Thursday, July 12, 2012

Journal 49 - Unbreakable Bricks and Dirty Kleenex


Searching for the right phrase the way a cat searches
for birds and mice has left me chewing on too many
geriatric bones, or worse - adolescent pre-mature
driftwood of a rat's soggy bone. Images are not like
kites on a windy day, but sailboats in the middle
of the harbor when all the flags in the city droop
down like wet towels on a clothesline. Sometimes I
feel spent like a deflated plastic bag of wine separated
from its barrel and its box, crumpled and thrown in a
bathroom trash-can, stuck with Q-tips, dirty Kleenex and
make-up caked cotton balls. Others I feel more like the
painting on the wall everyone stares at and talks
seriously about, tossing out compliments because they think
they're supposed to, but never really taking the time to
understand or penetrate. Like a painting I can't say or offer
loads of help - silent and amenable to whatever they say.
Would I were a weather-vane or a gentleman's watch,
a set of speakers or a stringed instrument of oily
fingertips. I hear the wind and the rain outside
kneading the burnt summer street; leaves in the wind
and leaves in the street swirl inside my swollen head
concocting deprecated memories of my distant-
sounding childhood, where rains can be the solution
and the problem to our farmer's lives and our athlete's
dreams. Athletes can withstand the deluge, as can their
muddy fields. I am more like the soybeans, corn and
cotton - the deluge overwhelms me until I cough up water
and untimely born seeds of half-duplex thought. There
are boards nailed up blocking the windows of my soul
like and abandoned 2-story house in the Mississippi
delta. I think I'm the little piggy who built his
house of of sticks' ti's said that God is the one
who built his house out of bricks - imperishable and
unchipped. But alas, I haven't seen this beautiful
house of unbreakable bricks; I wonder if I would
recognize it if I did. I want to have eyes to see
and ears to hear but all I see are the boats at the
yacht club and the wind in the leaves; the life I'm
taught is behind it is as plain as the new moon...


5.12.09

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