exactly six years and eleven months later

lying in bed that night
my left elbow pinned under
enso's big black dog head 
and you sitting up and reading
your spare hand reached across
and open upon my sternum
i realized how much i needed
the dog head pressure 
and the wife hand pressure
to keep me from floating away

that which does not need to be reviewed

NOTE: This written thing was inspired by facebook postings of various objects that ended up in the lost and found box from BluesSHOUT! 2013, and will likely be only the first in a number of reviews of things which in actuality do not need to be reviewed.

Credit for this photograph goes to the lovely Dee McCord

(as does my everlasting gratitude for inspiring this latest venture)

after sleeping fitfully with images of this hat flitting through my mind, and then waking, i have finally understood the quiet power of this photograph. while the hat itself is quite lovely, it is but a vehicle for the artist's vision of the wearer, a statement of the true nature of community. the fitful aspect of my sleep was driven by the unconscious desire to understand who was wearing the hat, indeed "what" was underneath it, both metaphorically and literally, and in my dream-addled state i was able to bypass my analytical brain and directly harness the amphibian nature of my lizard brain, which directed me to imagine i had only primitive clawlike appendages and to explore the undercontents of the hat would need to slide my scaly komodo nose beneath its lower edge, gliding along the mystery surface upon which it rests, and as the scent waftingly entered my massive prehistoric nasal passages I would not only be able to explicate the many traits of its oft-wearer and those who were nearby this hat at many points in time, but indeed to enable my proboscis to leverage the hat over onto its back and expose the world to its hidden inner dimensions. upon imagining this process, though, i began to feel a vague unease, as if to flip the chapeau was an untoward "red light touch", an unwelcome advance for which i had not been granted permission. as i rested with this unease, i was able to deftly unpeel the last layer of the image and its metaphorical cargo, realizing that of course this was the only view of the hat that was needed, nay, the only view of the hat that was required to convey the true wearer to the world. the thing that the hat rests on (a table, perhaps a floor?) rests on something else and then that on something else yet, and then it is (as the native americans allegedly say) "it is turtles all the way down," but in this case, the turtles must be dancing, moving with an exquisite series of micro-adjustments perfectly in tune with the shifting contents keeping it all from toppling over.

what an angel needs to hear

when they look down at you
and say 
i love the look on your face

they need to hear
that you love the look on their face too
because you know they are an angel
and because the look on their face
is the look of an angel
looking down on someone they love

they need to hear
that the look on your face
that they are loving
is the look of someone who knows 
they are being looked upon 
with love
by an angel