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Life Without a Heart


by Darryl Price


isn't so hard to imagine if you can just squint through the minutes like a good McGoo, slog through the headline happy seasons and sleep at it most of the day. It only hurts real bad whenever you try to carry off a roaring laughter instead of a restless cough. No, that action in and of itself is a worn out piece of sadly 

closed down for good no good joke, heaped upon my own worn down soul, good for nothing useful that I can think of, empty as a run over paper cup, and certainly not for singing beautiful secrets into your garden's pretty flowered ears 

anymore. Nothing really makes me  laugh like everything still matters, not anymore.The odd thing is that single runaway tears still drop like suddenly, softly missing stars. I hear them splash into the rolling nothingness I can feel without you sometimes, so far and far away now like the wings of a couple of ancient bells on the necks of a Christmas mare.

Otherwise you know it's all pretty much the same awful sunlit stench life offers every time I wake to the tender slap of another unanswered dream's extinguishing smoke alarm. No new thing comes into view except the damned view:

 

Oh I do wish I did have something more red this time than more blue this time to

fling up into the silly air, like ribbons or neon string, only for you now, when all I can come up

with are chewed on memories that look remarkably 

like the threads of a once cherished

but now gone to seed favorite blanket of mine. I always

said I was against nostalgia

as a way of life, but I yearn, I do,

for a drink again of something utterly

new. I collected all these years of

these seashells for the garbage.And now once more I

cast them like dice at your old name. Let them

sink away, please, take them back, back into

the deepest part of everything, far from

where I sit with my emptiness, an old

silent writer with no words at all for love.




Bonus poem:



Some Water


by Darryl Price


If it all just doesn't matter, it still 
matters to me. I get the tired, hungry 
sediment. But I still care, that's all I'm 
saying, if you are a hurt being who 
for some reason needs me to care. Here, let's 
give them what they really want: the running 
colors of the disappearing sun was 
disappearing, too, into a mash of 
shiny new rivers, where suddenly waves 
collided into napping shores and sparked 

the beginning of another new old 
chapter, born again into nothing and 
also everything. Can you eat it, the 
pushing, shoving, elbowing fish asked each 
other. No, said the sprawling ball of roots, 
it's much too salty to do you good. Well, 
what about a small nibble anyway, 
said all the gathering field mice. We'll try 
it. We'll try it. Let us try it. Please. A 
cool satiated snake slithered by and
 
said grimly, you're all a bunch of ninnies. 
A snail looked on with both eyes and said, but 
it really is quite beautiful, isn't 
it. Yes, said a caterpillar, but the 
real best is yet to come. And that best was 
indeed coming, time after time, even 
when being interrupted by a thin 
and matted mangy fox, who proclaimed, thank 
you for setting this wonderful table 
on my behalf, I shall belch out my best 

gratitude at the appropriate time 
and place, as per usual. Everyone 
immediately dispersed, except for 
a huffing about frog who had made up 
an original song,an instant hit 
classic, about the whole affair and was 
determined to sing it, right then and there, 
in spite of the obvious fuzziest 
lurking danger. And so the story goes, 
night after night. Maybe with some new made

characters, maybe with the same old ones, 
memorizing their immortal lines, or 
forgetting their mortal cues, and causing 
a solid thumping  ruckus down among 
the oblivious cattails, who swing because 
they can, and always feel it deep down in 
their reed of  reeds, where it really takes on
a happy blue tint of its own, before 
closing time and the quiet sizzling sounds 
of riding silence grows ever louder.    


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