First Day of December

Warm for the beginning of the first day of the last month of the year.
The boy, asleep, seems a body surfer among torrents of sheets and blankets
Blond tusseled, untroubled, his still hands held in super hero flight.
I take this picture with my eyes, sad that I'll forget, and go to work.

She's watching a movie featuring a boy asking big questions of God:
Why should I be good, when you aren't?
Reduce your expectations of others to zero and go on, Son, go on.

A swarm of undercovers circle two men spotlit in handcuffs and low pants.
In front of city hall, teenaged girls standing vigil around some candles.
Someone young is dead again, you guess, stupidly dead, needlessly dead.

We're expert here at shrine building, the theater of paying respect to the taken, but less accomplished at giving a shit about them while they live.

An Aim For December

Well, November is over, and I abandoned my National Novel Writing Month goal of completing 50,000 words somewhere just north of 19,000. I've been working more than an additional 40 hours a week on top of my day job so I've got an alibi, but the truth is I can't sustain interest, energy, and attention long enough to write a novel. At least not now.

My idea for December is to post 12 lines a day and maybe a photo taken that day too.

Snapshot

This is a photograph of me pre or post religous experience, I cannot now remember which. It all just dissolves into something I do not really understand. A child smiles with everything - its entire being (if left to do so on its own without prompting, without the desire to be pleasing to its keepers). An adult smiles with pre-meditation and intent, the pre-requisites for a Murder I conviction. Then there is the question of malice afore thought.

Sometimes cosmetically, wryly, sardonically, nervously, defensively, seductively, bitterly, photogenically; but how often honestly, spontaneously? There is no smile in this photograph of me pre or post religous experience. There is no expression at all, in fact. My head was turning, maybe distracted, and my eyes were more than half closed. Someone thought it was beatific, but I may also have been sneezing.

This Crept In This Morning

Facilitated

the inside of your head
is filled with mashed potatoes
burnt around the edges into
a mildly painful filling

close your eyes,
leaning forward, hands
clasped together in what
might seem an attitude of prayer
while you're only wondering
why your body never stops trembling
when you're awake

the facilitator reads a poem aloud
while you are positioned this way
and it's a little crazy because
as you listen to the words
you are writing one of your own,
automatically, in something like
a lucid dream

when she stops reading,
you have finished,
but when your eyes open
both the words and the feeling
evaporate

you are left with only this notion
that there were moments in this life
when you were a lover

almost a lover

Oye Como Va

Run With Me