I don’t know that I like your marble story.
As much as I wish I could believe
in a marble bag at my hip
to pick and choose as I please
I’d like to complicate your metaphor more:
Do you ever really know the multitude
of marbles left in your bag?
How many are slowly losing their light?
Blistering stars, dying, bursting
with their last fiery breaths before they go extinct.
And if not, how can you be sure when
you’re on your last one?
Which one to hide from the greedy universe,
its grubby fingers reaching, grasping
for the final grain of your ghost.
But mostly, you can’t get rid of the marbles.
Sure, some go fuzzy. But you can’t throw one out.
The most blazing, burning a hole in your brain marble
might as well be a boomerang. Have you seen Bruce Almighty?
Where he tries to throw out his pager, but
no matter how hard he throws it
it just keeps coming back, again, and again.
If you’ve got a manual, a how-to guide,
for casting off your sickest, most tangled balls
of thorns and toxins, open up a printing press for fuck’s sake.
Draw it in hieroglyphic detail and
Batman beam it into the night sky.
Take out an add in the paper, or
share your secret with me, unless,
that’s the one I’m waiting for
in a Coke bottle from the sea.
I’ll be there waiting, for this marble bag is bound
to bust loose from the weight of a few heavy beads
of burden as I try to stow them away further in these damned
three inch pockets.
(Damn women’s jeans, do you enjoy your deep pockets?)
What do you do in your spare time?
When you’re trying not to live in the sick
green light of those insidious marbles?
Today I found a line of ants traveling through my kitchen.
They found a smattering of old spaghetti sauce in the sink,
the chunks neglected for the pouring of sweet red
splashing in a glass, and myself pouring into the couch.
I pinned one down with the pad of my finger,
one of god’s ‘sacred’ creatures.
I felt the faint squirm,
and I pinched it between two. I
rolled, rolled, rolled
the ant between. Its crunchy body crumpling
under the crippling weight. I hear a pop,
an abdomen, or a head. I flick the lifeless body
into the sink and pinch for another.
Towering me taking on twenty ants in the sink,
a surely fair fight.
But why so..
satisfying?
Last night I made pork chops and beef gravy
that enveloped me like a dryer fresh blanket.
He & I drank red wine and slurped noodles, and I pondered
the thought that boys are not men, nor can they be lovers
unless under cover of a lusty disguise,
something sweet between thighs.
Then I thought, too,
that shared glances and darting lashes do not equal
time spent snoring beneath sheets, snuggled
into the sweet nest of monotonous monogamy.
It’s time I focus on the workings of my own pen
and the boundlessness of my mind instead of
things between thighs- these are easily attainable,
but I’ll write with this ink
until my finger bones twist and gnarl,
until the strokes of my pen are only ramblings;
remnants of crude thought and furious fantasy.
Are all of your pen strokes purposeful?
Or do they flow freely? How many things can you really do
purposefully? I mean, sure, we try.
You can practice and plan, but we’re just riding this wave,
right?
Living one of the multitude of timelines
swirling through the ether,
like the backside of your cable box setup.
And maybe, the universe really is
a self-winding, mindless wrist watch,
and we’re all just barreling into each other,
our marbles falling out and into others’ bags.
Maybe we’re all tails on a damn kite
and none of this really matters at all.
I don’t think either of us have any answers.
I’ll settle for writing poetry to you
about my mind’s abstractions,
and await your reply.