Entropy can not be excised from energy.
Now, we feel the onus on us.
Let them wear those ascots and eat their escargot;
and, I shall send this erogenous epistle that is delivered whilst tip toeing through brambles of sharp thistles.
An endemic epidemic extolling the benefits of the sentence of exile.
“What would the congregation think if they could see you now?” she asks.
“I would care not,” he replies.
Epistemic and affixed.
A’human energy existant and
avoidant.
Avoid, ant.
A void, ant.
Doll, you’ve got it confused.
You are completely vulnerable when you forget to be in the-Moment.
You merely feel vulnerable when you find the-Moment and discover you had forgotten it.
You were wandering through the Meadow of What-If.
The Marshes of Why-I-Oughta.
Your home is in Right-Now and you never leave.
You keep forgetting.
Mountains do not need to be seen to largely loom.
A pond does not need to exist continually.
Seasonal droughts come before
the flooding of Springtime
with its garish blooms and hissyfit storms.
Cycles of forgetting to remember to not forget,
abiding by celestial currents among the degrees of inclination about the axis.
As pokes retch,
a spoke stretches,
hissing,
from the rim’s circumference to the center axle.
Therein may we all meet.
I run up and down Main Street. Trying to appear not too insane.
I rush the bank in calculated urgency.
“Do you have an emergency defibrillator machine?”
“A what?”
“An emergency defibrillator machine?!”
“A what?!”
“Shock paddles. For someone having a heart attack?”
“No.”
I keep looking shop to restuarant to bank.
The paramedics arrive.
I return to the bistro.
We throw tables and chairs to clear a path.
~
“We’ve been doing CPR for nine minutes continuously,” says one of the nurse practitioners to the paramedics.
I see the glow of his Bardo.
~
And, yes, by the time I returned, his face had grown green and empurpled with veins.
He looked dead.
The paramedics take out the prize of a pair of paddles.
Finally. The defibrillator has arrived.
Fashionably late to the luncheon party.
They shock his heart.
His exposed chest heaves. He starts breathing.
He exhales; and, from this rest his next interval proceeds.
The color returns to his cheeks, though he remains unconscious.
Lazarus. The corpse reanimated before our stunned, gaping eyes.
~
A woman presents a check presenter containing her tab and a credit card, under my downcast eyes.
“I need to pay for this,” she says.
I respond without thinking, muscle memory taking over in the face of surprise and confusion, “One moment.”
I look up and see the face of Lazarus’ wife looking into me with tea saucers for eyes.
“Oh. No ma’am. We will take care of this.”
“How kind,” she dreamily responds.
~
The paramedics remove him to the sojourn of their ambulance.
I lock the front door.
Everyone decompresses.
Talking to a pair of diners, the owner accidentally drops and breaks a piece of stemware.
The busser rushes over to make ammends.
I reconfigure the dining room slowly.
Until it appears as though nothing happened at all.
I walk to table 12 and tell the pair of practitioners, “Thank you.”
Turns out they are engaged to be married in September.
Trying to enjoy a simple Valentine’s lunch.
The ambulance encasing him remains parked outside for twenty minutes. This is a good thing, apparently.
~
The ambulance drives away.
The staff makes a collective exhalation.
Pneuma.
~
I unlock the front door.
I say, “Happy Valentine’s Day. Welcome. Party for two?”
Wearing eyes like tea saucers.
Appearing disembodied and ghoulish.
“A man fainted,” the diner at table 7 tells me.
I look around. The fellow I seated at table 1 is lying on the ground. Flat on his back.
It is Valentine’s Day before noon. There are balloons everywhere. A pink and red rose vased at every table.
We just finished breakfast service. They were one on the first lunch service tables.
I had just pulled the jar of freezer jam from their table.
~
I recognize that I am seeing a man in full cardiac arrest.
I fly to the back office and tell the owner.
She calls 911.
When I returned, over him,
a crowd of people stood and stared.
“If you aren’t a doctor or medical practitioner, sit down and give him space,” I yell.
“Nurse practitioners,” says a diner from table 12, motioning to herself and a companion.
He rips the man’s shirt open and begins CPR.
She asks me, “Do you have a <insert gibberish here> machine?”
“A what?”
“A <insert gibberish here> machine!?”
“A what?!”
“Shock paddles. Do you have an emergency defibrillator?!”
“No.”
“Go find one. Try the bank.”
~
And, yes. He already looked like a ghoul, when he entered.
Bloated and sweaty. Too pale.
Fat and very old.
Her companion withdraws from giving CPR and says, “it’s been one minute.”
His female companion resumes CPR immediately.
“Go!” he says to me.
Thursday night, a fellow comes in for a gift certificate to the bistro.
He is from California, visiting.
Getting a gift for his local BampersandB host family.
He drinks an IPA at the bartop.
The bartender, he, and, I talk about a San Franciso hospital.
The one where the bartender had been born.
Where his parents had paid for a brick with his initials to be laid.
The hospital I could see while eating in the Embarcadero, when working in insurance.
The hospital this gentleman could see from his current home.
As he leaves, I happen to be at the entrance.
“I just had the best twenty minutes. Before coming here, I was at the marina by the shore of Puget Sound. Would it be okay if I show you my picture and poem I wrote?” he asks.
“Nothing would please me more.”
We sit on the bench in the entryway together.
The poem is pretty damn good. The first line includes “pilgrim places.” The picture is of the sunset.
The final word is Selah. It is Hebrew.
“It suggests forever; but, it also means like a rock or stop and listen,” he says.
“Like an exhalation or the interval and the rest in musical notion?”
“Yes! If I have a daughter, I will name her Selah,” he says .
“Spoken, it sounds lot like c’est la vie,” I add.
He smiles.
“Fist bump?” I offer my fist.
He makes a complimentary gesture and presses his knuckles to mine.
“Thanks for sharing.”
“Thanks for the first bump.”
His chest swells.
He smiles; then, breathes out.
~
The burn of the glare of a mal-humored bend of sunlight
coming through slats of blinds.
Water boiling in a pot before being poured over the Hummingbird blend.
Coffee soon with heavy creamer.
Thighs still sore from quaking.
Ass still sore from tightening in nervous tension.
Cheeks still sore from smiling so hard for so long.
(And, she looks for some sort of transition here,)
And, finding none,
She moves to the
Room under the moon.
I walk in the back door of the kitchen to the little bistro.
Announcing hellos to the line and the singing chef.
“What are we going to do today, Casey?” the chef asks me.
“Same thing we do everyday day, Hector. Try to take over the world,” I reply.
He resumes his singing in Spanish.
Ponchito sings harmony.
~
The Beach Preservation Busy Body Society is buzzing on coffee at 10:00 a.m.
“Thanks for asking, Judy. Not great, but I’ve switched to Metamucil,” says Jeanie, still recovering from hip surgery, amongst other things.
“Perseverance!” says Judy.
~
I start a fresh pot of decaf. I snatch up the urn of caffeinated, good stuff (Tony’s, Songbird blend).
I go around warming up people’s morning cup as a priest pouring sacrament.
Paul, an ex-New York state prosecutor, is holding court at table one. A two top right by the window.
“What the hell are you doing at this table?!” I tease.
He never eats at Table 1. He does breakfast at table 6 when playing chess and he does his business lunches at table 21. Both in the back, albeit opposite sides of the dining room. Table 21 is in the bar. Table six is not.
“Well, I figured if I sat up by the window, I’d attract people in for you,” he says.
I don’t recognize his companion, but after five months I know Paul well enough to say, “You are a pretty thing.” Turning to his companion, I say, “He is, right?”
The man squirms; Paul cracks up.
“He usually eats there or there,” I say motioning directly. “Fancies himself something of a local celebrity,” I add, walking off.
~
Coffees warmed, tables reset, and empty plates cleared, I perform my morning ablutions: sweeping the front mat in the entryway, cleaning the glass free of sticky smudges from syrupy fingers.
Showing the nearly hundred year old building extra love and attention.
It’s all in the details, innit?
Polished brass and dusted, wooden ledges.
Thriving atherium.
Persevering.
~
I sweep the outside mat, leading directly off of Main Street.
“Hey, it’s the auctioneer,” one of a pair of joggers says.
The locals finally accept me.
The line to the bistro regularly overflows onto the high street.
I usually run a waiting list by ten a.m.
The best system I’ve uncovered is to yell from the sidewalk:
Table for so-and-so going once.
Table for so-and-so going twice.
Table for so-and-so SOLD to the next party.
It is a pragmatic thing.
For when that absentee party I called, invariably returns, angry that their table has been given away, I have multiple witnesses who will enjoy laughing and saying, “Oh, she tried to call you.”
The other jogger notes the unfilled dog bowl we leave out.
“You need to put water in that,” says Jogger two.
“Why? You feeling thirsty?,” I think, but do not say.
Perseverance, right?
~
I slowly reset table four in order to better eavesdrop on table three’s conversation.
What writer doesn’t revel in moonlighting as a thief of the conversations of others?
“She never asked me not to leave,” he says.
“Didn’t you say anything?” she asks.
“No. It wasn’t my place.”
I overhear
I think
Persevere.
“Sunlight yesterday; dreary today,” he says.
I tease, “Oh, stop with the dismal diablerie, cad. It’s not gloomy. It’s simply a winter gloaming.”
“That’s not what I meant”, he says.
“Oh, I just thought you were awful fond of talking about the weather,” I panto, innocently.
” ‘Awfully’,” he mumbles.
“You are awfully fond of talking about weather?” I giggle, in mock with brown eyebrows arched.
“No. You meant to say ‘awfully fond’. Adverb not the adjective,” he says.
I howl in laughter, “Be careful telling me what I ‘meant to say’; because, you have no idea what I intend.”
~
There once was a boy.
And, there he was until he became.
He held himself still. Held fast and listened.
There did he discover he was himself
all over again.
She smiles, unobserved, from the corner.
The backside of the house was struck by sunlight following a cloud burst’s clearing.
Casted like spells looming, the pair of old trees guarding the home’s back door entryway, conjure a pair of ancient shadows, saying:
“We were planted nearly a hundred years ago. We saw it all. The doctor and his wife, first. They planted us as they built their shelter above the groping outpouring of our subterranean root structure,” says tree i.
“We saw him deliver the daughter right out of his own wife’s belly. Right next to the butler’s pantry. Midwife present to mediate the metaphysical nuances of old-timey, natural, live births,” says tree ii.
“He was the only doc in town, see,” ads tree i.
“And, we saw that daughter raise her children here, just as she had been raised above our roots,” says tree ii.
“And, though you bring us nothing but you, a lonely homesteader, we see how you learn to erect the ether of your own root’s structure,” says tree i.
“Yes, discovering the dimensions of your pyramide before constructing,” tree ii.
Build your radix for me, priapus.
Show us the wasted seed of what could have been the next generation.
You fell upon me like a gentle rain.
I struck you as pelting hail.
A heated fitt.
A meteorological event.
A wet tango befell from atmospheric interactions.
Intention of being in tension.
Umbrella abandoning abandon.
A story is a story is a narrative is a story is an experience is
A lifetime.
“I don’t know.”
That’s what he said
, when I asked in a low, hushed, tone,
“How do you feel right now?”
The lovely pitch and tremolo of that voice.
As delicate as sinew finely strung and harshly wrought.
Utter “freedom,”;
requiring me to keep one foot in the wage economy of the mundane.
Like how your guru turned out to have a cigarette and woman habit.
Something must keep a mystæ mind from leaving here and now.
What better than an active hand in one’s own mortality?
⊙
Morbidity versus gestational rates.
Malthusian growth.
I heard your response before you said it.
⊙
And the forgotten
essence of Hesse’s
Glass Bead Game slips through as an ethos that the spiritual ideal, once obtained, is to then be put back into
the service of life and the living.
⊙
Doting and clinging like
a jaguar killing a caiman.
Death rolling.
Binding in the collective noun enumerating
A rare of knots.
Throwing seed and sowing semen.
Tilling the earth, post slash and burn agriculture.
Fallow lands left to lie and respawning
New growth.
Imagine I feel exactly as I appear.
I came to arrive.
Then I learned to continously come.
Things appearing as little coincidences save lives.
So be careful with your calculated capriciousness as you do not know how others see you.
You may be pseudo-savior to their Lazarus,
but here’s the point of that story that remains unspoken.
Lazurus did not know what to do with his revivified self once his re-enlivenor left his side.
But, is that really Jesus’ problem?
It’s one thing to know you have powers.
To bring somebody back.
It’s another thing to know the ends which you use them,
aside from your own pleasure at experiencing the wielding.
If p then q.
The bats in the belfry belong to Whom.
Do you ever cry, not because you are sad, but because your non-corporeal self feels some emotion so deeply that you must manifest a reaction in empirical reality?
And my left eye seizes up again and again.
Ministrokes.
Little deaths preceding big ones.
Arms.
Pull me close in arms.
Mystical shaking from astral exploration. Tend my physical body while I fly.
Because, the reading of an old text alights my spirit almost too easily.
A mystical proclivity circumscribed in existential insecurity,
Because how and who am I?
You tell me what you see.
But, press me close to you, so I don’t runaway at what you say.
Held dear until freed.
Then, left as a tree shaking out dead leaves,
recalling, in newly resounding silence,
the originally begged pleas of ‘please’.
Here.
Heel.
We are running in circles.
Cyclical spires of turrets leading to screaming minarets.
All is as it has been before.
And, I hear your silent complaint that I never wear my hair naturally curly anymore.
Give me a reason.
Who summoned whom from the pneumatic ether and how many times?
Who and Whom are a real, diabolical pair.
Alain de Botton hissing out a status of anxiety.
Dialogueing with the ecological shaman of
David Abram casting natural spells of the sensuous.
Put your faith in me.
I will make you watch me return it and put it back into yourself while I ask you to consider the chartreuse evening.
Prowling the catacombs of the catatonic.
Buffering neophytic initiants while irritants and retinal scratches
itch;
because sometimes I say silly things when I’m embarrassed.
Hand sigils and face touching.
The difference between indoctrinated and initiated? I call to Æ like a game show host.
The difference between you getting it and blowing it versus you getting it and not blowing it: he grins, blowing it for both of us.
And what if what I call discipline is just self-indulgence?
You bitch.
Don’t fret. I love you madly, too.
It is true. I don’t know you, yet Æ thinks I do.
You’re interesting: he says.
I reply: you listen or hear better than most.
Ammend-able.
Amen-able.
Ami-able.
Ambivalent.
What’s the difference between the interval and the rest.
Your silence.
Duress and stress?
They were meant to know of how I see your eyes, dear.
Depleted and explicative.
It is a moonlit night in the forest. I am running.
I wear a black lace dress, giving only a pretext of covering my body.
Breasts bouncing freely, pointed appendages of low lying bushes ripping the delicate fabric grasping my thighs, allowing my legs to stretch farther apart in their stride.
I hear the sea gull behind me. One moment its call is a mocking laugh, the next it is hysterical crying.
Laughter and tears.
But, the gull is actually the moth. And, this realization makes my runner’s stride spark into a frantic sprint.
Because, the moth is actually the last man I fell for.
“Turn and face me. See my eyes again,” the moth/seagull cries.
“No. You will wreck me again,” I holler.
I want to feel you chase me: I howl, telepathically.
Peals of laughter erupt from his beaked mouth.
“You are chasing me, heyoka!” he bellows.
And, I send my perception into the starling flying overhead, my shadow spirit.
And, I see,
from on high, looking down on myself and him below.
I see how we run in circles. It becomes impossible to tell who is chasing whom.
And I realize: We’ve been doing this for multiple lifetimes.
A tree limb snatches the collar of my shredded lace nightie and I trip from its unexpected pull.
The gown tears away and I am laid bare and naked.
The forest melts away and now the moth and I are in a horse’s lunging pen.
We are tethered. One moment he lunges me in tight circles, tapping my ass with a long whip. The next moment, I lunge him.
We work each other out.
Jimmy (tha motherfucking) King appears, peaking over the fence of the pen.
He is furious and hurt. I’ve not seen this lover in over a decade.
He accuses, “This is what you are doing? This is preferrable to life with me?”
“I never wanted to bear your children. You wanted twins. To dress up identically and take to an Easter Sunday church service. You broke me when you told me that desire. I was twenty two. I would have taken that dream from you if I stayed,” I pant out.
The lunging pen melts away and I find myself at the little bistro where I work.
Seated at table six. The four top table at the very back of the dining room.
Moth, Jimmy, Sam, and I sit there.
I see Kim. sitting alone at table 7.
I’ve not seen you here: I say to her mind telepathically.
I’m here to play mediator: she says to my mind.
She smiles and I feel safe and held dear in her mind.
Moth’s mouth hangs open in a grotesque grin. Tongue hanging out of his lips. I lean in and suck his tongue into my mouth like I’m giving head.
Jimmy shudders in disgust.
Sam looks completely disengaged and tells me, “I hated you for years. I hated you before I asked you to marry me.”
“You abused my loyalty and I am glad you came clean and we never made it official,” I tell him.
“But, I’m rich now, thanks to you,” he challenges.
“I loved you when you had nothing. I could not care less about your liquidity.”
“Tell moth the truth,” suggests Kim.
“I showed you the story I was telling myself. You showed me how to deconstruct it, edit and revise it. I shall never forget you. And, it hurts, so I howl. Thank you.” I whisper.
“I did nothing but enjoy you,” he responds.
Moth suddenly cries out in pain.
“My ankle! My leather brogues!”
I look under the table.
A sweet, little one of a man is curled up on my feet like a dog. He wears vinyl short pants and a cotton sports bra with a lovely crisscross over his back. (The bra I lost on day two of visiting moth.)
I discover I am holding a leash connected to his collared neck.
“Don’t worry about him. He is mine,” I say.
Jimmy, moth, and Sam look stunned and scared.
The man at my feet growls.
I toss chicken bones under the table to occupy him.
“Careful, pet, they may catch in your throat,” I coo lovingly.
Kim’s laughter is so loud it awakens me.
I sit up suddenly and feel the pit of my stomach ache.
I am thirsty and the water tastes like ecstasy.
I will burn you out on me, exuberantly.
Calisthenics of cynics and a fatalist,
But, I needn’t concern myself with roosters of heretics.
No one ever believed Cassandra as she pealed out prophecy in ding dong ding.
Apollo had left her a bit flightily batty.
Cherry picking diurnality and calling it enjoying responsibly.
A truck drives by us, at well over the speed limit. Zebras in its trailer. It made you remember that limerick.
The only one, you. Know.
I say, “I don’t call ghosts ‘sir’.”
Precisely proud.
Let it roll while I make strange sigils with my fingers:
The pyramidic containment of an ‘A’, for you;
The flipped up middle finger over my left shoulder, back facing you;
The inversion with a middle finger flipped down;
Hang ten;
Metal horns.
(Another haul of the mother lode laid at the
grounded, pegged point of the Caduceus Staff.)
Shiva and Shakti as agronomists¿
And, my fingers move as if by some outsider’s volition.
The movement is an apple cart over-turning,
upsetting some.
Why wouldn’t we want to bring it all down?
Dictionary divination of a dervish
And, ca is followed by
cabal is followed by
cabala is followed by
cabalero is followed by
cabaline is followed by
cabanis is followed by
Cabaret.
Automatic writing is the
Art of transcryption performed through the
Act of transcribing made manifest by the
Hand of a scribe.
A dialectical tribal diatribe.
What if they all hate you? Æ challenges.
How can they hate me? They don’t even know me.
Thinking you hate anything outside your skin is a misperception.
You hate yourself for hurting.
Just like I do. Just like them
So, when I think “go to hell” what I mean to say is:
I’m sorry you ever had to ever hurt.
Because I know that feeling.
Because the whimsy arc of time’s arrow, once arched, can be cruel.
When I think “you are exasperating”, what I mean to say is:
Thank you.
Because, patience requires testing to find its grace.
Because, I know what it is to find out someone thinks you’re exasperating.
When I am stupefied in surprise or fury, or admiration, at you, what I mean to say is:
I care for you.
Clearly.
Because, I have an opinion at all.
That turned sappy fast: is all with which Æ can counter.
Well, you posed a ludicrous question.
The wrought iron chair scrapes patio stone, as I tuck into the table.
A thigh grazes mine, too innocuously.
Pressing its luck against me.
I look over to see averted eyes busily studying the hangnail of a left thumb.
“Rip it off or let it be,” I say.
Those eyes find mine.
I let my hair down. Disinterest feigned.
“Do you want to know what I’m thinking?” he asks me.
“No. If you wanted to tell me, you already would have. Besides, I already know.”
“What am I thinking?”
“You are thinking: I want her to ask me what I’m thinking.”
“Wishful and reductionist thinking.”
“So?”
I seize the arms of my chair and rake my chair closer.
Outer thighs mashing in an intentional collision.
“Put your ear to my mouth. I want to whisper exactly what I am thinking,” I say.
An ear presents itself to my open lips; and hears,
out of my sweet mouth, sailor strings of profanity pouring piously.
WrittenCasey 