Breadcrumb #431

November 09, 2018 by Bob Raymonda

SERGIO SATÉLITE

Motivation waits for me
with a cold glass of water.
I split my blue pills into breadcrumbs.
I cannot pray. So I drink.

Mine is a kind of voluptuous self-consumption
with its quasi-predictable-dance
between stimulus and response.
I drift. I float in my wishy-washy déjà vu-ing.
Too often, I seem unable to change.

A gunfight breaks out in the ship of Theseus.
17 against 25. God dies in the helicopter.
Purpose plummets with a hole in its temple.
And I. I Alone. Escape to tell you the news.

You fooled me once. Shame on you.
I fool me every day. Year after year.
Until your mother’s mustache gets sweaty.
What then? Long, hot showers? Is there a “beyond-the-circles”?

Why do we keep delaying putting away our ninja turtles?
Re-committing to Proust? Fixing the Venezuelan economy
and growing into the philosopher-kings our teenage versions
once fashioned for ourselves out of AM-radio-theologies?

Somebody has to go down on the Statue of Liberty.
Somebody has to perform open-mic surgery on this baby, baby.
Somebody has to plug the world back
into this drooling, dissociative unit.
Don’t you understand, Steven?
Somebody has to kill the babysitter.

• • •

Breadcrumb #430

November 07, 2018 by Bob Raymonda

MATTHEW D. ROWE

Broken thoughts piled up.
Heaps of recycled romance.
Your delicate wrists.

The love cell brimming
with sacred love oils.
My mouth speaks.

Little notes.
Smoke memories billowing
from the incinerator.

  You exit the same way.
  You came.
  A tower of complexities.

  Swaying, clinging to a concept.
  When the plumes of guilt hit
  the ozone, we have gone too far.

  Your chameleon eyes lock
  the service entrance to my insides.
  Wrap my hands in cling film.

  I hike the heap of hopes
  to a rowboat shimmering.
  On the beer can pond.

• • •

Breadcrumb #429

November 05, 2018 by Bob Raymonda

GERARD SARNAT

I began the day bemoaning I.C.U. State of the Union
including ongoing U.S. federal Civil Wars, then
continued post ablutions morning of our golden
anniversary driving to a Century City high-rise
to sign closing escrow papers on parents’
condominium where they seemed to live happily
since their two kids went far far away to college --
never to return until we had had a few children too.

Well truth be told actually I began the day
in the impermanent unit which was now
in mid-sprucing waiting on its new
occupants to complete what
I started but suspended per
negotiations with buyer now
hopefully raising the cash to pay us
so as Sister and I can end this hassle.

Ostensibly I began the day in the condo
to make sure the very last set of keys
not handed over to officialdom
fit into though the real reason
is I wanted some time alone
there to process termination of tangible
connections as such to Mama plus Dad
with the exception of chosen tchotchkes.

When the day’s tasks began, I unlocked the door
(check) to the place Mommy died 146 nights
ago after I as the firstborn physician son
gathered family to say goodbyes before
administering enough morphine to get
the deed done as comfortably as possible
just like it’d gone down with Doc Dad whom
Ger was a lot closer to 2513 dawns preceding.

Be that as it may, I began the day within space
evacuated of everything except a grand piano
smack middle of the otherwise buck naked
living room and salt/ pepper shakers
I remember from Chicago babyhood hiding
out in an overlooked cabinet inside the kitchen.
All of the rooms are consumed by fresh drywall
bland blizzard emptiness extending in each dimension.

Thus I began the day compensating for ambivalent
cool clinical feelings about the female who gave
genes, carried then expelled me, plus the male
ditto contributed tangled material. I offer myself
a half hour in weirdly bookless nooks to imagine
being lost without them: more importantly I conceded
dollars to the prospective owner, the Persian mother of
a current nitpicking tenant so they might live happily everafter.

If I began the day attending to past suffering, I finished up at
oldest daughter’s L.A. home in which her sibs congregate
with 5 grandchildren -- no minor feat given school, work
distances, pregnancy or sickness -- to celebrate our 50th
then remain in town for Ashkenazi New Year honoring
my wife who has come from a warmly Orthodox heritage
whereas [surprise, surprise!] Hubby derived from a tribe
of assimilated scientific atheist types, perhaps even Jew-Bus.

• • •

Breadcrumb #428

November 02, 2018 by Bob Raymonda

ANDREW KNOTT

The streets are full of children missing
teeth and teething all over—
sharp bits emerging
from every corner, poking
and slowly slicing
the gumline of their minds.

Summertime has dappled them,
and the weight of the stones
(in their hands and in their pockets)
creates a flux in the field.
The town is equally sunspotted.

Wind blows through a broken window
And whistles.
The children whistle
as they speak. Every tinkling of glass,
every throaty clang of a light pole
is an echo

Of a farm shut down,
boarded up,
machines halted and gone to seed.
The chimes taken off the front porch
and sold.

There is so much space
in every direction.
Desire lines of highway
cross-cutting the original
sidewalks of the country.

Missing it makes you rambunctious.
The children stomp their feet.

• • •

Breadcrumb #427

October 31, 2018 by Bob Raymonda

BILL LESSARD

wind that twines lack

deciduous doubt,
slender and peaked
a widowed harvest for the fork

shoulders flung into their own apotheosis

the inside of our coat turned out
our year turned the colors
nesting in the stem

brown white teal
the leaf that becomes air at the touch

arrival as season of leaving : :
equinox

birds raked
from the trees

blanket drawn to the neck : : the new horizon
wistful, watchful
wind that walks uneven heels : :
the body lifeless, levied, grievous, wind that finds center
at our center

our year narrowed into a thick yellow custard upon the tongue

• • •