my assessment: i am too honest,
straightforward, blunt...redundant,
but not enough to get a point across
with clarity (a cross; put a pin in the
genetics of it) (each year the research
seems to bring us closer to the roots and
branches of the family tree; i only sug
gested the pin as a—would it be a joke?
—because it is a too-used phrase i’ve
grown to acknowledge with an eye-roll,
but has its overuse perhaps peaked by
now...the things that become more dif
ficult to stay on top of [the things to
the top of which it gets harder to climb]
[the things to top upon which i attempt,
and with diminishing gusto, to climb] or
rhyme. this blusterous noise of nothing,
this noisy nothingness, this bombastic
barrage of blanks that boom as if mere
duds were all that filled the barrel of a
pistol that has its lever pulled repeatedly
by a blistered digit belonging to some
trigger-happy creep, that’s what this
godforsaken week has been. all noise,
mere distraction and bleeding eardrums.
this is what happens the further away from
the structure of steady employment or the
regimen of appointments or lessons, of
sitting bored in classrooms from nearly dusk
until the embers of the winter sun have faded
into a moody hue of indigo. you wish the rest
of light away, crave the impossibility of obsidian,
but the slowly dying city never dies enough, and
so, with smoldered haze of light that won’t allow
these eyes to distinguish but the basics of the
complicated map that once unfolded becomes
impossible to finesse back into a semblance of its
original state, you stumble down the path toward
the ocean, or so you think, weaving in and out of
brazen, brash and awkward through poetic frivolity
and frugality, never finding the tide nor even a
a swath of cooling sand, where all of the paths
that cross this city with which you’ve become so
intimate, and without failure, end. this is a con
fusion which drags the light of day, the clearest
way from the muck that you’ve been stuck in
toward the least resistant trail with the slightest
slope that will lead you back to clarity, back to
distinguishable signage and perhaps a crew in
recognizable uniforms that might help you through.
which is all to say it has been a week. with setbacks
that have turned all clocks back to somewhere we
once and not so long ago called past. with almost
no commitments nor resistance you’d think we would
be getting somewhere, and fast. but, exasperatingly,
here is where we find ourselves. here’s to hoping that
our next stop will be somewhere over there. and
please, we pray, not at some familiar point that
lies between here and where we started, when
ever it was that we did. all that time ago.
