Love Advice From Different Body Parts

Let lax the fists in your chest.

Unbraid your belly.

That insufferable lack of respite!

Unfurl the furlier parts of your leg and neck, then begin.

That foot ain't gonna rub its own worries out!

Listen. You oughtta eat a sandwich daily.

Go home every time you move.

Wish for love on every eyelash.

Drink every soul that shines like that.


-JV

Name-Drop Pasta Sauce or The Enneagram or Wiki-Poem

The enneagram he showed me – my friend:

A five with a four wing who

Dug my four – three.

Most recent and thorough cosmic lens &

Thoroughly through New Thought Thoreau we talked.

Emmerson & the farmstead flop: the

Loose clothing and nothing too fermented for the soul, he said.

The lectures & the Christ & The Father Divine of the Divine Lorraine of

One fair mount “heaven” here & there &

The rules thereof: Rules Of seven &

Rules of three – And never again with nines.

The four in me asks what Zoroaster felt – the sea brilliantly diagramed with belt notches.

Diaphragm diagram, after all: air, flair, John Mayer's pale taylor's hair – Etymological tour tragic epistemological tarot bone marrow scarrow crow.

[Turn up. Then turn down for room service]

Witman, Rumi sufi groovy.

Ginsberg Kerouac Stalin statements &

Dostoyevsky danger of

Solipsistic mystic business without pleasure, presence or presents for the kids.

Original sin-binge-drinking Abraham Lincoln-

Rumi's tummy & reed-flute juke-box asceticism-

Judea Judy Bloom Zoroastic bombastic-

Backpack trek – The Pacific Crest Trail.

John Muir's Han Shan Snyder pretzel dental desolation as

Catholic Angels, in their Nikes, are marking off jizz and gin in the sin bin hand book as

Marcus Aurelius is leaning on a three with a tendency to two himself a goodnight moon.
Stop.

Four (Three) Me and Five-(Four)-Friend agree that

Simic's gimmick lyrics and anti-fascist fashions ring in

Third-wave Fourth Way New Thought Shock Rock and can fathom

Involuted Druid cupid, establishing traditional yogic autocratic bureaucracy hypocrisy.


-JV

To the Great Whatever - Introduction

I

      I woke up with an unshakable concern for the interpretation of dreams.
      What had I dreampt?
--
      Last night was tarot cards and whiskey in my summer apartment.
 Luke read in his hand of cards that a cataclysm was all but certain and
that he ought to consider sharing his feelings
with that special someone.

       We felt little desire to wash the dishes that were groping their soggy way out of the kitchen sink - so we didn't.
Fruit flies billowed out in a flittering cloud as I lurched groggily over the sink to espresso myself awake.
Drosophila Melanogaster -the fruit flies-
their species name became a song I sang every morning with a side of jelly toast–

I welcomed them,
I fed them the sticky residual rings of mixed drinks from last nights party. Peach Schnapps.

Sudden visions of Biology 200 - the murderous subject!
Discarding tiny heap after tiny heap of drugged up drosophila into their soapy petri-dish doom -
but not before ascertaining their genetic breakdown for science - Eye color: 3/4 devil red, 1/4 purgatory white – Punnet perfection.

Come summer, I was done with death and
I made it law:
No one is to squish, swat, squash, wash away or do any violence of any kind to these benevolent guests.  I was still drunk from the night before.

We didn't have any fruit in the apartment.

–

II

       The subway stung my nose of urine in puddles and someone was smoking a cigarette on the platform. It was July, and hot.

The woman sitting next to me was a waitress. She spoke suddenly into my shoulder:

"You ever have these before?" [She handed me an obscenely orange tiny plastic bottle]

"No."

"I'm a waitress, so I work 12-hour days & I -
Well I don't drink the whole thing, just this much." [She pointed to a spot 2/3s of the way down]

"Right," I said.

 I got on the train, and didn't see the waitress again.

–

III


       I swore this was my last styrofoam cup, paper sleeve and plastic top I would ever send to a landfill.

       I wasn't sure if I even enjoyed my coffee.
The man next to me drunk from a “Giant-Gulp” convenience-store cup – the straw made a hollow squeak as he neared the bottom.
He suckled the last few bits and dropped the cup where he sat - Dropped the cup at his feet where he sat.

His eyes were hollow. The advertisement on the subway wall ahead of him was for a slick plastic cell phone. It was well designed.

–

IV


The events that followed have been described as our "Neo-Sincerity-Hipster-Cliche-Post-College Adventure."

A baby blue minivan.
Our degrees worth little more than the swank paper on which they were printed.
We were burning - the four of us.
We were certain.  We believed in believing in believing in-
The threat of being ordinary prickled our skin like dried sweat.
It seemed there was nothing we couldn't shake.
Society was a myopic cyclops 
and here we were
scurrying under its nose in sheep-skins.


-JV

Spot-Face

I have spots
          In my eyes from looking up
          At the ceiling-fan light.







& there you are
         In the living room, with
         A big rainbow spot
                  For a face.
                  .
                  .
                  .
I love you, 
                  Spot-Face says






JV

23 Today

-- I.

 Happy Birthday!

 

She is 23 years old today.

 She wakes with a start from her American dream.
The Holy Ghost in the corner is tugging on her toes.

– II.

The oven door shattered, and she cut her foot, those

Foyers she ran her childfingers down, stretched out: the paintings she bought when she was abroad
Were sobbing dust from their corners.

Inventory:
Iphone, guest room,

Tchotchke,

Silverware,

In-ground pool,

Going-out clothes and billiard room,

Dorito, Ikea, Target

Market Street, Wall, and Easy.

–

-- III.

She said earnestly,

               I love you, you know that right?

–

-- IV.

Get up!

SHE shouted,

It's Eleven O'clock!

And the child groans

Into their Daffy-Duck pillow case.

There's doing to do! HE said seriously in the dining room with pride,

Move Move Move.
And preened HIS waxy-'stache corners with a flick.

-- V.

Has anyone ever been quite so well equipped to choose what you will choose?

Are you conscious? Hey!

Hey!

Listen!

To whom will you entrust your detritus

When you are as dead as you expect to be?

What conveyer carries you heedlessly thence?

And Yo! Who built this ride? 
 

The boppy preteen, in the seat next to you,

With mushrooms for eyes, says

            You're totally safe.

But I don't believe him.

–

-- VI.

In what abject corner of the globe are you so satisfied not to dwell

That you happily shudder here?

Who will help you?

No one.

Who will call?

–

-- VII.
 

Beat beat beat beat fathers!

This dream is not mine

But you've made me dream it.

--VII.

Who dreams tonight

better than the evening news?

–

--VIII

Now is only preparation time.

Don't burden your consciousness with affect and trifles.

You are a serious person.

Work. Indeed,

Be employed.

Take not a single frivolous moment for observation;

Trust,

in short,

Your American gut.

– Ding.

When you are matured; indeed when you are done,

                [As a Lean Cuisine is done]

When you are ripened from toil and feebled soft;

Then!

          and not a moment sooner, 

Will you slink from task.

And, Oh! The Sitting Things you'll see!

The Sitting Things you'll have earned!

Sitting. Wheezing, sitting! Sunsets, you'll see, wheeze-hack, sitting! Hack-wheeze

Sunsets, sitting, sitting, sunsets, hack, hack-hack! 

And you'll let it all go then, 

At long last, you'll wake, ah! at last;

At long arduous last, you'll wake

from your Dream

–

--Then

Now

A simple dusty fifty years are passed.

Fret not

For your obedient, well-gendered,

2.5 children,

As ignorant as you are righteous,

Will seek no further solace than you have sought.

And the House!

           Oh! The house is paid!

What a brave brave life you have bought with hardship and grit!

Go peacefully now, valiant American, go!

Your time's been well spent; Rest assured now, friend,

 

Your Life has been well fought.

Now sleep, sleep!

    Others yet

are restless here.






-JV

Something Was Stuck, Rotting Between Your Morning Teeth

 OR                          

Falling Asleep In Work-Clothes

...







[It was 5 AM and
The crickets were still spooning on my window sill.]

Your cell phone alarm was a song we sung whenever we could.
But not this time.

I had slept for hours with my ring finger in the loop of your pants before, but
In my twilit grog, I recall thinking that this time was the best.


You had to leave in seven minutes or
Miss your train, But,  
This crusty-eyed morning,
At ungodly 5 o'clock - 
Before Work sharpened its pang - you
Languidly preached
That Under the comforter is nothing short of Heaven and that

Outside,
Is the vast kingdom of Hell; and so

You stayed softly Under with me
Until your living breath rattled at the neck
And jangled me warmly back
To sleep.


–


The crickets spooned still
Precisely as they do, on the sill, and 

When you returned greasy-beat and ready for rest again
From work,
You relayed this morning's events:

O, how I drooled! you said,
How our song thwacked and insisted and insisted itself into your ears.
How sleep honed itself into breakfast,
How you salvaged a work-shirt from the floor-pile, and how
You replaced my finger in your belt loop

With a rag

Used for wiping tables.


-JV

Withoutside

 "You know," he said,
"Sometimes, folks just don't got."



--

There is a silent house
On the street with the church
With
The Songs in it.

The silent windows of the house, I'm sure you'd remember
If you'd seen them:

      The windows with the “X”s in tape, you'd recall, I'm sure,
      On each of six window panes, an “X” in packing-tape.

Well,

Just under the planters of that house, under
The windows,

Peter
         “Subway” Burgoo scratches himself.

[He's been SICK on three swanky suits from the church so far]

Pete's groveling,

PLEASE!
to each of the passing trees.

Subway trudges, dumbly

Smoking his last cigarette, backwards,

His unfamiliar feet are oozing

From his scarecrow legs.    A dog is watching him.

SPIT.

And the strand won't break;
It bolas about his ankles and
he
    trips, but;

A bungee about his neck secures Subway Pete to the grid of clouds.

SNAP!

Something cracks open
His skull.

--

Meanwhile,
Through the windows, The Silent
Have watched Pete trudge
Up
and Down the street,

The one with the church
With The Songs in it.

They all know Subway Pete as the One

Whose breath could kill a hamster

          or a subway mouse.


-JV