On the Drabble, a cyber poem formerly published here last July, 2014.
Bass Clef of a Mistress
credit: http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs41/i/2009/055/e/6/___Bass_Clef____by_cheinrich1981.jpg
A parade courses through my days,
one of twitters chirped from devices and trees.
An avuncular path leading back to my ears
sounds the thrumming pump of plasma drums.
I can hear my blood when the music starts,
like the rhythmic stump of dog tail in mid-scratch.
Silence moves me too in humming refrigerators,
ticking clocks, and buzzing transformers above.
Door knocks muted wood of knuckles shy
jar my attention in irritated curiosity and dread.
Like the broken peace pierced shrilly,
a dog barks inside echoing plaster and tile.
Water pour-sliding down pipes in gushes
forced like fingers hard-pressed on a fingerboard.
I hear the memory thrust of my grandfather,
his fingers crushing mine high atop the cello’s face.
“No, like dees, you put like dees, here!!”
A stranger loved in osmotic care for a family’s music.
Wind cries rarely as do the clouds in this desert,
so the trills of trickling rain sing sweetly suckling tears.
Muffled voices beyond closed doors wordlessly
play mornings mostly before the whispers of evening.
When the clanging of aluminum, teflon and iron
ring the truth fed in tones nourished by hand, we sing.
Our collective voices intone in the eyes of intention,
a shrugging will, and love-notes tucked in school lunch sacks.
And when the confetti clears, the bass drum moves on,
the choir of antiquity will accompany me, soloist, alto, sotto voce.
Going Inside
Tomorrow I will walk off into the flourescent light for good
never again wearing the same shoes, thoughts or smile.
The clay shapers will mold another figure, thinner, weaker
shaken and crumpled, in need of a step stool to peer out.
With re-formatted database, my memory sense will falter
feed me implanted lies of the consensus, a replacement
childhood, substitute story of a life never lived, imagined.
Read me all around the sphere, then, see what you think.
The words that will cut and shave, clip and trim, make me
appear like the tale of an other who skinned another ideal.
And there will be no return to the sanity of reality, no truth.
For tomorrow I walk inside myself–again–for the last time.
The Grey Father
Who sculpts my bent,
my leanings?
A grim-hunched father,
desultory,
complaining,
hard-wired to paint
grey for green,
color blind
to all that thrives–
joyful noises
hope in humankind
gladness of the sun
gratitude for breath
upright posture.
Not everything falls.
Can he fathom?
The miracle we stand
right angles to the heavens.
Ananda
Pleasure: watching the mercurial orb gurgle to and fro inside the glass of an old-time thermometer, the gift of orgasm from an-in-love-with lover, the runner’s high
Delight: the last piece of the 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, the unexpected twenty dollar bill in your jeans pocket, the lightbulb moment when it all makes sense
Happiness: skipping down the path just because; lightness in your step, in the being
Joy: turning from busy-ness to spy your infant’s gaze following your every movement
Cheerfulness: the unforced mental smile naturally unfolding at the thought of another day as another opportunity to get something right
Sensual pleasure: the house-filled aroma of garlicky tomato sauce simmering; the sweet, milky scent of an infant’s head; your mother’s finger tips lightly caressing your face
16th MuhUrta: the last sliver of sun that paints the sky magenta
End of the drama: resolution after the struggle, war, riot, tussle, tragedy–triumph in acceptance
Enjoyment: a book to live in for a while; the first bite of deep, dark, smoky chocolate; poetry’s silent spell
Thing wished for: Satisfactory endings to poor beginnings, if not understanding then acceptance
Beatitude: Break-through acts of kindness, a helping hand when all hope is lost, a miracle, nature’s whisper
Kind of flute: hollow, wooden, champagne, salve to the ears and mind
Sensual joy: Late Friday afternoon nap, unclothed and entwined
One of the three attributes of Atman or brahman in the vedAnta philosophy: the oneness at the tip of the final exhale concluding meditation.
Name of the forty-eighth year of the cycle of Jupiter: the comfort of order, prediction and patterns; the recognition of the unknowable vastness of that which we are particulate matter and the burden that relieves
Pure happiness: Seeing the fruits of your efforts to help others thrive or blossom, the awe of creating another human being through unimaginable struggle
Kind of house: All shelters that provide the safety and security that you imagined as a child gleefully building blanket forts in the living room.
Note: Classifications of Ananda are in the Dictionary for Spoken Sanskrit; definitions are in the mind of the Gaze.
Happy Belated Birthday Adrienne Rich
An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.
It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
Apophenia
Credit: http://www.creativitypost.com/images/uploads/psychology/249_2nd%20place.jpg
Constructed from smoke and mirrors, us,
ideas floating around bodies,
expectations wherein others’ unfulfilled
desires, prejudices, hurts and dreams
hurled at us in continual bombardment
so we in the end do not know how or why
we possess our minds with determined drive
to become “successful” defined by they
who came before us in a long line of delusion.
Why did I “choose” to become a lawyer?
Because I argued my way through youth,
and my mother capped it all in a sigh,
“You should be a lawyer.
You always have to have the last word.”
Simple cause and effect?
A match of my talent with a career? No.
Parental desire, a definition of success,
a dream of security and hope for respect.
All myths. The mold makes more models.
An inundating lore trails every profession:
lawyers are sharks,
doctors have god complexes,
plumbers are slovenly,
and no one rises more than the level.
Human propensity to stereotype, shortcut,
satisfies a deep need and biological destiny
human patternicity or apophenia.
But the appalling truth, each arcs complexity
requires attention, examination, exploration
work, in other words, to evaluate
the fount each encountered being springs.
Only few venture willingly to invest time.
Thus, the disconnection prevalent
in polarized politics and social media,
hatred on roads, in parking lots and
on grocery store lines.
Sneers of indifference pollute.
The pool of difference is tepid.
Come in. The water’s fine.
The Twin
Many days ahead still
to break down a body takes time
to break down an image built up
so long, so many fucking years,
a plan, a pattern, a steel will and
hard head, soft with romance,
adventure and fury, a stubbornness
fiercer than a mother’s,
she who endured the beating
neglect of everyone who ever
claimed to love her and never stopped
gaining on them all, earning by degrees
and respect, even if she came late
to loving herself.
Many lessons to learn
how the humbling of a human
being slow-stodgily sinks in,
brick by brick pitched at a head,
to break in the wall of a notion
make it understood that
leading life in a spin
loses the ability to take notes,
to catch up, remember it all
the test failed, no doubt.
for it cannot be otherwise
in learning how to be someone else,
a someone else, and merge her
to the pre-existing other.
Impossible to grow two people
as one dies to feed the other,
but to kill a person is not easy,
interminably terminally long,
unlike the beginning,
life bursting on the scene in violence,
painfully spasmodic spilling
into the suffocating air,
and bleeding out
in infinite incremental specks
unseen, unheard, unrealized
only now and again spying her
a twin, creeping along the fence
in the yard peering out cracks.
Patterns of Memory Seize
credit: http://blaine.org/sevenimpossiblethings/?p=2216
A static image floats fuzzy still life before a mind’s eye
–mine.
Lips crushed in grimace foul, screeching silent panic
a movie memory sans sound features a small face
wet with tears, her curls raging above and about her
head brown with ratted coils
and a dainty, tender, fragile forefinger
one finger enlooped by layers of hair, an index finger
struggling, captive, to untangle its freedom locked in
a strangling tress much to the horror of its owner.
That image, that girl, that finger flashes before me
now, you, whose wide firm hand with digits like
iron stuffed leather rods rummage through my
hair gripping the base of the rubber band that ties
the tail to my head, tighten your grip, finding
the loops for your yanking intention
my head poised, still, steeled up to constriction
and confinement.
All hands reach back, pull my trussed will, memory-
bound to arches circumscribing the view
of the celestial seascape’s cliche’d vision:
a man, a woman, trapped in time and hair-locks.
A choice, ownership and recognition–
a cerebral passion, homo sapien adores patterns.
The Will and Testament of the Last Living Fortress
credit: http://www.rhinoresourcecenter.com/pictures/o/1218990307/Durers-rhino-1515.jpg
Hunkered down, head hung low in modest consternation,
a lonely ever lost lover has forgotten the link to his future.
Huge burden for squat shanks sunk in steely toed hooves
–the line of his kind–for the heart-white tank rests stilled
uncomfortably complex for a survivor’s fatigued fortunes.
The will to seed his fate is buried beneath a tragic query,
the horn of desire splayed as aimed weapon and snared
drum beats pound defeat and despair of all whose greed
swallows a species in unsurrendered satanic usurpation,
a reply to which singes will: Why do we kill what we love?
In the gaze of the other 
