the digital midden, or, we see our lives brightly through gorilla glass

dumb dora is so dumb

HOW DUMB IS SHE?

dumb dora is so dumb, she's been in kindergarten so long, she's the only girl in class with _____.

  gray hair

     a hysterectomy

        a maternity dress

          grandchildren

oh c'mon brett and dick and bill and carol

that's not what you were thinking

c0

notice my cleavage but don't stare.

does this pushup panty make me bootiful?

i am so not looking at you.

c0

how can i tell the difference between

"i don't like you"

and

"you are so irrelevant to me I won't even acknowledge your presence"

?

c0

it's all pain and contradictions from beginning to end

from squeezing through the birth canal

to squeezing through the pearly gates.

we look for comfort where we least often expect it.

c0

you did it again, little buddy.

group hug

group therapy

a gabillion nielsen households can't be wrong

a gabillion people who think they are the only one that feels that way

eating a pint of häagen-dazs

for 30 minutes.

i am like the people glowing in my living room

c0

i know i had a heart once, because it broke

in half

and half again

and half again

and if you do that enough times there's nothing left but small tokens of esteem and affection

like humpty dumpty boiled so long you can't remove the shell without tearing the white to pieces in broad soft diagonal shards

like it held so great a secret it exploded.

c0

stonn, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting.  

wanting is the journey,

and the journey is just the end without the disappointment.

forever wanting

is forever happy.

live long

and prosper.

but one without the other seems pretty pointless

and that is the lot

of the lot of us:

outliving our prosperity;

hurry up and die already, willya? i can't support another

loafer

alcoholic

addict

fatso

crip

geriatric child

baby

kid who rides the short bus to school

c0

we eventually see ourselves crumpled at the end of

a driveway half-shoveled and refilling with flurries

illuminated with red and green flashes

from Christmas lights

silently

like a neon sign into a drunkard's flophouse room;

or

heaving under pounding fists on an operating table -

"live, dammit, you're not going to die on my table!" -

but we do

every day

and no one is pounding on our chests;

the pounding is all inside

until one day

it stops

conducting gel

clear

thump

again

again

/\/\/\/\/\/\____________________________

c0

brian greene says there's no reason why things can't go backwards.

we start with no heartbeat,

finish with no heartbeat,

why not bounce around between the silence at both ends?

c0

i once thought i'd be a great writer

("great" as in "better than good"; it's an english major thing)

and kept my ideas to myself

(ideas so good someone might steal them).

now i write for anyone everyone no one or just me

because i'm closer the the grave

than i am to the womb

and all i'll leave behind besides my dna

is this

a digital midden

of broken bits

tossed out the kitchen window,

a record in reverse of parts

of speech

of gristle

of bone

of urns

of things and people and magical lands

that pull my mind away from here

to summer storms

to snowbound winters

to brown study

to the midden's bottom

to millions turning to muck in mass graves.

they didn't have a blog

not even pencil and paper,

couldn't write to save their lives,

they worked to live and lived to

work macht frei.

the dying scream in my ears

c0

"christmas a humbug? surely you don't mean that"

says the missus.

surely i do, sans the boiling and stake of holly.

maybe i've just seen too much christmas guts,

the shimmery green dusty guts that start

14 months ahead of the holiday

in china looking for the next big toy

in offices choosing fonts and palettes.

it'd all be good if it lasted a month

and then disappeared the next 11,

but alas it lives all 14.

how do we fit more time into the year?

plan twice as much for 2 months

c0

there are too many images left of us for the future to think

we were handsome or pretty.

look at washington

or lincoln

or old time kings and saints and such -

a handful of photos maybe,

or a painting

that forgives wooden teeth and pocks and wrinkles;

no such luck for the rest of us in a digital age

where every word and picture is preserved forever

and great great great whatevers

can zoom in on a pore.

somebody took all the fun out of it,

let the air out of the balloons

took the sugar out of cookies

the babies out of sex.

someone took away all the consequences

of what few happy activities

we used to enjoy.

c0

we look for constancy

and imagine it if we have to.

yesterday was like all the yesterdays before it.

marry,

conceive,

farm or mend or build or smelt;

gather, catch, and eat.

bury our dead.

rinse.

repeat.

today is different.

tomorrow different still.

c0

mom and dad were always old.

grandma and grandpa were always older.

c0

chrissy snow is reading the obituaries and says "it happened again!"

what happened?

"everyone died in alphabetical order."

"don't go up in your helicopter anymore," says hawkeye. "it's not your fault. you just don't understand the relationship, probably. when you go up in the air, all your stretchers are empty, right? but see, when you come back, there's always a kid, or a portion of him in one of the stretchers, right? nobody goes up, nobody gets hurt."

"chuckles the clown is dead," says lou. "it was a freak accident. he went to the parade dressed as peter peanut, and a rogue elephant tried to shell him."

we laugh else we'd cry

c0

Writer's Guild, Calvin College, 1984:

my poem slowly unravels until it is literally a scribbled line for the last stanza

.

it's a scribbled line

?

it's a metaphor for utter despondency and meaninglessness

??

it's the marabar caves, for crying out loud

!

c0

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wtf

we see our lives brightly through gorilla glass

[1962-11-29]

c0