This is
This is
this is the most beautiful
experience of my life.
And yet, look at what this day is.
I feel this intense, intense need
to write a poem.
I feel an intense need that will not be satisfied,
that my soul will not be satisfied until I create some art
because what I've just done is nothing very wrong,
but it's also nothing very right.
It's so sad to read a book of a higher age,
to see in one sense how far we've come,
but in another sense how low we still are
that I am caught in a rat race,
part of a company that is doing its best to survive,
not thrive,
not innovate,
and yet what we sell is to help others thrive and innovate.
But it is this twisted game of the blind leading the blind.
Maybe I am at fault
for not having the humility
to let go and let God. Just do the work.
But then I see in the grander picture
that the work I am doing is good,
but it is not great. The people I am
doing it for are good people,
but they are not acting rightly.
But the worst part is that
we're not doing anything bad;
we're just not doing anything well.
I believe the company will die,
and I'm waiting for that death,
collecting my paychecks until then.
And I don't think this is as much of a poem
as it is a confession. Where's the poetry?
A cloud. A cloud, a big, big
thunder cloud above me, above a ballpark,
above these remnants of America.
Some beautiful. Some. Some.
The challenge is I cannot
put into words what I feel right now.
At this very moment, I am standing in middle America,
in a very gentrified downtown, hardly a car on the road,
hardly a street, hardly a walker on the walkway.
My brain is so dehydrated having spoken all day,
taking the time for a client, that no nouns come to my mind.
My ability to articulate how I feel is almost lost,
so I stand at a street corner, drinking an artificial root beer
that is mostly processed fibers, and I say cuss words to God,
not because I am mad, but because
the F word is the only way I can express how I feel.
Love, mental love, though. My heart center is cold,
cold as stone, rock. But my mind is borderline manic,
like that time I stripped in a neighborhood while on different types of anti-psychotics.
I have more control than that now.
Thank you, meditation.
But what's sad is,
I feel bad after delivering a good day
because my employer asked me to sell
something to people who weren't ready to buy,
and they asked me to sell something to people who weren't ready to buy,
people who they failed to prepare for the training day.
In my inbox are several emails about
how we need to work on being better sellers
because the company is imploding,
but no one speaks directly to the water ingress,
yet everywhere I look around me,
the products we sell,
the services that support our clients,
they are inadequate, forcing our success
to depend on battle valor and improvisation,
not true preparedness. These are the signs
that the wall is deteriorating. Yet,
instead of fixing the wall, we ask to build more wall.
We say, “We need to expand the perimeter,”
when what is crumbling is our interior.
I sit in a dog park,
with beautiful grass,
a picnic table, and three or four
doggy waste baskets
for the fecal matter
that we've bagged in plastic.
As I drove by
down these highways
from the regional airport
to where I am now
the smell of tar and asphalt
through my open windows
was almost suffocating
until I remembered
breathe in the soot
so to feel the pain of the workers
who breathe this day in and
day out in the hot, thick heat
of middle Ohio in July.
How do they survive?
They do so mostly on nicotine,
caffeine, and at the end of the long workday,
alcohol. And they are almost guaranteed
to have lung poisoning by 30, 40, and 50.
For those that don't, it is because
they have such indomitable will,
nothing can kill them. But also,
nothing will change their mind
about how to live better.
Not now.
There is so much beauty in the sky.
In the firmament. Firmament —
perhaps my new favorite word,
and the only noun that comes to my mind.
Firmament. The sun, in this high latitude,
is just now setting at nearly 9:30 PM.
What is left of the dusk light
has caught the highlight
of the thunderclouds,
the remnants of a midwestern storm
that is breaking up. Underneath the clouds
are the dense gray of what would be rain
but will now carry on to be a storm for someplace else.
It's time to return to my car,
to check in, and in the morning,
to decide whether or not
to poison myself with caffeine.
I probably will.
I would love my heart to palpitate a little,
to mimic whatever love feels like.
I will write a report about how today went,
and I will have some good things to say,
and I will have some bad things to say,
and somebody might read those things
and receive some information,
some succor. Some suffer. Come next Monday.
We will have our employer of employers
speak to us about how to extend the perimeter.
Like a wake of a boat, ever will we create
more wake while the waves behind us
fall back into the sea, not
to be a part of the boat anymore.
And so it is that our company
will continue this bringing in of new,
unable to maintain the old
because of the flaws in the structure.
I am not scared. That's what I said when I landed.
I said, “I would not be scared even in this moment if I died"
because everything is so, so right —
to stand after a hard day,
knowing you tried your best
but did not succeed
in the eyes of the culture
and of the society, the company.
To feel ostracized is dangerous,
for you belong to no one, and free,
you act not by their values
but your own. You don't mind anymore.
The sun is falling on the tarmac
of a now desolate airport.
You're walking through halls
and halls of a void
to a car among cars that
await you, and to the attendee
who will be paid $12.50 for that hour
only to service you for those few seconds,
to disarm the gate for the car
that you drive in, listening to music too loud,
taking yourself to another rural town,
suburbia, a place, miraculously,
that you've been to before
on a previous work venture
and you go inside to a Kroger
whose bathroom you recall
has a sticky door, and testing this,
you feel at home again,
despite not living here.
The those who do live here,
the mothers, every one of them overweight;
every one of them with more tattoos than values;
they are kind to their children, buying their children
almost everything that the child wants, but
they are not nice, and they are not good, and
those children will grow up to have
their own set of difficulties and challenges,
but they will be loved and they will know love,
but they will also know great pain. At least,
that’s what it feels like as an adult, standing in line,
listening to how the mothers are disciplining their children;
I am offended, for I would not like to be disciplined that way,
not as a child, not as an adult. Yet, this workplace,
this workplace I'm in now,
disciplines their children in about the same way,
making demands that are not of sound nature or judgment.
This is my poem, a long rambling poem
that I will most likely upload to my computer,
edit down just enough to be interpretable.
Then I will record these sounds with my voice:
some good, some bad. And this poem
is going to be for me. A poem
for me. Maybe the whole website is for me.
This is how I fill my cup when
that emptiness is so heavy, it burdens me,
burdened because I give, maybe with the wrong attitude,
but maybe because I am over-extended; I am divorced;
my human soul is divorced from nature and everything revitalizing.
If I could cry at this very moment, I would cry.
I would cry at the beauty of a single tree
planted in the middle of asphalt
because even that single tree, no where among trees,
is gorgeous. Even when it is removed from its habitat, it’s natural forest,
it is beauty. Even when we, the Souls,
are removed from our natural habitats in bliss and peace,
still, even in the playful ruins, there is beauty,
there is beauty for me.
