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Author: Bartleby

Take me back to sea

Take me back to sea

He’s always been a funny guy,
flips up the collar of his pea coat
tidies the flip-up of navy woolen cap
struts like a rooster with forward-pursed beak
gonna turn the world upside down.

There he goes, hands in woolen pockets,
peacocking like he’s moving to 70s funky rock
instead of the clank of heavy chain, the whirr
of spinning crane and the smirking shouts
of dockers.

Take him back, sweet sea, sweep him back out into your rough hewn heart.
Take him back, let him wobble his head and glitter movie star eyes
while harmlessly floating far from society.

Author: BW
Copyright: AMW

Evil Friends

Evil Friends

Sinister friends,
laughing sneerers with wooden hearts,
counting money at a wobbly card table
in a dank dirt-floored cellar
where a single bulb hangs overhead
from a long and fraying wire.

My dirty friends,
screwing as a job
drinking as a cause
smoking on the job
bored with their hair,
how to change,
really change
my look?

My stupid friends,
chortling and grabbing
after waitresses and in parking lots
proud to fail and just
take it easy man

A man without friends is a man looking
he’s a man on the prowl
a man with a mission
anything to end this loneliness
anything to meet my needs
as a social animal.
You know?

Author: BW
Copyright: AMW

The water watcher

The water watcher

Watching water from my perch sitting on the sky bringing the ladle to my lips and you cannot hear my screams down there down inside the terrarium where the pigeons fight for crumbs in the town square.

Drinking from a paper cup. Drinking water I stole from the board of elections table when the old woman in the carpet-bag sweater turned, with an open smile of delighted surprise (a clever joke from a real fire cracker) and holding the rims of her swooping batwing glasses, to her neighbor.

I live her inside this dark room. I pace the floors wet slate floors in bare feet. Cold and wet and squishy with a plop plop smack sound all day long, hands behind back, stupid head down, trying to pretend to try to think. So lame. Someone come help me! Someone lower a love crane and pull me up out of here. Someone someone out there, get the floodlights off and come to the small hole in the ground 100 feet above my head. I can’t see you–especially as your head obscures my only source of light. Call down to me; tell me you believe in

We don’t know who can stop the waste of life and love.

Did I tell you that i give up?

Did I tell you that i give up?

Did I think to mention
that I’m quitting
everything?

Did I remember to say
that I’ve given up
once and for all?

Sleep through work
and watch 80s videos
on YouTube,
drinking a mineral
water
or yesterday’s beer.

Did I tell you that I cannot
stand another day of this?

But what is the problem?
And where is someone who cares?

I live alone
I want to go home
I want to get out of this
I want this to stop
I want to stop wasting life
but I do not know how
I want the pressure off
and the noise to quit.

Loud bored old pointless
hurt in the pit and spread
up and down and all through,
even narrowing my face
by pushing the spot
between my two eyes
in,
so my faces collapses
upon itself.

No one to talk to.
Keep talking to myself
No one to turn to.
Keep calling to myself

Bored, lonely, unable to face the task
any real task
shuffling papers
and waiting life out
Not good
how to stop
this?

To A Girl Behind Me

To A Girl Behind Me

I saw you walking down the long,
the many-pausing stairs
while I was walking up them.
You saw me and you quivered
–unless I overstate–
within your naked lines.
I saw you and I wanted
to somehow cross the distance.

And now by chance unglimpsed
you sit here in this room
where I too lonesome sit down
but at a separate cubby spot
on a table three rows above.

You are so fair and soft
so full in youth’s best stance.
A man is made for longing strong
at breasts and thighs and spots
too sacred for the coarseness of words.

A man is just a much-tossed branch
upon capricious ocean’s roar.
I want a deeper sounding down
into a firmer home.
But with you and me and desire
still intact and bouncing free.

Goodbye. We’ll never meet
since I can’t see me floating up
above the linoleum floors
and finding words and looks
that make a hello good.

I loved you with the pitter patter
of another unknown daydream
that erupted violently
because
because
just because
I’m a person.

AMW

America

America

In time enough the ferryman’s pulling arm
Will beach his bent-bowed bark upon the sands
Of yonder dark-masked land, and wave his hand–
White-washed bone that flies a nightsilk shroud.

So cross must I–and useless being cross–
The sleepy rippling satin flood between
Youth’s scattered hopes and the final result:
An all-encircling, all enclosing web
Which I as child to corpse have spun myself
From these first golden threads.

[AMW on October 22, 2016, 6:26pm, Tea And Poetry in DUMBO]

[Bartleby’s Poetry Corner]

Act I, Scene I

Act I, Scene I

The setting:
The swamp at daybreak, gators loll the still dark waters. Trees stand tall upon arching roots. Birds flit and whirr in the bouncing branches.
A young man on a poke boat poles into view. He is dressed in cuffed blue jeans, an open button-up white Huck Finn shirt, and a fraying straw hat.

Timothy: Hello! Hello! Where are you? How can we combine ourselves and lose these lonely lonelies?

Silence. A gator surfaces, blinks, submerges, disturbing the water as it does.

Timothy: Hello?! Please!

From above a female form slips down from one gray, paper-barked branch to another. The long, elliptical, sharp-tipped, shiny- and waxy-green leaves shake in the thick hot air.

Susan: Here! Here I stand! Here I am! Here I love you bright and strong like the sun sweeps through the shadows, overturning the darkness, melting the cold hollows, healing the desperate breaks.

Timothy: Susan! Susan! Susan!

Susan: It is me Timothy, Susan. I am the woman that fits your longings and compliments your bag of yeses and no’s. I am the woman who loves you and always will. I have come because I heard your voice shaking the treetops of the swamp.

Timothy: Susan!

Susan: Speak to me. Tell me, tell me how to touch you, where to know you, when we can begin, where we will go, what we we will become.

Timothy: I’ve wandered the bayous. I’ve pushed a worn-wood pole against a slip-mud floor day and night, with the sunlight and moonlight splatter-scattered through the thick swampland canopy. I’ve looked so long and hard for you!

Susan: Bring your boat round. I want to dangle from this paper-barked tree and ease my lithe womanhood into your pokey, wobbly swampboat. I want to hold your body and join with it. I want to share your joys and sorrows, to bear your children and build with you a home.

Timothy: A home! A wooden shack, raised on wooden stilts above the cool still water! With our own room where we find our own satisfaction.

Susan: Yes, a place we can call our own, where we can share ourselves with one another and be happy.

Timothy brings the skiff underneath the tree. Susan hangs from the limp and effortlessly places herself into the plank front seat.

Timothy: Your beauty overpowers me, but in the same breath it emboldens me so! The private flame mounts in me and I know that I must know your soft skin and big sweet eyes, that I must enter into a covenant with you that lasts a lifetime, that uses up every last bit of flesh and blush.

Susan: Pole us to your little one room white-washed platform home.

Timothy: Is it time? Time for us to begin?

Susan: I’m afraid so. It is scary, but it must begin at some point, otherwise we can never be together.

Timothy: I love you, Susan.

Susan: I love you, Timothy, and I am ready to be your wife.

Another Lonely Preface

Another Lonely Preface

Empires will evolve, crumble, scatter, shift, flowing. Beliefs will change and shimmer in the bouncing light.

We think that this group of people conquered that group, or these people’s ideas won out over those people’s ideas, but the truth is more complicated. Look back a little ways down the family tree and someone’s hand was forced–your forbearers too were won over by this and that culture with this amount of pleasurable, relaxing, safehavening seduction and that amount of blunt force. And both individuals and groups are actually open spaces where ideas and feelings collide: wisdom is growing kind enough for the heartofthematter to conquer, colonising the landscape with enough compassionate, honest, aware ideas and sentiments to fend off the marauders–hate, envy, greed, fear, boredom, pettiness, meanness, half-assedness, dishonesty, and the like–and allow the Light to fill the space and light the way.

The besouled will slide from one loci of thoughts/feelings/actions to another, always surging up and crashing down and drifting up and drifting down on waves of their own collective making.
Or so I heard one day in line at the drugstore, waiting to be ushered to the cash register, watching the clerk–with his long face and tall strong teeth, his roll-top forehead and square, forward-leaning jaw–nod with big eager, milk-soft eyes. “Oh yes, some people are just so blessed! I just never get over how blessed some people are!” The customer was legion–every age, every shape, every color, every accent, every worldview, every mood. Sometimes the exchange lasted longer than others, but always the need for a fair progression and smooth operation carried each purchaser away quickly and cordially, small plastic bag swinging with their speed and rhythm, perturbing it perhaps but every so slightly, imperceptibly, perhaps–who can say?–inconsequentially.
Who did I hear it from? I thought a little bird told me, but voici the chain’s spokesman:
“We can unequivocally state that company policy has no place for birds fluttering and hopping about, defecating in their bowel-less, random, drizzling way. We can further confirm that after extensive review of security footage on the day of the allegations, there were absolutely no birds in the unfortunately unfairly slandered store. Finally, we consider customer service our top-priority and shining glory, and birds giving customers wonky, impracticable, and confusing ideas about the deeper nature of things have no place in our store. Unless, of course, the customer, who in all our reflections must and does always come first, enjoys the companionship of the feathery vermin and/or self-identifies with the philosophical positions, in such instances and to such shoppers, we say this: we are with you, we support you, and, you now maybe many of us agree with the bird and its chatter–why I wouldn’t be surprised if that bird and it’s attitudes influence our business practices.”
So, who knows?

Bartleby WIllard

Defeating the Evil Together

Defeating the Evil Together

People of America,

I propose we join together to defeat the evil.

I propose we participate in the Get Out The Vote (GOTV) effort for Hillary Clinton.

I propose we sign up now.

Take me for example. I, being cool, live in Brooklyn. New York will, absenting a great reality-earthquak, vote for Clinton. But New York is next to Pennsylvania, a swing-state. Therefore, I should mail in my ballot, take off Novemeber 8th, and let rich concerned Democrats bus me to Philadelphia. If I couldn’t excuse myself from the workaday on November 8th, then I’d need to go to Philadelphia during the weekend and stump.

Why should I behave in this manner? And should I do so even if I was convinced Hillary was going to win with or without my bothering?

This country and it’s people and it’s world all actually exist and matter.
Representative democracy is the best form of government around.
Donald Trump–who is dictatorial, misogynist, and xenophobic; and who is uninformed and unthoughtful says whatever pops into his head and then demands everyone believe what he’s said–points away from wisdom in regards to both specific policy decisions and the integrity of the democratic process.
The republican party stopped offering workable ideas (ex: budgets that add up) decades ago.
The country is divided along party lines to the point that we can no longer believe that people supporting the other party are both mentally competent and decent.
We don’t debate policy decisions; choosing instead to go haywire over general policy differences.

What is to be done?

We need to at least be present in this election. We who feel sick at what has happened and that it has gotten so far need to go out and push against the disaster. And the disaster is Trump but it is also what has made his candidacy possible. The disaster is nonparticipation of the mind and heart. The disaster is participating with desperate hopes, fears, and prides rather than participating with thinking and feeling about what is really at stake and what is really possible.

We need to show up. We need to show up and say that we are shook up about what has happened in the last thirty years and we are desperate for all of us to wake up before it is too late. How many have fought and died for the promise of a nation where the citizens kept the rulers in check? And all we have to do is show up: how could we not?

So let’s all pick a day in the next month and go door to door for this vision: A representative democracy where the citizens pay attention and take responsibility and act responsibly and demand politicians who also pay attention and take responsibility and act responsibly.

Father Forgive

Father Forgive

Look on yonder craggy Christ
arms up and bleeding upon the cross
with waning day twinkling through
and flanked by two thieves
the one repentant the other silent–
perhaps thoughtful, perhaps asleep.

Look up towards skinny little
begger dirty ‘neath hasty wreath
of knotted thorns that cut
and trace out a glaring path
atop the holy head.

Listen for the rustle of the
moving robes and the sobs
of a stray friend or two:
“Father forgive them,
they know not what they do.”
“Father, my father,
why have you forsaken me?”

Listen for the Truth
in the agony bent through
the common sweltering pain
the leather sandals
grit lining the souls
momma bawls to watch
baby boy die twisted
and broken way up
against the disappearing day
on a cross next to
some false prophet.

Who woke Jesus up?
Who said,
“Boy, get on up!
You ain’t done yet!
Get your sorry skinny
ass out there
try again!”

And what could Jesus,
fresh from the horrors
of flailed flesh
human abandonment
God’s silence
and the devil’s
chores criss-crossing
infinite caverns
trodding ruthlessly
on failed souls–
spiritual losers
who maybe yes maybe no
amounted to something
on the salty sands
but down here just reek
and writhe in loserness,
what could Jesus then think,
feel, do, as the coach
lovepatted him back into the sunlight.

No I can’t guess,
no I can’t accept,
no I can’t dare,
no I can’t see
what kind of a world we’ve built between the lot of us.