Love at a Reasonable Price

All that was in yesternight
enclosed and clenched within belly blossom hunch
in morning bright flew out rustling pigeon wings.

All kept tightly wrapped within
this silver purse, her gold strings tinselled out
and rubbing off onto your soft lenten hands–
cannot stay behind the swirling billowing fibs.
Not any longer. OK?

We wooshed and we gooshed, we twirled and we turned.
We spun and we kicked, we hazzahed and we hahaed
up and down the white stone alley ways.
But now our bikes are lying on the lawn
and we’ve settled into drifting couches
coarse in their cut and dusty up close.

We knew and we thought we’d think while we fought.
We dreamed and we drifted, our work a sifting out,
and now the angels pour down and surge up,
tackling us from all sides, and channeling us down
into the cold waters where we once played the clown.

You know who I am and we know where we are.
So let’s not pretend anymore.

Author: Mulligan Stew
Editor: BW
“What is this?”: AMW

God, having nothing more to say for Its infinitely indifferent self, giggled on the sidewalk. Which was odd, because a second before It’d kicked It’s feet like an angry child.

But these are just frivolous antics–the kind of thing we immature beings use to while away our quicktoss moments. The really bad stuff is what God does to everybody else.

God will form the waves into a mighty twisting dark wall of water. God will crush ships full of hearty, ruggedly good-looking, stoically persevering sailors with such blender blades of salty springtime sea. Or, again with no real provocation, God, via the intermediary of 100 foot killer waves, will crush, drown, and, by tossing around trees homes cars and other objects about in a wily-nily sunnyday tantrum, bludgeon, gouge, decapitate, and/or eviscerate whole villages, towns, cities even. Why? That’s just how God sometimes rolls. That’s just what God sometimes does.

I’ve also known cases where God will build terrible diseases out of chance and tight warm oily-wet nooks. These diseases will kill hundreds of thousands of people and leave a million devastated by loss of friends, material and psychological security, and political stability. Not that long ago, God, through a kind of relentless lazy half-assedness, mixed together foolish ideas, political confusion, material longings, and the crazy lurching proudcat grabbies, engineered a horrific holocaust, imprisoning, torturing, and ultimately murdering people by the tens of millions. And here and there, whenever the breeze gets stagnant and the swamp turns a little greener and stinks a little brighter, mini-plagues of similar boring, but extremely effective meanness kick up and carry off a hundred or a thousand easy, walking barefoot in on the caked dirt or chatting merry robin in the kitchen souls, leaving the remaining hearts and minds sick to the gills, used up, done, forgotten and forgetful, stupid like the idiot you kept in the corner back when you had everything organized. I can show you the spot in our town where God, in the form of stupid ideas and a mixture of soft, gooey, and chaotically-sharp and -jagged feelings swirled around some poor young black man–a kid really–and beat him with hard human fists into a bloody pulp before hustling a rough hemp rope around his neck, hoisting–using simple physics–him up, and letting him dangle, already mostly lifeless, from a wonderful oak climbing tree in a nice little park where people often have picnics and tell funny jokes–right in the center of town.

Certainly, certainly, God is the worst of all of us. It all boils down to indifference. Infinite power plus infinite indifference: a terrible combination!

If you get oh so very wise.
If you open up to the very outer extreme and reach out with the gentlest, most good-willing open hand.
I guess then you can understand it all.
And I guess it turns out that it isn’t really God’s fault, or it is but not in a bad way. Or something very encouraging.
But most people, being middling-wise at their best and just-lucky-they-aren’t-in-a-situation-where-evil-is-super-easy-and-applauded (or, that luck lacking, worse) at their worst, don’t know about this. Most of us either have to pretend God doesn’t do everything or pretend nothing matters or pretend something else like that that we can’t really believe or even care enough about to notice.

Look, God isn’t good or bad. God is just everything crunching all permutations and spitting out all results. I don’t believe that. I wonder what, if anything, I believe about God.

What is going on?
A mystery, that’s for sure: it’s a mystery!
Some people have it figured out, but most of them don’t really after all when you get right down to it and examine their hearts from all sides. Do any of them? Probably not the ones who have it all figured out; probably only the ones who only love and who treasure loving so much that they keep quiet about it–even to themselves. These people must understand how God’s perfect and everything ultimately OK. But I’m worried that their trick involves not telling themselves what they understand, meaning that everyone either doesn’t understand, or understands but doesn’t understand their own understanding, making that understanding effectively a not-understanding.

Hard to say.

AMW/BW

Der Bach lebt wieder
knichernd bebt er heiter.
Die Sonnenlicht wirft er
blitzkaotisch herum.

Die Erde kann man riechen
Dunkel sanft und tief in.
Gesaeng schuettert die Baeume
und die Kinder spieln traeumend
des Flusses entlanggehend.

Die ein bisschen Aelter
schreiben einander Gedichte
und wir ueblichen
gedraengte einsame Masse
freuen uns abwesend
das etwas besseres Wetter.

Spazieren wo wir immer
sowieso uns spazieren.
Zerstreuen mit den Wolken
die jetzt voll bunt und weiss
den Himmel durchziehen,
alles ruehig hinnehmend.

AMW

[Bartleby’s Poetry Corner]

A Brooklyn dialysis center in red brick and blue awning
On a sunny day in a clear sky way
With Dean Street black and bright sidewalks wide cream.

The hurt that coats everything like heavy paint
is dripping down the sides and spilling
around the edges, filling in, gumming up, stopping down.

What is left? What can yet be won from this table?
The cards fell after the gunshot blew
They scattered and splattered blood gelled the scene.

I’m not the man I promised I’d be.
I’m the creature soaked in black goo
from the swamp where the vegetation stinks
together into this oily sludge coat
that we lurking beasties wear
and of which we alltimes stink.

I’m not the man I told my parents about
when I stood tall and chipper
talking over the rail of my clean
and proper wooden crib.
I’m the flying lizard with the open throat
who screeches mindlessly into a fading age.
I don’t know how some one so big and bulky
so lopsided and ungainly
managed to sweep the sky with great
but paper-thin and bone-bound wings.
Maybe the atmosphere was different then,
the rules easier,
the game bent towards me.

Forgive us as the white strewn soft long
clouds shift their spots, making the Jan day
now bright as summer, now soft as autumn.
Forgive us anyway,
though it is common knowledge that you needn’t bother
with us anymore, now you’ve grown stronger,
now you’ve moved on to better things,
now you’ve found your miraculous heart past the end of us.
Ah but doesn’t that make it just the right time
to double back ’round and accept us
for what we ended up becoming, staying, holding steady as?

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear heart,
oh my gosh, who can say what it’s all about?
I’m so sorry and please excuse me
while I go grab a seltzer.
I’ve believe with a few bubbly dabs
your red dress will sing as bright and true
as when you entered this party, ruffling as you came.

Just a moment, oh give me but a sec,
I’ll make it all right.
I usually don’t move so quick and unthought
I’m normally precise and kindly cool.
It must be the drink, though of course I’m
holding myself to a reasonable pace
and I’m drinking only the softest beers
and gentlest wines, keeping free of spirits,
breaking this party calmly like a master chef
treating tge last egg of the souffle,
oh gosh, I’ve really made an effort here!

I asked you to come here to come here to help out I specifically asked you to get down here to help me out to make this OK I said please and I directed my comments respectfully I was completely in line and only asked for what was reasonable for one such as me in my position and given my circumstances to ask for to ask of you given what you are to us and how you arrange yourself and how that arrangement gave rise to the flowering in the soft dirt and the many shapes and moving forms that people the inscrutable seas which are deeper than my veins and wider than my wildest dreams being but a man constricted by a time and within a certain range of space, like a cow on the state lands on the grazing lands that are big but eventually bound by barbed wire and the rattling old pickups that carry callus-hands families to church and the store and school and the store where the Mrs works and the gas station where the Mr lends his sturdy hands.

Come back around if you would if you please if you could. I cannot keep it up like this all day long. All alone here with the curving metal channels and the wind farms that look like a million naked prop planes one-eyeing all over this dusty leathery brown-grassed hilly land where I came without papers from another state in the union where I was born with the smallest dollops of sinful pride. I’ve got big ideas! The world is wide open!

AMW/BW

How fought we then in ancient days now spent.
We kicked our heels up high; we battered much.
Beneath your swirling sword, our tidal wave
of chaos and calamity did surge
against the gathered stones of neighbored foes,
and carried twisted limbs and gaping mauls,
shattered spears and scattered shields
across the bloody scream-up moan-down field.

Now great king, how thin, how pale: shorn of all
your valiant hair and ruddy ready charm!
And oh my king, your voice so ragged worn
that once would boom like thunder’s rolling roar–!?

It meets me strangely, these reappraisals
from younger folk with cleaner nails who judge
our days without our ways

***Oh, looks like a fragment**

I sat on a stony ground
just looking all around
at the people

A festival in the grass
that seemed about to last
forever

A bright sky blue sunshine
surrounding everyone
on the fairgrounds

Who’ll stop the evil for me?
Who’ll keep the hoard away
from my city?

Or must the angry chaos
Twisting like a storm at sea
rise and claim me?

They speak of ancient evil
A devil prowling wide
across the stages

I know who I’ve become
and I’m sorry for it
every day

Who’ll take my place
at the wall
where they face

The monsters that crawl
on spindly legs
squeal laughing at how small
we’ve gotten?

Who’ll put their back into it?
when I slip out the back
without any spirit
left?

Who’ll stop the evil for those
who like me
quit?

AMW / BW

Come flicking through the sheets
of thick seaside fog
coiled round and round the wires
where plump breasty flaps
sidle, ruffle, stare
settle down with a frown.

Come chasing the horn dark and blue
that beeps against the damp
that sneaks across the lawn,
and bores through the wool,
to lace your squishy flesh–
where centipedes curl
to balls of sleep-sleep time
for a thousand stupid years.

Fiends, ah friends!
Gather ’round,
bring it down,
pass it on!
Let it burn
as you turn
towards me
goblets held
for all to see!

Right you are
my bright lil star
who twinkle twinkle
in my scar-crossed eye!

This light’s stolen sure
from vulture’s jagged crook
above a sandy floor
about an aqua hook,
as bone dry air laughs
quiet and rough.

Creepy, sinister, parched air
that never did care
who within its stale breathe
caught a rattled death,
a lonesome, weary, bright but dreary,
sorrowful soft

Did you ever know the place
from whence came this person me
who I’ve had to become by chance
and or somethings worse?

It was a small town in a nowhere
corner of the who cares world.
That’s where I cut my chops
learned my licks flipped my lid
for the very first time.

Just some little grimy town
where everyone’s one way
and a little suspicious
of any other ways.

A nice town, where everyone knows
everyone and everyone understands
why we gather for this occasion
or that holiday.

A tiny little hamlet high in the mountain peaks
of 1850s Austria with snow sliding off pines
and the thought of another race
a different religion another style
occurred to precisely no one ever.

We lived that way.
It was easy ’cause we knew the path
that all shared, and God’s wrath
followed rules at which we each
nodded chipperly while chewing big
on potatoes cabbage a little pig.

Now where am I?
What has happened?
Everyone’s all jumbled up!
There are so many differences
there for us to notice.
Weird, weird, weird,
the weird sisters
cackle raspy and fight over one
big veiny eyeball.
Weird, weird, weird.

Everything flows