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)
I rarely do. Have a comp- lete thought (you know, without start- ing another one, I mean). Take the rock I’ve been sleeping on for a week now, for ex- ample. Nice view and all. But it’s a rock! And a very cold one at that. And however heavy the wind blows (also, quite cold!), it never really carries me, my thoughts or that confound- ed rock (from which what an extraordinary view!) away. “Aw, shaddap, Jim!” “Okay, okay,” says I, “good night, Slim.” “Good night to you, too, Mis- ter Jim.” To which he just has to add, with his arms and his four fing- ers in the air, look- ing just like the metal- head he never was, “You rock!” Then morn- ing crows. And it’s funny how the aches are never terribly funny until years later. “Years later, Jim?” To which we don our Devo ziggurat hats and fan out into the wilderness
I gave myself sun- burn! And look who’s at the doorway, look- ing just as sinister as he never looked, the halo almost a floating aura around this month’s bangs. Why, it’s YOU, that’s who! If, for ex- ample, we were to ex- change a glance or two (we do, we did), I’d think “and just to think, it all started with I don’t know you, you don’t know me. Right?” Right. But somebody must have really wanted to know something. (Right?) (And what a shame, ignorance?) (Right?). “Hey, sonny, can you make the burn go a-way?” Or can you at least make it go thattaway. And to think, the burn was the burn of the party cake, the slight heartburn of a heart having a panic attack. And the angel reminded the heart that there was no panic at all, was there? No panic at all. Then the burp. Then the twinned laughter. “Can you make the burn go away, kiddo!” started without the de- ranged scream, was more of a simple whis- per: “Burn it up daddy, just burn it all up.” Ama- zingly, since burn nev- er really goes up. In that sense. It goes down. “Look it’s all burnt down,” said Sally walking down Conifer Lane for the fif- teenth time in a row, thirty months after it all burnt down. The 5-alarm fire that didn’t even fry the doorway. If you look, or at least when Sally looks, she can almost see the cherub, his red flowing cape, and long ash-
Who’s funnier when you’re fifty (than when you’re in your late thirties). I, be- fore e, except after sex. Which somehow sounded just as good at fifteen. This is everything, almost the very end of everything, the everything that gets stolen right from between my legs. Just got, that is. What’s the difference be- tween two black and gray camouflage backpacks? Funny just will not do for this wise-ass crackpot, will it? Speaking of off- color humor ... just will not do for this wisecrack. More comedy ensues, it never fails. For example, take all of the instructions at the Tenderloin Police Department (a charmer of a community haven, please allow me to ensure you). When asked about the report I’d be filing, I begin with fifteen pages of handwritten words (“it’s part of a much-larger pro- ject,” I try to get out of the dry craw near my goozle, and somehow manage before the now imaginary “and much, much more...” comes out like the square wheel of my father’s long lost verb- alized breath). Ah, libido, how surreal! I think, smooth as a song sung by Mel Tillis. “...all of my important files, you know, with labels like “bills,” “housing,” “job- search,” and “urgent.” “It was really just a back- pack filled with earnest modesty and endless ‘im- portance,’” croons Tillis, as if honey from my stut- ters, “just a backpack that fell alseep in the wrong man’s backyard.”
No one would believe my story. And yet it would bore pretty much anyone to tears. My story, it ain’t no good. A story can come in many sizes and a good one will work on multiple levels, they say. The same could be said of the icons of today's blockbuster cinema: Superman, Spiderman, Naruto, Wolverine, Magneto, the Avatar, Captain Underpants (he IS a cinematic superhero,
right? I just ran into a 5 year old sporting an under-sized t-shirt with this unlucky official moniker), Jack Black, Captain Jack Sparrow, Cap’n Crunch, Peter Pan, etc. “I was born in the Summer of Love,” I say, just to throw people off. I mean, look at me, do I look like the son of hippies (I certainly am not)?? And then I wear a grimace for the rest of the day. What happened to all of the love, I mumble intermittently from, I dunno, 4:00 to 11:00 pm
(the latter couple of hours I mumble somewhat drowsily until later: “I wasburn in a Smermer of Loovthe!” I shout somewhere on Haight Street, knowing that most people confuse this summer (not my mumbles, necessarily) with 1969, the summer the twins were born (my little brothers), and the summer those men landed on the moon (or else the year that Stanley Kubrick was an unusually prolific, not to mention quite stealthy director).
Reality? Most people don’t get 1969 confused with 1967. On any level. Um. Perhaps on some level, almost everyone (of a certain age) gets 1969 confused with 1967. But what of 1968, 1971, 1975, or even 1979....1973? Presently, I’m either depressingly or at least toyingly toodling with the distance between the present and that grand demarcation: the Summer of Love. Now let’s all poke some fun at glaring half-centuries which ogle back at me like oversized
bobble-heads (aren't they all?). And above those blurred bobs – in a precisely delineated neon yellow – flashes the appropriate word, one we’d take on decades later: “D’uh.” So did folks living in the Summer of Love realize that they were participants in the Summer of Love? Or did that realization arrive years later as a posthumous (so-to-speak) appellative? And how subsequent, if so? This I am pretty certain is a fact that I should know, but, my memory.
And, on a related note, as luck would have it, I’ve already lost all interest. Except in how it might pertain to me, as usual. You know, that particularly easy-going plump babe was born the second Thursday of June; during what (in towns, such as the one in which I was born), lovingly (or laughingly) is called the morning rush hour (actually two fantastical l-words of my own bias, because most citizens hereof had
never even been anywhere else in the world (another fantasy/bias, if you’ll allow), when it comes to the rush of an hour, to even realize there can be a difference. I was such an easy birth, too, just ask my mother, (who definitely knows from worse). That’d be me, born as I was in none other than THE summer of love, a summer which will never again be half a
century in distance from anywhere else in the world (be that anywhere: Vesta, Arkansas; Kyoto, Japan; Skopje, Macedonia; or either of the multi- tudinous but each unique canals of Venice, Amsterdam or St. Petersburg).
