Exhilarate! Poem by David Floren

I briskly scrubbed a barnacled cereal flake
From my new Dansk bowl when I felt
Robbed of self.

Odd.
I knew what brand of bowl it was

But felt the bowl could never know
(Were it the world’s cleverest ceramic biographer)
what brand of me
I was.

A chapter entitled
“Escape from self.”

Strange escape,
To linger in a corner, back to the center,
Pretending to ignore a tiger.

You pretend.
Your very own will power
Is and will
Look if you see it,
so hungry.

When all this time,
Evidence of beauty,
Of God even
Explodes!

A lingering explosion (the fresh phoenix –
Frozen) on a postcard,
Framed, hangs
By the kitchen window
(As I scrub, wondering)
Has hung, has self
In explosion,
Of red rockets with green contrails.

They unveil a power slower
Than flower lids admit new sun
From brittle soil, this little
Ocatillo still
Births a stodgy
Hodge-podge of brittle
Mirage.

Exhilarate!

You show bloodshot eyes
A lot.
The point of a sunrise.
All the days.

See?

Be found
And graze grace
Unlike clods
Who’d euphemize
“Amaze me.”

[4/23/04 Santa Rosa, CA (revision 1/29/08 Livermore, CA) ]