"The Busy World is Perfectly Happy" by Darryl Price

The Busy World is Perfectly Happy

to continue to crumble its way through

another grinding cycle of slowly

walking to the edge of the universe

ancient treelike beings, like gentle ghost buffalo, and our

own thundering buildings by the hundreds of thousands,

pollen encrusted cars and crisp new blue

butterflies all stuck together like new

one dollar bills, the poor disappearing

elephant families, invisible

jet airplanes, bouncing balls and barking dogs,

weddings and bicycle crashes, soft rain

soaking the neatly pressed pants of a young

man with a bunch of gently paper clasped

daisies in his hand and a quick hot sun

primping the brim of the little straw hat

of the young lady who although standing

only as tall as a full rose bush still

dislikes wearing yellow sundresses and wants

more than anything else to play catch with

the dirty brown sparrows in the park one

day, you see, perfectly willing to blend

all the so-called rules together for a

wafting funny feeling smell of hotdogs

and homemade chili, a bit of homey

encrusted cheese stuffs from England of all

places, but back we all go at once to the

tiresome basics again, let's just say at

another tall museum of waxing

family members, two by two then, the

plastic statues of dead atheletes who

became the frames for stars to hang themselves

upon and the concrete frisbees of a

new commerce, oh my, we'd better go right

back to work ourselves before the three plump

oceans become crazily unbalanced

upon our own wobbly heads like a basket

of jumping cherries, one, two, three, walls and

bridges (look it up). Finally, to our

own work at hand which it would appear has

come full circle again. We have the right to start

again, to believe again, to want more.

Bonus poems:

Bleeding The Words(Practicing My Trees)

by Darryl Price

"No one is your perfect fit/I do not believe in that shit."--Stephen Malkmus

I know you don't want to see me bleeding together these next groups of words like this, not until the tee-shirt's fully washed, finished up for its fine service to Peoplekind and hung out to dry somewhere nice and airy. Then it has every lucky chance I'm told of flying away on its own powerful flailing arms and becoming someone else's lost treasure or trouble. Just not mine and not yours anymore. That's where the cut's the most awful,the deepest, I think. These new thoughts keep tumbling out of my eardrums like spinning jacks and putting on their oh so long glowing robes and taking their rightful places right behind me—ready to swing the daylights out

of the most sadly written chorus you've ever heard (when I give them the silent cue ball,that is). Well I can't help it if someone strange thinks I can swing. I've opened my mouth to speak undiscovered fountains of youth like winding stairs full of flutes and gotten several alarming angles of menacing clouds instead, to regurgitate fresh meadows I'd almost forgotten and gotten blotches of poisoning factories belching their overstuffed noonday snacks back at the sun, to moisten the heads of dolphins with a perfectly planted and well-meant kiss or two and gotten sand in a bottle for sale at an enormous price tag. All these things I hereby lay aside to push before you at some other crack in time because they are failed attempts to say something new without pretense. Why does it have to be explained any further than that? If I could I'd tie

them all up in a big blue blanket and fling them up at the sopping stars hoping to watch them brilliantly sink back into a black cosmos of their own making like the little stone sharpened stories that they truly are underneath their shells. But we all know that's all but nearly impossible with modern life being as it is. Here's only two reasons I can't throw off light any farther than that for now. One. Because you are like a drifting petal of exquisite hue that just so happened to fall on my head one day when I wasn't looking out for it. And Two. Just because I don't believe you are a lie to be told to anyone I know--at all. Maybe I don't care enough, period. That would explain a few things between us right off the bat. Nevertheless we find ourselves here at a moment of true beauty—it stays riding fast and furious between us for as

long as we both shall live and breathe the dream of our boldest dreams. Of that I am sure. But no more.Not one word more. Nothing else makes any real sense to me right now. Nothing that I would invest with any kind of soul power. This map then that I place in your hands only works when you look at it—no one else will be able to read its stick figure messages as well as you do. That is its sole purpose on this earth. To give you alone complete access to its funny looking mystery boards. And if you have not the wellness of mind to discover the gooey center then let it go unexplored by tongue or mystic Eastern thought pattern. It has been created with you in its engineered seated mind, that's all. Why do you think only in terms of faraway people and places anyway? There are so many

more good things going on within the contortionist surfaces of pages than pressed together wood fibers and an otherwise inky pulp from a host of ghostly squid might otherwise indicate. There's the black pressure of life itself stealing behind the ink to be sure, but that's not to say there isn't still a raging fire swimming on beneath the boiling water's craggy concerns with going somewhere after all. Wherever you are being you know that life knows its rightful place to go with it. I don't care if there's proof or pudding, there's feeling. We can't always listen to their selfish, hateful nonsense. Sooner or later it's goodbye to the death squads as we know them. We have to fly. We have to try. We know we might die at their hands. But this old death march they have been putting us on--on a daily basis-- already has forsaken way too many of us to a crippling loneliness. We want more to dream. And we want it to be as us dancing wonderfully unbound together. All of us. To hurt even the hurtful is not our way. We are not like them.

Can you deny us that one feathery pleasure forever? This is the history of the world you are fooling with. It happens every single day of the year. It happens every single minute of every single day. It's happening to you right now. To your mind. To me. And to all of us. To the very blades of grass we walk upon. Will you really shoot the stalks to torn apart pieces for a mere laughing lark among fellow killers? More will grow you know. More will come. In one form or another. They'll raise their sons and daughters to be loud mouth poets. When the daylight breaks something new and good and even great is born even when the weather is at its bleakest slowest hour. Always. Come on inside the words right now my friend and take a seat. Take my hand. Just for a brief and a restful moment to stand alone without fear guiding us, let us here celebrate something real in this world together. Ah, I say, a big,fat yes to all that and much, much more that I see living still in your deepest set of all seeing eyes.

Bonus:

Notes from Seven Cities (on the Road)/band notes

1. I personally sat there unable or unwilling to leave the land of softly burning music that was snapping like a warm string of red, green and yellow plastic flags in my head. It was feeling just too damned sweet to cut to the immediate chase and run away from its pretty siren's call. To simply shut it off like that without so much as a calm goodbye for now my pretty little bright lights off broadway seemed like committing a petty crime. Where's my stage burglar's mask, I wondered? Looking back on it all now I can see I felt funny right then to be creeping around the crusty old alleyways of this unfamiliar city with the likes of you (Does that surprise you?) at this late or is it an early hour? Okay so we did get there really kind of late for the gig. Blame the stupid rain. It threw buckets over us the whole way. I heard our poor hunched down by now parked van click-clicking in its sleeping head like a frantic dreaming cricket too big for its own pitiful rusted lidded hood. Does that even make much sense to you? I felt sorry for it, okay? Because it was obviously having some trouble breathing or slowing down its oily heart rate to something more like normal for an overworked beetle engine that is. There didn't seem to be anybody actually alive walking around the place, but then we started to beat on the carved up black back door, which looked like it had been attacked by an army of about a dozen small Vikings, it opened immediately inward. “You all are pretty late,” a disembodied voice floats out like a homeless cat to greet us. Whatever.Can somebody help us to maybe carry some of this shit inside before it gets lost or stolen?

2. I guess the central reason we got into this mad business in the first place was to not be seen by anyone we actually knew but only total strangers. No baggage. We gave them our musical numbers and they gave us their pocket money. That's the whole gig in a nutshell. We bought their crappy food to go with their cheapest beers all around town. It seemed a fair exchange at the time, if a bit cold from the outside looking inward toward something more lasting. You could say it was a far cry from the wilderness homes we'd come growing up from, all hills of endless pine trees and daily snow storms to and from school. Everything here seemed at once to be plugged into something else plugged into something else. It all fed on itself, pulsating like a giant spaceship. We couldn't speak the language on the ground floor, but we'd at least managed to see something we'd never seen before. That's a plus in this business if you ask me.

3. I don't feel so good. That's all I'm going to say about today today. Everything everywhere I look stinks to high heaven of the stinkiest ghosts of dead smelling fishy guts, even the beauty of the memory of living in this perfect postcard place that must enact its powerful magic upon the senses like packs of freewheeling gulls lolling around on winds above and beside the biggest millionaire's playtime ships like miniature zooming racecars can't help keep that awful sick smell down wind. I'm going to hurl in all directions at once. Don't worry—the constant smell should cover it up very nicely. Yuck! So much for the local sushi. No water! No water!

4. I was alone. I didn't want to sleep. I don't know what I wanted, but it wasn't food and it wasn't sleep. It wasn't anything to do with words either stuck to its face like so much jagged dripping seaweed. I didn't know what I would find there but I took to the bizarre uneven looking streets like a clever pup newly escaped from his doghouse chains. What I found besides my own loneliness and fresh smelling newspapers fairly quickly was the brand new morning, everything waking up with a loud bang and a sudden shove, all at once like the rest of it was nothing but a terrible offcolor joke, not to be taken so seriously after all. You could smell the coffee like the rays of the sun. People materialized all over the place,right out of thin air. Someone turned on the whole thing like it was a radio station already in full swing. The morning shift. It made you feel like anything was possible again.Give me a donut!

5. I was finally free. You could say I felt more at home here than anywhere else on this earth. These people were just my size, even though they were different sizes, if that makes any sense.

6. I had no idea that you would be singing.

7. I wonder how I could have forgotten my own name.