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
