Carpentry (she smashes clocks)

Up, carried by a dream wiping clean the patina of chronological life to find myself where I had fallen asleep yet surprised at being in the midst of an existence having all the features of mine while foreign to me. The short-haired carpet underfoot; the smells bearing more of themselves from the coaxing heat that's recently arrived to remind of the grit and sex and tumult of life; the clock above the mantle like so many clocks above so many mantles, as if they were born to pair, the former an almost organic and symbiotic lover of the memories sitting upon the latter, tick-tock we lived and died; the humble rustling of a hamster cocooned in a little globe of shredded paper she'd lain there; her, adrift in her own ocean, lids like petals softly concealing wherever the dark or light played lambent in her eyes as the red plush chair already sold and nearly gone gave her solace a final time--all the same in a visual, sensual pattern of familiarity that somehow breeds caution, if not fear.

 Caution: this is not your life. How did you come here? Up and up not into clarity but amnesia or a return to an amniotic state of innocence compelled by our leaving here soon, compelled by wonder, a naked eye visiting a potential future unprotected by repetition, those physical motions we imagine locked into an invisible and unyielding choreography set by a rational and divine order. We relocate our lives soon, we enter a portal of creation, everything blank and black with only our mistakes and the blood they spill to paint whatever house we'll call home again.

The sorrow of imminent relocation cloys and crabs my heart moment to moment now, compounded by the same I sense in her. We leave together but also in a renewed and fierce isolation from each other as the uncertainty of an untested path forces us into ourselves to reexamine the fortresses inside, slap their walls to ensure their soundness, feel our armor, and by its purity also feel an intolerance towards those acts or duties still a part of this place we will abandon, an intolerance to the compromises made and dignity divested in making them to construct a house now proved vulnerable to the circumstances of others, wills not ours. The order we thought divine shows itself illusory and we weep like children watching death claim and disintegrate the bodies of their parents. We weep for what we do not know, as well.

From my selfexamination I emerge no more or less emboldened by the reserves of strength or weakness found than when born; and with the same impertinent joy do I hold in the realm where sky and earth kiss the hand of my partner, my best friend, the person in whose gaze I will always find my solace, my being, my dream, the only certainty, the house withstanding all winds.

The last thing

And there's a last thing that was the first thing and always emerges when the only truck you'll have with life is honesty. You know it though never the right word.

And the Jews say God's name is ineffable.

The thing sits in you as the legacy of your birth, enameled up over centuries in dramaturgy, a bemoaning both the beginning and purpose of language, the allcry of the newborn blasted with pain. This thing is not loneliness though loneliness articulates its earthly sense; and it's not sorrow though sorrow enrobes it. Nourished by absence and presence entwined, the thing opts for worldlessness, a thereness like sudden violence or the authority of a storm.

The wall-clock's metronome keeps apace with its digital counterpart on the screen, each tick signalling a terrible loss, the horror of irretrievability. The torment of man's ingenuity, the need to by calculus or statue or dumb gashing name this thing. Shamen reinventing themselves as doctors prescribe around it; houses of shouting men and women would with writ or verse would lash it to a pole, paper it into stillness for study. This thing that means you can't ever keep your child or a tear of outraged hurt or of the joy preceding it--the great benevolence, leveler, death for life and the reverse describing the quintessential moment. This thing, it defies nothing, embraces the imbecile, tolerates the wise, never lets go. Never in it is a tick forgotten or remembered. Paradox its subterfuge, our agony, all passion. This thing that hides the harder you seek is right around the corner, there, on that bend you know so well, there in a mirroring blade of grass from a morning sun thirty years ago you were sure the first and last, the enduring one.

And then it happens. Invincible, you feel this thing make an etch of you, an afterthought held in mimeograph. Artful at last, you are testament to streaming tears, you are the laugh ever echoing, you drink from Keats' urn, you wallow no more, becoming it.

But, oh, for one more first kiss.

Strategic Planning

The placental tides swing back, a wash in the throat-bile and its balm the same. You hold, and nothing’s sadder, to the walls containing the promise of a liberation you thought fated. You hold, tight, to perse dreams of walls wainscoted, life bled true. And there’s truth in that; and in that truth of selfholding held long enough, you believe. And believe the next step in believing. And something better than you and a bit less happens; and you call it evolution though you know it’s another name unnamed by the one rendering it.

We don't care of the plod sending billions of shamed children to drugged doom by parents split and spoiled and spooled by the curvature you haven't the courage to name, though you know it screams and claws ever neural impulse, sketching decay on screens and print and the universities declaiming us. 

The marrow of it came to me when I sat on a red couch asking myself how truth and everything heard might be one and the same and where they differ. Currency had nothing to do with it: it's a ponzi scam crumbling us all ten, fifteen years from now; the monetary system is the largest gull by gulled hurt, redblue bruised. I thought that sending one simple message, indiscreet, might have an impact. And with the simultaneous force a thousand ways by cells respiring, construed, owed, give something we'd by any consensus call better. 

The plan was...............................