Legalize/Sell you a disease
/then,  sell you a cure*

"Venture Capital Bet Big on Gambling.
Now It’s Banking on the Addictions."
Barron's

This is how we "live"
from momentary to momentary,
from under coverlet to coverup
putting ✅'s  next to a litany
of little tasks, diurnal scheduled
and their completion is proof
you really made to that minute
of each day, a survivor,  for only
you can schedule, only you can
check it off, only you can rationalize
and hide the private shame of the
conscious deletion of the unfulfilled
                                                               untruths
                    
from illusion to illusion,
like wearing the right clothes
for the occasion, and/or going naked,
hoping no one calls you emperor,
you are chilled - put on an illusion
to keep you warmer and only you
know you're dressed for winter,
scarf gloves heavy overcoat for
SPF 100 protection from the glaring
of July's humidity's sunny suffocation's
                                                                      ill disposition

this is how we navigate our
basic training until habits engraved
on your skin are the wardrobe we hide
within, some even change our name,
our defining characteristics so others
can admire the unreal you
create, all dressed up in couture
illusory, smiling graciously to
imaginary fawning admirers and
you shed real tears for real emotions
conjured by dreaming lightly the fantastical
                                                                ­            delusionary

you cover yourself in metaphors,
eating adjectives like sugar and
nouns like satisfying carbohydrates
so you feel full for a minute and then
run to the mirror for more pretending
pre-tense verbal alcoholic snacks
                                                         getting fat on self~deception

your watering eyes make writing
so difficult even though the tearing.
words easy come and easy go out
                                                           but here, you persevere

you pretend you can change your name,
adopt and adapt to a new persona, thinking
how pretty I look in this new dress,
how thin (!) we appear in a fresh slim 8
thin fit suit, tie perfectly tie knotted, etc.,
                                                           ­        at our personal funhouse mirror

but she (who?) encapsulated it perfectly
in the Sixties, "it's life illusions I recall,
I really don't know life at all"
when/if I make it to  a century mark,
that lyrical rhyme,  I'll still be humming,
and making ✅'s on a calendar that
doesn't matter,, reassuring that ancient
nonsensical notion of I exist, therefore, I am...

12:55am,
refreshed after a nap and ready
to embrace the white light of an
empty shell of a clean unwritten sheet
of many individual minutes of the night
till it dawns once more, and the illusions
need checking off again; oh yeah, hi!
Please,
                                         DO NOT FORGET

                                               ✅ *write a poem

every poem gets the exact number
of reads it deserves
<>

nah, I don't think that for
a millisecond,
shoot,
not a ****** nanosecond (1)

truthfully
I'm torn up inside
and my thinking
absolutely
could be wrong
or could be right
absolutely

just like the optionality
of believing in god;
has to be some force
of intelligence that
could create such
microscopic complexity randomly
or just thinking the world
is just a series of accidentally
interactions

so
who's to say what's good,
what's not so good,
and by what standard
one should judge

Is this a poem?
Heck if I know

and what sbout the poems that
get not a one,
a single one, absence of curiosity,
an unheralded execution.
death by silent ignorance,
a master's mastery of exactitude
all because
just because

Is that a collective decision
by an unconscious collective,
the best moderne equivalent of
the unmarked death

of just a single one of
your billions of brain cells (2)(3)

all I know is
that my confusion is confirmed
my constancy is inconsistent
my equatorial balance is
gonzo, dragging me down,
each division wants to piece me up,
and today,
right now
got no answers
at all

how do I define myself?
what categories do I fit
within?

and yet
that answers one question!

do not write interrogatory inquisitions
at 1:15 am
(unless you're a DUMB lucky *******
who believes they got
answers)

For Ryan Geoffrey Hayward

This image does not resonate with me;
No, it bangs, dings, slaps my head,
Wake up call!
Time to write,
release, be pleased, ESCAPE
with pow!ered words,
oozing music,
You are not a fly,
but a human who can fly and find
those fork-in-the-path
choice holes
escape
[Escape]
and set yourself free
again and again
and
a Gain

Stumbling into ancient scripts, authored a decades plus ago,
ago being a modifier of time quantities, minute or large, unspecific
without an objective adjective additive, that faucets a stream of an interlocutory elocution of a batter of rooted emotional histories,
but not histrionics

fanciful words for dredged up memories, acute, but tarnished,
powered yet worn by a cousin of ago, a/k/a,
age
and yet
renews as of,

at this very second, as if it were a first, a tumult of visions, swelling of remembrances, embodied scars, and I weep anew but not
for me, as much for the resonating simpatico souls with whom
they even  now vibrate with resonance of the immediacy of
If not now, When?

Aside: The exterior environment is noisy wet pelting of thunderstorms and ****** sheets of bulleting rain, piercing projectiles, but I am safe in the sunroom, sadly happy my dog is no longer here to shiver and tremble, cuddle and be soothed by steady stroking

But I am here, wrestling with this dredging operation, digging up
tons of sand that require dumping, and I ask, inquire, beg:

Who will take this detritus off my hands, once more, now uncovered,
now recovered, the soil is already soaked and can absorb no more,
the soul is already soaked and can absorb no more, the weakened
heart, damaged and occluded, suffer cannot bare twice the

outrageous misfortune

of unbared recollections, twice, or thrice, and I feel myself drowning in revisiting pain, **** **** ****, these old poems, not nuggets, but boulders dropping from night skies, shot from a pitching machine, without letup, piercing of agonies that once ago  
freshly desecrated and decorated my basic training in humanity.

Enough whining:
I wrote those poems to
eject out those pains,
and I write this now, once more,
to realize that so so many still face
uncertain and unrelenting similarities,
doing their own sums,
and I wish them easing,
strength to compose and
thereby dispose of
the ineloquent
and eloquent
words of staining suffering

3:30am
Thur
July 10
2025

prayer of hope, for young and old, who suffer from the slings and arrows sadness and the loss of love; I offer up this prayer of hope and offer you my hand around your shoulders until you no longer require it

more than once,
for lengthy periods,
by events, other people,
my self was eradicated
and limping from day
to night, and J faced
absolutes, choices choking,
alternating alternatives that
offered zero, or even less
than zero, and the inkwell
wasn't refillable, and I could
point to nothing yet encouraging a mystifying purposed existence

then came a woman

who asked nor proffered
conditionals
pre, prior post or otherwise
and
offered up the miraculous
drink, human kindly notice,
snd it
drained the bitters,
began fluid replacement,
and slow resuscitation

and then
poems rebirthed me,*
 liberated the angry sacred
gory sadness words devoid of glory,
with a reworded score, and
the eyes could write without
a patina filter of jaundiced hatred,
and whispered private internally
many times a beloving
hallelujah

and when ever the remembrance of
the near misses are crackly occasionally appearing, the surge dissipates intact quick
into a netherworld for suppressing
and bid "away with you," and a
thin lipped smile part sneer
for having survived
even
prospered when
                    then came a woman

and the self, the my self,
returned
after an absence of destructed
decades...deadening decades

and I smile when
the grandchildren tell me
knock knock jokes
and gently knock me on the head,
to make sure I'm alert,
                    then came woman
who had already~all ready
knocked me on the
heart

~for she who knows herself, best..
maybe~

Humans are renowned
for mucking up progress,
two steps forward,
three back, meaning,
net net; we move forward
but we often forget to cherish,
what too easy gets swept away,
as non~progressive, old fashiond

in this hands-free environment,
a very fey useful place to inhabit, let
us nonetheless, in a new age of
unrelenting increased sun
variant higher temperatures,
(which no one can deny)
curl our fingers about a
PSD,
a Personal Shade Device
(or a ParaSolD)
and as the mind roams,
let us consider a
PTD,
a personal tongue depressor,
a sort of mini-speech delayer
of say 3 seconds, giving our
overloaded brain a momentary
pause before speaking an
emotional epithet, a pause to
reconsider, with variable lengths,
adjustable to heart rate, BP, etc.,
when sensors (censors) register
driving, pulling triggers,
and ***
being triggered,
or to borrow a phrase from the
advertising icons,
'The pause that refreshes"

Mmm...
Make a Moment into a Minute,
before we whack a rude dude
with our parasol(d)...

just another ridiculous insight @3:53am

<>

Note the Word
ParaSolD has been
TM

"These days
I'll sit on corner stones
And count the time in quarter tones to ten, my friend
Don't confront me with my failures
I had not forgotten them"
Jackson Browne

<>

these days,
you can come by tween
the mostly soft warming cracking of Dawn,
and the early born-ing of
the first peek of a full grown
but yet
sleepy sunrise,

you'll find me siting on a
asshard dock,
two seagulls staring at the
human interloper,
alone with the threads in my
hardened head,
beating time in casual rhyme,
because that's what poets do,
to warm up their
tongues & toes,
clear their eyes
and
sniffling nose,
their partly opened,
party closed,
throats, eyes and
give up, sacrifice
the longest list of little lies,
that makes (forces) us to get up  in the undimming earlies,
when it's just me, the gulls,
& the minnows poking around,

the fluke,
smarter but not wiser,
further out in deep water,
waiting to be caught

and
the cool blood barely flows,
until the rising orb warms
our fragility,
and we review the stories old,
that make us cold at night promising ourselves that
today you'll do that thing(s)
you've been putting off for years,

"Don't confront me with my failures"
Jackson pleads, but I concede,
thinking tell me them
one
mo' time,
make me unrighteous,
make me whole,
then take me,
holy displayed fully,

and the
first poem of the day,
will be my
confession total,
without reservation
and yet muse on
honor
something I thought I knew,
but needing a
closer examination
it might've been
dishonor
that was what
I was truly
knew
<>
Sunrise
July 5
'25
sitting on the dock
by the bay,
would I
lay down with a lie?

Cannot be done.
Absent those two d e v i c e s,
We wither die

I present you a poem
with no and(s) or the(s)

hear your mind going
but, but, but....

END