A Little Bit of Love for You

I’m thinking about why I do this.

Thinking about why this one way communication takes place between us. I’m thinking about what possesses me to be a part of this maddening process where I stay up hours and nights, dreaming and dozing and starting and nodding my way through the lines and the path and the word, just to try to find the clarity in the chaos. I do it for you.

I hope that you know that, and if you didn’t know it I hope that you know it now. I hope that you see the purity of my intention to just stagger into the scene, half-drunk, tripping over a fold in God’s bathrobe and falling to the floor, cursing and sputtering little bits and bubbles of spit the whole way.

I do it because I love the fall. I do it because each time, each fall, is a reminder of how impermanent the act really is. I do it for you; so you can see that fucking up, breaking down, turning inside out… those aren’t bad things, those aren’t good things, they’re just things. 

I want to take the time to tell you, that the reason that I write this, seriously, is only for you. Only so that you, personally, could read it, take it in, and possibly do absolutely nothing with it. 

As a thank you to you, I want to share a small excerpt from my next collection of poetry: An Exercise In Dimensions

Two small excerpts, actually. The first is an introduction, a “Warm-Up” of sorts; the second is a small section from my closing thoughts.  

---

Warm-Up

I will not be the one to say it aloud
But come, lean in close to this text:
Life has been split
The beams,
The popsicle stick, stuck,
Somewhere between your upper lip
and their bottom,
or is it more correct to say ‘your’ bottom;
{as if you could even tell the difference between}

Where it sits is
void; devoid; unavoidable;

I will say that I do not know,
But here, I will ink this down
S l o w l y
so as not to draw attention:

There are FIVE I have reached,
{Spread thin and cracked like a dried face mask,
I fell through- to a skin and film beneath}
Something both within and without,
Pulsing along and within my blood, your blood;
A collective pumping mass of white and red cells
Coupled and complimented finely with a
Bouquet of plasma and DNA;

You see it and you don’t
You feel it now,
(Now)[Now]{Now}<Now>
But you never could express the texture,
As if that makes even a lick of sense;

Are you listening?
Looking?
Feeling with blind, open palms,
Through the bright breath of each?
(Blinding) breath of each?
[Rotted] breath of each?
{Cracking} breath of each?
<Electric> breath of each?
O, my, how do they layer so finely,
Each incalculable reality on top of itself;

I welcome you to it,
([{<as if you hadn’t been already>}])
As if there was a welcome that did any of this justice
As if you could be welcomed out of it
As if you could definitively see the crumbled sky
The towering monuments
The rustic tracks of forged steel, running through miles of orange wasteland
The thin fishbowl sitting next to an impressive pile of psychoactive drugs;

Here’s to the hope that you can see what I write,
Although I cannot say it aloud
To the hope of truth
and
To a study in the dense closeness
Of this silken ripple;
This close collection
of nearest realities.

Please,
Invest your attention

---

Dear Reader,
 
I think that I will take any and every excuse that I can in order to write some kind of love letter to you. That’s what these books tend to turn into as they unfold for me; they are my looping love letters to you all. They are dirty and angry and confusing and passionate and messy and sexy and thoughtful and loose and tightly wound and layered and bare; they are everything that I could ever hope a true, complex love would be.
 
I am not sure why you read them, maybe you know the secrets, maybe you’re bored, maybe you know me and want to know more, maybe I gave you a copy and you are looking for the hidden meaning as to why, maybe you’re a pretentious poetry connoisseur looking for something else that isn’t yours to call your own, maybe someone threw this at you out of the window of an open and moving car. I don’t know. How could I pretend to know. The thing that makes me laugh, even as I write this now, is that these words somehow ended up in your possession and you took the time to read them. The very fact that you’re reading this now makes me smile and I can feel the laughter start to warm up inside my chest like deep roots of a volcano. The feeling is goofy and silly and I slightly chastise myself for having it; after all, the relationship between you and me is somewhat distant to say the least. We don’t know each other, how could we? How could we begin to, when beginning to know just ourselves must take our whole life?

---

Wanting more love, more poems, more music?  Stay tuned in.