over two decades in the making.
a timeshifting autobiographical poetry collage w/photography.
a diaristic, nearly "daily writing" (ad)venture.
new pieces are posted most days..
**new and in progress** --
recordings of each poem are being added.
these are read by the author & posted to each poem's page.
--Del Ray Cross (contact delraycross at gmail)
i’m not fragile. i don’t like to think of myself as fragile. i think i’m most often not very fragile. i suppose that sometimes i can be, every once in a while, historically. it has happened. just not very often. i don’t like to think i am ever fragile because help is something i was led to believe (in a skewed manner, but with unrelent ing intensity) was somehow unmanly, which is bad, was something that would reduce my independence, independence being one of the virtues of all virtues, all-important. and there were lessons, it was perhaps a very foundation of my education, i think. it taught me how to avoid being emasculated, a word in which the whole problem is, here i go, encapsulated. i’m less fragile than almost anyone i’ve ever known. that was a brag. i’m not perfect, of course. name some things that are wrong with me.
like a lot of life, right? choir practice in undergrad used to be a wonderful way to pass the time between what we thought was the important stuff.
on our nature walk on that particular day the cattails were weird, but so pretty – their normally brown fuzzy tops curled into the shapes of tiny umbrella handles. they were purple, i think.
purple is a color i often get confused. i’m not color blind or anything, but i do confess i wind up staring at whatever it is and mouthing all sorts of things. like violet, aquamarine, magenta, fuchsia, spindrift, amber, umber, and other colors the hues of which i cannot seem to clarify in my head at ordinary moments.
purple is my
favorite color.
but college choir tour, springtime of 1988, the first year i was ever in love. one rainy night in magnolia, i held the umbrella for both of us. i had actually packed an umbrella. Imagine that, me the responsible one. walking from the methodist church where we performed to each of our respective sponsors’ homes for the night. ours turned out to be a funeral home. the place was huge and we were giddy and felt the embodiment of romantic, scouring the dozens of rooms for caskets that weren’t empty, imagining the shag carpets between the twin beds were pathways through lavender gardens where we could get lost and miss the morning bus. surely nobody’d miss us. and even if they did, they’d never find us, the tall aromatic stalks twice our height and then some.
Childhood living Is easy to do The things you wanted I bought them for you —from “Wild Horses,” by The Rolling Stones
“hey, pioneer!” was the hiss & i was pissed. my gun’s a ghost, the sheriff’s toast & wild horses couldn’t drag me away from this hellhole. this badge is just a couple of melted shotgun slugs and we go way back. i traded a revolver for this here holster and a couple of these dinged up posters. i know you’re all shot up, but you look good, man. you’d be roiled with worms and a fathom down into the depths of the quickest swamp and you’d bring back a demon’s heartbeat. and you had to go and lock your hawk’s aim targeting the stuttered hiccoughing rhythm of mine.
an image of the world’s largest blueberry. it’s a world record. and i see it there, plopped upon i can’t remember, something that would show a viewer that, yes, that’s one behemoth of a blueberry; a blueberry behemoth. but who gets the world record, the blueberry or the fruit forager who found it? and is there incentive beyond just being listed in a guinness record list? i look again, quickly, before continuing my scroll toward some juicy and as-yet-unknown treasure, that will what? suspend my scrolling for longer than a merely negligible duration of my day, wondering more than anything where the actual biggest blueberry on the planet might currently be hiding out, and what it might take for me to divert my current life path in order to find that monster, so that my name might be, for some shorter or longer period of time, publicly linked to that blue
it wasn’t something he wanted to get away with. the concertgoers en masse were an enormous living breathing etc. two bald guys on their way to
the restroom bonked into each other, knew one another instantly. after the bonfire all hell broke loose. we all put up our dukes, readying like bank robbers for that big investment. people teamed up based on t-shirt color, hues skewed by the starless night and the fire’s remains. which were but
the dull embers left once the angst-ridden dragon had what was left of its blazing wings
not sure about you, but i happen to live here. are your hobbies boring? if i’ve said it once, i’ve said it a million times, you navigate and i’ll paddle. some times the best way to clean things up is to first get as dirty as you can. but my goal isn’t to be the last person standing. who’d come to the after-party? how dull would that parade be? so. anyway. what do you do for fun?
kenneth kimbrough’s closest kin, that is, his numerous siblings, included the following lady kimbroughs:
persephone (goes by pursie)
cassandra, who makes a rootin- tootin casserole
medea, the doctor, whose surgeries always seem to involve the medulla oblongata
lizzie (birth name lysistrata cuz dad had had a humdinger of a penchant for aristophanes)
renata, who’d grown from the spindliest of the litter to the hottest gal in all of Nebraska
melea, who seems like such a shy gal only it is really just
an intense and general disinterest that has her often come across in such a way.
corrina and cornea are the twins. and while their pops knew ancient literature inside and out, he was anatomically clueless, and so one of the twins who also happened to have a pair of eyes that looked consistently in opposite directions was bullied from adolescence to graduation (yet
thanks to intense twinly competition, cornea fortuitously graduated class valedictorian, much to corrina’s chagrin).
the only hint the quake had hit was how the telly wriggled just a wee from back to forth for a few secs with msnbc on the screen, an interview of quite serious import. it hadn’t seemed like much but the place they called home was replete with pipes corroded with such rust that kerblooey! must have went one and then the whole place got very smelly in the least appetizing way you might imagine when the plot goes pop in such a telling way. ruth stood up and set out to deduce the source of the smelly, thinking it had to be thattaway. eve sat still on the cold hard couch and switched the channel on the telly to anderson cooper. enid seemed not to have noticed a thing as she continued her loud and off-key rendition of lily of the valley in the back room with the walls of green (the shade of kelly) adorned in such a way that one might surely call shelly (for ruth, it turns out, had an unruly in fatuation with mollusks and would collect them madly ever since arriving from new delhi; eve would take the shelly heaps and pin each one by one upon the kelly green walls in such a juvenile-y way that one might think she’d spent her early years in cellie). eve had switched the telly to an episode of happy days which almost exclusively featured fonz, the fonzerelli. despite the fact that the original smelly had gotten significantly smellier, ruth was back, but in the kitchen making a sandwich of peanut butter and grape jelly. in no time flat enid and ruth joined eve upon the cold and hard sofa to watch the rest of the sitcom featuring arthur herbert fonzarelli.
is a bit similar to an interior monologue that is more of a psychological test in which the interior of your skull is wall papered with Ror schach inkblots that are decorative and otherwise perfectly impractical. except if you could see how lovely it is in here. as i stare at these beautiful abstract designs draped along the walls of my interior, i find that the splotches, rather than pull the un developed ramb ling ditherings about in my head not to ward a notion of what might really be going on within the depths of my mind, but instead keep things open, distracted from the less abstract goings- on that can diminish or relinquish my focus from where it needs to be in order to get me from where i am in this droll exterior world in which i float about to wherever it is that i am per haps attempting or wanting or needing to be. but then the prob lem becomes rem embering where that is or might be, or even hold a hint about a general direction. currently i’m looking up, at a supposed ceiling, for any bit of light that might emit as if toward me from those heights. the feeling this gives is that of a man trapped in a se wer desperately looking for a man hole cover, anything such from which i might escape these hellish depths. what lovely wallpaper! it keeps me on my toes and has me going places no one, not even i, might possibly know.
these are strange times. anything you say or do might turn you into an enemy, put you in dan ger. the state of our union ain’t that great, as far as i can see. but when you’re way over and into the pasture on the idealist side of the fence, it’s a bit of a relief to see that a man nearly twice your age can hold his own in what one might call the traditional court of law. i’ll take even an ounce of that feisty for myself, if you don’t mind. if you find those words to be fighting words, then perhaps you’d best reign yourself and your herd of bullying elephants in just a smidge, else this pacifist might be ready for a knock-down drag-out good old fashioned fight. i hope not. but i still feel it good to say. just in case.
is a mood piece, let’s say. geo metrically it’s a sagging ark ansas. but, hey, i’ve bad mouthed geo metry for dec ades. i got a post-graduate degree in the upper left cor ner. the parch ment was like the frozen cov er of earth the frosty wind sw ept over six months out of each year in that desolation —and there were five. don’t ask me how i made it out alive as i barely remem ber. but boy, i packed that car without a heater full of everything i decided to keep – a bunch of no good stuff i’d finally lose the rest of two coasts and down the road a few years later. my face got brighter, i’d dare say, the further away i got from that unbeveled and bedeviled tun dra. behind a leathern wheel i skated out to colder climes i did. with a hot heart and a harder happiness than i’d ev er seen in that most godforsa ken state.
I build this thing of how I feel and who I was and what I do to pin down and get within reach—perhaps among other things—of who I am and what I want. It’s
on display (this thing), my clumsy efforts just to see and say and hew through all the ugly and the beauty—and the freedom, tense with insistent constraints—of the now
(all of which pass swiftly by). And this I do to try to know (and yet I never do) a bit of how to live among you and remain (and yet so publicly?) as curious and con
tent as humanly I might, while ever near ing who I truly am and where I best will be.
In what specific cases should one re state a thing they’ve already stated, perhaps innumerable times (Is this art?), exactly as they’ve said it before;
Who needs a break? Are you looking at the tv, out the window, at your knees or onto the darker side of your eyelids? I met the 6th and 7th hurdles in an interminable set of interviews this week (yes, for the same job). No
word back yet. Need to buy a new pair of dress shoes, deodorant, some super glue, a new belt, Scotch Pads, a new charger for my Alexa (which has me sounding like I’m complaining a bit too loudly, I suppose), file folders,
dish liquid and laundry detergent, which I’ve used to clean all clothes and cloth items by pail in my coffin-sized hotbox for the past couple of years. And that isn’t as long as I’ve refused to step into the shower here. I bathe in the sink.
It’s even too disgusting and sad to use the one toilet at the end of the hall that, on the rare occasion, is usable.
No Coda as of Yet (what if shrinking time makes no room for its appearance?)
I could. Say what you mean. This must make sense. What would be the point if no parable could be derived from this garbled lack. Fate lies in our hands now. “But what about the inevitability of censorship?” says some
kid in the balcony who may or may not have raised their hand beforehand (I’m not wearing my glasses). I walk all the way up and hand him the textbook, which is half theory and half fiction. And maybe a smidge of
poetry, but who’d know? “We expand the arts and the natural sciences,” the professor says. I profess that I’m not a firm believer in the evolution of a species, anthro pologically speaking, of course. I mean, my feet may
seem to stand upon a firm slab of desiccated terra firma. But how can anyone negate the facts? We’re all doomed.
The Pile of Words Dithers No Matter Their Cumulative Geometrical Guise
Make one, I did. Not your trad itional music playlist. Almost no music at all. We can go through and, one by one, discuss each.
Hone that list. I would like to begin by going over the 5 x 5 questions and answers we developed at our last meet ing. Picture graduate school in Greece.
It’s pretty isn’t it? Erase that photo. Pur chase a TV. I mean a tv-sized monitor for all of the most intense chemistry and math and geometry. Follow up on plans
since nobody goes to college anymore. Gather in another week for 3rd brainstorm.