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I need to organize.
I need to organize my emotional finances and my thoughts.
I need to clear some space up for the organization.
The organization of clarity.
Finally.
I feel freed up.
Free to move about.
No one is poisoning my drinking water; I’m not drinking enough water to
worry about it.
Hydrated urine samples are by definition watered down.
What’s the word for repeating the same description with different words
twice in a row? I don’t know,
But I know someone who does.
Knowing is half the battle and the clichés roll off the tongue like
hydrated saliva.
Not that thick coffee and cream spittle after that last cigarette. Last
cigarette after last cigarette and blasé cigarette blah blah cigarette.
How nice it really is to stand on the deck.
Standing on the deck in the dark smoking and watching the cat at the
bottom of a tree.
Phantom birds plaguing the other wise sane feline mind.
Twitching tail catches those fine cat hairs against just cut grass. And
there you stand.
Right there in the center of that world and out it goes.
Out to the reaches of the other side of this globe and spiral spiral out
there to the rest of this globular universe.
Universe within universe of tiny possibilities that really could fit right
inside a snug little atom.
Atomically speaking,
What better place to have stood fifteen minutes ago than on the deck? Out
in the country,
Beautiful greens,
Lowing and jostling of clumsy cows.
It’s nice to stand there and be there.
Be actually in it, because that – just now – seemed so rare.
So rare and back to clear.
Clarity.
It’s nice to stand there and think of dustier places.
Adobe fashioned buildings and palm trees standing side by side.
Their solitary stances once compared to loneliness, but I finally beg to
differ.
Why not?
Palm tree is as palm tree does, and the clichés roll by gathering moss
like no rolling stone ever could.
Shall I organize this poem while I’m at it?
Tidy up a grammatical error here, a usage issue there?
Why?
Instead of why not here I’ll say why and that’s because, really,
let’s
take
one
thing
at
a
time.
It’s nice sitting here.
Dry walled room painted powder blue mostly.
Cement floor.
This floor must have a millimeter of dust from wall to wall, shifting as
you scuttle it across the room with your shoes.
Dust so fine and polished it could be framed and how symbolic.
Framed with any sort of revolutionary in any sort of state.
Now that’s love.
Love making and breaking realities across this globe at the very least.
Love just as miraculous and catastrophic as any current event.
Love.
Oh the smile that I have.
The smile woven all over me.
Stitch-stitched through cartilage and veined skin,
Through sinew and feigned kin.
From a bones’ splintery needle to a heart pumping out splendid dye we
create this tapestry of soul, and what could be better than that?
So many souls so much time and the many of our souls comes and boils down
to one,
the clichés boil down into this salty broth, this salty broth boils down
to this gravy modified by the modernizations of our lives and transcends
the potatoes!
The starch of our lives transcended not only by this sense boggling
super-gravy,
But by the simple.
By the ohm and the la and the la-ti-da of it all.
By the let’s see how things go to the let’s just see.
It was once written: ‘I cried my eyes out but it cleansed my vision, and
if all goes wrong this was your decision.’
Let’s leave the latter part out, but I see.
Cleansed and cleared and wipe that eye snot out!
All the tears of pretensions, disappointments, and missed appointments
with a self-made destiny.
Stopped.
No more destiny manipulations, this is too easy for that.
Cried and true, I feel like I can see for miles, right into a window
across from a bench that held two people and four hands slightly warted. I
look through that window to see a record being carefully placed on the
phonograph
By another beautiful soul.
Make an incision and peal it all off and there it still is:
Stark naked gushing insides and just as beautiful.
Miraculous.
Lay down with me.
Just for a moment.
Close your eyes and let me kiss these visions into them.
Do you see the cat; can you almost hear his phantom bird?
Can you see me?
Hair tousled and smoking that last cigarette?
Look at me,
Cleansed eyes open and warm soul here and there and wherever I happen to
be. My toes are blowing kisses and my mouth is running towards the sky
hungrily for a word to be blown in from one set of lips to another, to
another,
to another,
Lips joining,
Breathing:
Love.
© 2004 by Mary Elizabeth Otte
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