MOB, Or What I Can Look Forward To

muffed to a chair, resplendent with

water-willows and

tempted to turn a new course

with a new year approaching

or, there is no new

nothing – aghast at the

news and tempered with

traditions always left broken

but any angry mob can and will

will itself into a storm of new

nothingness – again, aghast

at the news

Absence/Adjunct

[                                                       }

We belong to a party where the champagne has been drunk free and done with. We tumble in a turnabout where there is no exit, no natural recourse to our driving, not mindlessly, just without a remembrance of guilt. The family in the lily pool of entertainment embellishes the stubborn means that makes means lacking. The heavy petting hinges out an acute bravado, one that makes monsters of those we love. From Vesuvius to the shack story of speech, we are still stuck in our own selves, however ashen those words may become. This is not to imagine a society in falseworks or furnishing the world like a Rousseau-ian glove. No, no many is so pat a pattern of touchstones. The trample of hooves stood near and dear over me, nevertheless makes one succumb. The quotidian gestural nuance of indexes and faces leaves such matters un-absolvable. The structures of absence leave nothing left but absence and the fact of so remains so. I still call absence, by being a word, being a thing, to be nothing but a general assumption that nothing means something. If we are left with nothing but the village logic of another absence makes our nothing greater, we are left with nothing but our own futures, as hollow and fragile as dust. But dust remains a substance of furniture we blot out, wipe away, out of tidiness, of order, of general health and cleanliness. The permanence of what we wipe away renders us incognizant of what is there, that nothing can be wiped away either by cloth or sword or swipe. At our party, the modernity of knowledge only causes us to lose sight even further, rendered in miniscule details that merely wipe away the nothing that we’ve always felt we lacked. We’ve burned books in order to bond with the history we know not well. We glean all material out of habit and sugar-coated spite, rendering the fiction that we have some choice nervously approaching defeat. The domestic markets of sublime are shaded with naïve symbolism that is tested in order to not be defeated by purposed psych

Haiku Foxtrot

Blended, and a blessed

beautiful in our unders

a balanced becalmed.

I remember the

fallen token of our short

shrift upon the wave.

While you become the

dancer in our dance of some-

thing because you’re there.

Close to the left foot

our embarrassment a fool

and that’s on us, again.

Charm becomes the end

a rational couple

coupled in the end.

What reaches the end

furious in the end game

and beautiful still.

All Doors Lead

The tragedy of life

is witnessing

so many doors.

Booth claimed

the book as both

tragedy and farce.

I cannot claim

all sorrows and

successes as my own.

I do, though, still

rub my feet, fleetingly

upon entering, entirely.

TWO DREAMS, a cliché - DREAM TWO

My parents were visiting me in The City. Where I was staying was the upper decks of the Art Institute of Chicago, which had been changed, basically, into a suburban mall run by back-biting hate-mongers trying to change the institution into someplace Sbarro would feel welcome.

They arrived, feeling overwhelmed by the magnitude of the place.

“This isn’t what I expected,” my mom exclaimed.

There was my traditional central visitors center, surrounded by a huge atrium with dozens of traditionally mall type stores and food venders surrounding it.

Above, as if in the heavens, stood the traditional glass view of “Paris Street, Rainy Day”.

My parents asked the front attendant to call me down from where I was.

“Could the faggot guy we have behind the scenes come down to meet his parents,” he announced.

20 of us came down, looking for someone we knew.

I saw my parents who smiled, happy to have seen me at last. They wanted to taste that “good pizza” they had heard about. How they had to be quick because they had tickets to “Wicked” and so had better have a move on.

We ate some pizza, both of my parents saying how it was true that they had “better pizza here”.

I wanted to die. 

They told me we better get going, as it was still a long walk “down to 51^st street”.

I told them we had to walk “up to 51^st street”.

They didn’t buy it.

I was out on the sidewalk with burnishing skyscrapers blinding my eyes from the glare of a water-soaked sunset. My father, looking at a map, pointed to the street in front of us and told my mother and I we could catch a cab there.

I told them both that if we wanted to catch a quick shuttle, we should head the opposite direction, in the direction of “the bay”.

My father crumpled up his map and shrugged. My mother wondered how I had figured out the city at all.

We headed East, where the Bay Bridge was, but I found that the route I had figured we could take had been flooded.

I told them I would swim out to see how far the flood went, and they agreed to stay and study the map while I was gone.

I was swimming, stroking really, along the gates of what seemed to be a flooded Marina, with others on speedboats plowing past me gesturing that I was being stupid in no uncertain terms.

I looked back behind me, seeing my parents look up from the map my parents held and wave.

I woke up with the sound of three knocks on the door, feeling embarrassed for my parents and really alone. When I went to see if anything was knocking, no one was there, no trace of a knock at all.