Signifying nothing

Imagine being a boy But not quite a boy That transition stage Of adolensence when You are not man but not Boy Imagine being a man But not quite a man That transition stage Of adolensence when You are not boy but not Man My brother, my sweet Sweet brother once said I don't see a man, when I was that moment Between It sticks with you, those Words

I've been thinking about this for a few Hours My sternum turned to bone All of a sudden I knew a cat With a similar Condition Sternum protruding From his furry  Chest The vet said  It was noting to Worry About But I worried And I am Worried

 This is let me take a minute let me take a break This is how we or do we take a break or can we  Are you sure we can or this is how we do or are  Are are are are are you are you are you are you Over Take a break

Rivers wash away Carrying our shit To who knows where But who knows, knows Where There must have been Some first human, bedecked In naked who realized this As he watched his shit  Float This was supposed to be Pretty. This was supposed To make me think of green And leafy things, so strong Crisp Snapping against our legs As we break the grass before Us working so hard to reach The shore where we can  Shit

I have an old lap top that I wasn't using, so I installed Linux on it, to revisit my fascination with computers, writing, and photography (among other things).  You can also find a live webcam, which calls back to the early days when I engaged in such foolishness.  All the devices on my home network at all named after birds, so here is in all its curious glory:  Signifying nothing's Cabinet of Curiosities ( https://chickadee.signifyingnothing.us ).

Scene opens on ROBOT running Away, across a grey, meteor-pitted Landscape It is Ganymede, so there are flashes Of green and blue and red in the grey Ash But mostly it is grey which makes it Difficult to perceive ROBOT who is Running Away cross the screen, over the jagged Pitted surface of a desolate moon of Jupiter The planet looms high in the black inky Sky--washed out and pale since this was the Fifities But actually probably more accurate than Our oversaturated present, with its wandering Robots Who are, technically, also running away Without legs, of course, but with outlandish Speed ROBOT is running away from something He may not even remember, since his memory  Banks Are full of pain and suffering of some kind Inflicted on him on Ganymede by those who Love But ultimately hate him.  So he runs; he runs And he is most assuredly crafted in metal to be Male He runs, this ROBOT with pencil thin legs Radio head with yellow blinking light and Antennae And the scene fades as he ...

It is 1975 A solo dog runs across Scene Panning back  The camera reveals Wreckage Two cars have Collided, 70's Cars Big boxy beasts With lots of plastic Wood And chrome, plastic Chrome for miles and Miles Slumped over the Wheel of one is Lucille Ball She was drunk, of course Having just Tonight Showed In the day, because day Filming and day Drinking And you would go to A doctor and be offered Scotch The other driver is Groucho escaping his Abuser 70's TV comedy Ensues with biopic Pathos

For some reason Main Character Has to make a Sudden escape In a self-propelled Parade float Papier-mâché Bursting into  Butterflies of  Wafting paper (Replete with  Accent marks) Careening this Way and That Tissue paper Streaming like Toilet paper Caught on your Heal

I hover over my new vacuum Robot, not to monitor their duty To the job, but out of sheer joy And Amazement. Yes, I am that kid Still who sincerely believed that A gift of walkie-talkies was the Absolute best best best and I love You forever, oh wow oh wow oh I The robot comes in a plain brown Box, like porno mags used to be Delivered. Uncle Ken had Playboy Sent to his house and had a TransAm Aunt Wanda loved him and loved that TransAm Now that's where it gets complicated This salacious appeal to my boyish Desires that were entirely sexual but Had nothing to do with sex as anyone Might define it. Desire. Desire? Is it  Understandable? No, so I hover over this robot, watching How they negotiate this wild mountain Of rug, this leg of lamp, this chair that Keeps moving because I keep moving It And I am in sheer ecstasy. Such a Simple and wonderful thing. The  Code runs through my mind. Decision trees play out in simple Desire Desire to clean, desire to map--desire To know.  I...

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...

 When I was a kid the only clothes I  Recall my mother wearing were made of  Polyester (Polyester fabric is concocted From the tears of dinosaurs, oil rich And strong with fibrous fear learned hard in the swamps) "These pants would survive a nuclear war," She declared as she pulled them fast and Taught over her hips, pulling the elastic wide And letting go of the band with a pleasing Snap And nuclear war was a possible thing back then, You see.  While we may not have dived under  Desks at the first sound of a siren, we all knew That the possibility was there that we could wake Up dead, or worse, and that there would be no more Saturdays We watched it on the jittery rolling lines of TV Saw the flash saw the bones saw the flesh melt Away because of a disagreement about how the Economy was supposed to run and how poor people Were supposed to be poor in each, which rules  They were to obey and which leaders they should Adhere (Karl Marx, by the way, dreamed of ...

 When my grandfather visited     (a rare occasion since he lived      so far away across mountains      of crumbling red sandstone and      vast valleys of sea green sage) He would be up at dawn Every morning to rake the yard Of sticks and leaves and paper Blown in by the wind He grasped the rake firmly with His one good hand, using his Frozen arm to counterbalance Later, not long after he passed While looking at books on Japanese dry gardens,  I made The connection.  Who am I to  Know whether or not he had Made it too while the rake Scratched pattern and form, Order and purpose on the clay Back and forth. Back and forth Taking away that which doesn't Belong

I have no idea how many                                              Songs Are on this old iMac      (a fine machine that runs Fine) But in reverse               Alpha                              beti                                        cal Order They start with numbers Starting with 9999 (Ways to Hate Us)     by          the Clutters Your are soon rolling through the decades          2002  (a lost love letter to a lost)                            ...

When you are seven It is to be expected But at fifty-six it is Concerning But these days most Have wisdom removed While young I always had a big Mouth and even the Dentist was amazed That they had come in Early So strong, at the back Waiting to have a full Life  When your are young You expect it but now Now? Tooth loosening And then it is in your Hand Fingertips edging the Points, wondering how The curved legs fit In the sudden, hole Unbleeding And you remember When you were seven And your brothers Had the brilliant idea To yank your bicuspid Out with a string As a sudden surprise You are surprised

 So many centers So many lights                                                   Where do you think you are? Where do you think you should be? We used to unfold maps                                                        Crease by crease And there we were At the heart                              Of the Continent Folding them back                                         Was impossible Never right                   ...

 There are a lot of different options being considered No, that doesn't have  I will stand my ground no matter what I am more hopeful than worried There are solutions that we don't even know they exist Maxine Kumin died She of the plane with her mother holding a package Died Dies Died Simple letter She dies and it is still this year It is still this shit It is still this same A package, you hold as the plane dives And suddenly                 Suddenly Survies