The Poetry Marathon

Before finally giving up jogging,
the voice of a 5 yo
had asked out loud
why I was running so slowly.
I stubbornly sped up
for a quick burst
to leave her and mother behind.
On my longer runs I used to encounter
a very fast paced hiker type
who also got my competitive
juices flowing.
Now, I take to the trail
at an leisurely clip and
have not attracted unwanted
attention by young whippersnappers
and have not been bothered by the comings
and goings of the other trespassers
of my path as I stop to watch
the pileated woodpecker fly
from tree to tree.
I don’t miss the jogging.

Our first adult house was built in ’41
and we lived in it for 23 years.
We know little of the genealogy and stories
of the previous occupants of that address.
That imaginary of the past didn’t seem to peak our interest,
despite the occasional plastic action figure or
miscellaneous mystery metal fragment buried in the backyard
or in the dirt cellar where the furnace lived.
Digging into that kind of bygone times
is not where our obsessive excavations take place.
Perhaps, it was the nazi sticker found on our side walkway,
or the pack of aggressive pit bulls
that trampled our garden
or the large several dumpster size garbage heap
with hawks perched on the fence
seeking out rats in our other neighbor’s yard
that stilled whatever curiosity
we may have had into the history of that place.

The last line by Yi Lei

Long, long ago, a dried, kosher salami
sought me out and filled my world with a fervor
for the chewy comfort of that
pinched and shriveled skin.
Becoming a vegetarian, my cravings turned away from my
childhood and hunted out recipes of beans and lentils with
a multitude of casseroles combining rice or noodles
with greens and cheeses.
Flirting with the world of the vegan, I found
a passion for a vegan jerky and would eat bags
of it during lunch at work as a kind of homage
to that cured meat I was so fond of.
Now with disease and the ongoing pandemic,
I have landed into the world of dried mangos
and chew with such pleasure despite everything.
Desire is dead, long live desire.

Our confidence in the value of our memories has been shaken
by the ease of snapping moments upon moments
of what our eyes appear to be seeing
and our ears appear to be hearing without
a lapse in time to develop and process
the narrative of the those encounters.
Thousands upon thousands of images stored
in a vast network of ether are mostly unretrievable
under the weight of the numbers and
reveal the impossibility of documenting
everything and existing at the same time.
SciFi predicts in the future we will
be able to record 24/7 everything
we see, hear, feel, smell, taste, say.
If someone views this recording of a human being,
whose life will it be?

Alright, I have little experience on what
zen and running mean together other than
a new age catchy phrase to sell something.
I meditate sporadically, am not a Buddhist,
and stopped jogging several years ago
when my body said enough.

Of course, I have read the archery and
motorcycle maintenance books during a time
of discomfort as if there is ever a time of comfort.
Rarely during a jog, the quieting of my mind
would allow me to disappear into the serious
business of just existing.

I confess the best time of the run was
that moment of stopping as my
breathing finally begins to gain ground
on where I am and I am able to feel
a sense of satisfaction at completing
a necessary but arduous task of subsistence.

So, there you have it.

I keep returning my eye to the bare, multi-pronged tree stump,
whose status as a living object is questionable
near where the metal Phoenix is working hard to gain
enough momentum to leave a place
without a lick of greenery to soothe the soul
and where the 12 pane windows still intact reflect
the whiteness of the nearby building and the mostly
dark hues of close by structures while the clouds
without the sharpness of the angled lines below it
are dissolving into the steel grey sky
and making their way stage left before
everything beneath it unravels

Events are moving so quickly in this land
that catching ones breath is not possible
with all of the contested gordian knots of limited
oxygen overwhelming my feeble mind.

The alliance of the Greek god Chaos
and the Egyptian god Seth
has permeated all realms of our lives,
even ones death, through the orange demon who is everywhere.

Shakespeare’s plays in time of plague,
in time of civil unrest, in time of imperial rule,
adds a disturbing uneasiness to how we will be when
events slow down and we look into a mirror.

after Victoria Chang

Time has shifted around my city of I
and its reliability to be always
steady and constant is in doubt though I knew
this welcomed distortion was a happening that
pushed many cities of I into profound grief
over the long overdue resolution of an ongoing crime that was
and continues to be done by humans against other humans as something
fundamentally evil that needs a mind meld in all of the cities of I
to view the world as cities of we which could
in time remove the stench of racism’s smell

Loss, loss and more loss
trending toward the ultimate loss
as a dimness slowly but relentlessly
covering one’s own realm
not like Job’s but
more like the black milk of Auschwitz
and Victor Frankl’s last remaining
human freedom:
the freedom to choose one’s attitude.

Watching from our cottage of angst,
and sipping from a bottle of beer,
we discover the treeline is changing
with the rising of the earth’s heat
right before our eyes
that even the denier’s cannot mask over.
What to root for?
Our dawdling, a kind of lethargy
like after having a big bowl of porridge,
seems strange given the marching of trees.
When we become more active,
we zoom helter skelter like a firefly
trapped in a glass jar with no way out