Alone within my emotional wilderness

A reverie along memory lane when, this lviii sea sunned
row man (stills paddles in oarlocks and serenely quizzically,
lackadaisically, and harmoniously drifts) along the slip
stream of time. Awash on his figurative manual navigated
opportunistic prideful quintessential schooner reflects,
regales, and revisits ebbing lapsed instances (fast receding
into the past time, when psychological instability grounded
fragile my self esteem (generated venting, steaming, and
piping hot brickbats). As a newly minted harrumphing,
grubbing, and floundering dada enmeshment (analogous
to a fish caught in a net, hence quickly ricocheting, rabidly
splashing, and sloppily thrashing) predicated my foray
into das fatherhood. Aye experienced nearest approximation
Bing battered, rammed, and torpedoed from glomming
(par for the course riot ting heaps) necessarily imposed
adult responsibility. Such metaphorical motoring across
avast Battle Creek with no landfall in sight, this then nada
so Grand Turk (key in the straw) Otto man continually
snapped, cracked and popped. This human ping-pong
fitbit part player papa felt akin to subjection re: thralldom).
At this juncture in me cross currents of existence I can
harken back to those most exhausting, fatiguing, and
grueling endeavors. Hindsight offers this aging baby
boomer the luxury to cast astern. Retrospective leisurely
trawls along the shoals throes of fatherhood allow,
enable and provide and opportunity to scrutinize per
chance, where arises this on account of the empty nest
syndrome. Ordinarily the wife (i.e. missus to appear
more formal), would caw out my name nonstop….
”Matt”…”Matt”…”Matt”…, but she opted to organize
the cluster of assorted household items at the apart
ment (located in Crum Lynne – Ridley Township),
we hope to move within a fortnight. Thy spouse
volunteered her own mini reprieve by setting order
to the miscellaneous fixings gradually amassed,
appropriated, and gifted thru out the twenty plus
years of marriage, which hodgepodge of personal
possessions downsized whence circumstance dictates
evaluating goods having keepsake meaning versus
anomaly of belongings to be unloaded, repurposed
for someone else, or ordained as unworthy to schlep.
Alone asper like a very brief sabbatical from marriage
finds stillness amidst the white noise of the whirring
fan. Thus, I sit here ruminating how to dredge up
some idea for a poem,  (non) fiction or essay. This
husband became acclimated, conditioned, and em
bossed with a mate a tete for two plus decades,
whereby both thee dos delightful daughters on
Track 742 heading west. Honest to dog, I miss
the role of fatherhood when either off spring
(with an age difference of approximately twenty
five plus months) romped, scampered, and trotted
as toddlers, and upon childhood, thy little girls
found exultant excitement dashing higgledy-
piggledy, hither and yon, to and fro across the
playground as most glorious human indulgence.
Despite the plaintive wail vis a vis Juliet saying
goodnight to Romeo (…parting is such sweet
sorrow) haint pleasurable atoll. Hitherto un
known that during the most vexing, trying,
and quaking bouts when both kin of thy ****
fought like angry cats would there transpire
the occasion of sincere tearfulness ululating
vain warbling. Now a pang of nostalgia arises
when I drive past their happy go lucky stomp
ping turf, or reflect on answering the trumpet
call to chauffer one or thee other to amusement
park, play date, mall, favorite toy store such as
Fivebelow, birthday party, et cetera. Even
certain tunes recalled to mind and/or heard
being broadcast across the audio logical spec
trum a cause for moistened tear ducts. Wince
with sadness also mixed with sigh lent bundled
expostulations of joy. Both progeny metamorphosed
into able bodied, minded and spirited lasses,
whose attainment far exceeded any projections
internally forecast. Initial onset of parent role
found me all thumbs. Prior to begetting two
darling dames, this chap spent disproportionate
number of hours sequestered within some hide
away, which frequently happened to be the
designated bedroom at 324 Level Road, College
Ville, Pennsylvania, 19010. Never did thee major
rit tee days of mine life point to babysitting or
working with that chronological demographics
comprising the adoring blessed innocence,
murmuring newborn obliviousness, that bespoke
penultimate unsullied, utmost virtue necessitating
interaction with tender infants beckoning being
cradled, endearingly fondled, demonstrably easing
fondness gripping heartstrings issue jetblue kinks.
Aye felt pitched headlong into this foreign territory,
and initially experienced utmost awkwardness when
attending, pampering and pulling (albeit gently)
upsy daisy, the nascent hint of autonomy. Remembrance
and recollection of élan, joie de vivire, and yea those
ear splitting threshold of pain screaming tantrums
all boxed into tidy wholesome Zen announcing
nuggets of greater meaningfulness and absolute
value. The above long winded reverie intended and
meant tubby a semi biography, but leave hit up to
his hie n hiss, he went way overboard, and will give
a one line summarization to describe his i.e. yours truly
life sentence fate decreed. He (this Anglophile chipper
chap lived under duress of extreme anxiety, obsessive/
compulsive behavior, panic attacks and essentially
schizoid personality disorder for the greater part
of his life and hard times, which raw bits would
warrant fleshing out to extrapolate how these psychic
pitfalls represented critical factors at various and
sundry turning points in his life.

I told the professor I loved beat literature and all the hippy consequences. He said they were such a small part of the population (along with Native Americans too apparently,  he noted a different time. Because of what, you *******? I thought).

A pompous misguided thing, which either understandably or surprisingly, been teaching there since the 1960s. Five minutes of a winded attempt at putting anglophile humor into the lecture and you know the choice is "understandably" rather than "surprisingly." Been professing for the establishment, closed to other ways of thinking trickery.  

A real square through and through. As if all change should come from appeasing the tyrannical bleachy supposed majority. Those in poverty, darker skins, gays, drug users, and all around flashy dressers ought to don suits for their one night Ed Sullivan performance. Get the folks on Bass Run Lane to be okay with seeing you in a glass cage in their living room scene. For just a couple decades. Then maybe they'll be used to seeing you in a grocery store. You'll always be laughable though, as they designed it to be so.

The hippies were a very small majority says the anointed professor.
"So were the suffragettes" snaps back a fiery thing sitting next to me. I should have talked to her more.

Twenty classless, eight cigarettes. 
Fighting over the radio at the 
Inpatient Mental Health Facility, 
A broken sense of belonging, 
And a dearth of veggie burgers. 

Listless with his lists, of course. 
Angst from the Anglophile, unable to 
Put a stopper in the pouring, 
Bleeding emotions. 
Open hands 
Stained red, and brown. 
Three breaks a day, scarring his 
Broken knuckles, they paint the walls. 

Code Smoking Gun, 
Code Smoking Green, 
Manic man, loading his shoulders with his 
Father’s burden, too big for Atlas’s arms, 
Or his mother’s shunning palms. 

Three breaks a day, 
Knee, shoulder, hip. 
The coffee’s decaf 
But your calves? Well, 
They’re just sore. 

They dish the brick every 
Other evening. But living, for 
No light, only serves to lessen your 
Love of life and make you 
Light-headed.

Broken beds with rock-solid
Pillows. Three breaks a day to
Remind you of your regression. We
Want you here as much.
Why’re you whining?

Busy doctors bust the doors, thank 
God for the freedom, the 
Fluorescent finish to your odyssey. The 
Flowers and grass greet you in 
Shades of pink and green your 
Greedy eyes hadn’t seen. 
Exhale. Ghost out your grieving.

The next little boat comes around the bend as the previous one sets sail.  No sails of course on these amusement park river rafts, but standing on that disorienting moving platform I can’t help but wax poetic.  I say wax poetic and I think of tall, slim candles on furnished banquet tables in foreign countries with languages that yearn to invert our *****, anglophile syntax and say wax poetic to mean ‘poetic wax’.  Wax with a flair for verbose romance.  Tall, slim, fleshy, slowly expiring under a weightless impossible flame, and thinking all along of shattered daydreams, looking into each like shards of glass and seeing not this melting candle but a solid body doused and extinguished with love and certainty.  There it is, my croissance poétique, my poetic waxing, to grow and elaborate, as wax simply does not - under these circumstances, at least. To be sure, I am still standing before my boat as my body moves constantly on the platform with no help from me.  I am thankful such thoughts find themselves so instantaneously or I would have found myself knocked under or over something or other.  I board.  Buckle.  I’ve never heard of anyone in an amusement park on one’s own; it’s usually a pair hand-in-hand, gripping each other on plummeting coaster drops in some panic-stricken foreshadowing of the taught limbs and pounding hearts that will inhabit their sheets come nighttime.  Or else a grease-stained fat lipped boy, esurient for the delicate touch his haggard mother and wicked-stepfather dole out upon his blind and handicapped sister, bound to a chair, bound to her own head, bound forever to her worn-out, frayed gingham mother and her stupid, jealous brother.  Even as my calves squeak against the rubbery seat and my knees bump with some hairy father of some screaming three, I’ve still managed to romance my setting into something far out of the realm of reality.  I’m afraid, though, I may be losing touch with it altogether.

Am I really there?  Something about the sensation of spinning and twinge in my core that feels like sickness tells me that is probably the case, but even so, I’m relying purely on a hunch.  A literal gut feeling, soon to be joined by the cold barrage of cascading water and my shoes turning wet and making my feet feel somewhat like jelly.  Physical experiences that root me in this world, while my thoughts, it seems, have died and transcended some time ago.  One blink and my transformation is complete, soaked to my center and the ride is over.  I’m exiting my little boat, orienting myself onto the platform that has kept spinning this entire time, unrelenting to anyone who would wish can this all stand still for just a moment my shoe is untied! The father of the three follows behind, but I fail to find a story for him. The faces I pass as I exit are not delicate, they do not carry with them tragic imbalances of the past, or beam with the pride of a love that seems to last forever (because it has lasted so long already, right?), they are blank. They are blank and wet and dripping like mine and they drip like they’re melting, like they are slowly expiring under a weightless impossible flame, and it is now that it has come full circle. The world as it passes has caught up once again and will continue to spin past, allowing only a moment where we both whirl together, where we are in sync and both of us have wicked step-fathers and both of us have soggy shoes and then again she will be gone, to unite with some other fleshy entity and reduce me again to my *****, anglophile syntax and my shattered daydreams and my wax poetic.  But she will be back.  And until then, I’ll drip into the floorboards and perhaps when she returns I’ll have something to show her.

the bookies of High Street North will give you odds,
1000 to 1, our paths will never cross, a simple notion,
we’ll never meet, it’s a sucker’s bet they’re happy to take,
despite, shhhhh, not that hard, truth be told, airplane,
Terminal5,  Heathrow Express, Paddington Bear Station

and yet, there are oceans to fly over, viruses in
every nook and cranny, and the biggest risk, those
what ifs...and the worries viral multiply as imagining
grows more spectacular than wild flowers on the
heath, bogs conjuring up Holmesian fluorescent hounds

she’ll know for whom this poem tolls, but
will never understand that my envision of her world,
through her eyes, unfamiliar words mellifluous,
for me, they, a nectar, the special Ritz teatime,
but don’t be mistaking me for an Anglophile

no, this Yank plainly loves her garden of nature,
and her own nature, beloved as well, floral blooming,
how it grasps his heart with her two hand’s nouns,
seizing and ceasing its beating, nicks it, his rhythm for
poetic composition, so little more to add, other than
writing this made both a young boy glad, an old man sad...


postscript

someday she’ll crook her finger, like the crook
of her hair, and this Tom, will no longer be waiting

-The stars in the sky have done nothing,
-Nothing, I think, to deserve their immortalization in verse
-They are the gas lamps still burning
-From the Universe’s Victorian Anglophile phase
-Old lights we haven’t looked at long enough
-To make them fade away

-The stars are dull and distant
-And yellowed with age
-When you step out to confide in them
-On a clear Winter’s night
-And instead find yourself starstruck
-To be surrounded by shattered sky
-Collapsed at your feet and dazzling only for you
-And the deer
-Picking through this fallen snow
-In quiet meditation

-Maybe the snow dazzles only for them
-It knows your heart looks skyward

I was drowned in the forest,
So deep and dull.
Where filtered no light that was blessed from the sun
And yet I was on the run.
Flowers there don’t blossom
Nor did my pale heart drum.
For no different was I than Mephistopheles
And was a beast that bore no feelings.

Memory had deceived me of my spring,
A time that time had timed away from my rhyme.
A little a dull dream I no often had
Of light and flies and lies and cries.
Cries, Oh! Cries! Ah! Cries!
Had I not cried would the forest have died?
Reason would tell it all but no sharp mind had I.

Walk had moved me onto the rocks,
And then to the river of smoke had I gone.
The vinous smell of which
Lumbered me into a deep slumber.

In sleep I saw Dante the man
At whose side stood Beatrice for whom he was mad.
I who knew nothing of groom and bride,
Glared my pearls onto the Anglophile that then did land.
Pierced he his mighty hands into the air;
Who under his command turned dust to there.
At him I screamed to know it all,
And answered he to ‘Speak low if you speak love’.
Pointed he his silhouette to the deity and uttered:
‘She’s beautiful, and therefore to be wooed,
She’s a woman, and therefore to be won’.

What sorcery had I witnessed!
For I heard my heart to bump and drum!
Sweet was the stream that filled my canals,
Where the fiery fluid of life now flows.
Fresh became the air that I drew there,
And a soothe deep blessed was in me.


Baptised was I then as human
Invited me then merry men to their den.
Oh! The smile I bore on my lips
For would witness I the kind to which I belonged.
Eagerness sprung out o’ my spirit
For soon with my tribe I will be with.

(today February nineteenth
two thousand and twenty two)
helps me to become more adept
crafting literary endeavors.

Remembrance of past circumstances
and/or happenstances,
which trials and tribulations
(particularly warm fuzzy memories)
brings to cobweb riddled mind
a quaint uncomplicated existence,
where childhood excitement arose
simply acquiring library card,
thenceforth selecting choice books

idling away leisure hours
mainly during twelve week long
summer school break
blissfully reading away,
the closest approximation
one strawberry blond Unitarian lad
experienced seventh heaven.

Ever since ability to read taught me
courtesy mother dearest,
I (when a happy go lucky little boy)
found pleasant escape
thru webbed wide world
of mine imagination
insync with printed words on page
which aforementioned attestation
declaration, habituation, mention,
situation, and zonation
bred fervent quest to quench
insatiable thirst for knowledge.

Fast forward when yours truly
experienced emerging adulthood,
upon which stage of mein kampf,
he began to cobble, dabble, scribble...
crafting poems about hardscrabble
emotional life challenges in Lake Wobegon
(I tip figurative hat to Garrison Keillor).

These averred literary endeavors wrought
usually comprising about dozen lines
cautiously, deliberately, extemporaneously,
noisily, obviously painstakingly keyed
courtesy Underwood typewriter brand
qwerty alphanumeric character arrangement
visualize index finger accessing
sought after hunt and peck method.

I exerted mental effort,
(and still put creative juices
thru their paces) to apply
words and punctuation
application of colon
and semi;colon quite nettlesome
resident with the English Language.

Upon espying a signature poem of mine
forces unleash mental processes
(triggering gears and cogs
to turn slowly within noggin)
scrutinize early feeble
linkedin with pervasive pre
ponder ring lurking predilection
tib hush anonymous re: dears
(dares) adventuresome mettle
taking him/her to the brainy
(briny) deep brink Icon fess this

(NON FAKE) pretense,
why aye metaphorically express
courtesy medium of ordinary
Anglophile alphabetic wonton poetrysoup,
or figurative egg drop bubbling broth
(el) doth brew) pronouns Sibyl affectation
affliction sans plethora,
where each ladle full adrip with
richly flavor Times New Roman
Font size twelve
sincerely textured vocabulary.

Aye sandman, I surrender to yar supreme governance
surreal spectacular soiree gifts subconscious sphere
soothing (analogous to natural palliative), ah...REM
member nought, asper exquisite entertaining cerebral
kaleidoscope replete with nonpareil visual trappings

aesthetically tantalizing unforgettable..., but lo' eye can't
captcha scenario upon awakened state, tis bothersome
transcendent, resplendent, quiescent,...transient dream
ticking escapement shuttered against recollections...
aye plead mercy to jog, (and gently jimmy - yeah of

course figuratively) shuttered facet slammed tight soon
nee immediately inaccessible dimension brought forth
teasingly, phantasmagorically, numbingly ephemeral,
nevertheless temporarily liberating, enshrouding, and
cocooning against incessant drubbing mine corporeal

wakeful body electric relentlessly fraught with profuse
inexplicable perspiration (principally palms) recurs
like clockwork (despite prescription medications), this
physiological discomfort hazards livingsocial quotidian
joyless agonizing oft times including courtesy, not

"FAKE" panic attack, these anxiety less debilitating,
when emotionally torturous teenage years wracked
every cell (no matter how fast I ran - just Kuwait, the
mailer daemons threatened) to undermine even flickr
of happiness, hence suicidal ideations (eternal slumber)

tantalized (still populate though processes) as surefire
solution to mitigate despite leaving those who love,
and especially hate yours truly, his existence bereft
of quality, though tranquil physical quasi rural setting
(Schwenksville), a naturalistic, fantastic, holistic balm,

here quiet as a cemetary removed, not considerably
distant from Philadelphia (hubbub disagrees with hair
trigger vulnerability), where madding crowd affects my
innate neurological predisposition, these lovely bones

easily rattled, quite aggravating to live verging upon
tremulous agitation assuaged through writing - catharsis
delivers temporary alleviation as doth solitary voluntary
sequestration poor substitute to relish L'Chaim!

Now Holy cow, I modestly bow vine
and dandy attired with New Times Roman font –
showing off me lix - plus iv ridging
despite afflicting unsuspecting reader  
to experience insufferable oh press
sieve corny word play yes
please lemme know and honestly profess
if profusion of words create lingual Loch Ness,
when hens can't come home to roost
especially, encountering
the following conglomeration
in Matthew Scott Harris patois.

He readily admits writing inventive
attempts usually ten tubby a literary mess,
thus finding innocent cyber cruisers
Angle fishing for Saxony fundamental fluidity
courtesy of Freudian stream of consciousness,
gabbling gibberish, muck not done on purpose
and certainly less
modest ambition to impress.

Gnome hatter intent toward
cogency, fancy ingenuity,
levity, the inevitable
resultant wrought gobbledygook
fascination for Lingua Franca
feeble endeavor splutters, splinters,
and splatters Asia Yukon guess.

Paramour status analogous with twenty six letters,
sans En gull Lush Mother tongue confluence
finds me submerged (as an Arctic Monkey)
swimmingly enervated
via ****** laced sentiments
perhaps finds bravely daring soul madly
hollering, gesticulating floundering,
(in close proximity to Davy Jones's locker)
to avoid drowning at sea
perchance comprehending passionate influence.

Upon espying a signature poem of mine
forces one pre ponder ring lurking predilection
tib hush anonymous re:
dears (dares) adventuresome mettle
taking him/her to the brainy
(briny) deep brink Icon fess

this (NON FAKE) pretense, why
aye metaphorically express
(via medium of ordinary Anglophile
alphabetic wonton soup,
or figurative egg drop soup
bubbling broth (el) doth brew)

pronouns Sibyl affectation
affliction sans plethora,
where each ladle full adrip with
richly flavor Verdana Font lee
and sincerely textured vocabulary.

Pluperfect mortals beings undoubtedly feel
(blindsided, how this hunger stricken author
suffers said sesquipedalian syndrome
particularly expectorating flashy

hoping tum bark on successful literary quest)
hyper aware aspiring paperback writers wannabe
might stoop to conquer, cheat, cadge
vis a vis plagiarize plethora
amidst storied plentiful English droppings.

Rather than succumb pretense feigning paucity
temptation to bask exultantly,
professed glorious unrequited love
announcing required sworn vow,
(el lye ding) avowed consonant covenant.