Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Red Matty on Ice

"To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another." - Bruce Lee

The nice blue dice rolls paradise,
Atlantis Braves dispatched
through some trap door to nothingness
with their guilt trip of death as oblivion war paint
like our lives need so much that shocking change,
a road never taken before.

Fibonacci Mordecai unstrands his spiral green absinthe
cotton candy, and banks like a flamingo an impossible shot
on Minnesota Fats’ magic-trick tablecloth royal blue felt.

But the only one who wins at this schtick
walks alone in the clouds
lacking the wisdom
of the lowest, sorest loss:
that we want it this way.

The allure of the losers:
Atlantis in half-light
still rules a toxic stretch of black hole tar
where ruck-sacked hitchers rue their power
in gasp-for-air bar chairs for victims
where the thought of being immortal
is too much to bear.

The ball goes in play—the heart’s leap of faith—
Time falls away, and the game is too long to keep score.
Eyes study moves like they’re holy book clues
to do unto others what you don’t want done to you,
with a full of love handshake and hug afterwards
for all the respect invested in a brother’s defeat.

Loser, that impasto graffiti
sprayed perpetually over vast boundaries
of stone by the young. The death never ends,
expression can never be emptied,
the puzzle is pulled out of chaos again
to dissolve afresh in the spiral
like flesh shells, expended, decay in the soil
that re-uses all to reshape life so malleable
—the spiral moves on, its dense clouds of mind
like seething grey downpours in the distance,
the fields being watered some unknown plane
far enough away the eye can't, mercifully, see
save transcendent sky that smothers with mystery
but never once gives the candy of its secrets out
for the heart must be empty to receive.

Today the rain drips from sundrenched eaves,
pigeons and people collect with each other,
share something in silence that cannot be known,
only work to be done, beyond the East River,
new gods to be tried, combinations applied,
alliances plied and untied
with the ease of the current to a half-imagined sea,
a destination irrelevant because it does not exist,
despite what the flow we surrender to suggests.