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)
breakfast seemed to come earlier and earlier. the bed would barely be warm again from their curled bodies. the four cabin-mates had been the best of friends for some three decades now. there was the writer of music, composing a symphony in front of the fireplace, who now placed upon her large page a small fermata. there was the daughter of the man who’d made millions in the candy business. she was sunk deep into the sofa snoozing. there was the stockbroker who’d been pilfering through his luggage looking for the most appropriate pair of socks. and then there was me, the troubadour, a relative unknown, so devoted to the writer of music that he’d spend the last of his days in obscurity, dipping his pen into the light fantastic, corralling words in clumps throughout even the most symphonic of her pieces.
he’d woken up with a lot of hair in his mouth. perhaps somewhere this was a good omen, but if so, that some where was not to be found. he spit it out, kept picking at his tongue with a grimace. the meal of the day would be served at two in the afternoon. there was time. but not a sub stantial amount of it. and for what?
there were several electrical miscalculations. we counted at least eight. until the lights flickered again mid-afternoon. since this was a holy day, most of us had checked out. undressed, a lack of distress. gleaming, the parade held no witnesses. no mistresses. only christmases.
Never judge a book by its cover. Always look ’em straight in the eye. Unmask the villain at the end of each episode. Get a life. Hell hath no fury like a human scorned. Huh? Tie a yellow ribbon round the ole oak tree. Yes, we have no bananas.
Over my dead body. Revenge is a dish best served cold.
Not on my watch. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Call me maybe. Everybody needs somebody, sometimes.
You have to hand it to Joel, he knows how to throw an Underwear party. So when he and Leo decided they were going to celebrate their 25th by inviting Every single one of their friends and colleagues (and they have Tons, trust me!) to an underwear party at their massive estate, It was the talk of Tripplehorn. And has been ever since. Did I get an invitation? Did Janey Mae? Did Ed Bach, of Ed’s Conservative Gentlemen’s Clothier? The answer: we’ll each be shopping for some quirky undies very soon. And I, for
one, am looking forward to the naughty party of the year!
Christmas. So, when I told Harold that Reginald wasn’t coming to dinner that night, I swear! You’d think Superman forgot to comb his hair. Or The butler did it. It’s a Menacing day, Anyway. Said Santa.
Tut, tut! And whatnot. (Reginald was having none of it!) “Eat your friggin’ eggs, Harold! And toss me that Extra biscuit!”
we pause to pray. the entire world holy. like sex with our socks on
we wholly pause. a
wooly habit (the nun
was itchy, i itch! the nun
said itchily). holy. the whole room, a bedroom, their studio, a micro-apart ment, pawsed. we’ll pause when we feel like it, we all said. then our home took off, the pads of its paws pounding the pavement for several par secs. the red socks, a set, had bed sects with the human individual who’d been most deli berately chosen to del iver the pizza. that deliv erer certainly is a liver! a life-filtered lifter of lots of pizza. pizza that, when delivered, gets tips with no bills, mostly by tops, gets topped as a tip, the pizza deliverer, who, fresh from the doc tor, was just diagnosed with cirrhosis of (guess what?) the liver. what a life that deliverer had had, a has-been not ex pected to last much long er. longingly, the room, living the livelong life of a micro-apartment, thirst ily pauses at a dog bowl that
is only somewhat moist. the bowl without water has con tents that soon get slathered on dog-tongue, get tongued by a studio whose inhabitant is primate, no longer 54. that makes 55 says the googly- eyed go-go dancer who’ll soon get paid to dance on the laps of pricks; on the pricks in some laps. he also slam-dances a conga in tonga with some regular ity. a tall narrow drum that is splayed on the floor is slapped with some hands. this is how the go-go dances. with his hands he did dance. and he does, only now and then donning a brief pair of aquamarine-col ored underpants. boy, does he dance as the studio bounces both this way and that. and other ways, too. for it has found you (who might just be me), who, of him, is quite fond. but let’s make this more of a mystery, shall we, for the sake of pretend anonymity? our home that now so swiftly pedals its way toward something
that no one is sure of might
once have been a tiny
apartment. and what might a small apartment want, what might goad one in any particular direction? picture frames and perhaps a refrigerator. but when the coffin-sized home is the pad of yours truly? once it arrives at wherever it’s going, it throws up a top-tipped dancer from tonga it had swallowed with only a couple of chomps, ‘chomp-chomp’ and the dancer was gone until he was vomited from home. he was gone, he was home, he is home when he’s gone, he was spewed from our home and we look at that once- swallowed dancer from tonga for days (while we’re dancing the conga, of course). but that poor, wretched liver that wretched deliverer of pizza, now finds himself lost and quite homeless yet tipped to extremes and then topped ex tremely by the tips of the pricks of some lovers of pizza. the dancer, he felt that he could not have feelings, the pizza deliverer felt unfelt. which was all quite suspicious considering the evening’s odd sequence of sick
events. and the sycophants were witness, they felt this guy’s radical metamorphosis, from considerate courier of circular meals to motional gogo, dancer of conga, to tippled taker of tops for tips by such pricks, to becoming a twice-chomped meal for a home until, finally, resuscitation by regurgitation, getting a life that had mostly been taken but this time without life’s most significant sensation, that characteristic which we call feelings were now missing. and spectacularly, for he had been eaten, you see, by the home of yours truly. and, oh, what a mini scule house this one is. gestation’s a bitch, it could be said, is this story’s amoral moral. but, really, who’d say it? and why and to whom? why, the answer’s yours truly, by all means, of course! who’ll, so as to have this historical house- spinning one-storied yarn best savored, will save the rest of it for later, if you catch my drift. do you know what i mean?
this one’s easy, or should be, i’m a familiar. like, hang on, i know this one. the tulsa dispenser doesn’t automatically send a padgett or a brain ard through the wilds of kansas and ohio into new york city, but when it does, i feel you ron, i feel you joe, as back to your respective families you go come christmas or hopefully not the 4th of july. but unless you’re hooking bass on a boat somewhere mid-tenkiller, arkansas is prettier. or at least the river valley ’tween the ozarks and the ouachitas. so maybe we’re even, a quad rant for a quadrant, let’s say? even as the derricks send a storm of dirt out into an early dusk that’s some how arid and oily at the same time—it’s not a haven for teen agers. hey, you poets of ponca city, let’s put the world on hold, just for a little bit longer, what say you? first we’ll head to tulsa, five years pre mature, meet ted at the uni versity. or that was the plan, wasn’t it? hey guys, come on down to fort smith, won’t ya? is just what i said half a decade before being born. i’m just standing here stuck in a big pile of manure waiting for youth to catch up with me. but nobody heard me. when tulsa finally arrived it was through the windshield of papaw’s second- hand cherokee pick-up (which was white but for a maroon stripe, or vice
versa, i cannot
be certain). but when i emerged from that jeep it was too late. sadness so perm eated the trek on I-40 from alma and across the border, and on and on until well after we took that right turn up through muskogee, that i blew out my very own trail of tears. because at that age i was nothing but an angsty greenhorn with nothing better to do but brood over my own stupid self. yet i claim to be a late bloomer? well, i turned thirty in the poetry section of the library of none other than the massachusetts institute of technology, where i caught up with ron, joe, ted, and all of the rest of the gang. stepping every weekday through the hallowed halls of engineers, this here all grown up queer. so, yes, ever so slightly i grew into my boots, got myself educated. it didn’t take much else than that, and maybe a half a dozen or so group hugs by the best linebackers and quarterbacks in the word business. you get squeezed by a poet and, well, something irreversibly changes, at least in me. though it’s no joke that the biggest chunk of me is still that podunk kiddo. this i say to you sixty years after i was born five years premature. and those, my friends, are just a few of my made to order mem ories of being a good neighbor. so, as for me and my bookshelf full of pals from oklahoma and the ones from the universe with which they hung, where else to go with it but on such an endless repeat (and i do not mean hung from judge isaac’s barrows, nope, that will not be, for this story’s entirely too sweet.) once again, loop it back and repeat.
‘but bring truckloads of ice,’ he tells me. and i am thinking that we are so hot already that once we meet the sultan we might just explode. he has other things in mind. like drinking muscat in muscat whilst steaming from midnight sauna to,,,where would we go after that? ‘just make sure you sneak in the wine,’ he whispers into my neck with such a hot sound the word ‘wine’ wriggles into my inner ear and then my brain’s on fire, ready to be yanked into whatever tempest his blistering palms slap and tug me into next.
today i am distracted by what would, under (let’s call them) normal circum stances be a minor disturb
ance, a blip, something quite easily fixed. an obstacle the obliteration of such is like flipping a magical switch and
KABOOM! it is gone. a flick that removes all too much life when the general circumstances—as they were, as they might have been—have
sunk. and that’s when somebody says that they’ve (with a whew!?) finally hit rock-bottom, it is as if they drove their own self there with some sort of
gotta get there deliberation, with intent, so as to, what, rise above it? nope, no way, i say. when one has been dealt a particular hand, when i have....
when i was dealt a particular hand, i found myself in a circumstance so abnormal, so unfamiliar...when i look around and there is no one—NO ONE—
to get me out of it, and, my means (mental, physical, most often financial, or whatever) are not those which i have become accustomed over a life, a half-
decade of life (which finds me with, significant, a living that’s dwindling already, as in there’s not time to dawdle with one more obstacle, but)....
when i realize that a problem that would have been essentially solved with the snap of a finger now might take a year or two just to get around
or over. oh how to disintegrate it so that i might find myself moving forward (forward?)? well, i suppose that in most cases i will determinedly, confusedly and deliberately
make my way past that obstacle, will solve the goddamned problem and move in the direction i keep seeing as ahead, toward the better, which becomes such
a muddle to contemplate, this determining has so much time and yet no energy or mind to do anything except just do the work required to blow up whatever is keeping me from getting
there. wherever there is. and wherever that where is, in my mind it’s always to a place where all of this extra time that is required in getting rid of whatever keeps me from getting there shortens
back into the moment it takes to, say, snap a finger or wriggle my mouth or my nose, or nod my head like jeanne or samantha, or tap my feet together and whisper there’s no place like home. or look to my
right or left, or shout the name of the person in the room next to me in a little pretend cry for help. but that sounds like fiction now, something i dreamed up to bide the time it takes to get through with such
work that my entire being is a machine that is out of oil, needs a heart, is incessantly trying to drum up some courage (but from where?) and the motivation to get beyond whatever it is that is in my past. my path
to wherever it is that is familiar, that is life, so that when i wake up, there everyone is, that loving pan orama of support, each babbling head is telling me that from what i awaken is just a bad dream. just a bad dream?
life begins again, right? so much life that the dream that seemed to last forever was just an anomaly that, with distance (created by time, by real life), becomes smaller and smaller until it is not but a blip, otherwise
known as the brunt of my education, perhaps? or my final exam? it’s too soon to know? but, sure, a cocoon, so to speak, wherein i hibernate for so long that i break through refreshed and yet ravenous. oh, to be back among
the living. who would not, when one is lost....? back to the joys of the living, yes, that’s what’s for me. or will be. soon. living and learning and wacky adventure. family and friends. yes, sir! i do hope that everyone’s already here, already
gathered around me for when i awaken. because, yes, i shall be doing that soon: awakening. but was it a beautiful dream? or was it not? and were you not there? and were you? and were you? and what about
you? i can barely see as i open my eyes. you are there, but exactly who’s you? thankfully, these things will come back to me soon, in a windfall, of course. and all of these memories fuzz up the terror. so much so that i just thought i had an
adventure. but wasn’t it only a dream? i made some imagined friends on a long and fantastical journey. memories make me happy. but these ones are fading so horribly fast. they fade into a reality with which i collide. at last i’m so ready for it to arrive.
you’re a card, paper. a paper card. here’s your paper card, carl. cool. cool. i think i love you, miss facil ities request system. in voices more hum an than computer, i swear, and with en ough oomph to erect a skyscraper on a cold and chilly month of mondays, i hear an earnest emotion- laden loop of ‘the feeling. the feeling. the feeling’s not in the least. this feeling is not mutual. no, not in the least.’ thank you, miss facilities request system. with love and with gobs of smoochies, too!
what comes after a nutty nothing of a barren nov ember? what else but the dares of december, of course. ‘query ginger for the general coordinates of larry’s au courant cafe’ is what it says right here, for example. followed by ‘respond’ or, it could be ‘rampage’ ‘michelle’ ‘again and again.’ such scribbles were made assuredly by this gimpy hand before me, but the gibberish i can all but decipher sounds a lot more bonnie and clyde than, say, mojo joe. at any rate, who could possibly determine whatever it is that
with this scratchy
mess of blurred words
i might have meant? the head that’s con nected to this horse’s mouth can certainly not recall. but i do so remember how hellbent i was on a goal of staring at the ‘zeros of blue cross and blue shield.’ how could i forget? for that was my home of employment for less than two weeks that i lost by way of slam-dancing my way through the hellish de mands that were made at me so that i might snag a regular, albeit miniscule, home sweet home of my own. this after not having one in the solid for twenty-four months. this is a memory that reminds me to pick up some tums on the way out (i would have to
beg, borrow or steal some, so
this is just fantasy at the mo
ment), so that, also, i might
nab a bit of rare fresh air, rather
than stare airless at the walls of this coffin-sized home i (fairly? unfairly?) exchanged for that short job some forty-six months (or so) ago. before i’m left with nothing but gasps, i might as well close the door on this particular ditty... since a cursory glance at the rest of the notes on this time-worn page of handwritten end-of-year goals insists that i ‘pickle’ some ‘office supplies’ to the tune of nearly five thousand dollars while also apparently ‘check ing’ my ‘melons’ (which must mean—in jest, or at least i do hope—that i was to gawk at all of the zeros in my checking account?) while i ‘float glibly’ through the limbo of another ‘mundane monday.’ ‘hash tag trucking,’ or it could just be ‘talking’ – but at what or to whom? as this note was scribbled well before my roomies, whom i call gener ically (not sure as to whether i mean that much offense), conrad, calliope and their crew (by which i might as well say army) of cacophonous kiddos. whoever they are,
they are, quite definitively, cockroaches, one and all, so there literally exist any numb er of reasons to reach the begin ning of winter after such a long fall. ‘to the death, dear monsieur?’ my good pal conrad rasps (and with such a detectable emphasis on sewer, i swear!). ‘mon dieu! these scrolls of ridiculous goals will be the death of me, yet!’ i reply as i tuck myself in for the morning as bass-ackwards as one might atop a cold and disparaging december day. and as i do, i slip with some ease down into an upside down dream of doing a zero gravity two-step upon my coffin’s ceiling. that nondescript surface that seemed but unreachable moments ago as my dog-tired eyelids slide silently over my over worn peepholes. zzz. and zzzzz.
written at the end of a longwinded idea for a great party game which had something to do with the i re member poems of joe brainard: ‘take notes. write a poetic/or other wise response.’ yes, i’m looking over a motley assortment of notes again. from weeks, months and years past. an exercise that might just as easily hurt a fragile memory such as the one laid bare within the husk that holds mine, an exterior that’s beginning to awkwardly digress downward from an apex that was its purported middle ages. this digression, like my meanderings, say, during a job interview via zoom, putts and sputters as it picks up speed as things do (like snow balls) rolling down hills after such an exhausting and eternal near- infernal in cline. so, for now, i’ll catch a breath or two, rather than embrace, say, a no-longer- quite-so-early death. i’m game if you are. room-a-zooma-zoom!
i believe that most all of us have at least one thing, if not several, that we think of, for whatever odd or reasonable reasons we might, as our deepest, darkest secret(s). and of those self-styled never- tells, we most all of us probably spend the best portion of our days making sure (as best as we possibly can, that is) that nary an additional soul, so far as it is within our grasp of control, will ever know this deeply hidden stuff. my guess is, though, that most of these secrets are hardly sinister, if even in the least; in fact, they’d no doubt more rightly be dubbed our deepest, darkest embarrassments.
“if i tell you this, you must promise never to tell another soul. you must swear it!” and it turns out to be such a ridiculously silly thing. like i once kissed so and so at the prom, but we were both on dates with other people. what a doozy, right? perhaps i should not poke fun, lest you think i am being serious. another one might be i threw a rock at the kid on the monkey bars who wound up with a broken shin because of it, and that furthermore some other kid got blamed for the injurious act of schoolyard bullying. if there were a metric system for sinister, most folks’ atrocious moments would be rather miniscule on said scale. sure, everything is relative, and each secret would be in its own unique spot on the vector, such that there would be things that caused individuals such a lifetime of consternation and yet that issue or problem might live at the very low end of this scale. so paltry the cause of so much anxiety that i just want to shake it out of whomever and yell into his or her eyeballs 'JUST LIVE YOUR LIFE HAPPY!' as they have certainly spent an absurd amount of life worrying over what i would, and with ease, call a bunch of hooey; loads and loads of nothing. of course, as one might climb that vector higher and yet higher one might then start to encounter some things that even i myself might find distasteful. i mean, first, of course, there would be such iniquities as white lies. later up one might find running over a neighbors poor pug with your parents' ltd landau.
let me state right here and now that i would put a fairly stout condition of objectivity onto said scale. as this exercise is elucidating, or at least i would assume it is, one person’s heinous is yet another’s laughing matter. but onward up the scale one would surely find such things as infidelity, for example. and that would in all ways that logic might have one traveling that vector quite a distance before reaching somewhere at the apex, if not very near it, with, say, murder. are you with me so far?
but we’re not all murderers and hardcore thieves, are we? as one example that comes to my mind, most of us, when it comes to commitment with other people, i would venture to wager, are pretty loyal. wait, now that i think on that notion a bit more, i believe i just flat- out lied. or i led you on. prevarication. see, i am accumulating things i should regret, or at least consider immoral. am i right? i think that was me projecting myself onto others just a wee bit, at least once i put my brain to it a bit more. based on my own personal experience, that is, but not much else. (in fact, one could call of this assemblage of lines a ‘projection collage,’ i suppose). i do err toward the belief that most everyone in a committed relationship of any sort has had at least a somewhat substantial indiscretion, if not several, during their said commitments, their relationships. but that’s just me.
i do have my reasons for thinking so darkly. and i have come to see that i’m quite the odd person out when it comes to my own personal beliefs in such matters. but then there’s the sticky issue of logic. certainly just about anyone who ever knew me at all, and for decades, would have the luxury of getting a headache’s worth of my diatribe about this belief, based of course on my logic: that sex, commitment and love are wholly separate, and that either of these, singly, do not need any reliance upon, or have anything whatsoever to do with the the the other two. each can exist just fine singularly. and i would go on and on about this, even relaying my own personal examples of each possible scenarios. so, if two or more individuals decide they want to set off on a long-term thing, the only thing they would need in order to make it something intent upon lasting is commitment, which is some sort of contract with each other.
those days have been gone for a while now. the ones in which i would have anyone around me to begin with, much less anyone who might tolerate me going on and on about this or that. it is not necessarily that my beliefs on the subject have changed so much. it's just that i cannot be certain anymore, if ever i even was, how to put such a theory smoothly into practice. it all still makes sense to me, though. but i have much to figure
out about it all, given that i have not only lost practice debating the matter, but it seems like an eternity since i have had the luxury or opportunity to put the theory into practice. not that i would care to, necessarily. since for now, at least, such ideas are all but senseless.
and while it has become terribly trite of me to say, it appears that i have gotten sidetracked. i started off on the subject of the silliness of most of our most tucked away, hidden secrets. and, indeed, how silly most surely must be, with some rare exceptions. if, for example, fede’s deepest secret is that he didn’t plant a row of potatoes in the garden back when he was, say, ten years old, and instead only planted two rows (when it was vividly requested that he plant three. . .), and in your later years you revealed that secret to me as if it were the worst of all possible things, would that not
be silly? would i say, “wow, martha, I think you should have tried a little bit of infidelity, you know? just for the experience, for what you might learn from such a thing, perhaps for the fun of it, even.”
then martha took her last breath. although her eyes looked right up at me as if i’d said something that could possibly have killed her. i look down now at her lifeless eyes and say, “you’re really silly, martha. you are such a silly human being.” then I leave martha’s lifeless body in the bed of her wonderfully furn ished home and head out to a fancy new sushi place that is the talk of the town. because i have a date with new hottie in town named stan. and this is a plan that has been solid for a few weeks now.
her first name, as it turns out, was hazel. i know this because my three siblings and i called her grandma hazel. this, as i’m certain
i’ve mentioned to you before, was a taunt that my father put us up to, knowing she’d be very displeased. and perhaps she was. but we’d never
have known it. i’d like to believe that she rather enjoyed it as something unique, perhaps even nostalgic. and perhaps she did. oh, and the other fact: if she were
still around, my dear grandma hazel would have been 105 years old today.
since she grew up in arkansas and spent most of her adult life in detroit she had a sort of a lazy midwestern accent, which is pretty much an oxymoron. on thanksgiving and sometimes christmas and other special family meals she often made a dish i would otherwise despise, but since it came from her it was nothing but greatness: sweet potatoes with syrup and marshmallows. is it because i am now a diabetic and that it has been over thirty years since we all sat down to one of her meals together that i cannot remember her signature desserts quite so easily as i obviously should? my dad’s absolute must have was, i believe, a banana walnut double or triple layer cake with white frosting. and i do re member those, and as i think about it more, it was truly amazing to the senses and i am pretty sure it was my favorite as well. though there were to certainly desserts too numerous to taste all of in one holiday, that is also something i re member. cornbread was a household staple, period. and of evening and/ or throughout the day there would be the occasional solo individual who just could not get enough (which would be anyone in that household after a meal had been served) who’d be eating cornbread with milk poured over it with a long spoon out of a tea glass. the mister to marie, my grandfather, would do this very shortly before he hit the hay of an evening, but rather than with regular milk, his cornbread would be swimming in buttermilk. may i take a moment to interject here, for the sake of some attention, perhaps, or a bit of pity, but no, never pity, maybe more as a hint that will never even be seen, much less acted upon by what remains of my family, that these things are so vivid to me, i am most certain, because i just made my way through my 8th thanksgiving alone, and soon will be encountering the 8th christmas i’ve had in a row (just as with the 8 thanksgivings) wherein i’ll be spending its duration without a soul other than myself in my coffin-sized apartment? i must add that, much to my elation, i received a care package from my mom and sister last year shortly after christmas which included all of the standard sweet fare from the family’s christmas, and so therefore much of what was included were sweetstuffs that filled me with such nostalgia it seems im possible to imagine today, nearly a year ago later, as many of the goodies were made with the same care by the same hands using the same recipes as those from which i indulged so greedily during my childhood and youth. now that i’m hungry for things that i’m sure i can not find in order to become sated for the rest of this evening and my stomach has become grumbly for the very same reason, i believe that’s where i’ll have to stop on this, my second short list of things about marie in under a week. which, as you can see, turned out to be just as much about me.
it seems like there are so many people for whom the concept of pain is obviously more tantalizing and alluring than the (seemingly much more logical? obvious? clear as a bell?) notion that while it inevitably shows up at times, it is something that should be avoided (duh!) at pretty much all costs. perhaps it would be well advised that when the patient reaches such a threshold, departing a life that reflexively goes out of its way not to bump into it and instead literally embraces the “pleasure” that could be had with it, therefore in a focused and driven manner, seeking it out on every horizon, running oneself directly into it until one is consumed by it; i mean, if, it’s even possible that there is such a threshold, when it is crossed one should be directed to reverse that demonic course post haste. but i know how impossible it would be to lure one back over to other side.
