and I almost felt like crying, wanting
to to just bend down
and place my lips on the middle of her back,
and just leave them there, breathing all night, pouring out
stories of now and those written in a life
that none of us know how to speak yet,
and I don't know if she would have felt the kiss
that I would have meant so dearly to give, sometimes
the images inside of eyes that are closed
and dreaming on the inside of a prayer, dont slow down
forever, like forever feels
slowed down when time is
set free
made equal.

and i almost felt like crying because
i think she would have understood it better if
at all, than my just smiling in the dark.

tell me a story she said, and i tired to, i tried
to tell her about maps made out of electrons
and fountains gushing light, and also about the romance of the penguins
down in the southernmost south, and also about soft hurt
like the white-pink sun leaning on clean wet grass, or the warm hissing
of disturbed and sleepy whispers, i tried to tell her how i felt
when i put my lips down on the middle of the back of the universe, and about
how excited i am for the future, how god damned beautiful i feel and am for the future,
i tried to tell her about the taste in my lungs while hugging each breath
stretched fresh in every now, and about all of the now's
voltaic and invisible along the middle of the back of the future, and how that
makes the future not so far away, its only
whats next
and everything.

i dont know what she was thinking.
i never really do.
and i think she does
think that i always have known, which is why
we are only close together,
not perfect.

and i have to believe that she is happy, as happy
as most of the people i am lucky enough
to love, but i really only need to believe that
for myself.
And that is why sometimes, like last night, i almost
feel like crying, but that would get confused like everything else
that i try to share with the world, and she would have
probably asked me what was wrong
and would have worried
when i insisted nothing
nothing at all.

Penguins in the Antarctic don't have to be scared
of things like Polar Bears or kisses misunderstood
or lost on the middle of the back
of forever,
and neither do I.
It would be nice and I really hope
that Jen understands this and that my stories
are all honestly very
and really true.

this was going to start
angry
and annoyed
but how can i be
i love you all so very much
such love i have for you
my beautiful my fragile
my lovely
lovely fools.

and i forget sometimes
how much i really scare you,
no matter where i am now.

and i was going to yell
until thinking about me yelling
thought about it,
and started laughing,
and laughing
would be no better way
to say it...
i mean really
there’s no point in saying anything
which is also something
i seem to forget, so you see
i know what its like to be a fool
im one of the best i know,
but it can be quite lonely
to know that.

im in whats called a terrible place
where the fools will say im not myself
so i guess that makes me someone else
but not a fool (because a fool could never fool themselves.)

wait,                           stop.
what am i doing.
i'm doing what
they can only know
as terrible.
fuck.
i mean it doesnt matter anyways, so no need
for me to mock this(it/them).
lets start over.

i love you all so very much
such love i have for you
my beautiful my fragile
my lovely
lovely fools.
i know you are afraid.
i know you think you believe that i am
in a terrible place.
but there is no such thing
as a terrible place.
places arent wonderful
or terrible,
they are just places.

i am only inside,
just wandering around
inside of myself, but understand
that where i am
is as true as
outside of me is -
where being afraid of me
you are somehow able to forget.
but no matter where i am,
i am not afraid.
but you don't believe me, do you?
will you even try to imagine it for me?
that just maybe it is possible that
i am truly
not afraid?

i know you think you are afraid of what
you think i am doing, what you think
i may
do.
but honestly, you have absolutely no idea.
but don’t worry,
neither do i.

and so,
there’s just that thing.
that beautiful and fragile and lovely
thing.
and i know some of you have felt good, have
humored me,
pretending to play along,
thinking you’re letting me think
that you believe me.

but that’s ok.
i was pretending too.
i was pretending for you
too.


and i guess it doesnt matter,
there’s really no point in saying anything.
i simply wanted to tell you that inside or outside, i am
always as near or as far as you can imagine that to be.

i love you all so very much
such love i have for you
my beautiful my fragile
my lovely
lovely fools.

and i dont know what its like
to be you,
any of you.
I wonder
what if
we could plug our head
heart
mind and soul
into an overhead projector and
everyone in the world
innvited everyone in the world
to attend an informal presentation
of what its like
to be each
and everyone
of us.

i bet- fuck -
no fuck that -
i know, we all would be
blown absolutely and completely away
flattened and collapsed
down to perfect straight lines,
in the most obvious
and beautiful
and incredibly unimaginable
(*don't try-you can't imagine something
that your imagination can't imagine*)
of ways.

i think our feelings
and our dreams and our hurting
and our fears
would relentlessly and
continuously shake, crack
and burst, leaving us (whatever is beneath)
naked, shiver-trembling, pure
and electric, and
then in a blink of a whisper
return us back whole,
each and together at once
soliloquy and symphony
boom and
thunder lightning
crackle and snap, yes
we would all be
such glorious storming
magnificent and momentousness,
time saying ok, we can go
just a little bit faster, as the voices
deep inside our bones
combine and tune their moaning
into song together, singing:
evolve. yea
that would be
pretty cool.

because lately, and not in
the petulant mirror-making ( that
is typical of our youth, unsettled )
kind of a way, ive been thinking
about my life,
and yours.
and for some of us i think, i can
only speak for myself, the
" what everyone wants " isn't really all
that wanted
much.
i used to think maybe i'd grow
into that common wanting, that perhaps
it would just bloom late, but so far ( and most likely
halfway through my season here ) I
have not.
i left some space in my garden
just in case-
wife-family
child-career
-healthy-happy
achievement-success-
i put them in rows, lined them up,
sat down
and waited...
so far nothing.
and whatever it is that reminds me
to do this, to check in on
these little vacant spaces
in my garden, seems to be
drying up.
I don't know how to water it anymore,
and i dont think i really care
or will for much longer.

and just the same, which is just fine,
i dont think alot of people would care
all that much, would be able to prop up
the interest in what
i do and who i am.

ive been happy and not.
im usually fine
either way.
i appreciate the experience
of both, i don't
have a favorite, i
love them both.
( for both i am )
for both are
innocent equally meaningful
and precious.
im not sure what would happen to me,
but if either one were to be no more,
what was left then could not be.
who knows what would happen then.

until then ill be here, in my room,
writing and painting
with Dublin,
my cat, and singing
along to great music.
you can come over and watch if you'd like,
make yourself comfortable
in a corner, and occassionally i will
look up, see you, and
watch you, and
smile.
(like
i always have and always
will. )

and im not sure if i should do anything...
send out a formal announcement?
maybe post something on Facebook?
i mean its not like theres a forwarding address
its not like you can google it
and its not like i really care,
but recently ive been slowly turning down the world
or more specifically
people in general.

i can still hear them, just less.
and the projector isnt moving so fast
anymore, i’m not
scanning the scenes
for clues anymore.
now is more
still images, careful ephemera,
just some little bits
im grateful and blessed to collect
just some little bits
trimmed off the circuits
just some precious and two
dimensional color and black
and white moments i witness
as a simple citizen
of the five senses.

but lately ive been pulling back
or leaning forward, perhaps
smiling
at the delicious ripping
of the paper wrapping
my context here.
its not the occasional toe
in the cosmic river, no
im waist deep and wading
wide and greater out
into the sparkling sizzling
voltaic flood and spill of space
and lambent forever.

so yea, kind of like
if i could take one myth and add a wish
i’ll take Noah and would preferrably hope
not to have to build the boat.
but wow, how peaceful that sounds
no people around,
all hearts, and no thumbs except my own,
so yea thats the myth and the wish
id pick
if we were choosing how we would like to exist.

and i have nothing against people
ive been lucky to know
some extraordinary ones and
some quite quotidian,
some ugly,
and some so lovely
that the meaning of beautiful
had to start over, had to
completely begin again...
but im just unscrewing some screws now
and softly snipping the stitching
off this vast tent we are all in,
so dont mind me at all,
as i tug gently on the tear,
or as i empty the pockets of the mind
ive been wearing...
time, nope, dont need that, or gravity,
here you go, and heres the lease
and here are the keys
wont need those
where there is no such thing as property
where locks and doors
are simply such silly things
simply surrounded
like anything and always
by everything
(separating nothing )

yea so not really too sure
how to put all of this, the next time
it starts to get loud, the next time
i say “ huh
oh im sorry what
yes of course im listening
who me? what have i been up to
um, nothing that matters that much,
um... “
...
( well ok, ive been quite alive in fact
in the aggregation of anti-sycophantic
and supertemporal apprehension
allowing my awareness to attenuate
any pestilential or prohibitive concepts
or considerations preventing my effulgent transfiguration
into edenic electrons and ebullient firmament
and the consequential ferity has been quite manifest
and strangely sybaritic,
“yea so not too much really you know
just wandering well in wonder
as i winnow away from the world...”)

Kenton Nelson started painting at 40.

he called me "young artist" today, I
quite liked
that very much.
I'm 37.
I recently broke up
with my words, more of a
we need some time apart, we need
time alone
away
from it all.

We went to his studio
after lunch,
 I saw pictures
of his daughter.
Nine, he said,
she's nine.
Kenton is near, if not already, an easy 60, a clean,
beautiful and capable 60,60 like you
imagine it should be, lean angles confident
like a statue that made itself, or
the simple posture of a tree
pure in the accident, now obvious
from 6 decades of conversations
with the wind.

I recently let my son go.
His name is Jude.
he was less than 5 months old
and inside of his mother.

I did the math quick, deep
and private, calculate the artist and
the girl in the picture, hurry, I did not
want anything at all aware, or that exists,
to see me racing myself
towards equals.
and it was nice to see something on the other side
of those two parallel lines, it was nice to remember
what hope feels like.

Kenton showed me some techniques, some methods discovered
from when he perhaps and maybe
had equally most likely
felt the same hope from
the same and wonderful words, young
artist.
I was new,
and grateful.
We were just
two men
most comfortable
in rooms where walls
cradle our anonymous cathedrals.
We were just two men, discussing tips and tricks
about the laying of
sacred bricks and invisible
colors in glass,
that others may notice, or not,
from the other side
of certain and particular walls.

And
for a moment I did not feel so recently
close to death.
And actually, death is a poor
and shitty word
to ask to mean this, but
right now you see, me and my words
arent exactly on what you might call
the best of terms.

Recently I have been close to something else,
something much different than death, something that does not
liberate, something that does not renew, something
that does not reap, and will not sow, and so
it was really quite nice to learn
that Kenton started painting
at 40.

how strange this sadness...
paper thin yet quite audible, crisply tactile throughout 
every wrinkle in my being, each
crackle of its fibrous layer makes noise
bigger than it's weight and true dimensions, and i
hope to know i think and pray
that it is present-like, covering
a simple pleasure and mystery beneath.

i am on my own again, well me
and my cat Dublin that is. Great
apartment, good new job, and complete
freedom, and the fertile ground for my
self-loathing, ridiculous despair, and most
ambitious fear to seek shading in the light, to seek
out any bend or streak of black, through which to sneak
in and hide my sins, moist
in the warm shadow, patient
in the expectation of bloom.

...and fuck all this morose shit, i mean
i am exactly where i've been working towards, planning on,
and there is absolutely nothing wrong at all.
but sometimes that can be the most deilcate
and dangerous of places...
i start changing the truth of women i have hurt
and do not love, i start accusations of self, accusations
of such magnificent larceny, fraud, cowardice, and
insanity, but then
i fight and actually free the ink, resist the urge to punish
the words due to my own fear, and allow this day
it's own brilliant chance to feel how it may, to watch in awe
at how it can make perfect moments of middle-class beauty, out
from the most hideous of inbred and aristocratic
nonsense.

...CrazyCrazyCrazyCrazyCrazyCrazy...

too many people decided they could not be like Jesus.
and then he died.
and now many Crazyheads are looking for something to do.

they can become you, they can hate you, they can try to hurt
and ashame you.
they can blame you for all their Crazyfears inside of their Crazyheads
or
they can ask you how you are.

at times ive been Crazy.
but then the wind will stop and catch me.
and whisper its all right.

one time i took a walk.
I saw a leaf down
alone on the ground.
i sat down and kept it company.
i asked it why it was so quiet.
it did not wish to respond.
i asked it how it felt and
a Body walked by and told me i was
Crazy.