Speak up more, not less, using your own ideo-vocalized mess.

Soliloquy  — in front of yourself and everyone else-a-melse.

Monologue, dog!

You and I can flip-flop nonstop lolly pop but that gets trite fast and then we just so need to speak our favor-ite verbo-bite.

Bebop, hiphop, tipitity-top, slop-a-pop.

Ski-ba-bop-ba-bop-voc; do that thang nonstop.

Be-cause …

We have been flattened by the road-grade blade of the prepaid lexicographers.

We have been run over by the top-botched, pop-a-voc.

We have suffered weak-a-squeak.

We have sold out for safety and we have shut up way too much because we thought we were stuck-a-muck with duck and cluck.

Nope! Fess; you’ve got that vocable mess!

Unperson; you’ll worsen, but word-dive and jivity jive and you’ll revive.

See!

Be inventy.

Sync with your blink.

Que with your you and do-ba-de-do!

Advertisement

I sit with my latte, and my shredded wheat, my clover honey and my almond milk and discuss the hoped-for future with my bathrobed, hair-tousled, coffee-sipping wonder-wife.

We musify in the morning.

We do the back-and-forthification — which is fun — but reality keeps getting tossed into the mix, and it doesn’t always cooperate — thus there is precarity in the plans.

It is stirred into the plenty.

The sun comes up, we go to work, the day gears up, the stock market goes up, our hopes rise, fueled by interest rates and dark, rich caffeine, and then the turn, as we weary through the late morning, early afternoon, the long commute home.

The sun slants, time slumps, life leaks and floats back to the floor like a post-party balloon — precarity. Thus and so, we are temporaria  — even the wise ones, even the prescient. As the scripture says, we live move and have our being within the precariat.

Did you think it said something else?

Hatreds, hopes, happenstances; genetics, genies, jerks; accidents, illnesses, taxes — all these and more, the various and sundry vagaries and variances of any given era — these insure membership in the precariat.

Oh, life!

And yet, and yet — the persistent goodness.

I am struck always by the presistant plenty, the living-loveliness of life amidst the persistently pandemic poverties. The ghastly demons of not shirk and faint at the edges of exuberant gardens, lined with white roses.

Last week we put up an beautiful, rod iron, arched trellis at the church. And below it, we planted a passion vine.

Thus there is hope, for vine, flowers, butterflies, tendrils, the reach upward, the stunning beauty, all-passion, the inspired community.

I am shock-smitten by such improvements, everyday, constantly, the preciosities of nature — love, babies, brains, branches of community, friends, finials, finitude, infinity.

The precosities — they just keep gobbling up the precarities.

We wake up together; our fluffy black cats are at the foot of the bed.

We get up and begin the day with strong, brown coffee in white mugs.

We sit on the couch; we watch each other. My eyes are on the completely particularized universal of you — your dark brown eyes, your gold streaked hair, your red and yellow cheeks, the soft contours of your essential orange.

We talk. We discuss the bright blue weather, our deep purple daughters, our investments, the upcoming week, the cats.

We go off to work. Quickly we come home again to each other. We talk about the day. Then you are sewing. Then I am writing. Then we are making dinner. Then we are luxuriating within the warm hum, sum and jume-da-jume of our intimate, red and yellow domesticity.

The whir of your machine, the click of my keyboard, the slosh of our washing machine (our clothes stirring together) the clink of our double boiler on the stove, steaming our dinner greens — this is you and me particularly, essentially artistically.

I am Chagall; you are my Bella.

You take my hand, we waft through the house, we lift from the floor and fly to the ceiling. I sit on your shoulders, you rest your head against my arm.

You most colorful, touchable, breathable specific; you minute blue particulate within the concrete bon vivant of my purple affection.

There you go, but here you are again.

You overtake me by degrees — your green lips pressed against mine immediately follow your tan arms wrapped around me always follow your orange smile coming in the door.

You spearmint breath, you green tea scent, you chai-tea warmth — you delicious Chardonnay, you perfectly hoppy IPA, you unambiguously welcome dark chocolate thing!

You are no idealized, disembodied, romanticized you. Your pink head floats past my blue hair. You are my most definite palpability. I taste your sweet lime tangibility.

We sleep, work, eat, laugh and drink connected. We are the perpetual state of met, mixed, melded, merged — mused.

I turn my face to kiss you, our red  hot lips touch, I put my hand on your purple waist, you hold my yellow head lightly, we float past the children, the cats look up.

The couch, the lamp and the TV tip over and fall out of the front window into the bright red Pacific Ocean.

I am here with you.

You are completely palpable; this makes us, “Oh, so magical!”

I’m looking into your eyes right now.  I love you.

Don’t quit not quitting on yourself, whatever is in your heart — big, important, longing stuff like the quest for true love.

Swing tenacity’s knife exactly as sagacity has swung your willy, nilly dilly head.

Look reality in its bright, bulging, blinking eye.

Track down any self-care apathy within, jump any legitimacy laxity — kill them both.

And don’t forget to take up the continuous, scientific adoration of honesty.

If you adore emotional integrity, if you favor psychological congruency, if you pound out new affective territory — then you will not fall off a cliff at night and you will not lose all you have always hoped for.

Here is what to do.

Stare love right in the snout and speak the truth, lean in and grind out a bushel basket of openness, eat a yard of authenticity and knock back true falsity.

Shout, charge and retake the emotional high ground.

What are you thinking?

You are all that anyone could ever want — you precious cargo, you personhood of inestimable value, you absolutely gorgeous emotive mess.

You’re tired?

Okay, go watch some brain dead TV.

You’ve tried and failed?

Okay, go to bed and get some sleep.

Remember when we had lunch last week. I told you that the first three tries don’t keep the fourth from succeeding.

In the face of failure, tenacity is the still the best policy — and ontogeny.

If you can’t grow one thing then grow another, you long, glorious bank of radiant blooms planted in previous springs.

Every seed you have ever sown — even if it has died in someone else — has flowered in your own soul. 

87 octane runs in our veins and propels us across the earth.

We shoot forward; we roar; we soar.

We are the motionable-mighty, motile, engined, tail-piped, turboed, technoed. We drag dead carbon from the ground, we race upon the earth, we fill the air. We fly the sky; we reign on high.

We rocket through the great waters, zoom over the high mountains, blast through the gorgeous firmament.

We gawk, ogle, probe and souvenir.

We are free — from atrophy, locality and gravity.

How?

What miracle here?

What science there?

What necromancy — what no mere slight of hand —  what awesome slight of time and space?

This, just this.

By crude oil we moil. By black gunk we are fleetingly royal.

We have sucked the black blood from the earth; we have shot it straight into our societal-industrial veins; thus even more than before, we are the paragon of the animals, wear a high and dizzy crown, drive a rattling carriage trailing smoke, the grim castle ahead.

Oil toil, roil and boil, wind and soil and sea we spoil.

Though the dark we plummet, thick black smoke trailing behind.

A world-wide boom; a clacking oily loom, what high and lofty king will we entomb?

I heard it announced on the radio yesterday that world hunger has decreased.

Only eight hundred million people don’t have enough to eat.

I kept driving: I don’t know why I didn’t pull over?

Grief, horror, and ruination!

Devastation!

Desecration!

Disambiguation!

Eight!

Hundred!

Million!

People!

Hungry?

 

This morning I cut my home-made banana bread thick.

I fill my coffee cup high.

I add milk.

Later in the day I will go out shopping, looking for blueberries, kale, almond milk, butternut squash, and also lean meat, blue corn taco shells, cilantro.

I may pick up some of the double chocolate covered peanuts I like so much.

 

Mad, mad, mad world — what is this numbing, numbered, not-knowing-knowing?

What is this crazy, chronic, crafty, killing contrast, this monumental, massive capacity for indifference, our gapping, gaping, going, going, gone unawareness of awareness.

What is the eating of delicacies in the same room as the starving?

Thirty billion light years from my finger tips the galaxies burn with white hot light —

I live in fire.

You fiery furnace — universal kiln,

I know your heat, warmth, singe, arc, burn.

I’ve seen your luminaries — glowing in my telescopes.

I know your lightening flashes on Jupiter.

Your volcanoes blowing up on IO.

And here too — your vibrating atoms, your everyday blue brightness and the noctiluca scintillans glowing in my own ocean.

But our fires — the ones we hunch down dark over, fumble, fidget, fume, kindle — they are differently dangerous.

We go home, click on our bulbs and run our thermostats to high.

We go out, shining small flashlights.

We devour the Lascaux.

We crave the light and spread low fire upon the earth.

We torch the Amazon.

We burn inside with a fierce, fickle, final anger,

We rain fire upon each other —

All our fires go out quickly.

And so it comes to this — you hold our hands after we have burned them,

Sooth and salve our blackened skin,

And hug us,

You sit beside us when we cry.

And with you near, we warm again from the inside out.

Together we flash, flame, flume, flare, scintillate, shimmer, sparkle and shine.

You will never go out.

Praise you.

Dark matter, consciousness, death, love — sweet set up to sell stuff.

Mystery lurks lucrative, so someone will always be hawking some witchery here, some voodoo there, magic, hocus-pocus, rhino horn, ecstacy, patent medicine.

But what is mystery?

Is it waving wand, silly staff, potent drug, scientific theory or secret glen? Is it esoteric syntax, new tech, plastic cross?

I think it’s nothing like that, nothing behind the curtain, gorilla glass, trees. It’s no hidden valley, magic hat or moving hand; no poetic cadge, literary cajolery, scientific skullduggery, religious legerdemain, no techno-tricks, no super-app, no tomb, mountain, moon or cave.

Mystery is not witch, wizard, wonk or wise one pulling levers behind the scene.

Mystery needs no proponents. It needs no operator, no literature, no religion, no science, no opiates, no humbug, physicist, diviner, historian, alchemist, prophet, priest, astronomer, amman, poet, shaman or techie.

For there, in every bit and bite, frag and piece and slice of life and world and space and time,

Exists the quiddity, the essence, the quintessence, the very non-not-nucleus of mystery.

Mysterium tremendum et fascinans —

It is the reflection of the tree in my bird bath this morning.

My tapping keyboard,

The cat sleeping beside me,

The rectangle of sun on the nook table,

And you, gone off to shop,

And return again because of your love for me.

in the singing place I saw the most battered hearts of my generation

sprung free from madness

by starving half-naked angels

and a bloody fix

they knew then that they didn’t have to do anything else

to prove to anyone else in the universe that they should be loved

they stopped PTSDing

and allowed themselves to be covered over with the clean white e-paper of

tripple-affirmation

they rose up in the supernatural darkness

to copy the syntax

of the ultimate request

they bent down with fearful symmetry and railed against moloch

resisting much

obeying much

they tragicocated against all skin-oppression

class-injustice

and schemified-violence

overtaken with sudden loves

they dreamed of adorations and illuminations

containing multitudes of the oppressed

they fell down before the throne of the tyger and the lamb

oh, you, you you, you beautiful, gorgeous dredged-up-wrecks,

I am with you, you re-made hearts, your best-hammered minds

I am with you in your imperfectications and in your insecuritudes,

I am with you in your nightly brokenry and your daily hallucinations,

I am with you in San Francisco, in Rome, in Beijing, in Johannesburg, in Mumbai and in Managua

as you walk dripping with alien goodness

out of a bright river into a numinous redempticon

I love life!

The wind blows the curtains aside at every window.

You can’t keep stuff under wraps, in the box, off the breeze.

Out, out, out! It’s all getting out

Whippy, wily feathered things fly from their cage doors at the first opportunity. Glittery, golden, gorgeous things keep breaking out of their corrals.

You can’t keep the goat from crossing the troll bridge, the cat off the counter and the lid on the pot when steaming the vegetables. It bounces, in place. You can’t even keep the potatoes from sprouting in the cupboard.

Light shines, kittens sleep on each other, water rises over the dam, things fly away, plants sprout.

Take beauty, it streams from every street corner — statues, trees, pets, lamp posts, signs, flowers, girls — the beautiful stuff just won’t stop popping out at the intersections.

And we keep popping out too, from various and curious disasters.

Potential — it smiles from the men at the bottom of the piles.

Hope sprouts from the misses in their little black dresses.

All our best commodities spring from our worst oddities.

Bravery leaps from fear.

Belief rises within every outburst of doubt.

A snatch of love pops up to overwhelm every living scrap of hate.

In every conversation lurks a friendship, or a partnership or a marriage.

Nothing stays down for long!

What’s next?

I can hardly wait!