It has been exactly one strange year since my last post. Turning sixty, my mother’s death, and seeing the psycho-pathology that is flowing top-down and spreading in this country is in the mix of reasons for not writing poems since last June. Just did not feel right, but time now to stop running away from the work. If I can continue to believe poetry matters and makes a difference, even if minimal, in the world, my summer slide into sixty-one looks okay. Below is a poem left by some anonymous creature who recently snuck into my files (we have no Gremlin shortages), followed by one of several new poems to be posted in the following months.

 

No One Cares

 

This is such a hard
truth to bear. Where
is your camera set?
                                     By Anonymous

 

 

Coming Back Ranting

 

Coming back after disappearing one’s self
has not been an indiscriminate pleasure trip.

It has been a year of hiding in strange spots—
even boarded cruise ships for solo-retreats.

An inside cabin makes for a cooled dark cell—
True, a costly solitary rocking confinement

for a Caribbean ten-day water fast is extreme—
could be labeled crazy by some. You call it.

Stewards to Security on the mega Escape
cover their suspicious intrusions with veils

of No problem: just concerned for your safety.
How many ways can one say do not disturb?

 

It is a little easier to comprehend a lone wolf
Appalachian mountain man nestled in the woods—

much easier to understand his gun’s place too.
A little cabin by a babbling brook sounds great,

if not for this always pleasure-seeking city boy,
now old, liking ambulances at the ready—even

a long love/hate relationship with policemen
skews in their favor with the grey growing in.

No mercy! Fuck the neighborhood loudmouth
saying, it’s a blessing to be alive one more day!

That is a bar set low, old fat man: could be just
a reflex thought. Being at peace with the world

often takes monster levels of denial to delusion.
How many medicate or day dream philosophize

to reach the right distance away from suffering?
Prayer hands Namaste, Metta to you, brother.

 

Difficult to live among people hiding in plain sight;
more difficult than being one? Masks are ancient.

Safely keeping one’s core, giving it a guiltless rest,
watching shadows march by on one’s cave wall,

until ready to reappear whole—looking for more to
find, as well as lose, in the fray is as old as alchemy.

 

And the crowd shouts Introvert! Asshole! Get a life!

 

 

Until next time,
keep writing.

Peace, 
Andrés Castro