Verses Standing Alone, May 12, 2015

Since childhood, he dreamed of being a hero

Modeling for adults the art of how to play:

Prey conquers predator, beauty marries beast,

Humility deflates ego, creativity replaces war, imagination erases dogma.

Games about mind over matter,

Love always defeating fear.

A warrior against all villains, his dream hero became real.

I often read poems

Meant for others

Because they are the words I need

Whispered to my heart.

What would be left to think about

Should my present thinking be

Put off til later?

O poet! You say confess feelings now, else

forfeit, no more second chances

I say come down from the cloud,

Believe in what you write,

Share feelings, after words

Love not in silence.

Because men do all the work and

God gets all the credit,

Let's call the one who accepts the credit

But is said to do no work, a wise guy.

Why get to the edge

But not look over?

I would then just stand, closeted,

Wishing you would move,

But you didn't, you didn't see at all.

How did you become confident?

By telling myself, "I am confident."

When did you become confident?

That very minute, by uttering the words.

"You had to spend some time there."

That generous split-second adlib

Immediately buried two years in a ditch,

By doing the next right thing

  

"You had to spend some time there."

That generous split-second adlib

Yanked me whole from the cunning mud

That had failed to suffocate.

"You had to spend some time there."

That generous split-second adlib

Asserted itself as truth

Born of confidence

I stare at the whitelight screen

Like a trained dog, who would never do the same.

My bloodshot eyes make the room look Jesus red -

or was it blue and green? -

The TV light is just there to fuck with me.

*(Two days later, I decide to make it one day to the Hunky Jesus contest in Delores Park, SF.)

Pretending to be employed

By Imaginary Company, Inc.

Reminds me of the need to cultivate forgiveness

For my pretend life.
Don't you have one too?

We do not throw anyone under the bus. Ever.

Yes, I'm from Vast Enterprises, Inc., South Campus.

Ghosts, April 19, 2015 (Inspired by an anonymous friend)

Nothing is ever truly gone.

Bodies that cruised Backrooms, or kissed lovers,

Shift, become

Invisible in death rebirthed,

Lazarus revealed to

Believers already fitted for straightjackets.

Curious visions these see-throughs -

Insubstantials watching, staring,

Commanding attention, turning from my public display,

Piercing darkness with laser-light confidence, yet denied substance.

Smoky words and letters, exhaled crystal gave shelter, 

Searchers escaped asylum, unhooded and unrestrained,

A brotherhood, moved to lower traffic areas,

Those fuck machines - Anything but porn! -

Gave humanity something wonderful - themselves, raw, exposed

Is this the realm of hungry ghosts, that mind-place

Populated by heads afloat and wasted bodies of smoke,

Dressed in styles from the ages, searching for

The way out? 

No Adkins, no Paleo, no warm-buttered-biscuit repast, only this

Ghostly, substantial nothingness,

Save memory [that]

Survives by harvesting our essence - words, sacred thoughts not ITs to disclose,

From the living, from themselves  :

"no limits here," carpe diem inspiration, wedding bliss, amputations, the

What-We-Felt-and-Did remains of having been who we were.

Wrongdoing and righteousness, discarded, freed Golum-ghosts

Possessed of Precious, crossing over.

Burning, bright-hot energy recycles into

Matter, the totality of which is neither created nor destroyed

Without any presorting into blue bins.

(Time out:  So basically we were living on history's leftovers -

excrement of the past, oil from the Gulf, fields of tulips,

Sherman, Lincoln, all of it repurposed.

Wake up! Your food has already been chewed!

But plowboys plow as they must, or as they've been convinced they must.

They do not have to do anything, nothing at all.

It's a frenetic mixing, spicing, stirring, and reheating of life's crusty stuffing, a

Self-imposed false burden that demands “New and Improved.”

But the wheel is already perfect!

A simpler communion for me!  Neither sipped nor nibbled, but

Shared freely at a table where life and death meet in the

Perfect wisdom that One cannot Be without the other.

This we think we know.

Do ghosts monitor our world stage, amused by

Fresh lives printed on recycled paper and

Cat boxes filled with clean litter, bowls wet with food,

Water to drink?

Poor creatures, earthboundlings,

Unaware that nothing really matters, that

Ghosts intervene, saving lives and love not from the taste of the

Forbidden fruit of knowledge, but from the

Gluttony of too much, too soon.

"No need to miss life's childhood, this human being-ness."

Piles of importance and self-importance, 

Bodies bloated, happier left to fuck and have a good time,

Level playing fields, kiss eyelids and noses -

Life-stuff for the dearly departed, who

Know all must be consumed and spit back into what is, for

Second helpings and chances.

Unimportance constantly renews, never lets anyone

Starve in the realm of hungry ghosts.

Come to my bed at night and look so damn hard at me but never

Say a word, yet speak as though I listen.

Pleasure rises under the gaze of Spirits,

Stares locked in battle lust, tongues in the mouths of the

Transitioned, here to there.

Which is alive, which dead?

Both.

None stay, all drift, fade

Evanescent like human lives, all

Ghosts under assumed names.