A Grand Game of Telephone

My mother whispered her best guess,

Which I maybe could have caught,

If not for the tingle it sent down my side






**For future reference, this came from the idea that humanity is like a big game of telephone, where each consecutive assertion confuses the real message a little more. The real message perhaps being the immediate experience of the present moment (the tingle), although that is another assertion, I suppose? Babies then, relay the message more directly, before they learn to translate and reduce it to words. But in time, with all the reductions and assertions that they’re taught, as well as the iterations they come up with themselves, not to mention the impact of their specific genetics, a unique representation (or bastardization maybe, if you see this as a problem) takes shape which we might call a personality, or persona, or just person probably. A term i’m told means “that through which the sound goes.” Kinda like a telephone :) I have no conclusions here, and the more I write the more diluted the original feeling gets... let’s just say, I enjoy the smell of the dirt in Spring, but can also appreciate Vivaldi’s take on the season. Maybe there’s room for it all. And it’s just glancing back every so often to make sure Grandma can still see you. Check her face for approval, and just a tiny bit of fear, so you know what you’re doing is brave and special.

The Song of Angry Men

Michael Larsen hit me hard,

Though I didn't even know about it til two years after it happened,

Wasn't the fan I pretended to be, I guess,

Jesse's dad, Brother Wilcox, Brooke's dad, Elliot Smith,

Sad grist for songs and cigarettes,

Anthony Bourdain was a sharp blow,

In France when I heard,

And I've never seen the depths he has, but

I'd been on both sides of addiction and

Been father to a ten year old girl, and

Maybe started feeling that I can't know anything for sure, but

 I had found myself on a shore which suggested that

The game was worth the candle,

And now in a Paris hotel bed, left to wonder if

Even this is too much to count on

Chuck E Cheese

I wonder how it will be if the afterlife really is just like one big mind waking up from a dream. Some supremely complex dream where each of the infinite fractions of your conciousness had a turn as protagonist... maybe even rocks and comets get a say.... and to realize that each thing you hated, and each person you pretended didn't exist because their every word and action seemed an affront to creation, was actually you all along. Rapists and their victims reconciling what they did to themselves... Jews and Gentiles, lambs and lions and all that.  And I don't know if it will outweigh the nausea from all the misguided self-serving, but a salve, or the hope in pandora's box so to speak, might be realizing your loves - the ones you knew before the dream lost its sheen, its new-car-smell, its ability to surprise and strike awe, the ones that made you feel you'd been holding your breath for years until you held them close and inhaled at last, deep and quenching - are also inseparable from you, with all their impossible goodness.

Void is Form

It is two minutes past noon and I am still alone in the office.  One colleague has called out sick, another has called in late due to fevery children.  The third doesn't bother with excuses anymore, as he never appears until he's been to the gym and had lunch.  My boss's Google Calendar says she'll be at something called "Moving Forward" until 3:00.  I don't mean for this to sound as whiny as it's coming out (there's a little self-righteous resentment yes, but just a little).  It's more of a lonely thing.  Ella Fitzgerald can't be helping... I'd never really listened to 'They Can't Take That Away' before.  And only 27 hours ago I was standing over the Snake River near Shoshone Falls, in the parking lot of a Michael's craft store, watching base jumpers leap from the Perrine Bridge.  My daughter is at the perfect age for everything and she squealed as each chute opened.

Mermaids can't be caught
Or they become like girls or
Fish, though goddelijk

I didn't get my little boy but I got my kindred spirit