A Venue

What future comes from
A void
What place
What pathway

Wholly empty
Completely at a loss
In my loss
As to where I should start
Caught in all that chaos

Where can I begin
To sort the wheat
From chafe
The sheep
From goats
The boys
From men
The truth
From lies
The
What was
From the
What is

They say that art
Seeks
What is and what is not
Which makes it a fair companion for the lost
Like me

They say that art
Like love
Is but discovery

But I have been recovered
Like an old couch
Re-upholstered
So many times
I wonder
What lost
Is left

So I protest:
I cannot start with art
I do not even know
What is

And in the denseness of my argument
I sense the arteries of creation
Narrowing
Constricting flow

And I hear the barest whisper
Of a voice I know
Offering
Not guidance
No that would be too too gauche

But just a thought
An idea
A …perhaps

Perhaps you should just push the boat out and write
Perhaps this is the thing you should do

Perhaps this is the thing to do

To write

Envoi

Never complain
Never explain

As fathers have it

Or as Fitzgerald said it well
Advising literary folks
Don't use some
Mark of punctuation to exclaim
It's like laughing at your own jokes

And though I don't wish to state another person's truth

...

Damn even that's a lie
More truthfully I
Do not care to close the door on my own truth

I want to leave the door wide open
Open to new strangers

Yet strangely
I feel compelled to craft this envoi

Not to punctuate
Nor parenthesize
Nor foolishly
To try and set some compass path

But selfishly
To try and synthesize
My present sight

Poppies …poppies have to find their height
Search for light

And when a tree dies and falls
It feeds their roots of course

But long before…
Above the forest floor
Above the shoulders that you used to ride
Above the bearded birds nests
Above the silvern hair

Where ancient arms held back the world
The canopy exposed
There is a hole

And light
Before unseen
Light previous and unwitnessed
Light which blessed
The former father

Now unfiltered
Feeds the child

Almost to the point of poison
Sun poisoning
And the son
Is father to…

…Some computational obsession
Circular confusion
An endlessly reworded confession
That only ends
But is never finished

Thoughts wrung out
Exhausted of meaning
No conclusion

Just clues

Geographically
I examine where I was

Geographically
I examine
Where I am

Geographically
I examine where I am not

And graphically
I examine
What I have done with nothing

And I try to think my way
To feeling
Logically

Psychologically

Pharmacologically

But all science fails

Lost in faith
To face

All those shifting sands
And then
Colliding with a barely
Incidental
Accident

And something breaks

And I leap from a diving board into nothing
From a diving board made of nothing
From a platform that I know to be unreal
Even as I lean on it

And knowing this
I use the non-existent recoil
To launch myself
Ignoring the so-called rules of conservation
Self propelled

Into

This devastating insight
How little I know
How little I am

I have to start again

…again

…Yet again

I pass from
Madly quiet

To

Quietly mad

I laugh
Cry at insane legacies

I laugh
Cry at the mad march of science

I laugh
Cry at my deception

Laughing at my
Lies

Laughing at performance
Anxiety

Laughing at sex

Laughing at absurdity

Laughing at the ordinary

And coming to realize that
The gods adore the ordinary

And that living

And growing

And godliness is…

Emptiness

And that art
Is proper suffering

Singing is eternal

And so I sing to you

Imperfect
Unresolved
Trite
Beautiful and temporarily
Complete

I write

Solitary Affair

I can't live this lie another moment
I must confess my faithlessness

…To a solitary affair

I have been intimate
…With myself

I have told the truth
And watched the movies that I love
I have held myself
And laughed for no good reason

I have remembered that odd waiter in New York
And made my quiet inside joke
About his Freddy Mercury moustache
And his inappropriate trousers

I have sat and watched the sun come up
Cried for long-lost and much-loved pets
I have rehashed old and endless arguments

Which on reflection
I have validated
And finally won

I have argued with myself
And even hated
Had angry sex
Makeup sex
Quick and selfish in the shower
Or bathing long and languorous and alone

It has been an effortless commitment

And some might say
All this is innocent enough
Why bother with confession
There are no victims of this
So-called indiscretion

But that's … not true

Long before I was unfaithful
I escaped - Ran away

That is how
I came to know
I have to go

Everything must change

…Now I … know that

I cannot love myself
…Without first
Leaving you

Evolution

I have an
Evolution of thought:

Hush
Breathe
Don't search for resolution

Don't be so quick
To seek
Acceptance

One stage of rage
Is merely to
Acknowledge it

Sure resolution comes
But the quest for
Restitution dumbs me down

I know the dissolution of my
Bitterness
From forgiveness
Will come

But do not
Numb me
Now

Don't pacify me yet

Let me
be enraged
… Engaged

Later I will forgive
But first I will be angry

For me
This is a revolution

Full Stop

The purging of an egg
From womb to tomb
A new death
An old beginning
No wonder I'm sad

This monthly grieving
Grips me and
Lest I dare forget
Clamps me

Cramps me?
Hah!

That's just a pale invented word
An extremity
A bare approximation for
This motion-emotion

Inside it is far more and less

Pulled inwards down
Dragged down
To the size of a half-child I cannot see
Crushed to fetal comfort
Savage in its intensity
Insanely selfish for attention
Clamped to my origin
Wondering
If continued would I in-fold?
Turned outside-in
Like some impossible animation?

I am crushed to singularity

And wrung out
Like some saturated
Psychic sponge I
Expel - These eggs - Expunge - Ex purge - Yes purge

Exhausted all my last
Regrets emerge
…Coincidentally
Putting purpose to my pain
Compelled to re-grieve all my exes
All my pasts

Time passes

And all those once and former princes of my passions
Become flushed clots - Passed clods
Full stops

For now