A start of something.....this post will self-destruct by the end of the weekend.

SLADDEN PARK


I have gone on & gone out, have written a life as big as a whale’s head, have put sparks to trees in the window I have loved best & least significantly. These things, you know, come nigh accidental. Speak of the big hated men in the park with their dogs. Speak to me of your inabilities. They are my own defects as well. As well and as to you, me, the bright playground bars the color of Chardonnay. My things is here too written.

You of a big hat & tiny heart, step back. Fie. Fee fo fum. A long hibernation has given the lie to “beauty sleep”; I’m uglier than ever w/ a Velcro-like swath of swarth in the field of my face, broken vessels, & crust in my eyes. I’ve walked a long plank-like protuberance to the very edge of a small plot of land named Sladden. Here there is the mess of the dogs & the mess of the trees, spilling the greens & browns, looking majestic like really tall tweed.

The way the mid-January light hits those dogs makes the golden retriever look more golden. The daffodils not yet yellow have begun to burgeon up, to push through the slick ice on which small insects and medium-sized rodents skate, making miniscule figure-eights. Good morning, good morning.

Past the grass-pocked asphalt, past an expanse of a splash of paint delineating for the bicyclists their tidy paths, past the dark park, past the puppies and their fur, past the Dari-Mart where young men in their twenties buy their beer, there is a small & lovely person deserving of more love. In this manila envelope is a sheaf of promises. I want a sullen woman to kick me out of her house. To feel better is here too written, not often written enoughly.

A poem is a collection of words used improperly. A life is a collection of acts turned against themselves. Depression & alcoholism are frequent features of a life. Poems are the direct fruits of these febrile sometimes fatal conditions. Poems are booze’s children, they are the offspring of a spring ill-spent & crushed bones. They are hard, pretty, & sterile like a caryatid. A small bug lands on my arm, a katydid. It’s really rather large.

This is a report on vitality for the actor Heath Ledger who died this afternoon, who was not yet thirty, who needed life more than life needed him. In a movie about love he wore a big hat, though he was not a hated man. He was a hatted man. God bless him. Selah.

Hi, how are you? Are you an electable candidate? Which people do you represent? Are you cognizant of the sky with its large knob of butter hanging over the houses in which the citizens live, over the backyards in which small humans swing on swings, over the beds at night in which the humans snore & copulate & read about the sun? Tell me who to make the check out to. I arise & search & search for you.

This is the story of a lawyer in New York City who invited a besotted, bereft, and now unbetrothed friend to her loft, who ended up playing the lead in a Cameron Crowe movie version of her own life. This is a dramatic reconstruction, slaked & littered with purple gloaming under a glittering Orion, with stars for a belt & a sword pointed at my park, 5,000 kilometers from the feisty attorney, in a small park where names are changed to protect the inoffensive. The best are stolen secretly. You reader, may steal from this book.

I drink for her to keep all sanity, paper cup, water, two lead pencils, I am not
writing a sonnet because a sonnet is a love poem & this is a poem about not love but abiding devotion to a Platonic ideal. I raise a toast then eat a piece of toast, garlic sourdough toast, for her. For her & for the waning moon, the streetlights in their filth-garlanded bounty of chemical brilliance.