over two decades in the making.
a timeshifting autobiographical poetry collage w/photography.
a diaristic, nearly "daily writing" (ad)venture.
new pieces are posted most days..
**new and in progress** --
recordings of each poem are being added.
these are read by the author & posted to each poem's page.
--Del Ray Cross (contact delraycross at gmail)
Rain drips down the venetian blinds/ Fourteen years we danced like this.
Things I wanna do tonight: read this stack of books, etc.; go to End-Up; finish listening to all the music I downloaded this week; put the new liners up in the shower; finish the laundry (48 more minutes); watch this 2-hour Japanese movie from Netflix (watched all the rest the last couple of days); dance; figure out how to edit movies; drink a liter of water; make the first journal entry of the new year; finish this list I’ve made here on my coffee table (completely separate)...
and the laptop sounds like it’s going to explode or take off to Mars or something. The sun shines amazingly and I’m inside making lists. How to go beyond the list? Get something done before the explosion or take-off? Stop picking up signals from 1991 radio waves, keep looking up songs on YouTube, fantastic tunes I’d completely forgotten for over a decade, like Aldo Nova’s Fantasy, Red Rider’s Lunatic Fringe, Saga’s On the Loose, and, wow, Van Stephenson’s Modern Day Delilah from Righteous Anger, 1984, one of the first albums I ever purchased, with cash earned bagging groceries, cassette tape (my first ever album was Queen’s Greatest Hits, that one my one-and-only 8-track tape, but that’s one too many diversions)....
Your flying saucers are so gonna hug me. Our helicopter is way too low, but I appreciate its NOIZE like Coco purring somewhere over the Tenderloin. So. I download New Years and break all my resolutions in less than a minute.
What have we to spare? One lonely stack of chaplets in front of a close-cropped TV set (its tweaky echo of a recent episode of Battlestar Gallactica – the one trying too hard to be like 2001). We’re still brilliant, and
always will be. Which brings me to today’s trivia tidbit: Which two states have official donuts? The answer, it turns out, is Louisiana and Massachusetts. The beignet (of course) and the Boston cream donut.
When will it end when will it end when will it end. 10:30 or so wilting roses in front of me dark pink lungs damaged from last night’s sleep. Upset most of last week though haven’t eaten much at all pieces of mac & cheese with Alex yesterday at Rock Soup Cafe then to Mitchell’s for an orange sherbet cone that’s it. You want to go to bed again?
E on Friday night said the sweetest things to me late in the night “I don’t know what to say or what to do but wewill be the best” “I love you sooo much” holding my hand sitting on couch next to dance floor “next weekend we can go some place quiet” and later “we need to get our picture taken together.”
Coffee seems weak my life of little substance I’ll just read with my omelet. How to revamp erase start over like I am somebody else. No longer good.
Collective unconscious. Reading Japanese poetry. Darleen sends me a message on Facebook but I can’t find Darleen she’s invisible or unreachable. Can’t reply. Message from a ghost? Not in Japanese, silly. Cassie loaned me this book with horrible introductions, but now I’m down to the good stuff. Unable to drink, spend the week keeping the wobbly upright, erect. I am not a good poet. But I just gave birth to something.
I’m not 100% sure it would have been a better way to spend the evening, but I offer you this: would you will- ingly read and reread an ounce or two of semen?
The conversation begins as a happy accident, like a newly burgeoning relationship that’ll blissfully last for years to come (except when one chases the raw-eyed other from the warmer end of a jointly leased studio apartment to the other, back and also forth for a good long time, all the while beating his head with a broomstick). I finally got the nerve to ask (yet and again) if he thought we could “move forward.” And he said
yes. Yes. I was dumbfounded (and this was back when dumbfounded was cheap and easy, which was either 1991 or the day before yesterday). So he came
to my place and we spent a lovely night, highlighted by a long set of soft slow kisses both nearly but not quite climaxing. The next day—
well, morning, our beloved other’s furtive fingernails jostling around within our very own unique intermittent “can’t-make-up- its-mind-what-to-hold-on-to” grasps, we skitter dizzily, each and as one, to Jamba Juice for Orange Dream Machine.
Let’s do the opposite. Rushing onto the dancefloor trying to start something. You, Mirac ulous Stranger, you cum obvious close—and not only do I accept and giddy appreciate, but also reach out & grab your dick.
Del is striving for avuncular (the apocalypse must be nigh).
Imagine that I am in love with this city. Well, fantasize. Too hard? Maybe, but I do love it.
Pick one line. “OK I was cut off.” Right. Pick another. “Long story short?”
Long story short my one and only ex-girlfriend finds me via Facebook last night. Same day I get a sly note from my first college roommate by way of yet another college friend. He (the roommate) was quite hotly and heavily engaged when we shared our tiny campus domicile. They got married soon thence and, inevitably, divorced. She (the other college friend) was a classmate from India and a fellow chemistry major (chew on that!) who arrived stateside our freshman year via freshly arranged marriage to the new physics professor; in short measure she was lauding a newly- found ‘liberation’—and soon thereafter was happily divorced. Next week, I have been Facebookly informed, said He and She will depart for the Caribbean, ensemble, where they’re sure to whip up some riproaring mid- dle-aged fun in (and no doubt out) of the sun.
One of my closest childhood friends’ kids is now at NYU on full scholarship.
Everything happens all the time, sometimes simultaneously. I’m just now reading a poem by George Stanley about him huddling outside of his apartment with his neighbors (granted, at 5:30 in the morning), just to get away from the noise of the fire alarm in his apartment building – “strangers and no structure” – he seems to be writing with a hangover, and then I misread “sleek & slender selves” as “sleek & slender elves” – well, it is almost Christmas. I mean it’s December. Or at least May, when I am back ON with You-Know-Who. I wish I could remember exactly how things went at Mel’s after watching X Men (he was 45 minutes late!). But as I was spilling my very soul out to him over a grilled cheese sandwich (and his Oreo milkshake?) I do most clearly and gleefully recall that I saw his eyes mist over.
I just dusted everything and it’s nearly midnight. All the blinds are closed and I’m wondering if the moon is up. Raise the goddam blinds and see nothing but blankly starlit rooftops. MOON! MOON!
I love it when you read. I don’t know why. I’m reading four books simultaneously (& doing laundry & sipping a lukewarm Sprite). Life, as they say, is good.
Facebook, however, is taking up too much damn time! My brother arrives Wednesday, the place is a mess, and I’m not going to get an ounce of sleep tonight. Plus I just downloaded The Last Guy,
which is not what you’re thinking unless you happen to be an avid videogamer (which I’m not— but zombies in San Francisco? How can I resist?).
So. That leaves room for a lot of doubt, right? Right. That’s a lot of doubt.
By the way, nobody writes at perfect pitch every single sitting.
What’s real? Martinis with Kim at Martuni’s last night. Talking the talk. They’ve moved the WellsFargo ATM machines to 333 Market (that used to be ‘indoors’ across Fremont). That’s real (though I’d heard a rumor....).
Our building’s fire alarm buzzer just came on full force. Real. I walk out to see a neighbor standing outside of his smoking apartment. I ask if everything is okay and he says yeah. “Do you know how to turn it off?” “Nope, sorry.”
And I mean it is LOUD.
Here comes the fire truck some fifteen minutes later as I go down (holding my ears) to check the dryers. One. Real. Empty. Rah! Plug her in!
how I’d love to dream let alone sleep it’s night —Frank O’Hara
The laundry is only begun. Joe just signed on. Doldrums since Saturday, no real reason. It’s Sunday. Then fondue. I made a rather long list I haven’t started ticking off.
People are dancing right now and I’m here on the couch writing a ‘poem’ – where’s the sense in that? The bells of reason will surely ring any moment now.
Til then, I’ll not name any more names. Except last night we couldn’t wait for Cyndi Lauper. Just couldn’t wait. Or I was in pain from standing four (five?) solid hours. Otto sweetly patient,
slow-walks home with the gimping old fart at
12:30am after Lady Gaga and one of the chicks
from Destiny’s Child. What’s a pop concert for?
What’re my memories of dancing all over the
bedroom I shared with my two brothers to Girls Just Wanna Have Fun –
and never to see her live except this place, me 41, her who knows how old, kids of 20 and 21 scrambling by with a bump and a shove, etc...?
Sure, she’s got a lovely new ‘hit’ now – one that even grows on you, doesn’t quite exude the vapors of nostalgia, one I’ll be most happy to dance at alongside a few assorted eye candy on my own present-day turf, which is whatever stomped- and slobbered-upon San Francisco dancefloor of the moment that pulses with the rhythms of a vapid-ethereal-electronical rehash of all things past and pop by way of a decently escapist semi-world-renowned DJ until the cows come home, no drunken
bumps, no live performance, except just this bash & bash & bash & bash &...
Welcome to my series of utterly honest sarcasms, bitter to the core, each with its own violently clever and overwraught (one and all!) twist that makes one wonder if I’m possibly this stupendous or if I’m merely lucky to bend a few attenuated ears with a garden variety of half-baked jokes, ha ha, which are quite possibly aimed at countless dull replicas of your very own self, Dear Degreed Purveyor of the Enlightened (known colloquially as Illusioned) Guess. A rather lavishly fluid volume of, let’s just go ahead and call them postmodern aggregations of memoria, each one built, if you will, upon its own wondrously appropriate paper head- stone; each grave (or any assemblage of graves) to be interpreted as nothing less than a mockery of all poetic traditions, espoused or otherwise; and yet, each blithe construct is a scientifically sound disputation of the very poignant, earnest, brilliantly straight- forward argument or narrative – that is, the very carcass – ensconced within each brilliant contraption; individual ‘disputation vs. narrative’ duets can by gosh downrightly be summed up as disposable ‘get on over yourself’ sermonettes craftily parlayed tongue-in-cheekly as choruses to an end
less knell, and always a sly misreprentation of the deviant, My Own True Self, sung just as deservedly to all kith and kin who spend their days, their nights, their final breaths languishing in the company of words, wordettes, and wordy wordisms. In toto, I might add, because it should be iterated, these incomparable casements encompass a fabulously excruciating excess of divinely harmonic redundancies, deliciously rabble-rousing bon mots, and just plain inimitable sentences, which to a T are gloriously impossible to repeat unscriptedly, and naturally inconceivable to utter in completion without the loving assistance of at least one strong arm slipped deep and ever so slowly up into the utterer’s wazoo.
I daresay a day or so of silence from you is an unmitigated joy; it’s several sheer pages of unmottled clarity,
a remedy for this year and next. “Life is a Jumble Shop,” and I’m too busy wedging Frank O’ Hara’s timelessly snappy coigns
into each well-intentioned day; I’ll drum nary a knackered word of my own into this chest, nor beat one, pithy or not, into our veritable daily dough.
Why worry a jot over kleptomaniacal tendencies? I am perfectly satisfied just to seek out that one clear frequency,
to pick up a clown-sized megaphone, aim it in any general direction. And transmit! I do reckon there are occasional
incidental problems around which to maneuver, but there’s clearly no need to reinvent the all-glorious antenna. I did have my mind on this
one thing, though, that really needs to get fixed, but while said slipshod mind cozily drifts off into something like eloquence, watch closely
as the rest of me resoundingly remains a fully functional and beneficent instrument of conveyance. Meantime, how’d you careen so magnificently, so sublimely out of control?
Hm. I do seem to recall some vague gesture for direction, an ever-softening motion toward relevance. But I’ve had a few kooky dreams since then that I could have just mixed it all in with,
not to mention I’m as down with love as either of us can ever hope to be. So cut out that racket! I’ll be damned if you’ll catch me screwing with my pitch-perfect reception!
