The Art of Overlooking 

Unpleasant Manifestations

“It’s a sin to fry a rainbow.”

                            ~Stanley Moss

First, take this quiz.

Is life pleasant all the time? 

Are people pleasant all the time? 

Should people be pleasant all the time? 

What is actually occurring when we are being baited by another?

What is the proper response to an insult, inadvertent or otherwise? 

Does chronic behavior signal unconsciousness?

As we age, are we meant to become more like ourselves?

What about those who think it best not to?

What about those who live to evolve according to their highest values?

Is it foolish to want to live up to another?

What is the proper measure of being?

If the thought of comparing ourselves feels like a blatant absurdity, 

are the very nature of sports a proclivity toward sin?

At what point does chronic behavior signal mental illness?

If disease is dis-ease, how soon do telling symptoms arise?

Does our urge to control life control us?

Can people behave other than they are? 

What is more important, being true to oneself, or true to others?

Are there times when we cannot be both?

Is overcoming the self a form of self denial?

Is an affinity for affliction the ego’s way of insisting on self-importance?

Is it ever appropriate to hold up a mirror to another in a social setting?

Does the consequence of recognizing a thing

outweigh the consequence of not recognizing it?

Is it ever appropriate to resent others

for not knowing what we know?

When we realize another’s selfishness,

will we be made aware of the selfishness in ourselves, 

and vice versa?

Is the price of achieving no illusions

the tendency towards seeing others in a harsher light?

If people know not what they do, and it is a fool’s errand

to attempt to change them, 

perhaps the best way to forgive is to overlook

without disparity.

The rigor with which I muse on myself

needed tempering when the same

light fell on others.

Peter Valentyne

April 19th, 2019

I Make My Own Joy

I make my own joy

even as I know

it’s un-manufacturable.

Listen anyway;

joy is gratitude

independent 

of circumstance,

a key in the hand

of a mouth

in prayer,

a shielding frond,

a harvest

of pollen,

a sun shower,

a still thing

that inspires

more stillness.

I make my own joy

because night

can be so full

of betrayals,

hurts and incapacity.

Every morning with

my head full 

of temporary terrors

that never happened,

my dreams 

disregard the facts,

which means

it’s possible

for facts to forgo

their dreamer.

Such nights make 

even death ridiculous.

I make my own joy

because I rise

every morning

from my burial plot

to see my name

engraved on a decaying 

granite of days.

And so

my spirit resolves

it’s gloom via

a preposterous

graveside picnic.

From my blanket

I thumb my nose

at the dead.

Not me,

not yet!

I’m still

in bed!

I make my own joy

when and if

by chance

it’s taken away.

As failures fertilize

a flower bed,

and pollen 

draws down

the bees 

to keep

them fed,

and tears

do really make

the roses red,

so why can’t

sorrow be

an eco-system

instead?

I make my own joy

because I can’t leave 

a thing like joy

to chance.

If grace can make

a planet sustainable,

why wouldn’t I wish

to maintain

my own 

atmosphere?

Think of misery

and passion

as twin flames

and our candles

will grow younger

by wax and wane.

I make my own joy

because morning 

is for resurrection

and a ritual of basics:

watering plants,

clearing surfaces,

washing dishes.

A life of repetition

needn’t be tedious.

To be alive

is not predictable

and never obedient.

Even as I do 

the same chores,

mull the same miseries,

stroke the same cat,

I am never the same 

man twice.

I make my own joy

because the alternative

feels unimaginable.

I conceive my joys

like a God who never

dealt in facts

but only in faith.

Facts cut my feet

and my soul needs 

it’s nightmares:

grist as they are

for my spirit

to flower.

I, myself, 

an inquisitive bee

hovers over 

dung and daisies

in a single hour.

My spirit is a crocus

and every morning

an inexorable Easter.

I’m too emotional

to be exact.

Poetry is remembering,

with the feelings intact.

I make my own joy

because there is no certainty

in the staunchest of conclusions;

my soil is full

of soul stuff

towards a concious end.

Last night I dreamt 

I roamed a ruin

on an uninhabitable planet.

and woke up

as it’s hapless historian.

I make my own joy

because joy is an arrow

in a magician’s arsenal

and because only my heart 

can hold it’s quiver.

Joy is not a fact,

nor is night’s

trials of the soul.

Repetition can

bring the change

we seek

if we can learn

to see the angel 

in the compost heap.

I make my own joy

because joy does not

arise from experiences,

but attitude.

My faith is not in facts.

I have grown used

to being a poet 

in a literal world, 

so I see poems

as holy worm holes.

I make my own joy

like a snake

that swallows it’s tail,

meeting myself

as a friend

on a circular path

without an end.

One of us,

the poet,

holds up a mirror

to signal

from sun to moon

and neither of us

need really know 

who’s light is who’s.

Peter Valentyne

April 14th, 2019

painting by Neil Kaplan

Viktor

I keep my sun in the shadows

which is not the same as

hiding my light beneath a bushel.

I am content with being

in the cellar 

amongst the gnarly armed, 

malformed potatoes.

Darkness has it’s uses.

Beauty must begin somewhere.

My work is my poetry.

Though, my goal is

to make a man:

chore-loving, 

shorn of vanity,

kind for no reason,

a man

with an effortless

un-self-conscious 

demeanor.

A poem of a man.

What I couldn't 

have foreseen
was that

we would be 

forever synonymous;

twin pages

marred by words

in some 

mysterious way

for better or worse.

This is how it begins.

The world drives me

from itself

into a barren room

where I find no respite,

the morning’s 

colorless fog

assuring me

that nothing is

 more fertile than

a cloud full of rain,

but for myself

willing you to live.

Finding my state

no longer reflected in the sky,

I search for new signifiers.

Where are you in all this sunlight?

Are you where I find myself?

Or am I like you,

a rapturous fugitive,

a creature sewn together

with a spider’s thread,

the grafted visage

of my own youth's tender ideals

like the borrowed breath

of a broken heart

sworn to do no harm.

You…
forever my great truth

begun in this
blessed blasphemy.

Peter Valentyne

April 10th, 2019

Enigma

“Why is it that when you wake to the world 

of realities you nearly always feel,

sometimes very vividly, that the vanished

dream has carried with it some enigma

which you failed to solve?”

                     ~Fyodor Dostoyevsky

i

Time is not horizontal,

if anything, its vertical.

Everything is happening

in a circular world,

perception is an onion.

Rising above

and going within

are not 

measured by distance.

Forget the perversion 

of the forward,

reject the seduction

of the backward.

Awareness is vertical.

Nothing is achieved

by racing toward it.

Only standing still

and becoming aware

of what is.

Learn the language of dreams

where distance is meaningless.

Consciousness is a spiral stairway
leading only to here.
When are you elsewhere?
Yesterday is a fever dream
and tomorrow is a fable.

Time is a contagion of the mind.

A mysterious illness

only a poet can translate.

Poetry as diagnosis.

Only night returns us 

to our natural state.

Day is for dreamers.

Night is for 

practitioners of soul.

Here, logic disowns you.

There is no distraction

from feeling everything.

We only think up

adventures for our bodies

to pretend they have

a life of their own.

ii

Our basement 
has a basement,

let’s face it.

Beneath the shadowy stairs

like the shadow 
of a shadow;

someone has to 
go down there.

Let the one who hurts 
the most go,

the one who feels his way

through darkness

by believing in the light.

Someone who can befriend

the neglected & rejected ones

even when they bite.

I’ll go, 

tethered to a thread.

You needn’t yank me out.

I will keep my head instead.

I’ll go.

With my faith’s sunny detachment,

like a wise fool who can’t tell

a compliment from condemnation.

This way,

if I turn the other cheek

I can rest the monster in my lap.

Peter Valentyne

April 8th, 2019

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