Feebles in Night, Second Edition

Updated 07152022-110125

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Feebles in Night, Second Edition
Feebles in Night, Second Edition

A word arrangement by David Blue.

Copyright 2022, Extratone Media No rights reserved.

Cover designed by Catherine Trehy and Kaleb Martin.

Second Edition ISBN: 0-692-66135-2

Author’s Note - Feebles

When one finds oneself with a warranting quantity of recognizable talent in word arrangement, but lacking in the discipline required for a respectable profession, I think a collection of this kind is a sort of inevitability. Feebles in Night is the aftermath of some five years of wholly irregular and nocturnal thought spillage and nostalgic memory fragments, but I have made my most valiant attempt to compile it in the definitively optimal manner for reader enjoyment, reflection, or inspiration. You’ll note my tendency to play with wordage - sometimes violently - but such is the privilege allowed me by this medium. From my perspective, it is perhaps the most essential quality to my works’ originality. It is my sincere hope that some soul-derived insight and value will be manifest for yours.

David Blue Columbia, Missouri, USA December, 2015


Lifetime Membership

Belt-driven attic fan, curious Hearing punctual freight trains in the heavens already willing it to rub off Hard at work, building waiting excepting the chamber pot, inhaling cracking leather on the relic

Schwinn over Main’s embossed crossing past absentee-doted bushes over the driveway’s entry jagged canyon two creaking screendoors ...(leaves, leaked) pat the mouldsteps to the twineswing by the naked bulb’s pullchain with the best view of the forgotten sandbox where one could excavate clump’d plastic Shermans and creased Army men under the baby-powdered bathroom’s drain and remember The Bomb and smell death

It’s not good for it Always, Susan Suzanne, at least? I tried to cycle a gritty cap gun but cowboys bore me

It’s just candid cadence so his pacemaker’s ok, right? How tiring Tear a whole day from Kiwanis’ year Examining up and down, an auger under load ...than Ghandi, superior lucidity Asked politely to soften on the organ (pot-luckers absentmindedly exchange recipes and are es vee peas)

Granola flakes on colored paper but Slim was always with me from Peoria, thru-front flaring nibbling on a ham sandwich with a splintry broom entombed by the fireplace under die-casts and lanyards and taboos

Bite me, Cold I’ll stop at the y-lot No isn’t always no

Blacksheep from the secret tower rooms since forgotten stage wiring is infinitely more enchanting than distant cousins’ water balloons

Mesh-umbrella’d cheap labor born around her open switches and chandelier moods

I leave my body for the knobbly ceiling note the Lutheran taffy wrapper in my pocket

Sieve

The swath of energy, constant swivels over chaff and stalk, alike

I come down from the great pinging creature through the rainbow’d pockets of heat it’s already released I’m always thinking about the loyalty of gauges like simple friends or the starchiest click’d acquaintance, they point as best they can to the truest truth of the moment

Communication is never tangible but it can be aspired to through it you can tame voids or in haste, consume the fawn bedded neathe the stalks or ignore the odor until the flames lick out the hopper

Tell me

how the brigade goes earnestly chaining so we’ll visit at the bar later

Even hacking up black dust, I am grateful for my hours of seeing it through the panoramic window of the county bathysphere


I spin with my feet my right hand outstretched if I go fast enough I feel the air on the pads of my fingers A cool counter top summoned in any time or orientation I desire If I could eat it, it would taste like sherbet It’s too bad there wasn’t ever any mystery in the marble smoothness of my own little atmospheric disturbance even when I was too little for my hand to make an audible whistle

To My Little Tractor

I heard that you'd found a new family recently and I wondered how strange it would be for anyone to do with you the things we did once without knowing my name

I think about the condition of your fame as you approach your centennial and what people will say and what they haven't

I remember the day we met and an old white display covered in ashes

I was military marching through a muddy field full of tired old implements

Some had rusted beyond identification Others were clinging to the better side of the line between usefulness and nostalgia

It was so wet, the ground didn't seem itself It absorbed my cold rubber boots They made sucking noises in tune with their smacking against my calves

You sat with your ridiculous face Your fading orange paint

That big black cylinder with the flush pulley I couldn't stop staring at it

Some bolts were missing

Your wide bus steering wheel that left black grit and an old smell on my hands

I laughed at the placement of your pedals and the deckplating noise they made when depressed

I looked right and left and saw your cracked tires peeking above those old gray fenders like shoulders in perfect symmetry

The inside of your wheels attached to orange drum brakes with a mechanical rod

I pushed and pulled your shifter through old gears (without synchromesh) and watched the stale boot as it bent and split, its lips forming some personified embarrassing function

Even your cooling fan was orange, with the belt that drove it

Your throttle looked like an orange thermometer When I pulled it down through the notches, your fan sounded exactly like the great night fans on the grain bins (They could blow me over and hurt my ears)

I laughed, bouncing on your seat, enjoying the beauty in every angle

You were still a snotty little bully among larger equipment seventy years later

Front tires so thin, they appeared useless I loved watching them so much, I once lied to dad and said I didn't notice their sodding of the pasture grass as they tilted and turned

You must've seemed ahead of your time ten years after you were built A cute accessory to the returning soldier's ten acre paradise

The crowd moved about the field, following a red-striped auctioneer like old donkeys A mass of faded hats with bankrupt seed company logos, denim shirts, cigarettes, and Dickies coats

I'm guessing they smoked and laughed at crude jokes But honestly, I never bothered to notice

Though it was a little embarrassing when the mob surrounded us and the auctioneer used the word cute a few times

Oddly enough, we did make a pair, you and I A seven-year-old kid on a tractor ten times that

We weren't worth much to anyone, together or apart

You'd seen as much as my grandpa and you expected to sink down in that mud with dignity, holding eye contact with the old house as it shed shingles, both of you giggling at fate Appear in some old farmer's field of vision every once in a while In his thoughts, even less

The picture we made humored the murder members who'd had enough coffee, and I grew angry

The red-striped auctioneer yelled for someone to start you

I used a whir of little hands to convince your starter wewopwewopwopwewopwop I pulled out your choke You spat black black smoke that smelled of old lubricant remedies with exclamations on the can The whine of your orange fan As your blades turned to a solid translucent pancake

I carefully modulated your controls before looking up with pride But all we did was stop the smiling I hadn't redeemed you much I felt like crying

Somebody told me to stop your engine and the bidding began

Nobody was thrilled, the process reeked of obligation

I tried to figure out where your ears were so I could cover them

But then dad raised his hand and it didn't seem like much of a surprise We'd already been matched, you and I

All the others sensed it too, and went about their business of concealing wisdom

And so, we came to be together Dad's attempts at getting you on a trailer with a slipping clutch bore the first time I laughed at him

I laughed again when we drained your oil It smelled as if it had soured and looked like soupy cottage cheese

I laughed at your darting travel method

Dad called you squirrelly

I'm sure whoever made you was very confused about what you should be Not that it ever bothered me

We mowed a lot of grass I did a lot of sneezing The heads hit your grill and I wondered if you were allergic like me Maybe you wanted some antihistamines?

We didn't always mow straight or fast, but we'd get the job done

Our pace and reliability equally frustrating for dad

Remember that evening we mowed the acre patch West of your shed? On top of the hill, we could see the red sun as it began to hide in the neighbors' beans and you crawled through yellow fescue heads, humming in reliable intent

I know you were observing the moment like I was Maybe you thought, too of how we'd always be together

Twenty or thirty years from then we would live the same scene Except it would be somewhere a little colder where I wouldn't sneeze and the mower's discharge would smell of tea Dad wouldn't be there to be frustrated with us

I'd have my own money for gas to pour under your flying cap

I could drive you to school if I wanted to and show you to all my friends

We'd participate in those stupid parades, milling around town, throwing candy at children, looking our best

I'm sorry to say now I have no place to keep you where I'm living I'd get ticketed if I took you to school (I don't have any friends there anyway) I have no grass to mow and I'm not much fun anymore

So, I guess I shouldn't regret not coming to get you, or my lack of time spent with you there

I know what we had is something I'll be trying to get back for a very long time

Be glad you've aged so slowly

I leave you dotingly with fondness and well wishes I hope you dirty another conspirator's hands and that they will become a friend who will do with you all the things little boys and little tractors should do


Pain is a disease Pick one tree, plant straight beans breathe ...steady ......squeeze

Leaking

creaking plastic camcorder tape the noise it makes red light catch up it drops up the sidewalk the sky is blue under haphazardly-scattered white veins wrapping around the entirety of everything a little less organized than the ones wiggling toward my hands (they weren’t visible, then) everything had some bright label on it the plastic seams itch my bug bites when I slip wobble wheel wing nut chlorined urine on the seat


Everdrear peacing edge between missed streetlamp frontier treeline-plotted arithmetic

On Fear of Death

It’s the smallness of wanton regiment that reminds one of the ever-approaching nothingness and the proximal moments stacked ahead to bar their dusk

The sound of the voice that should fill a last hour and the logistical implications of what if have come to weigh upon me as the leaves turn as the crawling things go, and leave me with peace enough to hear such silence and reflect upon the crowding teeth in my skull and permanence


Eager, on the Milo with his gun hear ‘em waiting for fun for the dust obscuring the dark passing the Lord’s time on a VCR I saved my voice for Revelation on the terrace

Visit

We gave another bushel of apples to the sunroom yesterday, waiting for company to show

Windows are walls, late-rectifier in the country The old house with comparative vulnerability but never stagnancy moving more, always enough for the self to be grape ‘n’ blueberry-speckled ...cushion

.........traveling ......have to drone, clench .........ration attention supper slave, .........nodding attempting to contain escape-seeking Conserve tot lorde of constriction .........time-hung, the vicious ......wiggled ears ‘en virulent miracles

belt-bred

Botany

Live and step lightly, young lovers Live and step lightly, old friend

The bounty deceives and the sea is too deep

Seeds newly, unevenly, recently deposited in the soil black

Walk with your old boots v’d, joined at the back cover them


Searching for value in tiny towns Touching everything, Cheaply .........but I breathe in every whisper of audacity so that I can fill myself up and become something

Summer House

The world is my ashtray dare I seek the sight of the spider-laden sages or the dour children, falling or the new money-filled lake and its endless coves of desperate happening Perpetually breathless, accelerating in a fish tank


You’re the smell of the dusk heat escaping the city and the sound of fresh wind in my ears

I am learning

Virginia’s Place

Browning Locust leaves begin to blanket the little lagoon Tendral-stumps ratchet the bank in place

The ticks have gone away and the corn’s tasseling steadily cozies the world

Overgrown chicken coop rubble surrounds the shed, sterilized by desolate decades

The spaceship’s on the dirt behind the six-row

The old Oliver is my favorite friend

Reunion is always occasion and always as I’d left it


Headed-out sneezing honing noble posture

Black Venice

Observing imagined gondolas on canals through my bluegreen memory along with my own movements in reflection, unnecessary

The rats are real, at least

The romance of far-off water cities is lost on me, and the intricacy of companionship is mentioned far too little when the robin’s egg walls berode cigarette smoke and coffee

Rifles on the stoop Nature in the shag

between sleeping and waking, the viscerally pleasant scent of washing denim for working

Give the rain purpose and rut the soil for a season

Broken week of fever’d bedsickness with a drink of the brittled well’s tenacity Riddling with clay turns bounty to impressionably fickle reality

Earth curves away too soon the tilled horizon and the ill-grated gravel upon which so many have tried to outrun death’s Sunday morning apparition

A little of everything e v e r y t h i n g l i t t l e

Happiness is a full tank of gasoline a new pack of cigarettes a roof for your history where it’s admirable to compartmentalize and discipline one’s identity (maybe it is)

On Infatuation

Mothers on stilts above an energetic boil compressing the stream to break the universe as wholly as I can manage to fathom the distance to mind the gap that is, by clarity, widening

I should’ve tried harder to capture the essence of you but the few notes I knew couldn’t contain your ambition

Only you do I allow myself to wonder under everything, knee-to-chin

My song, though, is ever-growing as you were absently reminding where to reach ever further, still

Escape Velocity

Metronomal knoll-combed clouds approach, suspending persistent exhaust wretch of absent infecting staying assured dystopic .........post-ing tick-teetering defaulted ritual ...martyring ......Croaking up flights .........muttering downwind their stumbles through life

She believed what was easier to believe


Shy’s notice I gave as much as could be allowed in winter’s warm our qualm notwithstanding nigh adrenaline’s nudge Emptying the vacuum

Soul Water

Movement in bitter vibrations about weighted clique in the sooted pit

Selling whatever and approaching some place to be saved, surreal or left or dead but included

There’s a love of the upset condition of leaving the bitterness in the bathroom

Fool me, but it’s expensive seeking and gluttoning the spirit medicine The muse of a thousand obstructions frighten amassed pulled anatomy of cowards to the drudged rhythm

Open something unwanted for wilting wanters tonight

Take it and you’ll thank everything give it all away

What is it, now?


Instinctual attachment to your beauty means I didn’t want to leave the moment I saw you, whirling But you are just a face But maybe you saw me

Savage Grace

Accompany me with your night to our hideaway from pleasant surprise

Glide me through what trees you give move’d about striding cruel stream

I am yours to reflect and bear with noble assumptions to reciprocally know across our existential divide

to divulge few precious cross-corridor smiles to know with only a rhythmic zest a favorite name

Such designed convergence! Such intentful patience! My escape in heavy air accepting as last heir to your sanctuary of apathy or so it seems in our newborn night lit by nearly-familiar intermittent tower lights to reveal a way devoid of purposeless reciprocation remind me occasionally, but not this night

To hum the music and dance in your beautiful retreat with the voice of a coincidence of a comfort of a pinnacle seen in sunlight one more time over the hedge by old plotting eyes that wonder’d in dignified legacy It was a shame

The voice of my dancer sustains necessary function to indulge our wary dark dabbling

Too occupied to sound off for warmth in kind that is appropriately distanced in disgust without fail, instinctually instantaneously

Briskly striding through the blackness without complaint or its language, paced by ancient intuition

Ye sure-footed sage Ye lethal lunar predator Killing as serenity obscured by silence’s sleepy wool

Stitched and bound by effort’s promise

Visible only as correct form to voluntarily carry noble titles through nostalgic undulations


O ’ l i t t l e c i t y o f q u i r k a n d c a l m W h o m o n l y I k n o w t r u l y , a l o n e


Love yourself and go away Tenses meander and play through a churning human sea The taxation of diligence for a reserve that could never be objectively respectable (nor profane) It smooths habitual language to their most dependably honed state

Underbluff

I drove my truck to the valley with a forty

I found a little peace I found a little respite, as had many before me

And it’s in such an affection that I lay

And I thanked, habitually In particular, nobody

And I remember the family in a similar state speaking old words of past lovers that had let themselves go

Perhaps, only in that moment, I wished them well


Stirred sparrow storm Where are your keenest words? Where is your golden drum? Could there be a man less burdened that I, with my unscrupulous song?

Denim Deacon

Barreled playing reminiscent of original daydreams but retarded by bigger desires and obligations If you could choose to return to the place where everything could be wanted, would you? From the position of some limited fulfillment? Risk. I never arrived at the horizon but saw of it plenty, in passing In me, the need to work it to handle it to pull it to yank it around the yard Even test, or give it a go, at least Lich of the heading the shedding behind troughs and supremely forgotten instruments Child of the least-though-of places still a bit insistent upon them upon his own illumination

Regular

By ill luminate the suspect and spectacle of a crowd under that duck blanket the one on the couch the essence of affection is, in fact, with the oldest of us Every distraction falls away eventually for all of us Caught always after in cracks, slipping like the futile cup you attempt to hold well water with Respect and fear play together as they have for ages as peoples of each Holy book, respectively Where are we really living? and is it in years? Can it be held or kept with enough cash? Do you nullify sacrifice with time? Leave it on the porch for the sun to fade

On Collateral

We are magnetic fission Elastic & wishing for the tide to come back

Geologically, I am as unstable as the summer sea

Wisdom & I at odds with mediocrity I cannot ask you to stabilize me

It takes bravery to kiss a ghost, but we have little else, pressing


Vivacious blue kicking up dust making loud crystals Aimless abuse, spoiling in gloom Lively living, rarely reaching My wildest places, all in timing

Southing

The opulent dance on warming current, rising The anomalous pair through the little city, haunting Livid lightning in the gray gloom erratic stings hovered decorum on my sleepy peace Default equations writ the heart-turned-machine prosthetic in jest; hourglass emptying Draw of static sans companionship of loyal light Competent senses, an ultimate sentence when the clouds have so far descended Relentless .........endless Mist of all time, misremembered


Yonder tumultuous blanket of suspended gasses will give us a moment of privacy from the eyes of the universe so that we may languish on the deals we’ve perpetuated with ourselves

Home

Pedestrian solidity is ......past when the grain of the street is swept in my hour

My hour, when the city’s too cold for the lonely and sure and the contrast of the contact you won’t have owns one for a moment of serenity amongst splinted trees and resting doors


Flailing through my second Earth over and over, into you

On Serenity

My silence is cosmic and my peace is the morning I am the mountain and its road I am the unseen envy of the unseen man My breath is rare and my hands are poets You could imagine the Holy night and its shedding When all the energy has gone and the streets are swept, I am life and death and home


I was told I’m not at peace of all things me, not co-existing with the sleeping streets every night while you were resting and seeking them in dreams which you chase away

Not at peace with the trenches I cross every day that I helped dig or the burrowing into the embraceless black like a wandering wraith The bowl of pause I volitiously jumped in

The Other Woman

Delicate whisper notes Fragile crystalline jewels in freefalling tumble down to my lips

They hang there in a minor wail The surface of the pool l rippled into hills Each crest in time with the soft balsa hammers striking my cheeks Light linen kisses


Night is sanctuary and observatory of Ends Day is just the means to them Tick in arc away the rations and moderate considerations I like big claims because I make them I don’t like winding down I prefer to run-leap and tumble

River Queen

An allergy to conviction swells in the bleak face of beauty, cupped in my hands over the fading red-checkered fruitile carpet flooring the hotel lobby

I wonder if I’ll be allowed to slip for a moment and lapse some cognitive energy or if the cultists spy me for a cheap bust of pounding feet

Even so far away, I recompile while the strange metropolis sleeps, curious for the form of conformity manifesting before me like dwelling in the dreary aftermath of arranged comically diverse endeavors


The expanse could be barren or filled with trapped cascading ripples of you Molding the sky to a diaphragm, upsetting my poise I’d like to play my part, thanks

Mint Monk

For me, only? I remember our pilgrimage fondly Our starry Spring sabbatical With the swayful white lady and her leather hugs Evermore we knew for every silent home sauntered by

Only best friends can impart such generosity, wordlessly A piece of fatherhood, mutually

First-hand American grace, originally elegant

Artifactual sage of pure indulgences, lost Neverboring partner in a time-traveling bubble of (sometimes contentious) rhetoric but inevitably adored by onlooking admirers Easy-over the highways under ancient sky Our chance to ask divine questions and count upon sureful answers

346

Cryptobotanical detergent odors stripe the city Luna has just hidden away, but I still see Polaris clearly I’m engaged in my shadowgrave, cresting mist in duality, paved The weary and their cars reviving ......idling I, as them with dew’d shoulders silk-enclosured

As horizons bezel gradients, startlers find no more entertainment in the beat and return with the owls to roost until the city goes back to sleep


There was a different smell that Spring We departed the country, but never left Mutual youthful surreality, kisses in the back seat


The Landing

Nodding off with the river nomads, waking them before twilight with down-come discoursing on Muddy’s simmering thrash

Inexplicable stirring opposite outline’d bank as she savagely deepens Intermittently-corporeal, Bitter-ramp postulate, Ever-tumbling vertigate, Degenerate with a fountain pen and I catch a whiff of past Twain-toddling academic Mark-fetishing (Polishing half-desks with shaving cream) and I give a little tug on the knot that’s tethered me to the quaint little village; The outpost of lamplight on a bend of the widening Missouri


Graceful pressure elliptically to my lips

My hand smalled behind you to fit, us as if

Over Ozark

Faith .........the virus that topples ............hourly wages

They’ve bandaged the road with black toothpaste

We’ve come back dreary doom impending

My skull bounces against the window .........overtime Why couldn’t his skin to the glass be given? They’ve reduced wing-walking, strut-hammocking, and free-loving to bags of salted peanuts and vomit You could scoop the gray from the sky with a fish net

I ’ l l p r a y f o r y o u

My bare feet lose heat from the passing wet wind before gaining it back through the light of Sol ascending above yonder steeple My book’s pages require a defense from ranks of lonely morning spiders though they decrease from all-nighter sleepiness

My thumb rests unintentionally on the transmit button Our jokes are heard but not listened to

Methods methods methods glued together;

Communal confrontation

I break too many things that aren’t mine I’m too often forgiven

The clock on the ashen kitchen wall whistles on the third bird waves of sound carrying the soap smell It floats, Purpose-driven

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