What now?

not poetry. i'm pretty much done with that for a while. there's still plenty of it to find on the interwebs, so go seek it.

if not poetry, what? randomness, which is to say life. no one may read it, and that's okay. i'll record stuff here, and see what evolves. back to the way-back then, mr. peabody, when blogs were 'blogs (short for web logs) and designed for journaling. off we go.

there is some festival going on in my hood. a flower fest of greenery getting with an official title i don't know. it seems to be drawing in mostly folks who don't live in the city and otherwise ignore it on the weekends. of course they're choking the streets with their automobiles, and the atmosphere with the filth those belch. i'm sure it's worth it so they can prettify the homesteads out in the vast suburban expanses.

i read this today: our drone delusion. nothing really that i didn't know, but plenty that most americans like to pretend doesn't happen. does anyone still remember that directive ford signed in the seventies to outlaw political assassinations, or the various topplings and killings that the cia perpetrated abroad before that (and probably after)? probably not. now it's not spy craft but drones that we use to dispatch folks, and they might as well be called that because of the humming these beasts force many americans into so they can ignore the stories about the death and suffering we cause overseas.

i did go out for a nice walk. i like walking in this city, despite it (and its steeped in car culture) not encouraging me to do so. it has monstrously snaky, multi-level expressways that dominate the landscape and try to intimidate my pedestrianism, but i'm undauntable at this point.

once i got past the flower stalls, the sidewalks were pretty much person-less. i went up to the bolton hill neighborhood, which is a couple miles north. there was a statue of a guy named watson in a civil war era uniform there, with mortars and balls at the ready below him. i'm sure he did something stirring on the battlefield and was worth commemorating, but we do too much celebrating of those who are skilled in killing, and i'm not going to bother looking him up. he'll live on in my mind as an unassociated hunk of metal; well-formed, but meaningless. that's one better than this post.

lonesome blood doesn't move

lonesome doesn't move, it clings
to time-tapered tree limbs,
to grey
sidewalks refreshed with a white snow,
and to the blood red brick walls overlooking them,
but not overlooking what went
past, no, not overlooking what passed as a life,
a life that went speeding past them,
with no quiet moments to take a breath
or to sit within them;

the past didn't go
the way she wanted it, the way
we'll see it, not the way
the blood red brick walls wanted to feel it,

but the bricks hold it, with tree limbs,
with walks, and they hold her,
and they offer her, still lonesome,
Hattie, stilled by blood, here to me,

and she comes to me, no, not her,
but the thought of her still blood, and when I take her,
or the thought of her, I take it
away, a little of our lonesomeness, the blood

And the bay

And the bay, not purple
but purple
in this light, addresses
all who pass by it
with its uncountable,
jelloing tongues. “You
didn’t come here to stay. You
came to put on calcite
layers. To let what’s inside
grow, or change,
or become, what you’ll become
when you no longer come
here.”

Most don’t listen, they watch
the wind
make a dead leaf hop.

this town believes

this town, it seems … believes
a subway is the way
the struggling move through it

one man says, or yells, looking back
and forward, side to side, in anger's eyes,
I learned what I needed … all I needed

to know about myself in that cell
be strong, always be strong … I don’t care
for them, or their excuses

another’s dressed like a pirate … he says,
I used to be a reverend … I know it,
and I’ll tell you … if you seek him

no matter where you are … no matter how
far down the wrong road you’ve gone,
god will show you a light to get back to him

this town is struggling … to believe it