Twelve months, twelve hours
twelve signs of the Zodiac twelve tribes of Israel twelve apostles and twelve jurors twelve steps, twelve notes, twelfth night twelve knights around a table twelve days of Christmas Twelve astronauts who walked on the moon and twelve petals in the heart chakra. I will always be twelve a one facing two the tip of an inverted triangle hanging from the two ends of my base a lineage of desire. Puberty put an end to my suspended animation pried me from that equilateral embrace embedded me in other geometries of wilder shapes and intangible points of contact. I triangulated my way seeking the softness of curves but could not escape the lure of triangles in the hourglass shapes of my loves in their lush pubic thickets in which I got lost in the tangle of love triangles and their inevitable trinity of beginnings, middles, and heartbreak endings. Even the dual bliss of matrimonial convergence proved the paradox that 1+1=3. I yearned to rewind the clock to circle back to that magical beginning which was also an end to childhood, to innocence to the time when one and two were once just one.
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I.
When my bungee cord was severed without asking plunging me head first into this prefabricated world –– A loose strand made of another cloth to be woven time and again against his grain into tightly stitched fabrics made to seem homo-genous, they eagerly braided me into their weave ignoring my proclivity to snag and hang by a thread doggedly resisting mending. These days a long line of untethered bonds trails behind me –– a fugitive from conforming an escapee from playing along opting for a one-part fuga a solo flight from the clutches of harmony the tyranny of woven voices. II. Each morning as I finger my 88-bead rosary I bless the newborn day with a prayer –– praying a Bach fugue. Two hands, eight fingers, two thumbs in search of co-existence freedom within constraints a wild harmony of paradoxes wherein horizontal threads and vertical lines may run parallel, if they so desire, without conflict or the need to explain –– a tapestry woven by a master weaver. a map charted by a rigorous mind that transmutes the sparse geometry of line into lush fields of emotion III. Lost in a crowd huddled clinging to an island universe the cold and empty void of rebirth beckons to me. I build up my escape velocity from the grip of centrifugal forces. Wherefore and whither I don’t know I am a thought not yet born a work in progress a potential. IV. Fugue comes from Fugere, Latin for flee or fly away. From what does a fugue flee? One cannot say, except that no cajoling would make it stay. My first tentative steps as a fugue are a solo, if you can call it that, more like a warm-up before the lights come on. I am all alone out there building up momentum when I suddenly hear someone mocking me doing a bad imitation and without waiting for me to stop, jumping in. I pick up speed hoping to outrun the bastard but soon realize he is not alone. They crowd in on me, one by one, quite friendly mind you, keeping an ear out to avoid a pileup. I try to shake them, modulating wildly between keys and time signatures but it becomes clear that I can’t outrun them so I relax, what else can I do? and try to fit in. I play a little less, listen a bit more. They are quite something these interlopers some stretched out or compressed like fun house mirrors others standing on their head or walking backwards spoofing me none synchronized each marching to its own beat. I listen in amazement: Are we some kind of utopian commune? No one seems to lead, yet no one forfeits its identity. Any moment now I fear the impending disintegration the descent into cacophony or, worse, a calamitous train wreck… It doesn’t happen. As if by a slight of ear we create harmony a musical landscape of tolerance – the simple courtesy of knowing when to sing and when to listen, when to wait and when to charge ahead when to take the lead and when to follow. … Ah, what I‘d give to be living in a fugue. Oh, nose of noses
my sniffly snout my beaky protuberant proud and exuberant erect like a tower of Lebanon the upper of two peckers the amour of Linda’s lip. I’ve followed thee sniffing through bush and roses unable to see past thy tip unless my eyes were crossed blindly getting lost like a Hebrew trailing Moses. When I was young I wished for another less Jewish, less out of joint, less like a hose I snubbed you, I know, to my everlasting shame, turned you up at not being aquiline at being too much like Cyrano’s shnoze. Once I even imagined, as in Gogol’s tale waking one morning to find you gone. It was a nose job I did on myself looking down you to spite my face and all the while missing the point of how well you fit, how full of grace you were, how fine –– the only nose that’d ever be mine. Left Behind Each time I miss the boat I find something left behind, an unexpected gift, lying on the quay and when life seems to pass me by I try to remind myself it was really me moving in the opposite direction. I know such Hallmark profundities only change the story not the facts –– but the facts, what are they exactly? What is there beside stories? It was always thus me stranded on a beach a shore bird of different feather pecking in the shallows the rainbows out of reach I once dreamt I was a song bird a coloratura with wings flying higher than a high C That too was a story, I know, but it sustains me still as I go on feeding on dreams and on the grubs and crustaceans by the sea. If ignorance be bliss
where would one ever find misery on earth? I think this as I dig into my breakfast stack of incongruities. The vaccine for ignorance, so I’ve been told, is knowledge. I should know –– I was inoculated for twelve years of misery and five. And here is what I have found out: Knowledge is like recycled air inhaled and exhaled from lung to lung It can neither be trapped nor shaped unless bottled up but keeping it to yourself will turn it toxic and blow it up in your face. Trace elements you may absorb they may even become you, for a while but in the end they must return to the vast vacuum of ignorance whence they came, for, like escaped air, lost knowledge leaves no trace behind. I knew you before I knew you
as the morning glory knows the dawn approaching in the gloom of night I knew you before I knew how to know without thinking or reason how to see without the gift of sight This kind of knowing, so easy to miss, is what precedes every discovery an answer to a question yet to be asked a sudden flash of insight not subject to thought I too might have missed you that day but for a glimpse of peripheral vision (what other vision is there in the dark?) a re-cognition, a déjà vu never before seen, that made me turn on my heel and see what I didn’t know I sought –– You standing by the door smiling an invitation to cross a threshold and join your expedition of discovery. You are my tera cognita now and I your cartographer every mound, every crevice of your terrain I have explored, triangulated, and mapped and still I get lost in you and have to discover you anew each day kissing you for the first time getting to know you again and again like the sand losing itself as if for the first time in each new wave … and yet, as we continue to echolocate through life we must in the end concur that neither you nor I nor we could ever truly know who the hell we are or were. Street People of Santa Barbara
Alive or Dead
Duet Second Law*
On a Need-to-not-know Basis*
Family Dynamics* Our father in heaven
A single dad Raising an only son Skipping out on Child support -- An absent father Tough On the kid A sensitive type A virgin For a mother Dysfunctional Family dynamics Abandonment issues “Eli eli lama sabachthani?” (Father, why hast thou forsaken me?) Old story New relevance. Making Love (From the diary of an 8-year-old)
Dopplegänger*
Bliss
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