![Profile banner image for mmandel321](https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/images.prod.theprose.com/user-127498-banner-1689726146878.png)
![Profile avatar image for mmandel321](https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/images.prod.theprose.com/user-127498-square-1693192133844.png)
All These Animals
(This is an abstract prose poem examining the inside of love as a verb from the opposite direction. Confused? Me too, and I do love you all. Promise. Enjoy.)
They have all these animals running around in the house pooping, eating, rubbing up against your calves, peeing, hay allergies on their faces in various places.
They make noises at night that make you feel slight.
What’s with all these animals?
They’ve got names like Odin and Mittens and Mickey and Orey, and I’m pretty sure the animals themselves don’t know those names.
But, then again, do I really know my own name? Do I call myself by the name Mark? I do not think so. No, I don’t.
Odin’s in my lap right now, licking the outdoor scum off his paws with his tongue. What’s going on, buddy? What’s going on?
He spreads his paws wide as I stroke his fur and tickle his chin.
Bunghole.
I call him, Mr. Duker and say, “You’re yawning, Mr. Duker. Why are you yawning? You’ve been napping all bloody day.”
He digs his claws into my shorts , and I yelp and say, “Don’t do that, Mr. Duker. Why’d you do that?”
Now it’s growing late and I’m yawning and saying, “Oh my fucking god. Mr. Duker was right. Love is a verb.”
Ouray’s Back
Buddha’s son was named Fetter
and he chiseled away
at the spine of the dog
named simply Ouray.
Lost in deep contemplation
but unable to walk,
he sits in his cushion
while the rest of us talk.
We squeeze out his bladder
each morning and night,
and his dung gets divested
while he hums with delight.
Poor Ouray can’t stroll
but feels deeply at ease.
He’s awaiting his papa
while he sits there in peace.
This is all just to say
that burdens aren’t as real
as the joy in our hearts
that is aching to feel.
Li Po Looks Back
Singing
with the sweet tang of pain
still burning upon the ridge
of memory
across the street of wandering attention
long after the facts have been splayed
i still often wonder, then and now,
if a positive influence will be maintained
as the years stretch like
afterthoughts down the
corridors of mind to the birth of creation
and the curiosity of consciousness itself
wends in a different direction
passed bodies and relationships
and music and hope and warmth
passed taste and surrender
towards something less meaningless
than lonesome surrender
passed personhood
and hunger and craving and thrist
to just a simple path being walked
alongside the mountain
in the shade of the sparse trees under the sun
on the outskirts of cities and mankind
when two or three or more
seems impossible to correct anymore
beyond my ken,
a moonlit night under stars
with silence still as sweet and bleak
as hearing “I love you” back
echos with certainty
lost now to foreverhood
and beyond
Beloved
my darling
you carried me freely
as I did you
and now
release
We Is the Enemy
Pogo put the people into a little box.
He tried to be so clever, just like the gold-haired fox.
But then the tide did turn and the fox became the king.
And Pogo lost his freedoms and all that freedom brings.
They took away his pension and his doctors’ payments too.
The fox just kept on smiling but he really was quite cruel.
Those who had invested leveraged all their stocks.
But the fox only rewarded all the warlord hawks.
Then he called the army to take up all their guns,
and he set them on the streets at home to arrest everyone.
They rounded up the parents and the kids who were in school.
And Pogo then watched the fox get up upon his stool.
“I’m going to force you all to make America great again.
And those who do resist me, I’ll put inside the pen.”
The fox‘s painted ladies served him
on the run.
And Pogo felt he’d screwed himself before they had begun.
3 Cups of Shou
three cups of shou puerh to the wind,
my remarkable journey today includes
not only heat beyond the bounds of history past, but working conditions that would make a Tibetan yak blush in fields of golden barley
oh, yay to be friends with thee,
i no longer hope to cope with the
happenstance and vagaries of creation
but now join together with the ravages
of weather or not as it may seem to be
in dreams unbinding in time
know this: that love and joy fuel the
unfurling of vitality that spreads our
hearts and minds unceasingly throughout
Being as consciousness Itself
In the Cool Mountain Air
in the crisp mountain air
longing for the spicy scent
of your dark brew
a half-remembered belonging
that was oh so fair
from a dream only partially true
what storms of mind we be
blown and bent
by the gasps we knew
yet we could not bear
softly prolonging
so we changed that too
in the cool mountain air
as off I went
and you withdrew
Satellite Song
The last time i looked
and it ain’t been long
took a whiles to remember
the whole dang song
gotta shadow my clouds
and i don’t know how
got some stars in the sky
that are bogus right now
there’s not much to it
if you can’t afford
the cost of the world
and the strum of the chord
but we gotta keep going
in spite of the pain
of the downpour of living
and the lack of rain
think i might have to move
once the missiles are fired
since the mistakes we made
about the things we desired
Handshaking
It was in the eighth century BC when Ashur-dan III was defecating in the royal garderobe staring down at the moat and plinking flies with pebbles from a peashooter when he heard a great commotion outside. Hastily pulling on his garments too early, as he rushed from his unfinished relief, he found his brother Shalmaneser IV in the hallway in a great furor.
“What’s wong, Shalmy?” cried Ashur-dan.
“It’s Father,” said Shalmaneser. “Adad-nirari III has died!”
This caused Ashur-dan much anguish. So much so that the rest of the pent up shit in his guts began to release. Ashur-dan immediately shoved a hand below his buttocks to stem and catch his own waste.
“What am I going to do?” continued Shalmaneser. “I so much do not want to be king. I do not wish this. Yet I am the eldest.”
And such was his distress that he almost began to faint, as was his tendency. He truly was not well suited to lead the Assyrian empire.
Without thinking, Ashur-dan the younger son reached out and caught his brother’s hand with his own scat-filled one.
Shalmaneser was so surprised by this that he immediately said, “Why have you soiled me?”
Ashur-dan was both embarrassed and chagrined by his unintended gaffe. But he had a nimble mind. “Brother,” he said, “by this act, I transfer my bodily support and full strength to your reign over our fair land.”
And thus was begun the tradition of handshaking and the origin of the phrase: You can wish in one hand and shit in the other, and see which one fills up first.
A New Sign
A new sign began to appear when I woke up that morning. As I rose, over my head I saw the fluttering of the wings of small tan birds that circled over me like clouds of butter.
They dripped into my eyes and held me there as calmly as a strap around a pole driven deeply and firmly into the earth, reaching much farther down than the roots of the tall scheming trees that grew around my small cabin, while their branches grew up and up and up into the sky, seemingly forever.
I didn’t know what to call the sign at first.
Was it my personal sign or had it appeared to all as all it could be?
The tension in me grew, and then I knew that the sign was only a fleeting, teasing thing, meant only to sustain a tone of wonder like the blue in the flowers I picked as I walked miles and miles along the trail that led from my cabin to the sea at large at the edge of the world.
Others walked dogs and carried little plastic bags in which to scoop and contain their feces and deposit into occasional containers.
But my flowers turned their faces towards the sky in fond remembrance of the vitality that always streamed through our beings, like the sign did now. Until it was gone.
The Nimbus
Little by little, the Nimbus eked into the world through a small hole no bigger than a cicada’s compound eye.
The cicada in question was singing his loud song at around 108 dB and was hoping to attract a worthy mate. What it found instead, however, was the Nimbus worming its way in to our dimension.
It surrounded the cicada’s head, which made it appear as if countless realizers, thousands of them, were peering out into reality.
The realizers were from all times and places and species. Some laughed or cried aloud, some danced (one of them the jig), and some just sat and beamed out their energies like everloving transmitters of Happiness Itself.
And one began speaking—in a deep, resonant voice more suitable to a human than a bug.
“Gather around, everyone,“ it said. “Gather round.”
It gestured with the wave of a wing and then continued.
“Now is the time when you finally must choose which path you will take. If you choose the path of love and creativity, things will be difficult, but you will prosper greatly within.
“But it you choose the path of fear and closure, you will live mostly as underground nymphs, emerging only ever so often and dying within a few weeks of emerging from the soil.
“So, choose well, my tasty lovelies. Choose well.“