Three Poems
Daniel Bailey
Pure Experience
I remember being born
I remember the love factory
Setting itself on fire nightly
How its ashes were swept up
And reconstructed each morning
I’ve forgotten everything else
Even forgetting is pure experience
I know I’ve stubbed my toe
But can’t remember when or where or why
I suppose the why is idiocy
Which is also pure experience
Blessed be the idiot
Embrace your inner idiot
That message being for myself
Everyone on earth has already formed
their opinion about me in the pyre
of their world view
When I said pyre I meant kiln
Today I flattened circles of play-doh
and used a plastic mold to cut butterflies
Then I ate Mac n Cheese on the porch
With my 2-year-old, I mean 3-year-old
Time has been neutered
What time is it right now?
It’s nearing dinner time
Pure experience
If that’s not how time works
then time doesn’t work
One Thought Per Day
Lately, everything is nostalgic, dangerous
I listen to a song I used to love
I am near death
Crashing down a wild river
I let the river use me as percussion
I become a salt shaker shook into the river’s egg
We remember music and feeling
But what of the future of feeling?
Who will push the thoughts down through my legs?
How will I ever reconcile the clouds as they exit the screen?
The memory of having sung
My thoughts bloodied in the wake of experience
The river shatters me in a hidden chasm
Which I ingest via glass
I spit my inner melodies up into the air
“Please don’t grieve me,” I say
Even though we’re just playing in the backyard
And even though “the rain washed the sun away”
We play in the obvious hug of mud
If we wait long enough it will dry
Or it will rain more
And we will be carried down river
Take my head, playtime
My dreams ambered in ceaseless thought
Future oil silks its way through the rest of me
“You are allowed one intelligent thought per day”
I get mine out of the way early
Usually in my dreams
Before I wake up
Which flows faster:
The river of water
Or the blood river of water
And a legal document stuck in the trees
That says it’s permissible
To be as stupid
As the day we all were born
Mouth Wash
Vow of silence
Interrupted by bee sting
I said “Eeeeeeeeeeyow,”
And walked out of the temple
Followed the path to the river
Became a cloud of minnows
Trapped inside a plastic bag
The bag snagged on a log
We stayed there for a while
Maybe 20-30 years
A government of minnows
We never aged, found peace
We argued a bit
Drowned a lot
but we agreed on a common minnowanity
Became quite the beauty of minnows
We exited the bag
We clung to water drops
Evaporated
Found a new home in the clouds
Kept ourselves a cloud
of minnows
Never returned
Never regretted our decision
To never exit the cloud
Daniel Bailey is the author of several books of poetry. He lives and teaches in Athens, Georgia, where he continues to revise his bio.