Play Words

Grandma never round upped.

I been sending out this book to agents. Not this book here. This is a blog. This is twenty minutes of free flow, of whatever comes. Always has been. Always will be. 

I want to speak to you of dandelions and the difficulty of believing in the words you write. I want to speak to you of Iowa, of the man who lives next door to my mother. 

I looked into his eyes. This, of course, meant that he looked into mine. 

My mother’s neighborhood is made up of manicured lawns, a green of grass that almost looks blue in the right sunlight. You might even be able to hit a good chip shot from the middle of a yard.

This guy named his baby Leon. My mother thought this a good omen, his having never met my dad. His having moved in after her Leon died. 

I sell life insurance now. But I’m a writer. I’m a steward, too. I am everything and nothing all at once. I’ve been reading about the world of Play-Words. I want to know more.

Did you know that Milarepa pressed his hand into stone and left an imprint? Do you know who Milarepa is? I didn’t until three or four years ago. 

Between implies that there might be two things, that somehow we can exist between them. I wonder what to consider when this father of Leon stands in his front yard with a jug the size of a gas can, a hose connected to this, and a sprayer aiming at the life that is trying to heal the ground where that baby Leon plays. Why does he want to kill the yellow flowers?

I want to tell him the year is 2023. I want to tell him of salads and wine and deep tap roots. I want to do this for the same reason there is difficulty believing in what I have written. You see, there is a false security that exists in knowing.

Inside of us are these different characters which keep us going, which determine our PQ or IOQ or some kind of something that is bad below seventy-five percent and good above this. Though bad and good are play words. All words are play words really. 

There is the sage and the saboteur. And so, toggling between Milarepa and Shirzad Chamine we might find consistency which the ground already knows. The balance. The way the flight of a bird might interrupt the spinning fans of an airplane and people might say, “Those poor passengers.” Sounds like something else.

I have a lot of words that I have written and more words to come. Like these. The ones that take baby Leon’s hand and press it into the grass. 

The next day he arrives at the airport only to be brought into a room because security believes this baby has residue, the beginning of a bomb on his hands.

So what does a crawling baby have to do with an insurance salesman in Iowa? The only answer that I might be able to give you is the consideration of the blessing a family will receive to see their loved ones live long past the paid up date of their life insurance policies.

And so there is nothing that needs to be said. Only a blessing, only a passing of the neighbor and a knowing glance that both of us know everything, that it is our minds that fester and rot like a bird falling from the sky, like limbs and steel and a beginning that you did not know, in that moment, where it would lead.

So when I send writing to these agents, maybe I will mention this blog, that they might come here and realize how much more there is to offer, how the year is 2023, and would they have ever thought this, had they grown up like me, riding a yellow moped to McDonalds at midnight in order to get food from trash and then getting pulled over and ticketed because Leon the elder failed to pay the insurance.

So now, having made it to the end of this, do these words make sense to you?