"it's all energy and progress"

in memory of Shmoke-Sifted Heflander

It's  all energy and progress you said to me

when we first became friends, passing messages between us like

saliva does between new lovers. It was cold and platitudes

landed softly on our shoulders as if mystical incantations could

attach themselves to mythic prophecy. I said to myself,

not having held the sky still long enough in my bunk bed

as a child, that there are dreams clearly designed

to make the most masculine among us, a bottom. Drive

something deep in our tight, sleepless asses,  like some

lost and murderous train full of gold. That there would be

a Sputnik at all, i'm still baffled by, and everything else

extra terrestrial that followed. But kindness finds like kind

each time, even on an earth that twists on in the silver books

of yesterdays damnation. That whatever mental plectrum resonates

(he told me that at least one time he fell in love)

the lights in the dim hall will brighten. That even Don Fanucci (had he lived)

could witness that we could give our full attention to nothing else.

It was as if nothing else had ever been loved; as if nothing else

could ever be, so deeply. "It's all energy and progress"

that rambles thru  the books in my attic like roaches clinging,

forever clinging

to our unrequited last words. "There are people in my family that won't

speak to me because of my choices", he would say. Which

makes me even more grateful for my horribleness. But I believe

in the spirally, taurotragus-ness of the blues. What I mean is that

after you decide you've had enough, nothing really drags you back, wild animal.

Perhaps John, nothing can really drag another's spine anywhere.

And it got me thinking about Tiresias from myth, and how a spiteful Hera can

zap you into a slave woman and not even another Zeus can zap you back.

Then I thought of how blind we are to being transformed.

Reviews

[Frank]

H D E
it is a bit of a ramble, split it up into stanzas so we can focus?

End with a moral?

Instruct us, not just your endless feelings?


Turn into a poem, like you usually do


Frank. :)

[h d e rushin]

thanks frank for stopping in to review. Just an aside though, John was a writer on this site and we use to embrace each other with ideas about form and structure almost every day. He was the first writer I met here who thought, as I do, that the morphology of poetry is as individual as
eye color or hair texture. You can wear colored contact lenses and get a perm but the fact remains that if form is what anything poetic is about, then the spirit of is it's slave. . Don't get me wrong my friend, I certainly understand what your saying. But I respectfully disagree and any poetry that ends with morality only is what nursery rhymes are for...
John, who had had enough of life (and morality) decided to kill himself at the end of 2013. This poem is how we messaged one another; how we talked about poetry almost everyday until one day, the messages stopped. I appreciate your interest in my poems and again, thank you. But I have to go and feed the dog. The one I haven't brought home the murderous kennel yet....love always...dana

[Frank]

OK, thanks for explanation. Love

[jacob erin-cilberto]

there is energy and progress and some say if we are not caught up in it, we are backwards, living in the stone age...but that is who I am, and I am satisfied with that...and nothing can drag me forward...

I have had enough of being what others think I should be...I am me...and totally okay with my "horribleness"---

there is always that drive of some to change, to find some new way of doing things, just for the sake of...when the old way was just fine.

I want to go back to my bunk bed, and will , thank you very much.

[h d e rushin]

thank you brother...this is from a message he sent to me after a poem I totally didn't
understand. But it's about principle, always about principle my friend. All a poet can stand on
is principle...thanks for that insight my friend....dana

[longlivenate]

I love it :) the imagery is amazing.

[h d e rushin]

thank you longlivenate for stopping by to visit......much appreciated...dana