a poem for 2007

i. another goodbye, another year

and he went to the front door,
nestled at his blinds to look
out towards his painted porch
to see who rang the bell.
he saw no one. his
existence was only a maple tree seed
ricocheting on concrete from the wind.

ghosts. he thought. buried
on the horizon of his past --
on the shorelines of forgotten lakes and
days where he once wandered in
boyish
youth and adolescence. he knew he had to
evolve - continue his revolution of Hegel’s theory.

and then came the question. why was
no one there, at the door, wanting a greeting, or an
orientation of hospitality? hello, can i help you?
the world was empty, and
he felt it in his
eyes -- which he shut --
racing inward to find the answer.

you’ll have these moments, moonbeams. they come
every once in a childish smile
and, for a little while, you’ll begin to wonder. who
rang the bell? isn’t there supposed to be somebody there?

ii.
America is not Africa. I’ve never
been continentally dark, but since I live in my head, I’ve
danced there a million times in Ibo, Dinka and Arabic ceremonies
of sand and infertile land before a heard of cows and ideas. I’ve
wanted to know what is the what.

All things fall apart,
my friend, in the beloved country, but i
understand they’re put back together by those of us who
need to laugh, to feel, to cry, and to chase midget shadows with islamic hope.
all it takes is the drive to run a city -- any city -- and the power of our mind.

iii.
Buddha sits in manufactured glory
all around my house and
yes, he stands next to a Maple tree stump in the back yard
entertaining the nut-hungry squirrels and
needy, greedy doves.
siddhartha, cycles, the Om.

Chinese workers make an American
hope, my icons, bought cheap at a discount mall. even so, the
rivers continue to flow, fluid, and
i continue to question -- is this the only
self i have? am i simply a samana learning to play Samsara?

iv.
Back then, i didn’t clown around much.
all that high school social positioning gave me
indegestion, luigi. i was odd, but i didn’t
learn to laugh until i learned to juggle: to
eat the moment for the flavor it actually was.
yapping. tap dancing. writing poetry for no one.

Man, i don’t know who taught me this. Me -- the
orangutan, an evolved ape with the
rare privilege to teach and to
gain, year after year, the reminders that
each career is based on mind games -- professionally
numbing. i should have chose plumbing (he types, thumbing his nose at the rules).

v.
Been improv-ing all my life
etching on sketches and skits, testing my
charismatic wits of imbecilic tomfoolerly and
karmic icecream.
my guess is that quarterbacks
aren’t too good and improvising the moment, either.
no. they’ve got their plays planned out, and they are

Judged by espn 1 & 2. (Ah, Big Bootie) but for us, the
Jokes are for a locker, the curtain call, and perfect for -- STOP -- a laugh.

vi.
Be of quality, they say, a man who is
rare, and who dares to take the higher ground
around and around and around the
delusions of mediated foolishness.
expect the best, and do
not rest until you are a man -- until you can breathe.

Blank expectations are where we have to find a way to connect the
line from point A to point B with few directives,
asking few questions until it is too late.
krazy. most of us don’t become men. we can’t
earn this until we internalize the advice older generations left behind with blood.

vii.
Cartoons aren’t only for Nickelodeon.
animation is imagination, a
rite of passage and contemplative
thought brought to us in a flash, an
evolutionary story board
reminding us of how ridiculous we really are.

Just yesterday, i watched tom and jerry
eating cupcakes before their
frantic chase ensued.
first, draw a nemesis, then scribble a
random duality between good and
evil with a whole lot of gray in between. Finally,,
you need a hero -- always let the good guy win, but let the bad guys get away.

viii.
Cave.
another shackled fire pit. Another
random entrapment
that this is all there is -
habits. routine. ritual
and pattern where we fall victim to the
normal.

Life is more than this --
or at least i pretend it is, -- and i seem to be in a
race to exit cave after cave after cave...
eventually, i guess, i’ll understand the journey, and
anxiously, i hope, the shadows will
learn to dance with me, protruding their lips with glorious attitude.

ix.
Caricatures.
each of us authored as a
true self --
an ink stain on smeared canvas
who, sometimes, makes sense to poetized others.
all of us are mere abstracts, the pop art
yanked into materialistic definitions
of t-shirt, kicks and recycled imagery.

Andy Warhol was a freak, but he captured
kambell’s tomato soup can like an artistic sneak.
ever wonder who creates the print of our
entire existence? Who
manages to whip up a soul, one brush stroke at a time?

x.
Church is a state of mind - the place of
learned reflection and where light
arcs its way through stained glass,
rituals, gospel and a drive for more
knowledge. Christ.

Ask a mime and he’ll perform. The
Jubilation is in the hope of the performance.

xi.
Delirious. i find myself hilariously
anxious and subconsciously
vivacious in the monstrous
isthmus of human goodness.
scrummdiddleyumptious.

Eros. pathos. ethos.
mythos. the greeks weren’t shapeless with their
imagination nor practiced as the
litmus-stained stasis of human condition allows us to believe.
y question the oomphalos*? *Oomphalos - belly button

xii.
Destiny is a powerful word.
i think about it often:
x-amining its connotation/denotation
of the destination written in the stars, and
nearing a galaxy of your individualized fate.

Part of me applauds, but hates, the moments i find myself
examing the hard work which brought me this far,
reaching the pinnacle of every summit, and
realizing the boulder must be pushed up again.
you’re destined to understand what i mean some day.

xiii.
Dusty was my first dog. i
remember picking him
up at the farm, and because he was the
runt of the litter, my mother chose him. we were so
young, and i still smell his puppy breath. In

June and July, we’d spend weekends
on Loch Lebanon, and Dusty would
run after motor boats, while my sisters and i
dove, head first, perfecting our form.
and Dusty, Dusty would wear the pads off his feet, chasing
never-to-be-caught skiiers. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

xiv.
Every year i move forward, i
arrive ten years behind. i
remembering the steps i took,
not knowing where they’d one day lead.
every movement is a slideshow of
yesterday and tomorrow.

So, i’ve accrued milestone
after milestone,
making memories
all the way. The
nearer i get to
the destination, the
harder it is to decipher where i’m
arriving or where i once was.

xv.
Earth to Bryan. Come in, Bryan, - we
seem to have found ourselves between
a rock and a hard place.
rally up the forces, kid, and
energizes the bunnies,
you’ve got to move on, somehow. Somewhere.


Captain Firefly, paging Mr. Moonbeam, are you
out there somewhere? We need you to propel
upstate, land your dreams to where they began,
return to the starting line only to
take off once again.
na-noo. na-noo
everything is evolving at exactly the right time.
yeah, you keep telling yourself this.

xvi.
Fact is, words are good for crossword puzzles.
i say this bitterly, knowing my brain
teasers have been stories and poems criss-crossed in
zebra stripes across a newspaper no one reads.
games. dissertations. papers.
examinations. they’ve yet to create a
reliable standardized test for life which
assesses the relationship between work ethic,
learning, wisdom, accomplishment and love.
dumb, really, if you ask me.

Love, though, can be the
universal choice “C” - the
kryptonite for every super man. That is, of course, unless there’s an
e) all the above. If that’s an option, I always choose it. i believe in everything.

xvii.
Great word. a female dog. a
rambunctious, degrading term used on
every woman capable of usurping power. one in which,
eventually, every XX knows as a
nickname. a back stab. a slogan.

My guess is you’re right.
each time its used it says more about the user who
goes for the easy bikini kill rather than the golden matriarch.
and for me? i prefer the history behind such a lexicon, admiring the
nuances intelligent wimin hold. They know more than me, anyway.

xviii.
Hamilton, New York, is where my mother was born. She
arrived to 24 Milford Street, to An E. and Spence
ripley, an only child from a pre-WWII romance. She was
destined to be an actress,
enjoying her True Blue100s and the azure
star-glitter in her eyes.
that was before she met my father, and my grandparents
yanked her college money away and bought a camp.

All throughout my childhood, we drove to Hamilton
nearly every weekend, and would
go to The Nautilus for an ice cream cone or
entertained ourselves playing baseball in the park. such a
little piece of trivia -- like
all the stories they told me which made them who they were -- who i am.

xix.
He doesn’t mean to laugh as much as he does, but
everything cracks him up, chuckle, and buckle under-
neath his snorting hee-haw sense of humor.
did you just see what i just saw? He breaks up
even when he should focus,
realizing the
seriousness of every moment, the
omnipotence of ignorance and the
narcissicism of a giggle.

Jokes on him, on us, he supposes, and he realizes the
existence of the whizgigging tear from a
smile counts just as much as the
saline drip-drop of pain.
i’d rather laugh at myself than
cry at myself,
and that’s the way i’ll be ‘till the fat lady sings (ba dum dum, ch’)

xx.
I had a dream near November. a
scary dream, where i opened my front
door and no one was there,
and when i turned around, my
house was being robbed. they
laughed. i turned to concrete.

Since then, my monsters have been obvious.
people aren’t as good as i want them to be,
especially when i watch them from paralysis, and am
not able to exist. i
saw my family and they saw me.
eerie. they wanted to help, but as a fledgling who
ran away, they were too far away -- they were home.

xxi.
Kuz on the night it was discovered that
all seagulls morph into
scandanavian blondes with beak-lips, and that
every great dane takes flight across icelandic fjords ---
you were there with Aaron Martinson, mario before senior prom.

Just three of us, wound up,
eating icecream, cracking jokes, and experiencing the
danish truth for a mere fraction of our life.

xxii.
King Lear wants his daughters to love him -- he
needs their approval in his madness as the temptest storms
on a dark-lit stage. ah cordelia.
u have
such loyalty for the
everlasting performance.

Royalty
and i play the fool part well,
coming before the court as the unnamed son and
hiding in a hovel of humor, while
entertaining tragedy to those i
love ---- ah, but this world is just a stage i’m merely going through.

xxiii.
Lass fried auf erde sein und fang bitte mit mir (*let peace rule, and let it be within
an. me -- with God, our father, we are
mit gott unserem vater, bruder sind wir alle*. all brothers)
or something like that. i was young when we sang it,
note for note, in a german class at
the junior high i attended. the tune

Just sticks in my head
and pops out at the most random time
no, i can’t sing and my german is rusty, but if
everyone is family, i’m sort of into letting peace rule the earth.

xxiv.
Life. There are those we think insane, who hear the music and dance to the
overture in their head -- the crescendo of
bass, strings, brass, drums and applause which
bounce along hallways, art rooms, stories and youth like a bud lucky cartoon.

Eternal music. How can we not spin to the
rhythm of Vesudeva’s river
in a quest for Om -- Um, and/or another
new beginning. And why don’t the others hear this music?

xxv.
Learning is complicated.
oh, they’ve designed this school stuff, and preach how we
need thirteen years of compulsory education, how we
go because we have to - it’s part of the machinery --

Very much like the 30 years of labor
invested to the mechanism of a
career, before
the social security checks kick in, and an
opportunity for retirement arrives.
ridiculous, really, this
interdependence between
a system and the self.

xxvi.
Monday, i walked to school
across the 2nd street bridge leaving my Ford to
rest, unmotivated to move.
this happens when one loses his keys.
i have lost my keys more than i have found them, even if i
need them to open doors to my future. All roads are
situated ahead with
orange cones, speed limits and the
nerve-wracking radars policing the pace we live.

All of us are tested
as patients to our patience,
randomly chosen for practical jokes, and
oh, how we’ll laugh. scream. laugh. scream. as the
nincompoops on the ledge of stupidity.

xxvii.
Mosh pit.
explain to me how any of this is not a most pit.
you wore the dress and combat boots, and
eventually dyed your hair sunset orange, so how was any of this not a
random stomp of adrenaline, testosterone and adolescence?

Man, it’s better than
a square dance or the waltzing of debutante divas and their groomed
rico-suaves in a promenade of conformity. Only the few will
zulu stomp and romp as they fall from birth to death, outside symbolic skyscrapers.

xxviii.
Magic is hard to believe in, and
i’ve been reprimanded for having such hope, and for
creating a land of leprechauns, unicorns and gnomes in
a soup of brown utopia, even if
no one else wished to believe.

Fools. Idiots they are,
reaching into their drawers for laws, handbooks
and routines to make them feel safe from the
nirvana they’ll never know.
cause they can’t grow, and
eventually, they’ll simply disappear, not knowing there was
serenity in the wand and the power of the pond they refused to see.

xxix.
My father’s a Nascar fan.
i prefer speeding on my own,
lapping along the track,
lagging behind the other cars.
i even enjoy going the wrong way
or racing the roads less traveled, where
no frog has been before.

Sometimes, i take my time,
hovering the moment as if it is an
eternity, stopping to smell the tulips,
leaving footprints beside the roses.
because these roads are free, i’ve raced, and
yes, it has made all the difference.

xxx.
My sisters and i were thrilled when,
on christmas morning, 1981, we
received skateboards -- banana logs which barely could hold
two feet.
our pride came from sliding down the driveway without falling --
not just any one could accomplish that.

Dad would even try, but he’d fall
and all of us would laugh to show him how it was done.
nerds. that’s what we were. dorks.
neophyte, kids
yearning to prove ourselves that we were capable of something.

xxxi.
Nock Nock. Who’s there? Aardvark!
excuse me? Aardvark
who? Oh, Aardvark a
thousand miles for
one of your smiles!
nock, Nock! Who’s there?

Errrr, it’s Alfie. Oh, yeah? Alfie who?
man, Alfie terrible when you leave, and
i’ll dedicate every
laugh, from now on, to the
yucca yucca yucca of the good-natured soul.

xxxii.
News is on again. some
girl stabbed her 15 year
old son in a fit of medea-induced madness.

This just in: tornados are currently
reminding someone, somewhere, that we’re
under the thumb of a greater goddess. why make our own
news? Why celebrate our slap-happy silliness, when nature’s
going to take care of us one day at a time anyway?

xxxiii.
News flash. The red carpet isn’t for the queen. no. NBC studios is
going to sober the rich and ridiculous for interviews so
u and i can watch them again and again and again on
you-too-are-a-boob-tube gossip gala extravaganza.
entertainment tonight needs its footage, and since anna
nicole smith imploded, they need a new madonna.

Does it seem odd to you,
all this hyperreal Americana?
no. he says, i don’t watch much t.v..
how can i? i’ve got more important things to do.

xxxiv.
News update: one of these days i’m
gonna turn it off. i’ll wave a magic wand and
u will hold an empty glass of water.
you will giggle and fidget, and
everyone will watch you on the stage, wondering what will be
next.

Hocus pocus, miraculous jokus.
u will blink once and a goldfish will appear.
everyone will be amazed by the magic, but it won’t be worthy of the tabloids.

xxxv.
On the walls of my history, mistakes
are chiseled with invisible ink. i
know what they say, but they’re not for
everyone to read.
sometimes i share them. And

Just when i feel my wings can reach the
orange blur of life, the feathers catch fire, and i
spiral like floating ashes back to earth to
highlight the imperceptible poem.

xxxvi.
Part of me wants to fold my corners,
as if i am a piece of origami,
sentenced to be twisted into the
shape others want me to be.
and i feel their
fingers bending my sense of
individuality, creasing my soul
under my heart and wrinkling
my mind until it is
exactly like theirs. It is

Maddening, and
as paper, against scissors and fingernails, there’s a
desparate fear of fire and getting wet.
i want to fight back,
show them how deep a paper cut can go
or unravel with the words i
need to survive -- like a 1000 cranes of hope.

xxxvii.
Pods of i’s --
eerie really, a wired generation of
children tuned out to immediate gratification,
keeping vanity higher than Mt. Olympus -- an
immediate culture of entitlement.
now. now. now. i don’t have the
patience to hear what you have to say
amidst the thumb-driven phenomenon of scrolling
up and down for personal satiation. Millenium
go-bots conditioned towards selfishness and
hubris. Of course, he laughs,

My t.v. is on CBS, and
alec baldwin is cussing his daughter for
the failure to return a phone call.
this is our tomorrow. I’m just as guilty.

xxxviii.
Perfect. The pace of the race
eats away at the grace of my
routine.
each day, more needs to be done, and
i can’t find enough hours in the week to
rally the internal forces
against the to-do lists.

So, what do
i go and do?
exactly. i vacuum too hard against a shelf,
ramming a twenty pound barbell on my toe,
and, ya know, it’s made me even slower.

xxxix.
Point is,
i haven’t figure any of it out yet. yeah, you got to
live a little, laugh a little, and
love a lot, but the purpose thing beats me.
orpheus could bring rocks and trees to movement, but
when he went for Eurydice, the underworld took the upper hand.

And perhaps, like him, I’ll land in Lesbos with
nothing left but my singing head, and the
damage caused by Ciconian Maenads,
ripping the magic to pieces, while
enchanting their missles
with poetics and pizzazz.

xxxx.
Pygmalion.
interesting story, huh? how a sculptor
neglects the real for a statue he
created by his own
hands. Perhaps we love most what we’re able to
bring into being: a painting, a story, a child. then there’s
eliza doolittle, shaw’s
creation -- a gutter-snipe-
kockney from the streets who was

Created into the very essence of a lady.
henry higgins
loved the magic of his mind.
ornamental fruition from the labor of
ego, and no matter where we go, such creation is our only hope.

xxxxi.
R we more than
ants scurrying to reach tomorrow, storing
yesterday in our hills?

Are we victim to a system’s
apparatus which institutionalizes its
rituals and norms into
our being, and uses us for the
naive propogation of its own cause? i pause. yep.

xxxxii.
R we the lead of pencil
escaping into form, and
going from thought and
arrogant ideas into sketchy
nothingness or are we the

Creative genius
hiding in a box of paint
lusting to be found
on canvas one day and
entering the universe, one doodle at a time?

xxxxiii.
Sleep.
curl up into yourself
on any couch, any chair, any wall, any bed, and let
the sandman punch your lights out, and
the venom take over your body like a spider, man.

Peace. be at rest, because
existence is more tranquil when
entertained from canadian dreams, eh?
just kidding. it’s time to wake up.

xxxxiv.
Since i was a little boy, i
had my way within silence,
especially when crowds of
people hogged my
peripheal view of the world. i learned young to
entertain myself from the nuthouse, and
retreat in my head in order to
survive.
on such occasions, it’s as if i
need the masses, but fear them just the same.

Even when i’m the center of attention,
ridiculously chalking my boards with
ideas, i want to disappear...
creep underneath the cattails
and write the stories of those who inspire me to death.

xxxxv.
Sunshine. It
has this way of finding itself through the most
intense window panes to light my indoor dust and
remind me, we’re a dirty species
caught in the sludge of
living and forgiving.
i can’t imagine life without such rays
finding their way under doors, around corners, in the
front yard illuminating the pavement i travel.

Cause and effect. The
orb above makes the herb below, warms the
rain as it trickles down these blades of grass, and
eats away the soil to bring creation to the seed. stay
young. this is the joy which brings life to the world.

xxxxvi.
Song.
i could be wrong, but whether we
evolved creationistically or we creationistically evolved,
god would want us to sing.
even if we couldn’t, he’d want us to embrace the color purple and
love for our freedom to be centered in our lungs and soul. Go to the

Juke joint, he’d say, and step to the spirit of
ancestry, history, reformation, recreation, and revolution. We
need to join the choir of all cultures and
entertain the hostest with the mostest -- we are so lucky to be alive.
see, i may not know church, but i
sure know the meaning of the search,
and, lord knows, i’m caught singing almost everywhere i go.


xxxxvii.
So, you’re up at the chalkboard and you hear a
mean rip -- i’m talking gas from
intense baked beans and white castle. somewhere in
this room, you anticipate a kid just exploded, and you
hang your head low as you turn around to see who it was.

Dorry ‘bout dat kids, says a braided Barney wearing an
orangemen jersey, and
making a cross eyed distorted face.
in a nutshell, this is teaching.
no child is left behind,
i find, when they all know how to laugh. i design the
quizzes and they
unleash the laughter.
eh hem. did someone just fart?

xxxxviii.
There’s a curse to being a poet,
u and i both know it, yet philosophically we grow it, and
randomly we flow it through our transcendental veins.
next day, it still rains, but the sun is much stronger,
egotistically, because we hunger for its
rays while meandering throughout this mortal maze.

Man is born to ask why,
interrograte the truth, laugh, feel and
cry and through his questions, a poet will learn
how to fly,
and the flight will recycle, Michael, in the artist’s
eye. some are born to follow. others are born to
learn from the hollow cave, while burning ideas for the shadows to follow.

xxxxix.
Very clever there, gooch bandit.
all this time you convinced me, dumb
noob that i am, about stapling your elbow, the squishyfleshygushy part
called the weenis and telling your peers they suffer from weenis
envy.

Bry, the teacher, loves his words --
ran down to biological Berry Line (yes,
i like to check my sources)
and that’s when I learned i was a
numbskull. dj dawgbite makes things up and i believed him.

xxxxx
When i first arrived,
a creek of Beargrass adopted me. i
learned my body was the ploy of water to
keep recycling itself around the globe and
existence is a watershed of h2o -- a
river heading towards the sea.

Eventually, i learned,
my bones and flesh will become fish food -
i found solace in this, and
learned to giggle that no matter how much i try to
yank nature into my mortal control, it will yank me into its own.

xxxxxi
We can be ferret like, needing to horde objects -
i admit it; i tend to glue keepsakes in my scrapbook of
life.
days. weeks. months. years. and
eventually, i get back to the pages of some journal kept long ago to
remember the pace will always be out of my control. One day, i’ll

Leave behind such books: piles of them which will
annoy the poor souls who clean up after me.
unbelievable, i think,
remembering the years i went through the diaries of
ane e. rip. my god, i am her grandson. my poor ancestors.

xxxxxii
What? he asks me,
i haven’t said a thing. I haven’t opened my
lips all year. You’re the teacher always
lollygagging and yapping, yadda yadda yadda.
i know i am, i tell him, but i can hear your mind
and it never sits still. it’s so loud.
moron, he thinks. idiotic english teacher. doesn’t he know
silence is golden?

Can’t get the kid to
hush up. Comes in first period, causing a
racket of blah blah blah blah blah,
interupting the silent world with his chatter box.
shut up, i tell him, you talk way too much!



xxxxxiii.
Well, we had terrible seats.
i hid my orange fanaticism and future on the third
level. i’m a superstitious man, but i
learned that when things don’t go my way,
i have the right to change my mind. the first half was
awesome and those red birds were
making ex’cuses all over their dumb, free hall. the
second half wasn’t as pleasant.

Keef wanted to know how i could cheer both teams
enthusiastically. that clown was carrying on like a red and black mad man
engulfed in rows of orange and blue. yeah, that moment will
forever be tattoo’d in the way things once were -- the way things should always be.

xxxxiv.
Welcome to real life, we tell them,
you are graduating and about to enter the real world.
now begins the rest of the journey, and there’s
no way to explain what’s to come.

Crazy, i say, because hasn’t this world already been real?
over the last four years, haven’t we all experienced
life as it is or are we supposed to believe it was all our imagination?
let me whisper a secret in your
ear: this year is as real as it gets --
every year is, but it is up to us to make it authentic and alive.
now, upon tassle turning, go out there, be-bop and jive.

xxxxxv.
Yodel. I’ve never tried myself, but you should. Climb
onto a city bus and let your lungs go ---
hollar “Yodel -leh-hee-hoo”
as if it is an urban chant,
nestled in the heart of humanity, a
necessity to save the galaxy with an
eternal chirp-choir cacophony of
serenading sing-song.

Krazy? then whistle.
enter that bus like a hiss-pipe diva,
releasing the toot-tootie trill of
existence.
not a warbler? Then leave the bus a poem.


xxxxxvi. curtain call:

God, it seems like it was
only yesterday i sprawled applications
on my parent’s floor, trying to make a
decision of where to go and what to

become next.
you are opening a door, i thought to myself, knowing that
everything was evolving at exactly the right

time. name. telephone number. declaration of major.
origin and date of birth. allergies. medical record.
data on your parents educational background.
and then, to the post office for a stamp of approval.
you are only at that moment once in a lifetime.

he understands such snapshots -- how they quickly become memories on
early sunday mornings over a cup of coffee, and he
laughs that time doesn’t sit still, nor does the
language, for what he wants to say, flow easy:
o curas hominum! O quantum est in rebus inane* (*Ah, human cares! Ah futility
the silliness of our willingness to be human fools. in the world)
omnia iam fient quae posse negabam*- (*everything which I used to say
my cave drawings are being left say could not happen, will now happen.)
over the fire-lit shadows of a brown cave, and once again i’m
reaching for a pen, an adventure, and
reminding myself that everything happens for a reason.
optimus magister, bonus liber*, and as a teacher, i’m still (*The best teacher is a good
writing the pages of my own -- Ore rotundo* (*with full voice). book)