Day 27
www.thegateless.org
#26
To Breathe Deeply, To Hope Otherwise
A Seriously Con/Jur/d Response Poem
[Stolen Words / Fishing for Words]
(RE)response; with a minimal French impact although I like Mallarme and Con/Jur/d, with Tracy Mitchell, 4/27/2023 “Dice Thrown/will never annul/chance” -- Stéphane Mallarmé “To breathe deeply, and sing loudly” god has it already come to this, this need to control the breath, didn’t I smoke for 30 years to live as Dragon? Outside the Occult book and knick-knack store, bumming a cigarette, and he says -- can you believe it? -- After my last relationship I bought a gun intending on killing myself but out of sheer curiosity took up smoking instead -- need to learn how, again to sing louder than I do, even in chorus, I could see the director drift toward me, making a lifting motion until he got close enough to hear, and his hands dropped, and he moved on like he hadn’t been looking at me “or the baguettes Napoleon’s infantry carried” No one ever said to me, a sociopath dies only once while an empath dies a thousand or more depending on their coping mechanisms, yet those doomed children -- by today’s marketing standards they weren't old enough to drink or smoke -- suggest to the committee who has taken over my executive function, this is true to suggest ownership of Waterloo, a highly questionable endeavor best left to patriots, profiteers and their spin doctors “Yes, the spreading tickled feeling” because of those stories we’ve lived, and the evolutionary impulse to appropriate, and synthesize, this eternal tension between being and becoming, my friends would call it kundalini, our detractors, madness I’ve tried that before, unsuccessfully, we insist “To hope otherwise,” folly or wisdom? Hard to say harder to insist, if this appears confusing, please refer to the being and becoming subclause, and if you can say with a straight face, you’ve arrived, please show me the Devil Trumpet blooming in the concrete box behind the San Francisco row house, whose blossoms occasionally fell into our rolling tobacco, those homeopathic doses explain a great deal about the next few years, don’t they? “And yes, there are those cows I feel watching me, but,” but, but, but! always implicit, this exception, I’m certain from personal experience, the Tobacco Tribe have always felt they were an exception -- there was the retirement villa, giving up, quitting, again, we had nothing, other than a few Gauloises whose spirit too strongly reflected the French traditions of blood so we asked the 90-year-old sitting in the glassine shelter dedicated to separating us from them -- and as we contemplated the breath made visible, an ambulance pulled in having rescued one of the wanderers who had found the local dairy fields and stood there saying over and over again Look how big these beasts are! But here in our containment we didn’t know this of course and they were running the lights strobing our hands first up and then down and he started repeating -- They’re not here for me and I’m not ready yet -- having taken it to heart explains a great of our history “To hope otherwise– that words might arrive like” we can hope, can’t we? Where these words come from and where they are going? Since you asked when we look All That We See Is A Great Unknowable The less said about it the better “Or words might emanate from the backpacks of bugs” we want to cry, with joy, with sorrow, for a little while our first sailboat was on Cayuga Lake, and I’d stopped Smoking and an old friend who hadn’t had a cigarette in 20 years let me know, he had a dream, where we leaned against a car and lit up like we were child - ren, who didn’t believe in danger except in the abstract soon after, a magus I know died in his sleep, he’d sounded like Bill Burroughs, and gave up smoking after he invited my ex to sleep on his floor and was creeped out by the choking ethanol clouds they produced together, she’s dead now too, says something about that time doesn’t it? “In each morning twilight, we wait to behold anew. . . “ that’s the truth of it, ain’t it? We’d have chosen crepuscular since there’s a certain satisfaction in those who know know and those who don’t, often continue the poem reaching for a real or imagined dictionary the outline of fingers and hands reaching, finding, tidbits outlasting us “Breathe deeply– women inherently know these” yes yes they do, long before I took up the habit to address my dis-ease, there was a lover, who wore dark red lipstick, and often black dresses over her acned back and she smoked and our lips found the bitter-funk delightful “What other answer might there be?” Find, I don’t know committed to this particular course, how to end “To accept as spring gifts from fawns in the forest” that’s it that’s it! No, it doesn’t end, does it? Soon, I’ll visit the dentist who at the last visit removed a tooth, and so I put my pack on top of a waste disposal unit where other members of The Tribe could reach -- An end of sorts -- except on vacation Yes! “And to pursue to the end”
But it wasn’t Sharkey’s Day Burroughs appeared on — It was Sharkey’s Night:
Much love,
Con/Jur/d, 4/27/2023