linux (abandoned) as a metaphor

/home/user/mmc-sdd/partion1/> cd

/home/user/> linux as a metaphor

Partition is easy to understand. Divide the whole to organize the whole. Partition East from West Germany, but Mr. Gorb., tear down that wall. Partition the East from the West Bank. Partition the rich from the rest. Partition my heart from my chest. Partition my hair from my head as I read New York Times. They'll raise the prices still, they think. The supply, the supply, they say. Shove that 'per barrel' up into the stratosphere. The space-o-sphere. The universe-o-sphere. Oh sure. The price will rise to beat the Nile. They slip in from the bank, those crocodiles.

This was supposed to be about Linux. This was supposed to be about me. Installing and running so far is complex. Lines of coded language where simple icons should be. I click the |X| to live in simplicity. Files lost and errors. I suppose this is Linux. Maybe this is me.

I read the paper and I see the crocodiles swimming. Crookodiles swaggering there tails in stuff we live in.

Some King hospital in NYC. Some psychiatric ward with, often, a 24-hour wait to get a bed. Security cameras record a woman sitting for hours. She blacks out – falls down dead. Over an hour later, a hospital worker nudges the dead woman with a neglectful foot. Autopsy shows sitting so long made blood clots in her legs. Deep-veined thrombosis, I think, is the term. People can get it on long car drives or flights. Stretch your legs every once in a while. The clots moved to the womans lungs. The waiting killed her.

Same page. Man and wife have decided their too-many-thousand-foot home is too big for them. Eight-car garage, movie theater, indoor pool. Everything. It's too much. She only wants 3,000 square feet. He needs 7,000, he says. For 31 million, the house won't sell. Economy's falling and real estate has the shimmies. For 200+ thousand and the right standing, you can bid on their house. Bidding will last a month and start at 19 million dollars.

Million dollars.
19.
1 or 19 or any million dollars... Same page: a woman dies waiting for a hospital bed. The hospital will be revamped and hopefully the wait time will be reduced to just 12 hours, a spokesman says.

Is it too much to evaluate myself as a metaphoree of Linux? Linux, an operating system I don't understand in a world I don't understand in a self I don't always understand. Where do I draw the line and say, 'This is how far I'll extend my heart. This is what I will understand'? To the universe-o-sphere? To my fingertips?

Same paper. More middle-eastern villages reduced to rubble. More politics in a bind in Africa. Zimbabwe has it worse than women in some King hospital in NYC.

Maybe.

Maybe it's easier to focus on fingertips. Maybe my hands are complex enough to fill my spare time. It's unlikely that the Crookodiles will ever come snapping at my hands. I know this is because they don't need to. They have already carved their initials into my wallet.

Partition my wallet from my pants. Subdivide and budget and understand this river we're swimming in.

i owe it to myself
i suppose,
in the way we all owe it
to ourselves...
all of us alike in this;

i also owe it to a
wandering star from
middle california
who owes it to
a famous wanderer
who once owed it to
roads and angels,

which were created
at some time or another.

tbcc

i believe in you only on the exhale;
you move out and up, apparently.

dissipate yourself into your true self;
stretch your shape into something more you.

you give your response because
the question no longer applies:

your taste is in the afterthought,
in the search lights of your escape.

east

hold not energy against
Mangala, over early to eat.

these things are happening
to everyone else as well. rice, fish,

roughage as a point which blends, in
Hong Kong as in Nepal; wash your face

and while handfuls of knives prepare,
and while footprints on the river dock --

freshly walked upon
to bring this naked meal

of rice in functionally sewn sacks --
evaporate into the dimming daylight,

and while you mill in the quay of the river
it is all the same. you will not

disrespect his state of mind,
nor your sense of self, nor i.

04.06.08 connection

connection is an assumption
.sometimes there are kisses.
or well it means some dear thing
.kisses are real connections.

solitude is real and solitude is not

solitude is a real loss of connections
.sometimes there are not kisses.
or will there be a meaning found
.solitude is not just no kisses.

connections are real and connections are not

hands are sometimes held
.sometimes there are hands held.
Sundays give no care whether this is so
.hands sometimes make connections.

Sundays are real and Sundays are not


belief

belief might be found inside
who knows
a yellow-flower petal
fallen upon Tuesday's grass
and dew-soaked

her face, her face
yes
it is that sort of day

belief might have dug
its way into a corridor,
or
decided to be no more

don't
you just sit there wondering
where this might be,
believing it is

something and somewhere

sestinka

A man on the corner cracks open an ice-cold Bud;
the summer air is stagnant outside his fixed-rent efficiency.
So, he thinks, this must be the city,
where the people are fragile and the minutes are agile.
This is where subterranean sewers collect
the run-off streams of runaways' dreams – possibly

mixing them with silt and rusty needles; 'possibly'
being a polite mask for 'certainly'; few dreams bud
and bloom here – the rain falls only to collect
in puddles with motor oil and antifreeze; the efficiency
with which it creates toxic sidestreet rainbows and agile
pools of pollution tells him this must be the city.

Hoodie and jeans: his haz-mat suit for the city.
Some tenants are moving out – going nowhere – but possibly
that kind of aimlessness is what keeps us all agile;
so, when the trees down the block decide to bud,
we load a U-haul on a whim, with reckless efficiency,
quit our jobs by calling in late, sick, dead, etc. Calling collect.

High above, evaporated ideals and dreams collect
in crooked clouds above the disappointing city,
ready to purge the polluted hearts below with brimstone efficiency.
"Another place; a suburb; another country, possibly;
but not this city, where my flowers won't bud,"
says some she to some he, with a face purely agile.

In a blink, she turns fragile: less agile
than she needed to be, she stoops to collect
pieces of porcelain, dirt, a flower that wouldn't bud,
the shattered remains of the smallest city
dream ever dreamed by some she, possibly
the perfect epitome of this city's efficiency

to flash dreams in pulsing neon lights, its efficiency
to purge hope from a heart once agile.
Maybe she'll leave her dream where it dropped; possibly
crack a weary smile at it all; collect
the few things that do not and never will belong in the city;
set out towards nowhere with some he – her old bud.

The truck rumbles inefficiently downstreet, past where the trees bud,
over broken pavement where the agile youth play the games of the city.
A rain begins – possibly the best city memory some she and some he will collect.