AND THE REASON AGAIN WAS

After a twenty two hour day
he fell from his steeple tree.
While the monkey people
around him
loud and crass
jumped from limb to limb
looking for a better position
to see his crash.

Bud sat lotus in his river of peace
looking for some sleep
a bit of rest, a little release,
while the scared crow people
around him
swam from shore to shore
hoping less and less
equaled more and more.



It was an interesting moment in the darkness. Not the poetic darkness of the soul, but the darkness of a day gone on too long. Every day is time moving from sober to drunk to sober; light to dark to light or dark to light to dark depending on where it starts. I realized something about myself that made me cringe in the wee hours. I am bored with me.

Knuckle head one and knuckle head two (in no specific order) were telling me of an adventure they took on a whim after we parted company the other day. It was not really an odd trip into heart pounding adrenalin rush hours. Just a typical sort of “hey, there’s this place I heard of let’s go find it” sort of adventure.

I was thinking of their little trip into places they really shouldn’t have gone but went anyway and tried to despise them for their youth and bravado. I couldn’t muster it up though. At one time I would have done the same thing without care or thought for the consequences. How do you despise your own history when it led you to the place of being fat, dumb and happy? None the less this morning I am bored with me.

I am bored with having no real desire to see more than I have already seen. I am tired before the day starts. Not the bone weary tired from lack of rest but the tired of too much resting on the past. I am bored with the same 500 songs coming up on rotation in my media player when there are 5000 tunes loaded into it. Occasionally a different one will pop up but when it does, I barely notice it. Shit!

The writing, the doing of it was an adventure, until the day I realized that I can write. Now I am pretty well bored with it, which on reflection probably stifles the juices that make the writing worth reading. Once upon a time I used to love to drive, just take my free time and go. Point the car in a direction that afforded me at least 10 days worth of space to move out in. Stop for gas every three hundred miles and sample the food that was near by and go to somewhere else. Now I drive a minivan for the love of Pete. And I’m not even a soccer mom.

I realize that after 15 surgeries over the years which left me with as much metal and electronics in my body as RoboCop that I need to necessarily redefine adventure. But except for being blind in one eye, a diabetic shooting insulin, and having seven fused and caged vertebrae, none of which I consider a detriment. I am healthy enough to have an adventure of some kind, just too bored to look for it, and once found, accomplish it.

I could rail against the machine that is the life, which retired me too soon and allowed me to become somewhat complacent and sedentary but then, what the fuck good would that do? I’d still be sedentary and complacent afterward. I’ve been fortunate enough to see and do so much more than that fat kid ever daydreamed of when he sat in a window seat in elementary school day dreaming of the life ahead. But damn, I have at least forty or fifty years left in me and I am bored at this mid-point. I am not looking for you to tell me what would be an adventure, because that would be your adventure, not necessarily mine.

Right now my idea of adventure would be to gain the ability to hit the I key at the same time as the shift key so I wouldn’t have to constantly backspace and capitalize the i. Must use what rules of English I do know, you know. God how boring I have become to me.

I am aware that this sounds like depressive prose but it isn’t, it’s simply boring. *sigh*

SWIM MIND DESTITUTE ON THE SABBATH

THE SABBATH

It is Sabbath. I should rest. I should rest from the bone wearying tragedy of the first six days. I should bow my body and bend my knee towards a Mecca I have only a desire to travel to but will never know.
 

It is Sabbath and I should rest. I should beg and weep tears for the parsimony of thought in the first six days. I should bend and sway and re-utter prayer words in mesmerizing repetition facing a wall full of holes I easily fall into and am swallowed by.

It is Sabbath I should rest. I should repent of the hell bound horror of my sins of the first six days and raise my arms to the sky weeping in the glory of an unknown god selling forgiveness for a donation and spiritual sounding sigh.

It is Sabbath. I should rest. I should sleep in. Hypocrisy was never my religion anyway.

11-08-09

DESTITUTE

And when my freedom fails

I will go to live among them

remanded in the alley’s,

the underpasses,

the mental wards,

the jails.

And knowing that it is the numbers

in a closed account

dictating my societal worth

that allowed my independence to prevail.

Though there are some hidden among the lost

who never are able to count the cost of liberty lost.

I am not one of them.

11-08-09

DORSAL FIN

Lone man,

singularly bred,

swims easily in pod

of ocean born dolphins.

Praised for the ability to swim,

the truth he held close in his head,

he simply knew how to hang tight

the stabilizing dorsal fin.

It was, he knew,

the best that he,

or any one,

could do.

11-08-09

HIDDEN WITHIN

Put the blinders on your eyes
refuse, refuse
to see the proof.
Burden is the weight of freight
hiding inside the truth.

Give in, give in
open up your eyes
there is no greater weight
than the proof hidden in the truth.

I see, I see
the blind one said to me
you are wrong and wrong
living most erroneous egregiously.

You dare, you dare,
to care, to care
the way is where from here?

We’re lost, we’re lost
our sanity’s the cost
of blinders on the eyes
unable to see the proof
hidden in the truth.

11-7-09

WE OUR LIFE BOAT

In the tempest of sadness
where the tears flow
without condition or qualification
I found the raft of hands
that come unbidden.

They reach and stretch
call me to them
to grab me
haul me aboard
the ever overcrowded ketch.

Always afloat on the seas of sadness
“come aboard, come aboard
there is always room for one more,”
just one more
always one more
overcome in the sea of tears
cried not for the drowned
but the drowning,
always room for one more.

I can’t be grateful for much
but I am grateful for a small
well crowded boat
with more than a few
that weathers every storm.
A bobbing boat named
The We, The Me, The You.

11-07-09

NONCONTIGUOUS THEME POETRY

21st CENTURY AESTHETES

Coffee bars and whiskey jars,
chocolate bars and jelly stars,
this is the dream they want us
to work towards, to believe in.
I never could find a ticket
much less get on or in
that mass transit bus
to ride along with that mass mess o lies.
My dreams go much further
than that end of those lines
of overly processed
high fat, and fructose funded carbs.

There is no need within me
on their life opined to be dependant
on the false saccharin saccharine
promises delivered with sweetly angry
lying tongues intended
to turn the mass offended
from the natural sucrose and glucose
of the sweeter moonshine truth.

Using a diatribe of lies given from
broadcast mass studios warm and cozy to
dead in the head zombie
belladonna flowerers
barely living warm while they wait to die,
under a wintry bitter cold blue sky,
at a bus stop long ago torn away
from a grasp that never really strives
to understand why
coffee bars and whiskey jars,
candy bars and jelly stars
are the tricksters treats not ways of lives.

11-6-09

THE POWER OF A GUN

Is it the bullet or the fun

in killing that we deem

to be the power of a gun?

Is the fear evoked or

the screaming running provoked

that give us our love

for the power of a gun?

I wonder what Hemingway

or Thompson would say

was the pleasure

given and found in gun play?

11-6-09

NOT WAITING IN LINE

In a line of lovers

I find you right in front of me.

We can cut ourselves away

from the love line

and form our own somewhere else,

around the corner,
down the block perhaps.

Two alone together

do not constitute

a line of any kind.

11-06-09

LIVING WITH MEMORY

SILENCE BETWEEN THE SOUND
In the silence of the spaces
between the music
my mind runs to places
often visited,
the far, the near,
the abhorrent, the dear.

I wait for a new sound to come carry me away
then back to the place I wait to decide
which direction the music of my life will flow.
There is no hurry though
for the sound will soon begin again
and movement will proceed in
syncopate rhythm simply found
with a new beat measured
in the silences between the sound.

11-5-09

ONCE BURNED

Ashes on my fingertips

point to the charred distance between us

all we had ever been

the landscape fields of times long passed

still burned unlivable and bare.

All that time since the fires

and I still refuse to return there,

knowing that no call can ever rise

from the lost horizons of the time

when we were not so young,

but too young,

to know much more

than the heat of two bodies

lost in the fever dance done for lust

not the slow tango of romance.

11-05-09

LIVING WITH MEMORY

Choosing between the days

when there was no beauty

but great battles

with great promise

from each harebrained audacity

and

the moments of wondrous artistry

with the great calm in the awe thereof.

I will choose the swift paced hours

where no clock could measure time

with its irritating ticking.

I needed nothing to tell me the epochal era

was drawing ever shorter buckets

from a well going swiftly dry.

I had no need, nor desire to know.

 

Life was endless in those days

and I lived it in myriad color filled hazes.

Traveling fast, rushing ahead without wit

had its own pleasurable benefits.

And when the gray upon my beard

began to appear I saw and understood

and found that a life lived rough

was not necessarily well lived;

only more fun.

11-5-09

WHY GOD*

I did it. Whatever is wrong, I did it. My fault, mea culpa, oops, the blame is mine. I have these shoulders and they can carry the weight, so what ever it is, I did it. That last earthquake, hurricane and tsunami? Yes sir and ma’am my fault not the earths grinding plates, and wind born weather but mine. Don’t forget the collapse of your savings, loss of your wealth gone to retirement without you. My fault, mea culpa, oops, the blame is mine. Oh yeah and all those wars from the dawn of time to now, eeeyup those are my fault too. I suppose you’re correct I just love the sight of blood being drunk in huge gulps by the earth. My fault, mea culpa, oops, the blame is mine. While I am at it let me take on the responsibility for every death by death as well, sickness, hit and run car incidents, old age, yeah old age that one is mine too and everything else that you can think of and are troubled by. My fault, mea culpa, oops, the blame is mine. Murder, assault, knife fights, gang wars and civil revolts, those are mine too I did my all, my fault, my fault, mea culpa, oops, the blame is mine. Losing a house, a car, a spouse, a parent, a cousin, a who or whatever…yes that’s right I hate you all so much that it’s all my fault, mea culpa, oops, the blame is mine. That’s what you say when you ask why did you do this to me God?

*disclaimer
This work is solely the opinion of Mark Durfee and I, God, take no responsibility for the words herein.

11-4-09

HOPE NOT YET

I am at a loss for love in the world of tears and fears;
anger and love have no companion.

Burn my fingers with the hot flame
and let it extinguish between them.
When forced to choose between the pains of fire
I would rather scar my fingers a bit more
than watch the flames grow and burn untended.

I can douse my tips on my tongue
but the roaring raging thing
gets no comfort from a little spit.
The earth, scorched already,
is on fire again with the sincere false hope
that once the ground has cooled
all will be better for them that nest upon it.

The arsonist is simply taking a break while they plan
another burn and I see him waiting to strike his match.

11-04-09

DREAMLESS

I dreamed a dream last night

and you were in it.

I am of course lying,

I didn’t dream.

Honestly?

I slept in my usual

complete

dreamless

utterly without light,

black cave

separated momentarily from all life

and thoughts of it.

It is the only way I can get some rest.

11-04-09

NOW I SEE OLD DEMONS EXPOSED

Lost in the tracks of them that went before

I too late saw this road was not mine,

this found field of green

is not for me to walk upon

neath the unhurried stars.

“Back, back” all that is within me cries “go back.”

But the wind of time has swept the way back to nothing

and there is nowhere left to get back too.

“Move on, move on” the thing within me pushes

“move away from the foot prints any direction

but forward through the lone easy ground.”

I never needed companions

or footprints before

until I wanted them and

when I finally left the easy way

I saw the companions

had been there all along

waiting on the un-blazed trails

for me to walk with, not behind them.

11-4-09

MOTHERS SORROW

Give to me the fallen leaves

and save them from their fate

upon my back.

For when the branch was broken

it was not because

of their hanging weight.

Seasons of war fatigue come and go

but the storms that always blow

the bending breaking branches stay far longer

and a leaf, such a fragile thing, is easily taken from its branch.

Give me them fallen, to my heart and

let me enfold them within mine own loamy peat.

Let them rest, in violence no more,

and I will show them peace ‘neath the sacred hallowed ground

where their mothers come to, to love them again, again and, again.

11-3-09