Huge hanging hook hovers over the cars-- high heavy hoister on brown beams and bars. Out on our odyssey getting some bites, offered occasion for sport, food, and sights. Both balance bubble teas, I get the peach. Rest on a rocking chair just out of reach. Consider customer's clothing, we stare, wondering whether she's worn underwear. Drive downstream driftingly directly home; distracted detours divert where we roam. Sit softly speaking with flowers in bloom. Touch the thyme, taste the tea, delay the gloom.
71
70
This flower looks fake. Or maybe it's alien. It's from outer space or else subterranean, with radial threads like striped purple tentacles or centipede legs but inter-dimensional. Its forked probing beak and antler-like mandibles would cause one to shriek if seen on an animal. And right underneath, arranged in a central ring, are bloodied pink teeth able to eat anything.
69
Someone tried to cage the tree. The tree said, "Nuh-uh! You can't do that to me!" It broke its bonds and filtered free, though, arbor departers ditch harbor slowly. To our sidewalk escapee these metal spines give support structurally. The half-chewed bars are neat to see, and they'll fully digest eventually.
68
Magnificent magnolia, this shiny broad-leafed tree magics a sense of growing up from distant memory...
A childhood home that I barely recall, no bedrooms, no kitchen, no laundry at all, just back yard and front yard and bathroom, I think. Or maybe just bathtub? I can't see the sink. And 100% there's a light switching string and white plastic pinchers for toothbrush holding. And somewhere I know is a Crayola bear and a red airplane lamp, though I cannot say where. But mostly I picture the front of the house, like none of my time was spent inside, just out. Two very high windows, and brick painted white, grassy lawn on the left, garage doors on the right. Though things likely weren't exactly as seen-- the tree too gigantic, grass surely less green. The vision has traveled through time after all. My tastes were less fine and my body more small.
67
As days drift I deliberate my own trajectories, where life goes where it wants to go with unknown guarantees. Some days are high, some days are low, some days are in between. Most days are blessed delightfully in ways I'd not foreseen. No good can come from floating by without self inquiry, and anyway it's much more fun to build philosophy, so here I think about the nature of companionships and collections of grins and frowns acquired by my lips.
The opposite of loneliness is having a best friend who thinks about you just as much as you think about them, a pairing where the sum of one and one makes more than two, with bonding so in balance nothing ever feels askew, a comfort countless fathoms deep no matter what you do or how much time elapses 'tween each happy rendezvous. These kinships are the ones you spend your whole life looking for, to feel the closeness beaming from their eyes at their front door. But if there is a disconnect it can create despair, emotional imbalance that feels karmically unfair. So woe betide the reckless fool who enters willingly into impossible romance without humility. Your fortitude might not be quite as strong as is required to sidestep psychic suffering inherently hard-wired. And if they're unavailable but say they want you near, it throws you into limbo where your future path's unclear. Should you run deep underground to hide from memory? Or maybe they will come around, so should you wait and see? And yet maybe it's all worthwhile, to fling those feelings on the pile of exotic experience. What's life without some limerence? Like cooking with ingredients combined in piquant deviance, all pleasure's in comparison to measured bitter medicine.
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These poems are Avi's diary. You can email him at avi@invariablyhappy.com