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TRENTON POLLARD NOVEMBER by then i had become a different person lost in the percussive rustling of leaf shimmer and azaleas in autumn bloom unrecognized by some my aquarius friend reminds me the point of this life is to transform so i tell another "i want to be the wind" born under the sign of venus and bull it's hard to let go of what isn't for me but i am learning weightlessness to be my own teacher because i am still and maybe kind, pigeons approach one at a time under my bench and on the railing before me people stare at me in judgment assuming perhaps that i am giving alms but i came to receive more than give greedy for the pigeons' air and careless quarrels if it weren't for my vices i would be richer but maybe also dead in all saints november, not a month as much as an aura prismatic dimming of perpetual morningdusk pilgrimage to a silence where something essential is remembered: i never wanted to work in an office as a child i wanted to live in a van and paint watercolors and am embarrassed i have yet to fulfill this dream streetlights hum alive earlier as every plot must have a middle this is where i have been a fool all of my life thinking i was going too far while ignoring suggestions to go deeper impressions of dark and then the dark, it cannot end here the little ways we stay alive not dying seeming courageous i see two people hugging and then kissing while the leaves swirl around their feet and on the other side of the path a man cries into his phone that he misses his friend at a cafe on the east side the hanging plants are brought in i overhear an adolescent friend counsel another "the more you try to change yourself, the more desperate you seem" at the table behind them i show my love a poem about a village surrounded by mist where the souls of poets appear as birds who disappear into light yellow leaves fall on us like manna or some other kind of temporary sustenance we arrive home and the sun is descending at 3:35, the silhouettes of pigeons flash against the wall, the long bar of the sill, where we belong with my bookcase of books I intend to read and five that I started recently attempts to break free from our perpetual present i go to a museum to remind myself that it wasn't always this way there was a time when people were just shapes in photographs and i want this for us no names or tags or timbre of self-promotion the story of art is of our need and failure evolving as a planet does: most mornings in the park I walk by a skull-lady-face knotted into a poplar remnants of a long broken branch resisting the trunk, rising away from her station and looking west she tells me the point is not to satisfy desire but to never stop desiring but how miserable does one have to be to make a moral out of everything i do what i need to do and return with less in and out one nostril at a time stay sane with breath, something as pure as nothing nothing sustains me the spider webs make nests of leaves sloughing off like wool, the turning of the season is beyond the shape of me wanting to be filled cold heart, making music from generational refuse cold heart, sway toward your becoming on the sidewalk a group of people stare at tv screens showing a rocket exploding the afterlife of its smoke looks like a person's long pretty hair falling to an acidic sea i stop returning messages people I disappeared from and reappear to with need and a preference to keep the soul alive i want it all to mean something while also avoiding the swerve toward theory i light a candle and throw my clothes into the trash I fall asleep to commune with my dead nakedly they tell me to keep writing a life built to bury where the "i" is not you and you are not the "i" and no one cares either way because it was everyone and no one and so vague as to matter i need my head to be split open to pour out the dream one can only fall asleep to the same film so many times before the numbing comfort itself becomes inconsolable what magic is left then you who know how to grow bones did you forget that with all of your unread mail looking to get saved in the barren dark we approach with glee and the packaged scent of trees temporary truce between the living and what we want to read into what was left for us "another time" is this time everything stripped and still holding on-this far north i am listening i, who welcomes oblivion who bares all but clings to nothing who holds his loves with need before letting them go who stares at paintings without purpose allows himself to be eaten wild dog unbroken horse tumor growing teeth performing the alchemy of death daily whose books are not his personality who works with his hands who has been worked over who has died a 1000 heartbreaks in as many lives and keeps coming back who has been reborn as bird and bug who goes to work on mondays whose work is destroying himself his body and his ego the voice singing in the bathroom washing clothes by hand reminding you of who you are in the amnesiac world |