Poem

Template

Gallbladder socked in like a bullet in bark.

Liver left cupped where I carved it out.

Oozes and seeps from the raw surface

But I have tricks for that.

Put it in a bag.

Pull it out.

Plop it in formalin.

It’s not a story to tell

Around the dinner table when your 

Wife and kids ask, “how was your day?”

(Actually just the wife,

The kids have other things to say).

You can’t take it home

Or display it on the mantel,

Not even the yellowed corn kernel stones.

Rinse it out.

Close her all up.

Dictate what you did

Before the details dissolve

In the solvent of repetition.

You’ll never come round these parts again.

Next case same as the first

Just in a completely different universe.

They’re all the same

While insisting on a silly particularity.

I use a template except for the parts

You have to free hand from memory.

Measure out a perfect box.

Now draw absence.

Sketch your best guess of being.

Then finish it off with love.

2/6/20

poem

Decorative Chair

There’s a lone decorative chair over there

Against a wall, facing another wall;

Flanked by a non-committal table displaying 

A framed piece of objet d’art,

Faux wood etched with a scripted “Love Lives Here”.

But no one loves this chair.

No one ever sits there,

To read, to sip some tea,
To wait for someone to find their keys.

Gray-green velvety skin

Stretched taut over a thin cushion.

Armless, austere, propped on skinny mahogany pegs,

Uninviting, forlorn, don’t bother;

You’d be better off just leaning against the wall.

The back seems to lean forward

As if it were itching to spring up

And bound from this room

Like a deer disturbed in the wood.

It looks anxious over there, thwarted,

Unable to become the thing it was crafted to be.

Not really seen, it accents nothing---
Meta-being alone is thin gruel for anything.

It just wants to get out of here, ok?

Go someplace where it can be a chair.

But it’s trapped, unloved, unrewarded;
It isn't going anywhere,

Stuck in a room where nothing seems fair.

1/13/20

Poem

The Fence

I want to be in a story where the good guys win in the end

Where the words get smudged by tears

But you can still make out what they mean.

I like when there is a line break between paragraphs,

Wide margins down the sides of text like promenades

Where I can leisurely stroll, leave my scraps 

Of inscrutable insight for whoever reads it next.

Better yet, to remain frozen in a poem

That few will ever read

Like a fly in yellow amber

Buried in the ground

Or lost on a dusty museum shelf.

Either way, a form permanently captured.

In a poem, no one ever wins.

The good guys end up sort of bad

According to the rules of enjambment

And the bad guys just melt

Into amorphous puddles of metaphor.

Unstressed

Unstressed

Stressed

Free verse was always the doom of us.  

The delusion we could create something

Outside the boundaries of rhythm or rhyme.

This is just a blind grasping 

At the unbroken fence of time.

Prose was always just a way to imagine what was on the other side

While all these written verses are the casualties of the clutching:

The scraped knuckles, the splintered hands,

The valorous, timeless attempts 

To conjure a world without a fence.

1/1/20

poem

Unfinished

I loved my boyhood unfinished basement:

Gray stained floor, smooth ass cement,

The rising red metal jacks propping up the beams.

Unchanged from the day it was born:

Unheated, unwalled,

The deep dank reek of kitty litter and mold.

The girls would spin round and around the red stanchions

Kid palms squeak ratcheting 

Ring around the rosies ring around the 

All fall down.

We didn’t have drywall or drop ceilings,

No halogenated mother-in law suites.

No slatted registers to keep out the deep damp cold.

I’d make a rink out of the floor

Limned by cardboard boxes and crates

Sliding over a taped blue line in socked feet,

Firing a puck at a broke ass fan I used as the goalie.

The floor joists were studded with driven nail points.

If you jumped too high it was a crown of thorns.
Stifled your cries or it was another tetanus shot

The cinder block walls were blotched with the outside wet.

Mom is calling for dinner but I’m not ready yet.

My basketball court was chalked

Out on the gray floor and a red horizontal line

Scraped into the mortar four blocks up served as the hoop.

The arc and the angle had to be just right

When the ball struck to count for two.
Whether it was a bucket or not, only I knew.

Paucity! That basement was cold and damp

And you couldn’t escape without getting

Snared by a weave of invisible cobwebs

That arced across the dark spaces every night.

The basement was cold and dark and damp

That basement of mine

Was cold and damp

That basement

Of mine

Slatted wooden steps:

If you walked down without running

Someone might reach through and snatch your ankles,
Drag you through into the darkness.
I never looked down, or back.

Chains hanging from solitary light bulbs

Implanted in the floorboards above.

The flippant despair of the water softener.

The thin black pipes that dripped

There were monsters down there

Under the crawl space

Where no one dared,

In the dark spaces of a drafty home

where even the children had to crouch.

I had no friends, really,

No after school redoubts.

I was born, it was home, I had no say;

You faced the basement terror

Or found another place to play

12/26/19

poem

Sages

The philosophical sages say a little bit of suffering

Gives those respites of joy a deeper meaning.

But I am unhappy all of the time.

I would like to be unhappy only some of the time

Or at least not all the damn time.

And the deeper I fall into sorrow

The less I even realize

what the word "unhappy" means.

Yin and yang, you see,

Black is only “black” in the context of white,

That regal pine is only “tall” amidst a grove of smaller trees.

Just like if you were happy and content all of the time

You wouldn’t know it, you might even get bored.

Which is why I always thought the theological sages ridiculous;

What with their paradises of eternal blissful consciousnesses.

Is that the best they got?

Don’t swear, fast for a week, pray with all your heart

And the Kingdom of Ennui awaits you.

I’ll take a little bit of sadness, or a lot,

Mixed with an occasional hearty laugh 

Here on earth and call that a heaven.

It may not be very smart.

But it’s the best one I got.  

12/20/19

Poem

Poem #10

All poems are to some extent derivative:

Other poets, better written rhymes,

Real life, just the things I’ve noticed.

We’re all thinking in the past tense

Or deluded by an conjured future time,

Grasping at falling snow,

Mad rush clutching at the last almond in the bowl

It’s not a representative sample,

All these transient things we choose.

It isn’t fair to all the desultory rest, 

The noble, mundane hereness of all the in-between:

This chair I’m sitting on.

The waning moon that looks injured.

That smudged glass holding my wine;

I’ll probably just drink it anyway.

I can’t say that I really mind.

12/11/19

poem

Poem #9

Some poems punch you in the gut.

Others slap you upside the head.

Some trip a wire that triggers

a trapdoor dropping you into the abyss.

Some are like a dive from a tent pole platform

Into a tiny bucket of ice water.

Some force you to look at your own damn face.

Others just welcome you to the club.

There are nascent poems all over the house;

Scraps of paper, recent receipts,
Cramped, uneven, down-veering scrawlings

In the marginalia of half read books, old magazines.

Someday I'll gather them all in a pile.

Strike a match.

Captured afterglow collages of a life 

Of long hot showers,

Sunday bottles of wine,

Hallway pacings, fingers to lips,
He always plays with his hands,

Back and forth lawn mower laps.
Drop everything and scribble something down.

It all seemed so important at the time.

12/4/19

Poem

Catechism

The sound of laughter in a church

Interrupting the silence is the sign 

of a religion I can get behind.

I want to heckle the pastor

When he trips over his tongue,

Confuses his proverbs with parables.

I want the incense 

to smell like urinals,

The stained glass to shatter

So all the air can get in,

Flowers and weeds and trash:

I always have a pocket full of stones.

The sermon is now a stand-up routine

On how not to rattle the bones.

It’s all a busted-up, sinking ship

And you’re clinging to this last raft

Learning once again how to laugh.

12/2/19

Poem

Grim

How do we show courage in a time of laughter?

The same way we snicker before the doctor

delivers his grim, practiced monologue.

Before we cough blood there is a rasp of a laugh.

Before we speak ill of the dead there is a tickle in the back of your throat.

I know how to make her laugh;

Under her arms, between her rib slats,

A pantomime of my own unenviable decline.

Falling face down, right here,

Everything is funny and just fine.

The first wave of the army is hardened by rows of wry grins,

Belying whites of eyes the enemy always mistakes for fear.

12/2/19