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 was surprised not to hear a peep from you all afternoon. This business is terribly declasse. Depressed is a word that is over used, between you and me, like stag nation or you okay, two words, you got me there, same cin namon, because we so hate sentiment, don’t we? So, sur prised, but also de pressed, and centy mental, oops! That is another word we don’t like using, all our signs seem load ed, all our signifiers point to signifyees we deem too sign ificant. Taken in total, they each, in turn, cross the others out, until everything is most likely one hundred percent insignificant.
There’s a person I know goes by the name of the name of this per son I know. It’s not that this is nobody’s busi ness but mine. It’s just that I’m not going to tell you any more than that. I’ve said enough as it is already. There’s this thing I do almost every day. But enough about me.
That trick of announcing a set of three coming after station ident ification (e.g., (guest stars, gifts, rings, fathers, sons, sodas, spirits, etc.), but yet, after a run of about seven ads what the audience (those at home as well as those in the studio) see is four grand pianos. Atop each is one tap danc er in cover alls. A piano quartet intro duces this section of the episode; the tap dan cers stand stock still atop the grand pie annies like mannequins who weren’t avant-garde enough to go through with the rest of this tv exper iment.
I’m so awk ward, messy; the trail I make is not one of a man who’s hiding something. A secret doesn’t have to be sinister. Is your secret like mine, the story of you that is most sincere? Is it what you understand the least or the thing about yourself you comprehend with the most profound clarity? Would it fall at one extreme or another on a vector based entirely upon you? Upon the sum of humanity? Did you, my darling, just now realize the matter of which you most definitively consist, that the primary goals that are the end of you that in your most hopeful of fantasies, that has always been the most intensely and intently desirous, that all of these are so inextricably bound to that most unwav erring secret? That this never uttered truth which you keep so close to your heart is, above all else, what makes up your very essence? And no one will ever know even one single half-bent truth of it except for you.
How was I to know it would re solve – that the words – all those years ago – would come to be reconciled, each page’s sum adding up to a negative or pos itive whole, which, when all put together comes to a big round zero or a thin, feeble one? – Either way, what resolve! But what would be the differ ence be tween a sum being one and a sum being zero? The difference, you dimwit, is sum one! That is always the difference between sum one and no one.
When the words do not resolve, but clank and die next to each other. —Cedar Sigo
And here I am – no, there he is. Here we are on page one, and we’re making noises with our pencils, our mark ers, our writing utensils. And what utility (tonight’s guest is gleaming and looks very out- of-place on Jimmy Kimmel)! In design er jewelry. Which brings me to text. Texting is design (textuality). This I believe. Hold on to me for just a mo ment, if you will. I’m not talking about fing ering a phone – not that sort of texting (nor am I saying I’m not young enough to be well-versed; or too old to get quite a bit of what there is to get about meth ods of communication). There’s a lot of things that I’m not saying, here – about pecking at little buttons-not- buttons that are, in fact, teeny-tiny, ok, small – rect angles we all too often think of meta phorically as hearts, as heart-shaped hearts, whether many of them, row after row, a multitude, that is, or maybe just two, maybe just one, which, if you’ve been around perhaps as long as I have you might make like punching out “less than” “three,” which would, in fact, and tautologically, be, for example, two, which, sadly, could just as easily be one, or – and who cares if, right? – could be less than zero (whose zero- headed thoughts go now to Robert Downey Junior and the windmills to and from Palm Springs) – that is, less than or equal to zero. No, no. I mean texting: the physical act of drawing words, let ter by letter upon a page, let’s say. The act of writing. Which I do now: I write a green sentence across this page (before it is sprawled across a screen, like so). A page from a book that I stole from a sidewalk some four or five years ago. Or per haps I took it from the shelter’s library (which was a tall, chewed-up looking stained bookshelf that stood in the breakroom of said shelter, the place I called home for a year and a half) (The shelter; that “library.”). What home has a break room? could be the beginning of a droll joke – another line or two that now live in a notebook begun (by all the evidence I have rather effort lessly gathered) as somebody’s diary, as someone else’s private book, its first few pages still mostly filled with what appears to be the scrawled thoughts and desires of an individual who never intended to part ways with these pages, unless by some accidental chance it were to be found by one particular person (and only her; she, alone, might find this book lying so forlorn upon the sidewalk, as it is, will be, was, in the middle of this city a hush falls upon). The author finishes a third page of scrib bled thoughts, a hush having fallen upon the city, the side walk, the notebook, its pages, the author of what appears on pages one through three, and then a bunch of pigeons who must’ve been the rooftop of the building propping up the author’s very back; and what pigeons, this bunch, flapping their wings all messily, moving from this roof to the rooftop of the building just across the street from a biographer: author of this love letter. These pigeons make a lot of noise for a small amount of time, the a mount of time it takes for all of them to move from one rooftop to an almost iden tical rooftop directly across Mission Street. “Carrier pigeons,” the artist writes near the bottom of the third page of the newish note book as the hush that had enveloped the city moments before is interrupted by the birds’ return, the last two words written in furious scritches and scratches in pencil, so that when the latest hush begins to blanket the day, the blips of noise the nub makes as it so feverishly ekes out this last line, tickling the parchment; something only the author, intimate as they were with
the notebook’s paper, does. Until. The sound of a train? Begins to crescendo. A chugging loco motive that makes a grand entrance into the big city, as if it were a star in some Technicolor Western, so that we can now think of each line scribbled across this page as a has been, or the horizon as it is flooded with charcoal-colored smoke that, as the train chugs ever closer, gets blown, thick black puffs of smoke that spew gloriously from the choo-choo chugging train’s swiftly approaching (nearer, ever nearer) front- end engine.
I can smell the emptiness as I pour myself a cup from the two-liter Diet Dr Pepper. Already I’m drained. But it’s Saturday morning. I’m reading the work of a poet with whom I’ve danced for years but can’t recall ever reading that dancer’s words. Which reminds me what a lousy list ener I am. “I do listen, though,” spoken in ear nest to everyone who has ever said a word to me. The fan blow ing a bit of cool San Francisco air at my left knee makes a few impossible noises, wobbly, rasped.
Rebecca Lindenberg desires to keep desiring. —Rebecca Lindenberg
I have an idea. Let’s write each other letters. They don’t have to be long; at least at first. They can grow, as writing grows on us. We can do this via e mail. I wouldn’t con you into do ing something horrible, would I? This is a thing on which you’ll just have to take my word. I under stand. I get it one hundred percent be cause this is one thing I can fully know: you don’t know me. Well enough. Well, enough cajoling.
Let’s just do it. There’s a reason worthy of such a whelming enter prise as this writ ing of long letters to each other (Let’s!). Why, it’s to know each other. To know “the other” – further fodder by which to, in an educated and logical manner, begin to separate what is true from what is not. No body wants to be a fake[sic]. I’ve an idea, and I really hope you’ll play along with me on this one; we’ll play as if it were a game, say. Let’s write letters to each other. They don’t have to be long letters. At least not at first. . . .
“Tenderly,” we thought. It estranged us a little. —John Ashbery
here we are you and me, me and you, a couple of lovely love birds, on our way to hap pily ever after. but as the camera pans out from us, two ideal specimens of humanity, until romance breaches our willing sus pension of disbelief, what is seen (by whom?): at first, two disap pearing specks. a couple of dots up on a bloated planet full of pickled, poisoned people.
for, well-in tentioned citizens, there’s no more time for gasps or gaffes.
the stars
of our pit
iful tale soundless ly vanish. and then goes the planet. a hush envelops the uni verse. fin (the end).
Too many echoes are like no echo, or a single tall one. —John Ashbery
place your text here. which i did. and like a lighthouse on the foggiest of peninsulas, did it ever! what? oh, hello. i was just admir ing you from a distance. many apologies, i can go back if you’d like. what’s that you say, you’d like? oh, no, i didn’t really mean it. i swear i didn’t. but where did that leave me, folks? same place as always, truth be told. folks?
i drove the point home. it squealed with delight, which was very distracting. i’m sure that’s why i forgot the address. “my fellow classmates.” a sea of graduation gowns. an ocean of adults, all wearing lingerie. aquamar ine, turquoise and sea foam green. the zucchini sim mered in the pan for about an hour before the stove was turned off; it sat untouched atop the stove for the rest of the day. this on the saturday after the friday morning during which i blew it. later, when he admitted he’d been “hella curious” what it might feel like to have me in his mouth. we grow old and dys functional. he just had to tell his new therapist that, over the course of the past three or four years, he’d done a lot of things that were hardly aboveboard. “how does that make you feel,” he lovingly lisped into his partner’s mouth, the bottom of his tongue lying ever so gently atop that of his love’s. “it takes tongue to tango,” was the response that arrived a few endless days later. surely that was a slip. the slippery slitherer swiftly slid (with occa sional sideways somer saults) through the sewer (as if communicating by way of semaphores?). i don’t even know her. she wasn’t supposed to just show up like that, but what a fortuitous arrival. they put on quite a show they did, and spontaneously. the two celebrity superstars finally agreed on one thing. the entire per formance was pointless.
i’m never quite sure how to tell you this. alarmed, he looked at the time, disrobed, got dressed, buttered his knife, etc., and then he was out the door and into the world. thoughtful ness ensued. until, that is, the afternoon. at rush hour he shot blanks at the oncom ing traffic, all of which was moving in excru ciatingly slow motion. but then he was struck by an idea he found so deplorable that he just had to bring it up at dinner. and once he did, the salty air that had hung limply over the coterie ever since the whoosh of his arr ival, if not before, let out an ever so slight whimper. all but content, he then decided upon the blackberry crumble for dessert.
“misread, misheard,” went the introduction, “misheard, misread.” “more like miss mis ery,” thought fred, his head, already up a dis tance, veered a hard right and then floated down the alley of mis begotten, his missus. but she wasn’t home. she was never home.
Home is where the tongue was. A phone was but a mouth. But now no eyes, no windows... zeroes, ones comprise this box without a human clinging to it, not a soul and not a spouse. Just skinny headless beanpoles and heart less hula hoops. So if there’s no more humans for to knock upon the door, what’s that scream? Merely an echo: “Get me... get me... get me out!”
“Nobody’s home!” squeaky helium- tripped voice less ness cries out to the screamy echo, “Go away! Go away! Ones and zeroes all the way!”
