a valentines day explanation of my reaction to your excessive and abnormal synchronous neuronal activity

- for melissa 

the reason i keep wishing
i would stop remembering
the way your face went blank
as you seizured on my birthday
and your body went rigid
falling backwards like a tree 
is that it was the first moment
since i met you 
that i thought 
you had ceased to exist
and that 30 second space 
before i was able to feel your heartbeat again
was a glimpse into a place
i cannot accept.

the world only makes sense
when you are in it.

basketfall

we have become experts
at carefully crafting metaphors
for small, strange, and silent forms of loss
and for random miniature disasters

two small trees of oranges
destroyed by a sudden random ice storm
still perfect in their color
their shape
and a sweetness
we can only still imagine

(special thanks, attribution, and additional dedication to sharon and matt)

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

introduction for a song that does not exist

(to be given at my performance of songs that don’t exist)

this next song is about love and loss and longing

and it comes from one morning

that was the morning after another morning 

where the same thing happened

but where the true depths of that thing 

were not realized until the second morning

it comes from me being in the shower 

and realizing my neutrogena oil-free acne wash soap

you know the orange kind that comes in a pump-bottle

and is the the truest male distillation of all that is neutrogena

in that it is the most utilitarian and functional and basic

of the ever-expanding universe of neutrogena products

was sitting out on the bathroom sink

so far out of reach that there was no consideration

about getting out of the shower 

and doing that small side arcing diagonal shuffle step 

with the bathmat under both of my feet

stuck out towards the edges 

so i wouldn’t need to take 

too many shuffle scooches over to the sink 

so i wouldn’t drip all over the bathroom floor

or lose too much of the shower warmth

i had fought so long and hard already to soak up

and so there it was

sitting there on the far right edge of the sink ledge

for the second day in a row

because we were both somehow able to struggle through 

the jarring reality of the initial separation on the first day

and its jarringness was so complete 

that any possible thought about some kind of remedy

to this situation

say like moving the soap back into the shower

onto the fourth tier of the simplehuman stainless showercaddy

was not even the remotest of possibilities

we found ourselves there again on that second day

having scraped by the first day without feeling its sweet caress

without its ephemeral texture and gentle cleansing action

without its purifying and preventative powers

and then to find ourselves in that same situation

knowing we should have known better

knowing somehow we should have found the strength

or the foresight to somehow do something

to avoid this groundhoggian reprise

and that we had failed

and our separation was a compounded sort of bitterness

with a garnish of regret and self-chastening

and as I saw my neutrogena face soap looking back at me

with as much ennui as a pump-dispenser of soap can muster

through its fatalistic anguish and defeat

i could see a small fragrance-free orange tear of soap forming at its spout

and my initial response was one of sweet kindredness

since i had just begin to weep as well

but just as the tear of soap had softened the edge of my despair 

that same despair turned from a rounded edge that once was sharp

into a vast and torrid whirlpool of infinite regress and regret

because in that moment i understood 

that though i knew we were both expressing our sadness

in exactly the same manner

at exactly the same moment

the neutrogena face soap was unable to distinguish my tears

from the water cascading over my face 

from the chrome moen rainfall five setting showerhead

and its currently wall-mounted but hand-wieldable counterpart

on the opposite wall of the shower with their mutual full-blastedness

and in that moment i lived and learned 

the true nature 

of what it means to love 

and what it means to long for the presence of another

and what it means to see their heart breaking

without them being able to witness my exquisitely

complementary anguish

that, my friends, is what this song is all about.

an admittedly perhaps premature (perhaps purposefully so) review of John Green's "The Fault in our Stars"

It is rare for a book to spawn a review before i have completed it, and vastly rarer still to initiate such said spawnage after only a few chapters. This rarity is further compounded when a book causes facial confusion to such an extent, as The Fault in our Stars (by John Green), and although that is perhaps only a circumstantial effect, it is worthy of at least a small and timid note, and perhaps as equally timorous of a note would be that i am not sure where it was that i was pointed toward this book, but the fact that Marcus Zuszak (author of The Book Thief, which is like the best book ever written (and i mean that in the sense of it (if not being the best book ever written) being at least roughly similar to the best book ever written) gave it high praise in his backcover blurbage, which allowed me to skip to the side of my slight (insecure?) discomfort caused by the tag on the spine of the book (applied by the library staff) reading loudly “HIGH SCHOOL” and proceed to first deem the book a capable solo accompaniment to my first-thing-in-the-morning platelet donation appointment, and then secondly to delve into its pages as my strong coffee and chocolate chip cookies were delivered  (as i lay in my prone position with the needle lodged painlessly in my right median-cubital vein).

Soon after the apheresis machine completed its second return cycle, the aforementioned facial confusion began (scarcely before the second chapter had initiated), and at this point perhaps the Tums were brought to me only seconds too late to prevent the tingling in my lips (being that the Tums mitigate the oft-experienced side-effect of the citrate (which is added to the returning blood to prevent clotting)), but it was late enough that i could not completely invalidate the possibility of the causal nature of the citrate and its involvement in the increasing strange sensations i was noticing in my face (which had by this point expanded curiously into territories outside of my greater oral-lipular boundary).  Even if i was able to ascribe my somewhat-numb-lippiness to the citrate, I became more and more convinced that the other uncontrollable facial affectations could have some basis in the words that were being absorbed into the cellular matter of my brain.

Given this partial certainty, it was required that i rest the book upside down on my prop pillow (on top of the half-body heating pad and blanket installed to maximize my comfort and speed of donation cycle) and consider at least every few pages, what exactly it might be in these words that could cause such distinct and decentralized sensations in my facial topography.  Was it that the characters were “real” to me in some innovative manner?  Was it the parallel overlappage intersectedness between the lighthearted (in the most respectful manner possible (which is actually quite respectful)) description of children with cancer and the fact that i was currently involved in a donation process that was destined to benefit actual (non-fictional-book-based humans) cancer patients? Was i simply experiencing a hitherto unnoticed hormonal fluctuation that made me unaccustomed to these particular facial sensations?

After pondering these hypotheses, and multitudes of other possible explanatory directions, i resigned myself to simply reading the book and maximizing my enjoyment of it by somehow monitoring and possibly managing to keep my concurrent brain chatter to a minimum.  All of this being said, there remains the possibility that ultimately this (so far quite fine and distinguished) book will disappoint me, but if i allow myself to examine even that small fear, i am rebounded by the myopically hopeful belief that even that disappointment will be exactly what it is i wanted.

In closing, i would also like to thank my long-suffering wife, the pulchritudinous and otherwise also amazing Melissa Fuller, for allowing me to convince her away from the good computer and (mostly for my particular requirements) keyboard.  I formally and publicly apologize for insisting the usage would be quickly resolved, when i (if forced to consider my excessively wordy proclivities) would have to admit that perhaps i was less than totally unmisleading in my characterization of the timeframe required for the completion of this venture.  I shall struggle to make this up to you (along with the thousands of other tiny things i am already struggling to make up to you) until the instant at which i perish.

thought of you yesterday...

(a birthular message to my amazing professional sculptor brother in law, Matt Babcock)

thought of you yesterday...

but failed to send you birthday greetings, so here they are today, after all the fanfare has died down and you are waking thinking that instead of the joyous day of celebration you experienced yesterday, with all of its fancy community-wide reverie and remembrances of the last year of your existence, complete with detailed exegeses of each of your trials, tribulations, and triumphs, that instead today would be more of a "back to the grindstone" type day where you trudged to your workshop and engaged in some revelatory creative endeavour that, at its root, contained a cryptic semaphore from your soul to the world at large, your metaphoric symbology cascading morse codified bits of your soul-beat and animalian spirit into the vast wilderness of humanity, perhaps muttering to yourself occasionally "consarned soul-beat and animalian spirit, and consarned too is this cursed endeavouring mythos and pathos and ethos I have been shackled with", but instead of making the sisyphistic, trudging trip to your workshop in such bleak and conflicted spirits, nay instead you have started your day with a small, concise, and tidy missive from your brother in law, who chose this time with such great care and tenderness, so that he might best establish a small and meaningful point of contact with your existence, and perhaps convey to your reactive mind a small token of non-particulate matter that suggests to you his (and his lovely wife's) egregious respect for you and your creations, and indeed if there were a word that conveyed great jealousy of your engagement in such overwhelmingly creative soulcraft, without that word having the pejorative sense of envy, but instead simply of sublimated esteem for both your character, the millions of tiny characters inhabiting your brains, and the beatific manner in which you so gracefully release those characters out into the world, allowing them the full Maslowian ability to actualize themselves and the selves of others in the parallel processes of our collective slouching towards some unknowable singularity, that would be the word he would use, and that word alone.

love, 
c&m

Note: if you want to see some of the amazing things Matt creates (and you should want to see these kinds of things indeed), check out his website 

his name was Woodstock

he was a small white goldfish

i had when I was a small white child

he had a red cap shape on his head

and when I was siphoning

part of his water from the tank

i siphoned too close to him

and sucked him up into the hose

where he got stuck headfirst

a few inches from the end

i blew back into the hose

and he popped back out into the tank

swimming straight into his castle

that was just a small clear plastic butter dish

with a square cut out for the door

his pectoral fins gently fanning

to keep himself centered

in shock and in place

i worried about him unmoving

that way for an hour

then reached into the tank and pulled out his castle

after which he swam around

like a normal fish again

i think about Woodstock today

when I find our big black dog behind his crate

in the bedroom at the foot of our bed

lying on the rug with his head down

on crossed front paws

when we have both been up

and in the other rooms for hours

i think about Woodstock today

as my wife lies on the couch

watching and then turning off

a TV show about texting while driving

a handmade wedding quilt pulled up to her chin

as she curls deeper into another nap

i think about Woodstock today

as my eyes and brain turn endlessly

to distraction after distraction

hopefully to hyperlinked weathermaps

documents applications and emails

and i try to imagine the sensation

of being pushed backwards

out from this compression

against the grain of our skin and fur and scales

and swimming back to the shelter

of our little improvised plastic castles

then i try to imagine the sensation

of a giant hand reaching in

and lifting them away 

out of context and without permission

(i recommend trying the audio version first, since this is meant to be heard more than read)

audio version - soundcloud link

I have this vision of my eyes scattering about
huntering and gathering among all of
your Facebook status updates and shares and likes and tags
and all of the amalgamated mental excavations
and throat clearing and yammering
and discombobulating it and then putting it back together
with the posting and reposting and replying of others
Others you may or may not be connected to
by anything greater than both of your words ending up
in the about an hour ago like comment share
post follow unfollow threaded undertow
we have all signed up for and friended for
and only partially filtered
and only so rarely unsubscribed from
and in my vision it makes perfect poetry

I see all of your words broken up
and recombining as if on their own
after being bitten by a radioactive meme
and the genetic mutation is occurring in full CGI
long lensed zooming special effects in my imagination
the DNA unzipping and new words flying in
from the far reaches of your worldscattered connections
and being inserted at the exactly correct location
clicking into place with sounds like mousebuttons
effortlessly building up into this sublime genetextual ladder
that twists off into the reaches of the interwebs

I know that when you find out I am taking your precious words
out of context and without permission
simply because I want them
you will take it as the highest kind of compliment
along with the ego stroke that I value your brief interjections
and smatterings of non sequiturs enough
to cut them and to paste them
and to consider them even for the fleetingest of moments
and it will pique at you enough to get you to follow them
around the corner and down the alley of another page
trailing them towards the everscrolling away downwardly bottom

I’ll tease you along with the candied promise
of what I did with some tiny subsection
of something you felt worth typing
and hope you navigate unthinkingly
to this completely separate and more intimate domain
where visiting it is in itself an admission
that you can’t help but acknowledge that you place
some infinitesimal value on what I have done
but not so small a value as to be unmentionable
because after all it is because of you
that you are following the trail I have created
because it is the trail of you
the scent of you
the promise of some small bit
of the fading contrails of your day
that is what started your small single click journey
and by this point of course it has gone beyond that gesture
to involve a swipe or two on your touchpad
perhaps a rabbit tip tapping on your down arrow key
or mousehand pointer hovering
over a position on the side scroll bar

I select from the top and then again
where the Facebook-inserted word “yesterday”
appears for the first time
and I take it to the top of my page
because it bracketizes this quixotic tilting at Facebook
with glimmering amnesiac nostalgia

With the title settled neatly into position
I sift for the keystroke-worthy chunks of your life
harvesting the words “this speaks for itself”
since self-referentiality pivots nicely
into the meta meta meta of voided context
but then I am oddly compelled by
“In the distant future, two superpowers control Earth
and fight each other for all the solar system”
and the line “They're always in the mood for love”
is a natural follow-on to create some dramatic tension

I am sure I could somehow segue
into this the talk of “cooking it in bacon grease”
and “like a lunatic” seemed to butt up against it
so nicely that they stick there together
and a Beckish inspired splicing places
“now I'm walking around saying”
next to “Sleep well, anonymous child. Sleep well.”
and one line below“Maybe you couldn't hear me”
and I see the ending eventual hopeful note
struggling to poke its head through it all
with “My daffodils are still coming up”
and “My crocuses are up”
the punchy “Our daffs are up an' at 'em!”
the terse urbanity of “chicago blooms”
and then the line that I see as wrapping it all together
“I can't wait to see what else comes up...”

I hold that thought as my mantra
as I sift and resift and group and regroup
“I can't wait to see what else comes up...”
as I look for the metaphorical connection
between battling superpowers and bacon grease
and saying things to no sleeping child in particular
and not being heard and not paying attention
and being a zillion times more efficient
and the whole time a small child is shouting in the background
about voting for Doris the chicken

At the same moment that it all starts to congregate
and congeal into something intensely manageable
where I find the ability to perceive both the whitespaces
and the blanks and the form among the formlessness
I see beyond this first finished masterpiece
to the timeline in the righthand margin
refreshing and updating off endlessly into the future
and as I follow it out the endgame is crystallizingly clear

I see the self-referentialty of the forced feedback loop
the peculiar entropic mobius twist we have gestated
I see the evolving subtlety of slight semantic shifts
in the words you choose as you become more aware
of their possible destination
I sense an elevated stature and generosity in your words
as if you are precompensating for the gaps
that might remain to be filled between those words
and those of someone else who also
without reference context or demarcation
is adjusting themselves accordingly
like the blind men with the elephant
when there isn’t even an elephant to touch
and they are all just talking about what it will be like
when someday they have an elephant to describe
in their fractured handscrabbling tinyworlded way

And it gets to the point where you are now posting
and reposting with this OCD ADD ADHD fueled focus
and fully randomized and refreshed reward schedule
to see what new amazing creation
had been forged from your excretions
you are posting horrifically tender metaphors
with garnishes of colloquial idiomastic simile
your comments are multi-layered densely unpackable images
and it is all meant to be so incredibly helpful
and I am so flattered by your contributions
to our convoluted conglomeration

But the things you are all post share commenting
have now become these perfectly wrapped vignettic lines
that self-sufficiently contain everything needed
for fully self-aware explication and revelation 
without the semantic company of others
and if I were to slice and dice and Julienne Fry it all
It would be like slapping a stencil of the triangular-tongued
Guernican screaming horse head over a starry starry night
and then stretching the canvas thinner at the margins
to make room to thread Magritte’s steamtrain
through the fireplace of Whistler’s Mother’s mouth

It would become a hack with no release for the attack
and no nuance to the yammering and jib-jabbering
it would get so fractalated pixilated and muddy
that it would reduce itself into absurd solipsistic fibrosis
and it would collapse white dwarfedly inward on itself
under the weight of all the tiny eyeballs and expectations
and the growth of our gravity would distort all nearby orbits
until we had to admit that we are no longer
traveling in a gentle circle together anymore
scratching each others imaginations along the way

And it is my fault
I have invited you along on this ride
I have buckled you in
and I have showed you 
how to use your oxygen masks as musical instruments
I have handed out peanuts and Cokes to all of you
and walked up and down the aisles
collecting all of your plastic cups and napkins
and now we are in a flat spiral dive

And one moment later inside the admission
of our non-circularity
is the realization that each orbit
is only reducing the inward distance
by one single zero one bit each revolution
and the g forces are exponentializing with the speed
until the only thought I can keep in my mind
without it getting flung off
like toddlers on a redlining merry go round
is that soon we will arrive
at a linguistic singularity
that must be avoided
at all costs
my apologies
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comment
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an antiquarian history

in the beginning was the shell
and my feet were moving over the face of the waters
and somewhere between the beginning and my feet
there was the ehlers-danlos
and after that the softness of my feet
and you my god always you
unable to be begotten away from you
from thousands of miles away
there was you suggesting i walk the shoreline
with your wordless askingless asking
and then the doing the no pausing just the doing
the doing without the thinking or the waiting
because of the sweetness of your wordlessness

and then there were the steps upon the sand
and the bruised clouds roiling in over the bay
and after the roiling of the clouds there was the shell 
the shell that was there in the beginning
when it begat the waiting for the finding 
and then there was all of mankind 
and all of those creatures who moved along the ground
right beside it without ever seeing it
and all of the birds in the sky that flew over it
without ever swooping down to look at it
and the evening and the morning were the days

and then there was the finding of the shell
that was there in the beginning
then there was the looking 
and at the very same time of the looking 
was the seeing 
and then there was the knowing
and the knowing was begotten by the cleaving
the halving of that which was there in the beginning
and the convolutions of the hollow cavity in the shell
spoke of the knowing with its half tunneled half pattern
that was created there after the beginning
and then there was the the seed within itself
the half hidden homunculus nesting in its outer ear
its own tiny spiral opened to its host

and then the knowing was you
once again always you
looking down from the firmament
into the broken tightening half spiral 
that i had created of myself in my own image
the knowing was you
seeing the pattern and the form of the cavity

and then it was you finding the curve
at the heart of that cavity
that could hold you so perfectly
while you rested

it was you beholding it
it was you
seeing that it was good

five stanzas for enso

i love the round sound your tongue makes
when it curls back into your mouth

like a the sound of a large marble

dropping into a quiet pond

from just above the surface

i love the uplifted yearning angle of your head

and the rabbit twitches in your left hind leg

when i find that one spot on your neck

where the white of your chest

meets the black of your shoulder

i love the long grunt you make

when you wake for a moment

and stretch the black fur bouquet of your legs

all the way down to your toenails

before falling right back asleep

i love how you ride shotgun

when we drive home from the park

your big head sticking out

the passenger side window

and your cheeks rippling in the wind

i love the way your forepaws

pin my left foot to the floor

as you work on your rawhide bone

and every time i run my hand across your side

your tail spins like a propeller.

on the pathology of emotive amnesia

ever since i was old enough
to start remembering

my mind would often find itself

skittering along the surface

moving too fast and shallow

to place the exact reason or thing

that left me with the feeling

that i knew that i had

i would retrace my short-term history

scrounging for the reason for my mood

until i found some small or big something

a new micronaut toy

my aunt polly bought for me

when we visited her in chicago

with green metallic wheels

where a person would have had legs

the slow fungal death

of my siamese fighting fish aurora

in his tiny round bowl on the breezeway shelves

ed tuxbury telling me to give him five

and when i gave it

and held out my hand for five in return

him spitting into my palm

a kevin schwantz replica #2

arai motorcycle helmet

in red black and white

with a dark smoke shield

finding cindy werner

kissing mark warford

when she should have been kissing me

a photograph i had taken

of my best friend

framed in a doorway

against the sky

the light curving perfectly around his calf

once i could re-triangulate my position

and be certain mind and mood

had synchronized their watches once more

i could settle back

and let it wash over me again

but then i saw you last night

trying on the spherical pendant necklace

with 3.2 carats of natural world diamonds

in canary, ice blue, aquamarine, and white

encrusting its latticed surface

and i knew i would never forget

those exact coordinates

now

when i misplace the memory

of what it was i was looking forward to

or away from

i will always find myself again

in the center of that small jeweled world

resting in the curved hollow of your bosphorus

watching the sunlight sparkle in

shifting from one shade of the ocean

into another

nineteen ten

(a work in progress…)

we know only a little spanish

so we speak like little children

so we think like little children

this is good

this is not good

we speak of no shades of grey

having only black and white

and our minds relax completely

into vacation

as we graduate to

this is excellent

my name changes to  juan carlos

and melissa's e turns into a long a

we learn slang from a taxi driver

how to say

this is wicked

we learn the words for open

and for closed

from the l.e.d screen

on the safe in our room

by reading the yellow and black signs

we learn what is dangerous

new words enter us

and new words leave us

like the name of the not so ugly

fat-bottomed rats we saw

carrying bright chunks of papaya

back into the forest

we add an afternoon

between our good morning

and good night

we drink micheladas with the locals

and ask how do you say this

pointing at this

how do you say that

pointing at that

and we learn to drop our s’s

so our good nights

sound less like they are coming 

from the pages of a textbook

and at the end

we check out of our hotel room

returning to our infinite shades of grey

and both of us can  pronounce our room number

perfectly.