Poetry And Grief II

Thanks to poetry,

the final image of my dying father has begun taking inventory of the thousand words its worth,

and soon,

when the memory begins to blur at the edges and fray,

I can stick these words into the cracks to maintain the illusion

that some things

never die.


-JV

The First Poem Of Your Set

The first thing to know about performing poetry is

that if you don’t know the first thing about performing poetry 

you cannot expect that you will be able to discern whether the audience is enjoying themselves or not.

2

Oh yeah, these lights 

will throw sand in your eyes.

3
From behind the microphone, there will be gobs of eyes to set you in stone,

so you would do well to assume the dust and carved hardness of a loveless room and
keep moving.


4

All the cuties in the house are formulating

poems about failure 

with your face in mind. And

by no means should you expect 

the other performers on the bill 

to rally the crowd for you from the back of the house.

The others 
are wall-flowering in judgement. Or 

they’re in the ecstasy of words you didn’t write, connecting 

with mucus and tendon all the signifiers you left in the void.

[Poets are like that shrimp that has more optical cones than you: they 

see in patterns you cannot know,

and, being shrimp, they couldn’t explain if they wanted to, 

though they do,

and so they are always furrowed masses of malcontent, sexy 

in their villainy of language, spied on

by science, and the normative sex of 2 things alone. 

And no more.]

But also, some of the performers have the simple seeming of 
dopes who are doomed to bad metaphor and zhuzh - 

either way,

5
poets are not to be trusted.

The sixth thing to know about performing poetry has something to do with sincerity. Unless
you’re really cool.

Seventh Thing- You are not a stand-up comic, unless you are, 

in which case you will be. Good for you. 

And you may ignore the previous instruction. Unless 

you are very good.

Eight:

Your heart will be crushing the hand 

of your throat in anticipation of flight
or birth.

9

And finally.

A thing to know about performing poetry is that if you are persistent or lucky enough to get a gig, or if the venue is desperate enough to host your shit, 

Fail.

You could be a lobster or a tree for no reason at all, but you, 

Are a poet.

-JV

Uber Driver

I was wondering who "Jo" was, whether
It was a boy or a girl.

I am Jo and
I am neither.

...Well as long as you pay me, I
Don't care what you are.

-JV

In A Crowded Restaurant

In spite of how you've
slowed in old age,
the delicate glass
fumbled
clumsily from your fingers
Falls
as eager as ever.

JV

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

In This Old Photo You Took of Me In 1993

I’m reaching out for you from my high chair in the kitchen and 

All I want is your warm neck to nestle my head in. 

Yesterday you turned 75.

And now, your neck, has gnarled thin and pessimistic, 

Chemicals meant to help.

The scheduled weekly injection.

Bruised arm. Radioactive, thinning, wrinkling your loosened skin, scaling you back, 

Slowing you to the final stop.

Stopping you in your masculine track.

I see you now, 

Slipping away, and yet 

You won't say, anything, about it.

I'm reaching out for you, and 

All I want is to dance you around in the kitchen on top of my feet.

-Yes, I know we're adults, Papi, but

I still want to give it a shot. 

Come on, lets 3- step, Papito - I'll teach you bachata.  

Meanwhile, the mirror tells me that this Newyorican shock of hair

Is your dark mane, and that these hands are scarcely mine

My dopey ears, yours,
The grovel of this voice is your rhasp and

These hang-ups are yours too.

I’m reaching out 

But the TV’s turned to westerns, and so,

You can’t see me. 

I’m reaching out for you and though you never came to see me in a show, 

I’m an actor too, Pa, you know? 
That’s my job. 
Like James Arness, but with your eyes. 

Like James Garner with momma's thighs.
Like Michael Landon with a clown-nose.
Like brown Marlon Brando. Yes.

Like Brando, Papi,
Like Brando,

Who, as we both know, 

Is a dusty, rugged, greyscale, bullet-riddled tree out west, who, 
like you, never ran from a fight. 

And never says a word.

-JV

Somewhere in America

A mother, dripping
In her night-black funeral gown, is holding
A brick
Over an American history textbook that has not been banned in Texas.
Her child's face is on the cover.
Only he's white.
And smiling.

She's fixin' to pour the brick right in.
Into its pages; through the spine,
Shattering the thin lessons into shards to show
How sharp they are.

She wishes she could tell the president on page 786
That his white hair and cock-face make her sick.

But somewhere in America
A secret agency has her name on file and
A maximum-security security guard
Is being payed minimum wage.



-JV

Old-Heads

Keep ready
on your way
to listen to the universe sway,
this way
then that.


-JV

Looking At Your Feet

In amazement
That your body
Terminates in a splash
of flesh at the end of your leg.


-JV

I Used To Consider Bars

Spaces for old mustachioed men to go and get sad.

I couldn't resist the sight.

Now

My skin is sagging noticeably under my chin

And my upper lip itches of bourbon.

-JV

A Facebook Post

Is the world of reality a drag?

- No it's not; you're just buying too much into the collective-least-common-denominator Reality of money, myopia, and pride.


-JV

What Did the Watch Say to the Capitalist?

 

Now is not the time to take time

Now is the time to time time.

You can make time to take time -

But there is no time to make time to take time now.

-JV

A Few Minor Notes From An Old Journal

To find yourself in love 

With the sun 

Is a solid-life choice.

--

Some folks talk so much that they pass the feelings they are referring to.    

--

Today,
I made a point of wiping my ass
With my left hand. 

For the first time
In my life...

--

--

 

Some folks talk so much that they pass.

--

The vault of the sky.

A constant reminder.

There is.

Up.

--

 

Some folks talk so much.

--



-JV

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