long-distilled love
again, to Donna
we’re fifteen hundred miles apart/but i can feel your beating heart/and i can hear your honeyed voice/and thrill as both of us rejoice
the years with change and machination/have yielded nectar’s distillation/more tasty than the finest wine/two souls in intertwining vine
we’ll turn our back on stressful censure/continue on this sweet adventure/and loving kiss may well presage/a romance free of care and age
because we want to look better
we have made jewelry for thousands of years
applied makeup for centuries
we have worn extensions and falsies and shoulder pads and fingernail polish and shoe lifts and merkins and furs and antiperspirant and curlers and tuxes
who remembers liberace? friends called him lee, which name has been borne by everyone from lee marvin to princess lee radziwell
norma jean baker became marilyn monroe and marion morrison john wayne
wayne newton had so much work done it looked like his face was being erased
isaac newton didn’t get einsteined for hundreds of years
isaac stern and yitzhak perlman and isaac asimov all really have the same first name
and now we get avatar makeovers and ai ass-kissers telling us how fiercely honest we are
and our enhancements are less of our own will and more of an imposition
so please, friends, FIGHT for your trueness
for your gloriously unenhanced selves
where your true beauty resides
with some ugly strokes of the pen
a guy who helped hamas launder millions skates
dozens of violent protesters skate
defrauders not only skate, but get to keep the money defrauded from the victims
all this from a joker who has intoned
“LAW…AND…ORDER…” over and over and over
..
pardon my skepticism
pardon my disgust
for i do not pardon the stink of corruption
twenty-odd degrees is the axial tilt
relative to the ecliptic
so solstices are more sunny at a pole
lights out at the other
so the heat of a midsummer sea
is most energetic at that encircling bulge
closest to the fusion reactor heating sea-nrew
so storms and hurricanes
so tides and land-crawling newbies
so us
thus us
so thank the tilt we’re here
there was a throbbing in his lower neck
there was a throbbing in her yearning heart
and so they got together/and ran in rainy weather/and shackled passion in a horse-drawn cart
..
her parents were aghast agape appalled
his parents had long fled this mortal coil
and so they fled the scene/and lived aloft serene/and made ends meet with kisses books and toil
..
we leave them near his deathbed decades hence
their daughter and their grandkids leave as asked
he says what gracious robbery/you gave with ardent throbbery/i throb with you my truest love u n m a s k d
wrobleski of the dodgers delivered a pitch high
and quite near the bat-gripping hand
of blue jay gimenez. the pitch was not too far
from gimenez’s head, come to that. gimenez
reflexively dodge-danced, perhaps reacting
out of fear of being beaned.
(beaning is hitting the batter in the head with a pitch. last century bean was one of many slang words for head.)
then came trouble. wrobleski threw a pitch
near-identical to the previous one and this one
smacked gimenez on the hand, hard. soon the field
had outraged blue jays swarming onto it. wrobleski
acted the injured innocent whilst gimenez
was escorted down the first base line
by a peacekeeping umpire. the beef soon cooled.
(a beef is a dispute. the blue jays felt the opposing pitcher had twice attempted to dust off their teammate. dusting off is a deliberate attempt by a pitcher to intimidate a batter with a pitch dangerously near the batter’s body or head. cooling the beef is settling things down without a fight.)
ah, but then in a nicely karmic turn of events,
blue jay springer drilled a wrobleski pitch
right up the middle, hard, right into wrobleski’s legs.
a stadium filled with blue jay fans cheered wildly.
a leg-bean for a hand-bean
is not exactly an eye for an eye, but
roughish justice had been served.
o flow and ebb go lofty thoughts go interest rates go astronauts and like the tide the beach is littered with driftwood kelp and dreams embittered
we school we strive we get professional as hair and hopes become recessional whilst meters run and turnstiles click and pinpoint chaos makes us sick
home stretch is full of yawn and laze and cortex blurs our minds to haze as vultures wheel as heirs lick chops to flutter in when heartbeat stops
but i am here to tell you reader that your fine self is your best leader and striving’s in you for to go into the midst
turn ebb to flow
i am well into my eighth decade
and so am beset by pill pushers
insisting that certain medications are vital
lest i die
..
blood pressure/cholesterol/glucose level/prostate
need atenolol/rosuvastatin/metformin/tamsulosin
and there go $240 a year
..
my phone plan is $55/mo
anti-virus a hundred a year or so
entertainment and news subscriptions $25/mo
website $104/year
restaurant tips in the hundreds per year
car washes eight dollars a pop
cardboard-sign-beggars’ donations–
today a man slumped sitting against a mcdonald’s wall asked me for a cigarette/i told him i didn’t smoke/he said something unintelligible/i said “what?”/he mumbled again/i came closer per his scheme and said “what?? I am hard of hearing”/he said “do you have a dollar?”/and i said “yes, but i am going to take it somewhere else” and walked away/for i had sized him up and concluded that my dollar would add to his death spiral
but later of course i schmeared a lady with a shopping cart with a fiber
so it goes in my microeconomic universe
and it may well be the death of me
gather round the watering bowl
the clay-form array on the ware board looked as if
they were waiting for some water in brother bowl
..
the chess pieces are bone dry
the bowl and birds were just made
and are still wet
..
when all are dry they will be bisque fired
and then glazed and glaze fired
a continuance of a tradition
that began millennia ago
..
and when the glazed ware emerges from the kiln
perhaps there will be another gathering
around the bowl
..
perhaps some non-canterbury tales told
perhaps love made
swollen eyelid
an eye is awry.
its lid hoods and occludes the iris
and tickles the lachrymal duct so that it weeps
and the tear-filmed pupil makes for blurrish vision
and the man who owns the eye
feels like quasimodo or someone
even more grotesque. he worries
that it may be a staph infection
or, worse, some flesh-eating parasite
chewing his head away.
..
he tries to dismiss such foolish thoughts
by reminding himself
of a lifetime of hypochondria
and the many oh-i’m-gonna-die episodes
that turned out to be laughably untrue.
..
a visit to urgent care
would be a resounding smack in the pocketbook
even if they don’t upsell him like the charming lady
doc who said “you have earwax. want me to
take care of it?” and that two-minute tune-up
cost forty additional out-of-pocket bucks.
..
he looks in the mirror and smiles
with the half of his mouth on the unaffected,
uninfected side.
tries to, anyway.
he wanted to make a comedy/tragedy mask
out of his single face but the other half of his mouth
insists on half-smiling too.
now he half-laughs at his melancholic vanity.
“That’s Life,” he murmurs,
and feels better.
One with Clay, Image and Text 