The Mutual Arising

“Begin their mutual arising;
as they breathed so too grew the trees;
so too the sun spoke
in exhales of their increscent breaths…”

The Girl floats
done-this-my-whole-life-smoothly
and shouts across the water at Zero,

“No matter how deep this gets, ya’know,
it’s just more of the same. Same. Same.”

From cross legged
on the shore,
like the tail
end of inertia,

Zero jumps.

“Just keep looking,”
he jubilates,
“only nothing can stay
the same for very long.”

Zero and The Girl stretched
their methods upon the bank,
within the dust
encrusted over shoreline.

The wake distending
broken upon the mosses;
a provocation of eddies.

Zero watched high
about the trees when red
beaked against the leaves
snapping up bugs, crickets
the size of chimneys, dipping,
driven to beak-dive,  the bird
plummets to pluck polliwogs
and froglets from beyond
just the shoreline
in perspired pockets of pond water
squishing between Zeros toes
the brash bird lands,
and bends in for the nibbling…

“Hey!” cried Zero,
“try bittin’ your
own toes! See
how it feels!”

Cro nipped a final
peck against Zeros
knuckles and hopped
to toss some
lift across his ankles

squawked

and propped himself
from shoulder, to head, to
shoulder.

Across the rocks
The Girl postured
the flattened billow
of her fist
cocked back
suspended above her head she yells,

“Do I strike?!”

But slick like a joke
she’s back underwater.

All fists flailing and kicking currents
now bobbing
just chin deep and she yells,

“I got em!”

She spins her inevitably
soaking sibilants
and spits,

“That’s what it gets for messing with us!”

The Adventures of Zero and The Girl

“Sonder a moment…

The Wondering Metaphysicist…

The Chrontortionist.

The Changeling.

Your Ignis Fatuus.

They seek a geometry of conjuring spots.
A collision of collapsing corners.

Walls fallen; they paint the air.

Growing now dense and thickly
stitched within the gaseous
dance of the innumerable dead.

They seek the ancestries of eons
lain beneath the consistent constriction
of gravities deepest impressions.

For they found the trees had
grown into rock.
For they found the flora had
compacted into momentary stone.

As they scathe the time between the burials –
between the tribal arisings – they scavenge.

They seek the relevance in distances,
of the times between us.

They seek the metaphor at the yolk
of nature’s virtue –
the collective distillations
of the human expression.”

“The Past is not what it used to be…”

The past is not what it used to be
nor for the matter is the future.
And when I’d found myself a decade
later than your death it was still;
no time, no rung, had passed.
I found that whether today was
my 22nd or my 33rd year
was an otiose tide; for arriving
in the next decade became this
decade, arriving in tomorrow
was always, is allways, today.
Is a moment now if still redolent
of then, of you? I found your picture
was kept either way you existed
and in existing either way I found
something in your smile had changed.
From the moment it was placed
away, lidded, to when this coffer’s
inspiratory gasp had expired your
respiring respite – something
in a still photograph had altered
(adapted maybe). My father had
brought me then to now
on a conduit of pictures and fading
albums where I found that whether
today was 2015 or 2004 it was
still, and yet no longer still,
this, year. Each photo (even
irreversibly through that decay
of time) shone your smile, your beauty
and found I did keep you
around in photographs for since
your suicide – every pareidolia has been you.

The Bearable Lightness of Seeing; My Mother Never Died.

That smile is all I ever needed to inherit from you.

Mom,

I’m proud of you for finding the eye of the human hurricane; I’m proud of you for putting an end to what hurts; most of us can’t even find a poultice let alone a release. I now know that if I were to look at your suicide vehemently; in sadness; remorse; lack; less than; pain; that I am only saying “you’re suicide made my reality more difficult to accept” and with that understanding I am proud that you took off; I’m proud that you made your reality something that you knew how to accept; mine is fine; I’m doing well; I’m a sign language interpreter now; you’re still my mother because how I knew you was in a way that no other could have which means…

Shhh…

Don’t tell anyone…

You’re still here in my heart and mind; no one can take you away from me; not even you…

I love you more than I love poetry; than I love to learn about the cosmos; than I love to build things; than I love to garden; than I love to interpret; don’t worry, your secret is safe with me; I won’t tell anyone that you were never capable of dying…

Nov. 15, 2002; if your name was Toilet.

Looking through old typewritten papers I keep finding these odd ones typed on the back of really strange photocopied magazine adds; in 2002 I am working in the library at the Univ. of New Orleans filing old magazines; my boss; Hurricane Florence; had me photocopy to archive millions of these strange adds. I would keep a copy and take it home to use as poem paper. This poem paper just happens to be an ode to Eliot.

The smile is of content, of radiance in acomplishing
an open book breeze slicking back your hair
fanning you.

You could see with your glasses if only you had eyes.
and your clothing will never become fresher, never un-mothed,
like mothers tells us, 'stop picking at it'

Let your pocket blow it's own nose
the world lays top sided and languid outside your windows
a slight blue of where 'now' will take you

However, there is falsity to this world,
perhaps it is mirrored without you near
or backwards (I'm sorry, i see xxx only rings on strings)

but still i return to that x madening glare
you seem to me as if you are the breeze, and the book is blown over by you
yet still, somewhere in the darkness you are dreaming, of wasted lands

You arex spotted upon stripes round that neck, 
some striating your collars perpendicularing your apple, & most are hidden
because of your overly properxxxx aproach to looking to much like you.

Smiling, breathing, blind, hearing, smelling, and holding on to life
yet walking, you may not do, never again will you promanade your way
threw my park, nor my chess game,

xxxxxxx i remember someone once told me why you added the S to your name
because backwards,
it would have spelled toilet.