reeling a thousand in...

photo by Edward Rinaldi © 

a briefcase pertinent recollection

     we are told of ancient industries, pantheons of these mortar-less tributes, cut stone pieces fitted with an exactness, science strives to understand, we split things, reverse engineer time to emit information, we want, we desire, teeming in foment, we build up, we tear down, we are meant to be something besides alive, we incarcerate, to border our world, we emancipate by molecule, elated to be gyrating in a stolen moment or two…

    I am an irritant, prone to pitching tents where gadfly circuses make the rounds on the far sides of towns, I know I just have to find enough containers to fill with the exhales of my anti-social behavior, the little to strung out savoring of things that ring inside a bell tower tablature, an adagio for strings in E minor...you call them streamed poems, not so connected, desperate images, painted day times, burning on the glass and night times spent finding a way past where you only want the blind entrance fee paid for by someone else’s cemetery whistle because crawling yourself home is a tiresome way to live with destiny as a clutch of beans and choice as just another way not to feel…

       I ordered a misdemeanor, got a felony instead, knick-knack paddy wagon-ing, all the way to bed…

           thirsting for the right kind of rain in oceans of evidence the prosecution has laid out, I turn to my attorney and ask them to have the law call off the metal dogs, I will change my name to Jacob Marley...

       sometimes I sink down, a roll floor writhe kind of down, wanting something that cannot be described by words or mathematical formula, something, that only says when you get here I will be unspeakable in your current written imperfections, numbers and emotional howls…I feel my way to here, scratching a claw-skinning blind along each rung, roping the flung matter, all the brick and mortar storefronts, where I used to write love poems, act as if they knew what I was before, was I just another bible longing to be something more horny and lustful than providing daylight to some night shaded part of myself better kept in the dark, I think to myself, no one can understand you when your mouth is full of shit in an non-stop stream of divinities and fecal screams…

     you said give me the keys but I drove anyway looking for the nearest bridge or cliff, I took hold of the big bus wheel and turned it into the parked cars of our curb forest war zone ways of life, I jolted the lead springs, we bounced and careened, we lurched and you grabbed the jesus handle and I swore to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, but the truth is a lonely trick sometimes. sinking down, I only wanted to stay sick I think out loud, lowering myself to avoid the strafe of influence beyond gas created wasting vitamins on the inside, I was not thoroughly chewing my food, maybe everybody already knows its hurry up and go and artificial intelligence does not have to mean abdication of morals, am I another wide angled lens, can I narrow the focus on myself without having to step on anyone to get a better view, somehow it seems, everyone knows but me, to stay quiet and look, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the fires to burn a smokier blight, so we might, escape, feeling a good numb doing it for bullets to stop dancing tracer ballets, I laugh and muse, logic is leaving me, I think I know, they can’t shoot everyone if we all start screaming our truths at once…

    I haven’t the foggiest idea how to swim, I just do it to stay breathing, to stay alive, I just swim. learning to do what instincts do as an instruction manual defeats the purpose of living life instead of managing it or in my case mis-managing it, to a microcosmic dystopia, each pulse taken of what used to be free and easy now comes with a price and the bent back of burdening one’s self with doubt and other shrouds, so my instincts tell me to write, to keep in this voice, mad or not, just to keep writing, to keep in this voice, while all the earthly tomes say, you better get a job, you have kids, you have retirement to think of, everything you do is about chaining yourself to a glue factory redemption-ality, don’t be Gideon, bound in paperback, a slid drawer beneath, an old phone, a yellowed plastic covered keypad…

     rotary dialing, went the way of neon in the glass tubes, we had once used as the illusions we abused ourselves with, we do things more openly now, every dime is only the thin edge of quiet left over, crying to go home, how come I hear questions as inescapable noise, am I really felonious humanity, do I have mad intent, am I bent on leveling the playing field with my own destruction or have I accepted the view to the top from the bottom gives me a greater meaning to soaring heights and distances traversed…

     in order to keep writing now, I take the wheel every chance I get, I go in and out of a dodge city blues, sticking to where horses and cars shared the cobbled streets, in long loops and treks, so I know, when I make it to the coast with the surf calling me in at low tide, it is a familiar feeling, and the missing cliffs I desired to leap off of, are on another road for another time, and I can get out, kick off my shoes and dig my toes into the wet briny sand, there are no bars here yet, no cells to keep me in and the beach is deserted but it’s early, so give me time to find a way to script the Sun to play high tide against why I run, with a kite of many lines palming the Moon as a friend and lover…I know my smile lasts as long as I hold my breath so as I turn blue, knowing my sentencing is past due, I am near where the faint last echoes of a hammer and gavel are meting justice in all the words, leaked past conscious conscience, the crumble ended pieces, I’ve left scattered with the clams after the lifeguard had gone home, already pleaded my case for an empty heaven to feel rain again…

EJR ©