From February - December 2010

A note on this:  This chunk of writing, and the last chunks of writing I've posted here, are all from my past.  I was then developing into who I am now.  I don't think and feel exactly as I did then.  But in the last two thirds of a year or so, I've gone through something of a transformation which is ongoing, and have put older, younger things in place.  I published a book a few months ago, and it occurred to me that I might want to then republish things I'd unpublished, and perhaps also publish things I had not published yet, in order to give this book a little more of a background.  I hope to publish said book here soon, but there is still more I want to publish here leading up to it, chronologically.  I hope I don't bore too many people.  But then, that's probably not much of a possibility.
 
Oh -- Yes, I've included in this chunk three versions of one of the poems, each slightly different from the others.  No, not just to torture you.
 
*
 
Lend me an ear,
and watch me walk away with it.
 
Surrender your mind,
and feel it spreading to the wind.
 
See your heart fall to the floor.
I’ll sweep up the jagged, bleeding pieces.
 
Am I really such a charming speaker—
or do you just take things really hard?
 
*
 
And the shade hid the fact that there was nothing there.
 
Give me a tune,
and I’ll fuck it up.
 
Give me a message,
and I’ll try to tell a joke.
 
Because
 
all this elegance
is a hoax,
 
and eloquence
is a form of lie.
 
Why should I care to paint that
rainbow across the gray space,
 
or give the shade a character
facing us with a garish smile?
 
I got a little high from it
for a while,
 
one of the few things that
made me smile,
 
but that’s not right now.
There’s a big, brick blocking wall,
 
and I just can’t seem to write it down.
 
*
 
Her whole world reads like a fairy tale.
 
But her evil stepmother and her fairy godmother
both shoot up.
 
And Prince Charming was no help when one of her glass slippers
shattered at the stroke of eleven.
 
And she would’ve taken her pumpkin carriage home,
if the driver hadn’t gone in search of better fares.
 
Now she’s walking home, and this fairy tale ends
at the end of the trail of blood,
 
because at home, someone has recklessly lit a cigarette
and fallen asleep,
 
leaving her home in cinders.
 
*
 
Waste
 
He wrote “This is a poem.” on a Post-it note and pushed it across the table.
 
She looked crushed.  She wrote back
“But what about the artistic value?”
 
He looked around the room and smiled,
plucked a recently dumped sponge from the waste basket,
a red pen from a cup,
wrote “This is a work of art.” on another Post-it note, which he placed on the sponge
and stabbed in the middle with the pen, then passed the corpse
across the table.
 
On his next victim he wrote “…And a poem.  And so is this.
      P.S.  Maybe we should waste breath instead of Post-it notes.”
 
*
 
Life is gray, and I’m tweaking my recipe
for rice and beans,
to pull a single thread of rainbow
across the sky
and through the mists that swallow life
day by day
with the simple things.
 
Abundance frees the soul
to view its losses,
while indulging in the rug that
slips beneath it.
Simplicity feeds the mouths
of complications,
that grow hungrier, and hang
from twisting lines of truths.
 
And this has been known about for some time now.
And we all see it coming.
Still,
while the last remains of the feast are being taken away,
a lost soul feeds.
 
*
 
I’ve come a rainy day,
to share my tattered fragments,
scatter-brained, shattered soul.
I’ve called my self cold and heartless,
but part of me still cries for the grave,
cries for the milk-white bones,
beaten to dust by the fists of windy time.
Sometimes like a hammer hitting a bell,
that’s it.  Your time is up.
And I have come to drip all over you,
but I won’t burden you with baggage,
‘cause I’m just a suit and hat on a hanger,
and I’ve just come to another decision—
and the solitary man retreats,
and goes back to his loving shadows.
 
*
 
What else should I write?—
I might be dead in a few days again.
The weather is
the weather.  For the sake of aesthetics,
let’s call it rain.
 
I’ll say
I have nothing left to say,
and maybe never did, anyway,
then kick back in my armchair,
and quickly fade the rest of the way,
to aesthetically pleasant static.
 
*
 
It’ll be a busy time but I’ll be alive.
 
Do you want to be alive?      --No.
 
      Why not?
 
The closest thing I have in life to a passion is dead—
 
      really         dead, this time—and needs
 
no funeral, life is futile and utterly fruitless, always has been—
 
      fact recognized long ago and lived on ever since,
 
Don’t care unless obsessed, and a dog is barking.
 
It would be fruitless to search the roots of these things, as
 
      I have been doing so myself:  bored with the world.
 
No matter:  I knew this was coming.  I saw the water rising.  This was
 
all I wanted.
 
*
 
The lack of meaning has become a demon,
and I’m dreaming of some deeper feeling,
so I might just reach farther down, until this hole
becomes my grave.  I’m having thoughts
of getting caught with no redeeming qualities
except for my humility.
I’m sitting at a crossroads in the winds of change,
and I might stand up and fly, or lie down and fall.
And I’m playing out scenes in which people who care
are worried, asking questions, wondering my condition,
and I simply deflect, with a few cold jokes,
because you’ll seldom find me in a conversation, and I
just want to have a little fun hiding my misery.
 
*
 
I’m scurrying through my house of horrors,
scared out of my mind, and I can’t find any doors.
 
I haven’t faced a mirror in days, just because
it doesn’t matter.  That’s clear to me.  I’m just fading
in a self-made haze.
 
So I took a poem,
chopped it into little bits,
and called it a poem.
 
Yeah, I sprinkled it over time.
 
I spread a thought on water.
I took a moment,
broke it down,
and wrote a poem.
 
I made the page digest it
in little bites—
hungry blankness,
wanted to swallow it all
in one well-formed gulp,
but I was onto something.
 
*
 
I’m not surprised,
so I know I shouldn’t,
but I’m running on rage,
and I’m not surprised, so I’m
laughing out loud.
 
Life’s an illusion.
We’re all clowns.
I’m frowning, so let’s
clown around, ‘cause I need a little
make-believe.
 
Let’s make a date,
but don’t wait for me.
Just breathe life into some balloons,
and watch them fly away, ‘cause they’re
high on helium.
 
And they’re gone.
 
Gone like eagles
to the edges of strange brains,
 
It was charming,
when we would have died for our dreams.
Now, dreams finished,
we wait.
 
Take what’s there,
feed it to the pigs,
then bleed whatever’s left
onto the page—that isn’t me.
 
Bloody eyes watching sunrise
      --isn’t me.
 
Scurrying around in no particular hurry,
with a flurry of words ever over-present,
my persistent brain insisting I listen,
and bear witness to imagined meanings,
terrified in my house of horrors—
that’s me.
 
--I used to use this.
 
*
 
I thought if I was saved again,
I’d finally change my ways and
improve the rest.
But now I’m just resigned again.
My days are halved, my nights drag on,
and somehow, I feel, that is best.
 
If the sun finally shone on your mistakes,
would you stare in a tearful gaze,
or fearful for your future,
lend it more authority than before?
Would you bend before you break,
and take a final bow as a clown?
Would you care?
 
Maybe you’ll just let your rainbow
run its course, to where the rain always falls,
yelling at the door knocks,
ignoring every call.
And sliding down the wall,
you’ll find your mind is at its best,
just winding down the clock,
until the call to final rest.
Find yourself in heaven,
or find yourself in hell,
or find yourself in a hole in the ground,
with not a thought at all—
 
a lost soul only says,
“It’s all the same for now.”
 
*
 
It’s the death of a dream in youth
at a ripe old age, a bundle of simple desires
fully satisfied, leaving in their wake
a heart regrown (in part,)
a longing we said we would live with.
A longing we promised ourselves we would live with.
 
Just a phoenix diving back into the flames.
I’m sorry, but, could you drive me home.
I may have wasted my life this far,
but the shame is it was already lost.
It’s alright.  I’ll walk.
Heaven’s closer.  Hell’s closer.
But does either one exist?
 
No sweet reward.
After all that’s come and gone,
after all the pain I’ve gone through with insanity,
I’m boring as hell.
 
*
 
My silent acedia has become
an old inside joke.
That’s the only reason I’m not laughing
after the man in my head asking questions says to me:
“If that’s the way you see it, then there’s no hope for you.”
I give a little smile.
 
“Better to have loved and lost”—
      slaked one’s lust,
had fun and been busted in youth?—
 
Truth wears many faces.
Mine’s the one no one talks to.
 
I pass people on the sidewalk.
Behind their eyes are memories
of kinds of places I’ve never been to.
 
They snicker at the way I walk.
 
*
 
Cold cover beauty,
a frozen moment of freedom and bliss.
What bitter barbs are underneath?
What great schemes have surrendered
to the toothbrush?
What great ideas have been submitted
to the toilet?  (It needed to be flushed twice.)
Who’s dirty laundry was found in someone else’s machine?
(They washed and took it for their own.)
 
*
 
A nail
scrapes a meal
from a nostril,
 
deriving
satisfaction
from a hole.
 
Drive me
to the airport.
I need sky lines.
 
Walk me
to the train, then
run away.
 
Falter for words
finding meadows and hills
to call greener.
 
I’m at the train station,
running my brain
through the rhymes of this world, because
 
I’m in my house.
I never travel.
 
I ponder a wheel
and derive satisfaction
from the hole.
 
I’m 23.
 
It’s time
to learn
to ride
a bike.
 
*
 
Desparate desolation lifting
dried-out eyes
slowly,
 
turning to meet
a driftwood grazer.
“How has the river changed you?”
 
--Washed away
my former pretenses—
it shone at first, like a wet stone—
wiped away my darkened crags,
and left their secrets splashed across one
cool, smooth surface.
 
Desolation likes
short and bitter:
 
shattered glass
dragged across a
concrete desert.
 
--I am the poem.
The whole sky is the page.
 
--You’ll see me stuck between the stars.
You’ll find me dragging on the pollution.
(I choked the first time.)
 
*
 
I don’t often write tribute poems.

You know it means a lot,
and it doesn’t mean
anything.
 
So here’s my third poem for you.
 
I wrote the first two in my teens.
The first one was a year late.
And since you’ve gently hounded me
for another,
 
here’s my third poem for you.
 
Smile,
for you know it may even entertain
a tear, or a fear,
or entertain.
 
It may peruse this morning’s breakfast menu.
It may praise the latest inane phrase.
It may lament a fallen
toe nail.
 
Here’s my third poem for you.
 
It will not usually buy a meal.
It will not pay the rent.
But it may “save the poet for another day,”
or waste a lazy fucker’s time.
 
(Maybe that old Russian judge was onto something.)
 
And here is my third poem for you.
 
It might even            whisper            sweet nothings.  It might even
 
Screeeeeeeeaaaaaam            “I’LL KILL YOU!”
 
It might even            fade away,    and            die.
 
So here’s my third poem for you.
And, Grandma, you won’t be receiving it.
 
*
 
It’s the never-ending goodbye,
sliding into the fyring pan,
 
 
 
 
 
And if you’ve stumbled upon
my jumbled up, spat out, miscellaneous,
meaningless lines,
why, you dear soul, what sad adventure
led to my little corner of God’s unfinished chore?
 
*
A neighbor is chopping
what the wind didn’t finish
off a stump.
 
He asks for my help
with lifting it.
 
I oblige, then walk off,
feigning mild interest.
 
I walk farther up
the almost-autumn path,
 
a perfect ensemble in solitude,
an accompaniment to the wind.
 
Carrying food and supplies
in the wind,
my arms are thrown back,
like the tiring wings
of an insect on errands.
 
Mowing the lawn
beneath the mountain pear’s
low, scratchy branches,
I bow my head.
 
*
 
And the rain battered your balloon
as it climbed for the clouds.
 
And the sun blasted me into dust.
I reformed after dusk.
 
As the sun rolls over the hill,
you ride my horizon.
 
At a distance a dust cloud
looks like a dust cloud,
 
sounds like a bell,
and smells like the dew
 
on the ground.
 
A call to action:  look around.  
But we don’t suggest you look down—
 
you just might glimpse
your shattered reflection.
 
The shade of a tree
depends on the breeze.
 
The shape of the breeze
depends on what’s in its way.
 
If you choose to stay,
you’ll see the changes roll on one by one,
 
each taking its little toll.
 
Are you going to fold?
 
So, you’ve played your last hand,
and you’re making your last stand,
 
standing at an upstairs window,
watching the cargo ships in the distance making their
 
last voyages of the year,
apathy arguing with fear.
 
*
 
A green leaf falling off a limb,
a wasp sipping at my Yorkshire Gold,
a clump of black and red beetles,
communing on the side of a fence.
They rise from under the ground
just as Autumn begins to descend,
and by Winter’s first frosty wind,
they return from whence they came.
They tried something different one year,
one fairly warm pair of Winter days.
By the next, hundreds lay dead on the frozen ground.
They’ve made a fine recovery.
I wonder if their descendants have learned,
or if any are left who recall frozen cousins.
 
I’ve tried to write a poem about
things that happen over and over again
again,
and ended up digressing
again.
 
The funny farm in my head
is not so funny.  I’m repeating
all these things again and again
and again.      But I can
appreciate a falling autumn rain.
I chat with my shadowy friend.
He is no longer so inspirational.
The funny farm in my head
is not so sunny.  It’s a prison,
a prism of grays.
A favorite song that plays too long,
with long-lost value.
I laugh.
I cry.
I’ll try to stretch.
 
*
 
Pay no mind to the man behind the trees,
though he can’t feel your hot sane stare anymore,
born to wander through the molecules of life
with imaginary microscopic eyes.
A nearby driveway bears a clattering of steel,
and he feels undefinably profound.
 
*
 
Where is the beauty that was there?
--Classically gone.
  --Slipped out the back.
 
Things is good right now.
Things is going fine.
  Like rhinestones on the water
 
shine until compared
by practiced eye
  or layman’s eye.
 
The poor laywoman wept.
 
Where is the glory that was here?
Took it for what it was worth.
  Leapt off the Hone in a car,
 
missed the water,
  blew half the dock.
 
The clock is rolling sideways.
  Does it slow?
 
Show me this science.  I know
you will wonder
  what I want it for.
    I have scissors.
 
Roll me that clock.
Begin at some distance from me
  so the time will begin to slow.
 
Lend me this scene.
 
I will bend it and switch it
and throw a parade with it.
  I will hire a clown.
 
A pantomime of a dream
fascinates the spectators.
  He drools.
 
A running man
crashes into the crowd
  and is caught.
 
    The clown behind him has a knife.
 
Life is a
  Life is a
    Life is a lifting.
 
Grip the gear and make the shift and
  try again.
 
Where is the beauty that was here?
It’s there, sipping, waiting.
  It will not wait long.
 
A wrong is a right
in the end, then a
  rickety chair.
 
Share with me some life.
Shed several minutes.
  We burned the night.
 
Turning to day we looked on the ashes,
fumbled for goodbye’s
  and watched a wad of trash
    tumble into an old crooked warning sign.
 
Simple
elegant
form
 
returns to its roots
as it evolves
like hoofbeats to the heart.
 
The blood pumps
into a hand that twitches
and strums.
 
A melody runs through the breeze
to be kept free
  and dies in its own forest
    of distortion and noise.
 
Poised to perform this memory
  of a memory
    of a memory
      of a memory,
 
*
Thanks for the week we shared
crashing your car.
Now back to my eternity.
 
I appreciate your
smashing my mirror, honey.
So sorry, I’ve
just crashed your car.
 
Another night, naked and alone
in the cold.
The demon tries to shake ideas
from my bones.
 
The afternoon I spent
crushing cans with my feet
was a triumph.
 
*
 
From The Sid Chronicles
 
You look dead, Sid,
standing on a corner,
hands at your sides,
staring and storing your life away,
looking like a poor man
who wants to be left alone.
 
*
 
Sid’s light is rapidly fading.
His vapid soul stretches everywhere,
touching nothing.
Nobody’s watching as
twilight shades the lidless eye,
and Sid begins to look alive.
 
*
 
Sid suddenly swallows
as the back of the bus draws a crowd.
Stripped of his crown in solitude
by one eye peeled and drawn to bear
he feels nude and ugly.
So sad,
he shed a tear to feel this once.
 
*
 
Sid peels reflections and shadows.
He is peering into the meanings of things
and looking at open, empty sky.
He is still staring.
He did not choose to loose his grip on the world,
not wholly—
good fortune falls, and fools
always seem to know where to stand.
 
*
 
Simon summoned supper
while his brother Sid sat with him
rethinking plans:
 
He’d wanted to saw the legs off the table
so no one could sit under it.
 
He’d thought of stashing the plates and the napkins
so everyone could make a mess.
 
He would carry the chairs to the lawn—
let fortune fall on everyone—
but it was an arid evening.
 
In the end he simply sat and ate with Simon,
as no one else had come.
 
*
 
A shiny shirt appeared in his basement,
glinting in the dusty light from above.
Sid raised his arms,
slipped his wrists through the sleeves,
and it fit just right.
Now bless your bitter heart
for finding Sid’s shiny shirt
and fishing in it
for him.
 
*
 
Sid became less jaded.
He saw the blood on the razor blade
when a poor girl wrote about cutting.
 
She followed him,
drawn to the glint of the steeple atop
the mountain of garbage he dragged through life.
 
He crashed her car into a tree
and walked away,
a little dazed,
and watched her bitter heart blossom
in the distance.
She spread her glass petals everywhere,
shooting out glistening shards.
He stood just close enough to be grazed,
and occasionally pierced through the chest.
He could speak to her now,
repentance, redemption, and peace.
Deeming himself too clumsy for that,
and her to happy without it,
he held out alone with grace.
It was nice enough, keeping the distance
in silence.
 
*
 
Sid knows he’s unoriginal,
playing Russian Roulette with his skull.
He knows he’s unoriginal,
lean and eating up life ‘til he’s full,
laughing at love,
crying for love after feeling his heart has regrown.
She was his friend.
He let her down.
She’d outgrown him long before they’d met.
So he let her go.
Back to the first course.
So unoriginal, simply breathing.
So he points the lovely revolver into his temple,
smiles at his reflection, and says,
“Let’s play.”
 
*
 
Sid wishes all shadows away, then wishes the loving ones back.
If only loving shadows waltzed and played along his mind,
and monsters didn’t fly in through the window,
aside from being social, Sid would have it all.
 
*
 
Sid swallows his self within himself
‘til he walks amongst people,
and regurgitates in public, and the mess
tells him how to behave.
No one waves.
He doesn’t wave back.
One day he met a woman and began this procedure,
spilled himself out at her feet.
Before the mess could lecture him, she scooped it up
and ate it.
 
*
 
she spat it back out.
 
he was lukewarm,
 
whisps of smoke from a candleflame
clumsily dodging a breeze,
clinging to itself.
 
oh well,
 
guess he felt cold.
 
guess
 
in tragedies,
 
heroes and villains and fools
never change.
 
*
 
He wore a hat once,
when the hat was a rat
that batted its lashes
because it was dusty.
 
Perpetual silence shattered around him.
Whispers burst through his windows
demanding his mind, then insisting
he be absolutely still.
 
He’d killed a rat once,
and taken its place.
The whole thing went unobserved for years,
the murder and subsequent replacement.
 
He wore collapsible leather shoes,
strong enough to be run over
by a large man in a rover
in a retirement home.
And he still wore the hat.
 
*
 
In the room full of broken things
nothing quite matters anymore.
Nothing is ever fixed.
Nothing ever goes wrong.
Disaster doesn’t exist.
Mementos are discarded and lost
in piles of mementos.
Scars flake off and regenerate
and he bakes with them.
 
*
 
Insidious, hideous fiddler,
peddling insipient mysteries
of the minute to be solved at the risk
of wasting time.
 
Hypocritical riddler,
he wearies of the rain and windy day,
yet flies these kites of paper anyway—
he intended them to be made of glass.
 
Just another tallish tale of a small idiot
with no redeeming qualities.
A hidden dreamer.
He dreams what you dream.
He should be forbidden.
 
Or shipped to Siberia.
 
He’s a mystery soon to be solved
if it isn’t already.
 
Would you absolve him,
or dissolve him and let him run with you?
 
Pause of Sid Chronicles
 
*
 
Where is the beauty that was there?
--Classically gone.
  --Slipped out the back.
 
“How’s things?”
 
Things is good right now.
Things is going fine.
  Like rhinestones on the water
 
shine until compared
by practiced eye
  or layman’s eye.
 
The poor laywoman wept.
 
Where is the glory that was here?
Took it for what it was worth.
  Tumbled off the Hone in a car,
 
missed the water,
  blew half the dock.
 
The clock is rolling sideways.
  Does it slow?
 
Show me this science.  I know
you will wonder
  what I want it for.
    I have scissors.
 
Lend me this scene.
 
I will bend it and switch it
and throw a parade with it.
  I will hire clowns.
 
A pantomime of a dream
fascinates the spectators.
  He drools.
 
A running man
crashes into the crowd
  and gets tangled.
 
    The clown behind him has a knife
      and slips on his own nose bleed.
        The stranger is safe.
 
Life is a
  Life is a
    Life is a lifting.
 
Grip the gear and make the shift and
  try again.
 
Where is the beauty that was here?
It’s there, sipping, waiting.
  It will not wait long.
 
A wrong is a right
in the end, then a
  rickety chair.
 
Rock with me, you spectre,
  hyperbole,
exaggerated shadow
of things that were,
  
    you shadow of mine.
 
Fall, and you shall not fail,
      rain.
 
Share with me some life.
Shed several minutes.
  We burned the night.
 
Turning to day we looked on the ashes,
fumbled for goodbye’s
  and watched a wad of trash
    tumble into an old crooked warning sign.
 
Simple
elegant
form
 
returns to its roots
as it evolves
like hoofbeats to the heart.
 
The blood pumps
into a hand that twitches
and strums.
 
A melody runs through the breeze
to be kept free
  and dies in its own forest
    of distortion and noise.
 
Poised to perform this memory
  of a memory
    of a memory
      of a memory,
 
*
 
I do appreciate you being such a good host.
I forgot to thank you because I was busy pretending
I wasn’t a ghost, getting lost in my void of choice.
It seems I’ve been there since the beginning of time.
 
This party’s getting slow.  Even I know that.
I’ll do something stupid and open my mouth,
just for a laugh, ‘cause it’s a party, after all.
Better to be silly than to stall.
 
Listening used to be something I did (quite well, in fact.)
But that was then, and now I’ve been hidden away,
getting lost, filling in my void of choice,
and it’s just cost me for too long,
 
so I’m about to do something stupid, and open my mouth,
‘cause I must talk to someone, or no one will ever talk to me,
and here she comes, alone and eager to hear me,
to see my side of a gray thread she hasn’t seen spun yet.
 
You were so eager, I said everything.
Now you’re my very best friend, ‘cause you’re still here.
Now I’m sorry I’ve bored you to tears.
But can we do this again, like in another seven years?
 
*
 
Count Dracula crucified himself.
He set up the cross just before dawn,
and hung there as the autumn sun rose.
 
Of course, when the people came by,
all they saw was a cross, bereft of its victim,
as a cool wind had passed by just in time
to sweep the last of his dust away.
 
*
 
Count Dracula cuts himself.
He has tried to be something he truly isn’t anymore.
So he goes to a bathroom counter and bleeds down the drain.
This is difficult as his wounds keep healing.
It gets easier.
 
*
 
Shaving off the alien layers of life,
peeling away the faces of things
to see and feel what’s real,
stealing another date behind the mirror,
kissing the pondering pool, wandering along the edge
of the pond of dreaming.  The wishing well was
abandoned long ago.  “I still come here,” he whispered.
“Don’t tell anyone.”
 
Pennies line the floor of the well,
slipped from the tips of his thumbs and fingers.
 
*
 
He’s hunched over the wishing well,
fishing out the pennies.
 
*
 
Poor girl,
wants to wade into the pool
a rich boy drowns in,
and drown.
 
*
 
Resuming The Sid Chronicles
 
Of course he stood around alone at the party.
Nothing at all to say to anyone.
He’d done odd jobs, dead,
gone through college, dead,
high school, dead,
life-long dead.
His cousin wanted to catch up
on the last few dead years,
and he tried his best to answer,
but he couldn’t stop focusing on
the blank wall next to his cousin.
So he stood around, as a ghost.
He helped the host.
He guarded the coffee.
“It’s strong, French Roast,” she’d said.
He wanted some coffee.  He wanted to be careful
how much he took from the living here,
so he only allowed himself half a cup.
And another half a cup.  And as he drank he realized
he liked the cheapest instant coffee better.
 
*
 
He’d always said he had no pride.
But deep down inside some part of him
considered himself a genius.
He played the part in dreams he claimed
he never had yet clung to like glue.
They held his shattered mind together.
He did admit it was shattered as the days flowed
into years and he faded.
 
He was a person, not a poet,
afraid of romantic connotations.
Writing was his toy.
He tossed syllable salads
from ashes of flames that had died.
He rhymed awhile,
in that insanity that mimicks conceit,
spitting out cheap rappy phrases
that popped out and bounced off of dead ears
they had killed.
 
He changed his style and was jaded.
There was nothing new to say.
There was never anything new to say.
But it mattered how you said it,
so he said what he could,
and thought he would share it.
He didn’t quite know the face of the art
he threw stones at, and he always said,
and never showed,
and he grew a few sizes, just a few,
the day he finally sighed and decided
to toss a few salads
into the trash.
 
*
 
They met in orcherstra class his junior year.
After a brief exchange, she told him, “You Suck!”
and he fell in love.
She seemed a free spirit in some way he couldn’t quite place.
Two years they barely spoke.
She’d come by to admire his pretty cello.  “So shiny!”
A concert/field trip to Chicago a month before his graduation,
she noticed his loneliness, and they spoke.
He was getting a job at Speedway.
She drove a truck.
He didn’t drive.
He was trying to get a book of poems published.
He-he—“Thoughts,” he was calling it.
“That’s cool.”
(The publisher never replied.)
He felt a dream realized.
And he went home, with a collection of Billy Collins:
“Sailing Alone Around the Room,”
and a collection of Poe, which he’d just bought.
He felt alive, and extremely nervous.
It took a few days to gather the courage but he did manage
to say hello.
She smiled and hugged him.
He gave her his phone number on his graduation night,
along with a letter.  A few days later
he found a bent wedding ring in the road
in front of a rummage sale.  It went unclaimed.
She never called.
 
*
 
Sid as a kid sought worldwide distribution
for his philosophical scrawl and his young love,
like many a young poet would do—
in hard copy.
But there was some confusion.
The deed showed on his account,
but sowed no seed—
he was not granted an ISBN.
Sid considered the book a dead venture.
He kept at the writing, which twisted in strange ways,
and in a year he was ready to go busing around,
selling the first silly scribblings of his next little book.
Those who would have cared
would not have cared.
 
Sadie had bought the book.
As a download.
Sid was shocked,
having thought the book dead for two years.
She wanted to print more copies,
show it to faculty at her university.
But Sid was adamant:
“No!  You must never distribute it.
When I wrote that book I was young,
and stupid.”
Sid was now nearing 21.
Mostly he worried she’d learn that the love poems
were not about her.
And he was shocked that the book lived.
Weather she heeded him or not he would never know,
but he had learned something in this moment,
and he kept the book in worldwide online distribution,
and went on to publish more.
 
*
 
Catharsis has never been Sid.
(It may have looked like it was.)
Victims never dulled his fury.
When he told a story,
it was for the story’s sake.
He’s never gone digging
for the beginnings of emotional pain.
He knows his roots well, as he digs himself up
to find a friend.
 
His mind works overtime to be “out of the box”
in the wrong places.
Common sense is foreign to Sid on occasion.
So he had a common sense epiphany pondering
the girl who never called,
an odd sleepless morning several years later.
 
End of The Sid Chronicles

(Yes, I know that’s an odd way of ending something.  The Sid Chronicles was a file I put all my Sid musings into.  I paused with the Sid musings after the one that here has “Pause of Sid Chronicles” posted after it.  I was really tiring of Sid.  Then, a few weeks later, I got what I took to be a sign that I should resume them, so I did.  But I really didn’t know how to go about it, having lost that something I’d felt the previous musings had had.  Thus, the later Sid musings are perhaps a bit less intriguing than the earlier, or perhaps a little more blunt.  If you have read this posting this far – bless you – I can perhaps hope to bore you a little more with this explanation.)
 
*
 
Shouldn’t have bothered.
No bother.
hidden in an enclave,
fresh cool breeze,
seagulls,
cries.
 
Stairwell worries.
Whole lot of moments.
This is the star of the shadows.
 
The shoulder of the water falling
ignores the growing rolling sensation.
 
You have prospered
since I’ve been gone.
 
Light this.
Cut that.
Sit here.
Ponder there.
 
I am finding nothing works.
 
Exhale.
Exit care.
 
This is what happens when someone
who could really be a character in a story
--the insane one
tries to write a story.
 
I could rhyme you all day.
Would it matter?
Do you have the time to
support promote consort console
--I need no consoling.
And I hid no pain
until now.
 
He lives in a shack.
His soul is a castle.
His God sauntered off.
His soul is a castle.
 
May nothing ever contort your face with pain.
May no one ever report you out in the rain
without a hilarious reason during your
fool’s errand into the wind.
 
*
 
Syndication fade away,
follow through with new material.
I never mattered.
Fall through.
 
I dug and dug and dug.
The dirt piled up around me.
Where was it to go?
 
Did I bore you?
Oh well.  What am I to say?
--So sorry.  Poor soul.
You were the one who saved me from myself
and discovered I’d stored no value,
kept nothing locked away.
And I’ll simply die safely
tucked away, with no one
willing to lift me,
and nothing left to say.
 
*
 
Oh, give me that blindspot publicity:
 
the rolling drunk stumbling into inspiration,
the lost soul taking a break to kick some trash around,
 
the young man jilted at the altar, who,
on a cold day six months later,
deciding what to eat, looking back,
sees me,
peering in through the window—
 
anyone with something to gain by following me
while I chase after the wind.
 
It has led me off of ledges.
I have learned the art of gliding.
 
It has pushed me into corners.
I have learned to scrunch and shrink.
 
It’s punched my nose in the spotlight.
I’ve learned to slink out or at least fade away.
 
*
 
Very few on their way to The Wizard use this route.
 
The scarecrow was bored to tears,
just watching the long and winding
yellow brick road
stretch and bend out of sight,
without a passing friend or foe or fancy.
Everyone thought he had brains made of straw
and a back made of steel,
just a fool with a simple task in a field of weeds.
He half believed them, as to his brains.
The other half was false, and that was painfully true.
And so he wallowed watching the road
and sunsets in skies bereft of crows—
at least he was spared the nuisance of pecking
and their noxious cries.
And from time to time he spared a glance
at his sleeping friend who would not wake.
He saw the rust accruing.
That was it.
He needed to break free of this.
He needed to be torn apart.
He needed to be lighted, and face his fear of death.
He needed to be knighted with a broomstick.
But first things first.
Maybe if he jumped and swayed incessantly
he could rip this cross from the ground,
tip it into the road.
There was about to be some traffic,
travelers looking for gold.
Hopefully they’d look down before tripping.
 
*
 
I know you lost a lot of blood limping home,
only to find it was gone, burned to the ground.
And now you’re on your way to see
where The Wizard used to live.
Oh Cinderella please forgive me
for all the good I’ve never done.
And you may burn me later if you like,
I promise, but for now, please just cut me down
and let me share this road
for a while.
 
*
 
The clouds above blacken heaven,
bleeding lead, pleasing seeds
to be thrown from the ground.
The storm we made is blowing hard
and gaining speed,
but fall, and you shall not fail,
      rain.
 
The sky drops its keys on the ground.
They bounce, jangling, off of city streets.
Most are speeding too fast to catch one,
but a lost soul got one
stuck in his head,
and a man on a ledge
found his path,
at last.
 
*
 
Where is the beauty that was there?
--Classically gone.
  --Slipped out the back.
 
“How’s things?”
 
Things is good right now.
Things is going fine.
  Like rhinestones on the water
 
shine until compared
by practiced eye
  or layman’s eye.
 
The poor laywoman wept.
 
Where is the glory that was here?
Took it for what it was worth.
  Tumbled off the Hone in a car,
 
missed the water,
  blew half the dock.
 
The clock is rolling sideways.
  Does it slow?
 
Show me this science.  I know
you will wonder
  what I want it for.
    I have scissors.
 
Lend me this scene.
 
I will bend it and switch it
and throw a parade with it.
  I will hire clowns.
 
A pantomime of a dream
fascinates the spectators.
  He drools.
 
A running man
crashes into the crowd
  and gets tangled.
 
    The clown behind him has a knife
      and slips on his own nose bleed.
        The stranger is safe.
 
Life is a
  Life is a
    Life is a lifting.
 
Grip the gear and make the shift and
  try again.
 
Where is the beauty that was here?
It’s there, sipping, waiting.
  It will not wait long.
 
A wrong is a right
in the end, then a
  rickety chair.
 
Share with me some life.
Shed several minutes.
  We burned the night.
 
Turning to day we looked on the ashes,
fumbled for goodbye’s
  and watched a wad of trash
    tumble into an old crooked warning sign.
 
Simple
elegant
form
 
returns to its roots
as it evolves
like hoofbeats to the heart.
 
The blood pumps
into a hand that twitches
and strums.
 
A melody runs through the breeze
to be kept free
  and dies in its own forest
    of distortion and noise.
 
I’m poised to perform this memory
  of a memory
    of a memory
      of a memory.