Believe it, hip sucks; you play a mean tune and they call in the vultures who are crazy about alleviation.

I came of age in the eighties, under the blinders of the Reagan era, struggling to be “capable of being in uncertainties” as Keats said some one hundred and fifty years before I was born.

It is now the ninth month and the return of the deluge, where something in passing becomes holy writ; one note that is held, waiting for resolution, the other reason to write a poem.

I was never much of a dancer, don’t get me wrong, I’d cut a rug anytime, anywhere, if the music played itself, bouncing from ceiling to floor, yet tonight my feet moved in rhythm and precision. Maybe it is the same, when limbs flail or you know the bossa nova, maybe pain is love in retrograde (yeah, I like that).

It’s been a long hard road;
this is the poem where I finally give thanks,
this is seven years justified,
this is the beginning of what will only be described as incredible, without regret we missed anything, and being there in each moment, even beholding that dark side that doesn’t want me back.

Let’s ride the downbeat off in the distance, wild running toward the horizon outside Ocampo, Mexico, where Texas is a dream. I love the image of a car riding across the desert, validated by the veracity of passing from nowhere to further and you know where your going (don’t think about it that much, that much is what I ran from, to my fantasy of a city called refuge, one built on cocaine and alcohol, and sex, and the stains that where burned onto so many sheets that revealed what only a blank page can).

It’s like that old song, two worlds colliding, but whether we stand or sit or lie down and fuck good for an hour before reality sets in and you hit the road or just get lost and find sunshine around every bend; could anything be more holy or pure, finally becoming the man and woman we have always hidden from?

I love your vagina, truly the mound of Venus, it mystify me, telling me the story that brings your heart to the surface as it finds a new way to survive.  This was so much easier when I had a typewriter, primitive these days, maybe, truly functional for writing poetry, absolutely.  It is sticking your hand in and singing ‘bring on the night’, now, because it rushes to the dawn.

So I’m sitting here at my wooden desk writing you some lines instead of doing them (I hope we can still be friends).  I write it
because you made the stars align and I am proud that you would choose me, a planet on the far side, vast, wanting to come back and never more able. Let’s sail this world and make a poem home for the fleeting seconds when we can be each other, ego dead and there to catch each other, especially because we made each other fall (gravity is a bitch) into the rest of our lives.

I write this not to propagate some lust for life or thirst for some imagined need.  We need food, we want each other. I write this to assign meaning and place myself in time, I want to touch the earth, drink in the mighty river down in a valley that is calling us between the vast sands we trudged in another world, now it’s not hard to be ourself because there is nothing wrong.

I write this to welcome the sun,
I write this to tell you ‘yes’,
but mostly I write this because I wish you were here,
it was that cold last night.

The tide gathers trash in the corners of the dock, here in my corner of Baltimore’s harbor, by the walls that raise us above the water; it quietly floats, a fragile surface that appears as if it would support a hesitant foot in motion. But to do so would be to find it is but pieces, a story with only characters and an ending; each thought a fading sentence without predicate, a child that falls as it runs down the steps, face in the gravel, only to rise and continue toward the water. You would think God would have a giant net to skim this surface; to let the fish beneath be given a chance at oxygen and algae without eating cigarette butts, and the mallards that swoop, almost lost amongst the cold concrete and pylons that shape the ledge just beyond them, a chance at the fish. Maybe it will happen, maybe it will just take longer than a day; a gentle curve that slopes inconspicuously down the radius of a mountain. It would be nice just to glide down, but speed requires deceleration for control. We have rose to the top of that mountain and mined the depth of the sea, still the harbor where they meet becomes the hole where what was deemed useless beholds its resting place. You can’t make a river run straight, just trust it will end somewhere downhill.

There came a point when I couldn’t distinguish between McDonalds and Burger King as the empty bags floated in front of me, they all sell the same thing. They were bits and pieces of songs, fragments of a melody that passed through my ears like sun raging from behind thick clouds and dirty windows. The pieces swirl, I gather them and continue. They reconcile the past and I find I have been looking for her for years. The abrupt change from being the overly defensive soldier, always the first to attack, back to the quiet medic, willing to accept healing as the only viable option. There are only beginnings, even as the flight lands or song ends. There can only be resurgence, loud guitars riding a furious beat, floating organ and a chorus of deep bass. We can go home. It was like high school or before, that first kiss on a dark dance floor in the schools gymnasium, rising toward the first taste of glory and the awkward pressure that leaves you consumed and drained. It used to be an endless fascination with consumption, what the other person felt, and a self doubt that was a bloated stomach spewing like the sun over paradise. Now it is ‘she will exist’, the questioning, not worrying; now is how we will move. Is it time for the possibility of ashes rekindling under the cool springs breeze to burst mercilessly into flame? A slumbering breeze that rises from the dark of New Years, the sweet cocaine that replaced snow last winter, the alcohol, the dance, the work that came before the sun should have rose on me.

Yes, I did survive, a tattered card that was shuffled and dealt again. The warden let us dance and sing, albeit a different dance and songs in a language that was vague, but almost familiar. We no longer pilgrimage to the tiger, the fringe and the caves that lie in silent wait. We wait sometimes outside of that roadhouse, but know we really belong within. Its walls carved scrimshaw that depicts glories never attained, where both bone and action have fallen short of potential. Trees line far away roads, the only direction that movement still takes place. Some people want to be crippled, broken down, and cared for, not us. We line up, cattle, since elementary school, single file against the lockers, fastening the clasps to hold down a body bent on projection. We wave our flags, wilder, prouder, now that we see a weakness that is inherent to freedom. Only when we join the wagon train that forces itself to jump back do the halls become crowded and the eyes that stare at our movement become empty. The song dances in its own right, the roulette wheel free from the hand of the croupier.

Have you ever felt like you found your home in a field, or in a car riding toward West Palm Beach, or in a person? A comfort, a fire burning to warm the cold hands that are forever our truest connection to others; our feet that of a wanderer, crossing thresholds of doors that are always open. Where we find a shelter against the pain that rages in open wounds, the wind that spirals around us, a place to rest your head and be lost in the Satori of motion. Even the thief can learn to love and he will, but only when he can forgive the trespasses he committed, the love he so vehemently fought. Those who don’t, like the king who stole everything, will pay for the dark horse that rides their souls, the tide from their vanity flooding the streets of the kingdom. The flowers all know, but only the violets and daffodils will acknowledge; open and make love to thick mud and rain, be born in grasses to wake the dark pasture and make it scream into a meadow. How do we distinguish between what is a beautiful moment, a place captured in time, and the impetuous for a life that was never considered? Is it only by time we measure in phone calls, glasses of wine, and slow dances to Sarah Vaughn in her darkest glory? How do we order a past informed by the dried ink and brittle paper of history? Should I walk this road or turn and run home? Will it be an example of what the attraction should create or a quiet ending to a flame that raged at the moon?

It’s Thursday night, one of those nights when I remember I can find the words, be they crumbled and barely legible or bold and screaming from the tree that allows night to creep up from behind the sun.  I don’t know if I believe in poetry anymore, if there are songs that can speak out the innermost feeling, I think they often just flutter along the outskirts and we assign some deeper meaning with a comfort only found at the edge or when lying ravaged.

When I was a child I knew, at seven, or eight, that I wanted to be a poet; I didn’t know what a poet was, but it seemed that the rhyme and reason went so hand in hand that there wasn’t much of a choice.  I am older and know now that I just want the poetry, not to necessarily be the medium. I want to see it rise from some benign catalyst and come flooding out as I try to stand and control it only to get lost in the ecstasy of the image; like a faucet, a hot and cold running love affair ——- On & OFF, ON & OFF, ON & OFF —- over a sink in a basement, installed and forgotten except when you have to venture down.

I often think of Sara, the woman who never speaks in The Eolian Harp, how she plots the latent’s manifestation in a world populated by archetypes and gods; where biology, religion, line, and melody are fused to create a landscape, this strange dark where we chase our shadows beyond the street in exhaustion. Her silence is where all words dwell, where we can pick a few, give them form, a shape, and a name. It becomes a poem that now will rest, for a day or a month and then tell me whether it is real, that will offer up salvation in the tiny pool of water I cradle in my hands.

Often times, the lines of aesthetic reception and mass, popular culture flow together in a stream of interrelation. In other words, what is found artistically favorable is rooted in the perception of the given culture in a specific space and time. The state of technology, itself an aesthetic form, can become an erotic personal intermingling of beauty and the sexuality of the body that is reflected in our own sense of cultural perception; technology has become this culture’s art form. Specifically, in our complete concentration on the media, we exemplify the artistic critic, as we would study the contours of a sculpture or the specific color usage in a painting. This sense of aesthetic is tellingly specific to culture, for the technology has become a materialized canvas. Its form is everywhere one looks, it is inescapable. Thus, just as there is a certain quality, a beauty in other art forms, the same can be found in technology. We are subjugated by its assault daily. In the union of body, computer, television, and Ipod, and an almost art-like intimacy found in social networking we exemplify the quality of technological aesthetic; there is a co-habitation of aesthetic reception with mass culture. There is a direct correlation between how society view things, in this case art, and how society functions as a whole. There is a symbiosis between the two, between mass culture in general, and the ways in which art is perceived. Each directly affects the other. Great innovations transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art. All of the old catalysts for art— genius, creativity, mystery and eternal value— have all become outmoded in a society of reproduction and mass consumption; where once only food, water and electricity were the bare necessities, so have audio and visual images permeated not simply into society, but into our very homes. Clearly the link between the reception of art and mass culture becomes even stronger, when art becomes readily available at any given time or place. With reproduction, aura and tradition are completely removed from the work of art that brings about both contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind itself; the perception of art is directly related upon the culture that views it. In the case of modern mass culture, the void where ritual once stood in relation to art has been replaced by politics. Rather than relegating art to the realm of ‘cult object’, it has become a tool for the manipulation of thoughts, beliefs and behavior of society. Just as the words became easily reproducible, turning the reader into the writer, at least in the case of “Letters to the Editor” so does the reproductability of art turn the observers into the arts. Reproduction of art has changed the reactions of masses to it from reactionary to progressive, and in doing so, brought about a change in the very notion of art itself….