Me at work at the Roxie, photo by a kind tourist lady named Eleanor, taken just after writing the poem
If you are reading this poem on a phone, note that the integrity of the lines, a major feature of poetry, is not displayed properly. Many if not most get cut short because of the small screen.
I sit and toil all day at the heart’s sky, laboring meaning into form that won’t surprise me with its despair.
I unhand time. It seizes me. I believe in miracles. It’s all a wonderful of the All-Look’s gaze. I labor to see that.
I can remember it happening long ago. All the sights I see hide God. Can you hide God? It’s a revelation in a day, the abruptness of creation organizing time.
I can see through the forms cloud my mind with meaning. That bus that just stopped there, it stayed a bus, but it carried mystery.
The people at the bar getting drunk next door, a singer sings their songs. I can’t find the music or the melody they become more than sharks wetting their nose on freedom.
I carry them in time, the little guy at the Roxie station wagon tourist information center, seeing past the show into metaphor’s play.
Bathing suits and butts don’t know what they mean. Their wearers are proud of them. They walk past smiling don’t look stirring sexual desire.
I don’t know how to do this, be a Roxie concierge and assign God to the role. I just mean somethin’ to everyone. My hand is ever on time’s grasp, “Yes ma’am, can I help you please?”
I study tourists tryin’ to find time a meal on paradise. Can I help you folks? Every meaning gets bigger than time and be what it means for.
Can you see that? Every meaning we look at wears the face of God, but every dog knows God is horribly attentive to things you don’t understand.
I will find meaning there. I will reach beyond the Earth and sit at the Roxie and be myself guiding tourists to their destination on Fort Myers Beach. Yah get me dog?
What’s the biggest love you ever had? The receipt is in the bag, and you’re probably torn apart by it. Good how you doin’? That’s the ode of life, our first knowledge of it. You can’t get over its size. It jumps out and bites you all the time.
There’s somethin’ here. Your love has nothin’ to do with it. It’s a list of hard. You can never reach it. Look at the dog. That’s payment of love let me tell you. The point of this somethin': Donny get your head out of your ass. Get so close makin’ it look like people look, hear their voices, hide their fears, and they are the lovers of your life.
You want me to tell yah this dangerous love? You look awful. Do it, love you in the perfection of love’s care, and you’re this simple little organism that must awake to itself as the horseman, that you are the starship, you are the unicorn, that shatters time and all barriers to arrive back at the house the One, who wears time as his robe and space as his molecule.
Ever the mystery of God finds God, and God himself is a station of the One, created before time began. He bids you a self-discovery bigger than himself but that can fit into an atom and a plant or any ring around the rosie, but only the human being can make it real to itself. The dog just loves its master.
Now I am clothed in time, but I have worn this identity in an unimaginable sphere, and that brief moment has determined all my life. I have to deal with God’s love putting me on those tracks again, day in and day out, and I have been given a load to bear that makes me hated by you. Only the most exceptional people, and they are few, will make my life easier with their care and concern, give the comfort you get every day from friends and family. I am almost completely alone in this world, and I don’t think you can grasp this isolation it hurts so.
So I have taken the world what to make of it, and I have found God. Wrapped in unimaginable mystery, he holds my hand and lets me see things you don’t and gives me keys to man’s change, and I can still love my boy and my best friend and my dogs. I can still love the world. I can love mankind. I can love it all because I have gone through a holocaust of human abandonment, and I discovered what love is. God is love my friend. God is love.
Harm's End 