Here’s a poem of mine published by Spillwords. To be honest, I’m not that impressed with their use of AI art. It changed the meaning of the poem. That’s how strong images play into words. I appreciate your support! T. Ahzio
And I don’t know why I want to begin with and.
Perhaps, it’s because my life is a conjunction, where I’m continually moving from and to persons, places, and things.
Just like you, I’m always in the middle of something.
Yet, and is tricky.
One must be careful to avoid “this bad thing happened, and that led to this bad circumstance.”
One might try to mediate their way out of that kind of and with long engagements with commas, em-dashes - semi-colons; and (parenthesis.)
But that is precarious and can lead to stringing things out for too long.
I think the answer is found by being careful with ands and taking time and patience to produce good ands.
Some ands that I have planned out have become successful, such as writing and revising.
I think one of the coolest is “We met and fell in love.”
And an and can be friendly and downright cute.
How could pralines and cream exist without a nice and to bring them together?
And what about the ampersand?
How many symbols can look cool and bring clauses together at the same time?
Hyphen, em-dash? They don’t come close.
Where would we be without ands?
The beginning? Nowhere to go? The end, plain, simple, uneventful?
So, I guess my desire to start with and is my way of honoring the conjunction, for this ode is a continuation from all my writing before to all my writing to come.
Pronouns, proper names and objects are wonderful places to begin, and I highly recommend them, and I wouldn’t be writing without them.
But nothing would continue for anything or anybody without an and.
Cylindrical thoughts caught in symbols
Covered by an outer celluloid
Upgraded with playbacks and reruns
Of old friends and fictions who are everyone
They were, will, and want to be,
Births, rebirths, death, and immortality
I speak in repetition, stumbling into you again
No wonder gravity forms balls and circles
Our dialectic, a language of insomnia
That living lip sync of teeth and tongue
That make up the shapes of ghosts
Crawling like faint shadows of moving clouds
Our fleshy hearts tethered to the whirl
Internal, speaking of the external
Of clocks mistuned inside the unsteady continuum
With our linear kissing and stove top stuffings
Perhaps this is our mistake
Caught inside the act of noise
Trying to explain the hyacinth
“Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”
Speach vanishes, with the incoming of golds
Browns, yellows, and reds.
Autumn turns, turns, turns, while the
Wind haunts sticks and stems, looking
Forward to their recycling, and our
Eyes old and new
Peering
I feel a slight brush upon my calves
Then, a light head butt.
It’s Mr. Fry, the cat, looking up at me while I write.
He’s concerned about my Word document
My Google Docs, my Office Suite, PDFs and printables
Shared and synced, blogged, published, and backed up.
Apparently, according to him
My prose is threatening to verse
My verse is proposing to prose
My characters are in a state of mutiny
My narrator refuses to put a word in edgeways
My alliteration is acting like an assonance
My plot took a poop
“My dialogue is depressed, crying like a monologue,” he says.
My enjambments are threatening to reach the right side of the page and beyond
My cliffhanger is falling to its death
My denouement denies all involvement
I’m suffering from hyperbole!! It’s no exaggeration!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Mr. Fry offers his help……
Searches at my feet, looking for stray words I may have disregarded.
He claims to have a better nose for such things.
He loves to bat words around like a plastic ball with a bell, engaging the toy muse.
He licks the side of his front paws, then cleans his face with them
Starts nibbling at his back paw toes in earnest
Twists his head as far as it can reach to lick his back.
He’s intent on editing.
Then rolls on his back, asking for a tummy rub (He’s kind of a dog kitty).
I’m thinking, the finished piece?
No, he moans (He’s Siamese).
He wants better writing
Writing that acts like catnip making him silly with play
Taking him to a higher Realization of Cat
To touch, to speak, to comprehend
All that is of Cat.
Attaining Cat.
I tell him, sorry dude, not today.
I promise to go to the store later to pick up a treat.
I return to my scratching post.
He gnaws on a T.S. Eliot book.
Aluminum foil-covered, cardboard stars above our heads and the basketball hoops have been drawn back, painted lines and circles below our feet. We dance in socks, leaving our shoes out in the hallway.
We mimic the leaves who aren’t ready to dance, because the air is still warm and we glow with a luminescent heat, moving in aimless directions as if the gym floor is a sacred grassland and the seasons do not exist. Our desires – a clutter of arms and legs. The sweat on our lips drawn down to our tongues, for the world has always been and always will be a dancer.
Winter will come.
We’ve skated on its skin before, scooped the marshmallows off countless hot chocolates, been told the stories of the wolf in the snow. It will change our waltz, starting when the rain comes. So, in this form, today, we dance in the body summer has given us and we coalesce to get ready for colder climate, dancing to escape the body, while being in the body.
When we look, it may seem like we follow the sun, aligning with the rising and setting of things, turning with the Earth. At other times, we are beings of our own choice, crisscrossing the paths of others. In these moments only movement exists, nothing else is real, we can only dance. The galaxies are no different.
Look. See them samba with our own eyes.
For all these moves are known by heart.
And when we sense we know our hearts, we feel the floor beneath our feet.
Elvis can’t strum a note.
Still, many look for him
During a nighttime shanghai.
But these ghost-like hijacks
Excite only hipsters and bruisers
And cute, off-hour barista users
Wearing their best lattes
To catch the ships of myth.
Back on landlubber strip
Alcoholics look like pimps.
The 99 cent lady scratches
Lottery tickets, chewing on mints.
She yells at the gutter kids
Who pee on sidewalk cracks.
Children of insults and rip-offs
Selling newspapers to news crews
Their mouths askew with twisted views
Crooked grin from the bookstore girl.
Her windows bashed in for no reason.
Sells last year’s calendars & rusty rock pins.
The trattoria boils millions in noodles
Hiring from art school purgatory
Haloed waitresses with yoga mats
Channeling their inner schmooze
Living off deep-fried borrowed blues.
The mayor rolls out sorted plans
Sketches of the new Pantheon.
City council sucks sugar tits
From kiss-your-ass developments.
While food carts form shanty towns
For the visiting team’s hangovers.
Their mascot yanking on his head
Stuck
In a permanent state of cheer.
The old urchins on their last barnacle
Live back in the glory days
Of cheap chiva, bad Bud, & noses caked with coke
Taking bus rides to fake desperation
Basking in their burn out, dabbling in
Dysfunction. (A national holiday)
Celebrated with bogged down Bloody Marys
And get-well cards with handwritten
Apologies for nothing... that’s gone wrong.
Charles is in the twilight heat
Where summer rubs
Like tectonic plates on skin.
He tells me stories
Of shooting people in Vietnam
During the war.
–
The rifle he used is under his bed.
I saw it once when he asked me
To feed his cat Molly while on vacation.
He took his wife to Canada
To watch the caribou, migrate.
–
It’s such a plain rifle, worn.
Wood stain nearly rubbed off.
Barrel dull, black and textured.
He drives hundreds of miles
To watch the caribou.
–
Through his kitchen window
He mentions how hot it is.
The sun is an orange throb.
He tells me how he used to hunt
in southeast Oregon, Steens Mountain
Hauled back all the animal
Limb by limb, organ by organ
Buckets of blood and fat.
–
I don’t like it when the morning sun is hazy
Before the heat proves
It can take the night.
Charles throws seeds to blue jay parents.
They’re always uptight, worried.
Especially if Molly chews grass near them.
A grey squirrel gnaws on antlers
Nailed to a tree in his backyard.
The antlers are decades old.
–
The goal in Vietnam, he said, was to maim not kill.
It ties up resources, beds, hospitals
Doctors, systems, and puts stress on a country.
Killing just needs a burial or a burn.
–
He’s in a wheelchair now.
Sits in front of a television, volume turned up.
Still feeds the blue jays.
The seed is stolen by crows.
A bus picks him up once a week
To visit the VA hospital
Treating him for dementia and heart disease.
Talks about how he watches the caribou.
Molly doesn’t seem to notice.
I’m on hands and knees
Sketching your lips…
Into the dry mud of this meadow.
Wooden steps built here
To cross over the old wetlands.
Useless now.
In the past
We walked across
This meadow
When mist made trees rain.
We were awkward
Unsure
About our balance
About our steps
Thankful for a rare dry patch.
The path, in and around
Here
Brought us…closer
To mountain views
Sweet water springs
Where thoughts became lucid…
A lucidness
That aligns the heart
With blood & soul
Shapeless, wordless.
Now,
This beauty, these lucid thoughts
Lie hard beneath me
I stand at the edge of the meadow
As we had
Realizing the wetlands are no more.
We’ve misunderstood
Each other,
The land.
I can only think about us.
It is like
We balance on stilts
For no apparent reason
Poking & prodding the earth
Relinquishing the comfort
We had with one another
I’ve drawn your image into
This dryness.
Maybe it’ll last forever
And all who come here anew
Will see us, what we built
What we created.
What we loved about each other
What we lost between us
Those who see your image
Will be lovers like us
Who
Run with the pack
As we have ran
Eat from desires
Real & imagined.
As we have eaten
Look for the primary colors
As we have painted them
Upon brittle canvas
