Dandelions

The dandelions

agree to everything,

caring little for where

they find themselves.

Accustomed to feeling

inferior,

they are content to live

by their own means

as others do by their wits.

Contrary to their reputation,

they are not a weed,

nor the chosen flower

for a boutonniere

on a wino’s lapel.

But they are the Fool’s gold

of the floral world,

accustomed to being dismissed.

Bright countenance,

you lift your face

in prayerful alliance

and mimic the sun

as if it were

joyful to be humble.

Though lacking glamour,

your simplicity speaks

with startling

sophistication.

Even as your roots

gain strength

by interlocking

hands

beneath

the earth.

Inclined to cluster,

you enjoy nothing

more than being

amongst your own kind,

as if your sunny

alphabet

dared to spell

a word more

definitive than

your color.

Though

in numbers

you seem

an unruly mob,

you alone

form

a chorus.

Even as

a solo choir,

you remain

undaunted

by hardship

or landscape.

Plucked and held

under a chin,

it is possible

to make of you

a golden butter,

proof that your

divine imagination

is in harmony with

the sun's rays.

Then,

after living

a life of vibrant yellow,

your exuberance

matures

exploding into

a backward butterfly,

living proof

that breath becomes

a ghost in the chill air;

a gentle geometry

of fireworks

that is nothing less

than holographic.

Evolving,

you finally implode,

initiating

an unexpected

transformation

with your

final act:

to fulfill the wish

blown from

the lips

of a child

bold enough to yearn

for something

greater.

Let the Colors Take You to Themselves

Art lives

as long as

it goes unfathomed.

Once plumbed, it dies

a transient’s death.

Digestion precludes disposal.

Therefore, be careful

what you choose

to make self-evident.

Immortality is for

the enigmatic.

That said

to renounce anything

has its uses.

Maybe it takes

casting the self aside

before we can truly

become authentic;

for our bravery to set in,

a loss of inhibition,

the first perilous prerequisite.

Such a quiet compulsion

to go on harboring.

But what other choice is there?

How better to register

the quake that occurs when

the world loses

something or someone

than through

a work of art?

Circumstances are pretense,

but cause is a canvas.

To act,

to paint,

to write,

to dance,

to sing,

to play

“as if”

what we do has its roots

in our deepest being.

As if we matter.

As if others care.

As if we weren’t giving

birth to ourselves

in every single moment.

Dabbing some paint

in the form of words

on a jute

made of morning

is how one begins to

make something

out of nothing.

I like being imaginative early

as it helps me detox

from the night’s ferocities.

My body gets the bends

from rising too fast.

I start every day

a kink from head to foot.

I don’t know about you,

but my nights are

awash in pathologies,

even as my days teeter

atop a heap

of humdrum

literal minutiae:

feed the cat,

piss in the pot,

wash the dishes,

brush my teeth…

to the more

reflective desire

to match my mood

with what I wear.

Blue says

I’m poised for peace.

Red says

I’m looking to connect.

Green always

for want of a woods.

 

As If

 

How many of us

are living life 

as if 

there is no God?

Even if we pray, 

the despair in our voices 

reinforces his absence.

As if 

he's

a delinquent father 

we'll never be close to. 

 

What if we were to wake 

up one day 

lying on the outside 

of ourselves?

Spontaneously ashamed, 

embarrassed even, for living

as if 

we are unloved, 

despite how many

may or may not 

have reached out

toward us.

Would it still be

an acceptable posture 

to maintain?

 

As if 

we were tramps 

homeless in a rainswept city. 

As if 

we were tourists

wandering a Roman ruin.

As if 

nothing added up 

or possessed any meaning. 

As if 

we were lost children

feeling our way 

through the dark.

As if 

we don’t belong anywhere.

As if 

living a nightmare 

we cannot wake up from.

As if 

we were deaf, 

dumb, and blind.

As if 

we weren’t here 

for a reason.

As if 

 we were beggars 

in a house of plenty.

 

As if.

4/12/24

 

Thoughts on the Poem: “As If”

 

The theoretical underpinnings of "Acting As If" are deeply intertwined with self-perception theory. This psychological framework posits that people infer their own attitudes, emotions, and abilities by observing their own behaviors.

 

Acting "as if" involves wholeheartedly believing of the achievement of your goals before they materialize. When you embody this belief, it activates a powerful energy that attracts opportunities, resources, and the right circumstances for growth.

 

Acting as if is a necessary mindset to inhabit for social cohesion and the greater good of societies built through healthy, empathetic, goal-oriented individuals.

Living in the world is pretty much an “as if” proposition. For all intents and purposes life is so mysterious in its, at times, seeming indifference combined with its paradoxical penchant for grace, its well-oiled machine-ness of universal law of cause and effect, and its blessing/curse dynamics of manifestation…leaves we who are much grateful to be alive to embody (therefore take responsibility for) our own fulcrum of perspective. This can be as easily abused as to be empowered by. The cup “half full or half empty” is the free choice we have at any given moment in any and all circumstances. We are our own windows on the world and taking responsibility for our interpretation of it is arguably one’s most important task in life. Its far-reaching consequences extend into everything we feel, think, and ultimately do. I am reminded of Anais Nin’s famous quote “We do not see the world as it is. We see it as we are”. Therefore, like it or not, we are the captains of our fate; our bodies: the sea-worthy or compromised vessels we make of them. If you think having a physical or mental defect in life is unfair and stacks the world against one, it’s not that simple or true. Only in comparing ourselves with others (never a wise thing to do) are we subject to unparalleled protestation. On the other hand, the law of compensation is a saving grace anyone with an impediment can become advantaged in. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Without the world’s many challenges we would all likely be callous, insensitive zombies. Humanity is born adaptable and subject to conditions good and bad. The person who is born disadvantaged is the person who more than likely realizes they must take matters into their own hands. The person born advantaged is less likely to develop equivalent powers. What is taken for granted often lacks awareness. What is suffered builds awareness. Therefore, happiness is not a goal but a grace. A constant state of happiness would starve the soul of its necessary alchemy. Nothing would matter very much at all. I remember as a child watching the film The Sound of Music and being struck by a line Maria says to one of the children after they have just been singing together on the mountain (paradise) with my heart chockfull of the beauty and joy all childhood fantasies are made of. Little Kurt asks Maria, “Can we do this every day?”. Maria, in a shocking turnaround from the utter sweetness of all of that had proceeded before this exchange, replies “Don’t you think you’d get tired of it eventually?” (Or something to that effect). As a young boy with a built-in song in my heart, I couldn’t believe my ears. Why would she say that? How could anyone ever get tired of such harmoniousness or for that matter of happiness itself? That line haunted me. Now as an adult I reimagine the consequences of unending happiness. How uninvolved it would eventually make us. How poor in spirit because the spirit is a muscle that increases its strength more through adversity than anything else. 

 

My poem “As If” puts that ball in the readers hands. How easy it is to feel overwhelmed and even lost in the matrix of our existentially fabricated world. Buy this and you’ll be happy. So, you fork your money over only to find that it makes little, if no, difference in your happiness no less than an hour later. You’ve spent only to have lost. 

 

How many of us are living life as if there is no God?

 

Since life is an “as if” proposition, it makes as much if not more sense to side with the existence of a loving, all-seeing God, as to not. Because to conclude there is no loving, all seeing God, is equally as if as the opposite conclusion. Think about it: How does a child begin to become the person he wants to be? By pretending in increments that it is already so. If that same child concludes that he or she could never be what they want to be, by blaming a negative voice in their head or having had some discouraging experience to do with that desired self-image, they will inhibit their own growth because they have allowed, no, invested, in the very stumbling block to make it so. This is an easy mistake for a child or young person, but an even deadlier one for a grown adult. Because the ego has likely formed and tends to take credit when credit isn’t necessarily due. The adult mind in tandem with the ego wishes to distinguish itself from the masses. And no one wants to be the fool, though that is what we are, all of us. As the tarot makes clear, our journey is to incorporate and individuate, and that is the fool’s journey on his way to becoming whole, if not holy. The tarot is not in contention with a God, if anything, it imagines God’s many attributes in a polytheistic approach. As if God had many rooms in the mansion of his being. “In my Father’s house are many rooms. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am, you may be also.” John 14:1-3

 

The Woman Who Knew All Too Well

(for Joan Valentina)

 

 

That her health was now a soldier

astride a battlefield,

too wounded to correspond.

That her body was in a lover’s quarrel

with an impervious world.

That the simple act of walking

was to drag an anchor

across unforgiving ground.

That each breath she took

was a flower devoid 

of its ambrosial scent.

 

And so

this woman who knew all too well

has now left all that knowing behind

 with us.

Though my life only brushed hers;

a moth grazing a bulb ablaze with light,

her absence has surreptitiously gnawed a hole

in the fabric of our world.

Aside from my own lackadaisical interest

in the lives of others,

my mind no match 

for her uncanny radar,

few could hold a candle

to the breadth

of Joan’s kindled exuberance.

 

You wouldn’t be wrong to say

Joan knew a thing or two

about everything and everyone,

as if peering room by room through

a spy glass made for 

drawing down the stars.

 

I could see her apartment window from mine

and now and then I’d glance

across and notice her scrolling the internet,

her posture like a question mark,

her lamp casting its theatrical spot

as if she were the sole star

in a now =bare bones production of her life.

So it was that a vacant light caught my eye

having been on night and day for weeks,

with her, uncharacteristically

missing at the controls.

 

I wondered if she were in hospital

knowing she would know if it were

the other way around.

I suddenly had the uneasy feeling

I might never see her again.

 

Though she was never

one to withdraw from the world,

her Lupis had lately gotten the best of her.

Even so, she would still find ways to stay

on top of any and all goings on.

Nothing could extinguish her desire to know.

Or at least I thought.

 

Now I wonder,

where has all that knowing gone?

 

A friend or loved one’s death 

tilts the mind’s tender machinery.

It simply does not compute

for someone to be suddenly and irrevocably erased!

Not someone as vivid as Joan!

An habitual problem solver,

her resourcefulness was Emersonian.

All things being in a ceaseless flow of change,

Being the subject of constant metamorphosis.

She prided herself on a dauntless self-sufficiency.

 

It’s true I once described her as

tilting every room she entered

so that all roads led to her.

At a party, she’d speak

without pause on any subject

as if from the axis of her

own personal wheel of fortune,

with the inarguable voice

of lived experience.

Nothing was off limits.

The food she cooked.

The parts she played.

The clothes she wore.

The people she helped.

The stories she shared.

The problems she solved.

The paths she took.

 

Nothing escaped

her powers of observation.

She, the mystery solver.

She, the truth decoder.

She, the gossip monger.

She, the storyteller.

She, the advice provider.

She, the mentor of

finessing every room

she entered.

 

As I write this on the morning after her passing,

The Queen of Outer Space

is playing on TCM behind me

and an unlikely thought presents itself:

How much world must we

hold inside ourselves

so as not to fade away

when we are gone?

 

I remember the last story Joan shared with me.

It lasted the length of an entire meal.

A man had come into her life.

A wonderful man full of kindness,

a gentleman wanting to do for her.

Why was he lavishing so much affection on me?

She wondered at a loss aloud.

After all, she was no spring chicken. (Her words)

Didn’t he know every step tired her, 

that every breath was a chore.

Joan, I said, why not just let yourself be loved?

 

After that, our conversation dwindled into 

demolishing our decadent desserts.

 

I’d like to think LOVE had come for Joan,

as late as it was.

Love unplanned for, love unexpected.

Maybe this was the last thing 

she longed to know

all too well,

one final thrilling adventure

before moving on;

 a Love that eclipsed 

the most ravenous of minds.

 

Then again, 

maybe because she once said

I was her favorite poet,

I’m left too dumbfounded

to do her justice

with a single line.