The name of a 90s band.

It grew blossom to ball, seeds gorged in fruit. Picked, carried, set out to pass and perhap praise.  Someone, somewhere, seeing, set passivity aside - maybe thinking of the homeless, or the holocaust: they couldn't idle by. The pumpkin now named, weight in hand, held, measured, tasted, smelled, explored to flat chunks. The shallow rounds of rind rubbed raw on road.  Which - all a part of plant plan - god of seed to seed, who maketh the apple blossom sweet, who maketh the squash some fun to smash, who this and that, renewal through temptation. We smash and suck the plumpest fruit. The 4H is the plants displaying us. The chimpanzee that learned to feed the chimpantree.

Creative writers strike!

Free pickled eggs in bars. Quieter bars. Living wages and benefits for writers. unionize! Strike! No writing til demands are met!

An old one hammered at

That bitter surprise:
that the faces coloring the bar twin others
one moved to another city
another served your father in his hospital bed
or stopped your calls
or lay with you

naked and

promising


all



vanished in magician's smoke
to be forgotten
remembered
doubted
glimpsed
in the strangers whose
hair
jaw
voice

until
your grail becomes
the curve of knee
the tilt of neck
the rarity
the new you can not quick.

and then the shade
who smiling
whispers

this one's gonna need some editing

tears, born of stars by way of ocean
therein born the first that lived
but these were born of those -
that swam together
their school a knowing thing
that walked
and talked
and shed the salt that bore it once
ouroboros
finally knowing
it could not swallow
without being swallowed
the rock shaking
in the roots
of the first tree
and still - again - those tears
a silent ragnarok
the ravens flown
the one eye
blind
in its own salt
like oedipus
last seeing
the body
under the fallen robe
and broach in hand...

let's keep writing?

and words and words.

There's something in 'stream' that feels like the start of something bigger. Wanting expansion and maybe refinement.



Trouble there, when revisiting and WORKING on a piece rather than writing it and then running away, I get the chance for the self-critical voice to get heard and I panic.



But I'll keep at it?

-

That morning he said
"no sun today"
and waited
hoping he'd be right
and terrified

Here is a joke

A man with a very tall hat
Walks in to a bar ?
God's under his hat you see.

The stream down to the river

There's no contentment without fear when life so wants, our cells and mito (so we're told for who has seen them speak) explode themselves to make anew and be have been, be post-content and breathing heaviest when least content and fearing death or wanting it one lap in another piston slick hips like frames for the painting of eden, and around these words a frame of light or dark or plastic, or framing all words the rests and measures, music made from noise with waiting, and in that waiting, without wanting, breath held, listening for what note next, sounding the sigh of it coming, like light through air, the first sun of morning blessed for rising, from river or hades or tomb, for they tell us, singing, rising comes, but we in dark under the too dim lights look west where we went down and east again and the dark a rest and in every pulse of blood a rest and before each next we know our dis content until we are and end.

---

A disparity crawls between a desire for happiness and the discontent of having it - or between the happiness of seeking and the disappointment of finding.
Things we know for seeing or know for being told or know for expectation of a repetition, and the doubt we keep of our knowing, however it comes, so that the coming of a sunrise brings relief, surprise, and maybe regret at the loss of another desire. Again that discontent. The wish for endless night, for the sun to stay up or stay down just for change, or for the satisfaction of our fantasy seen in the world, for why should our dreams receive less truth from the world than the old dreams of others, god or man?
And the old stories there, where the sun goes down, where the spring sleeps, the coming morning and the chariot aflame and the pomegranate wife, the old monster death coupling to she, wheat daughter young and pretty, and that coupling the bitter winter long, undeserving old to young or death of life or selfish trickster to her grain bounty salted with the sea, and even in the undeserving, our undeserving, one of another, but our clinging anyway, one to another, because the joy is there, even without deserpt.
And all those stories then, are ours, to tell and to feature in, and to save ourselves, and to carry the sun, and sweating, as we will or have or wish, one in another, limbs akimbo, to tell ourselves the story how we came to be there, how we'll part, or where in the other we might reside, as spring or as winter, as knowing or doubt, as content or desire, or, forgetting all stories, die, and find that other part of our music, the silent rest, between.

---

Persephone,
above to below,
Spring her dress' train
returns

and asks the farmers
grateful busy planting
for tales of snow
which while she
coupled underground with
him
she could hear falling
above, and could smell
for so much smelled of snow there
but never saw
or felt
and when she rose
it melted

won't they make for her
a dress of snow?

---



That morning he said
"no sun today"
and waited
hoping he'd be right
and terrified

heroin

Tom Waits wasn't playing yet.
No music.
Voices, though: from many bodies, laughing, playing games.
And she through the door did not belong: too wan, too wide-eyed needing now.
Selling before she asked to sell.
And was it smell, or face, or carry of body? That made them, every one of many, look away, intent not to see her?
So that she wandered in the crowd alone,
and left alone,
cash in hand Callabash,
The lights on Lancaster dimming over her
and the rain
under her feet falling
because she knew
how to find it