belz

At the risk of stating the obvious
I am very beautiful, and sometimes
it gets in the way of real friendship,
because I’m not sure what people want.
Sometimes I just have to say, back off.

But other times I let the other person
or people fall into the dream of light
their own tearful eyes have created
based on the ineffable glory
of my physical appearance.

It is on those occasions I’m reminded
of something Sir Elton John once said:
It seems to me you lived your life

like a candle in the wind, never knowing
who to cling to when the rain set in.

Of course, in my head I change it to,
to whom to cling when the rain set in.

• • •
 

My soul has been dragged down into the depths
by endless texts on Sunday afternoons—
by things half-said, half-meant, not understood.

I wish I’d stopped in 2007. I remember walks
back then, around the grove, the park—like heaven.
We’d walk to the convenience store.

But in the past 10 years how text has harrowed,
or half-harrowed by its vague suck, my heart
and head into non-meaningfulness.

How the overabundance or rather abundance
has half sharpened me. My wit was two bowling balls
back then, and now it’s a thousand bearings cut loose.

My heart’s become ten anthills of disaffection
where once it was a single, earnest dog.
Once it nipped and played in the night, but now

it merely is, in its many fractured desires,
a heart without heartness, without real gravitas!
Let’s just say there are too many hearts in me

just as I suspect there are the same in you,
a candy heart assortment, and this by ceaseless
text, endless interaction—a sickness of the mind.

• • •
 

If your god never disagrees with you
it might be an idealized version of yourself
or one of any number of other things
that never disagree with you—
a bench, a certain twist of foam in the surf
off the Cape of Good Hope. A cape
hanging in a costume shop.
A shopkeeper hanging around
a costume convention. Consider –
a universe in which nothing not only
disagrees with you but is even aware of you.
Humbling. Or should I say Kellerian,
all creatures of our God and King?

• • •
 

Secretly, and without telling anyone,
he had an effective game plan
for everything he did. This quiet
intentionality rubbed off on
his colleagues without them noticing.
What a time to work here, they thought,
not knowing why they thought it.
For, prior to that time, they’d grumbled,
groused, or merely moped, albeit
practically imperceptibly — like vapor
vanishing as the sun comes up.

Arrived today: A long awaited paperweight.
Arrivés aujourd’hui: Le voulu papier-pierre.

Marcus Greely, Corporate Recruiter: Epicore Software.
View Marcus Greely’s profile on LinkedIn.

• • •
 

“Open your hands,” says Dad, so I do,
and he puts about twenty seashells in them.
“Found those up by the jetty” he says;
“I’m sorry if they’re not very good.”
I throw them one by one toward the sea,
and pigeons gather, thinking they’re bread.
Pigeons are almost as dumb as my dad.
Haha, he’s actually not that bad.

• • •
 

Turns out my neighbor is selling her Porsche.
Ah. One thing at a time, says my wife.
Apparently, DirecTV is still billing us.
I keep trying to cancel service.

Meanwhile we’ve been hit with an afternoon
thunderstorm every day this week.
I pulled as much grass as I could
out of the garden. Garage is still musty.

There’s a dog park about a mile east of us.
I don’t know why I’m telling you this!
Beyond that is Home Depot and the sea.
We’re trying to figure out how to live here.

• • •
 

Ah, yes! A little fisticuffs! A private boxing encounter right here in the lobby. We’ve got to brawling out here behind the building. Rolled up our sleeves and commenced to clamor. Begun a brouhaha, a fracas, a quarrel — ruckus. We’re kicking up dust out in the street, near where the tram runs through. Next to the horse track, the old stables. Here, where the busses hiss to a stop, their doors creaking open to let travelers step down to hot pavements. Here we fight with hands and feet, you and me — in a spasm sparring, a set-to of singular strife. A duel for the ages! Ah, yes! A scuffle between us has started.

• • •
 

Met, at Mother Kelly’s in London,
a nouveau restauranteur
who perhaps was being provocative
when he grumbled several
pro-Trump statements
such as “I hope he DOES build a wall.”

“Are you pro-Brexit?”
we asked him. “Of course not,”
he shrieked. Later, my wife
recalled him as “That coke fiend,”
and I can’t blame her.
She really hates Donald Trump.

• • •
 

It is all coffee shops and typewriters and
thin smoke rising from unstubbed butts

Cigarettes burning silently down to the knuckle
of drowsy, lost in thought writer,

It is ink spent, ink spattered
And ink wasted, ink’s ink; the ink of ink

Curled pages tucked absently into attachés
and hurried through rainy streets
to editors waiting in austere and lonely offices

Yes, it is all of that and also
lost love, hated love, rejected love,
Love in all its masquerade

It is lost family, hated family, loved mother.
Betrayed and redefined.
Writing life is the Loved Mother
of all lives. Yes, it’s the invented mother.

And it is a certain winsome threadbareness
of the blazer with the one seam pulled
of rumpled cotton shirt and denim pants
and out of fashion boots

The writing life is an utterly genuine badassness
that always feels sui generis

but is in fact the same everywhere
both the same, rather, and as
absolutely different

as it seems.

• • •
 

“This is the assembly line. They change
trains here and they need to avoid
the domino effect into other elements
of their journey. This is where the dominos
could tilt either way, and they just want
to protect their bucket of money. We want
to make sure we’re planting holistic seeds,
so when they get to 59½ they don’t think wow,
I’m at a crossroads and don’t know how
I got here. All they want is Social Security.
All they care about is their bucket.”

• • •