Follow The Heart In Where/What Forces The Bite - The News Or So It Appears On The Ledge Poem by Warren Falcon

for Mark, unplugged, unsparked

wild sweetness is a stolen base
the tongue an untended garden

here is a burning soft hands can know
which shall finally run some headlong
for home, an inherited circle at the end,
a latter-day glad son gathering berries
from shadows
...
leap only to love instead of 34th Street
in the alley between scrapers toward
relation jump lurch even twist in air

happiest between world wars, most certainly
born too late, would have been, would be now,
brief florid flame a life of art and throwing over,
avoiding trench carnage, paintbrush in one hand,
lover in other, all the world a passing rage, just
to be clear, Miss Dickinson, rage is that thing
of colors, strokes, new uses for knives


1
Today's sad news is

that someone jumps from a window, plummets
head or limbs long into traffic, sidewalk, car park
or parked car, whatever's below, stops Mind

just

stops

It

now newly dead friend

hangs between the moment at the window the
movement over ledge and out no time to rewind,
reboot, but fall pell mell to ground/concrete swell
nano-seconds to meat one

Mind cloys in air, still frame or slo mo at least,
he-who-is-falling is thoughtless, no time to think
sympathetic nervous system mugs all faculties,
somatic, mental, was a breath taken, last one,
between the leap and the crunch, was there
time for another inhale of air, or a let go of air,
at the jump, sudden, legs and arms aflail, pitiful
sails, spindled wings without span, or, in shock,
frozen, neck twisting or trying toward zenith sky,
body knowing a mistake when it sees and is one


2
Too much. An opium den, the din-less nothing
there, could be vacation, even evacuation of self,
purge without feeling or senses but's another kind
of fall - narkosis, forgetting, or one could inventory,
reinvent a life from snips/loops of memory physical
as well as mental records, those movies, those dreams,
whatever may be flavored and scented with some

jouissance...bit o' sizzle...snap th' crackle...

take lean brown or brawn a love for all the above,
even if once a week, sneak, steal away to primed
nerves, drives, swell up thrust thrive then share
a meal, wine, again to lie abed all Buddha smiles
while resting one's head upon suspiring chest
breath sour/sweet aftertaste afterglow bodies'
glorious pure dumbshow honoring the primacy
animal living with and between the teeth the
swallow to follow the heart in where/what forces

the bite

3
leap only to love instead of 34th street,
hopefully in the alley between scrapers,
toward relation jump lurch even twist in
air, love in spite tribal affiliation, of wee
niggling pathetic humanity thinking it is
more than niggling pathetic humanity
beyond facts beyond inexorable animal


4
now itch/scratch I'll with dispatch I'll now agree
to endure, to stay around, not drop out a window
or off a high roof, I'll confound all that dark apparent
nothingness, Dear Incomprehension, that so insists
with my persistence, my obdurate patience and
inherent sense of graciousness derived from my
beautiful stoic brown-eyed mother - her

arthritic elegant porcelain strained through acid
and accedence to no minute alive that had not
harmed her charming as she was in her Georgia
way, though I'm no Georgian unless of Russian
Jewish kind, a good thing, turning in the wideing
klezmer gyre, mystic ecstasis, as the czar then
"the State" tighten around ecstatic spinning, yes


5
I am spinning, yes, spinning reeling spilling
am still at poetry stuck in my craw, evil and
poetry, and somewhere somewhere - Grace.
In spite of my fury pray, I have lived have

witness born ever and ever my life into a
corner no way out, scratch as scratch can,
construct a mountain made of dead skin, ash,
nerve endings' revolt break into rash harsh
extermis dermis raw red crawl itch paths
across corpus, such as are fire breaks to stop
inflamation of spirit beneath within and upon
flesh, calcination without end, like Anne Sexton
confessing, me too,

"I was born doing field work in sin"

So grace can't be too far out of the way, right?
or so the read-ching wagers


6
Still, all this grief, the trees just below me
blossom brightly as the sun has burst from
clouds dark, such shine on such fragile things,
new blossoms flung from branches ripped to
street by last night's high howl (or was that
me) , even this urban crawl space is sheer,
utter, brilliance, beauty...would be blasphemy
not to say it, to give praise as Toni's tumors
grow so large she looks nine months pregnant,
agonized she scratches her body entire, a
new regimen of medicine, toxic sure, that
will surely send, most probable alas, her to
death, clawed skin red, gritted teeth working
out her "what did I do? " she asks other day,
"what did I do to deserve this? "I cry too,
stumped through and through, staggered,
mute, holding her, she struggles to breathe,
tumors press, evil evil tumors, press her guts
into her lungs, less space for air, for life, her
entire body and the entire f*cking crawl space
of the planet entire, nothing but grief, grief,

all grief and quandry. Unanswerable quandry


7
there is still always the laundry


8
still, there, ironically,

innocent they are,

the blossoms are

close, not far


Look


they smell like semen

"and the world wags on"


9
Grace, I can't, or won't, argue

but can welcome. Meanwhile,

Toni and tumors and the suicide

friend, the falling man who chose

such intimate relations to gravity

and end, gravity's end (such is

not a friend of mine but) betimes

I wonder if going on and on de-

spite eternal returns, or so it

appears till our sun goes nova,

blossoms perform for the eyes,

conform trees toward affinities

for seasons, rooted, they are

and remain in place, are places,

without envy of motion, they

even fall or parts of them do

which does not surprise the sky

or dirt, all hurt seems born to

every option, seems to some

how know every plot


10
This I can say with assurity:

I do love things though,

and some people few.

That is not nothing


11
Freezing in a park behind the
glass construction at Astor Place.
Weather man lies re: warmer temps
today. I'm underdressed, rife with
cabin fever so here sit weeping
from cold wind, nose running,
trying to write with frozen rash
swollen fingers, can't read clearly
through tears though I should know
how to do that easy peasy now, a
lifetime of briney lenses. So let all
verb tenses confuse themselves
for seasons


Slovenian homeless schizo man
shouts wildly into his phone, self-
righteous, pleads his case to whom
or what but it matters not in the
dusk as parked city bus now cranks
itself loudly, obscenely, so drowns
the fury, toes poking from cracked
leather shoes. Nothing more to do,
cigarette hand-rolled, deftly so, no
matter the psychotropic drugs,
tenderly, patiently

He stares blankly, inner look goes
nowhere at all but for granite void's
cold rock park. It's all good, or so
recently was said a few years passed

For all the billions of years,
as far as universes go, ours
has only just begun

Grief, Mr. Berryman, not life, is a bore

So,

a bientot

tout et posible

I remain prehensile but tense.

No longer on the fence.


I've chosen my side now in
loathe of edges. Not going
to hedge or even venture a
guess regarding the mess of
living but live, by gods! I will
though I may some day over
spill, fall but hopeful still, in
spite all or nothing, further
into life, become the silence
more on purpose 'stead of
his discharge, this dread,
but discharge I must to honor

the newly dead come to ground