Happy Birthday
(To someone who has probably stopped celebrating the reminder.)

  Tenth Daughter of Memory / deathbed revenge

(Next month perhaps Tom will have a happy little muse)

First of all, a deathbed does not seek revenge. Imagined or real.

People come to me as a last resting place. A place where you know where you’ve been, but not to where you are going. As elephants traveling out to the bone yard, or where you’ll find the deathly wounded sheltering in holes and scrubs. This place distracts from dreams and focuses concentration. A place people walk into knowing, having somehow decided, they will never walk back out. Everyone spends his or her life circling in on me. It’s like a parlor game. Reality always seems in the next room. Eventually I win.

There is history here. However, none of it judged.

What is missing is the future telling. Foretelling the future is taking away free will. Whose will is it any way? What would become of us if we controlled the present to foretell what is to be? I deal with the absolute/tion of death not the meander towards it, and certainly not the way it is handed out.

Everyone knows there is an end to everything that breathes. Does a cure take away free will? That is not miraculous, that is not prophetic, and that is not revenge for the living. No, I do not take away free will, it is will in process.

Second; I am in good shape, not broken down. Though once in a while I am, for lack of space. It is then I need to be re-built. That’s when I come in a kit of 22 easy to assemble symmetrical parts. For more rental dough I come with a pillow, for an uneven total of 23 parts. It is indeed a hard mean little pillow. You pay for the plastic wrap of new.

Thirdly: I do not recognize indulgences. You will have had to already taken care of that before you get to me. I simply pronounce the unconditional after passing the threshold.

Stretching the rules Right Over Yourself

(And I mean) tedious random notes from a notebook.

Not very often, I’ll look into an old codex and read where my mind was at the time. Try to figure out my connection to the page. First, of course it’s deciphering phonetic spelling, and the mistakes of my furiously getting something down.

Dream of a refusal to listen to silent books.

A combination of misunderstood and thirsty.

Look for an alternate tribe.

Revisit an old painting -She Carried a Blazing Flag and was Looking for a Cause.

Meet someone who wants to become a pamphleteer. Not the type you run across the street to get away from.

Articulate ideology.

Decide whether life is detritus. Or not.

Always remember that understanding poetry is kind of like asking someone to untie some else’s knot.