mmmmmcxci

Clunking Onward

     Call me with your danger
              —Kathleen Fraser

Are you ready to move this in another
another direction?  I am.  More absurdity,
less anxiety, and no boredom.  So what

scares me?  Fear of death.  Fear

of being alone.  An extrovert who’s
come down with a decade-long case
of agoraphobia.  The fear of ending
in tragedy.  Realizing that, oh hell,

if I were to bite the dust, to shuffle
off this mortal coil as I slept or (scarier
still) just as I began to go through the con
flicting process of waking up; if the spasms

began to erupt, those ripples that lure who

ever I am in dream-state, giddily and dizzily,

back toward a simpler awareness, to an 

awakened state, if this time nothing 

manages to entice me, so that instead

I lie here with my eyes closed until I have

gone cold. Who’d find what was left?  It’d 

be nobody I know, that much is certain.

After how many days and nights?  Am I
cognizant of how disturbing—how scary—
that what I leave behind, having accrued a
few things since less than a decade ago losing

all that up to that point I had, the ephemera, 

only to replace it with these few pieces of furni

ture and a dozen or so reams that, individually

and in summation, are but a heap, garbage, like 

the carcass that was once had been me, at least

to whomever would arrive to take it all away, to 

dispense with me and my detritus. Who would
understand what these relics had meant to me?

Who’ll consider the bias I had for each piece

of this mess?  No one.  It’ll be someone who
arrives and makes a dispassionate, democratic
list, more than likely (surely there’s nothing here

of any significant cash value).... Rather than
finding my way toward fresh perspective, I’ve
trailed off rather morbidly, haven’t I?  At the
outset, I thought I’d work my way humorously

through the horrors of my greatest fears.  But
how bland I’ve been lately.  Perhaps I’ll put
this down, switch on the television, like I did
around this time yesterday to watch the Emmys

(in which newcomers and personal faves Pluribus
and Widow’s Bay all but swept).  How might I
diminish my fears with laughter or pleasant
thoughts?  To relax the tension between aspiration

and reality, to redesign goals so that, should I tap
into an as-yet-unfound pocket of energy, I can
meet them and move forward, ever forward,
while this life yet remains spirited.  Here I am.

mmmmmcxc

the weight of the world

who wants to get stuck in
somebody else’s doldrums?
is kind of rhetorical because
how many of us, and with

intention (good or bad),
take up residence in the
troubled neighborhoods
that are other people’s

seemingly unsolvable
problems.  oh tortured
poet that is myself, use
your own capacity to dig

yourself out of this one.  and,
until you’ve escaped in real life,
find some mind-tingling pretend
paradise in which you might

grandly research, taking copious
and effervescent notes which you
might dangle before you, in an

effort to hide your foul aura.

mmmmmclxxxix

“can’t we pretend?”
(somewhere out of my head)

proceed.  we must proceed
with this fresh procedural.
don’s porcine collection
does not include porky.
hans’s motivation was 

to prevent the death 

of his best friend.  a
termination of life
was prohibited.  

how paradisical 

to live on with
no end.  the 

peculiar 

party 

of post-

graduates had
pert tendencies,

their preference of 

prevarication, “we’re 

from st. ignatius, fresh 

out from montpelier.”  they

shared a tepid parfait on the
patio.  they parted penitently,
which stretched their patience. 
to have pressed on together
would have been peril.  but

each previously pent-up perp 

was pleased to breathe a sigh

of relief.   plenty of laws 
were broken; nothing

lethal, though.  so 

(whew!) our 

dreams, for

now, endure.

mmmmmclxxxviii

What am I doing, in memoriam?
What I do to remember your death
is none of my business, really.  I want
to sift through pictures of you at parties—
all the rest of the attendees gather around
your throne (your edge of the big green sofa),
everyone is attractive, participatory, filled with life—
they are mixed among other colorful photographs, here

we’re at the aquarium, here we’re sipping wine at glen ellen,
and here we’ve somehow found ourselves walking a golf course,
glimpses of the ocean appear behind your vivid hair, ornate fountains 

spew arcs that are bent by a breeze I suddenly remember (flashback to

a spirited dance toward your dark straw hat that’s been blown off
the top of your head, and to me quickly stooping to scoop it up. 

i place it securely over your vivid head.  What do I do with 

such memory-soaked time?  How to best put use to such

reminiscences, to gather perspective in relation to the

present and uncertain future. To, as pleasantly as
I can, take it all in, so that I might with purpose
and grace, give my best from where I now 

exist—with an unwavering awareness 

and with utmost respect—to this, 

our own living and dying.

mmmmmclxxxvii

i am not a grape

(somewhere out of my head)

it seems an odd time in life to be a fruit
or a vegetable.  you once thought my soul
was royal purple.  imagine my surprise

when you turned out to be so sour.  i
watch the man behind the counter
slice up a thick banana for the

circle swirl atop my açai bowl.
today, i’m getting the hanna banana,
my usual—when i’m allowed a treat, which

has occurred with greater infrequency
for quite some time now.  i’m not carmen
miranda, either.  not for lack of vocal ability,

i might add, but rather because the fruit keeps
falling off of my head.  the vertigo is back.
and not just metaphorically.

mmmmmclxxxvi

readying for movement
(somewhere out of my head)

it seems an odd time in life,
illogical, trying to claw my way
out of my head into healthier
than i’ve been in years,
perhaps decades, even
as two weeks, maybe
three since mom’s
funeral.  i try to
be celebratory,
after all it’s my health,
i list in my head all of the
issues from the past twenty-five
years (surgery, bad knee, etc., but recovery).
i go on long walks in the city several times a week,
first time in years.  but i’m destitute.  this week my
weekly meals box didn’t arrive on monday as it does
every monday during each of the four or five 12-week cycles
i’ve been getting them.  tiny meal slurps, i call them.
but i don’t go hungry.  not yet, anyway.  and yet
have lost 75 pounds or so in the past year.
it’s astounding to feel this good.  to
send out applications and resumes
every day because i’m not having to deal
with whatever crisis of the moment that is too
all-consuming (three days since i should have gotten my
box of meals, though).  sufferin’ stagnation!
my health.  having a mother for 59 years,
then one day, not having one. d ad’s
been gone for 25 already.  and gary
for ten years. but me, healthiest
i’ve been in years, yet unable to
live what i still call normal life.

whatever this is has long since

become normal.  has become life.
i can hear voices out the window
of my apartment, just on the
other side of my desk, but

cannot make out what any

are saying. it is just me here.

in this dull but singular, and

now healthier, existence.  i
wonder what i can
scrounge up for
lunch.  i keep a list,
there are always items to check off,
a lot of items go, most days this is so,
but the list barely grows, barely shrinks.

overcome, as i often am, by a dizzying wealth

(i can call it that) of thoughts swimming around

in my head, moving too fast, too many of them.

straining now to focus.  it is time to focus,

time to act, and to rethink how to be.

mmmmmclxxxv

the life of an artist

can we just get rid of this life
okay it’s gone this life of an artist thing
but wanting to be rich did you see what i did
when i said rich was a risk?  he went all out with risqué
is kaye okay?  no she gone like whistle gone like the wind
like a windy whistle.  got something to wet your wistful (gone
west) it is a deadly thing this dehydration don’t you play
with me.  you’re having a conversation with your dead
voice voices like a wet whistle on a dry wind do you know
whether there is a term for that or weather a term as deep
and mournful as dry wind becomes wet?  oh moisture.
oh moisture thinks the mouth when how come
you can never go hungry
go thirsty how come you can
never go hungry in the desert
because
because of the sand
because of the sand which
is there.  the sandwiches is there.  see how easy it is
to examine the sand to spend your life looking for a water mole
to spend your ever day your life searching for a water molecule
clinging to a rain of sand like sands because now that is something
now you know why you needn’t go thirsty.  thirst kills
and who laughs?  how come you can never go hungry in the desert?
because you foolish mirage you are lying there thirsting to death.

mmmmmclxxxiv

hot to the touch

always hard 

you was always hot to the touch
i thought maybe this is just a scary planet but all the fear
was so sincere.  can’t you just say it melted?  not this year

but when it snowed and we were so slow and cold don’t move.
when the ice came from the sky and we got frozen for each other
oh those were the days we couldn’t move.  those were the
when you was alarm warm.  three alarm?  five

more days of froze is all.  can we just have
another day?  what does it matter hot or
cold when you are an arctic ocean
when i am just an arctic arsonist i don’t care

where is there?  i don’t care hot or cold if you
could make me froze if you could frost
the lock of swaying outright hair
if you were there i wouldn’t care.

i was so hot to the touch that you
would cool and soothe with just one
finger of your thumb or fist i was so
cold that were you there and i’m just in my

get me there.  if i was so cold just in my
underwear and you were there would be
no glacial oh if you were here no move me
i was just so froze and me a glacier in my

underwear but you are there.  if you come
back i would put on all my clothes.  none of our
sweat would evaporate until we
drowning.  in drowning on fire.  maybe i care.

mmmmmclxxxiii

a fist that fits

you speaking was always alarm red it was
funny how frightening it was until you started
speaking my language.

mmmmmclxxxii

and with a fist

this how you taught it this is
the time you taught me so time
and again and again with a fist with
your firsts you said don’t say the words
don’t say it’s the fist that takes out the piss
an education of the limpest wrist you sissy fuck
it’s in the wrist it’s in the wrist it’s with a fist that hits
and hits and hits and hits and hits

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 i was 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 just

can’t feel 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 to what you did 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 just me talking about all the 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
am reading 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, but
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 (almost an auditory hallucination) 

broad, mostly non-specific thuds, blunt noises made with 

amorphous blocks, fat limbs of wood at center stage, the sound 

moves out upon a sea of uninhabited theatre seats, wooden

row after row of them.  and these noises seem to be from a woman
onstage banging these two boards for this silent ocean.  with gnarled

arms she bangs an unwieldy stub of birch onto a thick and another hunk,

irregularly cut, lying flat upon the concrete stage floor, the collision
sounds do not carry far, even given the echo-riddled acoustics 

of the empty rows of surely uncomfortable, also wooden chairs.
darker, though.  these chairs are smooth and polished.  they sit individually 

and altogether, rowed, with much more intent than the two hunks of 

birch this woman is banging about on the concrete stage that juts a bit
out toward the empty chairs, a stage that is, but for the woman and 

the two slabs of wood (before each thud she chants a sort of warning,

like “a child drowns” and, later, “a sudden empty place/
where something was,” then suddenly she is almost keening, words, 

a letter filled with “many misspelled words” which grows 
into furniture: a couch, a large bookshelf (each quickly vanish).   

worst of all, with finality, she warns: “you are not coming.”  and the 
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 as if from a mock belfry.  the thud of a once-known clang. 
echo thud ripples 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 these walls.  once there

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

those wooden blocks.  each wall a blockade.  altogether they

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 rather characteristics i wanted, were the desired traits of 

my coming of age sexuality.  as in i wanted them in me.
or at least to find and then hold tightly onto 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.  but no brooding, no bad boy.  most often when
i dance what radiates from me is whimsy.  and gratitude.

my appeal, when it exists, is that of a good, happy guy who
dances with intermingling grace and awkwardness, gliding in and
around the other dancing figures in a clunky-stealthy fashion,
from the far end of the dancefloor, all the way 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 a long line, 

am wistful every once in a while, albeit rarely, between when the 

club closes and when the sun appears on the horizon.  and when that sun 

shows up, my world is filled with joy, if with a lessening clarity.  eyesight

dissipates with age.  i adjust my glasses and walk home

as daybreak hits, enjoying just this 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 so 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 up, 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 prepubuscent
nippers would use whenever we’d encounter

some sort of obstacle that had dramatically blocked an important
entrance to wherever we wanted to be?  for example, a door that has just
slammed shut at our face and bolted, perhaps just for spite?  no worries.
all us pipsqueaks had to do, with a voice aimed as if with
magic toward that door, slowly chant-sing: O P E N  S E S A M E!  that
entry would be cleared of the locked door or drawbridge post haste, 

    and through it we’d go, off to whatever was next.

fixodent and forget what?

mmmmmclxxi

today’s topic:

what will our subject be 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, an effort to
nix the nightmares i get from reality’s daily grind.  design an eloquent

escape hatch – for words come 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