Signifying nothing

That's me in the back there The baby in his mother's arms Her wild hair but her recognizable Face She is foisting me into the row of Her children, Larry in front, so much Like me, or I guess I am so much like Him, but so not like me and so Himself Like me.  He's objecting to something And Michael the oldest brother so Assured but so yeah, what do you say And sweet Annette, there she is In control, like she always needed to be Sad It is. Let's let that go, though let's be  The hovering infant your mother Wants to foist in line with the rest But yeah, it makes me wonder as I look at the line of my siblings To see the lines of cousins, like us Lined It makes me feel the sad loss of  Douglas, so big, so young, so him Striped shirt and ready to become Dead at 30 of a brain tumor with  A child I don't know even half of these People and the half I do know I've lost, lost somewhere in the  Tensions of family. I'd like to Though. 

Ive been thinking a lot about life these days I'm intrigued by how the little things like eating toast Seems to mean something (Yeah I'm writing a poem) But I am thinking a lot about Life These days 

But I probably live in that Romantic world where things Matter. I can understand Faust when you hear a song like That. But the best song ever, you know that I think, Isn't.

 When I was a kid My brothers and cousins And other neighborhood Children Would wander along the Roadside between our Well-spaced farm Houses To collect bottles thrown From passing cars to cover For a night of sinful Living These were liquor bottles You see, and in my small Mormon town, drinking was Forbidden To most, but by the time We were done collecting (When being a teen was a Thing And collecting discarded Booze bottles no longer Held fascination and petulance Ruled) We had hundreds and hundreds Of bottles lining the walls of One of my cousin's old farm Shacks I don't recall ever once thinking How strange it was that we had So many, even in our small dry Town And we certainly never thought Of drinking any of the few sips Left sloshing against the thick Glass Occasionally, though, we unscrewed The caps and sniffed the sweetness Liquor wafted through the small Shack

 I've been reading Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ and was struck right from the start how well it could be adapted into a one season television series (unless, of course, the producers would want to carry on with the second coming in season two--which might be a hoot.)  Each chapter could be a complete episode, and would rely on the iconographic feel that the imagery in the book has.  I mean Greek iconography--the icons that the iconoclast worked so hard to destroy (but in the long run failed to.)  The visual design of the piece would be magnificently surreal, like those icons. I can see lots of flat lines of disciplines lined up in rows, warmed in golden light. Perhaps the irony would be that they would be dressed as "ragamuffins" as the translator so gleefully used the word, rather than all kitted up like Byzantine aristocracy.  Jesus's baptism strikes one as a perfect set piece from the book, with its Roshomonesque quality of no one quite certain...