vacuum aug 2012

  

she is not here

as much as she is gone

with no way to predict

if she will be here

 when I arrive seeing

her vacancy as a painful

 as seeing her horrified stare

she is not here even when she is

 not  a hateful stare

 I was wrong

 the blank stare

k that avoids  me

and voids my existence

 and I am here

and I am a ghost in the machine

 that just about functions

rbut which one of us is the cog

 that creates the chaos

the Piece of the mechanism

 that does not function right

does not work with others well

 who needs to leave before

 the whole thing gets fucked up

I am here less often

than I ache to be

in exile elsewhere

 save for this single day

 when I come and go

 and am barely here when I am

 she lurking as if she believes

 the world is her world

when it used to be mine

and I miss being here

 even when I am and she is not

 

 

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Tattoo bracelet January 19, 2024

 

I never noticed the tattoo

On her left wrist

Until I saw it briefly

As she reached down

To shape the number 100

On the ground with feed

For her steed to eat.

Just when she branded herself

I cannot say, maybe as far back

As when I knew her back then,

And I just never noticed,

Too consumed with watching

Her eyes or her mouth.

Maybe it wasn’t there then,

Inscribed since, a string

Of symbols I can’t interpret,

If they have any meaning at all,

There for me to take notice of

Now, a new feature for some one

I thought I knew everything about

(and really know nothing)

Did she do it out of love for someone,

A declaration of possession,,

Signifying her undying affection for,

Or perhaps she just liked

The way they looked

A tattoo bracelet with no

Real meaning at all

 

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back to kansas June 7, 2012

 

 I try not to let it show, t

he impact and yet I suspect, 

I am predisposed to the role 

in this insanity,

 as if marked from birth,

 a sign on my forehead 

or floating over my head

 only someone like her can read,

 selecting me to play out

a part in the passion play

 I never intended to perform,

yet, like the needle in 

a old fashioned record album,

 once inserted into the groove, 

I am doomed to run through 

the whole thing until its natural conclusion,

 too predictable to avoid revealing

 who I am or how I feel, 

knee jerk to each temptation, 

doomed to replace (in my mind at least)

 those who came before me, 

like a man looking at himself 

from deeper inside,

 telling himself not to do this or that, 

and yet compelled by some unseen force 

to do it anyway.

If I close my eyes 

and click my heals,

 maybe I can get back to Kansas.

 

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white sneakers. Feb 20, 2014

  

I find the pair of white sneakers

in the back of my closet

worn once then abandoned

because she said I look like

an old man wearing them

 I am old

old enough to be her father

a real bit of Oedipus in that sense

 I also want to fuck her

and so as Father figure

 full of lust for my would be daughter

 I stash the sneaker in the closet

 and do the best to forget

 they're there

 a haunting presence

 the ghost I imagined in the closet growing up

waiting to leap out at me

full of teeth and claws

Time’s Unwanted Chariot

dragging me to the eventual Doom

 while the sneakers stir under dress shoes

 and old garments that slipped off hangers

a not so elaborate striptease

I always imagined her doing

 those long nights long ago

when we texted each other in the dark

white shoes for an old man

 with pretensions of being young

 lusting after his offspring

the way all men young or old do

 but most of all for he, I think

as I take them the shoes out to the trash bin

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Waking up to smell the roses. July 2024

   

if she wants me to stop I will stop it

I get confused when she turns

the faucet on then off

 a mixed message

when I'm already puzzled

by what she wants

or doesn't want and

with no means to know

which she means

does no mean me no

 or does it sometimes mean yes

the link there less than a week ago

suddenly absent and though

I know where it ends up

I keep from subscribing

just the way I kept out of sight

all those years ago

scared that if I stick my nose in that door

 she might slam the door on it

better clever elusive than sorry

nothing is ever clear with her

so I'll go back to where I started

 that petulant Frat boy who

needs a drink or

 do I dunk my head to wake up

to smell

 if not the roses

then reality

like it or not

 2024 journal menu

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No text this time July 28, 2024

  

I won't make the same mistake

I made back then

no birthday text just a sonnet

which she may or may not read

though if she does she'll understand

how hard life is

and how we all cling to those things

we think will bring us joy

an illusion maybe

and yet not so farfetched

life being more than

an accumulation of candles on the cake

countdown we take part in each year

 to some conclusion we dread

somewhere in the midst of all this

beyond the count of time

we manage to find our bit of joy

what was, what could have been

we celebrate perhaps our survival

 never assuming we could have

made it this far, and we did

and may yet be privileged

 to make it to the next lighting of candles

as we say secret prayers

appreciating the in between

where love resides

beyond just birthday wishes

 

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Just another trophy Aug. 28, 2014

  

I still recall the moment as if it had happened yesterday, she playing her role as a PR professional at an even designed to create political peace, for the mayor she was loyal to, misplaced in retrospect after what they mayor eventually did, ending her career, yet not yet at that moment, the school renamed, as I humbly watched the circus unfold, the arrival of a freeholder from another town who greeted her as an old friend – a freeholder well-known for his womanizing, even in public spaces, and I wondered, had these two connected as he always does with pretty woman like her. I tried to read the tea leaves from their faces and yet now, all these many months later, still do not know if he had added her to his trophy shelf, and whether or not she would have let him, that brief exchange in that brief moment in that school, how friendly they seemed even though he later claimed he’d not met her for that. Just another trophy?

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