AT SOME POINT I am there/here again. Wondering what it is I meant
at all to be saying with my life and my time and my words at all. It’s so
unusual now to feel myself saying something I think is very much wort
h saying, or very much worth the time that it will take to say it. I wanna
be in love, and I know that. But how could that really mean anything be
yond bizarre sentiment? What can it say for how I will get to work in th
e morning? Or what I will eat when I get back home without groceries f
or another night? How will it drive me to clean my room or to pay my b
ills or to care for anyone that is not me? I find so frequently I do not like
what people call me. Whatever it is, it’s never just right. I don’t want to b
e righteous    nor sinner     nor pussy or push-over   nor pompous, not se
lf-loathing, nor esteemed, nor belittled I don’t want to be some bereaved
soul nor do I want to be some jackass addicted to happiness AT SOME P
OINT there has to be an ending…………………………………………………………

a heavy face boils on the stage
a hold on their hearts     as he opens
to every memorized manuscript which brings him severe tranquility- it brings him an intimate absence
of anything which is or was
.                                          one’s own
-because one’s own can only deliver
.                     a cranky silence
*no small
.                     revelation. not even
.                     a line                      or clever phrase, just
the lapse of time                  on a silent stage
and his busy mind and the empty page

he reads it off
the silent mug, the coffee stain
the coughing lungs, the laughing page
this is
some author’s way
.                     of raising stakes
turning the page
and leaving it blank:

now my voice even, is a violation
to what could make a world perfect.

best, to not.

best to be, a missing something
perhaps person or suture, claiming

perhaps heartless or murder
is better than the tone of me missing notes.

02.25.09

I and my ego,
You and yours.

You and my ego.
Your ego and me.

“Double blind date?” I say
“On the contrary” he says “only I will stay.”

Thusly, there is no date
Just Blindness and us.
No date, but certainly two
Who perceive they see
And in time they see they do
Not see as they first perceived
Double dating
Your ego and I
You, yourself, and mine.

don’t know if I can begin to express
the way a body feels
when a body leaves what a body is
to be what a body is
to me.

Did you know I loved you
when our hearts beat
when the sun rose
when the hand you held
was holding yours

at your mother’s house we could hold each other up
past the sun
at the same door I knew to ignore
now my chest is for
your head to rest

there were hours I felt nothing
there were hours I did not know
did you know I could love you
when I was not sure

Close them close them please
I keep unsealing eyes to find a life;
but absent of time I can survive
sealed up in wet animal eyes
no conscious thought- just distortions of what I want
to be thinking and cannot…

I laid out a table for to die upon
Yĕhovah overturned my table
and outdid the totality of death.

Things pass. They d-
falling asleep maybe on green yards gazing
at greener yards, no I’m sure they must, they do
and the tub drains straight to the fountain of youth
ever unstuffed-up, it will keep us scrabbling for
pools accumulating, but pouting toward
rusty drain pipes
of time-ago; their call and their lure

still keeps us scrabbling, believing
youth past is not completely passed
just slipped through some wire gate; for to us
minimal wire gates, well, they are fences
white and picket, knee high and we
we will step right over someday- away
someday away from ideal in
in- into real. This is how thing pass they
stay asleep then Present wakes them up to run
and hop, jump, and skip over Ideal’s fences into
which one we..
whichever one we admit to perceive
the other side to be…

Why did you paint your walls
why tonight could you not stand the beige-
the cream crept in and licked up your sense.
Did you try to get drunk and stare it down
because it owed you the service
of starring back. Did you yell
at the walls did you yell-
because they ought to shut up
and listen for once.

So you paint them, with life they
never knew. Were they
jealous of your mind so you
gave it to
them finally were you
just alive and
just tired a
nd ready tonight to paint
more than
———-all the other nights
———-that we both knew someday we will all
———-need to paint
———-some time. some place. on some wall?

R.I.P. ‎Jonathan Jabari