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| CARVIEW |
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Random driveby shot. Don’t blame the trigger finger. Wasn’t aimed at you. Besides, you’d do the same for me.
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Some strange notions of “random” making the rounds lately, that’s all I’ll say.
But you’re right about that I’d do the same for you.
Oh. I just realized where the “hour” comes from and how you’re recounting it, and what the “unwound” is of and why you’re being so careful with it, and why it’s “an” versus “the” or anything else not even just blank. I know your poems aren’t meant to be puzzles or riddles or mysteries or math formulas any more than an eclipse or love or a newborn baby will be, much as they are that to some, but I’m still floored by the authenticity of what you’re doing when it all clicks into place. Like how real it is when the moon lines up against the sun. Like when two lovers are uniquely one. Like how your child will be. That’s how your poetry feels to me when it lines up like it’s doing here. Don’t be done, please. What you’re doing here is for real, no matter what anyone else says. Don’t be done, not even when you reach that line in the one you’re writing where you’ll write “the end.”
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It does tire me and sadden me, I confess, how some view traditional poetic form as artificial and mechanical, inferior to the spontaneity of art that has little more discipline than a fart or a burp, somehow less true to life and love than supposedly formless art is said to be. Even when the sheer beauty of a sonnet perfectly mirrors the days between the new moon and the full. Even when the shining echoes of a villanelle are as pure as a child’s mirror of her mother’s eyes. Even though the weave of a sestina is like DNA itself in all its exquisite elegance. How no dance not even in its wildest of renditions is without the patterns one finds in poetic form. How not even the most unscripted lovemaking fits as closely body to body and passion to passion as the most rigid rhyme in the most elaborate design.
Yet as though form were not the most natural reality we know, the poet who works with form is acknowledged only in disparaging terms as some imperfect lower rung on reality’s evolutionary scale, something the artist is to grow above and beyond, without even necessarily stopping along the way to even have the vaguest experience with what form is even about. As if following a recipe produces a fraudulent taste inferior to feeding on the “truth” of authentic vomit. Failing to recognize that even the most free form poetry is little but chaos and meaningless babble without its own adherence to form.
No life is without form, nor is any love absent metaphor. No metaphor is without life, nor is any form absent love. And all verse visa.
But that’s no longer for me to be saying. I’ve been publicly mocked quite bluntly and definitively by one who should have known better that I’m not what and who I am, when the truth was quite literally a matter of life and death, a matter of a most certain truth, a matter of the purest love.
Here, I know I’m no longer who I really am, but only what gets made up and lied to others about me. And I’ve been shown with the most dismissive of shrugs that I wasn’t even so much as a friend one would bother to stand beside (although apparently talking trash about me behind my back gives one the right to preach to me and tell me what to do without caring for what’s true and real and sincere).
So this here has to be done, ended, laid down.
21 more parts to this final cycle, as you must have seen already, for you to’ve said what you said here, then I must go no further. It will have to have been enough, no matter how real it is to you or to my family or to my few faithful readers who still remember where to find it.
I will be over to read yours and will share the occasional private piece just you and me.
As has been requested of me by the one who does know me and love me, I will open it all up one final time.
But I do know this is done. I leave it behind and go on to those who are true to their love. After I have passed through this one final time, I will not be back. There remains nothing here that has not been rejected and trashed and ridiculed and lied about by the one who ought to have known.
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The poetry you’ve taken to its new home
out where you and your word aren’t mocked
and scorned, that sings with the bards
and sages who taught you songs your own,
dancing naked where your word’s unblocked
and making love in fire, dying in blood —Your friends, we bathe in that rich flood,
then here we dry off with these discards.
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My interest in writing hasn’t diminished
but I’m finished.The scenes I wanted haven’t got written.
They stay hidden.I once dreamed a metaphor already broken
in poems unspoken.You know me by now—I can’t quit casting.
No word is lasting.
pearls 
Still present and will be. Thank you for not letting go. Now just focus on you and yours. I won’t leave.