poem

 Olden Days of Yore

Poems are like embarrassing old photos of yourself

They only feel any good in that 10-12 minutes

Just before you publish it

After that it rots quick. 

You can't stand to see it 

Sonnet? Looks more like a mullet

Enough years go by and it starts to hit a little different

Nostalgia sets in, lo, those olden days of lore

Not an embarrassing spectacle anymore

Merely an article of fact marking how things used to be

You were neither as cool as you thought

Nor as ridiculous as it seemed

Whew! In any event, that was a long time ago

Even this moment has the makings of someday

Becoming the nuts and bolts of another poem

11/19/24

poem

 Poem #49

There is the deep abiding fear 

That we are uniquely alone

That not a single being 

In the universe experiences

The world quite like this.

A good poem winks 

At the estrangement,

Beckons come hither—

Ever think of it like this?

Maybe it’s just you

11/19/24

poem

 The Entertainer

It started as an act of whimsy—

Whenever I saw a group of people

Facing the same direction

Silently waiting for something

To happen, like a professor to show up for class

Or a receptionist to call their name 

I would rise, stand before them 

And begin to entertain.

The first time was a long narrative joke

Involving summer squash, a mastodon and Farmer John

But I blew the punch line. I fucked it all up. 

After that I got better—

Acquired patience, developed a drawling cadence

And a better sense of timing.   

When the laughter died down I would tell another

And then another and another it became a goddam stand up act 

But I got tired of only jokes.

I began to lecture on things I knew or had recently read about—

Plate tectonics, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics,

The rationale for extended lymph node dissections in gastric cancers.

Word got out about me, let me tell you. 

It turned into a nice little side hustle. 

Doctor’s and dentist’s offices came calling

There was steady work at the DMV

I even worked a few funerals. 

But I ran out of pure knowledge and stopped being funny and had to take things in a completely different direction

Didn't want to become repetitive or even derivative.  

Delusionally, fancied myself some kind of artist?!?!

I began to theorize origin stories of every lasting cliche 

A man in Kyoto who had a bird in the hand but two in the bush 

And starving twins at home 

And a beautiful girlfriend on the other side of town.

The critic who ran out of time and judged 

The first folio of Shakespeare by its cover 

The clueless young doctor who once told an anxious wife

That every cloud has a silver lining

Just as the overhead PA beckoned Dr Parker to please call the morgue.

I ad libbed lyrics for songs that aren’t musically possible to play.

Rendered soliloquies of random middle class bros 

Lamenting their life’s lack of any real tragedy.

I would stand there in waiting rooms in bus stations on intermission stages

And do my best to entertain

All those condemned to wait until their name was called

Or it got late and lights turned off and everyone just went home.  

One day I ran out of things to say entirely—

Totally unplanned and unexpected. 

It happened at a Giant Eagle MarketDistrict

(Which is just another kind of super-duper supermarket).

Just when I seized the focal point of attention 

All I could do was smile wryly

While my mind went utterly blank.

All these people in the checkout line

Thought I was the bag boy 

And not a very industrious one, at that.

But no, I had been hired to amuse and distract.

I’m standing there mutely even now 

Waiting for the perfect moment 

When the customer takes their receipt

To tell them the secret

That will either change the moral arc of their life 

Or at least reassure them that, yes, we all get it 

It’s all rather absurd, yes, yes indeed, yessiree.

I’m the quiet guy standing alone at a party, pretending to be interested in a plant

I’m the idiot walking his dog with a bungee cord when you gaze out your window

I’m the love of your life, across from you at dinner

Too tongue tied to speak, for your beauty and your eyes and your bottom lip….

It’s all part of the entertainment 

11/19/24

poem

 The Nonchalants

The nonchalants have taken over the world 

One half hearted shrug,

One distracted sigh at a time. 

They live in lemon yellow mansions

Stanchioned by pilings driven into bedrock

On golden coasts ravaged by maelstroms.

All around them a town lies in ruins.

After yet another cataclysm passes 

They are the last ones left standing,

Sipping wine, trying on floppy hats,

Nibbling crab gruyere hors d'oeuvres, 

While idly chatting about news they’ve heard

Of federal disaster relief corruption.

They barely glance at velvet sunsets

Picture framed by bay side verandas.

The photos get posted on Instagram:

#FloridaStrong  #InThisTogether. 

Jet engine whir of whole house generators

Drowns out the wail of beach wanderers

Trying to find everything they once owned 

Sandbags stacked on the sidewalks

Prompt them to post 

About “our resilient little community”

On all the social medias 

Followed by a series of selfies taken with hubby

From the balcony of the Ritz Carlton in Orlando.

They turn fathers against their children.

As a practiced act of self-regulation 

They stifle yawns when you tell

Them about student loans 

And rising insurance premiums.

The origin story goes:

Someone got a hand out,

Another one cheated.

But when they were young

They didn’t get anyone’s help 

They did it all alone

(as far as they recall).

In life there are winners and losers

That’s the name of the game.

In the end all you see is a scoreboard

As the clock ticks down to zero.

Everything they have has been earned

Every win fully deserved 

Luxury is a referendum on a life well lived 

Poverty is the purgatory of the merciful god. 

Even near death they remain nonplussed 

It’s just another distant event they saw coming 

From a million miles away

When the rabble wasn’t paying attention

Like cryptocurrency or soybean futures 

The only difference being death is still a long way off

And why wouldn't it be?

They’ve never been wrong before.

Besides, it would only interfere with plans

Next month at the elegant Broadmoor.

11/16/24

poem

 The Defeated

I gravitate toward the defeated.

My community is anyone familiar with loss. 

We commiserate, lick our wounds,

Get strong again and rise.

Look around, we’re not alone

We see it in the whites of all our eyes.

Next, we’re making love and forming clans

Pledging loyalty and everlasting friendship

Surreptitiously sharing the same hopes and plans.

But do not mistake us for a bunch of losers 

We are only talking here of loss

And its fellowship of impoverishment.

We are the living homage

To everything once cherished,

A band of broken hearted brothers 

And sisters circling the wagons

To guard the last dear thing

Each of us has ever won

11/14/24

poem

 Consciousness Explained

Consciousness is measurement.

Nothing more than that

Dials and gauges

Balances and scales 

Awareness is the language of laboratory—

Volume and height

Length and size

Hardness

Hotness 

Charmless 

Love letters that ramble on for 8 pages 

The 37 shades of blue

Radioactivity

The brilliance of your crescent smile 

The melancholy of the moon

The sharpness of the knife

And the pain of the hidden wound.

The number of days until all this is done.

Megawatts. Nanohertz.

The voltage of your touch.

My boiling point in degrees Celsius

Even emotions are merely measuring.

Sorrow is the great distance

While happiness retains absolute proximity.

Anxiety is thinking every tiny little thing must be weighed 

Boredom’s finding out everything’s already in the ledger

Mirth is realizing the instruments are actually broken 

And rage is totally forgetting how to measure.

What is love, then, in this realm of pure calculation?

Love is a ruler that gives the same value

No matter where you are, relative to me. 

It needs no calibration—

In my arms or trapped in thought bubbles

On the other side of the universe,

The answer shows no variation.

I always know exactly where you are 

A distance that never alters 

You’re always this far away from me—

The measurable limit

For as close as you can be

11/7/24

poem

 Involuntary

I drag my past around like the empty half of an iron shackle

Clanging behind me while the other end cuts into my ankle

Despite the crud and blood and junk it’s accumulated

Over the years, it doesn’t seem to slow me down

Sometimes it feels like it’s attached to another person

And I’m responsible for all the dead weight

Admittedly it’s a much heavier burden now

But I move as fast as I did when I was 26

Over the years I’ve developed specialized muscles 

To power this steady forward progress

They’re involuntary, like the heart,

And they can’t be used for anything else

11/7/24

poem

 The Map Room

We don't fit together like lock and key

We lack all adjacency

You have to take a step back

Acquire a bird’s eye view

All that space between us 

Is part of our shape too

I know you get frustrated wondering what I’m thinking

I’m thinking if you put your hand right here 

And I reach for your hips

We make a peninsular nation

Jutting into an ocean 

With its capital buried in ash.

Move your left foot just a fuzz

And there’s a door between our shins

That opens up into a vast map room 

Where we go to browse the atlases

And find the geometries of our life. 

11/7/24

poem

 Wilderness

Found myself surrounded by people who all seemed to like themselves. So I escaped through a trapdoor of my own despair and fell down into a brightly lit room with a basic table and on the table a single orange. From one angle the orange looked like a plastic fake. From another it appeared real. Either way I wasn't in the mood. A door opened up onto a single lane road that extended to the horizon, undulating over gentle hills. There was nothing else to do so I followed. The sun was hazy. The sky looked like dirty sea. No birds. No animals. No trees. I suddenly had, what was for me, a bit of an epiphany: This was all my own doing. Everything here was just as it is. The only thing to do was accept it. I reached for a glass of water I knew would be there and of course it wasn’t. I drank it anyway. Above me the clouds parted and God appeared and started to apologize but he wasn’t talking to me. Just in case they suddenly noticed me loitering in the middle of their very private conversation, I pretended to be working on a poem about the scoliosis of the earth’s spine. This whole time I was walking. Once I get started it takes on a life of its own. One step after the next through a landscape of brutalist unoriginality. I would have killed for a single weed. Before too long I found myself entering a dark forest that, depending on how you looked at it, had millions of well trod paths or unfurled as pure wilderness. Of course both were true. The paths are limitless but I could only choose one. I rested for a while on a rock flecked with so much moss it looked infected. I could hear the faraway murmur of falling water. Either that or it was the room above me where all the happy people were probably talking about what to do with me. The longer I rested, the less I cared about their proposals and solutions and the stiffer I became. Not arthritic,old man stiff. More of a languorous immobility. I felt myself rooting into the soil. I had lost all desire to move. Only to grow, to be swayed by an independent force that never stopped to consider its own provenance. If they were to come looking for me here they’d walk right past. I was becoming something else, unrecognizable. This is how forests get made, I suddenly thought. Maybe I was even starting to like myself. 

11/4/24