

Bye-to both sweet stars and bruised apples
if you read this, thank you, and farewell!
And waving goodbye is just as significant as waving hello
but as tales are told
the proverbial hourglass has drained too much
and returned too little
in ways that consumed the house of my health
which caused a beige like sadness to invite itself in
on account of this artist’s neurological inability
and sometime frantic efforts
to read the room’s social fruit
and yield structured normalcy,
reaping instead
self provoked
punishing frailty
but…
this artist‘s heart
was captured by the kindness of a precious few
and in this digital playground
accepted both sweet praise
and sour apathy
while always longing
to be kind and to give away something for everyone
until the overload of painting the soul
in words both bold and meek
bore the strength of crushing internal armies
and why this artist makes it urgent code
to know when the social machine
is something too hot to keep on hand
so…today this artist
waves goodbye
to those gentle few
and thanks the ones who showed pleasant curiosity
and welcoming sweetness
be it in sporadic glimpses
or in open eyed constancy
now…
to the sullen apples…
well, you may be bruised
but not rotten
so…
spin your moral compass
to bring you victory in the age worn art of etiquette
because cold unkindness
will only rob you
of that imaginative sensibility
and innocent joy
that you feel trembling in your excited hand
at the ready, to put out for others to cherish…
now once again to my friends here, please take care
and:
STAY KIND.
STAY BRILLIANT.
CREATE A FEAST OF CREATIVITY.
and this is the last thing to be written
says my heart’s murmuring little voice,
spoken loudly to my pals here:
THANK YOU.
-TGG (and friend)
January 31st, 2025
Bone breakers
I give
because the discomfort of vulnerability
breaks my bones
to add flesh
(and fill in the lonely parts)
with
self flagellation
rebirth ritual
toward healing
my soul scarred carriage
-and this loathsome necessity
confirms
what I already know
(but surprises me still)
-at how cold and impenetrable
some bone breakers can be.
Screaming into the void, once my forever friend
Screaming into the void was raw primal therapy
for him and in his higher
than bonded blue beyond mind
he crowned himself a king
of somewhere hung up on ocean eyes and needle cloud skies
but the last time I saw his skeleton face
was when I made an almost tumbling
exit out his getaway hearse because the breaks in his head
had corroded and burst and
I could never say farewell dear friend
to the best one of all but clearly his pride
was a ruined song left soldered sonic melted plastic
buzzing burn that perfumed dirty death on the wingless crippled
beetle breath that spied out his black hole of a mouth
oh the things he screamed made him shake and flattened stars
someplace somewhere other than here and now
and I miss you my sad friend but how I still love you
just as you are
just know that the trade off with your ecstasy of knowing too much
is your inability to survive even the little stones
thrown at your diamond skull and lampshade skin heart
but I love the way you burned your outline
as a piss off to the stars
because the night enlarged itself to accommodate
your unrestrained shadow
and you still cut such a wounded smile
when I need reminders that all was not lost.
Three Bad Eggs
They sidled through the hatchery of carcasses and boiled
bounty of plenty, where faceless jars and cans all blurred
into a snail crawl of tedium and blank stares that looked at the
overhead lights like they were thirsting for a mothership or
some golden sun to blast back from eons ago or a dusty voyage
but they kept walking and their pace was like mall cops denied
respect and dates and their pulse quickened.
she was the first to notice his body and he was the first to notice
that nobody else had noticed what was unmistakably clear:
that the deli counter clerk had fallen over gross plastic tubes of
air conditioner absent bologna and sheets of congealing cheese
and the flies had come not for his soul but for the wasted plastic
that was marketed as food.
She started to dart like a fish from being stabbed through the
rippling stream magic mirror and he checked the clerk’s clammy pulse
and the clerk was barely alive or was once dead but crawled back to life.
They started to lose their shinola but realized that fussing to a fevered
scream was about as useful as selling Elvis earrings to Bostonian bankers
or convincing sons of the soil to invest in bitcoin and solar panels
so they carried the poor moaning bastard through aisle 6 right up to 10
and used his ghost like face to batter open the outside door.
They dropped him without grace next to a puddle of piss, checked the poor
bastard’s wallet, raided his pockets and lint fell out like funny cosmic clockwork
to let the detectives on scene have a clue of some sort I guess.
Anyway, they picked up their walk away from marooning the deli clerk who
was 2 days late for his bridge club where he was supposed to get an honor
of some kind and turns out that the deli clerk lived and identified the couple
as the 2 mall cops he had mocked on Saturday night and it was just all a
weird cosmic mind melt that karma grabbed all three by the nuts because
the clerk went to jail for possession and the couple for thievery and all in all
they were the real bad eggs in the grocery store, even worse than that liquid
dog foul they call egg beaters on sale for $3.
Empty Backstroke
Half cup empty and half cup full miracles
are where small leaps of faith have their birth
and dance out of my cup
leaving liquid spell trails of both doom and joy for unhatched dreams
hungry for tomorrow’s tide which pulls me out piece by piece
doing a fallen angel’s backstroke in an empty sea
full of great nothing