Ouroboros

(for Bob Hock)

The first thing I thought

was What if this is

the last time I ever see him?

He’d just come from the CVS

and was crossing the street with

an un-customary grimace on his face,

contorting into a crescent smile

the moment he saw

me closing in.

I could tell he was in pain

and he probably 

didn’t want me knowing it,

never wanting to draw attention

to his defects or failings

as he was trying so clumsily 

to be one of the living.

His grocery bag dangled

like a drug addict’s purse,

a green leafy lettuce

poking out from it, 

a feeble reach towards freshness.

He was one of those rare men of age

that still kept up with cooking

his own meals.

That, and he had needed his refills.

They say he’d come around

to Bingo and was looking much better

in the last week.

He’d even been seen

binging on an over-sized 

wedge of birthday cake;

a grown man channeling 

a wide-eyed child,
even as life threatened to become
more than he could chew.

I can see that photo-ready face

he must have made, 

an actor still ready to deploy a mask.

He always announced himself

with that funny gait of his

that made him so easily imitatable;

a stride that, I felt sure, had been quite sexy

in youth, but now had resolved into

a kind of wounded affectation. I knew

he was in pain only because

we once spoke about 

the evils of opioids

after an un-characteristic confession that his feet

hurt him with every step for a decade.

“How are you feeling,” I asked.

“Oh, I’m soldiering on,” he said flippantly.

He was wearing one of his plaids.

His flannels always made me think of the Midwest.

I think he was from Illinois or Michigan,

a life bolstered by it’s proximity 

to water.

Was it poetic license that he once added: 

“Every mother is a natural body of water.”

I pretended to know what he meant.

Once I saw him talking to a much

more youthful man

that looked like the other end of himself.

I wondered whatever were

they telling each other.

Why is it so odd

to see the young interact with the old?

Maybe because there's only so many ways 

a man can hide a battlefield with a smile.

I keep to myself, he once said. 

The youth today are animals.

I gave him the benefit

of his cliche convinced that it

was just his loneliness talking.

Maybe we’re all animals

until we birth a soul,

I thought to say, but didn’t

as I wasn’t about to lecture him.

But my inner thoughts continued 

to close the circle.

What if a soul is not a given?

What if we were cobbling one

together all along

even as we used

those imaginary tools

of childhood?

He had a fear of falling.

Life had become a balancing act,

each day passed in

a death-defying circus ring.

Of late, he’d taken to walking

around the block looking for

someone who’d dare to meet his eyes.

More than that, he wanted

to be seen straight through 

to his insides.

To meet that person

who could apprehend the 

journey that was curling

around itself like an embryo

at the heart of him,

as if an affable visibility might

bring him full circle.

Could I be that person?

Dilapidation had begun to

bring reassurance;

a wabi sabi of acceptance

of one’s own diminishment,

even as his handsomeness

had long since sunk beneath 

it's lunar surface,

he was and is a man of great beauty.

On his worst days, his spirit

felt like parched flowers 

in a waterless vase.

He thought of Mrs. Conrad

who kept a jar of crisp

rust-colored roses

by the side of her bed

where dust had formed 

an encasing web,

unwilling to bring herself

to clear it away;

the last of her beloved’s cells

as precious as 

the memory of a first snow.

Now, back on the raw reality

of 10th Ave and 43rd,

a wind conspiring to 

blow us both away,
I embraced this civil war 

of a man

and for one 

un-embattled moment

he and I became 

a circle of two.

Peter Valentyne

February 9th, 2019

Theatre of the Deferred

In dreams

I am my own

understudy.

Every night
another

big break.

The truth is:
I'm being made
to play myself.
To go on

I must enter

through a trap

in the floor
that signals
my acquiescence.

My bed sheets,
the white flag
of my surrender,
a page without script.
Night is no writer
but it's theatre
built upon
a compost of dreams
produces nightly
artful improvisations. 

In this one

I play myself

at a crucial age

when everything

was still possible.

A rare memory play
in an age of forgetting.

As a producer
night is brazenly tyrannical.

He likes me helpless,

vulnerable,

off my game.

His concept:

always the avant garde.

The house lights dim

and the players join in.

The stage manager 
is feral,

clutching my diary

like a dog-eared bible.

Sexless, he (or she)

illuminates the stage

with a vanity mirror

that bounces light

off the moon.

Ragtag caterers arrive

like a band of bit players.

Out of the darkness

someone whispers "Places!"

and things go 
south from there.

The dead 
make their entrance 

without applause.

Someone I loved

has unfinished business.

Take note:

every prop an impromptu artifact.

Rousing to a lack

of occasion,

I look down at

my body in paralysis

lying discarded,

an obscene marionette;

my fate made fictitious 

by questionable facts.
I brace for a reckoning.

Asleep again, 
I live only in the past

an anti-body

unable to discern

what is happening 
and what is not.
How would you feel
being made to star
every night

in a black sky

of un-finished stories?

Tonight, I'm cast as the Garbo

of multi-duplicitous affairs.

My loneliness

used for so much mulch.

I am in turns
overwhelmed, frightened,
joyous, and enervated.

Tonight I'm given parents.

They enter stage left.

Has Beens desperate for a come back.

The woman playing my mother

I recognize from a commercial 

for Mutual of Omaha Life Insurance.

But she makes the scene work.

I'm in tears in no time.

My distress giving her something

to play off of.

Am I the only one

not acting in this sideshow?
How is one to act
when portraying yourself?

Are these dramas
messaging me from
inside
in order to aid me in
an acorn's individuation?

I am my own fodder.

Who’s version of night

turns me so inside out?

Every evening's production

is meant to undo

what makes me tick,

to force me open,
even while I'm

pinned like a starfish

to a plank,

my five senses

held in place

beneath a shriveling 

midnight sun.

Peter Valentyne

March 12th, 2019

W-A-T-E-R

We are at the well.

I am spelling myself out

to you in our

conjoined hands.

It’s simple,

but what’s veiled

resists vocabulary.

Our hands are wet,

damp with nouns;

ripe words made of juice.

I am urgency

jacking the pump

as if to fill a flat
convinced that

air and water

will bring us

both to life.

We are in the dream.

There is no 

mine or yours.

Finally, we are 

without possessions.

I pump the water

ferociously

through both our hands.

We make our clumsy cup

a holy vessel.

Dream water

sparkles in the sun

though it arises

from dark depths.

We are made of 

and for

each other.

This is where we 

marry the world,

reconnect our

thirst with the clouds

and begin

to wake.

Peter Valentyne

March 10th, 2019

Santorini

We met

at the top

of a

chalky white

tower.

Your lithe

tan body

full of

the life

ahead.

You tied

a bag

of black

umbrellas

to my bike.

I was

going to

have to

make the

next boat

as it

looked like

rain.

I followed

you 

into a

celebration

full of

vivid

colors.

We lay

down

on the

ground

to watch

something

small

crawl away.

Then

I

woke

to 

a morning

full of rain.

Peter Valentyne

March 10th, 2019

Use Me

Dying has enlivened me.

I live for rain.

When did I stop writing

about love?

After too much pain?

What I wanted

hurt others

because I refused

not to be the protagonist.

Until I did.

Now I’ve no longer any need

to tell my story.

I’m free.

My mornings are spent

trying to resemble the living.

My clothes barely conceal

my absence.

People mistake me 

for one of them.

I’ve no doubt

 a dead poet is

writing through me.

The cat knows,

but no one else.

Living is very distracting.

And love always

wants us to

kill ourselves.

I let it happen.

I am being used.

It’s okay

because everything
matters now.

I was willing to step aside

and let my tongue shrivel

up like an apple 

too loved by the sun.

I can relate.

After too much loving

I begged to be locked away.

Give me a rocking chair.

Let me 

cry to Mahler.

But I digress.

I have since

found employment,

the miracle so far behind me

that remembering is tricky,

if not mythological.

I can no longer keep it 

here.

It keeps me.

Peter Valentyne

March 1, 2019

Lamentation of the Lily

Oh my dear, Lily. 

I’m afraid I saw this coming 

yet wondered why it should come at all. 

I know what it is to be 

on the receiving end 

of confided grief and dread. 

I see how it can seep 

into the receiver and color the well instead. 

But your fate need not be so funereal. 

A life of cultivation

especially this late in the game 

is rarely made of dreams and ideals, 

but often diminishment, tears, and pain. 

This is, of course, compounded 

by the uncertain affairs of clouds 

and the irony that there is 

such darkness in lofty places

where all of life abounds. 

BUT, do not find your meaning, 

worth, or wisdom in judging soil or sky. 

Instead find it within, 

in a space so sacred 

that nothing can corrupt or touch its integrity. 

The minute we start comparing miseries

we lose our way

because everything has it’s resolve

and one rose’s dilemma 

or sunflower’s challenge 

is the marigold’s chance to evolve. 

Our realities are unequal,

whether meadow, vase, or bed. 

Because we are based in consciousness

and not literal or external instead. 

We meet our adversaries 

as shadows of our unconscious. 

Contrast is how we differentiate. 

Opposites are natural, organic, and necessary. 

The only thing you need 

other than irrigation

is to take responsibility for 

your vibration. 

In this you are like the bees

who oft mistake blades of grass for succulent trees.

Don’t miss the forest for them. 

Or what you fear will take the lead.

Shadows are darkened by your source of light

only to be enhanced each and every night! 

They may seem alarming, even insurmountable.

But like the bee, they are illusory. 

Life is the plight of the peony.

The peony is it’s own poem.  

No poet should explain a poem.

How does one deduce a flower? 

You can only reduce it in an hour. 

A flower is here 

for such subtle and illogical reasons. 

It is here for its own sake. 

It’s texture, smells, and colors so ample, 

they reveal themselves to our senses

but once explained, are trampled. 

You are a flowering, dear Lily.

You are not here for a reason. 

You are a collection of qualities. 

You are not here to solve 

the lamentations of the rose. 

You can empathize, yes,

but do not glower.

When life creates an inferiority

it also grows a flower. 

Your fate is in your petals. 

Do not feel so victimized. 

Stop identifying growing up and old 

with helplessness and demise 

just because you see others 

wilting all around you. 

Be your own version 

of everything you hold dear. 

Be bright red…or glorious yellow.

Embody what you cherish. 

You need

only bloom to defy your gloom; 
an art that has never perished.

Peter Valentyne

February 28, 2019