Quote Unquote

"You will be born
with a powerful
innate desire
to remain alive.
You will do almost anything
to continue living.
At some point
you may discover
some limits,
and allow your life
to end."

the meaning of life

this is it

this stranger among us
this you
this me
too strange
among us
this us
is this it?

silence

wondering why

you stand there wondering why you're
staring at a canvas...

gravitational pull

the gray of black too silver
like a sleek fishing lure
take the bait, i'm the catch
the elusive flicker
of the deep

swimming past the century
that severs life in half
darting in
and out
of time
in lame attempts
of swift escapes
from savage ways
that ravage
every last bit
of
flesh and bone and wit

nothing more left to lift
with spirit disconnect and
all the years, a lengthy narrative
of amphibious roles I played.
tell me now. was it all an act?

the last stand

one word. that place you've always been
generation after generation. and then
don't stop. why the miles and miles when
it was only the next step? the motion
hardly physics.

ahead of his time

Richard Yates had true courage to write the truth no matter how painful or unpopular, to live the truth no matter how short lived, to expose the hypocrises of the American Dream.

zipcode art

curious how grants are so lopsided, favoring counties.
aside from the obvious fact that the county designates
funding, why should it matter where the artist comes
from? what happened to the art? that's what i want to know.

anonymity

"Names no longer apply and he can't find a satisfactory substitute. All the limits and expectations and experiential bullshit people bring to nomenclature, like the attitude copped when they hear the name of their first lover, their estranged mother, their crazy aunt or their incorrigible ex-husband. No one is truly different because name, rank, profession are always reminiscent of someone else’s identity, someone else’s station in life. You are only true to yourself, he thinks, that is, if you’re capable of it."

ruff ruff

i talked to her over the phone
and she licked it. my mother told me
she was just back from the vet, a pound lighter,
with a nice, soft crew cut. my brother asked me about
the parakeet we had when we grew up. the one that
used to ride around on the back of daisy maidle,
our pup. davey crockett, i told him. but of course.

speechless

longing to be a visual artist
words so tired, so poor, so arrested.
not sure what being a writer means any more.
without an attention span what's left?
recording for the sake of it
validating the alphabet
creating new syntax
for what?

why not?

there's always this vague suggestion
of meaninglessness masquerading as dependency.
i don't know what to do with it
because of course it's meaningful,
and there's no path, nothing
circumscribed, nothing definitive.
there's now and then there's
nothing and we're supposed to figure
out how to navigate in between.
that thought, that touch, that sound,
that space, that breath. this is it.

the calm...

where is my mother?
backward, forward, that rocking motion.
we become accustomed to it. expect the shift.
a member of the hemlock society in its nascent years,
now she is projectile, a missile with a programmed
target and the ability to forget.

time out

mindlessness
joblessness
wanderlust
all add up to the disappearing act.
the one you long to pull,
to become, to succumb to.

best friend

“If he really thinks about it, he doesn’t exactly hate Mark. It isn’t in his vocabulary to hate a man he loved so much for so long. While he might have the impulse to kill him, he doesn’t harbor the kind of animosity that inspires violence. It comes from some other place, that unknowing place where chaos presides and hangs in the air, waiting to explode."