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)
if i seem a bit reticent, and upon reflection i doubt that i do – and yet i am? – isn’t that for being read like a book, wearing heart on sleeve, day after day, year after year, exposing myself? but what if all of that public humiliation wasn’t so much for the unwitting, but rather for the unseeing, uncaring, shoulder-shrugging, could- not-be-bothered, already- inundated-enough, can’t recall aggregate of aud ience around whom you (for whom you) ripped out your heart, tore it into gnarled and bloody shreds, and tossed them out into that sum of oblivious gatherings? what a tragic waste of well-played drama that would be, wouldn’t you say?
I thought perhaps that I’d forgotten how to do this. Apparently I have not. You’re surprised? Things forgotten . . . intentionally or not. And so we make some records, sow our seed; our texts slam space into inverted lamp shades such that beasts like you can use as castanets.
More X’s than O’s Are we, the two of us here, having finally found an un locked door to coll apse in this pitch dark vestibule. Once inside, one of us says “Reach out and touch me.” Once inside, everything smells of gasoline.
3rd year, this place; 5th one displaced. mean ing what? in the wrong place can’t be. shoved out of one place into no place for starters. 2nd one here, my little coffin of a home, always warm, generally too hot, really, today, incredib ly pleasant. the white noise of fans (2, one is a miniature ver sion of the other) and the louder white noise mak er on the fridge (originally an air purifier, a gift from a hoodlum; he stole it from a swank hotel room he stayed in one christmas), further away, yet almost blanketing the sound of the mama & baby fans at my feet. may be it wasn’t xmas or even a holiday when he stole the air purifier. i don’t
think that it’s even been turned off since last christmas. when you’ ve a small space you learn to make ro om, to or ganize, but when you’re in a space for so many months
at a time without a single visitor,
you begin to
sweep random
clutter as you pace from desk to doorway
and then from door
way back to desk.
i resolve, there
fore to be much more organized henceforth (a
resolution!). only once
you’ve the
luxury of having a
home may you strive for greater, more comp licated goals. organization, love, escape. these are my resolutions. may they arrive at a swifter rate than a 5th thus xmas
in this space. in fact, i re solve here and now that i know myself well enough, and that there shall not ever be a 6th, no, not even a
5th (or 4th) christmas day thusly
spent in
solitary confine ment. resol utions have been estab lished.
Slide the “O” of your lovely lips over my Pretty boy mouth and I promise, just for you, I’ll Defy gravity—but then (thanks to me & my magical pal. Oops!) nearly Every villain in the multiverse bedazzlingly appears as our universes collide—but I’ll Right every wrong, delivering death-defying knock-out bursts at the last
Minute to the likes of Mysterio, Green Goblin, Sandman, Electro
And Paul Giamatti, etc. Never fear, the Spider-Men are here! Oh, you may have
Noticed that I didn’t mention Doc Ock.
Well, what would you have me say? After all, I haven’t even seen the film. It’s been Years, in fact, since I’ve even sat in a cinema that isn’t my
Home (which, thankfully, at least now I have). Oh, there’ve been many a time when I have so intensely craved the Movie Experience, in a true cinema. In the End, though, we must roll with the punches.
An artist is an observer and a thief. —Viola Davis
I once met a man named Banana Who captained a ship to Bahama. His cargo was fruit. He embarked with said loot, Veered off course and wound up in Havana.
Toot: First order of business. Resounding! My day was wonderful. Would you like a readout on my wonderful day?
Sweet: His day was boring. Ordered olive oil and had issues. [Pauses for a moment] Spent a bit of time painting the kitchen.
Toot: [Wondering what color Sweet’s kitchen walls are becoming / have become:] Well, what are you gonna do?
Sweet: School me. That’s what. You’re gonna school me.
Toot: [Now quite satisfied with the business of the day; very glad that Sweet has all of next year in which to decide how to deal with getting an “education.”]
Short Play In Celebration of the Passage of Time Spent Sleeping*
she’s weird but has some awesome cool presentation quirks and especially her elocution: four stars
was that too clinical?
judge: it’s her fault. witness: it appears that your boyfriend is sleeeping. judge: only three e’s?
i don’t recall
judge: the defendant will yield the floor to the ticking rock witness: [the notes each go down a notch] it’s tock, your honor not rock – parents: go directly to jail
defendant: but paaarents. the beeeeech?!
parents: you look familiar defendant: disgusting! [and after a short pause] do you have any meth? girlfriend, driving pick-up truck into the courtroom: uh, you should know.
*only you can know the subtitle, which is: (tickittytockitty)
is a tiny portion of a quote I just heard journalist Dana Bash use. She said it from my telephone a couple of minutes ago, moments after I awoke (at 2:30am) to be gin my day. And while she was refer encing Vladimir Putin, and using the word, presum ably in the sense of being a partici pant in a game, whether it be a team sport or a one-on-one match, but she finished the sent ence in such a way (“...and to play those individuals [who oppose him; his foes, in this case]”), that now she was clearly using the word with one of its many alternate meanings: to trick. The connotation, the array of met aphors involving one word, if you will, to enjoy the camaraderie of be ing on a team play ing a sport, or to go head to head with an opponent or to toy with or trick, the words... the words, they all begin to fade, and the journalist with them, the cellphone, my environment; and in my head I begin to envision a fiery groundswell in some far-off distance, localized there (in the distance;
at first) and slowly expanding. There is nothing else, just this foreboding vision
that is not literally seen, but it feels real nonetheless, as the grand yellowish expansion in the distance begins to mushroom, as it very slowly and steadily grows upward and into the sky,
the hue of it having been a deep navy blue when the disturbance first began, as the universe often appears around dusk or right be fore dawn, but it starts to change colors just as the growing and now more orange-colored expanse did. Steadily, the color of the morning sky, this bubble of des
truction, its hue(s), which become ever more bright and brilliant, merging into one, the expansive
mass shifting from yellow to orange (beautiful) the new sky shifting from navy to violet, the orange then redder and redder and the red gets redder and redder and as the colors converge into this
melded vermillion which gets –
occluded? – by a window-rattling,
overwhelming, earth-shattering,
all-engrossing N O I S E – – – and as the evolution of the colors in the distance become more solid, more unified, color simply
bleeds liquidly out into the universe, blanketing the earth in what
had become; this expansion/ explosion finally makes its way
to where I am (sitting upon what was once a bed); it becomes the air that I am no longer breathing,
that I can no longer breathe,
that is unbreathable. This horrific
scene engulfs vision, imagination,
as it takes over so completely
that consciousness evaporates into – literally? – N O T H I N G – which has now become all that is left; what was has become what was not, what is not, and that nothing persists, bleeds, until it is all that is, which, makes all that was a
was not. So. Finally. There is no team with which to enjoy conviviality, no teammates with whom to play. No more games, no more war, no more playing at war, no offense, no defense, because there are no adversaries,
there is no one to tackle,
nothing to pillage. When everything becomes nothing, all playing ceases.
The nothing left
is not existence.
There is no victor,
no last man standing, no flagstaff in grip,
no grip, nor otherwise. But
what? A bloody cloth, half shredded, atop a pole, flapping in the wind. Not there.
The man stooped and
out of breath, here to show off the spoils that he
and his team have so gallantly earned
by playing this magnificent game. None of
it. No one.
My eyes open again. I hear a new journalist jabbering, and glance to my left to catch in the corner of my eye an unopened deck of cards. Might anyone care for a game? But the day, the day. To which I respond aloud, nonsensically, breath nearly sapped from the cinematic vision, so ,that
I am all but
voiceless, a mere whim
pered song:
to play, to play, oh, day, today. oh, just this day to play!
Isn’t it good when we up the ante? Isn’t it good when we give ourselves higher goals? Yeah, so now that we have talked to Google and Apple and T-Mobile and the person talking to his dolls on the sidewalk of Howard Street and been accosted by the lady who works at the front desk of the apartment complex in which we live, and now that I have been so maturely yelled at by her for asking her to kindly let me know if she works
here in my apartment building simply because I did not recognize her and there was another lady standing next to the front desk office who had just been asking to see my key (this was new), and now that I have zero dollars and zero cents and see no end to this plight for quite some time, and now that I’ve once again and so publicly begun a fundraiser in hopes to get a buck or two — just in hopes a couple are so inclined and have the capacity
which I do not, and now that it
has been determined that despite the fact that I was sold a brand new iPhone (already having a brand new one) by some lady at T-Mobile, and yet now am
being told despite triple- and double-checking all of the price points during the phone
conversation in which I was
sold the device that instead of paying a reduced amount of half the price for one phone, I’ll be paying logically more for a very long lease for two phones, and why would I
accept such an offer without
double- and triple-checking
that my ears were not playing
tricks on me, and now that four managers have told me that there is nothing I can do to get out of this and now that the original phone I had did turn out to be a factory dud (no fault of my own) and now that I just had my Moderna booster shot which put me in bed with aches and fever through most of yesterday and some of today and since most everything that I am telling you has transpired today, this morning and afternoon and evening and night, and now that I won’t have access to my email until Tuesday or Wednesday, so it is likely not a worthwhile venture to look for a job until after then anyway, and now that I have told you that I have probably lost all of the weekly unemployment, that which has allowed me to survive the pandemic and being laid off in March of 2020 because of it and now that i have told you that the job I had which I thought was the coolest back at the end of Sept ember was removed from me because “I’m not a good fit,” was removed
from me because I “would really hate it and I’m not psychiatrist but you should be in a theater somewhere as corporations are clearly not for you” when I have happily and quite
successfully worked in many corp orations big and small in the 30 years of my paid career and how could he have a clue about me any way, the geezer gave me only 8 days to prove I could do the job, and I proved I could no matter what bull shit he said to try to convince me that I
could not, so, well, now that you know all of this you know what a pickle I’m
presently in and probably have some idea how I’m doing, despite upping my
ante to as top notch as i could muster but now there seems to be the utmost need for the ante to be upped in an even more resounding fashion and the question is how much does it matter how much one ups the ante, how much sweat, tears and crazy work must one give to the all-too-often good-for- nothings who deserve nary a notched increase in whatever ante you think you can up just to get ahead of the lousy game — just you all wait
until my next opportunity, so many good things are
going to come of it, all that history to help and happi
ness and new experiences and fun times will be the order of the day every day. just you wait. and so what if it doesn’t?
A whole bunch of people said that once. And isn’t it more true than just about any thing else? Also, might you describe for me and for any of the folks here in our studio, as well as anyone out there who might be tuned in and just the least bit curious, how any of this might be quantified? I’m just kidding. Because that’d be entirely unnecessary. I know I am being less than clear here. And not that this will help, but this week, I have found myself in a very odd place? By which I mean that every day this week, as I wake up, I have been, well, I have been clearly identifying, explaining so that pretty much anyone can grasp, some timely (for me) problem or another. And then clearly laying out a fix, a viable, always confoundingly simple solution, explaining exactly what it would take to correct this gross malfeasance, this massive humanitarian disaster. What!? But seriously, if you would just hear me out for a minute. I made up my mind, as if in realization that this sort of thing was way too difficult if not downright impossible for a me, I decided, a very long time ago that I couldn’t change the world, found it impossible to take any of our—let’s call them institutional—problems, to take any of the way too numerous problems that face humanity, that’s us, here in this universe, that’s home, then to paint a verbal picture, provide some backup ev idence of said problem’s exist ence, including laying out in a clear fashion to all of the rest, of us, the magnitude of, the rela tive harm, that said problem pro vides to us, each and all, by in variably crushing or pulverizing our combined materiality most assuredly and steadily into dust, blowing out the dust of us, so to speak, regularly, daily— the import of the problem. See, I’ve already lost you. I’m not the guy to do this, that’s what I’ve been, what I am saying I realized a long while back, not at all the most eff ective human to clearly pre sent the problem, provide the evidence of it (providing the evidence of problems of such magnitude still seems laughable; I mean, wouldn’t we all know it’s a problem?? But that’s not even the most profound light bulb in all of this, for me, which would be), I repeat, providing evidence of the problem and its severity. Because I’m too close to the problem?? What?! Well, no. I mean yeah, I’m too close to it, that’s certain. To them. There’re a lot of these problems that affect negatively our entire cumulative livelihood, liveliness, our life, our lives, it turns out. And I simply don’t have enough voice. But what I’ve been realizing so giddily as I wake up every day this week presenting my case, in some sort of transition be
tween conscious and not,
presenting it loud, aloud,
from or within some sort of dream state, and to whom?, to one in which, albeit in a room wherein only I live, posing a clear thesis, laying the whole thing out so that even the least of us, the least of us, me, so that I might actually get it, and then smoothly and articulately finish the whole thing off (and by this time, the dream state has completely dissipated and I’m hearing my voice reach up to the small rec tangular ceiling of my coffin-sized apartment, seeing my voice reach out, because I’m awake and what I am saying is clear, makes sense, and I’m literally making the noises of it all, lying in my broken-down and very real [isn’t it?] bed . . . . . . Well.) Those high-falutin’ occu pations of, sure, of relative import that we, well, that I tell myself, have told my self for as far back as I can remember, because for some reason I’ve proven this, to my self, that these occupations, of im port, I’ve told myself that I’m simply not the right man for the job, too imposs ible, requires too much patience, just do not have the right kind of intuition, but, well, it turns out I’m a late bloomer, and that we’re always picking up a few new tricks, right? Aren’t we? Am I? Our choices are not as limited as our little heads imagine; imagination is limitless. Or we just imagine something too true, like laziness. Right? Do I? So, music. There are songs upon which I dwell, but, oh hell, I could present this playlist to you so that I might, so that we might feel familial? We are family! It’s the obvious stuff that’s the hardest to clearly relay, you know, so that a, say, kindergartner might get, clear as day, palm slap to the forehead-like, why didn’t I think of that-like. Well, I blew it again. But if you’d been here this morning, we might be well on our way to solving all of the world’s, all of humanity’s, problems. I suppose there’s always tomorrow. But, boy, wouldn’t that be something? Sigh. Art. Not thought.
Catching up with Stephen Colbert was nice and all but the offer to catch Rosemary’s Baby at the drive-in (Curfew SinemaXXX, they call it as of late) was an offer I couldn’t refuse. You didn’t hear it from me, though, Stephen, sir, but I’d have been such a horror as a comedian. Yet in a trad shriek-fest I coulda been a contender. Or at least a frontal lobotomy. Yeah, I’m definitely mixed up because, man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing. Either way, late bloomers, which I’d have been if anything at all, don’t get served the roast beast these days; that goes rare to the kiddos, served with some fava beans, but there isn’t any chianti and there aren’t any roses. Anyway, apologies, apologies, am I ever whining tonight. And it isn’t just whimsy, either, Doc, I mean, I think I broke my back. Or at least slipped a disc. That’s when you said ‘I’ll have what she’s having,’— what a jerk, I think, (cuz I’m such a wild and crazy guy). Still, I’m a pushover, I tell ya. When you ask how it slipped I said sliding in to the Batmobile all deep-throaty. Heh, was I wearin’ my daisy dukes you might, like a fish called Wanda, wonder (I wish), to which I might’ve to wit been inclined (I always whined, but Kevin clined) to retort all hurt-like that if you really want to know what people are wearing, all you had to do is look at them. But I’m too nice, and Kev, he’s always had me at hello, so I just glanced over, winked, and said, “Thanks for the memories.” To which he chuckled and said, “Well, nobody’s perfect.”
