Most-Basic Vocabulary: a poem

You are a liar

If you’ve felt so confident

Eternally flat footed

Participating in this unraveling happening

Not confused from the head down

I doubt you

Very much

I distrust you

As a politician

As a teenage smirk

But somewhere we are not liars

You and I

We and they

The summer months

A vital clarity

Some dangerous dodge

Or whatever peak of heaven you please

The hairs of your arms and neck

Sobering up

And your being follows

For me: that place where the grass grows high

Grows straw colored

Where it blows in the wind

Endearingly

The soft wind alone

The gentle golden hills alive

I only ruminate of shy young women

Or those of soft grinning wisdom

With the same unflinching affection

And there, off the well-traveled freeways

Along lonely one-laners

I make my way

To those vistas and meadows

Those places that are mine somehow

And they welcome me as an ally

Here, my highest rituals I embrace:

Trying to remember the central things

That nothing’s ever truly personal

That resentment is a child’s fiction

That if you want to improve yourself

Be content to look stupid and foolish

And out here, I come to rest

Come to retrieve the rudimentary

Some most-basic vocabulary

That appears fully pronounced

When I make the effort

Coming back

To me

Like the smells of my childhood

And true rest is never with others

Not yet

For I wish the lot of them away

All those interruptions

All that arresting of my development

They don’t give off quiet

What all my veins long for

Where I may hear the source of things

Hear and feel the wind

Know the wind

Of this self I am among

That’s what I want

For compromise never really suits the appetite

The stomach never settles

The noise lingers on

And breakfast, so hard to eat

The mind

Turning over

The enslaving duties yet to be done

The body already resistant

For the food cannot be taken

With the worthy spirit

Of a hungry man

The sacred respect it deserves

If you’d ask me sincerely

I’d say that I want to be flying

Absolutely at the front of the game

Developing the damned thing myself

Fuck the benefit

I want to feel it, I’d say

Through the veins

When I breathe

It’ll be there

At-hand

Birds gotta fly

I’ve gotta fly

Far beyond the bullshit:

That entrapped enlightenment

Prescribed by the smart,

Well-adjusted fucks within the institution

And out there

On the edge of the thing

All warm and soft with kerosene

I’m swaying with the golden grass

Breathing it in

Sick with health

Melting in violent balance

The health of having nowhere to go

Having no one to please

I make me way

To my most-basic vocabulary

Like a man who finds himself interesting

After the second or third drink

Conjuring up that thing I was to be getting on with

That thing I meant to do

Have meant to do

That thing daydreams often storied

The quiet of real work hungered for

That true education

That emendation of the intellect

Remember

You’ve sat against yourself

In the screaming body of a victim

Your body

So many years

Always digging yourself out

The body like a wet towel twisted dry

And the familiar disease we call consciousness

The crippling possession by worried thought

That continual negation wherein the energy escapes

Every thought checked by another

Possessed by the community

Itself split and dead

Never able to swim wholeheartedly

In your most deliberate moments

The only felt problem worth addressing:

How to overcome destructive thinking

You would do well to remember, Pilgrim

If you want to play your card

Forget that you are injured

It does no good

To leave the highest trajectory

For another time

Play that damn card

Nod at it like you nod at a good wine

All there is can be summed up thus:

Unaccountable weirdness and unaccountable longing

And so nod at it

And throw everything into it

There is nothing else to do

And only when you throw it all in

All your energy spent

Are you hit by that absurdly good news

That health the wind relies upon

That sees everything as an art

As an endearing art