Honey, Don't It Look Like Rain

To the solid earth my body's bade,
All in due time, not right now, I'm afraid.
I'm still all wrapped up in this
Commercialistic, greedy world.
It tastes of salt and then
It's under your skin shifting visions
Into confusion again and again.
Really it's a bit of dancing,
Staged by players wrapped in feathers
Of incredulity whilst the asshole
In the corner
Of the ballroom
Recites some modern prose he wrote,
Boasting about using the word "whilst."
It's a crying shame, really,
That six feet deep seems a very nice sleep,
Though I know better than to prompt the offer.
Until it comes, I keep waking up,
To Life as a constant, painful, monotonous joke
Reminding me of the reason for laughter.

Into the Black Hole, Out The Quasar

I am a traveler, and these are my travels.

I stick my eyes upward, and suddenly find
Black bands bending light while I
Drift into the spherical plane resist
Themselves and leave me smiling
Into the depth and rhythm of cosmic churnings.

I stop into the mire, I bounce inside the mixture;
Time stops, all is motionless in the
Magnanimous speed surrounding me.

Then, all at once,
Streaming into consciousness I find
Brilliant light before my eyes.
It twists and shapes and combines with the darkness,
Huddling like the hot air on black pavement into
A burst of birthing fractions made whole again.

I reach the outer edge,
I find the end point pregnant with clusters
Of numerous prisms expanding infinitely
Into the otherwise empty space of the cosmic fugue.

Legs (a small portion)

"Alright, let me get this in order. You have no personality, no manners, you don't talk about yourself, you're body's not all that fabulous, you can't dress, you don't have a nice car, didn't go to college, work at a supermarket, and you're not charming or mysterious. Seriously, Brush, what's to keep me from walking off right now and finding a man with at least one of these qualities? Really, what have you got going for you besides a solid impression of a brick in the dirt?' 'Well, Suzanna, I do have this one thing about me that seems to appeal to women. Don't get me wrong, I would love nothing more than to trade it for a personality, a good job, a degree, or something like charm, charisma, you know?' 'Well, what the hell is it, Brush? Jesus, I'm dying here!' 'Well, I would like to show you, but we're out in public, you know? I can't just go flashing it around in front of all these people...' 'Flashing what arou... oh Jesus! You're kidding!? Tell me you're kidding, right?' 'No, no I'm not, at all.' 'My God, Brush, just how big is it...?' 'How big is what?' 'You know, your thing...' 'What thing? I'm talking about my legs. I have fabulous legs.' 'Oh for Christ's sake!' 'No really! I do. I should have been a goddamn dancer with these gams! I mean, I'm not trying to brag, but for a man my legs really are top notch. Alot people tell me so. You simply must see them..." There was a long pause between Brush and Suzanne. Finally, after weighing the facts of the night, checking her watch, looking around for escapement and finding no avail, she shrugged her shoulders and looked at Brush. "Alright you son of a bitch, lets see those goddamn legs you keep raving about."

Your Thoughts?

The sickness of my soul is not dissipating with spring, with booze, with anything. It used to be, give me a good pen and some paper and I’ll fucking destroy worlds of thought with words. Now, it’s all electronic; its all without a pulse. Some kind of crutch I can’t do without. I guess that’s the way of things but while we’re on the subject I think it stinks and I wish I had never submitted to its ease and convenience. And yes, god dammit, I do feel like there is some kind of sickness in my soul. I feel uneasy, restless, exhausted, bored, excited and confused almost simultaneously- all the time. So I do things to keep me distracted, you know? Like these fucking movies. I watch a movie about a guy who is on his last leg, about to give up the world and commit the eternal deed of darkness, then he’s interrupted and some cute little blonde job with all the right answers comes sprinting into his life with surgical precision, cutting right to the cancer in his heart and removing it, and somehow everyone comes out O.K. and in love and all that crap. Well, I don’t really know why I watch the shit, I guess it’s been programmed into my brain or something. The worst of it is that I actually prefer the kind of movies that I feel most resemble my deep, wanted fantasies. I am a fiend for love, only I don’t know shit about the subject. All love isn’t the same- I don’t care who says it. There’s love for flowers and rivers and sailing and smoking and having a good wine in the porch in July and there’s love for a dog or a goldfish or a distant cousin and there’s love for your family, the close one’s I mean, like mom, dad, sis, bro, grams, gramps, aunt, uncle. It’s different for everybody, but the thing that sticks, that really cuts down deep is that other, bigger love, you know. That kind is the kind that makes all these other’s happen, in one way or another. Hell, you could say it’s the other way around if you wanted- that all these prompt the big Love I’m getting at. Any way you slice it it’s still that big, end all, be all, chips fall where they may, dare to live kind of love. That is the love which my soul thirsts for and is sick from being deprived. Honestly, anybody else writing shit like this would make me sick, make me annoyed to even read it because I would quickly scoff at the lines and say, “so and so is too goddamn young to even know what love is!” It’s bullshit, I tell you. We all know what love is. Sticky, stubborn, pissed, intoxicating, motivated, destructive, ambiguous, dangerous, deadly. It is the means to each and every one of our ends. Too much love, you go mad. Not enough, you kill yourself or someone else. Long life full of love, a whole damned series of generations riding your coattails. Short lived love, the tragic undertaking of painful memory and cheap articles and literature. Love is a motherfucker, I’ve decided. It’s so hard to figure out. I’m so pathetic, really. I can’t even say hello to a girl. I guess I’ve got it in my head that something will just happen, you know? BoOM! Love is here! Days of agony over! Bullshit. Some say you’ve got to work at it and some say its magic before your eyes. Whatever the hell it is it’s damned late or neglecting. I probably no good right now, anyways. If love came walking around some corner I wouldn’t even acknowledge it, most likely. I would keep walking along, my eyes planted to my feet and the pavement ahead, thinking about why it is I am such a sap and a weakling and an obsessed freak for this silly concept that seems anything but. Love would go on, unimpeded and I would light a smoke and try and think of something to do later on since I can’t just sit around loving somebody.

Red Comet Dust

You're constantly watching me.
Sometimes I like that-
Your eyes transgressing symptoms
Of my soul, like a doctor to a
Slow healing wound; very dangerous
And sensitive, and worth the look, perhaps.

So I will tell you about my day.
Today I woke too late and rushed to work,
Sleepy, starved, (in more ways than one)
And disengaged from life itself a little.
It began with the clouds, I think. Or,
Perhaps this new place I am going to call
A home, only it is empty and sad. I can't fill it
Enough to make it mine, but I stay here all the same.
When I peered up at the sky today,
The clouds, stuck upwards shutting out the light,
Gave me the faint impression of winter's slow fade.
I became sad and hungry for folds of life,
Life I had not yet known,
And to accelerate time to find them before me instantly.
Because of time, then, am I sad.
Time has stolen the past from my present-
Stops the future from my present-
Leaves me in this present
Where I look about searchingly.
What am I trying to find?

The day went on like that for some time.

I came back to my empty shell of a home,
Spent some more of time's useless currency
In distractions of the usual measure.
Music and glowing screens and
Something to fill my aching stomach.
The day was not all dismal, I promise.
Spoon River Anthology kept me company,
And I finished Sidharrtha this morning.
I was so happy that he and his friend
Were once again united
Before they too became the primal dust,
The solid earth, the leaves of grass.

But in this night, you know, I am always tempted
Towards those terrible thoughts that hurt me.
I jealously find everywhere togetherness,
And I, with nothingness. I have my heart,
Beating out of habit. I have my blood,
Barely warm enough to remind me I'm cold.
I have my eyes, brazen yet mockingly
They reflect my cold face.
Tonight they wept a little.
It was at the expense of fiction, rest assured.
And as the tears dried from my face
They began to fall from the sky,
Solidifying the anguish in my heart.

Why do you watch me so?
Why, why do you care what becomes of me?
I no longer plead, I no longer despair-
I am complacent with this existence for now.
Though it seems I am not so well
It is only sometimes I feel this way.
When I want capricious loyalties
To bar, and friends, and youth, and night,
I only find the night.
In that absence my mind finds a blank screen,
Filled full and fuller still than it can hold of me,
But never a word uttered to anyone but myself.
I am a bit selfish.
I am hiding,
In waiting,
Yearning and needing,
Wishing to breathe
And be happy.

This is just another glint of red comet dust
In an otherwise black and listless night.

So I Let The Motherfucker Sing, You Know?

A year in the maker's and my eye,
While you and I were still two foxtails on the hill
The world was passing by in effigy.
The same eternal year,
When the lone hill reflected my thoughts,
In cris[, hopeful fractions
With every turn of every season.
I'm standing here now,
Lost for the foxtail
I still wish I was dragging around,
But the world is in turn,
Beneath, above, and among our heavy hearts.
I do indentify with the butterfly
Perched on the open petal of
The returning flower, when next year returns it.
A day without sunshine is night.
A night without sleeping is futile.
But every moment I want to sleep
I'm forced awake by that demon in me,
The one that whispers, "let it sing, let it sing."

Letter To The Future

Dear Future,

It is often hard to see what it is you hold in store for me when I find myself resolute to seek you out more clearly. Oftentimes I devise grandiose dreams of achievement in the various forms of interest I encompass at the particular times in my life. But, as it is almost always the end result, I find myself more and more confused with the coming days and more I learn. Many different great and achieved men of the past have come up with their particular solutions for your purpose. It was just yesterday I read how Mr. Ralf Waldo Emerson stated in Self-Reliance that all things of the past are irrelevant and that to trust yourself and yourself alone is the only way to go about living. Of course, due to the fact that I cannot correctly dictate his words verbatim you receive a vague statement of his ideas from me. Blaise Pascal, another former interest of mine, states that man is nothing without his humble sumbission to God and Christianity. Pascal says, "We almost never think of the present, and if we do it is simply to shed some light on the future. The present is never our end. Past and present are our means, only the future is our end. And so we never actually live, though we hope to, and in constantly striving for happiness it is inevitable that we will never achieve it." He is a great man, but at the end of the day he and I differ in our beliefs. Mr. Emerson too, I hold in great respect for his insight. He does put an awful lot of stock into the youth of every generation. Many others tell me things, also. Kafka, for instance; that great and wonderous German vagabond of the conscientious thought says to me, "We too must suffer all the suffering around us. What each of us posesses is not a body but a process of growth, and it conducts us through every pain, in this form or in that. Just as the child unfolds through all the stages of life to old age and death (and every stage seems unattainable to the previous one, whether on fear or longing) so we unfold (not less deeply bound to humanity than to ourselves) through all the sufferings of this world. In this process there is no place for justice, but no place either for dread of suffering or for the interpretation of suffering as a merit."

I understand these things well, dear Future, but all the same they seem to confuse my sense of reality all the more. These are men who have lived very trialsome, arduous lives and documented their experiences along the way. Blaise Pascal felt so necessarily bound by his questions that he spent his life in seclusion rendering his visions, and dying too soon the summarize them into a concise manner, leaving us Pensees. I don't wish to be that way.

I think that my greatest problem is that I am far too anylitical of myself moment to moment. I feel that it is using up so much of my creative, spiritual, and intellectual energy that I am drained of any progress in other engagements I find myself a part of. Perhaps the greatest promise of the future is that it holds absolutely no promise, not even for life itself. My will is my destiny. I believe that among other things.

I used to believe I was such a scattered individual. I thought that I could never pick one thing and stick to it with all my might. I know better now. I know that I need not pick any one thing, but all things, if I wish. There is much that I love of this existence, this nature, this humanity, this little spec of stardust in the universe. An upright idividual would simply choose all, and expiate all with the light and truth and love of one's own passionate virtue.

O Future! What more can I ask of you but to contain me? Nothing, I think. If love there, I shall arrive. If great success in work and life be there, I shall not notice. I shall simply acknowledge my existence and ambition for that which I am aroused by, and propell myself onward in the directions of those things until I have reached that absolute furthest points of both satisfaction and possibility. I am C. A. Dominick. Poet, Musician, Painter, Wanderer, Dreamer, Astronomer, Philosopher, Lover, Fighter, Soldier, Teacher, and child of Nature. I am many more. I can build if I so wish and I can destruct whatever house of brick or establishement of thought I so wish. I will tear down all ways of conventional thinking if the task is asked of me from my own trusted will and conscience.

To you, Future, I send my regards. As the custom goes, I will forever be headed your way, never quite reaching you until at last I perish. What I leave behind is for someone else to understand. I forever ride your coattails in the wings of Destiny and find my feet trodding the soil of all my loved pursuances.

Sincerely and humbly yours,

Charles Anthony Dominick

Good morning.

The taste of day
Is that small space of time
Between my wake and leave for work.
That five minutes
Where I sit down
With my breakfast in the morning.
To turn out the loud tv
And hear some of my quiet morning thoughts.
The taste of day is only a taste.
When sunlight
Pours through the windows.
Because
The day is gone
When work has come.
And quickly am I off;
To busy to think
Of anymore tastes
Of this day.