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Taken Shaken Godforsaken

December 7, 2024
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Life was fleeting fun and fudgy/Then you die and things get judgy/Sins remembered fry your bacon/Taken shaken Godforsaken.

“There’s No Hope” is what the door meant/Here comes Santa bearing torment/Flame and tiny demons jabbing/In your ear Aunt Esther gabbing.

You’re repentant you’re remorseful/But the horse crap by the horseful/Buries you in flaming poo/Not a damned thing you can do.

Then the heavens part and smoke/Makes things disappear. “A joke!”/God Herself declaimed, and laughed. “You’ve been pranked! Spanked! Punk’d! Giraffed!

“Hell is but a vicious rumor/Scripture satire! Doom with humor!/Boogeyman in chaptered verses/Spicing Blessings up with Curses.”

Then God’s browline lightly knit./”As for heaven, He-She-It,/You may find it, you may not,/That depends on what you’ve got.

“Use your Viewpoint. Watch and learn./Use your Wisdom. Think; discern./Be an Angel, not a Creep. Dream without the need for sleep.”

God began to dim and fade./”Find yourselves and interbraid./Right some wrongs. Unbotch some botching./Love as if your friends are watching.”

God was gone. In space, adrift,/This new Angel-Ghost made shift/A satellite, then speeding dart/To Earth, to guard, to watch, to  [heart].

epithelium elysium

November 23, 2024
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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

wombwater

November 21, 2024
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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

The Kid Who Wanted Me To Come Out and Play

February 15, 2021
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The Grief keeps on coming. A couple of weeks ago a former next-door neighbor died. I didn’t know him well, but I knew him when.

In 1971, when I was a high-school senior, this much-younger kid would knock on our door. If my mother answered the door, he would say, “Mrs. Bowers, can Gary come out to play?” And if I answered the door, he’d look up at me with a confident grin and hold up his play-catch ball and say, “Wanna play Catch?” That’s the way I remember it anyway.

And we’d go onto the asphalt of Glendale, Arizona’s Pasadena Avenue and toss a ball back and forth, our throws getting longer and longer as we slowly backed away from each other. He was pretty good at throwing and catching for a kid his age. And sometimes I’d say after just a few minutes that I needed to go do something, and sometimes it was relaxing and fun to just keep launching that ball into the accepting sky. But my recollection is that he was never the one to want to end it.

He was Jay Yeomans, son of Jay senior. Everyone called him Jaybird.

Now he is no longer among us. He has died, of an aggressive form of cancer.

I learned a little more about him after he died in hospice. For instance, he liked Jack Daniels so much that one birthday he got several big bottles of it as gifts. And here’s documentary evidence of that, courtesy of a mutual friend.

20210205_221114

I look at this picture and I see that bold kid again, asking an older kid to come out and play. My message to him in the Great Beyond, which charges no postage but offers no guarantees, is, “Farewell, Jaybird and Jay. I’ll bring a ball to toss when next we meet.”