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PAUL E NELSON

53. Nothing Death

A kiss is nothing in brackets.
– Ramón Gomez de la Serna

A poem’s nothing on paper. A stellar jay’s a punk in a western vista. Any death’s an opportunity. One wd sing his pop a harmonium-laden blues w/ gurus and aunties in the same field as genius & uncles wondering what pain’d come at the end, maybe ass cancer. Who wants to write an elegy who aware of the avalanche the ancestors plot who wants that tower card to appear in the reading on mortality?

The Chinese poet wd call it complicated and reach for the buddha roll, symmetry and mold on his jacket, 80 days of rain on his mind, the flight of the mosquito never far, fleas piss the dream clothes as the protagonist chews on pocket cedar.

A goodbye may be more enormous than you know, another nothing, this time between cups of puer, down at the side of the winter river keen in its protective fog its own awareness of grief’s velocity & river duty to bring it all downstream where everyone lives, a grief field flipped to something a more pliable.

Death’s surrender between
Facebook meal photos. Here intellect cringes/
wishes
for something huger.

11:06A – 1.10.12