Last Days

maybe I can wake up if I
try harder and drink more
water in the form of what
you will fail to identify
wars go on for years 
now like falling cards
as if chance cared less
than stupid governments
putting us back to bed
to sleep to dream last
days of open hearts
wondering what to do
to make us all feel better

The Doing

things that happen are not all
the things I do modeling self
as I see it emerge transformed
this is not Rimbaud speaking of
waking up smelly still stoned
this is the body conscious of gain
and loss that was never there
something else will not save me
from real made to order fantasy 
like a merciful anesthetic again
opening up heaven's overflow
sun pours in celestial clockwork
grinding away from inside out
ecstatic if understood right
as it happens I am the doing

Poem

she gave less as we went on
both afraid to have our gifts
rejected or barely noticed I
didn't lead she didn't follow
or want to go anywhere it's
not her fault or mine but
there you are now it's over
not to be revised or clearly
grasp what I might have
done to make it better

Myself

We are doomed to act our self out in the physical world at all times and especially when alone. Other people will readily project some existing meme onto you, which you are free to inhabit and interpret without adding any particular content of your own. It is easy to make this comfortable bargain, hard and risky to break out of it, although we all have selves distinct from this sociability, if we haven't denied, distorted, neglected, or forgotten them. The dining room is full of memes at tables of four. You watch yourself from the inside while maintaining a suitable outside, in company and by yourself, beside yourself. You project perhaps an idiosyncratic idea of the prototype but not an entirely separate existence. One other person can make you feel objective. It may be counterfactual, but solitude feels like being more authentically yourself, more "real," existing in time alone. That isn't the whole story though. With luck you are also othered, part of a larger reality, connected on the soul level with in a circle of love, if you have sensibly made yourself lovable and given others the love and attention we all need

Revision

 such a special private pleasure
changing one word to another
slightly better more particular exact
meaning elusively in flight
 
anything is game you win
or lose the knotted thread
balks at the needle stuck
with what you started with
 
becoming alien diversity
yourself in lieu of anyone
other actually present
in the all-white dining room
 
the poem never ends you
wander into another dream
where no words rule or care
what you wanted to intend

The Chair

powerful gravity in this ugly chair
bought in Santa Barbara decades ago
for a play I produced at the Lobero
I finally escaped from happiness into this funky

void it must be adding several stone 
I wish my penis was interested in masturbation
idly fondled between my thinning thighs
it lengthens in my fond familiar other hand
I slide loose skin up and down the shaft
how long has it been a week at least
on a day like this  what else is there to do
it feels good if I let it and why should I not
no love sex left so I'm on my own

sultry air smoky sky no one here I'm so bored I
almost fall asleep dick shriveling in my hand
what little lust remains has waned

the chair still holds me in its vinyl grip 

gravity never sleeps
 
8/20/23 4:30 p.m. (revised) 

 

 

Do Something

how he feels in the
in-between time when
nothing is happening
causes him some alarm
is it enough to remember
or anticipate something
interesting when he was
more alive less formed
for the last time weak
with age and completion
is anything wrong
do something he thinks
anything better than this
creeping homegrown
inertia and remorse

still there and so is he

A Reminder

 (for Julian)
 
though sounds like snow
not like cow which is thou
and plough and bough
or off as in cough
or puff as in rough and tough
and enough
though is like dough
and so is although

Nothing Changed

a huge fire on the other side of the mountains
smoke looms like a giant cloud
we go on living well
presuming to be happy
wind blowing the other way
nothing changed
not burned up yet

Not Writing

writing about not writing
not being the good man
accomplishing more
laughing loving sharing wise
instead of not writing
not knowing how
or who I am