Imagine Everything
About Poems
There comes a time when you’ve gone through something so many times it doesn’t make any sense to go through it anymore.
It is, however, difficult to recover. Difficult to become someone else. Some help is always warranted.
Time got you this far, maybe just give it a little more time.
In here, in this place I can feel my heart starting to give out like a warning that my time has begun to run out, and I wonder if these are merely poetic musings or anatomical realities vested upon me through lineage.
My time along with everyone else’s began running out the minute we stepped out from nothingness into this reality, to live and exist until all this is no more.
Until there is no memory of it at all.
And the unanswerable shall too vanish, for there will be no one left to ponder.
It was a night around this time six years ago when I was on my way to pick up the blonde for our first date. I was a stranger in that structure patrolled by twelve paws.
In the darkness of the night, I approached and saw the four paws that caught my attention.
She seemed friendly, so I made the mistake of touch and was greeted by a swift little bite. A bite that would lead to six years of on and off belly rubs, seekings of warmth, and her little temper tantrums.
Six years that went by in five minutes. Mini is no more now, she no longer suffers, but I cannot see her anymore in her little sweaters, jumping on the couch to lay on my chest.
She is missed.
I miss her.
I was planning to make my move to The Walled City when a woman who I grew up with contacted me, saying she needed my help. However surprised I was, I accepted unsure of what that decision would bring or how it would alter the path I was on.
She commissioned me to care for two little jewels in a land surrounded by lakes where people build things out of colorful blocks. There it seemed I was destined to carve out the next chapter of this story, unplanned, unbeknownst, seemingly orchestrated by an unseen hand that shapes everything.
Sitting out on the rooftop porch again, looking at the trees,
thinking, writing.
It’s cloudy, windy, and rainy.
A plane’s engines are heard overhead along with a dog’s bark in the distance.
A man’s voice speaks over a loudspeaker, but I can’t make out what he’s saying.
Perhaps a holiday caravan?
The sounds interrupt my main writing and so I stop to write this.
A writer’s best interruption is more writing.
A new year isn’t a time to become perfect and infalible such is what
dreams are made of.
A new year is instead a time to leave unhelpful habits behind,
unhelpful thoughts, unhelpful behaviors in favor of the
beneficial.
A time to chase down goals meaningful to you.
A time to foray your markers as best you can without delay.
A new year will you waste?
or
will you
Carpe Diem?
Someone who believes in what the horoscope says would probably say I attracted the Zippo to myself because I put it out into the Universe.
Or so it goes.
I don’t know much about that, but the Zippo did come to me.
A friend of mine gave me his after I mentioned I was looking to buy one. I love the sound it makes.
My father had a silver-colored one, but I don’t remember exactly what it looked like.
Whether or not it had an engraving on it, and such.
This one is completely plain. The only markings on it are my fingerprints now.
I feel an urge to do something to it, customize it somehow. If I paint it, would I ruin it?
I love the sound of it, I said that I know, but every time I open and close it, it reminds me of my father.
There was no closure, no final conversation between us before his departure.
There were no final set of instructions…
How do you leave your house with the door and windows open?
How do you move on from that without thinking about it much?
Day after Christmas,
A day that should be happy for most people,
A day closer to the close of another year,
A day of contemplation, work, and more contemplation,
A day of some discontent and apathy and yearning for bygone Christmases of yore.
A day of wanting adventure and Exodus of isolation,
A feeling and a need not unfamiliar who refuse to leave,
And of wonderings of life’s punishments.
Isolation isn’t a gift,
All you need are pockets of silence for in Chaos there is life and
in isolation stagnation.
In the lives of your fathers are stories lost to time unrecoverable and in
stillness there is death unpreserved.
The worthy of death are only those who were brave enough to have lived.
December 26th,
Day after Christmas,
No snow, no letters in the mail, only hunger for what is out there.
I’m out here sitting in the dark listening to the bugs and the little toads out here in the woods,
staring at the night sky looking at the stars and I’m imagining my dad up there talking to Bukowski
the poet, novelist. I just see my dad talking to Bukowski saying, “Hey man, he’s you, so I need you to send
more Bukowski stuff so he can watch and be inspired and do something. I’m not gonna let my kid just sit
there and be a nobody. He’s gotta do something even if he’s a fuckup and from that fuckup he’s gotta rise
and do some bullshit, cause he’s my son.”
Croupier smoking a cigarette, hesitates picking up the red phone;
His father has a job for him, he doesn’t want it.
“Jacko, call Mr. Reynolds at the Golden Lion Hotel.”
I’m reminded of the little room in the school library
where I called my father up every day at noon
and I say:
“Listen to your father, Jacko. He can call. You can call. You’re there. He’s there. Some people can’t call anymore.
Some people you can’t call anymore.
Like Marion.”
