Too complete anger management leads to middle management...or is it middle age management? There’s a danger in not taking the (mis)direction of your path personally - it comes at the cost of your personality.

My following self-assessment, might it be generational too? Whatever the case, I am simply not mad enough about where I am, about the reduced circumstances of my life versus the birthright of its prospects. Days like this, I can sense where the future is headed, a pit in my stomach is discovered, but then I find some sweetness around it and write it off as part of a greater, sweeter fruit. The cost of the season.

I know I should do more. But maybe this is an enemy’s most insidious trick - keeping one just comfortable enough. I’m not the first to say: we all have some small part of us content with a cage...as long as we can keep this confinement from ourselves in a plausibly deniable manner.

Who am I? Late American, office drone, anonymous writer of brief essays? Ah, were it that my fuse were as short as most of my completed pieces!

So what does that leave? Today? Well, it was underdeveloped out of a too limber acceptance. That’s the risk of too great flexibility: when it’s no work to stretch towards what you need, the incentive to grow, truly grow, towards it diminishes.

Cut yourself off. Get mad. It’s only road rage that’ll get you swerving out of this lane now, who knows, maybe turning, turning everything around.

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This Last Morning

Here porch sitting
on an aluminum
foldout chair

pulled cool
from a carless
one-car garage,

I begin my
last morning
at Grandma's house

facing Simms St
and a neighborhood
precisely background

for the large stump
central to her
split-rail fenced yard,

a pot of pansies
blooming on top of it,
small against the roots 

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Propped on the Balustrade

Squared around
a sizable hook,
there's white bread dangling
midair from the line.

I veer left of it,
walking past captured
by the sea view beyond
and the fisherman casts

out into that immensity,
props his pole on the balustrade
that I, further down, now lean on too
coming up with questions

too big to land.
Useless would be the estimate
of my silent colleague, knowing
you catch more with what's soggy. 

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Prayers for Ka

I hereby, Lord,
wish to submit

from the multiple prayers
made an eight minute walk ago

at Parroquia Nuestra
Senora del Rosario

a full retraction
of any self-concern

included in that asking,
an unworthy dilution,

consider only what concerns
the healing of Ka,

suffering and loved. 

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Leaves Enough

Lord, leave
me affected

that I may
confirm your wind

though my
roots and trunk

have paused
responding

may I yet grow
uncertain

with leaves enough
to join in

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Overblown
To the Levante (with all due respect) 

"Overblown,"

chirps, mouth full,
a green parakeet,

among a fanning
chorus of leaves,

keeping height
with a sure-stemmed

and half-eaten
pomegranate. 

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Not Yet, Beacon

Walking out
that heavy,
lockless door,

down towards
streetlights
deferring to
parked cars’ hazards,

taking leave,
yes,
but first (and finally)
a seat. 

Not yet,
Beacon,
for a little
while longer

I remain solely
a street-facing thing,

something perhaps
still worthy of
being assigned
an address, 

or the alms
of one 
at least,

not yet grounding
these five years
of chasing
your unfigured light

up and down
four bounded flights

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Once and Future

Now incomplete, 
you are everything
you’ll want tomorrow
with hands full
of future, eyes
dreaming time, 

don’t leave
so quickly the flesh 
and earth and man
you’ll return to
grasping with mind,

the only
thing worth keeping now:
what you caught and
released yesterday.

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Crossing Thought

No moment 
fully lived

can think to
build a bridge,

and this being
the middle

of a farewell dinner,
I’m underneath

where it’d span
anyway,

it’ll be far-side
memory 

breaking ground
and building toward

what’s been completed
to loss

without a
crossing thought 

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Given Conditions

Oh life of
heaping blessings,

what I have
seems in 
such perfect

given condition!

But why
do I think of
the model car kits,
Christmas upon birthday,
I was gifted
as a kid,

only the bow
and wrapping
ever opened?

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Insofar as our insights are muddled or apparition-like, we are better off in pitch black with pure imagination than in letting our senses delegate truth to us in the half-light.

Such a slippery slope: from “I think I saw that,” to “I saw that,” to “I know that because I saw that.”

Am I just building a tower of provisional answers? Well, better to remain on the ground floor in that case, asking up, in awe and reverence, rather than building out my energy only to eventually ask the same question from a slightly higher vantage, but now too worn down to even approach the matter with the infinite curiosity the infinite deserves.

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At My Best

How it cuts
through the branches
is the light’s
business,

my back 
to the source,
I watch it puddle
on red brick,

attention
landing there,
a quick
windblown drink,

in matters
of spirit
I’m at best
a small bird 

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From a Comm Ave Bench 

Branch and
steeple-riddled,

finally
scraper imposed,

I beheld
with touch

of cloud
and hush

of self
what blue! 

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Keep Sipping

My life
as a cup
recently dropped

not more 
than half-spilled
maybe less

and quickly picked
back up
but there's concern

where it landed:
dirty bricks,
smoked butt.

Holding it now
sure again
without lift

there's still
warm coffee in
a healthy thermos

which means
nothing without
further sips

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Eddie the Car Inspector

Eddie the car inspector, you don't move
at a city speed any longer
but manage the metered parking
with a little bit of Friday luck perhaps

a leased company vehicle
is what you're here to consider

passenger side, into traffic
you get the required photos
without hesitation without quickness
in your step

laughing at the real danger of duck boats,
the years in 'Nam now posing
less a threat than a hurtling conglomeration of tourists

but that is indeed your world now
(and perhaps most of ours)

halfway through the job
offhandedly you reveal
the story,
today is your day:

"I would never have imagined
myself doing this on my 56th wedding anniversary"
in the brightest tone
possible for such an admission

May 22nd 1970 you were married
and you're still glowing from it

you'll see your wife tonight
just as you did for the first 10 days
after your wedding
and then as you did not for the next 14 months

you fought through the jungles
in a war that mythologized
only those who stayed away from it
(and yet this is just my narrative
the litter of an outside perspective)

you talked about it being the best
thing you could've experienced
your particular marriage to your particular person
and the 14 months away were proof
of how lucky you were,
your wife and young son
waiting for you
and the 56 years and counting

including now
this Memorial Day weekend
that's just beginning, Friday afternoon
and you're done here
and as I'm shaking your hand
you notice the ring I'm wearing:

"I hope it brings you as much joy
as it has brought me"

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The Good in Me

What once
showed itself
too briefly

and honestly

was unable to keep
pace with my
increasing elevation

germination
too prone to
rain dancing
for more soil 

and years passed
uphill,

and years passed
uphill.

Now at the treeline
I keep watch
for straggling seedlings

that slow as they may be

crucially
never slowed 

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Fellow American, increasingly, there is being built a kind of Berlin Wall between us and our history, and my hunch is we are to the east of it.

History progresses, you think. Of course we can’t go back. But it’s worse: you are actively prevented from doing so.

By what?

First, of course, laws. Social pressure too: to openly express a too ardently nostalgic wish, especially when we are talking about the heartlands of the past rather than just its border regions with today, is seen as suspect.

But really, most of all, by ourselves, though unintentionally so. We consume too freely the ideas propagated to us, their self-designated labels as consensus truths. We swallow ourselves into perspective determinism. Everyone knows the story of the 1960s goes like this, means this, is a triumph representing this, etc. (The meaning of the 1960s is but one of a myriad examples, “many such cases” as the saying goes.)

Above all, what they don’t want you to ask: is it possible that most of what was lost was actually stolen?

To lose something feels like an Act of God, a fact to be disappointed at but ultimately accepted. Acceptance then fades out the energy associated with the adverse event. To have something stolen, however, inspires in any person with a reasonable supply of agency a program of recovery, and a desire that the perpetrators may face justice.

Bad weather, the decline of civilization, who’ll blame the sky for its rain?

I think it’s a movie set. The thunder crackling, a thunder sheet struck to the left of the frame. A lot more is staged than you think. And you may be just an extra, but you’ll be asked to stay for the entirety of filming.

And not nicely.

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Out of desperation for a deeper silence, I uttered my first words. My expressions, mute as they were, had begun to give too much away. Yes, involuntarily, but this is also to say more truthfully than I had wished. I needed control over the giving of any part of myself. No part of me could be allowed to work independently; it must always report back to the whole, a unified conception of self that only the most conscious aspect of my being had authority to impart. In short, I decided my path was in the arts.

To direct a light in one direction is also to shade another. I wanted to retain myself entirely, giving only a greater appearance of expression. Not to share the self, but the self-created self, which is to say something other than me, but of me. The man who only wants to share his fruit. The apple tree camouflaging the leaves, so that it appears to burn all red in the summer sun. And when the leaves finally do change colors, it is only to become more fruit-like in appearance.

I wanted to give and be the gift. Self-creating the self, arrival without precedent. An artist is always born in a deep shade, if truly left to their own devising devices.

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May as well admit what my way of living has already long since confessed: I am content to live in the imagination. There’s an unreality I’ve cocooned myself in, and it has generally sufficed. But should it?

The missed world turns into a cousin of memory, imagined memory itself. Experiences, upon sober reflection, that were in fact within my physical reach, but were bypassed out of fear. Or was it just as I’ve described: a literally imagined sufficiency?

Youthful powers of spirit and body squaring off, with the intangible almost always coming out ahead. Advertised as this generation’s fight of the century, it certainly hasn’t lived up to its billing. Our poor senses, overmatched.

But here is how the balance of power plausibly changes: assume the soul’s immortality. Meaning, it is the firstborn. It has been the older brother in this fight the whole time - of course it’s had the advantage.

Oh world at my physical fingertips, I have begun to believe this: my experience, rather than my conception, of you is about to hit its own version of puberty. Soon, perhaps today, it will begin to hold its own in this tussle of brothers.

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I knew Spring once, but I stopped speaking. Funny, I must have thought the summer was implied. But it wasn’t, and that spring of mine faded without resolution, compressed petals falling clenched. And, as it wasn’t the season for foliage, what did fall found no audience. Oh hints of blooming, I relied too much on the context of youth.

It’s less that what I produced was not seen, and more that what I started to make was not seen through. I silenced myself before giving the world a chance to listen. I attributed that self-silencing to everything beyond me. But, on final count, the blame falls only here, like a spring rain in a city with its mouth closed by concrete. It was I who shoved the roots and buds together, so tight that not even a seed could fit between them.

But still, any forthcoming summer would not be out of order. Oh late saving grace of a chronology only stalled, not shuffled. The right flight, long delayed, is still far more useful than boarding the wrong one on time and finding yourself, at its conclusion, somewhere utterly foreign, for which your passport is not valid, waiting only in detention until eventual removal.

Oh Spring, finally you’ve reminded me of what I have yet to do. I hope you will not judge my slow, shy steps too harshly. Anyways, if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit you’ve procrastinated in coming this year too. (Perhaps there’s a little bit of New England in my becoming too.)

Spring, I accept your invitation. How wonderful to discover that, as the flowers open, so too do doors. No longer ignoring this weight on my branches, I understand more and more that your promises can only be kept in direct sunlight. To come out again before the world, with an opening not choreographed by the reputation of the season, just dancing to the same music, giving the appearance, naturally, of Spring and I finally in lockstep.

What was once silence now, to remain so, must be silenced. Oh God, we pray with no audience in sight. How much less faith is required to present our own words to the visible world. If nothing else, I pray that my own prayer may be audible. I speak to myself, but will now make sure to do so also in the vicinity of others. This is how I will find an audience. They will be near because they share something with me, and thus my speaking becomes intelligible. My words to myself are intercepted, and so I am spared accusations of insanity.

This time it will be up to the world to decide not to listen. I will no longer make that decision for it.

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In the spirit of the season, and with the assurances of my speaking, why don’t you susbcribe?

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