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Against the V(2.0)(revised)


by Darryl Price


There are simply no more words around me quite full enough yet to sort of cancel out
these more than emptied ones. I'm sorry. There might be some forever fields left of
crowded purple flowers if you look hard enough but no mountain's majesty
to compare them with or to and thus no fresh
brightly lit memories to be planted as always on the anew only for you, my love.
They'll cling to the revolving groundswells anyways I suppose ,
tossing and churning like one big opening
mouth ,chomping and chewing everything
in existence into a peeled
and empty waste-land, bad-ass smelling perfume.You're
so far away from what I'm feeling 

right now that I'm only vaguely aware
of a dot shrinking somewhere in
the vicinity of my lost dreamland's scraped forehead .
I might have probably only been resting my hot face on my darkened desk all the day long 
anyway. I can only remember
bits and pieces of my life before this.
The crunch of an apple. The wet of
a coat. The wind of a lake.So once
again I am like a lost & knackered toy
soldier (all alone) in an unfamiliar
world that maybe once upon
a short time we used to breathe about  

in, giving oxygen its northern
pathway to the stars, or so I am being
told by shadow after terrible, mumbling, grumbling
shadow. Nothing wants to ever hold
me close like that again. I'm dropped through the through, 
every sky I piece across, shot open,
colorless,empty and rolling easily off even
the greenest of bright blades! I don't move
much from this bottom layer as I will often
wade and disappear and reappear
among other things. The books only give
me their hunched and cold shoulders now. None will  

look me in the one good eye. We used to be
such close friends. They hold their words gathered
in their tummy pages against the
hungry burglar in my eye.Each trapped
window warns me not to try and surface
from the days but I cannot muster
even a middle finger because
I am made of sedimentary
particles and cannot rise at all
unless stirred.Where I am going there
are no curious fish to create life-
giving (many) ripples against such open vastness.




Bonus stuff:



Escape is Only Another Door You Don't Want to Open


by Darryl Price


You are inspiration in the golden alone moment of your own feeble
attempts to shrink. The world follows you down, becomes the next world. Deep is 
just a tunnel. It deposits you somewhere, but unless you accept the 
place as where you are meant to be nothing will give you peace in
this journey. It doesn't mean anything. Heart is always where you will find
all the potential to continue, but the stars are in the acceptance your own 

mind allows you to let go of. You cannot just believe in 
what you see. Do you want to sleep or not? The excitement has to
end sometime, but the experience never does because it is a struggle between
the forgotten and the almost here. But again, relax, don't fight with everything
all the time. Walk and be the walk. Music has its own 
rivers to follow. It doesn't desert you, it just meets you where you least 

expect it. Just because you hear, it doesn't mean you are listening. 
Wisdom is of no blame, no doubt. This gift, knowing it exists as you,
do you pretend it is just something in a pretty box and therefore 
a burden you must carry around with you for the rest of your life,
or let it be? You will realize there is nowhere it can go 
that you are not waiting. There is nowhere you are waiting that it cannot

find. But that is up to the two of you. No one can 
do it for you. We can celebrate heaven or hell together, but only if
you are willing to forgo all conclusions as to the outcome. Otherwise
you will never really care. Not about yourself or any others. Yesterday is
today. I think about you. I do not remember you. It is not that 
empty anymore. It never was anything less than shimmering, flickering with all that love. 



4 Bonus poems:



Soft Bird (Hit Hard to the Ground)

by Darryl Price


We walk in a thrilling dream manufactured 
by star-dusted atoms and talk on a 
phone made of many more lovesick dreams 
than fingers, move as if a dream 
of someone's lonlely rock and roll. I'd 
kiss you, but you are not there. 
That has never been the problem before, but

things change, even as they remain where 
they are. That is the big mystery they 
are so afraid of. It gets so 
boring watching their faces melt the harder 
they grind against knowing when to let 
go. The perfect dull moment dies in 

your hand like a bird hit by 
a car. It has never sounded funny to 
me, by the way. Men are cruel, 
women are mean. How do you get 
away from all that petty nonsense? I
do not know. Just choose and go I 
suppose. Anything is better than pretending to stay.

I like your plumage, but it does not 
make me change my mind. I want 
you to stop talking just to be 
heard. It is ruffling a lot of feathers 
you do not want to be ruffled. That is
not an infringement upon your freedom so 
much as it is a warning not 

to take yourself so seriously that you 
cannot laugh in the mirror. Do not be 
an evil queen. It does not suit 
you. Remember, you danced when others walked. 
It does not matter, your reason. That was 
you being you. That is why so many 
muscians laid their guitars at your feet.

You made them want the real thing. 
What do I want? Your trust. But 
that is just a poet's dream. And now
it is too late because you have put 
things into motion that cannot be turned 
around without harming some innocent animal at
your feet. I simply will not be party 

to it. But here I am anyway, 
trying my best to say I will miss 
you, without messing it up. Too late. 
But I guess that is the point. We 
do not get to go back and do 
it all over again. This is the 
photograph we made, they will judge us by.




A Postcolonial Flush Without Milk

by Darryl Price


"Wake up and ache for your life."--Natalie Diaz

We are never talking about some other 
lost place in time, there is no other place, 
just because the costumes have changed into 
long years of humiliation and sad 
suffering at the hot iron forged hands of 
swarms of robot soldiers. They learn to shoot 
first because shooting death is how they think. 
Shooting is how they love and hate. But it 
is the heart that matters most when you are 
talking about the brain's ability 

to think on the spot, when you are training 
it to finally let go of, and quit 
clinging to, all that foreign junk carelessly 
dumped into its river by unscrupulous 
business men. Its clanking refusal 
to cooperate either way is 
nothing new. We are mostly made of strong 
subatomic wires and unless they are 
gathered together properly they will 
misfire in all directions at once and 

cause harm to all beings everywhere. We 
do not have the luxury to look far. The 
browning damaged fruit says it all. Green hills 
with their arms and legs missing. Birds left to 
bleed out upsidedown. Skies filled with toilet 
paper and thrown out food by the busload. 
There is no air, stop trying to breathe it.
That is what we are fighting for above 
your own fight. In the middle of your own
parallel courageous fight to be heard 

and seen and listened to. That is the course 
set by our own standard above the sharp 
embarrassing pointing of centuries 
old fingers to the contrary. The next 
poets do not stop coming up the hill.
The new dancers do not stop twirling in 
the bombed out squares of the cities. Gender
warriors will not refuse love as love.
So forgive me if I sound out of time,
but a man must do what a man must do

in the time he has. This is not a
dress rehearsal. There is no other chance
to change your mind. I'm sorry if you cannot
see me in your arms before I die, but
that is not my problem. The world is counting
on us. The oceans are full of other 
minds. The forest floors are littered with them.
The stars have risen to the surface for
now inviting us to walk across the
universe. We must make the difference.   



Here

by Darryl Price


"And when there's breathing in your ear
You put your faith in all you hear"
--Todd Rundgren


I come here just waiting for stars. I come here
waving goodbye. I come here not knowing if
I will find you. I come shining my own
light. I come here listening for soft footsteps.

I come here chasing you through the forest, like
a luminous fleet like creature. I come here, 
not to figure anything out, but seeking
freedom. I come here to breathe. I come here to    

give love its due. To know my empty feelings.
I come here in a sporting spirit, but you
do it better than me. I come here, the skies
are washed out, and I wake into a step backward.  

It can all be such a drag. Come up slowly
hoping for some other outcome. I come here,
it was nothing, asking what do you want, what 
do you need from me? I come here already

gone, in some sense it is another rainy day.
I come here to offer whatever it is
that I can. I come here, but I never get 
to stay that way like all of you. I fall down.

I do not know what you're after. I come here to
make peace with being together, but you will 
not take me alive forever. I come here
one more time to begin to dream. On your own,

but ready to have to sing again, it gets 
so lonely, and yes there is a lot of room out 
there for it. I come here seeking no holy 
redemption I have not self-realized. That 

ship has sailed off into its own sunset  Here
I come to ask you, do you love me, too? You are
taking an awful long time to answer and that
is the answer. I come here often. I guess 

I'll see you around the universe. I come 
of my own free will here because it is home. Leave
you these words everywhere because we became 
friends. And, maybe you will make something more fun 

out of  them than I ever could. Give it a 
nice big try for me, will you? I come here in
my own wagon. I come here, a little rock 
on a mountain, but how fortunate his place.   




Blah Blah Blah to you, Too

by Darryl Price


When the wind blows you have the rare chance to listen 
into a million directions at once. It is a 
huge amount of fragile wavering window panes 
to choose your road from. Listening, itself, can be 
refracted into its own fun time stations. Too 
little time for us all. That's why it is good to know 

yourself, or at least take better care of yourself. 
Otherwise you might get blown away by something 
that is too loud or just too close to the delicate 
grinding bone to completely ignore, and you could 
still lose your comfortable sense of balance in 
the rumored process. But the music can bring you 

back to life, too. It can rescue you back into 
being yourself, if you will let it, and you choose it 
wisely. Listening wisely might actually 
be the best choice of all, to be made in such a 
deceiving circumstance as the trying one we 
all currently find ourselves mired up in, where bad 

people make bad things happen to good people. But 
that takes courage and humility to smash, and 
empathy and freedom to escape. Anything 
can be used to torture you in the wrong hands, and 
in the wrong ears. Or you could just build yourself a 
tiny blue boat and quietly sail away. Yeah. 

Away is a destination unto itself. 
It makes its own music as it goes. And who knows 
where the wind blows? Does it matter? Give me a chance
to tunnel my way to you, will you? It matters
to me. I don't know about the other fellows
hiding in the weary forest for who knows what 

to happen. I'm sorry for things we said. Away
is hard. It has left me cold, damp and bereft. I 
didn't mean to be unkind. You should know that, and 
not return the favor. We have a beautiful 
music between the lines that I have tried over and 
over to forget. But it backlights every page.






 

 

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