O Those Ridiculous Summer Days

Let's lucid dream the professional boat-naming class…

The sommelier serves red coffee.
I wear a William of Orange tie.
Outside, bees hover on blooms like the sun unfurled,
Leaves like insect wings
Wave indolently westward to the sun
White in madcap coils above its roads of gold.
The plum sky lifts like a fingerprint.

The sun asks too many questions.
The dirt holds too much truth.
I chase sun cunts through borderlands of gravel,
But the answers just burn and confuse,
I forget what I've been doing,
I get dizzy on the steps of my life journey,
The way behind is plowed with flawed predictions,
Yet I dangle like a puppet of experience
Holding for the future but a copper,
Small token of forgotten quests for meaning.
Where does it all lead
When it leads nowhere? Expectancy festers
In too-resistant air, the past's weight, when it falls,
Cannot be observed
Except in passing…

Finches walk on rocks. It's pomegranate season, and I'm whelked.
The solemn sunlight unloads all it knows
On shriveled, ignorant attendants, lettuce-limp in soupy heat.
The locusts, the toads, the typewriter birds
Squealing and dripping in syrupy turns
Skim like a lazy stone the cloudless water surface.
Soon the thunderheads and gaping veins
Will pull down the steamy rain
For desperate drinking, from orange grass
And Colorado corn, like pebbles on the tin roof
Of the all-night diner that is my memory,
A gumbo with mushroom, celery and cream,
A purse of Lucky Strikes folding its collars
Against the one innocent reason,
Chasing its tail in the folds of brain fog.
The room darkens with meaning as its sense lifts like smoke,
Darkness under glass
Calls to my heart in darkest lament
To release it from the chains
As it beats to the steel window frame.
My toughened heart tries to obey,
But the endless light returns through the glass
To remind me of how I have to go
And blind me to how little time is left.
Noetic skylines are surging free,
Everything grows nearer, impossibly far away.
Freedom's a crutch.
The dying lives in the moment.

Words are the alibis of other worlds, like sausage loops,
Like auburn coyotes who disappear then reemerge together.
Speaking meekly, words have power, to turn everything into ritual,
To keep the one true thing at bay. Behind the rhetoric of iron, though,
It's all just entertainment, this illusion—
This idea that it can or can't be saved, the world—
Beyond the partitions, most are fans who only want a good show.
Thinking of peace seems better than peace itself.

Like those two lads who sounded like Emmit Rhodes
Who hung themselves as if to fulfil
The destiny of their lyrics: “I can't live, if living is without you.”
So it goes. There is always poetry in used bookstores,
But outside, it hides in trees that are only trees.
So large does it seem (so small when it's seen),
It comes and goes without my knowing
But as we all die it is only growing, ever-flowing.
It's the light on the leaf coming out of an eye
To cheapen and sharpen the unobserved corners.
Let my hollow voice quiver its sound,
The vibratory power of love that, in being all,
Subdues all—in learning of itself within its lack.
The all-sound and no-sound jumping around,
Perfect pairs, or at least pretending to be,
For they are really one—just as a man who tastes the divine
Seems to be all men, capable of all things, but only for that instant,
When unconscious with a gift, carrying it without seeming to
Break under its weight, unaltered from the task by awe,
Not needing to be there, at all, because it is always there.
Such are our efforts in Summer, but they run against
Resistance, to find eked out victories eventually taken,
To end up holding on to what rejects even love,
That holds it back, dividing the stream from its center.
How to close my mind and rest my heart
So spirit can make me invisible.
Only then to be a part.

There's a shortage of grammarians in Dykeland,
So get some slot monkey to agree
To unpajamaed tyrannies where none ought to be:
“Poems are never finished, only abandoned” (Paul Valery)