half Tex

There are things in the past, my past, that have tried to. Things we should know about. Mischlinge

things; half unslept nights. Half and half. Part girlfriend, part eternal conflict. Half a moon

away from residual magnetism. My Paleozoic half spine, throbbing with lust.

Too hot for the pansies in the cement vase. Too distant for the shovel I have propped and waiting

against the unpainted garage door. My Hispanic neighbor waves, yet I don't know his age. Things

that change in two or more seconds when slowed down

and sucked on. And I have compared ARIBICA to what my lips, your lips, prepare themselves for.

Mother wants her coffee in the morning but can't remember sugar at all. Processes distill

themselves against coextensively elementals like finding

a million fruit flies stuck on the ATM. So I pick one up by it's wings, which I've been told, doesn't hurt

at all since their bodies are soft and cushy like the inside of

Mar's bars or lost poems socked in milk thistle

yet somewhere along and alone there resides, under the calendar marked 1978; under the faded

picture of John Kennedy over the freezer with the Giant door, in Texas, hands on his knee

in the same brown suit

then being shot, Zapruder style, from a building on a hill, and my auntie would weep and weep

until the greens boiled down to salt pork and hot oil. I didn't want to go to Ronald and Loretta's

"30 years of caring and sharing" anniversary, so I stayed home, half jealous,

and wrote poems about roads and streets that curved around, where the young race their half

cars.....you know, psychological s**t, and I get the news that Michael Jackson is dead.

"What happened"! Was he as sick of everyone as I am? Sick of having air

forced up his a*s? Sick of chimpanzee intelligence? Sick of Blanket and the bullshit dream scene?

Sick of Neverland and the oft, stupid human perception. So great beauty is treasonous now?

What about Kafka and the slow grind of alienation?

What about Gompers and the Talmud: the decline of withering cloth?

"Mrs. Plath, can I have a word with you since Ted ain't talking? Is the world

more bearable when the stove your going to be drowned in,

burned in, suffocated in, has it's eyes exposed like air, like nature does the bones

of the extinct"? I watched "Jurassic World", the part when the giant croc

eats the great white shark and thought

that when violence is slowed down and swallowed, there will be beauty and bones

remaining.  That's why I held you tighter last night. Hoping your eyes would pop out

like they do on the cartoons. Then Rikishi  makes the evil ones of

WWE eat the booty like groceries. As I sat little and learning.

Reviews

[Jane Taylor Hardy]

I like this style....it felt like listening to a creative stream of consciousness that refused to be hemmed in by the formal form of a poem...nicely done!

[h d e rushin]

thank you Jane for stopping by to visit.....Much appreciated...dana

[Emily B]

I can't eat. I can't sleep. I don't fit anywhere. but when I paused by your words I felt understood finally. I need to pause more often.

[h d e rushin]

I miss you.......dana

[Emily B]

I am here . . . for so many more years :) life will adjust itelf soon

[W.k.kortas]

There is significant breadth here--the piece is cutting a very wide swath, but it's alos personal, converstational. A piece like this, if it is not handled with skill, can degenerate into name dropping silliness, something in the line of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" (which should have been burned), but you have sculpted this just so until it is, as the wise jacob notes, something special.

[h d e rushin]

I want to write poems wk, like August Wilson wrote plays. Where the characters, even those
of little significance, talk to each other. Both conversational and communal. Kinda like what you do.......thanks my friend..dana

[jacob erin-cilberto]

this is something special...Ted certainly ain't talking...if he does we will slap his face...

suicide was the giant croc that ate the great white shark of life that was gnawing on sylvia...

and there is beauty that just gets bashed...people meaning well and then getting scandalized...maybe michael couldn't take it anymore...many of us feel the same way...

and Camelot...which ended so tragically in Zapruder style...beauty again blown apart...

the kingdom smashed...Violence does need to be swallowed...i just hope when it is we can keep it down...

we have had enough of hate spewing out like vomit.

a very thoughtful write...it's in fragments, but so is life...and getting more fragmented.

[h d e rushin]

I knew you would catch that part Jacob, considering how dear the Plath subject is to your own
thinking. Thanks for those kind words my friend...dana

[Siegfried]

Bits and pieces of tantalizing moments. This is a very good start on something special.