"Pending" and "Top Floor"

Pending

It’s the twelfth of December and no one is stirring.
Not even.  Pay for the best people and the best
people will come.  Except those who won’t be
bought, have already been, or operate along
another scale of value.  Hunkered down.  Not
on the gold standard.  Likes shiny things but
they need not be silver.  Graphite can cut like
a knife.  Tales are told and don’t know which
are which.  When a youngin is struggling we all
struggle.  How long did that take you?  Long enough.
Greeks and their sense of timing: kairos & chronos.
I guess we’ve been reading the same sources. 
Measured and experienced.  Once upon a time
I was in the French Air Force.  When I go home
it's like traveling back to the 1950s.  No internet.
Not even phone connection, really.  I can’t really
work there.  Which could be good.  But I don’t
want to be in the way.  They’re saying don’t come
now.  Everything will be fine.  Just come as planned
in February.  You see I don’t want to go over there
and then be stuck.  I know people who have done
that and now can’t leave the country. 
We have
Wild Lights at the Zoo planned.  There will be
200 people to join the animals in residence.  They
have a great deal, it appears.  They do animal things
and then get to live there.  They do also, however,
zoo duties, which is pretty much a whole other part
time job on top of their full time jobs.  Plus there is
the usually unpaid work of being an animal. They
are such so.  Animals have instincts.  We recognize
what we know.  It takes one.  To know one.  We
have a feeling about it.  I remember this from two
million years ago.  It’s just a sense of things we have.
Don’t say just.  Don’t command people.  Do as I do,
not as I say.  One’s just sold and another is pending.

 


 

Top Floor

Your own conversation goes on
even as now you know they’re there
And you anticipate a time later
when you might converse, but there’s no hurry
We’ve got all evening
and you just arrived a bit ago.
 
They’re talking away
nothing urgent, nothing Earth shattering
but substantive nonetheless
like an old idea worked around from a new
vantage point.  Did you hear about?
One thing I’ve been wondering about is.
Another thing they talk about is how.
I see what you mean, but I’m also thinking that.
 
Tennis talk.  Hop gently around
It’s mildly rigorous, mostly for fun,
a bit of exercise and an excuse
to be out in the fresh air, when people don’t
want to just sit, but somehow do something.
 
We could diagram it all out but better still
would be a portrait that is one if you say
it is.  It’s yours and yours is the saying, so
say you.  D’accord, and fly.  A sketch
has become a model has become an image
made for large commissioning.  Get thee to
an office.  There is a foundation for you.
And things are being said to do things
all around the edges on the top floor.

 

 

Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter

Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter, PhD, MA, teaches at a public university in North America and consults/coaches at Sollars & Associates and independently.  Benjamin is the author of Death in Documentaries (Brill, 2018) and Explaining Jesus (Lexington / Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).  He co-edits Cruel Garters, a contemporary poetry publication.  Benjamin recommends The Life You Can Save.

 

Edited for Unlikely by Jonathan Penton, Editor-in-Chief
Last revised on Monday, May 15, 2023 - 09:30