23 Mar 2021
by davidfekete123
in Uncategorized
Tags: adulthood, basking, life, poem, poetry, seasons, summer, sun
BARED SKIN
Lying on the raft, anchored out from the beach,
Which floats upon icy-cold summer Lake Superior
I would bake in the Upper-Peninsula Michigan weak summer sun
Until the surface of my skin felt hot
Plunge into icy Lake Superior
Feel the bracing, cold water against my heated skin
The sensual feeling, my skin become my consciousness
My consciousness, my skin
In the deliciously chilling Lake Superior water
Dove under water over all my made frigid skin and face.
I climb back up onto the raft and bake off the chill
In the summer Upper-Peninsula Michigan sun
Repeating at my leisure through the passing week-end summer afternoon
We like bright summer sun’s heat on our skin,
Basking as bare as we can in its rays,
And the general warm summer air.
Summer cools into fall, fall freezes into winter.
Who enjoys winter’s brace upon our barely exposed skin?
Extraordinary stimulation excites my sense
Like chill Lake Superior water
Or heat of the sun on bared summer’s body
Or brisk, crisp air in winter’s bite on the barely exposed face
My sensuous face embraces icy air’s welcome winter brace
As much as sensual summer’s pleasant bake on my skin
Or the years that came at me in this early adulthood
When it all lay in front of me and I was ready to take it on
My future my consciousness, my self making my destiny
But I didn’t know it at the time nor even through much of my adulthood
And now, among fall’s gold and russet colors, I think of coming icy air again
22 Mar 2021
by davidfekete123
in Uncategorized
Tags: Auden, Bach, daylight, Easter, music, outdoors, poem, poetry, Salsa, springtime
TIME TO BE HAPPY
It’s springtime and it’s time to be happy
Soon it will be Easter, the happiest day in the Christian calendar
And how can I not be happy with increasingly more daylight
Longer days and I can go on a walk at 5:30PM
And, in time, way north up here there will be little night
In fact, just a dim dusk which is what we call night in summer
That will make my accustomed indoor activity difficult
For how can I write music, read W. H. Auden
When my eyes are blinded by brilliant long day light
And I don’t feel the quiet dark indoors and maybe a candle-flame’s faint glow
Even in recording-studios they play only in red light
The buzzing bright florescent lights turned off and the soft, red light bulb
Glowing to set the mood and I have a red light bulb in my floor lamp-stand
When I practice, I turn on the red light bulb for mood
And light a candle to Sarasvati when I write poems
All that dims with the rising spring sunlight, bright days and
The candle-fire yields to the sun even as indoors yield to outdoors, and
Latin music makes more sense with its outside
Percussive soul and how many different drums and percussion go into one song
And group response chanting vocals because outdoors you can gather in groups
Salsa steps in the open air, and even the piano plays percussive syncopations
And it makes no sense for me to play a mambo all alone in my apartment
Or a güiro or claves punctuate your dance steps to a Bach fugue
Which it does make sense to play all alone in my apartment
Like Bach way up in the organ loft and the congregation sitting still, listening
I live in The Festival City and in summer we congregate by the hundreds
At Bluesfest, or Folkfest, or Symphony under the Stars
And the Mandolin Coffee Shop and Bookstore will soon open its patio
And it will still be hard to read W. H. Auden in the brilliant sunlight
When it is better to hike, bike, picknick or barbecue and even bonfires
Don’t really work in the perma-twilight we call night way north up here
Sitting indoors doesn’t make much sense;–as if there hasn’t been enough of
Sitting indoors, though one does become accustomed
And springtime is always a new exploration of life way north up here
As when, a teen, one by one, I discovered Beethoven’s only 9 symphonies
Sad to discover that Vivaldi didn’t sound like Beethoven
Trying to get over the mini-skirts in the halls between classes
Or at desks while I tried to concentrate and get algebra over with
And I would play around on the piano in my parents’ living room
20 Mar 2021
by davidfekete123
in Uncategorized
Tags: bipolar disorder, clarity, community, friends, mind, poem, poetry, psychiatry, recovery, self-image, stigma, wholeness
My illness once was my life, when I was the bipolar poster boy
When I needed, I needed to know, needed help, needed support, community
My illness was all bewildering—new to a shattered world, my world
When the fulness of my life sunk into my illness
My identity reposed in the drop-in center
When the eyes of all consumers waited upon me
My category slotted me High Functioning: the drop-in center super consumer
When my illness was my life and I befriended NAMI’s salve
My life and acquired competences sent me all across the US
When my story lectured at local, state, national, and international conferences
My recovery article published me in university journal and recovery workbook
When my illness was my life and I was a textbook label, the bipolar poster boy
My illness echoes in my every life outside the doors of the drop-in center
My recovery calls me to thriving stories outside psychiatric textbooks
My illness recurs but ritual chant in archaic language of quaque hora somni pills
My recovery fashions me in the image and likeness of a wholeness I always was
My illness wrapped me in clouds, warped self-image flashing fragments past self
My recovery closes the textbook identifiers written upon a terrible chapter
My illness fades in the clarity now illuminating the mind it once dominated
My recovery lives as a poem, a song, a choir of friends, a cathedral of love
My illness shadows my awareness as a backward glance into the dark
My recovery belies the stigmata that would mark me as unholy, unwhole, ill
My recovery nearly makes me an unbeliever, that there ever was a time
My illness was my life, when I was the bipolar poster boy
18 Mar 2021
by davidfekete123
in Uncategorized
Tags: alone, ambition, bipolar disorder, comfort, friend, identity, life, poem, poetry, psychosis, self
Has your consciousness ever been in blood darkness?
Where the black all around your soul is palpable, though you can’t touch it
And you can’t seem to see through the blood darkness
And two funny guys next to you at the bar—
One sitting next to you and the other—his pal—standing
Give you the time of day, almost care
But not enough to touch you through the black cloud
Encompassing all of you except a fragment of mind
Just poking through into the light, to the two funny guys
They make a joke about Ordinary World by Duran Duran, popular those days
It’s playing on the bar sound system, and I listen to Ordinary World
Twenty years later and I think of those two guys
And how they were almost comfort
I needed comfort badly, all alone with my psychosis
Which my psychiatrist’s professional distance
Didn’t afford, all alone in psychosis and no insight
Little mind available to understand if there had been an explanation
Neuro-transmitters, serotonin, norepinephrine, bipolar with psychotic features
And, maybe, someone to tell me I’m still a person
Understanding’s comfort, any comfort, like the young couple
Who worked at Subway and befriended me—which meant
More than hanging out together, us guys—total acceptance we both craved
And I didn’t wonder about what had become of my ambitions
Like my old friend over the phone thousands of miles away
Made me feel like I wasn’t all alone while he was on the line
In blood darkness, though I was still
Psychosis and its consequential changes in my life
Derailed ambitions, transforms identity, remaking self, patched-up fragments
Changing the way I attack the world’s scarce opportunities
I wouldn’t say I attack, now, as then,–before
And changed direction into the path I followed to here
Becomes life as I know it, self as I know it
Trajectories of identity and it’s not a matter of
Adjusting to circumstances—I, in fact, am the very circumstance
Blood blackness and emergence into such sanity as I possess,
Such stability as content the psychiatrists, which is measured and categorized
Into functioning and I am categorized as High Functioning
Even though to me, 40 hours is a stretch, not like before,
And people wag their heads at me and think me lazy
Blind to the blood darkness following me like a malevolent shadow
And I can’t make them see the light, not even in a dissertation, textbook, poem
15 Mar 2021
by davidfekete123
in Uncategorized
Tags: apathy, blues, COVID, poem, poetry
I finished my Calamari
And as I sip my coffee, I wonder
“What am I going to do now?”
I suppose I need to get gas
Go sit all alone in another COVID-emptied bar?
Go home and sit all alone?
Maybe I’ll feel like playing Stones on my keyboard
Record the bass line for my new blues song I’ve had in mind for weeks
Maybe feel like it
Why don’t I feel like doing anything?
I feel like I should be doing all kinds of things
09 Mar 2021
by davidfekete123
in Uncategorized
Tags: Auden, Bach, festivals, indoors, outdoors, picnic, poem, poetry, Salsa, Sarasvati, springtime
It’s springtime and it’s time to be happy
Soon it will be Easter, the happiest day in the Christian calendar
And how can I not be happy with increasingly more daylight
Longer days and I can go on a walk at 5:30PM
And, in time, way north up here there will be little night
In fact, just a dim dusk which is what we call night in summer
That will make my accustomed indoor activity difficult
For how can I write music, read W. H. Auden
When my eyes are blinded by brilliant long day light
And I don’t feel the quiet dark indoors and maybe a candle
Even in recording-studios they play only in red light
The buzzing bright florescent lights turned off and the soft, red light bulb
Glowing to set the mood and I have a red light bulb in my floor light-stand
When I practice, I turn on the red light bulb for mood
And light a candle to Sarasvati when I write
All that dims with the rising spring sunlight, bright days and
Latin music makes more sense with its outdoor
Percussive soul and how many different drums and percussion go into one song
And group response chanting vocals because outdoors you can gather in groups
Salsa steps in the open air, and even the piano plays percussive syncopations
And it makes no sense for me to play a mambo all alone in my apartment
Or a güiro or claves punctuate your dance steps to a Bach fugue
Which it does make sense to play all alone in my apartment
Like Bach way up in the organ loft and the congregation sitting still, listening
I live in The Festival City and in summer we congregate by the hundreds
At Bluesfest, or Folkfest, or Symphony under the Stars
And the Mandolin Coffee Shop and Bookstore will open its patio
And it will still be hard to read W. H. Auden in the brilliant sunlight
When it is better to hike, bike, picnic or barbecue and even bonfires
Don’t really work in the perma-twilight we call night way north up here
Sitting indoors doesn’t make much sense;–as if there hasn’t been enough
Of sitting indoors, though one does become accustomed
And springtime is always a new exploration of life way north up here
23 Feb 2021
by davidfekete123
in Uncategorized
Tags: children, church camp, Commandments, memories, Moses, music, poem, poetry, Tablets, words, Zawinul
At 6 AM, before I went to bed, music and my memories floated in my mind
My headphones rendered Joe Zawinul’s “A Remark You Made” in amazing
Ecstasy—the live, orchestral version was all clashing, brassy harmonies, sax
And Jaco’s bass didn’t exactly play a soundtrack to memories in my mind’s
Slow wandering and resting—modulating between Joe’s so right harmonies,
And an afternoon at Almont Church Camp transport of tonal modes, moving
Me to holy moods lively, living memories, placing me playing Moses, as if
He had just descended from Mount Sinai and I held aloft two ceramic Tablets
Fabricated by Eric, fired in his own kiln with real Hebrew writing on them
And he wouldn’t let me smash them like the real Moses did and in a loud voice
I proclaimed the Commandments one by one as best I could remember them
On the sandy shore straggled with grass next the pond at Almont Church Camp
Man! Those harmonies hit it! Just guiding the tonal flow into the changes
Of Jaco’s heart-rending solo with the brass and sax of “A Remark You Made”
Ending a good night, musing, music, memories, me as Moses with the Tablets
Eric made and five or so children stood in a half-circle staring at who was it
Behind the white cotton beard, robe, standing there holding up two Tablets
Out of words and one of the five or so children guessed me to be that guy
Who sits on the porch afternoons listening to his Walkman, smoking cigars
Usually joined by a teen who didn’t quite fit in and later aspired to be a poet
And I dragged my attention away from the memory, sad that I’d abandoned
The stunning harmonies in “A Remark You Made” the sax, brass, Jaco’s bass
Fading in memories, back, half aware of the pleasant 6 AM before I fell asleep
19 Feb 2021
by davidfekete123
in Uncategorized
Tags: guilt, identity, mortality, poem, poetry, self
I sink into myself
And subordinate my consciousness in guilt
As if is seems everybody isn’t better than me
I reach a plaintive grasp
Into the ether that is the other
Hoping for redemption from mortality
I lose myself in soul discounts
Appraising identity against my sex drive
When it comes to you there is no other
15 Feb 2021
by davidfekete123
in Uncategorized
Tags: anxiety, bipolar disorder, music, poem, poetry, psychosis, recovery, self
It was such a kick, I couldn’t contain myself
“I’m going to quit school and go back into music!”
My girlfriend thought I was serious and it scared her
We had rendezvoused at The Backyard Bar in Newton Center
Subsequent to my performance on guitar at a Harvard variety night
I stayed in school and gigged through it in a couple bands
Playing way into the night at home, too, alone in my basement, most nights
My drive collapsed; my confidence broke subsequent to
My first bipolar disorder episode
“I’ve got you covered,” my partner assured my broken nerves
Subsequent to him asking me to sit in, and I got through Johnny B. Goode
We played in a band before my confidence was
Crushed, bravado broken
Before my psychotic episode eroded
The self we both knew
Bold, brash, commanding
Years subsequent, we talked, over a few days, about good times on my visit
Performed a couple simple songs we used to play at an open mike
He noticed me shaking, heard me fumble a few notes
Didn’t want to hear my narrative
The tragic episode bipolar wrote for me
Doesn’t want to hear about me weak,
Subsequent to the visit I was on jazz keyboard back home at an open mike
“How did it feel to be back onstage?” Brett asked
“Terrible!” I exploded and surprised Brett
“It was clean!” Brett protested to my collapse
But also said that he noticed me shake, subsequent to my asking him about it
Almost convulsing onstage at the keyboard
Did the audience notice?
As I started the song, I desperately wanted to stop
Run
Interruptus
But the song had to go on
The song I was in the middle of
The song I shook all the way through
All the interminable way through
Shaking
Agony
“I wanted you to solo some more,” my teacher said,
Subsequent to my performance
He didn’t know, didn’t notice.
I don’t play way into the night, anymore, alone, at home
Don’t feel like it
Don’t perform—can’t perform, looks like
Subsequent to diatonic disorder
13 Feb 2021
by davidfekete123
in Uncategorized
Tags: anarchy, assassins, attorneys, guilt, house, impeachment, insurrection, law, liberty, lies, poem, poetry, Senate, trial, Trump, votes
NEWSCASTERS VERSUS TRUMP’S MONKEY BOYS
I saw one of Trump’s monkey boys sit at the Presiding Officer’s Desk
in the US Senate Chamber
Another Trump monkey boy hung from a wall by one arm just like a monkey
in the US Senate Chamber
A Trump monkey boy stood in front of the chair of the Speaker of the House
in the US House Chamber
Desecration
What does desecration mean—de-consecration—Desecration mean in this time
And this age—this age that holds nothing sacred?
Sacred
Indifference
Trump’s monkey boys riot and think it a good time, indifferent
in drunk anarchic party orgy
Dignity
In affront to the dignity all around them
in drunk anarchic party orgy
Contempt
Contemptuous of law, due process
in drunk anarchic party orgy
Respect
Knowing no respect for the symbol the Capitol Building is
in drunk anarchic party orgy
Disgrace
Disgracing the suggestion of a temple the Capitol Building is
in drunk anarchic party orgy
Honor
Honoring no one, nothing
in drunk anarchic party orgy
And the TV newscasters said that they were embarrassed
Look—you’re embarrassed when you’re caught with your zipper down—
Embarrassed?
They worried about what the rest of the world would think
“What kind of message does it send to the rest of the world?” journalists ask.
As if to worry what others think ever matters
Treasonous rabble bursts the oldest living democratic republic
The coup led by a president who craves power as coups will
Marvin Gaye asked long ago the persistent question, “What’s going on?”
Liberty in New York Harbor; her torch beats in every American’s heart
Anarchy’s fangs salivate at the edges of liberty, slinking for a chance
SECOND IMPEACHMENT TRIAL: PROSECUTION CASE
Were it but anarchy
Were it but drunk anarchic party orgy
Assassination attempt
Intent
Murder
But for—
Escape
Sequester in secret
Protection
Were they but monkey boys
They were assassins
But for—
Failed assassins
Their would-be targets escaped
—Escaped—
Senators, Congressmen, Congresswomen
Targets
Insurrection attempt
Treason
They did murder
Death
Steal the election
Discount the votes
Congress convened to count
The voices, our voices
My voice, your voice
Violate me, violate you
Intent
Steal the election
Intent
Incitement
Direction
Lies
Credulous
Incredulous
Guilt
DEFENSE CASE
The lead defense attorney opened the defense
By calling himself the prosecution
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