Years compressed
a blank slate the wish
instead of a history redundant,
intransigent, intolerable.
More of the same without a new outcome,
only more virulent in its expression.


Unlike most long term relationships
that fade over time, lose traction,
lose passion, lose significance.
Released unconditionally, untainted by loss.


But this thing, this thing we have created
is darker than dark, from the deepest part of the known,
broadcasts despair and channels ever living memory into
one single thought. When will it ever end?

 All is right when your crinoline circles the universe in cerulean and songbird yellow, dark eyes chiaroscuro, patented L-O-V-E. You are all that we believe no matter how long and how arduous the journey. Licks and slaps and big do(s), look-a-likes, you strong, strapping males, more tattoo than tan, tattoo over tan over ass, over the last  one. Never really over, not really. Sweet boy of 12 with that big groove-on looking like his big dyke mother. uck me! It ain’t the music or the occasion or the grief. Ain’t the Prop Million March or the visit to the cemetery in the face of a man I once loved like a soul brother. Deliver me this day from my journey that is elation, emancipation, liberation, creation in every cell of my body at once thrilled. Mind you I am, but I am not mindless. Your beauty overwhelms.

Ray Charles in my blood, bag o' rags and nights in the attic of my girlfriend's house. Just friends - the old definition. Trying to sort out
sister love and hate, father drunk always accompanied by a pail of white paint and the prospect of passing out and mom, oh what a believer. No stopping her and her sexy self. None of it quite added up but this was my chosen teenage family and when she walked through my door, the vibration stopped, the music was syncopated, the couches long and filled with possibility. She knew she could hide there. Her house was my escape. My house was her refuge. 

What incredible views from down here,
from that place we all travelled before
but this time the destination is new.
A touch, a glance, an impression so powerful it floats,
like the gravity of a new planet undiscovered, 
brilliantly lit and surrounded by an atmosphere 
you no longer have to adjust to.
Family, that strange and other worldly space
nothing else can replace, to which nothing else compares.
All the years that passed, all the oblivion and misconceptions,
all the baggage you cannot check, has somehow disappeared.

New word, old meaning
on this Day of Independence
from love, humility, trust.
Our humanity in jeopardy. Thanks, Frank (Rich),
for pointing out how far we've come
but how far we have to go.
Our president a moving target,
our streets a home without walls,
our nation only one in a global community for all
struggling against the isms that imprison our thinking,
one nation after all.

 

How seldom do we get the point,
do we make sense of those things we tend to avoid
and never conquer. We walk through the shadow
of the past and wonder why we're so afraid to look back.
Clarity, that's what we need as the years pile up
like some head on collision.
Steer us further from the closest exit,
from the point of no return until
there is no looking back any more.
Set us free
In this life, of this life, the only one I know.

I stood before you like a child who could not comprehend your pain,
your desperation, your plea for release.
Who wouldn't understand your inability to let go, to concede,
to accept the doctor's hardly indirect question that you are ready
for the netherworld, that negative space, that parallel universe
we'll never know but are destined for?

How could you? No one is prepared for that. But your eyes pleading
while your heart could not let go were convincing enough for that
indelible signature when for a split second we wondered if we were ready, knew we weren't, knew we never would be.

Goodbye dear mother. How can it be a year to the day tomorrow?
How can it be that long that we haven't spoken, haven't argued, got
pissed off about politics or the state of the world?

I am in your likeness you and then again me
and I feel one layer less, that vacancy, that minor to the major.
But I promise in the days ahead,
the weeks, months and years,
I will try to release you.

All my love.

No tag necessary. You're at the bottom of the pit, baby. Nowhere. You're consumed by you. There is no place other than that big black hole that sucked you in. You are hopelessness, relentlessness, redundancy, the merde you step in. You relieve yourself too often. 

24 hours to the day we had that talk, you and me. The one I always dreaded, the one you never wanted to have but always tried to. What constitutes the end, the life force, exactly what is it you're going to give up? Of course, I didn't have the answer and you didn't ask the question and somehow all of a sudden we were having this conversation that was so final, so irreversible, so irreconciliable. How can you have a conversation like that with your parent, with the one who gave birth to you? With no conclusion, only silence that is deafening and then the knowing. Of the end. To this day I can't totally accept it but I will try and keep on trying and that's all I can ask for. To you, mother of my invention, to you, my love always. 

The stillness of the thought, vibration aside, the wave, the crest, the cadence
and then the fall. The layers, the light, the prism, the circumstance. The bats, the knives, the guns, the pop culture decimating everything in sight. The stillness of the thought.