Confrontation (haiku)

all confrontations

are left handed compliments

of primal kindness

Soliciting awareness

Pardon my entry

into your awareness.

My innocent ploy is

your voluntary interest.

Yes your focus is my need.

So . . . here we are

and I have your attention.

Well, maybe I am just reaching.

I have made some assumptions

about what we share.

I thought you were

as bored as I.

I mean

this pretending to be separate

and then freshly meeting up anew.

I vibed you many times from afar.

I assumed that you did like wise also.

This does not feel like

meeting at square one

you know!

So what are we to do?

For my part,

whatever is fine by me.

I am just struggling with

the way we do who we are.

No, not just you and me

but people in general.

What is this means

we use to give appearances?

This way we stand apart

and then meet as if anew.

All this language and posturing

and then the story as fill.

At one level this all really seems

very odd to me,

and yet overly habitual

in all those other familiar ways.

It is like

let’s agree

to go unconscious together.

I won’t rain on your stagnation

and you don’t rain on mine.

This is our collusion of sorts

but supposedly not intentional.

It is weird how much we do this

and not notice enough to care.

It bugs me in a restless sort of way.

I mean it gets in the way of being,

most all of the time.

Not that I know for sure

what else there is to do.

But it is so blatantly vacant

and nothing really happens.

I guess it’s like

we lack something playful inside.

I feel mischievous

and do not know

what that really means.

It’s not like practical jokes

or punking someone.

No, its not like we need to act crazy

or get wasted on something.

It is more like I know you

but don’t know how I know.

I feel you

as if we had walkie-talkies

on our inner dialogue.

It’s fun that way

and there are others

much the same.

But nothing ever happens.

no response, no play.

So what do you say?

This awareness stuff,

is this all that strange to you

or what?

my pencil (haiku)

often my pencil

donates the blood of my thoughts

in graffiti style

The story: my next life

My next life

THIS WAS SENT TO ME!

I want to live my next life backwards!

You start out dead

and get that out of the way

right off the bat.

Then, you wake up

in a nursing home

feeling better every day.

When you are kicked out

of the home

for being too healthy,

you spend several

years enjoying your retirement

and collecting benefit checks.

When you start work,

you get a gold watch

on your first day.

You work 40 years or so,

getting

younger every day

until pretty soon

you're too young to work.

So then, you go to high school:

play sports, date, drink, and party.

As you get even younger,

you become a kid again.

You go to elementary school,

play, and have no responsibilities.

In a few years,

you become a baby

and everyone runs themselves ragged

keeping you happy.

You spend your last 9 months

floating peacefully in luxury,

spa-like conditions: central heating,

room service on tap.

Until finally...

You finish off as an orgasm.

I rest my case.

MY RESPONSE To:

I want to live my life backward!

(The eventful seduction

without actual consequence,

go figure!)

Okay start out dead

and come to, luckily,

(as opposed to cremation),

in a dark small space

buried six feet under.

No one can hear nor care.

You use all the energy you can muster

to claw, scratch and dig you way

out of your claustrophobic situation

with limited air,

eating dirt along the way

making room for yourself

in passage!

You have arrived

with no one to believe you.

It is even worse

than identify theft!

Now you have to face those

who have inherited from your passage

and you have scared the hell

out of the rest

by your unbelievable presence.

You have no insurance

or way of claiming

your situation to be real.

It is only the freakishness

of your situation

that keeps you alive

by the curious and the estranged,

who associate with you

as some demonic messenger

for what comes out of your mouth

to explain yourself.

The nursing home wants details

on your financial situation

which you cannot any more provide.

How you get healthier

is from sympathetic souls

and dumpsters.

Your, quote ‘retirement’,

has to be a life of crime

since there is no way for you

to receive or cash any benefit checks

that have your phony name on them.

You work without a green card

and scrap a living out of cash income

on a daily basis

and of course,

pawned that stupid gold watch!

After 40 years of de-toxing

and believing that you are an immortal,

you become unable

to maintain your appearances.

'Youthful' feels like an emaciation

that you think no one

wants to tell you about,

like a kind of shrinkage/cancer,

that no one seems to have heard about

before now.

You invent personas

that go with your new looks

and prey upon others in ways

that you feel could get you arrested

if ever discovered.

You feel profoundly guilty

and deeply sick inside

but no one seems to realize how

depraved you have become.

Your life now is as a vampire

with diminishing skills.

You hide out in schools

getting shyer by the day

and more fearful of discovery

by the night.

You listlessly play yourself

into deeper boredom and dismay.

You stealthy substitute yourself

into families as a runaway child,

hoping that no one will ever really know

and that that child does not return!

Every phone call or knock at the door

threatens you to the very core

of your being.

Anxiety represents your decay.

Eventually after a masquerade

of family settings,

you realize your only option is hospitals,

large hospitals with big birth wards.

Any stray crib will do!

It will take a real miracle

for you to double up as

an unborn twin,

crowning and reluctant to come out.

There is no way you will get nine months

of safety and passage.

Embarrassment and a c-section

will force you out.

Your dream of closure

with orgasm as completion

will end with a gasp

and at best, your death is

by some crib syndrome in discovery.

And once again,

if your are lucky enough,

a no ash circumstance,

which you should humbly accept

since this time around,

you do not have the where with all

to stupidly dig yourself back into life.

My advice is that you should have gone

for the reincarnation in the first place,

committed your memories to a new brain

and played through in a normal fashion

and blessedly not said a word

to anyone about who, where, when or how,

and just smiled,

an old soul sort of smile

and proceeded!

Care to? . . .

Fate scripts (haiku)

each person’s fate scripts

an impossible story

till reflection’s read

Understanding's amnesty

Understanding is an amnesty deal.

There is something inherent

in the presence of understanding

that seems to exude self-assuredness.

It is as if understanding

makes one safe

from all the liabilities

of presumed ignorance.

It is as if referential knowing

has at its disposal

some sort of leverage

that immunes one

from the aftereffects

of what “predominate” understanding

has become

as the consuming attention savior

of the now.

How did this happen?

It seems over the course

of the last few decades,

understanding has become

an implied form

of a socially acceptable means

called ‘distancing’.

Understanding implies

nothing of action or response,

just the potential to appear

to objectively intercede or interact

with the world around.

Understanding has an assumed handle

on temporality’s siege.

Understanding permits a self-exclusion

from these subjective domains

of influence

that would otherwise put one at affect.

Understanding is more than

just a knowledgeable status.

Understanding implies also

the workings of a situation,

and an operational capacity

to be functional in that setting

but deemed with restraint.

Understanding has become

a method of absentia.

Understanding infers

a world of avoidance.

It is better to understand

where not to be

and what not to do.

Seek the world of predictability

and learn to effectively control it.

It may even discreetly pronounce

be “street smart”

versus be “college educated”

as these two distinct methods

of understanding

thematically dominate

the controlling of now. . . .

Drivers (haiku)

desire-plain drivers

feature themselves on straight roads

with no need for breaks

Can you really ask yourself (part 2 of 2)

. . . Can you really ask yourself something like . . .

the right twenty questions?

(part 2 of 2)

11. ) are your habits such that you can’t be bothered with a reassessment that would really alter anything about you?

12. ) do you have aspects of a marvelous temple and treat it as urinal so that when criticism comes you abound and when compliments come you abate?

13. ) ironically when you dress well yet do you look into the un-kept around to see if there is a brighter soul than yours?

14. ) would you comprehend the spoof of the drama of your life and yet continue to compel yourself into creating it?

15. ) if lessons come that require discipline

would you feign the connection to accept as tedium what would follow?

16. ) do you ever get bored with your own self doubt as a your primary search method for self worth?

17. ) is it within you that struggle is good

but chaos is justifiably better?

18. ) when you are deeply honest

does it ever seem that the truth is of you?

19. ) are new people the salt lick of your life lessons at a safe enough distance to not take the lesson personally?

20. ) would you hide your deepest issues in the opposing gender to indirectly challenge your own self-critical view of them?

Remember,

just asking . . .

. . . Can you really ask yourself

. . . Can you really ask yourself something like . . .

the right twenty questions?

(part 1 of 2)

1. ) do you want that unbearably negative inner voice to be drown out by your preoccupations with positive conversations?

2. ) do you want the intimate attention you pay to others to be at the expense of an inner distance from your authentic self?

3. ) do you want your busyness to falsely

project your warmth towards others over the hidden anger you carry inside?

4. ) do you want your care and love to be given

in such a one-way exchange from you to others that they involuntarily validate your private isolation from anyone?

5. ) do you want your life to simply go on

without interruption from the subtlety of a higher cause?

6. ) do you want to believe that there are no easy answers to the difficult questions that asks for life through you?

7. ) would you like to believe that the only legitimate wisdom in your life has come to you ineptly from strangers?

8. ) would you like auspiciousness to suddenly appear for you without any resistance interpreted as inadvertent dumb luck?

9. ) would you like to be taken to a higher plain from the false sense of responsibility you would feel towards caring for others?

10. ) if growth were a given, would you have then chosen the right path to have perpetuated self-exile as your predicament?

Just asking . . .