mmmmmclxxxi

punctuality

and this was when you god this
was when you created punctuality.
yes you was always punctual punk.
you was always punctual you punk fuck.

mmmmmclxxx

yeah he was thinking he was so bad

all smug wound up so con so smug up
when saying all of this.  know it all is what
you thought and i was right i did.  because a word
doesn’t matter when there is tongue so hard word word
just.  just try and make that sound the only thing giving it a real
making any purpose was that tongue that human son it
burns with human intent.  a word reclines on a sofa like
a bunch of them built into the sky.  a shez lounge.  the
pretend a furniture.  a word cannot pretense without
a tongue a human and when you confidence winds
you confident wound up like some kind of toy
wooden toy (sold ya) when you so smug so buns up
cocky you make with that tongue a click that clicks
kind of like a gun the click is not the pistol the click
is the human finger that makes the click the
dick the pistol ha ha ha in its neutrality is what goes off.

                                            I am lonely for my life.
                                                      —Kathleen Fraser

mmmmmclxxix

just baby talk

i just want to get there and
to fuck it up and know i cannot
get there anymore and cocky never ever
was you was.  thought you were but now we’re not

nor never can be.  age is just when you’re gone
a fucking unreachable faux finish it
cannot even be achieved nor done
and you taught me there and once once and

always gone always gone to fuck it up and
know to no i wasn’t ever there and know
i cannot ever i was such a cock i never
knew and going on and on the tragedy of never being there and now cannot

(you fuck and have a baby thinking it might could grow up like
you never did nor could and only knowing this now that the
baby isn’t gone but you are where i thought i was)
not dead (wherever i thought i was is not and never
nor ever can be where you were) i am just and always be
a bad baby that.  can’t get up.  can’t hurt just comes how
come this can’t hurt?

mmmmmclxxviii

no this one first.

i already know how to feel. it tock
me so long to get here and now i
must wait for everyone else to figure
it out on their own on their own tick.  this is not resilience

fuck and you you taught me how to even
understand which is no small part it’s pro
bably the biggest baby.  oh and growing up
being a baby growing up when for fifty-nine

years you or i were the biggest child the
eldest baby for fifty-nine years always
got to be best because first (breast
because diapers) and then bam no

baby no more.  no baby no more
because i cannot cry nor ever
could.  in this extra line is
where i fix myself enough

to double in size.  i knew
i was an artist but i just
thought i was.  i thought
i made heart but then

you taught me how.
just in time to realize
to realize how come i can’t
feel just time.  i mean maturity

age is just a faux finish
how come this hurts?

mmmmmclxxvii

he lost a lot

when you was saying just the words
what you mean amazing was lost.  oh
come on with me listen what you when you
was saying just the words.  what you meant is
always lost (in fours in say it ones and twos a

one and a two) when i say oh when i say anything
it is just a word with a nose to the sky thinking it is
funny (of course it is me talking about demons being equal
me saying every single word is neutral that neutrality only goes)

bang when given individuality when made human all words being
created neutral right

mmmmmclxxvi

home.  the vague memory of cattle.

it is 2:00am on monday morning and i
read poems that tell blunt, tragic tales
that are vaguely disguised as poetry by
a woman who wrote these words some

where in the american west, surely, and
whatever her proximity to the ocean they
were initially scrawled or drafted in the years
around when i was born, shortly before i came,

perhaps shortly after.  i keep thinking of the
stage, of theatre, and of hearing broad, mostly
non-specific thuds, blunt noises made with amorphous 

blocks or limbs of wood at center stage, but out toward 

an empty sea, an audience uninhabited theatre seats, wooden
row after row of them. and there is the banging that a woman
is making as audibly as she can for this silent ocean with gnarled

arms she bangs big birch limb upon a thick and irregularly cut

hunk of birch that lies flat upon the concrete stage floor, a
sound that does not carry far, even given the echo-riddled
acoustics of empty rows of uncomfortable chairs, wooden, too.
darker, the chairs are smooth and polished, sit individually and 

altogether, with much more intent than the two hunks of birch
the woman is banging upon the concrete stage that juts a bit
out toward the chairs, a stage that is, but for the woman and 

the two slabs of wood she bangs as a warning before words

like “a child drowns”* and, later, “a sudden empty place/
where something was,” but then the stage is no longer barren, 

there is a letter filled with “many misspelled words” and then
there is furniture.  but it all disappears quickly.   eventually, and

worst of all, with finality: “you are not coming.”  the wooden
thudding stops, the echoes disperse into silence, the woman leaves

the stage.  i am still here, thinking of death and silence.  until i

have unsettling dreams of pre-existence, emotions.  it is the end

of a very long day that has been interrupted occasionally by blunt

banging that mock belfries, a once-known clang. just thuds that
echo ripple out into a soon-silent void.  who was the child who 

drowned?  who wrote the letter filled with words spelled incorrectly. 

i’m disconnected.  in this space.  but comfortable.  my eyes move

drowsily across each surrounding wall papered with what must be

the detritus of me.  there is nothing beyond the walls. once there

was a web, a glistening network that stretched out beyond it. 

those ooden blocks.  each wall is a blockade.  altogether these

make the confines of a comfortable box in which i sit peacefully, 

aware that i am slowly forgetting.  no remorse for whatever is or

was beyond this box.  my legs are crossed upon soft cushiony linens.

*words in quotes are from Kathleen Fraser’s poems in “What I Want”

mmmmmclxxv

’til the cows come home

mom died last saturday.  i was
never brooding or suicidal – nor was i
a bad boy.  really.  bad, brooding and
suicidal were my coming of age sexuality,

though.  i wanted in me those characteristics.
or at least to find and hold tightly to someone

who had them, impossible as it would have been for 
me to take either on, to be kevin bacon in

footloose.  as i got older i became a fantastic dancer.
so i got to be that.  what eventually made me sexy was
the dancing.  just no brooding, no bad boy.  most often when
i dance what radiates from me, what i give, are whimsy and gratitude,

my appeal, when it exists, is that of a good, happy guy who
dances with intermingled grace and awkwardness, gliding in and
around the other dancing figures in a clunky stealthy fashion,
from the far end of the dancefloor to the dj booth and back.

my optimism dims, but never that much. i  want to live forever.
i can sometimes pretend i’m a bad guy, i can adjust my face
in ways that might suggest a yellow flag, that i perhaps might best

be approached with caution.  i’ve come of age, the last in my timeline, am

wistful every once in a while, rarely, between when the club
closes and sun comes up.  but the sun comes up, my world
is filled with joy, if with a lessening clarity.  eyesight dissipates
with age.  i adjust my eyeglasses and walk home

as daybreak hits, enjoying just for once the solitude,
walk up the stairs of my apartment building, unlock my door
and close it behind me again against the
brightly lit city that i love.

mmmmmclxxiv

one daren’t out-flash adelaide.

hot pink, it says right
over here, often appears thematically in contemporary and regional productions of
the musical, guys & dolls,

particularly in the costumes for miss adelaide and the hot box girls.
it does note that while the original 1950 production had its own color palette
newer renditions ever since tend to amp up the flashy nightclub aesthetic when the      

     gals are on.  when the
knuckleheads nathan detroit and sky masterson are on, however, there is

    often a generally muted earthtone schematic in play.

mmmmmclxxiii

fame

red carpet moments are
especially fun for me.  whenever i,
del ray cross, play a

character
at the cinema that becomes a particularly
red hot hit, i just
put on my dapper
entertainment face, strike a half a dozen of my most fantastic and terrifically
talented poses, then disappear like a demented recluse, until the next big premiere.

del is not short for delusional

mmmmmclxxii

two all beef patties on a what bun?

origin of that
pop culture phrase
every one of us prebuscent
nippers would use whenever we’d encounter

something that had dramatically blocked an important
entrance to wherever we had to be, like, for example, a door had just been
slammed shut and locked at our face just for spite? no worries,
all us pipsqueaks had to do was strike a sing-song-y voice
magically toward said obstacle, slowly chant: OPEN SESAME, and, of course, the
entrance would be cleared of the locked door or drawbridge, and through it we’d go, off
     to whatever was next.

fixodent and forget what?

mmmmmclxxi

today’s topic

what will be our subject today? shall i delve
into a real issue,
something which in reality,
here on earth, is the primary source of my high
blood pressure, for example?
or will i disavow the bonier, thornier subjects again today in hopes to alleviate the typical
nightmares i get from spending inordinate time plowing through reality.  make up an
escape hatch – words come so much easier when they’re primarily diversionary.

feathery fluff

mmmmmclxx

aura farming

done that (been there)
is what i say of this new teenaged trend.  but how fun it’d be to
rake and shovel in such a garden, digging up the puzzle pieces from
the rows of fruits and vegetables to construct who i am.  i’d tend my section of

red radishes, snip lots of long, silky, slightly-curled
okra – as if these were all the parts of myself i would then show off to you.
aren’t we almost always cultivating ourselves in this play-pretending-
deceptive way?  face first, yet with a mask we’re always editing, developing

     as we grasp it before our face, to invariably shield and tease and create and

     recreate our very own ever-shifting unique self?

mmmmmclxix

have you heard me

say how drawn i am to the color yellow?  how do yellow hues rank for you?  are they
up among those that you are
most drawn into or toward?  yellow.  the color of some
melons, of the sun, a color that represents brightness, or
electricity.  yellow often seems to truly
rev me up, to energize me, and yet, at the same time, to

soothe, to
quell any growing

uneasiness or
anxiety that i might have over what comes next.  often the color of beachcombers’
swaying locks, of the beach beneath the spindrift, it’s the golden glint in

hazel-colored eyes, which my dad often had (hazel was his mother’s first name, too).

mmmmmclxviii

part 2

(continued from the previous day)

...situate myself in a
   particular now, always with no initial attempt at analyzing that spot or adjusting
   oneself
  (that’d be me; myself).  only then do i briefly assess how much i
   like the spot in which 
   i find myself at that moment.  then, quickly, without thinking much, i move my body, a bit
   gently, so that if and when i am next propelled, aimed in the adjusted direction, i might
   have the best chance at next finding myself in a location
   that, when i leave it, i’ll have become profoundly better for having just been there.

mmmmmclxvii

part 1

really easy, this
one.   especially
since, clearly, i so regularly look backwards, scanning over
every year of this so
-
called life that i can recollect, if for the
one singular purpose of putting together this
lyrical project
over the course of the past twenty-two plus years.  some may find it hard to
resist the incorrect notion that it is an
endeavor in which i (
del, who is me) often likely find myself enmeshed within tangled nostalgia.  

given the discipline with which i’ve given this years-
long project, which we may call by its name,
anachronizms, however, when i do and regularly and swiftly
scan through my memory logs,
stopping long
enough to grab a line or two for the present day’s lines and land on a particular
snippet, there is little emotion or wistful desire, in most cases.  instead, i ...

(to be continued)

mmmmmclxvi

instant

gone
up from
now

stop

mmmmmclxv

mercury runs

quicksilver, it says right here,
upon doing a swift search online,
is a traditional, poetic [yes, it says just that] name for the
chemical element, mercury.  did you
know that i nearly completed a bachelor of arts degree studying the
science of chemistry?
it’s true, i swear on my
left-brained life, such as it is.  a primary characteristics of mythological mercury, is his
volatility.  he’s also known for being shrewd, for his
eloquence and his
roguery.  [the statue below depicts orpheus, not mercury, in stockholm, sweden, 2010]

a bit of thievery fever

mmmmmclxiv

the devil’s tool...

plumbing the depths of my
liquid brain in an attempt at discovering
utter perfection
might require a

pitchfork.  well.  remember keats’
endymion, the first line of which famously

reads: “[a] thing of beauty is a joy
for
ever?”  but only if those fork’s tynes are
capped with
the most delicately soft cottony puffs.  elsewise, one wrong move and no more joy.

...pokes an infinite kaput

mmmmmclxiii

vermillion

red.  the color of us
extant human being’s blood, when
damage is done to our self such that any singular

runnel from
our inner estuaries
crosses over and into a body’s outersphere.  i
know a few similarly-colored things.  like

danger.  ginger (the spice, the human—used colloquially, the gilligan’s island bombshell,

eve—
surely she of the bible was a bombshell,
except—was she a
redhead? . . .).  i  have noticed that
there are also many desert mesas and buttes that are crimson-colored.

mmmmmclxii

speaking of television, and
this particular
author of pretty
ridiculous lyrics, what’s our favorite
science fiction series?
heck, this
is easy
peasy: star trek (which still floats through space the same age as me).

mmmmmclxi

teevee druthers

say, might you remember a
certain television show called scarecrow
and mrs. king?  how about
remington steele, in which a dapper pierce brosnan starred with stephanie zimbalist,
efrem zimbalist jr’s daughter, for those of us who
care to live life overfilled with
ridiculous celebrity trivia.  perhaps
one might ascertain from this acronymic tidbit
which of those two television shows the author prefers (and preferred).

hint: he’s a 007

mmmmmclx

EFF the tech oligarchy!

well, today i am quite
angry at
the world, but mostly at google. they do most appropriately represent
each and every greedy corporate
rat bastard in this
megalomaniacal oligarch-
eat-oligarch universe, don’t they?
let’s have every billionaire after each
other for a kill-or-be-killed
nanosecond. but then who’d get rid of all the millionaires?

wealth!  ptooey!!

mmmmmclix

chew it

“bet you don’t know what i’ve got
 up my sleeve.”
“bet i do!”
“bet you don’t”  “try me!”
“lots of love for me.  and frowny faces for
 everyone else.”  “aw, when are you ever going to
 grow
 up,
 mister man!”

’til you pop it!

mmmmmclviii

six decades

look at me (but don’t, really),
over the hill,
sated with dinner and
the long day, feeling practically

brain-free, or
at
least unable to get a dim spark of a neural connection in this
lazy body
of mine. such is the brunt of life for an
old
nobody like me.

seven sins (vii)

mmmmmclvii

six decades

do you seriously dare to
unleash the wrath of this near
sixty year serial sinner?!
the audacity! the

devil itself has
exactly nothing on me.  i’m
vile, i’m terrible, and when
i’m angry, there’s nothing that poor, pathetic
little you can do once i sic my dragon on you. unlatch the door to the cage, my love!

seven sins (vi)

mmmmmclvi

six decades

but how does one find gluttony in a desert blizzard?
look, what’s that ahead, just over that next butte,
is it a shot of ozempic?
zizzity
zoopzang,
albert. you’re
right hilarious. i practically
died laughing (of starvation).

seven sins (v)

mmmmmclv

six decades

plenty of ways one might
eradicate one’s
net worth, when it comes do it.
number one on my list at present:
your neighbor’s hot cousin.  envy.  (& he comes with—or without—a fancy sports car)

seven sins (iv)

mmmmmcliv

six decades

lascivious
arc:
pie
in the sky ethereality versus
skin (the real deal).

life is
abuzz with the
zeal of
uninhibited
lust.
it’s living worth dying for.

seven sins (iii)

mmmmmcliii

six decades

now
everything once yours
comes
to me [
avarice ] and how deliciously
right—how real—the world now seems.

seven sins (ii)

mmmmmclii

six decades

cross my name off your list.  how
real do you think a mask of my face might make you, might
elevate your sad sack of self?
alarming as it
may sound to you—

oh, this is good, this is good.  i’m too
fucking good.

that which my name would
heighten was but an
ember lost in the river of lava that

clogs at the coast,
rhombuses ablaze as far as the eye can see.
oh, you are, indeed, full of it.  you of cowardly false
pride that implodes (explodes inwardly).  may your heart well learn from it.

seven sins (i)

mmmmmcli

broken

butt to his bed-linens, uncharacteristically late to rise for the day,
our fallen hero, normally filled with ideas, morning to midnight, and carries a significant
number of maps in hand (or pocket or backpack) of each of the
elaborately detailed steps required to reach each of his high-minded goals.  not today, though.

verso reverso

(the spell has been cast)