Slightly rocking

a wait more frustrating existentially

than Waiting for Godot

yet the sandwich was good

as you came not at all.

Knees Up and Saturn Continues Its Shallow Voyage

And I will admit four full days passed since last guess at time

Never less sure of

which will prophecy another age of becoming I

Which loss relative or comrade will shake listlessness from turpitudinal eyes

Forward forward slightly.

Let water rush through fallow hands trailing currents in directions

That I do not know final partial but fragile destinations

In a little Catullan boat floating drearily along summertime sunshines

Clouds dispersed in

Rhythm

To take up rest in cirri of solar rays

In a Pollack scatterplot

Space it out to find

Another way to be high.

I see you here too like ever before

And after and after and after

And such things that dreams find surprising still

And after and after and after and after

I refracted through a finely twisted lens

slipshod inside our private maladies

Humming positive melodies in minor keys

We once forgot to sing

A lyric so Cave.

It’s bright but why is there glass in the ceiling? That doesn’t make any sense!

It was, in simpler words, my exact thoughts about a majority of the Chihuly exhibit: it’s incredibly colorful and impressively crafted, but in my opinion, gets rather old quickly. Or, as a small schoolboy said to his teacher:

It’s like the Star Wars planet of Felucia.

Exactly. My mom, on the other hand, who worships Chihuly like Evangelicals love Jesus, was immediately smitten with the series of brightly-glassed rooms. Her journey through the Chihuly special exhibit took more than twice as long as mine. In the time before she finished — and in the extra time when she went back for the second time — I managed to peruse every item in the gift shop, trade eyes with the cute brunette (you know who you are), watch a bit of the documentary, trade eyes with her again, look at old people, continue looking at old people, and write the following poem, dedicated to the Ladies of the Dale Chihuly Glass Exhibit:

We still take all sorts of pictures

non-flash, assured,

and whisper witticisms

with loose-fitting smock

shirts and LL Bean tag scratch

and speak to ourselves

there is such beauty in the world,

at least here if only today.

If only…

And we will read

imprints of walls and heart

to become experts in a science

of comprative linguistics:

like nothing seen before.

How phallic, but softly thought

that Dale made these all

for me.

If only…

Sparkling glass glaze and light

preferentially accepted

thrills our pupils pale eyes in anticline.

To tell our husbands they’ve missed out

as we live our lives lost love

amidst luminations and shape,

not at normal non-places of

residence while we are

at least here, if only

Ladies of the Dale Chihuly Glass Exhibit.

Call me Marlow.

You saw him out of the corner of your eye. Fashion label jeans, shirt just tight enough to suggest…
(“It’s not what’s revealed but what’s concealed,” said Ms. Conrads about art, and you would heartily agree if you knew art. Splatter-splotch guy?)
SENIOR ALERT!
It was love (omg!):
Maybe it was the sports player charm (qt)
Thrill of an older fellow (roflcopter)
Mysterious knowledge of anime and science (plz)
Gun rack (srsly?)
But you up-down him and want to effing shout “Right on!” up to the mother-effing trees!
Pulcinella ring through the breeze.
Experience like a sage, amateur Brad Pitt in training –
Casanova, baby.
Little nymphet running to your Humbert Humbert.
There are snakes in the motha-effing school!

Have to stay silent, keep it inside, untranslatable like morse:
. . . . – . . . – - . – . – . – . . – . – - . . – . . – - – . . . – . . . . . . . – - . – . – . -

“The junk merchant … does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.”
Peer pressure, competition blow off course like Aeolian winds.
They’ll be back.
Corruption is the name of the game for the Mad Men –
Morals deep like shallow pools, won’t think twice.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Great expectations descended and break pay tribute money like Massacio handing Perugino’s key to the treasure.

Just like Iraq Taylor Swift PT Cruiser: sounded good at the time.
Love is not Seth/Summer L.B Jeffries/Lisa Fremont
You don’t know love…
so, like Heidegger, let it be.
Famous disavowal: “I know very well, but all the same…”
Careful Rumsfeld, always sounded good at the time.
“Stick to your own kind, one of your own kind.”

Next day plays a game of disappear like the Major.
Jumps out the window as you pop in.

Don’t leave 9th grade guys fighting over remnants like famished Irish farmers foraging for a tater.
Satisfactory reason exists to avoid Olympians.
You will see the best minds of your generation destroyed by madness.
Like McD’s, expand, monopolize relations.
“If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others?”
Open up hearts of darkness like Suger.
“The horror!”

All work and no play makes (insert nice fellow’s name here) a dull boy.
All work and no play makes (insert nice fellow’s name here) a dull boy.
All work and no play makes (insert nice fellow’s name here) a dull boy.

My suggestion for the 9th Grade Ladies starts
wait…
Fix hair, straighten shirt
wait…
Ok: GOL (giggle out loud) with your little girl-power teen posse gather tightest together Sancho Panza on left, Watson on right (in girl form), and then TBH just say L8R, LSR.
“I am on your side. But you have no way of knowing it, because our heart is blind.”

Depart as air, shake your splendid locks at the runaway sun.
How old are you now?
“I’m seventeen and I’m crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane.”
You’re 15,14,13 — 17. And crazy.
After all, Cabot was an explorer and disappeared forever.
“I decline to accept the end of man.”
So sit back and enjoy the strawberries and the Queen’s gambit.
We all grow up too fast so let’s walk backwards.

Every year she tries it again.

Again?

“Anne Hertzl you can’t go to the Christmas dance.”
Bobby had asked her at school.
6’5,
Football star,
Mathlete.
Triple whammy?

“No, no, no,” they said, “Anne Hertzl you can’t go to the Christmas dance.”

Times like this, Anne thought,
times like this, oy vay!
Maybe that scroll is missing a bisel about me.
Where’s the section on high school?

At the Shul, Wednesday, December 17.
“Well it’s all just questions you have to answer yourself –
Everyone has these kushia, but mazel tov in your quest”
Etc, etc, etc
Rebitzin shares a brief conspiratorial smile.
Rabbi says a lot without saying anything.

Anne Hertzl just wants to go to the Christmas dance.

Streets of anonymous name and variety flow past a solitary grey Japan-made vehicle. I am one with the capitalist consumerism its flaws clumsily coalesce into subconscious acceptance; conscious reluctance to admit I’m another prostitute for the “machine.”

Listlessly the distance stares back into blank brown eyes. Strips of white submerged in the blackest of blacks slide by underneath my torso. Car stutters mutters unheard alien love discussions from a radio channel change I hear it all and transfer back to the music.

Every night I have the same nightmare that I wake up and there’s nothing left for me to see. That globalized gluttonous mass-culture continued on and left behind a Nietzschean paradise for me, that I feel nothing stronger than she imagines.

Every night I have the same dream, that you wake up and know about these flaccid feelings left unrelated unexpected in a heart’s abysmal crevices. That I escape awkward repetitive conversations that I’m more than internet 2.0 and Reality TV create, that you feel it too like every stale cliche. Did you feel it Allen Ginsberg before the Hep’ took you away?

These city roads have no life after 10 p.m., that’s when it all shuts down, when the city men head to cocktail hours late nights meeting women of dubious quality but “disease-free” their contact assures phoning in “late” again to worried wives. Soon investment banks restaurants bars everything: closed. That’s when the ‘burbs get busy when the jubilant kids own the limitless night.

I see abundant cars poorly parked surrounding charming cul-de-sacs lined with same-design mansions, constant streams progressing up slanted artisan grass, footmarks desecrate masterful landscaping, labor of love by Nikolai, hot Russian import tennis moms can’t stop flirting with behind high-end sunglasses and tumblers of Arnold Palmer’s favorite.

I see you pass red plastic cups, brimming with forbidden tonics, stigmatized conversations pass like fleeting chirps of newborn birds under bass overtones on Tech N9NE’s newest track. You who said local was “alright,” who ate country club meals for country club prices, wearing Polo-brand shirts (seafoam!) Punching in Dad’s pin number.

Who imagine interest in what lacks, in television shows you sober find sickening, in books of minimal literary achievement, in boys and girls whom parents thought were attractive 5th graders but nothing more. Who started out slow but floundering reached for more dazzling rebellious addictive alternatives.

Who crack jokes in between cup flips, who crack smiles at cute boys, who crack lies to unwitting adults, who live in a perpetual world of summer an incessant state of sycophantic Hollywood lifestyle mimicry tasting everything in public parks in vacant tennis courts in hidden alcoves. Who little brothers sisters and cousins look up to and can’t look away from at tedious melodramatic family reunions that don’t quite “touch” you anymore.

Who take their sloppy one-night lovers by the hand, staggered by not-so-foreign substances, lacking capacity for thought possessing thought enough for copulation, discarding bottles and blunts and innocence on familiar staircases going up to bedrooms you’ve never seen and won’t forget. Caught on a repeating Gravity’s Rainbow-esque adventure.

Who dread the coming of the week because it means paradise lost, sleeping through monotonous lesson plans, pop quizzes, tests, essays, essay tests, quests, school, time. Who pre-gamed Art History because you just wanted to feel alive again because you needed to make it through the day.

Who travel abroad to escape a mundane “small town” existence only to end up passed out friendless in Hungarian raves where thumping techno rhythms drown out the beat of your heart and the voice inside your head saying “go home.” Who wanted to lose it to the suave French dropout with chain smoker’s voice and “fuck the world” attitude.

Who frequent the frats like a bum patronizes the soup kitchens, always hungry for more of that love lust desire and safety of muscled arms marooning your Sancho Panzas in exchange for momentary indiscretion and thrill. Who travel home dreading the feeling that you’re a Meursault in your own house.

Who struck mothers and howled at fathers over heated screaming contests when you were found out how you ignored the tears and disappointment in exchange for another night of insouciant exploration of youth and vitality how you changed your middle name to vice.

I think of you all as city council-forgotten vicious pot-holes remind me I’m cruisin’ on Prospect with prospects, oh mother, irony overwhelms! I see single moms carrying multiple tired children and infants home to dismal hovels quick glances around in multiple protective circles (be warned!) She’s not someone to mess with tonight.

Of puffy black-coat-wearing wannabe gangsters and thugs trying to replicate the Tupac and Biggy style and avoid the Tupac and Biggy outcome glocks riding inside pockets and dimebags situated in safe zip-up havens Timbaland boots tap broken sidewalks, all children of broken homes. Which one do I get it from?

But constant road vibrations mix with cellular vibrations, reminding me of what I missed requesting I join the fun. Will I be there soon? Who’s calling? Silence. Lapse of control so momentary I’ll forget it happened in the morning none of this happened. Just another night.

Just turn right then left then right again. A man walking home to his lack of a home. This city lost its life and why didn’t anyone let me know? Thunder clap cacophonous sends bolts of light plummeting earthward furiously but you don’t affect me.

I come to a red light, with an urge to drive through, and I pump the break when I see a billboard sign. All it says is “Reappear Here” and it’s an advertisement for a lifestyles magazine. Am I just like Clay? Am I feeling less than zero? I turn off the ignition to make it all stop.