Self Portrait Poem in a Bottle (EtLL#3)

A meditation on the delicate art of watchmaking, magic mushrooms & love for one's mother.

“Self Portrait Poem in a Bottle,” from my up-coming book, “Everywhere the Light Lands,” set for release via A Jabber Publication in 2025 - a continuum of isolated, fragmentary noticings, formed of intense blips of direct observation. A photographic and notational poetics as relating to everyday experience. (Photo added with corrected line breaks for those not on desktop).

Self Portrait Poem in a Bottle

    Ever un-ceasing,    solar gears 
spin on in the elements, bringing about 
a bright day downtown.     I’m headed out 
to find the old horologist, to entrust 
my watch to his delicate hands.         Time 
is a broad flat lake before me    I enter 
streets like a salmon in flow.        A ladder 
leans propped on a stranded cloud where 
tenements bask in morning sun. 
Bantering laughter    blows down to
street level.                       Two roofers step 
on the stage    of the sky. 
                                                24 years deep 
in the second millennium             and 339 
months from birth!                  Earth turns 
and I enter the store at 650 miles an hour.                 
                         That’s 290 meters a second 
in my existence upon this latitude.
               There’s nothing arthritic or stiff
in his smile    as he opens the blue tin lid
of his precision screwdriver set. 
Lamplight gleaming gold on his face and
narrow neck and sloping shoulders 
where an apron 
            down the measured decades, like a 
second skin     has hung. He bids me wait.
I step on scales with a big dial face where
rows of uncut keys are shining, coming in 
at my standard 145lbs     
                           —all corn stalk 6ft 1’a me!
Thats a third as heavy 
                      as a blue whale’s heart,    or 
one-and-three tenths of an adult octopus,
         a fifth of an Arabian riding horse or 
one tenth    of a grand piano.           I hear
the blue tin lid click shut; I go to present
                                   a note to the counter.
    He shuffles off his stool, as if weighted 
down with secrets, having spent 
        a whole life tweaking and tending to 
time’s    inner machinations—those gears, 
wheels, studs and springs embodying
brilliant metallic anatomies,    that stamp 
the hour on peoples heart’s and tick away
    in eternity.                          But all I want
is a battery change, for fear my life be
cleaved into angles! It’s 10:28 in the year
of the Dragon.      Once more, my Casio’s 
jubilant beep,    tweets! in the digital age!
I exit and the doorbell chimes 
                         and echoes off in infinity.
On the curb, two art school students
                                                 glide idly by,
giant sketchpads tucked under arm
laughing    quietly    in young love’s 
                                                           dream.
They step round a workman        stooped
    down in a pit; the pink-flecked-whites 
of Chestnut bloom    impossibly erect
over all of their heads          billows scent
    in the breeze.
I have a set of stamps in my pocket,
                                       first class,    crisp
and purple. On them,       King Charles II
    looks off to the left, showing us a royal  
elephantine ear    and Roman nose 
                         in keeping with history.
I admire the light 
                            on his sun-dappled jowls
as it jostles and filters in overhead trees 
    to make that sea-sound surge 
                         a million leaves make 
    with shut eyes       I give myself over to.
Here, on this park bench      with me,
                  —how the warmth of the Lord 
    is upon you,    Sire!
I think I’ll post        a letter to my mother.
I’ll post a letter to my mother   who lives! 
    On it, I shall write
                     —Only an eternal moment lasts!—
—One luminous essence, all radiance you are!— I’ll tell to you what the mushrooms told me growing happily in my garden, as the black night swung round a low gold moon, stilled, like time’s own pendulum. That finally, nothing’s so serious the whole world over—a deep faith I can only explain with a smile, a smile in mists of a drifting dream. This is my most sincere conviction, that this life is nothing other than dance!—a radiant spectacle of ceaseless unfolding, flowing unfiltered in fresh revelation! Yet how profuse, the thorns of ignorance—how much we cling to ourselves! I know that you will understand. Mother, we blossom and fade like flowers. We gather and part like clouds, and in the rain-washed midst of this, kindness springs from your grass heart you’ve honoured as life’s true calling. When to behold your face again? Ever suitably bibulous in this tipsy world! Your son. God bless you. Je t’aime XxX