scruta

These are the days when the trees will sing their windy caterwauls,
And imprism the light in ravenous bloom.

Young men will cock their heads akimbo, prowling like drunken wolves,
Ravenous, yet languidly falling to a feast.

Young women will sway brightly as their steps approximate a dance,
A reel, hurdy-gurdy tuned, like the rise and fall of some giant cylinder,
Pulling you deeper into its core,
A bingo wheel, a threshing stone.

The old will roll their eyes and pucker their mouths inward,
As if trying to taste the memories inside themselves,
Gone too far in space and time to even speak:
“Yes. Yes. You know me well.”

Children will scream, if only to hear themselves scream,
Proving conclusively the existence of their vocal chords and the air they vibrate,
A prelude to the future,
The endless task of asserting:
“Yes, I am. Yes, I exist.”

The streetbeds will clamor with the sounds of more feet,
The roar of eager cars,
The swish of seasoned bicycles.

The skies will creak and clatter.
They’ll moan and wail,
Swirling at a pace tempting wild speculation,
Charts littering the walls,
Machines wracking with hums,
Men who speak in half-truth percentages
And eyes in space.

And though these things all speak their own words,
Their own signs and gasps in the firmament,
Together they call:

“The time is here and now and short,
So love these days in their passing.
The heat will come; the cold will frost,
And bake these days to memory,
To harken their return again.”

I had a dream last night,
About half past three
A goddess spoke:
Sweet Technology.

Her skin was like crystal
In liquid displays,
Fibers for eyes
pulsing cathode rays.

Her lips were both pouted
At binary best
And silicon folds
Arose from her chest.

Her voice started too harsh
All gravel at first,
But smoothed like waters
Intended to burst:

“Darling, will you hold me?
And give me your heart?
I’ll give you the keys
To worlds that you’ll part.

You’ll see into atoms
Make ad-men’s lures,
Stealth and wealth weapons,
Lowly cripple’s cures.

You’ll rise in newfound days,
Learn to beat the sun,
Grow the world white hot,
Cool it down for fun.

And when you’re alone and tired,
Visions that you’ll see
Will cloud your clocked mind
From mediocrities.

Visions of great houses
And monster truck boobs
Will awe your mind to sleep
With LCD tubes.

So boy give me your answer
I promise you’ll have fun
The time to act is now
The race has just begun.”

A girl poses for a picture,
Flushing Chinesely,
Her shoulders of her shirt
Falling by her friend’s help
Showing more of her body
Standing in front of a fountain
Thinking herself a Botticelli.
(For a moment, I made her one.)

our lives are heartbeats
of a hummingbird
seeking its dew

I praise you, my greatest weapon

Triggered at quick scrapes with social obligations

Floundering insecurities

And greatest aspirations.

How could I thank you for all your services lent to me,

As a wiley beggar strangely, suddenly, perversely

Giving me money just as I hunger for dinner?

You ask nothing but that I engage you,

That I hold you honestly, like a child,

Finding in each of your fiendish devices

A new amusement.

You would pressure me to laugh at nothing,

To find joy in the mundane,

To find myself absentmindedly getting up and

Spinning loops in a square,

My mind full of fantastic scenes,

Only to think that I have lost my wallet

(but then realize it was in my hand the whole time).

You sting deeper than any drug because

You are hand crafted, genetically grafted

To my idiosyncracies,

Heightening no particular part of my psyche artificially

But heightening it all!

You teach me with madness

Only to bring me wisdom. I cry at the thought that I

Was blessed with so perverse an attitude,

With such a kind friend as you.

My shadow, my wanderings! You go

Where I go, intensifying, casting over and over into infinity.

But I feel I must reign you in,

These 3 AM love affairs you bring me while eating

A bowl of ramen can seriously, undeniably,

Medically verifiably, prove detrimental to finding an actual love affair.

It stands to reason you and I have gone too far,

Have perhaps broken off too great a chunk

From the muse’s hip as she bent forward and we stretched for her bosom,

Failing, but refusing to go away empty handed,

When my shrink,

Modern day arbiter of dreams,

Confessional for all those awkward reconstitutions of reality and fantasy,

Tells me I have an active imagination.

(This is usually when we begin to wax Freudian,

Beds filled with all sexes covered in blood and the smell of incest;

Behavior modification,

Careful accounting for thoughts and their distribution,

Since thoughts really can be regulated the same way as the UPS,

Although they rarely illicit the same kind of joy upon their arrival

As one of those brown packages;

The newest tinctures for securing the moderation of anti-social behavior,

Along with careful harmless looking advertising,

Weight gain? Ticks? Loss of sexual appetitite?

Not with this happy blob!

And of course,

Philosophy.)

Okay, we’ll strike a deal,

My ravaging imagination!

I’ll give you a couple hours a day

Just with you – like a girlfriend or something.

We’ll sit in public places, and dream all kinds of things

And I’ll laugh and nobody will know why.

I’ll lock myself in a room and furiously, passionately

Hammer out pages of prose with your assistance.

And then, later on,

I’ll go about my day,

Not going into flights of fancy

Unless I need to be clever for some reason.

I know that you don’t like to work on command,

You’re a prima donna and you need your

Led-Zeppelin style bowl of all green M&Ms

But do you think you could help me win the girl,

Or come up with some really original TV commercial?

Everybody says those pay well…

A broken heart is heavier than lead
In eighteen wheelers Jupiter attacked
By gravity. A broken heart will head
From sunny strolls to pits of snakes, when backed
By thoughts of love like lobsters boiled in pots,
A-squirm for life that suddenly went numb.
A broken heart will run on breathless plots
Of ponzi schemes, a soured chance to thumb
A nose at chance, to fill a void with void.
A broken heart will fight with shadows cast
By puppets, characterizing those joyed
Affections lingering to hold the past.

[WARNING: I wrote the following concluding couplet to try and add a happier resolution to the matter, but having just now taken my own advice, I find that it’s basically bullshit. (This is probably attributable to my singular inability to have any kind of lasting, meaningful, affection for anyone. I attribute this to my genes or environmental factors, but I’m sure the victims of my so-called ‘affections’ would probably term this to be the case of my being a ‘cowardly ass-hole,’ unwilling to commit to anything of worth. (I should note that I’m not altogether unconvinced by their sentiments, but that I would attribute my own ‘ass-hole cowardice’ to geneological and environmental factors… A reductio ad absurdum: you provide the reductio; I’ll more than happily provide the absurdum.) Like Washington, I now have similar reservations about love: “it is not reason, it is not eloquence; it is force.” (Even though I know it’s not.)]

But even broken hearts can mend with time,
A beer, a friend, or just a clever rhyme.