from the Soil of 2006

©Jason I. Stutz 2006

My heart reaches to joy that, in 2006, I wrote at all.  If you are in a dark mood of existential despair and need co-misery to accompany your strides, I am here, your friend across the decade, also searching through grimy sewage tunnels in the dark.  Know that hope in the light filters through these all.

Being Right

What have I done?  I assumed all was fine, just fine.

Now, all my life is in chains

Waiting for a bondsmen who doesn’t show.

Who am I, now that I’ve become this?

My name is something diseased-

even my body seeks to spit it out,

revolted by it.

 

The end of the World

people screaming

white people with blonde hair running in their jeans and tshirts

mothers and their girlfriends

men with dark, well groomed hair

running

it’s day time, mid-day, maybe 2 or 3 pm

 

what- what is in the air?

vultures circling

the air is hot but not troublesome

why are they running?

 

 

For a man, it so happens

For a man

it so happens:

 

the first time

he notices his hair is starting to thin;

the first time

he hesitates before stating his age

to a beautiful woman;

the first time

he compares himself to younger men

that he is “twice as virile as…”

 

he starts to look upon himself

as one marked by Time,

as singled out by the ever-nearing, inevitable scythe

in league with all those who must one day

experience the decline of their physical powers

and ultimately die.

 

The second part of life

is about letting go

as our bodies spiral into the ground:

 

a mountain whose continual landslides

slowly reduce it to dust;

a candle burning down, down, down

yet, somehow,

only the light remains.

 

 

I used to be good at friendships

I used to be good at frienships.

I remember walking along aside my best friend,

at ease, mentally alive, searching into the light as it reached us.

 

I think of him now and he has changed:

how he thrashes against openness.

There was a time when our emotions were

a gem in our hearts that we held up to the sun.

Now, he forgets himself- the glory of him-

he closes around it with his jaw to cage it.

 

I was so good at friendship, then.  We gave each other

little gifts we had kept in strong boxes in our rooms, under our beds

long desperate to have them loved

as though pulling them from the Heart-chest of God

we gave each our treasures.

 

I have closed myself as well.  My friend

(tears) mirrors me

wounded, now, under a sky of fear.

 

 

Bullfrog

It does not care if it is a bullfrog or not.

It knows it has an appetite

And what it likes to eat

And when a predator approaches

It flees into the safety of the pond.

It likes sunlight

But it also likes the rain.

 

“But, Bullfrog!  Look at yourself!!”

 

It doesn’t matter,

flip, flip, slurp, slurp

 

~*~8~*~

I am not as beautiful as Joseph was in the bible,

But I walk along pleasing to this air that I breathe

and I am sweet and musky to smell.

 

Not Casual

I can not be casual.

My world is turning about you

There are distances in us

that I fight across gorges to overcome.

And when we feel “too close”

I fight against a wall of “too-closeness” to overcome the urge to back away.

The wall enters me like a battering ram today, and though I wonder why I stay,

the wall sinks into my solar plexus and ends with  a “poof,” a cloud,

soft, like the asteroid that bombed Jupiter.

 

What this means, now, is that you and I are one.

 

 

Sharing

I did not know that I was you

and that your love was tireless

 

If only I

could have you constantly

sharing my blood

developing jewels from its platelettes-

my heart filling with you and emptying you into my veins,

 

I could feed the world with that knowledge.

 

But how?  I stand, as ever, in disbelief

Describing futility with every tooth in my mouth,

Singing immortal some fancy vision in your stead.

 

Haven’t you learned to save me, yet?

 

I did not know that I was you

And that your love was tireless.

 

If only my heart could know and not forget ever-

with that knowledge,

I could feed the world.

 

A Dream: Tank

Government sends a tank

To crush

 

A Ghost mask covers a man

with fright, armored from escaping

 

He happens to pray

but does not consider the result

 

A hand (angelic?) guides him to safety

A bomb blows up around him

his armor melts

his fear escapes.

 

 Words from God to god

“I’ll never show you what to say,

I’ll only show you what to be.

In the present context, be:

letting go, happily.”