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)
ILLEGIBLE 💙 Note to self (And the rest of the kingdom):
No More Bags On HeadS
“No. I am And also, coronate Lance Bass the (do not blame the King. This King!” came to me in a DREAM)
Mega Mania!! Lo
See! Hi! Hello! Retry for ME. as King of this Kingdom.
PROCLAMAIONS*:
1. No court jesters necessary (the savings are incredible!) Also 2. No more rubber soles Etc. 3. Eliminate all spoons 4. Alveoli 5. Smartphone speaker holes will ALWAYS BE TIGHT
*which are kind of like proclamations without the t’s ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Sally Field Is Now Head of Air Transportation
And also…
All lefties will henceforth Be regulated to the Stockyards.
Oh, I don’t think you’ll be laughing long.
Neighing Perhaps. Neighing perHAPS.
It’s a sad day in the kingdom for anyone who sees illegibility in the King’s SACRED PAPYRI.
Show To Mother (Stephen Colbert sticker poem VII*)
I found two quarters and two nickels on 8th Street (sidewalk) yesterday. She’d be so proud that I bothered to stoop over to pick them up. Madoc, on the other hand, would probably have found them before me. Or, if by some odd chance he did not find them first, he’d most certainly need to know the date in which each coin was minted…if they were pennies, anyway. I wasn’t hopping from interview to interview when I found the coins. Not like I’m doing today, when I learn I haven’t quite enough money for a cheap lap- top (you can get one for $100 these days, I’ve just learned. One that works. That’s cheaper than most mobile phones, just for some con- text or perspective.) Then I real- ize that I can have $40 more if I return the keyboard I just bought here two weeks ago (I’m once again at Best Buy), so it might yet be possible for me to walk home with my very own laptop, the first one that I’ve owned since my second night home- less over twenty-one months ago (a cold night when I slept on the sidewalk a block down from what was my apartment, our apartment…. The problem was I put the large piece of lug- gage hastily packed full of what I decided quickly were my most important possessions, which included several iPhones, my laptop, a few of my favorite clothes, a few bathroom sup- plies, Coco the Loco, who was a cat who for nine years had never been my sole responsi- bility, was never even my idea to adopt in the first place be- cause someone else beat me to the punch shortly after Sepia the Cat passed away. All these were in my large suitcase, along with some completely random items from the apartment – stuff I’d been able to gather from the bulk of all that was in there, one third of which was not mine but had been left there by the deadbeat terror, another third of which was mine or- iginally and the last third be- longed to me and the dead- beat cumulatively – like Coco the Loco – like the apartment itself, the lease of which had both our names, even though I’d paid by far the larger share of the rent and the rest of our expenses for over five years while the deadbeat eased his way through college). And of this disparity of items, I’d been able to pack up and get to the UHaul truck about one third of the material
that resided in the apartment
with me, with us. And that
included only a portion of what I had accumulated in my 50 years of living, which was perhaps a third of what had been in the apartment, before being assaulted by the apartment manager simply because, thanks to the most extreme panic at- tack I can recall, I said I need to take a quick trek to the emergency room. As the manager, a guy for whom I’d sung praises for being the best, empathized with his work, spent hours talking with him about AC/DC concerts, and who had gotten intimate with some of the stragglers who invariably stayed with me during their hard times (I am told some of the advances were unwant- ed, but cannot attest to the veracity of that), had me in a neck-hold lifting me up to the roof of the cabin of the U-Haul truck, refusing to let me take the short 5 block trip to St. Francis. At least until I screamed “POLICE, POLICE, POLICE…” at the top of my lungs and lo and behold the police very quickly arrived and I was able to escape the horror of being there excav- ating the history of my life
while being bullied and beat
en. Once I was able to leave,
I pulled in to the St. Francis parking lot until I stopped hyperventilating, then drove in- to the Sunset to sleep for the night in the UHaul truck (where I discovered the next morning that I had a flat tire). Backing up a bit, I’d only gotten about a third of the material that was in the apartment in which I’d lived for 13 years, about a third of which was mine in the first place, but all of which I paid to be stored for a year, only to have it all auctioned off (My entire poetry library! My every journal! All of my photo books, including those few I got from my grandmother’s collection, and the quilt my other grand- mother made me, along with the many items that had no- thing whatsoever to do with me, except that I had lived for a decade with their right- ful owner, their rightful resp- onsibility. They’d just been left for me to take care of. And after a year of making payments while homeless and jobless to keep the items in storage, I lost every item after missing a couple of months’ payments, after which all of the items were apparently taken and auctioned off in some horribly im- personal manner to the highest bidders. But back at Best Buy, and upon contemplating all too much of this craziness that had led to me needing or wanting badly or just being here seeing it would be poss- ible for me to finally get a new lap- top, in a new age where they could be had for cheaper than most mobile phones, I became full of questions so big I would never have thought they’d exist, these big questions; they had not even crossed my mind. So I called Mom to ask her what she thought of the sit- uation I was in, or perhaps it was a di- lemma. I ask her what I should do, what she thought about all of it, but her response was a familiar lamentation about how she feels so terrible that she can’t help me financially. “Mom,” I say, “you just sent me $50 for Christmas,” or I wouldn’t even be considering what had, given the last couple of years, been an outrageously delightful dilemma. She does her curt little chuckle and I then recount how my week between Christmas and New Year’s has been thus far, and began to feel almost giddy about how much more pleasant it is, despite all that I’m still currently living through that is, well, sub-par. After this final exchange (which is much more me than her), I hang up happy to have gotten the opportunity to listen to a few of her complaints–who’s passed away, who’s
in the hospital, etc. –and I chastise her
for not sending me any sweet treats from
the holidays this year (neither from Thanks-
giving nor Christmas, both of which al- ways include the best, sweetest desserts my family is capable of concocting – and I’m serious, for the most part, having hinted surely so much that she had to know it was a serious request). But this welcome and trite conversation with Mom has opened me up to the realization, more than ever, that even though I’ve endured what has been five years of horror, the past year finally saw a tic upward rather than downward, and remembering last year’s holidays reveals how significant a difference the present holiday season is, since it’s one in which I remain mostly upbeat, positive, motivated and even happy – a stark con
*(the title of this poem is from a page from Stephen Colbert’s I Am America And So Can You which has a set of “STICKERS,” each with a phrase which he recommends using to show that you are the “man in charge” or that “you’ve got it all under control” – I assume to be used especially when the man-reader actually has no clue, or simply isn’t interested or even paying attention)
On that day, the five dozen volunteers walked over the edge of the precipice, stopped for a moment, huddled in front of it, then, as directed by the first in line, moved forward, following him, one by one, into and completely through the massive oval of ancient rock that had been sacred to the planet’s inhabitants ever since as far back as their recorded history, and no one knew how long before that. But no one, at least in recorded history, had ever dared to go where no Vulcan had knowingly gone before; as far as Vulcanity knew, no one had ever passed through the Sacred Portal on the Great Precipice. The line of individuals making their way to and through the Great Portal were each volun- teers, mostly made up of academic veterans of research along with a few of the eccentrics who lived further up the mountain upon which the precipice and its “portal” stood. Each indi- vidual who passed through the chute made of sheer rock (which burned a bright shade of bronze on clears days such as this one, which was due to an admixture of heavy metal along with the planet’s dusty mantle), once on the other side, found that they had entered a void filled with nearly blinding solid white—not quite light—that was thicker than it could possibly be; in fact, it was so dense that as each of the travel- ers looked back to observe the side of the portal from a perspective that, to their knowledge, no Vulcan had ever seen, no trace of it could be seen. There was nothing but the intense bright white. Each Vulcan learns at a very young age that, even with ardent and open-minded, steady non-stop focus in one direction or at one thing for any significant duration of time, any con- clusions implied by logic about what was seen might be about as far from the reality as imagin- able. In other words, logic does not always win. There is and will always be the inexplicable, the unexplainable; illogic. Nevertheless, what with imagination being one of any typical Vulcan’s weakest link: what does one use to make any progress with a subject encountered that with standard logic is only misunderstood, inappropriate- ly managed or dealt with, or worse, is an udefeat- able enemy to civilization and harmony. Vulcans become both palpably disturbed and very curious when they encountered this sort of oddity. So, by the time the seventy explorers had each passed through the sacred, hollow rock and paused long enough to glance back toward where they at least believed they were moments earlier, the thick white non- fog had in an instant become a seemingly imperm- meable hue of pink. A Vulcan bathed entirely in a sea of pink is a sight to behold (reference for example, the master swimmers in the T'Paul Sea in the late spring). It is the color for love, pink; and their color for grief. And to immerse oneself in it is to encounter within oneself the dichotomy, that primary conflict which the proud race had all but successfully quelled for as far back as the established historical record goes. When bathed in this present pink light, each individual experience was deep and unrelenting, it was pure emotion. And emotions are illogical. To express them, to even allow them even sparingly into consciousness was lowbrow, if you will. Yet oddly, it was the primary ritual, catalyzed by walking into the hallowed caverns where inside nothing existed except a vivid pink intensity which could somehow, upon being temporarily sealed (in an airtight manner) allowed move- ment and breath within. Each Vulcan father would ex- perience for a day, a night, and another day until dusk, directly after the birth of his first-born. Several of today’s volunteer explorers had never even experienced this ritual, this rollercoaster through heartbreak and ecstasy and everything in between. A few hours after being lowered into one of these pink caverns, there was what was termed in Vulcan something that, roughly translated, was the reversal, a moment when all of the passion-inflict
ing rosy light began to subside and then slowly disappear altogether. Nothing is left. Perception is momentarily eradicated. Nothing is perceived – by either of the seven Vulcan hypersenses. There is no negativity, no positivity. There is no love, no vengeance; neither pain nor joy. There is only the nothingness through which the trajectory of the genesis of life soars to its culmination, to its inevitable extinction. The drop, sheer as it was, wasn’t actually a drop at all. What was perceived as precipice was rather the mere top of what might best be described as a swarm of poisonous green blood that co-existed with the mighty pulse of existence, the unusual longevity of a race that had always evolved, and swiftly, toward some ideal. The swarm, however, had also pre-existed, and had moved beyond ideal. And it would outlive the pulse. There was no sensation, to be sure. There was “I know who you know” and there was “I feel what you feel.” Representative of the entire race, these explorers had grasped, in unison, that which was to be normally quelled and yet experienced unto numbness only in proximity with life’s most precious and poignant moments,
which, when combined with each like experience, was the
summation of every Vulcan’s ritualistic journey from everything
into nothing. Their thoughts, as the beings each flew or fell into the nothing of all nothings, were melded with those of the green swarm. And all that remains of the event are im- permeable notions. Love defies and denies logic. No love, except that which extends indefinitely, exists. There is no existence. There is an irrevocably pure, fathomable simpli- city that is and will always be toppled by duplicity, or un- being. These notions are held true by millions of hollow words in thousands of fictive languages. The green swarm always bleeds to death. The expanse of altruism is a boiling vengeance. I see what you see. I feel what you feel. And how would either of us ever know any of this or even throw a wrench into the enor- mous machine that creates and then contains and then perpetuates these notions, when we each choose no- thing but to keep swimming desperately just off the shore of hope, in the dark confounding sea of denial?
*(the title of this poem is from a page from Stephen Colbert’s I Am America And So Can You which has a set of “STICKERS,” each with a phrase which he recommends using to show that you are the “man in charge” or that “you’ve got it all under control” – I assume to be used especially when the man-reader actually has no clue, or simply isn’t interested or even paying attention)
Trivial Pursuit (1980’s Version) #3 PER* Question: What US association considered a seal of approval for low-cholesterol foods in 1989. Answer: High Anxiety
ENT Question: In what mountain range does Dirty Dancing take place? Answer: The Catskills NEW Question: What two young brothers joined together as dark, unsung, gun- slinging anti-heroes in a 1988 Australian western? Answer: Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze TL Question: What long-running musical is based on T.S. Eliot’s deepest, most intense and thought-pro- voking volume of poetry. Answer: Cats SL Question: What is created when you throw Diplo into a bowl of Skrillex Answer: Jak Ãœ
WC Question: Anastasia, Sheena Easton, Shu- hada Davitt (Sinead O’Connor’s new Islam name), The Time, the midnight singalong of Purple Rain (Thank you, Peaches!), Nothing Compares to? Answer: U *Category key PER: Personalities ENT: Entertainment NEW: In The News TL: That’s Life SL: Sports & Leisure WC: Wild Card
PER* Question: Whose campaign aides warned “A vote for Anderson is a vote for Reagan”?
Answer: Jimmy Carter’s
ENT Question: What brand and style of condoms is the favorite of Freddy Krueger, Ozzy Osbourne, Nancy Kerrigan and Dian Fossey?
Answer: Red and black striped Trojans
NEW Question: What sent Carter-Wallace stock from $61 to $150, coinciding with the be- ginnings of the AIDS crisis?
Answer: Trojan
TL Question: What country’s military squeezed out $9,000 for marijuana-laced, freeze dried urine?
Answer: Martha Stewart
SL Question: How many inches long are the razors Freddy Krueger uses on his victim, a) Dustin Hoffman; b) Jack Nicholson; c) puck chaser; d) Carl Bernstein or e) ...it “ranks right up there with the Mountie and the beaver,“ eh?
Answer: Wayne Gretzy (It‘s a sports and leisure question, so what were you thinking?)
WC Question: Years before Nicole Kidman followed suit, whose daughter married Danny Keogh, the son of a Scientologist?
Answer: You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, and oh what a cruel one at that. But you always love me tender when I’m caught bouncing on Oprah’s living room trampoline.
*Category key PER: Personalities ENT: Entertainment NEW: In The News TL: That’s Life SL: Sports & Leisure WC: Wild Card
PER* Question: Who did Teddy Kennedy say he admired for not getting involved involved in the Reagan administration?
Answer: Ronald Reagan
ENT Question: Taylor Swift?
Answer: Taylor Dayne
NEW Question: What Disney character, whose video was released in the early 80s, is first cousin (at least) to the present day ruler of the free world?
Answer: Pinocchio
TL Question: What body part did Ronald Reagan have skin cancer removed from in 1985, 1986 and 1987?
Answer: His nose
SL Question: What kind of juice, with pits, was thrown up ad nauseum in The Witches of Eastwick?
Answer: The Juice, Juice Newton and Oran Juice Jones
WC Question: What Billy Joel song most closely depicted the future of American politics with the lyric “…but it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for…”
Answer: Pinocchio
*Category key PER: Personalities ENT: Entertainment NEW: In The News TL: That’s Life SL: Sports & Leisure WC: Wild Card
You never get a second chance to make a first impression is not always one hundred per- cent accurate. For example, it occurs on plenty an occasion that, with but the firm handshake you share with a new acquaint- ance, you can immediately sense (or even “know”), at times visc- erally, that this hand belongs to someone destined to become a men- tor, a primary confidante, your best friend and/or long-term lover, if not life-long partner. With one firm shake of the hand. That’s all it can take to discover one with whom, for each passing week to follow, you’ll en- joy hours of titillat- ing, salon-like, deep and pressing conver- sations that inspire not just the two of you, but all of the friends you accum- ulate simply by vir- tue of the celebrity- like charisma you as a duo command, wherever you hap- pen to be. And after the throngs are enlightened by these educational romps, what will follow are con- versations until deep into the night, or more often than not, into the early morning as the light begins to glimmer about and the local birdsong is in full fare, with just the two of you; more end- less, captive, seismically mind- blowing, career- enhancing, and even more pass- ionate than the earlier round- table engage- ments, filled the laughter of gleeful repartee, replete with flirtation, eso- teric mind-games, and just enough slight disagree- ment that either of you can triumph- antly sway the other at least slightly in the other’s direction. These evenings will see the con- sumption of scads of middle- to upper- range-priced bottles of wine (because your new best friend has an expansive cellar, and knows just the places – or can ascer- tain in a jiffy – to find the best spirits at bargain prices, being friends with vintners, bulk traders and sommaliers world- wide). These nights are libido-ridden and rife with com- pelling import, which must be dis- cussed at length – and soon, of course, and plans are quickly made to do just that, right before you stag- ger out the door and into the the filtered rays of a sunrise, rays that dance toward you from heaven (or there- abouts) and are inter- spersed with patchy introspective-conduc- ing fog. Then, after happily walking for a while, and emerg- ing from a final patch of fog just rotund enough to encapsulate you and your momen- tary fantasy, you are brought back to the here and now, back to this first encounter with whom you are by now more certain than the intimate connec- tion the flesh of a couple of palms during a firm hand- shake. That moment when you are clear of the imminence of what will be a lifetime connection, which will expand beyond that first electric grip each day henceforth. It all begins with this 15 or 20 minute mo- ment during which your spine tingles with anticipation of what will come. And then you trade cards, your new best friend pro- mises a call with- in a week or two to follow up with something or other so that you can be gifted a back- channel to a man whom you asolute- ly must contact immediately, for whatever upward- moving reason. And as your new soulmate fades into the crowd and the conver- sation still re- sounds in your head, you’re nothing short of giddy with prospect, pal- pably sonic with relevance, when mere minutes pre- vious it (your head) was clogged, stag- nating with awareness of the insignifi- cance of your life, which has now become of grave importance to you as you pocket your new power- mate’s card and bid an overzealous Farewell un- til next week (or so), so sat- isfied with the assurance that you’ve found a new mentor for business and social ventures and who knows what intriguing partnerships and adventure to come.
However, of course, your new acquaint- ance, the unbeknownst burgeoning co-conspir- ator you’ve imagined, after mere moments of gliding through many admirers, stopping to speak at any and all occasion along the way, may quite possibly, by the end of the evening, if not sooner, have, like many others before, completely forgotten you and your life-altering moment; may even, perhaps never again register a glimpse of a memory of you or your first and only encounter. in memory. Not once. Not ever.
This length of time (this length!!) is nothing that I ever once en- visioned, was une- quivocally never part of any plan (unless con- spired). None- theless, this solitude is what I choose, having seeming- ly such lit- tle choice, as it were. As it were? It isn’t. I must move on. I do.
You see me cocky, scattered and high when perfectly sober. Drawing con- clusions from disheveled over- compensation makes sobriety suck. Quite simply, it does not clear the air between us, never mind our heads. When supposition equals real- ity it's your withdrawal, not mine, that loses me in the end.
Wriggly Freckles at Widow’s Peak Pointe catches a spider. Oh yes she duzz! Aleecia reck- ons that’s just the trouble with kibble these days. Clumps of dust is not a meal, as far as she can see. And since Freckles is not a vegan or any- thing, and her digest- ion is good (In fact, it's superior! says her vet).... it’s just that her knees are a bit wobbly. And she’s got a bad heart. But what’s a messed up ticker, anyway. We’ve all got some- thing. And Aleecia knows a lot about bad hearts. Certainly enough not to worry about such things when there’s the can- cer. And the scourge of cars that whiz by The Lemon Shoppe day in and day out. Freckles’ hunger, briefly expunged by the spider, hoofs it – all the way to the incoming Pacific, gets wet right up to her weak knees and then dances a tarantella on the beach, which is beiging from a swiftly-sinking sun that’s soon to dusk, so that the ocher ball is pretty much aligned with the end- less, salt-licked sand making endless love with the Pacific. Over- stuffed boxes of lemons (with an occasional lime) are stacked clean up to the tin-wavered roof of the nothing fancy shack that is perched between the beach below and Highway One just above, home of Freckles. And of Aleecia, who happily claps the tempo of the tarantella as she watches her companion. Freckles the Fancy-Dancer! she yells down to the dancing dog, words that mute quickly – what with the whizzing cars at her back and the incoming waves that lap at the horizon. You’re just a Fancy-Dancer – Oh yes you are! Each of Aleecia’s words go damp, and then settle somewhere upon the even- ing’s spindrift that blankets the waves as far as her eyes can see.
Worldwide, fervent belief in conspiracy theories is at an all-time high, both in the magnitude of the population who adhere firmly to the veracity of one or more, but most radically in the number of such theories assumed 100% true on an individual level. I just made this fact up, to be honest, but it’s only a rhetorical question. And because duh. Back at camp, we’d always know when it was time for the party to start when the rebel forces were approaching. Their transportation apparati were always in stark contrast with those of ours. There’s a rhyme and a reason for everything, as Shakespeare incessantly did not attempt to convince his contemporaries. The announcement was barked over the loud- speakers: “The rebel forces are approaching. The rebel forces are approaching.” We’d all quickly slipped into battle gear, donned our epic battle-appropriate make-up and then we would dance for days on end. I really miss those days. Sure, there was slavery. But dancing through days and nights that moved as slowly and as deliciously as syrup slowly seeping down through the middle of a whopping stack of flapjacks (not to mention the otherworldly plunge into each disc of butter, one on top, one on bottom, and ones smashed between the center of each cake, along with the thousand flak jackets seen pulsating through a hallucinatory mist in contortions that could only have been locked within mirrors one normally only en- counters at the county fair (remember those?), yet were actually dozens of not variations of the ecstatic raver slipping slowly through the party’s glorious goo but several dozen meat- heads from my own platoon; the rest of the seemingly endless ultra-hedonistic wide- eyed party crew. They were the shit, those parties. Certainly enough to give anyone familiar pause when hearing the variations on hyperbolic adjectives used years hence to describe a night (or two) at Studio 54, (for example). Those men swathed in camo and dripping with bayonets put today’s attempts at weekends full of fireworks and sweat and the so-called slaves of the circuit to shame. Circuit parties? Lugubrious imitations of impossible to render minutia of a memory of a sliver of time spent slathered and body-slamming at those war-gatherings of yore. Hmmph! Today’s bodies puffily jiggling with shame. No pounding here. And those bayonets, which by the bottom of the cake had found a thousand new meanings, each one a vast epistimological distance from any war zone or deep governmental basement. Those good old days.
They say it’s interplanetary progeny, a proliferation of these disproportioned kids, something the spiritual journals call the “homogenization” of human-centric and other human-like species. Human-like. Ha. Many of these carry not an ounce of blood, no watery substance. And hearts? We’re becoming a vein-free galaxy, they say. And this is a good thing?! A culture devoid not only of the heroism of hedonism and the inevitable and completely impossible to describe intertwining of the knives and the long barrels of the era of bayonets; devoid of culture itself. Talking tubes incapable of speaking but one language or of uttering a phrase that is neither selfish nor utterly empty.
But this I can say without conviction. You can mark my words, as much as one or two even matter in a moment of time such as this: this dearth, these point- less talking tubes, the homogenization, despite its funny-looking kids…I tell you it is but a cover-up for the real story; a diversion from the plan already being implemented. The truth is out there, all right. For whatever it’s worth. And we’ll all come to know this plan. Intim- ately. And unless there’s anyone in here who gets everything I’m trying to tell you, we’ll all, each and every one of us, know all too late what atrocities this heinous plan entails. We’ll know way too late, I tell you. Meaning we will never know.
But, men, you should all stand with me on one thing for certain. Those were some damn fine parties back then. So fine that our wars always brought the enemies together. You remember, John. Surely I’m not alone here. You and I, we’d be royalty. Royalty, I tell you. It was war. It was life. We were the shit. You remember now? I know you do. Man, do I ever miss the war. Those visions, a camaraderie only the jungle could ever offer and by far the purest love any living member of the tribe has ever experienced dancing. Dancing. The buzz of war, I tell you. [He clutches his heart like no tomorrow]. I seriously miss the camo, the slow- motion camo, the war and its men. I miss them all something fierce. Like rear view windows, like all of those ancient pyramids’ objets d’art, like soft-boiled eggs, like birds, and, oh, eggs, but more than all of those things combined,
what I miss the most is those good old days.
*the title of this poem is from a page from Stephen Colbert’s I Am America And So Can You which has a set of “STICKERS,” each with a phrase which he recommends using to show that you are the “man in charge” or that “you’ve got it all under control” – I assume to be used especially when the man-reader actually has no clue, or simply isn’t interested or even paying attention.
