The First Workless Morning in Months

Sitting for 30 minutes. Or 10 minutes; Or 5 minutes, there is the severe silence of something happening in the box of your head regardless of you.  Sally would speak of something soft and painful to the left while the right is making up images of lost cocktails and opportunities.  Someone’s worried in this room, using your voice to describe it, but its not as simple as simple and not as solid as self.  Self is upon the shelf while watching.  Watching is what happens when you listen.  Listening is glistening for a moment, then splashes into the tumult of time.  Time is sure to make sure of itself. Besides, time is wallpaper, or an ocean, and either way we’re fish.  And by the way, suffice it to say, the head is far less head than a splash of flesh and limb. Dumb meat. Miraculous meat.  Meet meat for the first time every time you sit.  Meet meat and no longer wish to eat meat- unless you do.  In which case you will.  

Will will not wish for less - unless it does.  Then you can never get enough less. And this will hurt you.  Having had as much less as most want, the child with your name sits bitter in the corner, while, under the weather, your better half is sinking sadly without your help to save her.   Undercover of lover your self does savor the feeling of loosing its self-full fervor.  This will hurt you.

It will hurt you not to see what is trying for you to see it in the box.  It will not be happy with you when you try to clear your mind.  It will not be happy with you and you will notice it or you won’t. It will ask you to look away from its dusty corners which are actually sinew and moist. It will not be satisfied until you’re the same thing again.  It will suck you until it won’t - in which case it will mope around or fizzle out or burst or smolder. All of which can be shapes to see.  All of it is a soft suggestion.  All of it will say something about the origin of something - none of it is type-face.  It is the ping of cold metallic meat.  It is miraculous meat that has a tone of its own in spite of self.  It is mostly meat though, that speaks of hands and feet.  Mostly meat for sex and safety.  The other stuff is true and trite and will make for a great novel someday.

-JV

December 19th, 2016

I’ll feel you when the rain comes, Papi,

I’ll listen for you on the breeze,

And someday soon I’ll be singing you with my own voice

just as soon as I catch my breath

JV

Reel

No sound.
An otherwise empty room.
          TV Screen:
Tight-shot on your face:
Cropped to your ears chin and hair.

At first, in the silence, your face will twist
Into the expression indicative of receiving a strong reprimanding from the viewer.

Then, it'll seem as if you had just locked eyes with the love of your life,

Then, suddenly, you'll look as though you've discovered a poop,

Then, very slowly, your face will gnarl into precisely the expression that coincides with watching Walt Disney slap his ass while
Licking an ice cream cone that your mother is holding
Up to his lips while
She slowly lifts one leg
And plays the kazoo.

JV

Poetry and Grief

Something sinister is creeping just behind your eyes,
that can never be extracted with the sharpness of words.

Poetry scaffolds the crumbling facade.
Bowling alley bumpers-
Poetry plastic straw to suck the soup of the mind.

Once there is a voice for verse and flair - tricks and little flips of speech, the
mind gets busy building
toy-block towers.

So after I read Jack's poem about the cleverness of breezes,
my Mind got to work recalling his sallow cheeks,
his shallow eyes moments before
the final drop of air tumbled over the chap of his lips in an egoless croak.
I could see it.
The sunken ribs, distended, the belly,
the final swells,
the chest.
I feel the uncharacteristic
stubble scratch as I cradle him indefinitely and I think,
"He writhes for release from the ills of embodiment, but rest,
Arrives when you're least" -

                                  And just then
                     As if to smooth it all over,
my mind presented me with the image of Marvin Martian leaping from a child's bedsheet billowing out of a Bronx tenement window-





-JV

The Glitch Betrays The Mechanism

Waking up some winter morning after two clock-time snoozes,

There is a collapse, 

relapse?

or maybe, prolapse -

When after pulling the towel from my window,

I witness a soft downy bright and silent pattering which does not immediately read

as the word, signified by the crisp, times-new-roman letters S-N-O-W. Period (.)

Meanwhile, the concept is lost among

piles and piles of signifier files, like to the rafters.

And at the foot of each manilla mountain, is the personification of an axon-

A business-casual-clad default person is dwarfed by their respective stack,

shuffling their lot madly

in the office building of the mind.

Meanwhile, someone is shouting into a red rotary phone that

someone else had better, [quote] “file the damned missing concept report, like yesterday, asshole!” [end quote] And someone in HR is worrying a paperclip before their meeting with Conscious Thought who, as a rule are best paid and least busy,

and whose suits are invariably smarter than their deliberations.

And while the concept-in-question is being frantically sought by the underlings,

the Board of Conscious Thought are placidly looking through the window- and

heedless of the bureaucratic nightmare outside the room,

the oldest and most dignified of them is smiling his cracked face into ridges.

-JV

Stopping Spontaneously On a Busy Street

Just show me this street where I'm standing, please, Life.
Just show me this street - which never tires of itself -
Show me this street
novel, without a single atom taken for granted.

Here folks come at intervals
passersby
bystanders  -
always regulars arriving
always arrival
always experience & rarely recognition.

Trajectories disguised as people pass
waiting for something to shine -an argument, a bauble, a curse word, or a fat-ass-
but shining is a shallow game played by disco-balls and Maseratis.
This street, however, humbly bursts with the spontaneous impulse of being, everyday.
Would that I could set aside the self and learn to too.

"Today I'm a vantage without a point" I demand - but I'm just pretending.
Trying this hard to see my nose leaves me with a headache, and
ultimately I know I'm trapped in my skull -
But the streets don't mourn like people or elephants, instead,
they sing that unhurried tune that my mind is too fast to process.

And its a shame I've stopped here, only to find that my mind keeps careening -
And I am all but given up on learning the language of learning the language of the street, when
suddenly,
there he is,
         and his eyes - a human being moving among vectors -all magnitude and no direction-
somewhere come, somewhere going, and yet, perfectly here
                                                    Smiling his poem right at me.

And in a moment he'll be swallowed up by the clock that says that tomorrow is always on its way,
and just as it is today, the next day is bound to be stardust arranged, particularly sexy with subtle significance, always waiting,
but not weary.
Suffice it to say, today I saw you
and you saw me.

Spider Dream

A woman lie dead
In a cheap twin bed
with no box-spring on the ground

And beside the bed
Her journal of red
right next to her body they found

And in it, a pen
with which had been
written a dream which she expound.

"A spider..." it said,
"...had entered my head,
with a spindly kick
it passed through my lips.
I woke in the night
and threw on the light
before a coughing and sneezy fit."

The spider, it seemed
had entered her dream
though nobody would believe it.

And on its way down
whatever it found
it stung with a poison bite.


-JV