((h/t Amy Schumer’s Gratitude sketch https://youtu.be/l5dTdaKdGG8)

Thank You God for Most This Amazing
poem by e. e. cummings

I don’t want to write, inspired by it,
But rather to read it again and again
Until I sink, completely, irretrievably, into
The quicksand of thanksgiving

I want to smother in thanksgiving
Forcing the air of trite, culturally now gratitude
Out of my reluctant lungs

Smother until I am forced to breathe in
The gritty moist sand of thanksgiving
The sand that drowns my lungs
Forcing out the last molecules 
Of easy gratitude

I almost kill myself
Reaching reaching
For the unattainable
Illusory total gratitude
Even as I sink further into
This quicksand reality
Leaving above facile gratitude
Drowning in thankfulness

Though there be no bottom
No slide down into a starlit
Infinity of universes
To then whoosh through
With all the skill of current CGI

I will live
I will learn to breathe in
Tearingly gritty, tearfully moist
Thanksgiving

“The substance of things hoped for”
As the garden sleeps
with tender plants surrounded
by piles of mulch
He plants the bulbs
that will bloom in the spring

“The evidence of things unseen”
Long after the flowers wither
under early summer’s sun
the tall slender leaves
of daffodil, iris, hyacinth and tulip
bear evidence
of next year’s flowers

Poetry,
I often try to think,
Is a felicitous marriage
Of perception and thought
For better or worse
For richer or poorer
And not even parted by death

Because
Capital T, Capital H, Capital E
Soul
THE soul
Not yours mine or ours
Not even gods or goddesses
Just THE
(please, in your mind, always see THE capitalized)
THE soul of everything
Infinity in a grain of sand, to borrow shamelessly
From one of those old dead white men
Who were assumed for generations to be the only ones
Able to express THE (all caps, remember) soul

THE soul is so very different from a soul
And yet, of course, a single soul is 
Every bit as much
THE total soul as 
THE total soul is each single soul
Which bring us squarely into the realm of 
Quantum physics

Next stop, surely, is the illusion of linear time
But the individual soul animating these fingers
Feels the need to stop words and rest
Quiet
Secure
In awareness of THE (all CAPS, remember) soul.

The poetry prompt “What words of love surround you”
Leads me quickly and inevitably
(unlike John I love the unfashionable adverb)
To “Words of love
Soft and tender
Won’t get you where you want to go”

And soon I am not writing poetry
But dancing in the streets
With the Mamas and the Papas

Even though Christine McVie
(she of Fleetwood Mac,
Not Mamas and Papas)
Died yesterday

Sadly and inevitably
Dead
To dance no more on this earth
Except with worms, maggots and other bugs
Until she dances again as a blade of grass
Or a tree root or just rich dark loamacious earth

Impossible that Christine would want 
A dirge: dance-free, song-less
No, not that, but
Perhaps a second line
With colorful umbrellas
Jazz dancing down the street
Behind the brass band

Memories of music
Merge and twist together
As though choreographed 
By Chubby Checkers

Wrap me warm
Bless my rhythm
As my now old body
Continues to dance