PDF

Here is the thing. No one knows what it (actually) represents


by Darryl Price



 
beyond knowing that when it hits you, you've been very much run
over, and flattened like a stack of cardboard pancakes. I've seen it all before, and it works all right I guess. But my
oh my, my, my oh thank you Jesus, to the holy H, and also to the disarmed body of Christ in Heaven's vestibule T-- I'm sorry they hurt you--the very sad, sad, sad old heartache,
surrounding the echoing crash it makes is like a vastly expanding ocean, within another vastly expanding
ocean, maybe forever, oceans upon oceans, surrounded by an ever empty-looking desert of pouring tons of sand. You know
 
that can't be perfectly real, not in that closed off of an environment. No way. One feels tiny in
comparison. All kinds of people get there in a grotesque parade of crazily fashioned funeral 
boats, I suppose, but only a very few can ever stay awake. George Harrison, maybe. They don't even
have to turn around and head back to sea, out of a total
lack of imagination, like the rest of us. They just all of a sudden find
themselves alone again, out to the chop, chop chopping waves of time, like a bunch of migrating seals. Bunched up, and floating for absolute fun. A grand design won't
 
save you from the oncoming shock of coldness coming along either, by the way. You're the only one
that kind of thinking impresses, in the end. Sink or
swim, you'll have to learn to read the stars and
trust in something you can't even imagine is there, swimming just below
your legs, to survive through the night. Then they'll spend the
 
rest of their ticking time bomb lives remembering a dream to anyone who
will listen. I saw what I saw. I swear. It's
true. Please, just listen. Just listen. Electricity pooled out of a
floor plug like softly glowing air from a pressurized but
leaking inner tube of wire, and then shimmered into pure nothingness right there before my own two
disbelieving eyes. Leaving no witnesses, and no wetness behind. Not even the aftermath
 
and ash one would expect from such an unusual fireworks display.
No, that's just not the it of it. I'm talking about the center
of your being. Well okay. That's numb and dumb. Nothing names itself
properly, I've noticed. I've already tried North and South. But back to the big room chart we so love to colorize and hang on our computer screens. No
dis-colorization happening here, of the already stained by years of shoes and feet rug beneath our still sleepy little heads. Just a newly minted
 
moon, dropped into the window frame, like a sticky old Mercury dime, trying to
melt its own way out. Sooner or later, it manages. You
wind up seeing it miles away from the previous
spot it was in. Is it trying to tell you
something about your own moony self? Soon enough you're forced to leave your
beds and see what waits for you just below the creaking of the stairs. He was there first. Thank God for just such small miracles in the good old neighborhood.
 
D.P.    020910




A Cloud of Feathers, as He Exploded

by Darryl Price


Everything changes into bursting colors before your eyes 

--but not really--to a completely

newly named monster in your head, altogether real and not 

so much like the same lumbering beast (often seen napping) 

through a long past room's frosty windowpane. You

only begin to see that other

foreign land of fleeting beauty or

say endlessly erupting fearful wandering beasts on

yet a newly clarified surface from

a different settled point of view as you

gain momentum running full speed at yourself. That gives

you strengths in the ever shifting air

to renew your faith in the oneness

of your own bottomless bit of the harsh sky's kingdom. Guests.Go on in. Just say hello.English's okay but music's a more universal given here. 

It's all in the constantly heating

 

up or slowing down of your golden brown

purposes. The TV trial is always 

within yourself to watch. As much as you might

want them to be there's nobody in

there with you. You're the whole shebang on

some level. It's your reflection that

crazily glares or glows back from you

on the surface of the pond. All lives

overlap the pictured stars above.

That's all. So you're bound to have blurry

ticks on the shining tocks of sometime, some bleeding

out of the important colors.So what? You can't imagine history. 

Understanding of any of this

doesn't change the facts of your atoms wanting to do the fiery atomic dance with someone else.

The real world goes on destroying itself

 

with a volatile hunger that can just 

never be truly satisfied. Not with a

simple bunch of decaying swaying bodies anyway, a fated

number of concluded years lie just ahead of us. You fly

yourself on out there now and stop whining. The short and the long of it 

are not so different that you can't name

them so in your anger if you wish. Doesn't work that way for us miners. 

Why go so much into it after it closes for repairs? When there's heartbreak

enough for everyone to go around?  Abundance

lies in the drooling as much as the

cool wind surfing. All that sunshine turns

into rain and all that rain gives a

thirsty skin its long awakening

stretch in the most silent nighttime. But the dreamer has still to keep

it together,little otter bear.

Forgiveness should be the path's surface you are always
drumming on. It is easy to say let's
make a war because anger is so quick to
strike its own blow for shadow land and build a fire between us and
those who do not follow our familiar way, but
to honor the living's a much harder and clearer picture to paint on your cheek.
It can begin with our words here,yes but it
will travel through all the worlds as our taken
actions there. Even our bodies will take
on the figure of your totem when
we least expect it. Do not bear the
awful burden of hatred even 
in your deepest medicine bag's crumbling corners. That's no power
to be rolling dice with brothers and sisters unless
you mean to sacrifice love's last beat to the blunt end of a very heavy hatchet.



There Is Still Some Old Magic Bean Dip


by Darryl Price



 

On the homesick tears thickening up in our 

sad eyes  like an uncertain country about to 

go to war like a glazed & sacred 

donut  On the urban pleasures we feed into 

like a nail head floating to the reflection 

in the mirror just like flaming wolf mouths

 

On the music you played on us like 

a trick something starting to dissolve like sharp 

ears bent toward the black puddles of just 

another day Or the broken glass that holds 

our drink like stopped sundowns another slightly wronged 

word on a stained tongue a star's unhinged 


hanging arms Like skin on the hand vanishing 

through one spoiled horizon after another like so 

many crashing tree trunks signaling which way the 

world goes berserk like blankets in the cold 

dying air or the thoughts we are constantly 

searching for over the mountains with their burning 


lights to retain and imprison like helpless & 

dumb fireflies or like guests slipping on glass 

boats where all the best girls sink like 

pink dolphins in love with the undulating color 

green like standing on one missing foot on 

the desolate number of times we attempt to 


feel something on the dust and rain quivering 

on the forgotten lips of our own lost 

and ruined together season the brown coffee stained 

poems painted on our kitchen-floor or the 

weight of an orange the peeled Saturday afternoons 

we shared alone like the madly barking winds 


at cool night how like this particularly harsh 

April might actually be ending for us now 





Bonus poem:



 The Last Time


we met you wanted to
be hungrily kissed in
the dark with a small moon
for your only pillow
and just stars for your billowing

nightgown. How am I
to go forward with so
much sweet chaos in my
mind? I am wrecked upon
your lips like a delirious

dilapidated
old sailor who embraces
the surrounding
sea like it's an arrow
through a sad and thirsty heart.

 


Endcap