THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GAUNTLET

Today has been both ridiculously exceptional as well as filled with abject desolation.  

The heady exception came in the other-worldly conduction of sublime inspiration and pragmatic execution that seamlessly unfolded during the course of the afternoon as I was preparing a post in answer to the friendly challenge J.D. Smith set before me yesterday.  The challenge mandated that I reflect my thoughts in poetry versus prose and was one I was, at first, reluctant to accept given the deeply personal content of most of my poetry.

But after a fair amount of time and some reasonable consideration, I decided, "What the hell!  Why not?"

And so I gathered up a handful of some of the poems I had written over the years, ordered them in a way that seemed most appealing and logical, and then proceeded to preface them with an explanation as to why I was posting them and, particularly, why I had been so reluctant to share them in the past.

Being the obsessive curator of words that I am, it took me several hours as I labored over both the content as well as having to troll the bottom-most layers of my soul to figure out, even for myself, why this poetic receptacle has been so vital and so dangerously personal to me for most of my life.

It was good.  I mean, it was really, really, really good!  Possibly the best writing I have done ever. Ever. Ever, ever, ever.....

At this point, most of you veteran bloggers (of which I am not) are feeling a slight gnawing in your abdomen and a tightening in the back of your throat because you know where I am going with this having likely experienced it yourselves; and if your reaction to it was as layered with black thoughts as was mine, there is a good chance you might still be in therapy right now questioning the seeming lack of justice in the universe.

About an hour ago my brilliant, exquisite, intelligent post was complete and my brilliant, exquisite, intelligent ego had come out of seclusion and was heavily imbibing in a large carafe of  AM I F***in' AWESOME, OR WHAT?

The preface was profound.  It was candid and salted with just enough grains of humor as to not be maudlin or affected.  It was rounded out to the nearest whole qualifier of perfection with the deft execution of God.

But there was something not quite settled about it.  Something that lacked the fluent grace of heaven and needed an ever-so-slight adjustment.   One poem just did not fit the mix, and so I made the executive decision to delete it.

If I had any questions as to the nature of and emotions in hell before that move, I need question no more.  With the exception of the last three lines of the final poem, I had inadvertently deleted my entire draft.  The whole thing.  Gone. Voided.  Eradicated.  Eviscerated.  Expunged.  Destroyed.  Decimated.
O-Fucking-bliterated!!!!!!

Pardon my use of such a raw expletive but nothing leaner than a fat, crude, street-invective can adequately convey the radical implosion of my sanity at that moment.

After an hour or so of frantically searching the net and every blogger help site and post available in the English-speaking world,  I realized that it was hopeless.  My words were gone and now no one would ever know the mind-blowing spark of pure, unadulterated brilliance housed between my ears because there was no possible way I could mine that particular vein of awesome again.

It's time to move to another cavern of promise and get back to digging.

In the meantime, here are those lousy poems and I am definitely keeping the one that triggered today's cyber-psychotic breakdown OFF THE LIST!   Forever!

No preface this time.

And no turning back!

SELF INDULGENCE  Some things are never meant to be Those brittle limbs of misspent dreams Where consequence is always freed From knowing all that sorrow means The sweet allures of 'self' and 'choice' Obliterate the Sacred Mind Denying access to The Voice That speaks of 'fair' and 'truth' and 'kind' Instead we cultivate our plans To counterbalance discontent With lies that fashion and demand More recompense than we have spent We stake our pride in vapid ground To circumnavigate our trials And when no solace can be found We counteract by swift denials For every choice a price is paid A judgement, fair, for every hand But once the soul has been betrayed There is no Truth on which to stand Yet if we knew the somber cost Of trying to outwit our pain We gamely suffer any loss To earn the grace that it contained THE MARITAL BED Extracted from my sleep I disavow The conjugal mystique behind his bliss What alabaster prayer can stop it now; that trace of rage unfurled within my kiss? This life, with dreaming dormant through the day, has sanctuary sacred in the night Its funding of forgiveness strips away the rancor I exhibit as delight. But now redemptive pleasure takes me in and holds tomorrow as I hold my breath Recovering the mask beneath my sin I dance with silence like I'd dance with death.  THE LANGUAGE OF HIGH SCHOOL We were so vocal then  Bold and Fly-high-ing Marking with world with a language We invented Fast and incisive Taking corners on two syllables Carving our initials with loud vowels or invectives Deep into the commitment of unspoken trust Each one of us Rounding out words in those spaces between thoughts Fresh verbs that carried to resonance Codified lingo we lived by or folded into memory Our sentences Fully varnished In the common care Of friendship. Surviving The Plan Recovering a carefully labeled midlife My hours committed to blanching displeasure Preventing the truth from revealing the strife In language whose texture’s too common to measure The play of good conscience restores as it’s able The loss of our substantive need for each other It buries the facts of this misguided fable Dismembering dreams we will never recover Survival increases my lien on deception The debt of the hollow and human design It alters by count all the fractured perceptions That challenge my plan to perfect and refine It weathers this shallow, truncated devotion As need resurrects my expandable sinning By polishing myths that I set into motion With the lies that I spoke from the very beginning  Dead Ahead At seventeen we were mystics; peace reapers Posed in The Lotus on hardwood upstairs Walled in by paper columbines, sun-faded and fraying Gilting our innocence in Kansas with transcendental leaves Culled from Siddartha and Shiva Sung out with Hendrix, Jimi or Dead, Grateful The Blissfully OM Our language became a cathedral, fabled and fertile Expandable deities shingled with prayers Not anchored but hinged to forgiveness Funding forbearance with decorous chaplets Sounded out, poised In dead silence Religiously OM Choking on souls swallowed whole we would sing Strapped into denim, hip-high, urban-wide Aching to break from that Midwestern amble And stride toward nirvana..or at least The Coast Strung out on hope Not Dead. Holy. Supposedly OM Now as midlife bears down on light-seeking, we pray For a lightness to aging; rewinding the distance from then to deliverance As routine supplants revelation; and sanctity, Desperate and thin, is shameless like voices Screaming out in fear Of dead endings Repeatedly OM DARBY'S STAR Darby O'Shea longed to live on the star he saw in the distance while driving his car. His mind often wandered when traveling at night A salesman by trade is a pretty dull life. Though how we would get there was not very clear he somehow could sense that the answer was near. And as he gazed up at that beautiful sight, his car veered off left but the road angled right. Darby O'Shea now resides on that star, and he knows he arrived, indirectly, by car.