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My Mind Says It Wants to Forget Everything


by Darryl Price



you think it knows about getting us as far as we
have, to the here we are now boathouse where we can stop holding onto our world
weary chains so much. How else can I slap this thing into a new 

clay pot for you? All those things that are constantly
being remembered as true love by me are gone for
good and that part of me that even remembers them

is daily fragmenting into some kind of reconditioned paper row row row your boat lullaby.
I'm seriously beginning to think I might be running dangerously low
on the ink of the ages.Maybe that's just the

way it goes. You start missing tablets of vital information
so you start having several troubles getting from here all
the way over to there with any kind of real finesse or

comfortable ease.The picture changes.The picture changes. The picture changes. I don't know all about me yet. I don't want to know all about
you ever.Who am I to want that? That's three little mutations for you right there 

all in a crisp and plastic inch worm moving along kind of row... no, now it's a
pretty piping foursome singing along like another manufactured rock group on early black and white TV. See how quickly things do change on us? I'm
not here to write you of anything awesome I've only just discovered lately.I'm sure you'll feel everything

eventually without any help from me. Oh once upon a
time then maybe I thought I might actually help you to
get in touch with the living essences of say beauty's walking

tour visits without calling it a new or the old
memory kicking in. I'm talking about a real hand to
hold onto yours. Not a movie hand holding scene to longingly watch
 
on some big ultra screen version of reality. Not the flood of a novel's words popping out without an actual ending in sight.  
Not a strange message written on a hitchhiker's cardboard destination
sign, but real pungent bunches of freshly growing flowers slinging themselves about in the winds by

the side of the any road in your own sweet
imaginations. You could just put your own two trembling hands
through the poem's gauze and feel them all the way in if you

wanted , or just enjoy them freely. And then maybe you'd
pull yourself all the way inside, completely through at last and realize
that it's not a paid for magic that belongs to

you at all but the ability to think for yourself
and create a better world out of nothing but nothing. One that
is only partly made of dreaming. One that is surely

there for you to discover and explore according to your
own screwed up courage. One that is neither completely wild
nor polluted beyond poetry's help. I've written this same love soaked

letter to you out of what luck I've been able to
muster many times before but it sounds like a suicide now instead of just hello hello anybody in there 
again. That's simply because I'm a sad stick figure in the

latest chapter of my own mystery so far. I know a lot of things, sure, 
about how things work but I've been drowning in my
own words several times a day now more than ever it seems. When I've finally

been able to free myself from the need you've always
been gone away again. Surely my sad heart must look like a pin
cushion by now. A porcupine on a deserted stretch of

road looking for a leaf to curl-up under and sleep
tightly wound into a pointy ball until the darkness and
the night are finally become one long cloak. Then we'll rise again.







Bonus poems:



The Cloud and other stories

 

While out stealing the sun she'd added
a most wonderful child's
out of body cry against my so easily moved chest .
I never felt the betrayal despite the exhausted
limping paw of the kitchen clock
anywhere near willing to go ahahchooo. 

My sweet bird's quizzical banana-
eye then looking poor and
tender beneath the chewed iced kisses, reflects a sad
sorry strain of clumsy grown-

up living conditions-- all matched to prove her
jealous answering mind was

never clothed in a drink,now
and then,maybe,but naked
and pure like she was singing only to me through a lovely brown
paper bag. That selected loveliness,

meaningless, syllables of
empty disregard,sunstruck and always 

whispering,the full moon and some lazy stars,so often
terrorized,modernized,windy beyond taking a deep breath to relax,
and the wet swallowed up sky,unborn,an island the colors,  

of extreme urgencies,
great cascades of life's arts and
sciences,forsaken ,slime

encrusted, mysterious slips 
returned to faithless Sundays as if
white horses were galloping away from an expansive
ocean trail. Like anything being
exterminated.Like
the hours we boogied 

through the absences that kept
trying to break us from within;

nobody works at this half life better (she's hoping) than herself --
through love's wartime suffering
of secret eyelashes and
the bitter forking of beautiful garden paths.

I have an idea.I'll
draw for you this picture of

the dear dangerous monstrous aesthetic phenomenon and we'll listen for its response
together. Animals
dreaming. This might work. But
in the meantime I'm pretty sure you should go home without waking me up tonight.



A Coat for Your Hiding Place
 
There's something secret being said everytime
you look into the words I
write and smile back from wherever it is
you are. It's a language invented
by the faulty moments of giving
up on being made of such
 
distant mystery and disappears just as
quickly.This causes a strange pang
in the thoughts. But I would
surely know that sound of you
slipping down just about anywhere,anytime,
in spite of my many sloppy
 
heart beats. And because of that
I might hear you coming out
of a single drop of rain
racing into a million drops of more
rain like a revved up robin of some inexplicable kind.
It could be the splatter. It
 
could be the splash. The fall
itself. But I've noticed you often
hit the bulls-eye with uncanny accuracy.
I suppose I'm dented somewhere on
the inside by each and every
stride you intend to make. So there you
 
have it. All nice and simply put. A newly crumpled
portrait of the unwanted. Another day
in the flow of these few molecules. Here
are some things I can't help:
you are large enough to fit
into the whole building I'm sitting
 
in like an invisible giant Alice. You
stretch across the highway of my longing
like a hypnotizing rainbow. You are
also small enough to sit on
the end of my finger and
cause sparks to crackle out and 
 
type these words without any help
from me.You appear in my dreams
as yourself, always. But here's the
real rub: I feel like I've
already loved and lost, like because
of you my many poems flow forth as one.
 
D.P.  04/22/09 

 

 

 

 

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