Lovely How the World Treats the Unloved

 

I. The Order

Tangled in a knot, I hear the barback
ask for my drink order.
How do I count the knots in my stomach
and take the order back?

I want to say the words I feel.
Torture is not good behavior
for an aspiring human.
Some tragedies belong to the imagination.

I gather my strength.
“Vodka soda.”

He turns his head,
whispers to the person beside him.
They agree the order is sufficient.
Why they do this remains unclear.
They should be more careful.

Shouldn’t we all be more careful?
Sometimes the order is not the right order.
People forget the exchange is a choice—
between the one who asks
and the one who serves.

Some tragedies are held too long.

Lovely,
how the world treats the unloved.

Some days the rain stops.
Sunlight breaks through mist.

II. The House in the Forest

Circles and triangles dance in my mind
around the house I built
in a small forest
by a narrow creek.

Smoke rises—plumes of circles and squares—
threading the trees.
Small birds chirp the leading tones
of Bill Evans’s melancholy voice,
prancing toward a space
beyond the horizon of a heart
cracking in the fireplace.

On my bed beside the hearth
I clutch a pillow, hum a simple prayer.
Hands extended to warmth,
I watch spheres and cubes
march up the chimney.

I am a small boy—
head resting on the bed’s edge—
feeling the fire grow warm.

Nothing but calm energy
carries me to sleep.

For now,
nothing feels wrong.

III. The December Rule

Can we, as a people,
decide in December
that our mistakes were never ours?

If rules are revealed only after they are broken,
what kind of system is this?
Such a structure assumes
the rule-makers are fair.

Rules should rest on judgment,
not reaction.
When architects of order lack wisdom,
what they build
is not shelter
but trap.

IV. The Phoenician Merchant

Peering upward through brine,
my gaze harrows—
a jolt, tingling with haze and sorrow.

I am a Phoenician merchant
in a foreign place.
Below me, a little girl
with bow-tied hair floats—
buoyant, light—
yet she sinks with me.

Crying here makes no tears.
The salt refuses reprieve.
The phonetic note of grief
carries no song.

Down, down I go
into dark.
Up, up rises
the chorus of my breath.
Down, down goes my soul
into the deep.

V. Reductio Ad Absurdum

Triangles collapse into two-sided figures—
reductio ad absurdum.

To hold two truths at once
is a fallacy.
Yet logic survives
only if its conditions remain.

Sun to cloud.
Cloud to rain.
Rain to river.
River to valley.
Valley to desert.
Desert to open ocean.

I speak in circles.
I listen in squares.
Hummingbirds sing their melancholy.

A child whispers,
once—

What is it
I am hearing?

VI. The Flâneur

“I am not poor; I am a flâneur,”
sings the child—
androgynous, page-boy hair.

“Shelter is where I make it.
The nectar of the gods
is my drink of choice.

Deny me nothing.
Give me plenty.
I am not poor;
I am a poet.”

VII. Phaedo’s Sphere

I am:
dew at morning,
mist at evening.
A bouquet—fresh, abundant.

I am:
an eccentric mystic,
a philosopher
contemplating the universe
in my own face.

Many visions wait
as I rise—
airborne, unmoored.

The daimon of my sophia
stirs
inside my dreams.

I rise toward Phaedo’s sphere—
philosopher in garment,
poet
in the making.

Fin

Lazarus, Odysseus, Er

 

No one but Lazarus

can tell of death.

Yet he is silent.

Even if he spoke,

could we trust his account?

He was not meant to bear witness,

but to be a miracle.

To attest to the cycle of...

Odysseus journeyed
to the Underworld's shore.
Not for wonder,
but for a guiding word.
Could we trust
the specters' whispers then?
A truth for his path,
but not for ours.

Er was sent to testify
to the drawing of straws.
Can't we trust Socrates' account?
Er is the device that teaches us
how justice is achieved.
To question its essence.
To attest to the possibility of...

The Iridescent Steps

 

In a dimly lit room, seated on a chair, I attentively listened to the ticking of the clock.

A murmur is heard, cutting through the air, a punitive “do you understand what anything means?”

A blank stare, a tap, tap, tap, tap of four tight straight fingertips syncopate on my thigh. I reply, how do I know, I know?

Grin on face exposing a pale set of spotted teeth like a cheetah tucked snuggly in its crescent moon of pale gums; two ticks, pat, pat, on the beat of the clock, over humming the beat, the smack, of a lip between two clicks; uh huh, uh huh!

Witness my demise, as a feint glance toward a glass sphere, with a red dot pulsating, capturing a framed reality, the signal separate from the voice: what can I know when I do not know what I know?

Intermittent flicks, of the red dot, on, off, on, off — pulsate, like infinite turns of a pulsar. 

Abruptly the turns cease, the sphere dims, the light pulsates no more.

The murmurs become blank stares, the teeth tucked in the setting moon, the sphere, unwound from its cudgeled frame. 

Keeping past ignorance held suspended in time, a mockery as pale as the moon that set, in the mouth that murmurs its own foolishness.

Out of the din of a sacred silence like footsteps in the dark with no way to know who is coming, darts a raspy voice flying from behind the table.That’s all for today, in clear, direct, punctual speech.

Expecting nothing but more deception, and seeing that my world is in question; I stand erect. Weary and feeble, as if my bones had not felt my own weight. Up from repose, neck tight, eyes low, as I rise, I turn my head to see a glimmer of a smile.

This way, this way, in a stern harmonic tone, stood a gallant man, with ivory eyes that showed the entirety of life in his gaze. Pointing as he whispers, up, up, time to get up, identical to you, I once sat in repose, chained to the chair, lost in my ignorance. Hand out, pointing, up, we must go up. Up, up out of the chair, out from the night.

Guided up and out of the chair, we headed toward a door, to a set of steps, a vector spiral to the surface above. Half-way in our ascent, we glanced at a platform that stood above a gulf below which appeared to stretch endless.

Between the gulf and a whitewashed wall, sat the chair where I sat. Rising from its depths like a hiccup of indigestion was the hiss of a small creature whom sat on a table; projecting light onto the whitewashed wall.

We pause to glean the creature standing erect on a table. Its tiny paws gesticulated before an incandescent bulb, casting shapes onto the wall. These shapes appeared across from where I had sat, when I was in the gulf. It casts a marionette of shadow, its movements a mimicry of the truths I once thought true.

It would hiss, sounds similar to the raspy voice, and make ticking sounds like the murmuring of the clock, and make shapes like the crescent moon with its tiny paws to simulate teeth with its fingers.

In a dramatic pause, like Orpheus ascending from Hades, commanded not to look back, the air trembled with the weight of unseen eyes, as though the shadows themselves yearned for a backward glance. I gazed forward at the gallant man direct in front, whose steps glowed with an iridescent hue. Each step reverberating, with a pulse of unknown knowledge.

I huffed, a silent question, is what I saw in the chair what was dancing across the wall? Did my ears hear the sounds I thought were a voice? From the lyre on his lips, a tune sweet as sleep, humming, "Uh, huh”, “uh, huh”.

We crept up the steps, each progressive leap leading to a pale light, growing less pale. We halt at a door with a rim of violet shimmers, a knob with a dot of light bolting to the other side of the spiral. This is it, open it, he urged. I gasp a breath and turn the knob.

A cornucopia of colors beam into the damp, spiraling passage. The colors shimmer in my eyes with a resonance of truths unknown. I saw the shadowed truths for what they were—fragments of a story I once believed, now scattered like whispers in the light of colors containing all truth.

Carried by a warmth that holds my weary bones, I begin to hum, drowning out pale memories of the murmuring clock.

Transforming this chasm of ignorance that once held me hostage to the chair. No longer its murmuring fool, I saw the shadowed truths for what they were—echoes of a voice I no longer understood.

In gallant stride with ivory eyes, I turned to thank my companion, but the iridescent glow had become my own and his had faded. His purpose fulfilled, his song now sung through me, I stood and began my spiraling return.

Back down the spiral, past the platform, back to the door outside of the room, the clock ticked as it always had, yet its rhythm no longer held me. I smiled, knowing the chair would not. I look across and say, "This way."