Michael’s Journal

Standing in the center of the first of
Two rooms my eyes scan pieces that have been
A part of my memory for only
A few days but still somehow seem almost
..Recognizably memorable.
Familiar.

Like an uncle you’ve only met once or
Twice, like the drive to an old girlfriend’s house…
You know how to get there by sight, pretty
Much turn by turn, but this time a row of
Trees and houses, once called suburbia,
Become flecks of human life among all
Nature’s oaken marvels; and the trees aren’t
Green and brown anymore, no, they appear
Auburn, chocolate umber and deep orange
Brown, sliced by delicate flashes of white
And refractive solar warmth of daylight.

Islands of separate nuclei, yolks of
forgetful longing seemed to have taken
on lines, if not shapes, of their own. What was
once a lot of yoke has morphed/developed
into states or heads of states, like photo
negatives of a skewed caricature
portrait from the early Twentieth Sea.

Nailed to the wall on a painted circle
skillet I see the facades of monkey
bourgeois loveliness or a two-faced Holmes.
Sherlock and old man Janus sit side by
Side, the latter with the mask of the stage
Peering from his railroad windows that he
Cannot hide. Seriocomic bliss rests
On either side of his white clay coin face.

Mental Vacations of indeterminate wavelengths.

And now I recline in this hourglass
Fiberglass encased bandage. I recall
A linen tablecloth smudged with tea and
Marmalade stains. Teaspoons are weapons and
Breakfast’s simple footprints of no one there
To clean up after ol’ me. With yawning
Fat men and snickering tourists I turn
Away and I see my old stand-byes have
Resulted and also resolved themselves
Deep into ado, to do with my love
Of cooking for you and also my love
Of singing for food.

All these holes in the grain of my existence live on without me, with or without my resistance.

The birds still sing though I recline bounded
Half women half-dance in these confounded
White lacquered walls that plague me with color
That hang up my insides y todo mi
Silencio y dolor solo pueden
Oír y oler, ver y sentir el
Olor de mi sangre que
Ruega para vos… ensima me pege
Como la mano de Dios.

Raw and unfettered and leaving nothing behind, I stand and I wait holding onto my mind.

Six hidden heartbeats that drip off these pics
Have eluded all the others because
Their mind’s all play tricks.

Their minds who are closed, their souls who are cold
Pacing through life till they all are just old.

I had to search I had to listen but
That’s what I do, just share all that glistens
Take from the gold and yes even the rain
Whatever I can so that nothing’s the
Same, and no one’s to blame if you stand to
Gain all that is here in front of you: The
Colours all hidden in green, red, and blue.

I can’t ever make my way deeper in.
There is something that pins me right here deep
Within. My center is alone, and I
Feel like an egg whose time is all but up,
With the passers all by knocking over
My cup, but with each person going I enjoy
The waves of silence and the private show
For if you want and truly see there’s more
To everything in your life’s gallery.

Standing in the center of the first of
Two rooms my eyes scan pieces that have been
A part of my memory for only
A few days but still somehow seem almost
..Recognizably memorable.
Familiar.

Like an uncle you’ve only met once or
Twice, like the drive to an old girlfriend’s house…
You know how to get there by sight, pretty
Much turn by turn, but this time a row of
Trees and houses, once called suburbia,
Become flecks of human life among all
Nature’s oaken marvels; and the trees aren’t
Green and brown anymore, no, they appear
Auburn, chocolate umber and deep orange
Brown, sliced by delicate flashes of white
And refractive solar warmth of daylight.

Islands of separate nuclei, yolks of
forgetful longing seemed to have taken
on lines, if not shapes, of their own. What was
once a lot of yoke has morphed/developed
into states or heads of states, like photo
negatives of a skewed caricature
portrait from the early Twentieth Sea.

Nailed to the wall on a painted circle
skillet I see the facades of monkey
bourgeois loveliness or a two-faced Holmes.
Sherlock and old man Janus sit side by
Side, the latter with the mask of the stage
Peering from his railroad windows that he
Cannot hide. Seriocomic bliss rests
On either side of his white clay coin face.

Mental Vacations of indeterminate wavelengths.

And now I recline in this hourglass
Fiberglass encased bandage. I recall
A linen tablecloth smudged with tea and
Marmalade stains. Teaspoons are weapons and
Breakfast’s simple footprints of no one there
To clean up after ol’ me. With yawning
Fat men and snickering tourists I turn
Away and I see my old stand-byes have
Resulted and also resolved themselves
Deep into ado, to do with my love
Of cooking for you and also my love
Of singing for food.

All these holes in the grain of my existence live on without me, with or without my resistance.

The birds still sing though I recline bounded
Half women half-dance in these confounded
White lacquered walls that plague me with color
That hang up my insides y todo mi
Silencio y dolor solo pueden
Oír y oler, ver y sentir el
Olor de mi sangre que
Ruega por voz… ensima me pega
Como la mano de Dios.

Raw and unfettered and leaving nothing behind, I stand and I wait holding onto my mind.

Six hidden heartbeats that drip off these pics
Have eluded all the others because
Their mind’s all play tricks.

Their minds who are closed, their souls who are cold
Pacing through life till they all are just old.

I had to search I had to listen but
That’s what I do, just share all that glistens
Take from the gold and yes even the rain
Whatever I can so that nothing’s the
Same, and no one’s to blame if you stand to
Gain all that is here in front of you: The
Colours all hidden in green, red, and blue.

I can’t ever make my way deeper in.
There is something that pins me right here deep
Within. My center is alone, and I
Feel like an egg whose time is all but up,
With the passers all by knocking over
My cup, but with each person going I enjoy
The waves of silence and the private show
For if you want and truly see there’s more
To everything in your life’s gallery.

Half eaten or just a slice or two
This banana cream toast-infused
Pancake buttered red and blue.
Dancing legs on white walls vanish
While other legs just freeze and wonder
Sitting in decrepit blunder
Shadowing far away from you.
Mirror image and dashed-line shadows
Glow a bit from their grey-soaked hue
While stolid steely angle flirting
Is diffracted from one to two…

Fallen chances and beaten egg yolks
Crack into the black space now
In a tri-colored invasion
Of green and white and blue.

Salt and pepper spoons
That have been used and used
Stain a linen agéd cloth.
Choked and tied in herbal wonder
Something’s fused me to this chair
Designed by Alighieri’s sloth.
Leaning back and tied forever
Bound into this place and time.
I remain here now and forever
Convalescing in the land of rhyme.

Plastered to a skillet pan
On a vertical kitchen stove
Someplace south of my tomorrow
Did my mind begin to rove.

Pinned and tacked like island continents escaping into nothingness,
A yoke-al center part of Whiteville seems to hold this nucleus
Tight to themselves but not each other, away from one another still
Like some ward of black construction waiting by the window sill.

Looking off, off into nowhere,
Nowhere’s in particular it seems
I travel here and there and go where
My mind rips to and fro my seems.
Waiting for some sort of order
A sentence to the frying pan
My voice is monotone recorder
I stand alone facing the man.

Licking plates clean
Neck and ankles straining still
Bound and gagged
A Bugsy silhouette
Hides something ragged
To the eyes of those who will
See something ‘neath this black silk screen.

If you only look down and deeper
If you look past all my color
You will see yourself
Across the table in the mirror.
Seek and you shall find the reeper.
Half a chair and half a window
Cooling blades cut through my walls
Seismographic mirror forests
Birds that chirp but never fall.

And here stands a step by step instruction manual of sorts
Turning you, a human deduction, to a furniture cohort.

But all around I am rescinded by my fellow man who’ve tried,
Mossy mirror glassy floor-rid this is how they all just died.

Stepping through the creaky caverns
Of someplace deep inside my mind,
Hearing stolid wingéd messengers
Warning me just what I’ll find.

Glass infused
And light diffracted
Dancing women
By night distracted
Tearing ticker tape in two
Cardboard crayon
Convalescing
Won’t ever bring me close to you.

Won’t ever make a whole so messing
When the scheme of things
Leaves me resting and caressing
Those that at least I can see.

For the warning singing fowls
Left me all alone tonight,
And with pentagonal statues
I cannot recall to fight
My way through…
They’ve taken me from you.

I sit and am bound.

In the corner do I sit, waiting hearing you
Endearing me to stay a little longer
They won’t let me play with you
Why can’t they just take my word, my dear?
Why must you always run away to here?

Exhibition: January – March 2009
Sara Greenberger Rafferty, BANANAS
Vlatka Horvat, Or Some Other Time

One of my favorite shows on Broadway had a contest to win a pair of free tickets and a romantic dinner at Tony Di Napoli’s.. here is my entry! I suppose it wasn’t a true freestyle because I wrote it out beforehand.. it’s alright I didn’t have a date anyway!

Enjoy the video :O) and stay tuned for my next theatre gig in April: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” at RoundHouse Theatre in Bethesda, MD.

i

i shot an elk last night
and i barely know what they look like,
majestic and brown
buckish and lazy?

they tread on this earth fattening up for winter,
preparing themselves for the onslaught of cold.
while i aimed my rifle through the safety of glass
and metal, wood, lead and a bit of fire,
he simply looked ahead and with desire
began to chew the grass at his feet.

ii

there i was down on bowery street
with a pair of rented gloves and a handmedown jacket
racing ‘cross town to my yeats reading club.

with some plath on my arm and a bit of mine own,
i tread into a world that for sometime has owned
me, yes deep in the day and always at night,
the drug that is verse and its piece that is prose,
takes me and wakes me like plucking a rose
from its warm yet sullen earth, its once and former home.

and so pollination or maturation were only yesterday,
but now you represent ‘love’ or at least a gift,
slowly dying always fleeting — life.. at short shrift.
and yet we pretend that everything is still alright,
while you’re a simple symbol that always whithers away,
something bound to fall like a lover or the sun
who crashes through your horizon every morning
and just like that they leave you again.
leaving you with nothing to show for yourself
‘cept maybe a tear or even a grin,
a smile or a glassed over stare,
maybe some ice and a bottle of gin
but no one’s waiting at the top of your stairs.

iii

i shot an elk last night
and took silent pride while i did it
it was so easy.
it was too easy.
God forgive me, i have done it.

there he stood, the sun froze manufacturedly
upon him like a stage spotlight,
and he chewed his grass so golden brown
that i wondered to myself with my usual frown
who’s aiming at me?  someone is assuredly.
upon my stage there must be a light
to show my doubts and all of my frights,
someone while i’m sleeping.
someone will pluck.  it.  out. 

and no promethean heat will e’er enter my lungs
no more will my frigid alabaster heart beat,
but it shall stay frozen as it is now
like my toes that once treaded this ground.

iv

surrounded by poets on a street north of houston
i sit across from a liquid brooklyn,
while zombie-comedies flourish flatly
i laugh out loud like i haven’t in a while.

a john-goodman-in-the-big-lebowski-look-alike
reads from his book of anti-god rants and hilarious antics

everyone seems to know him, this sarcastic famous f***,
and this contemporary or at least modern-comic poet
goes on about angels and rednecks and god and cain and dinosaurs

insincerity runs rampant like woody allen on acid,
or maybe lenny bruce during a catatonic food coma
with the vocal prowess of jeff foxworthy and the charm of a stockcar race.

with metaphors as good as a word or two thrown together
(with the delicate fecundity of a trash collector on a frigid monday morning)
the oaf pontificates on humor, and other impossibilities of today.

as the laughs ensue and continue and continue
i keep writing in case something hits me or at least
until this is all over.

v

and so again and again,
i take aim with my pen,
such a beautiful calligriphic mess of some lines
just some random observational narrative rhymes,
but with each sip i take and each beat
i break.  him.  down.
I can’t believe the judgment the hatred or my pen
the high incestuous climbing of my clammy achy skin

i don’t sweat, i take aim.
i don’t fear, i take names.
and suddenly my forefather’s of thought 
take me under their golden wings
fill me with words and other splendid things.
things i have never seen before
things that come to me in the night,
beats that keep me walking
keep me talking without fright.
it’s not easy for you and ain’t easy for me
so why did i get off on this voiceless killing spree?  

they tread on this earth inspiring and desiring
just to talk a little truth, whatever there’s may be.
and there i was taking aim with my pen
through the safety of the empty glass just in front of me.
but something just tripped the wrong set of wires.
he simply looked ahead with artistic desires,
and began to chew and spit on the grass at his feet.

vi

(whether the green monster took hold of my heart beat,
or maybe the yellow belly of some wannabe hero
took me aside and said, “Here’s the match Nero!
All’s you gotta do is hold it close enough,
the heat of your weapon will do all the rest.”
and i choked down his fire and it burned in my breast
and…)

i shot an elk last night. 
and he didn’t even know it.
buckish and majestic
the nature of expression.

i shot an elk last night.

but really…  

he shot me.

The quivering Oak outside my window seems to droop today.  It may be the rain of a few days ago or the cool gray skies of today that make my tree shiver in place.  It may be it’s readiness for fall.  In the distance I see leaves turning, slowly turning from green to gold and brown.  I hear the shouts and smell the traffic and I even feel the sun trying to warm up the day.  Every Fall is something new and something ended and something blue, something chipping away at yesterday and plowing forward to tomorrow. 

The path I have walked (or run, or driven, ridden, or even crawled) is slowly coming up behind me, being purged and replaced by Johnny Appleseeds and Susy Marigolds.  And up ahead, I use the stones of my past to concretize the future… but maybe a road doesn’t need concrete or even stone.  Maybe the urban reality of concrete forests and asphalt jungles is a sad one — the roads are already marked, the maps are already written, and the paths have all been traveled, trodden through and through. 

          Can you make your own way and blaze your own trail
          While riding their trains and holding their rails?    
          What is it you search for, oh artist in me?
          Can you play their games and be totally free?
          Can you make your own art each and every day?
          When politics and smiles just get in your way?
          I refuse to be old and look back all wilted
          To then be an artist with a past that’s been jilted.
          Why can’t I sing of new found beauty and lost love?
          Must I wait like a heavy cloud to cry up above?
          “We too feel pain and must be respected!”
          Cried the Little Prince upon being dissected.
          You think my world is small, you think you know me well,
          But this Steppenwolf inside has oh so much to tell…
      

(But let me save this for the ring, those five minutes of artistic grandeur.  The comical conversable laughable criable liable to make every actor scream, those things that get you out of bed in the morning, and those things that keep you up at night:  the audition.)

So for now I will leave the stones – the aforementioned stones of the quickly-fleeting past – I will leave them all behind or at least share them with someone else, for you may need but a few to cross a little creek, or you may need quite a lot to slow a raging river.  “But I am quite finished with neatness!”  cried the little boy to his teacher.  And she looked on in horror, and also jealous amazement, as he took his blue crayon and drew all over the lines… All across them and around them with all of his colours.  “I don’t want to be messy, or careless, or ‘free’… (that false freedom to act however one pleases, without recompense, remorse, or even thought for your fellow mates)  I want to be happy and I want to be me!”  So let the waters come and let the rivers rage, I will swim and drown if that be my quest, or I will ford the river in time because EVERYTHING is fordable.  Fighting and working hard everyday is an affordable investment, because it inspires me and gives me more energy to deal with every challenge in the road ahead.   

And very soon the road will be covered, blanketed over in umber — raw and burnt.  But as the leaves change and before they all fall, I will take a lesson from the urgent Oak and steadfast Pine, I will stay in my place and work for a better tomorrow because I know if I plant the roots now, and I mean really plant them, I can survive the winter wherever I am and whatever it is that she may bring.

And through the thick clouds the sun shines on barely, barely letting us know that she is there, through some gray and dull flouresence she shines on in vain.  Come fall, come what may. 

          I will shine as brightly as I can 
          ‘Till I burn your clouds all through,
          ‘Till I melt her snowy-whitness
          And, Master Art, I am with you.  

          But that time has not yet come 
          And I’m ahead of myself, I am.  
          For the morning has left and left us the afternoon, 
          And before I walk along the birch-lined lyrics of my past
          I hear the voice of Sandoz cry out to me at last,
          ”And now, back to work!”