Vincent Price double feature: The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Conqueror Worm, which I never finished seeing because she came back to pick me up midway through the movie.  Who drops off a 6-year-old by himself at the movies on a midweek mid-afternoon?   I never seen The Conqueror Worm in its entirety.  Bita’s unrequited love needed “requiting.”  I needed the movies.

Lap Dissolve:

My father and I bonded at the movies when I was 10-years-old, in the wake of his dying marriage to my mother.  We were at the movies nearly every weekend during 1973: Sleeper, Papillon, The Sting, Westworld, Live and Let Die, Day of The Jackal, at least one film a weekend, sometimes two.  But it was that double bill of The Aristocats and Song of the South I remember most vividly.  While Uncle Remus sang, “my, oh my, what a wonderful day…” my father broke out sobbing.  He said he messed up.  He said he missed us.  He said he was sorry.  He wanted to come back.  I held his hand.  I didn’t understand what was happening.  I had never seen him cry.  After a while, I said I had to go to the bathroom.  I called my mother from the safety of the phone booth in the lobby.  I told her he said he was sorry.  He was crying.  I was crying.  She had to take him back.  She said, “That a son of a bitch drug addict.  I’m going to kill him —” and hung up.  Who takes a boy to a Disney double feature and breaks down with bluebird on his shoulder?  I was isolated there in the phone booth under a flickering, failing, light.  I never wanted to see that movie again.  What else could I do now but resolve to make my own movies one day?  I swore to myself I’d never shoot a happy ending.

Fade Out

“It’s not easy to sit down every morning with next-to-nothing and try to make something appear.  But we do it because doing it beats not doing it.”

— Austin Kleon

Oye, Hermano:  Ode To My Unknown Half-Brother

Oye, hermano,

We share the stuff of life;

In us flows the destinies of madness

And abuses most sharp:

 

Self-abuse, self-abasement,

Self-abnegation, self-aggrandizement,

Self-atonement.

 

We are mad with missile crises, 

And hostage crises, deep 

In our DNA.

 

We are three decades apart,

But the same shipwreck disorder — 

Those same 90 miles and congenital madness — marks us.

 

Where are you now, hermano?

What do you do and how

Do you cope?

 

Have you children?  Did you

Continue the family line?  Did you

Extend the name another generation?

 

Does that madness still live?  Will it

Outlive us both?  As we float apart 

On our separate continents sinking.

 

We will be inundated

With memories of belt buckle rain storms

And searches for redemptions in chemicals and mind control…

 

Psychotropic — be our names —

Peaceful (I hope) — be our rejoinders —

In our separate searches for meaning.

 

In this madness

That has been bequeathed

To us in separate, mysterious, lives.

 

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those that do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”

— Graham Greene

A Rare Delectation

He woke up with the Spinners’ “I’ll Be Around” spinning in his head.  He had this dream 1,822 times since seeing their performance on that Saturday morning in 1973.  The gold and ruddy light of it.  The smoking jacket outfits on the group.  The dancers in a sea around them popping up sharp to the rhythm and then descending to the backbeat in perfect rubbery time.  The beauty.  The sheer joy of it.  The possibilities.  He never tired of this dream.

Feel good.  Incendiary.  

The sun was up like a burning bald head.  The brightness insisted its way through the gap in the blinds and past the scrim of his eyelids.  The Soul Train Spinners had been preceded by a nightmarish episode where he was caught out on the Ustyurt plateau during a violent electrical storm.  

He was the only living thing standing for miles, and as the wind lashed down on him, and the lighting cracked the sky into splinters that imbedded themselves in the rain and came homing for him like millions of tiny needles.  

Dreadful.  Noxious.  

He feared not for himself but for the congealed beef plov which was the consistency of dried cement and while he saw the individual pieces of mutton, carrots, and rice in the kazan he couldn’t get the spoon which was intractably stuck in the inert block of food to move.  He was two weeks without food.  And as an electrical charge exploded nearby he was full of existential angst like he’d rarely, viscerally, felt before; and in that howling  — in the egregious hunger — he heard the mellifluous voice of Don Cornelius introducing the Spinners.

Recurring.  Hope. 

The opening strains of the amber guitars and percussion faded up forcing the yowling plains of the Ustyurt into a pin prick spot of light that sparked momentarily in the “O” of the Soul Train neon sign above the Spinners starting their dance routine.  And as the clopping congas, violin glissandos and horns caught momentum, he felt sated.  He was momentarily content for the 1,823rd time in his dreams. 

Today would be one of the good days.

“Celebrate writing and writers you love. Don’t go out of your way to be an asshole or devalue writing that matters to other readers. And don’t buy books on Amazon!”

— Kelly Link

cored

i went to the well and saw jesse

floating there

her eyes frozen on the concrete sky above

arms splayed at her side gently

lapping in the blackness

 

her eyes were stone gray

 

i went to the well to perform my ablutions

but jesse was floating there

she was cored

a sliver in the murk

 

i too feel hollow inside

a stitch of guilt

 

i went to the well and saw jesse

in an act of transcendence so absolute

so pure in that darkness

that i will not speak of it again

 

i went to the well and won’t

return

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.”

— Margaret Atwood

birds of prey

I.  Turbulence

As his flight boarded he finished the bottle of Malbec in the airport bathroom.  Someone brusquely shook the stall door a third time and walked away.  The sound of flushing urinals, toilets and hand dryers echoed off the tile.  He was dizzy and fell back on to the toilet, cracked the seat, and bounced off onto the wet floor.  He saw a mop bucket rolled up to the stall door. 

A pair of shoes worn colorless and splattered with stains appeared next to the bucket. The door was jostled again and a voice said, “Sir, are you all right in there?  Are you o.k.?”

He tried to lift himself up using the bowl for leverage.  He grabbed for the seat, it shifted and he careened to the far side of the stall, and fell face down on a wet spot.  The wetness was colder than he expected. 

“Sir, I’m going to get airport security,” the voice said.  “Do you need medical help, sir?” The door shook brusquely.

“Coño!”  He heard as the mop bucket wheeled away underneath the door.  “Que mierda, chico,” trailed away. 

He saw a procession of suitcases clattering, and shoes, mostly sneakers, and some dress shoes, and a few open toed sandals — “somewhere sunny and warm,” he whispered. 

He struggled up and sat on the toilet.  He reeled and listed.  The seat cracked again and he teetered above the bowl.  His plane taxied down the runway.  He bounced off the sharp edge of the bowl.  He keeled in some indistinct direction.

 

II.  Friendly Skies

Shit, the one and only thing that’ll calm me down now is to switch to Jesus Christ Superstar on my IPod. 

I’m stuck here in seat 14F — the window — with two large ladies blocking my escape route.  I’m full of gas from the channa masala I had for breakfast and I have to take a grievous piss.  These women are talking about their church bake sale in Brunswick, Georgia.  They must have been programmed to do this precisely at this moment.  Outside the wings are vibrating wildly.  The jet motor seems as if it might fall off in this turbulence.  How could these women not be affected by the storm outside?  They’re oblivious to the plight of the airplane.  They must be automatons planted by my mother to spy on me.

We’re above an endless plateau of cirrus, and look at that wisp of crescent moon nailed to this impossibly saturated blue sky.  The moon out at noon.  Proof, and more proof, that I’m being watched.  These people are everywhere.

The two year-old behind me is screaming shrill cavils.  His parents seem inured to this spectacle.  He’s kicking my seat.  What’s wrong with this little fuck.  Why are these people doing nothing to control this bastard.  Who are these people.  Shit, they’re glaring at me. The parents, too, are plants.  They must be. 

And look at the two across the aisle.  She’s reading Cosmopolitan and he has a copy of Weekly World News open to a page that screams:  Elvis Found! Living As A Hermit In The Himalayas.  Another ruse. 

The plane is compressing in on itself.  We’ll all be crushed up here at 28,000 feet.  Maybe I can crack this window open with my elbow.  I must, I must get out of here.  I can jump out and catch hold of the wing just thirty feet behind me.  Easy.

Maybe I can take this kid out before I head out.  Yes, the pens in my backpack.  I’ll stick one into his neck and puncture his carotid artery.  Yes, yes!  Wait, where exactly on the neck is the carotid?  I’m not sure.  Fuck.  No, no, I’ll just puncture the left side of his neck under the ear and pull across the throat to the other ear.  Yes, I’m sure to hit it that way, probably twice actually. 

Wow, look how cool that looks down there.  That solid bank of cirrus has broken and now we’re over mountainous cumulus clouds, big puffy fuckers, like god-sized cotton balls.  Man, that is beautiful.  Whoa, “Pilate and Christ” this is my absolute favorite on Superstar.  Lots of give and take between the two and those horns pierce.  Fucking pierce!  Ah, shit, “Herod’s Song.”  Shit, no, this is my favorite, I think.

God damn it, kid, shut up. 

Where is it.  Not this one, I hate these pens, a back up I’ve never used.  Here.  Yes.  Why won’t this top pop off?  There.

Shut up kid.  Oh yeah, I love this line “Get out, you, king of the Jews… get out of my life.” I never pictured Josh Mostel as Herod.  He couldn’t sing for shit.

Kid, say goodbye, so fucking long.  Here.

Why’s everybody screaming?  What gives?

Wow, this blood is darker and warmer than I ever expected.

Get your hands off me, man.

Why are these people running up here?  Ow, lady let go of my balls, you fat bitch.  Who’s got their hands on my neck?  Fuck, fuck, that hurts.  Get off me, you fat fuck.  I need to get to the window and I’ll be out. 

Yes, someone has my face pressed to the window.  Just let go of my arm, asshole.  Just got to get my elbow… 

Shit.

Look at that sky.  I never thought a blue like that was possible.

“Be a good steward of your gifts.  Protect your time.  Feed your inner life.  Avoid too much noise.  Read good books, have good sentences in your ears.  Be by yourself as often as you can.  Walk.  Take the phone off the hook.  Work regular hours.”

— Jane Kenyon

 

Epigraph in Ekphrasis:

Or more stories about C-sections

 

i.

I would like this poem 

to be an envoy —

Bearing a gap-toothed smile

between sharpened incisors…

 

ii.

“Remember, you can’t be denied.  Everyone hides.  Where is this little big man hiding?  Hmm.  Sorry, hon, we’re going c-section on you.  Oh, relax.  Nothing to it.  Look, I was a c-section myself and I turned out all right.  

Nurse, get me that sardine can top — the one with the pull tab.”

“This one?”

“Yes, god damn it.”

“But it’s rusty doctor.”

“Give it here.”

“I gave you a good dose of fugu fish tincture, a few minutes back there, hon.  That’s why you can’t move or talk.  You’re basically a zombie, see?  Just breathe as deeply as you are able — provided your diaphragm is nearly paralyzed.  Just think happy thoughts.”

“Nurse!”

“Yes, Dr. Sobrenada?”

“Play some atonal music.  Loud!”

“Not Valkyries, Doctor?”

“Schoenberg, god damn it.  Webern at the very least.  Some James Tenney tape loops in a pinch.  But loud.  And now!”

“Yeah, sister, I got a crackin’ tape collection for being 90 miles east of Iquitos.  How in the hell did you end up there anyway?  And in this state.  What are you doing traveling by dugout canoe so irrefragably pregnant.  Silly rabbit.  Well, you’re home now and relaxed. We’ll have that cracker out of there in no time…”

“Goddamnit, nurse, turn it up!”

“No use squirming, sister. You can’t go anywhere, and I ain’t no bibliolater.  Just a man full of meanness.  A misanthrope — I guess you’d say.  Take that 25 cent word with you to the bank.  Well, maybe not to the bank… take it to your shallow-ditch grave.  I aim to put you out of your misery…”

“Nurse! Incision…”

“Yeah, go ahead and scream, sistah.  The fugu tincture certainly did nothing to your vocal chords, did it?”

“Nurse, maximum volume!  Good help is so rare these days — keep ‘em when you get ‘em.”

Mmmmm… yes… let it out, hon. You sound like a drunken pileated — hey, hey listen, you know that Woody Woodpecker?  ah, well…”

“She’s out…

Nurse, who said time heals all wounds?

It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds…”

 

iii.

She starts her days on a handheld screen furiously tapping words — 

into images — on gorilla glass.

She reorders the world in this manner.

 

iv.

Why do bombs rain on the poets?

Bombs rain down on this poet.

But this poet, he’s fierce —

explosions in his green stellate eyes — 

standing on a casino chip 

cum soap box.

 

When he hears mortar shells

He cusses more in his odes 

and cuts down on guitar solos.

 

The bombs stop mid-air

Impaled in simulacrum skies — 

Inert butterflies flayed for display — 

black and white nuggets of flower-lava.

 

And a carbuncular woman yells out:

“blah blah blah blah metonymy…

wah wah wah synecdoche…

I have a PhD… from Iowa, damn it!

Give me my due.”

 

“But this is a poetry reading,

With Gueetars, bitch!

This is Las Vegas in ever-burning neon.”

 

And beyond the earth is screaming

And we’re turning to ashes on a dying planet

In the waning days of Emperor Fossil: 

a quick hello to you — 

and a quicker goodbye — 

in the Anthropocene.

 

The Poet has the power to arrest bombs in mid-fall — 

The bombs evanesce into partly cloudy skies —

But his reading is tubercular.

His strumming atonal.

He had too much to drink.

 

The ghosts of misogynies past are railing

At Catullus backstage, 

like an impotent Bukowski — 

robe indecently open — 

maundering impotent in the wings

 

v.

The Monday morning maunder is my worst day

Of peripeteia mumbling…

The Tuesday morning constitutional is full of vim vigor logorrhea: the words pour out.

The Wednesday wander is absolute shit…

 

vi.

So I go to the cupboard, ‘cause I’m an angry cuss, and there exhorting me — virtually screaming at me in 12 point bold — is some numbskull at Dr. Bragg’s ad copy department extolling the virtues of drinking straight —

no chaser! —

Apple Cider vinegar — like it’s some modern day elixir o’ life that’ll pump you up of vim and vigor — a “bracing” tincture it proclaims (ain’t no snake oil here, but strike the band up, and bring out the Bojangles soft shoe!) ‘cause it’s a gonna’ change your life!

Smooth out that existential dread, give ya’ a boner with extra “ ‘ONER ” — o o o o, you’ll go, buddy boy.  

The missus will appreciate it.  And for the misses work out the kinks in the monthly hysterias( if you know what I mean) with all types of effluvial matter that looks like dead wispy spiders floating in your drink.  

Quaff this you’ll see the ideal pick me up, and I mean pick me up fellas “perfect taken 3 times a day!” Did I mention the missus will thank ya’!  It’s the ideal!  The surreal!  Pick-me-up drink: upon arising! (heh! fellas?!) mid-morning and mid-afternoon.  

And the missus says to me:

“The best ting that happened to me in the world:

MENOPAUSE.

That’s what I lived for — for the last 20 years!”

 

vii.

final jump-cuts from the c-section bridge:

 

a.

SMASH THE PATRIARCHY!

 

b.

“Look at that guy on the sidewalk. What’s he doing?”

“Looking for his soul in the cracks.  Look how he burrows, drawing blood from his fingertips.  It must be a fine old soul.  I wonder if that’s what my father was like at the end?  When my uncle found him on the streets of Little Havana looking for crack.  Crack in the cracks.  Heh!  Oh, well, whatever.  Never mind.” he said.

“Ow! Oh my God,” she said. “I think I’m going to need a C-section.  This doesn’t feel right.”

“You mean something akin to omitting the envoy from my sonnet last night?  Bitch!  When will you learn?  I’ll use a god-damned fork to get that out of you!  When will you learn?”

 

c.

Intersectionality– the theory that the overlap of various social identities, as race, gender, sexuality and class, contributes to the specific type of systemic oppression and discrimination experienced by an individual.

I live on the intersection of Hispanic avenue — the preferred nomenclature is Latinx now — and cisgendered male terrace;  near the fluid-class, decade-long, unemployed, heterosexual, forced-into-celibacy-roundabout.  

There.

How’s that for an intersectional address? 

 

d.

CODA 1:

“FUCK OFF

I AM A PAINTER

DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO PAINT

I WILL PAINT 

FLOWERS IF

I WANT

I WILL PAINT

DEAD BODIES

IF I WANT

AND YOU CAN 

ALL FUCK OFF”

 

e.

CODA 2: 

Datta.  Dayadhvam.  Damyata.

                Shantih   shantih   shantih

 

“I’m actually not a big believer in writing books for other people… I believe in writing books for yourself… ultimately I write a book because I want it I need it…”

— Carmen Maria Machado

 

Violet Bathroom Dictator

He is the violet

Bathroom dictator; king of the plastered

Hairspray combover.

 

He is fall

October turning chill at 10:09 p.m.; a smoldering 

Ruin, abandoned house burnt.

 

He is tornadic 

Aftermath, roiling clouds receding;

Waxing solar eclipse.

 

He is a prickly

Brown weed foisted into the wind;

Injured porcupine.

 

He is a stagnant

Tidal pool; A sargassum-clogged beach 

After man o’ war arrive.

 

He is a rusted

’74 green Impala; A worn

Holy-soled shoe.

 

He is a stillborn

Merengue; A ridgeless guiro

Missing its rhythm stick.

 

He is a bruised

Rotting Mango – Acrid 

Espresso in the Little Havana heat.

 

“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

— Toni Morrison

mini-flashes o’ funk

The Father

  The sun cut a slice of light into his head — the effulgence of stellate light streaming in through the top of the window blinded him — at the very moment the bullet fragmented in his Broca’s area — it split the infinitive making its way through his synapses there.  All he managed was “¡guao!”  His face a frozen distortion.  What was left of him — and his locked body —  made its way through the air on its ineluctable path to the terrazzo floor.  What was left of his consciousness seeped out with the type O negative flowing copiously from what remained of his ragged head.  His last thought and last partial word unnoticed by anyone else.

The shrapnel still sizzled in that now useless brain — the organ quickly losing its way in the world.  Some shrapnel tore through the curtains and jalousie panes, and some of the shrapnel was embedded in the photograph of him and the Commandante on the wall, commingled with parts of his frontal and parietal lobes: the lobes that once entertained dignitaries, wooed countless women, and gave voice to the orders to shoot 183 people in the revolutionary reprisal squads turned to organic detritus all about the kitchen’s formica surfaces. 

 

Pixies In The Shower

She named the cats Didi and Gogo. The cats do not respond to those names. Beckett’s “Fail, fail again, fail better” is her wife’s favorite quote. She looks like the Venus of Willendorf, but blonde. Her wife doesn’t look at herself in the mirror. They both once wore identical braids on a Caribbean vacation. They sing Pixies songs in the shower together. Tomorrow they will cry, then board the cats. The day after they will set out on a long trek. One will whisper “fuck, yeah” and the other will shout “woohoo” on a summit two thousand miles from here.

 

The Grilled Cheese Camorra

Henry found Mao, his mother, and Fidel at the foot of the bed. They sat cross legged on the floor. Fussing. Castro held a cast iron pan up for the Chairman’s approval.

The Chairman said, “Your mother is teaching us to make grilled cheese sandwiches with just the proper char, Henry.” Fidel turned to Henry and hummed approval.

Henry’s mother said the secret was in the breast milk wash of the bread, and the queso blanco.

“Always use white cheese, Henry.”

Then she dissolved into a mist, spiraled about the ceiling fan, and floated down in a mushroom cloud hiss.

 

Keeper of The Doomsday Clock

I am the keeper of the Doomsday Clock. I know what will happen to us. I know how the world ends, but I don’t tell you. I’ll keep you in the dark. I stopped the hands on the Doomsday Clock at 11:59. When we met I thought I would turn back the hands on the clock, that I might set the pendulum in reverse. But you said our fate was sealed and it was fatal. I was drawn to that. I was afflicted. I set the works in motion once more, the cogs thunder. I have chosen this minute.

 

“Interviewers ask famous writers why they write, and it was (if I remember correctly) the poet John Ashbery who answered “Because I want to.”  Flannery O’Connor answered, “Because I’m good at it.”

— Anne Lamott

(my short film monday lagniappe for you… take 3 minutes out of your life)

Walls

You believe…

Calypso…

 

In rising seas,

In openings, closings,

 

In walls to protect him;

The journey no longer as important 

 

As the destination.

We build trust,

 

We fall apart, Inside this temporary

Housing.  Odysseus, heavy as stone,

 

Maintains his sad sway — An island

Without bridge-makers in

 

This migrant disorder.

 

 

“If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.”

— John Cage