Gone Fishing

The Square Corner will closed for the next couple of weeks. Time to take a leave of absence; to give the inhabitants a mental health break--the guys at the One Lucky can fend for themselves.

I'll be on vacation. If there is an internet cafe nearby, I'll check in. Maybe I'll say hello. If not, we'll talk after a stretch.

Time
More years have gone past then lay ahead
Time goes by, a prompt makes me ponder if I'm old and gone
Am I?
It's time that touches me from the past
It's time that retreats like a winter army
I can't hear music through drowning years
I can't see a clock's hands
Nothing moves me!
Nothing moves me!
I feel those days that weigh on me like heavy stones
I feel those days that are easy like a gentle sea
There are those hours, too, I can't recall,
Like photos from an old roll of film,
I can't unspool them, put them back like threads of black and white
I say when Kodachrome died it took a piece of what is mine
But in the end, these prompts as poems are markers, I see, on an uneasy path that is a life

The Meal

Spaghetti. Third day in a row. Watery tomato sauce falls from a jar. A man unwraps a slice of cheap yellow cheese and breaks it up into large chunks onto his meal.

"My God," he thinks. "How did I end up this way. I should have married her when I was young."

That girl was thirty years ago. But the man can't let go. He pulls the tab on a can of warm diet coke and drinks the coke slowly. He'd rather be at the One Lucky and drink with his friends. But times are hard at the Square Corner, money is scarce.

So the man leans back uneasily; his mind is confused. He sits until a weakness comes. Then lastly he lays on a weary bed and speaks of her as his eyes slip into a dreamless sleep.

The Challenge
What do they want?
What do they want?
My flesh torn. My blood drained. My heart strings straggled like cords around this seamless neck.
For what?
For what?
They deride me. The Graven One. The Fisheye in intemperance. He too derides me: The Paradox to the Human amalgam of time, of place, of self deception.
Go back to the old ways!
Go back to the old ways!
They declaim in bloggers prose. The disdain. In alluded reference of a city filmed, voice dropped, head lowered.
They want the past.
So they cry.
Go back to the old ways! To the lives of squalor. The Square Corner of earlier times. The pain of lost men. Of lonely dames. The Square Corner of a different place. The lucre of fame a distant dream. They want somnambulist souls crying in heartache and numbed sorrow. The drunken dead poet visited upon a yellow page. They want his presence.
Not the now!
Not the now!
It displeases us. Marshmallow roads with lemon drop tears. They stereotype. I know. Ignore the darkness of the present words. The ascendancy of followers, they say, has cheapened my true voice. No longer clarion in obscure echo, I call your names. I call you out:
The Graven One!
The Fisheye!
The Paradox of Humanity!
Prove it to Tortelli's name. No more roguish comment, please. No more snide reference, please.
Blog it!
Post it!
Be the men you claim to be.
Blog it!
Post it!
Let your views on me be known: The Square Corner one. You shall see the new old me. Your voices silent, and you shall hear this drowning sorrow. The Square Corner like an island sinking into a dark sea.

New Home
He climbed to the top of the world's cage
Then rolled his toes, balanced his bare feet
With arms held wide, he muttered a wishful prayer
Like a high wire man to cross a lion's lair
He moved:
slowly
deliberately,
cautiously,
Callous only somewhat to the chance at his demise
then the great fall
down,
down,
down,
To the end
He made it to the other side
criss-crossed back to say a victor's good-bye
Stole a liberator's kiss, then went away to his new home
Flew easily with his new spirit wings

The Search
It's all a facade
It's unbreakable glass broken
Block it out!
Block it out!
The untruths
The lies
The Dormant undertakings
Fall away and reveal something to me,
Like a road well taken
Travel under searching light
See me!
See me!
The facade that is my soul

The Fall

Zigman Zibanski fell drunk into a Zen Garden. A gentle monk lifted him up and sat him on a stone large and mossy. He offered green tea and spoke kindly to Zigman, words of concern and of encouragement to walk along a simpler path. The monk waited till soberness came to the drunken one. Then he brought him safely home and returned to the Zen Garden, where he tended to the grass where Zigman had fallen. The sun would set soon so the gentle monk worked quickly and purposefully to mend the earth to the way it had been earlier in the day.

The next evening at the One Lucky, Zigman sipped warm sake. Drunk he soon became. But he saw clearly through an emply glass: of a gentle monk and simpler way.

Runaway
Against the sand and wind they strode
In pitch blackness the lovers as runaways
Like smoke rising in the night
Together and alone with ghostly heels
The spoken words held tight like clasping hands,
Desperate against the climbing sand, the fallen young
The final rising comes, Godly it was believed
At the home of blackness they sealed forever dreams