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I'm Just Not Interested


by Darryl Price


in making your sad blown apart hearts rise up and squeeze out the kindness juices ever so sweetly anymore. Tried

that. Didn't work out too well, not for me, wasn't a BIG time of waste, 

but did eat up some important wee hours left to just simply

be floating about in my garden with the greenest of nice faint folk at hand. I've come to the

 

conclusion you should never do more than enjoy the true time just the 

way it is. Just grab a hungry lungful and an bashful eyefull

and go about your own small business plan, which I suppose is to eventually 

leap over the garden walls and run like hell towards the unknown worlds. We kicked ourselves out. That's

 

what we do the best. Let all the denizens stay exactly 

where they are—you'll meet more and plenty. Only a fool would

look up at the stars and wonder why we are

still here all alone.  I've got to say I believe in

 

something quite tangible, so why not this mental buzzing and inky pathway set down here before you? It's your own table spread before you as much as mine.It's as

good as any cloud for containing a bunch of rainyday

dreams to come, and who knows it may even divide and

provide an incredible slide show for all the kiddies? Nah, I mean

 

that's just way too cynical, even for me. You can have

your monuments to fearful heavens. That's never worked out for me 

except to make me aware of the loveliness of bells,

the sadness of angels, and the wretchedness of most people.

 

Why are all the corners of the logged in world full of

little old ladies polishing everything into a slippery mess?The good old 

point, the point that can't be gotten to so easily because

it lands where it lands, and that's a different throw

 

each time you make it I'm afraid-no matter how good you are.  That's why you don't aim. It's pointless. You

just bring the two colliding world's heads together and bite deeply into 

the oncoming spark with all the gusto you can muster. What happens next? You are far-flung into a

freefall, where you will either right yourself or feel like

 

your arms are melting off on a runaway speed dial whip of wind. Your father cannot save you then 

from such a glorious  height. Only you can save you. That's

the lonely flare on your own skin cells you'll be remembering. It's telling you right now 

that another piece is either gone or coming back home

 

again to complete your kit as you become your own journey.

You're it. People know all this one way or another.

They're not fooled by books. They just don't have the

heart left for it half the time because they've already had

 

their own hearts eaten away in chunks by invisible wolves. Amazing

how much of a missing song title will return to you in the many sad 

days to come, if you truly want it to, but you

have to wish for it with your whole life at stake or it simply won't speak up any louder than as a small whisper, 

 

refusing to self-manifest as more than a few quickly blown notes

to the winds of time when you aren't looking directly at it. You will force yourself to

live again on purpose. Rise up again on purpose. And again. And again. And again.

And again. And again. Until you have fulfilled the ultimate

 

breathing at last to the sounding out of the life majestic living directly inside of you the whole time a note like no other and yet familiar.And now

we come once more to yet another ending of one

thing and the beginning of quite another for the both of us. You are going

on from here to breach another shored up doorstep to the ultimate end zone, kill

 

another day with kindness or not, mold another soft hour to your bidding, add another ice cream cone to the eternal breakdown of civilization,

another beached whale tied to the bricked wall, another city smothering in its own churning filth,

another voice above the blinding din of crashing metal monstrosities, another after another after another. You'll find yourself either roughly 

shoved up flat against the tallest glass around or slipped just slightly under it. Everything torn

 

out or worn away or simply gone to make the

road stretching so far in front of you that you

can't imagine where it ever stops, how you'll even get there from here, 

but there it is, and here you are, like always.

 

 

 

Bonus material: a draft

 

 

They didn't know you could still exist like that

from just this new morning,can't believe with their

own two eyes that you've managed among them for

even one more same day. Nobody's just a

girl anymore. Maybe once upon a time

they could teach you their scare stories while baking

you up a gooey chocolate pie,but you

taught yourself how to read the good ones on your

lonely own time, now you know how to find that much more

interesting kingdom in your own secret

voice,and like the miracle that it is,you're

quite able to share its doorway with many

hungry others anytime you choose. They are

surely going to have to spend a lot of

crunch time convincing you otherwise, but they'll

try, they'll try. It isn't that they don't want you

to be full of your own magic,or to use

that gold dust to fly,but only that they want

your rare laughter to themselves for as long as

humanely possible. It's an old way ritual,

a first dance. You choose affection. No

matter what they say,it's always your best choice.

If they respected you they'd see it in a

New Moon minute.They chose a more physical

manifestation of happiness, one that

belongs more in a museum than in a

ratty old backpack filled with childhood's playful

medicines. But why am I telling you all

this stupid stuff? Because right now you are the

one red button everyone has their hands on,

press hard enough and you'll disappear forever

into whatever life you fall into

as you slowly descend. Some love you for yourself,

but only because you are beautiful.

Such an ugly word. It doesn't mean you. It

means your time has come. Your essence is in the

world at last. Even you will abandon that

clothesline life for a walk into the nearest

unknown just to drop out the door of your own

free fall. Please remember to carry with you

your one favorite Beatle record and some

rubber bands and maybe a poem or two

about wild horses and islands that you have

already memorized but still love to read.

BONUS STUFF:

Think

by Darryl Price


There is a perfectly fitting ghost that is

your rightful place in this world. The sore problem

being that you can't fully step into that

comfortable cartoon space until you're quite

done working it out with this more mundane one.

Still it's a strange room of remembrances with

your one name carved on its door like an exit

sign. It does you no good to go to the church

after the recent fact. There's no comfort in

cowering in fearful hope all over again.

All ships sink. All angels have hearts of stone,

unless you become one yourself and change the

celestial rules. I like that idea.

Let's keep it in mind like a dream ace, like

the ultimate feeling. You've got to present

your ghost to the new, larger host, as is. Maybe

you'll come back, but I doubt it. More likely

you'll never leave us at all, not in the holy

way you're thinking about. So what's that exactly steer

us with? Like any other obvious choice,

the present body in motion I presume. You don't have

to think about the cliffs or the rocks or the

numbing coldness of the water, the breathless,

last supper of liquid air, because it doesn't

matter to that minute. Here is where you'll

find poetry. Here is where you'll tingle to

the touch. And here is where I see you every

bit as enchanting as any tale of any

miracle sent to save us from our own

petty boredoms and ugly, violent crimes.

Here there are treetops aplenty. What grows

over there? Here, at least, I see your bright face,

every reason for each new beginning day.

Mr. Poetry


happily lived alone in his full blown head like it was an

assigned bunk in a nuclear yellow submarine. It was there that he

sought out any true friendships with this otherwise truly given life. To

be completely accurate, he was a dreamer by day and an animal

actor by night, and in between these two sun-charged extremes he could

be found scribbling on various flat or folded surfaces of the physical

world his little marching words of love for love's sake. He was

a brown man in disposition and a green man in demeanor and

a blue man while driving and listening to the classical radio station.

He thought for sure that everybody else was experiencing the same shift

in cloudy rainbows on a regular basis that he was, but naturally

no one knew exactly how to tell him otherwise. They assumed he

would find out sooner or later just who his predators were and

who his friends were busy being at the same time. He reminded

them of a friendly bug. They hoped nobody wanted to squash him.

One thing Mr. Poetry liked very much in his lifetime was all

butterflies, not that he wanted to be one, or even like one,

but that he wanted to befriend them always for some deeply ringing

reason. He sought no answers for this particular desire because he thought

none required. He liked them and they liked and accepted him. This

all started to happen quite naturally when he was around five years

old or younger. He would very simply walk right up to one

sitting spread-winged on a flower or bright purple bush and tell it

to jump onto his straightened finger, it would do it, just like

that. He could then carefully bring it up to his nose and

look at it all he wanted. When he was done looking at

its shape and notating every colorful flashing scale to his brain cells,

he would thankfully tell it to fly away, it would. Done, simple

as that. But of course relationships do ever change over time and

so did Mr. Poetry's with his friends, the summer's many yellow and

orange and blue and red and brown butterflies. They began to fly

into his dreams and stay there with him, even on winter's loud

runner's breaths, you might say. At first he thought nothing about this,

what's the big deal? He liked them and they accepted him. So

what was the harm in letting them flutter a little longer inside

his memory if they wanted to? They were welcomed to fly along

any time. He enjoyed their peaceful, playful company and always had. Mister

Poetry thought nothing about his ability to make friends with these kinds

of woodland creatures, it was simply a matter of presenting a real

non-threatening presence to their antennas through a vivid imagining of constant goodwill.

No big. Anybody could do it with a little conscious and consistent

editing practice. One day while our Mr. Poetry was lost running around

in a little jag of daydreaming splendor one of these butterflies, a

tiny blue azure fellow with black and white stripes running up and

down his feelers like some kind of Tim Burton barbershop pole prop,

spoke to him through the hairs on his arm, saying. “ We'd very

much like to ask you to write something down for us, will

you do this?” Of course, my friends, of course, Mr. Poetry answered

through his wet eyelashes, you know I am honored to hear your

actual vertebrates. He died with all of this leading up to that

mythical paragraph added in a quick dark ink scribble to the end

of his will in hand, but for you, dear reader, we shall

know the last half of his understanding together. Here is what: You

think us as like grass, but we are witnesses to the day.

You want to build your homes in our homes, but we welcome

you. There's still plenty of room in eternity. We shrink because we

will. We'll always fit the world. What we are doing is our

duty, what we are being is our prayer. You think you have

to dance alone to find your one true love, but it's the

dance that is the one, dancer is present everywhere, making things happen...

 

 

   

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