one chess strategy is to get your opponent to surround their king with their own pieces
then your mild-mannered knight swoops in and attacks their king
and their king can’t move and your knight cannot be taken so checkmate they lose
and this is called a “smothered mate”
which is a good description of the cause of many divorces
so be kind to your mates mates
make sure they have breathing room and wiggle room
abide but do not abrade nor preside
and don’t play chess games to win love
i knew a woman/but hardly at all
on a beach near the border/(all beaches are near the border)/she came walking out of the setting sun/and asked me if I had a cigarette
when i said “Sorry, I don’t smoke.” she said “Good.” and i felt as if i had passed a test
her direct and honest eyes looked deeply into mine/and shyness brought me the impulse to flinch/but regardless of whether this was another test or not/the best thing to do was relax/exhale/look right at her/and see what happened
what happened: i saw her/she sought amusement without mockery/adventure with purpose/as did i
and alas i also saw she was married/though she wore no ring
and seeing my dismay she broke our gaze
and softly she said, “Young man, your time will come.” and she turned/and walked back into the sun
thirty-nine years later, i wonder…
did it?
will it?
our skins go bad with time/our nails gnarl/our hair has its autumn and winter/and sometimes blight
so it is natural to long for an afterlife/involving a retrieval of youthful glow/and taglessness and lush lock flow
and since it is fun to wish/perhaps we afterlifers will be able to trade in our vehicles/for different makes & models
or maybe it works like a salon/with the client describing the perfect fit of flesh/and getting the pamper-treatment from the cosmetician magician as regrowth and reshape happens
but i wish for something more diy/sprouting my own new hairline/pulling my legs longer/disappearing the foliage in nose and in and on ears
or commanding “Idris Elba as Heimdall” and getting those golden eyes
eyes are epithelial tissue too you know
.
more likely an afterlife though/involves nonhuman robes of nonflesh/maybe softly glowing jellyfish bulbs/or semipermeable four-dee membranes/enabling safe passage/through forever
perhaps in my lifetime the computer simulations will become real/and freeing/extending the duringlife indefinitely
wished the withering old man
if you’ve escaped the grace of God/to don the lace or lacerate/or mix some even with your odd/or call to question good and great
you will find sisters brothers too/and hotlines hot for you to dial em/for in this dizzy whirling zoo/all we extremists find asylum
after my father died infarctively in 1983/I resolved to strengthen my own heart/and starting july 4th of that year/ran a distance of at least one mile/at a pace at least as fast as under nine minutes per mile/every single day rain or shine healthy or sick
managing a streak of four hundred and twenty consecutive days/and in the summer of 1984/trained for and finished my first marathon
to keep myself running on a given day/i developed mental games and tricks/to subdivide and conquer a given goal distance
one game was called “candy man” and the simple rule was to pay myself a nickel for every telephone pole i ran past/and when the run was over spend up to that amount of money/on candy and snacks/at one of the many convenience stores operating under the name “circle k”
at that time I could eat all the candy I wanted and not gain weight/because i had a ravenous metabolic furnace
another mental trick was to turn myself into a rider of the rohirrim in the tolkien mythos
a messenger delivering urgent tidings to a safe haven called “wombwater”
and having delivered the message and bathed in the healing waters of a celestial womb i would turn back and head for home/running till there was a mile to go/then clopping on my non-hooves the rest of the way for cooldown
and since my run started at 19th avenue and indian school road/and wombwater was the frontage road just south of orangewood and also on 19th ave/my run became a walk at bethany home road/for a net running distance of four miles
and at that time four miles was optimal for my training
.
as a man in his seventies my mind turns now and then to mortality
and paul simon singing “it’s all gonna fade”
but i yearn for a reality in which i exit galloping/to reach once more the healing haven of wombwater
and be restored
sweet-talk may compel us to beguilingly do things/we did not intend to do
but sourtalk has given us a new old old president
who told us “if you elect that other guy it will lead to world war three”
and “if you elect that new gal it will lead to world war three”
and “I’M not a threat to Democracy, SHE’S a threat to Democracy”
and though he’s lied thirty thousand times
it seems we are always willing to give the poor guy who’s been castigated ever since he came down that golden escalator/and gave up his billionaire lifestyle and his presidential salary for us
a second (to the 30,000th power) chance
and many of us secretly like it when people get away with really bad stuff
we made heroes of bonnie and clyde, after all
.
but all that sourtalk has warped his face
i mean, LOOK at him
he looks like he has a mouthful of lemon juice
in the midst of this valley of the sun/near the airport where i once worked/is an archeological dig/of a platform-mound community that we call the hohokam/but of course have no clue as to what they called themselves
and about a thousand miles away/and on the other side of the mississippi from what is now saint louis missouri/another people from another long ago built mounds
both peoples started broke/but luckily mounds are dirt cheap/when you add elbow grease
we now everywhere are mound builders/but our mounds are undesirable stuff called “garbage”/and our mounds are called “landfills”
twenty years ago i met a guy in the waste removal business/who when asked what he did for a living/replied with a joking “business is picking up”
alas his business was not only picking up/but also dropping off/and he said recycling really didn’t amount to a hill of beans as far as the environment is concerned/but it made people feel better
our throwaways include effluent of various toxicities/and traces of them end up in our bloodstream and fat cells and skeletons
an uncountable number of micromounds in every living creature on our planet/including you and me
so here’s to you o mound-builder reader/bystander innocent or otherwise
and here’s unsolicited advice from a fellow mound-builder: take out the trash
by which I mean
despoilers of our earthly home
i live in an apartment complex that has water issues/and every now and then we dwellers get an e-mail/saying that the water has been shut off temporarily
last night i found not by e-mail/but by a gurgling sound and no water/that it was happening again
and the timing was awful/because i had yuck on my hands/and needed to wash them
i handled that crisis by using the drinking water in the fridge to wash/depleting my potable water supply by about a third
but another crisis began to loom/that of a growing need to answer the “call of nature”
and it seemed to me that the middle of the night between sunday at 10:26pm and dawn monday morning would not see a renewal of water service
consequently and from desperation/i created an ad-hoc religion called the Church of Immediate Needs/central to which dogma was the proposition that the presiding deity or reality-aspect or supernaturally-powered listener would prioritize prayer by immediacy of need weighted by relative outrageousness of request/and if the need were sufficiently immediate and the request sufficiently modest/it would stand an excellent chance of being answered in the affirmative
and having formed this religion immediately prayed that water would fill the toilet tank after i flushed and if possible would also resume gush-on-command from shower head and faucets
and then fell into mildly troubled sleep/and woke at the urgent message from my body’s evacuation system/sent at 3:57am
and stumbled to the bathroom sink and manipulated the faucet control
and LO AND BEHOLD like a car engine cold-starting the spigot sputtered and coughed/but then gushed blessed and holy WATER
and i was able to take care of business
.
so now there is a new church…or is there?
perhaps our own bodies have their own Church of Immediate Needs
and “Gotta go! NOW!!”
is a prayer
hark: a shark
hark: a shark
feel: an eel
swish: a fish…that got away…in the dark…
unreel
Afterword: Compulsivity led to the creation of this minimal list, minimalist poem. Midevening today I realized that if midnight came and went, and I failed to publish something on my blog, I would end a streak that started on July 25th. My friend RussKaz was nearby when I had this realization, and he happened to have single-word prompts on flash cards, so I asked him to pull one at random, and he pulled “shark.” The rest is hastily-written microhistory, with the subtext that a text-body in motion tends to stay in motion, especially if the textmaker has a screw loose.
she flexed her wings and flew into the sky/and orbited a planet she had known/before she donned her latest flesh. in high/aphelion our sun but dimly shone
but she supplied the radiance the brightness/and dove into the atmosphere a nymph/of firefly glow of first-time-kiss delightness/swift unlymphatic for she had no lymph
from core to ring she sped and danced en pointe/and left a ringdust phosphorescent wake/a kindred soul beheld in lust and want/but she was gone a differed need to slake
through solar wind she fled then bed resumed/through sun’s core in her dream cleansed unconsumed
One with Clay, Image and Text 