Relative Something

Another poem from the archives. Written in 2003;  untitled. I’m guessing I have a fondness for this one, because this happens to be the third time I’ve re-posted it in the 3 years I’ve been doing Relative Something. …I checked.

Since I like finding it again, after time fades it from memory, I’m hoping others might be okay with it, too.

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What if I simply wrote about it
and when you read it you were moved
by its inherent tendency to apply
rendering all your suppositions proved
not like the tacky film of ad campaigns that try
no farther
much farther a way than that
down where involuntary doesn’t even begin to exist
and up into the stratospheres of our existential bliss
where the vibrations of our ever present song
invigorate our reasons to believe
which we do
and have been all along
neither color nor flavor
but both all that and more
where nothing else disturbs
the focal distance from before
the shoelace became frayed
and elastic recoil that happens not
sickly film forming over soup in pan
as simmer faintly fades from hot
beneath the late afternoon’s waning light
revealing brilliant yellow gold
where moments ago there was only white
there’s both new and also something old
already been here already done all that
it’s the same as what already was
as if that’s some bright new found fact
a digression from a fear
accessory after the act
it fascinates and it bores
though mostly alluding every grasp
like a meaning getting briskly stamped
upon our spongy blue-green minds
and we wile away while we can
or is it them or me or you?
flailing away in attempt to understand
both a meaning and intent
focussed solely on the only thing that
hasn’t even happened yet
slippery sliding down a slanted slope
of largely hypothetic tries
to heap ungodly piles of healing balm
on swollen red and tired eyes
and waiting ’til the late of any night
as if waiting makes it all alright
seeking not that phantom wisp of what
it is that starts
and stops
this unattainable freight in flight
which circles round upon
the very path
it paved away from here in desperate fright
a feeling not so bad in fact
except for when it  lingers far too long
draining out the last of tact
struggling grip on the flowered teacup
steady enough to avoid
stuttering clatter as you sup
a smile and a worry that have grown together
as if wed years ago
when nothing that has happened
had even begun to happen yet
wonder what
if any
silly significance lies
in the way that some people skew their words
to pronounce the “th” sound
as if it were a “d”
and say with cultivated aplomb
dat dem’s da ones dat up and died.

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