Poem

Elemental

Dust and leaves swirled around my feet

In the middle of a summer cyclone.

My body was buffeted but I hardly swayed

For even the wind ignores the likes of me.

I went for a morning swim in the big surf

Off an abandoned beach,

After everyone else had joined the evacuation,

But the roiling ocean refused to get me wet.

When the house was burning down

I doused myself in gasoline

But couldn’t feel the heat

While dazed gray ash fluttered against my face.

In the middle of the earthquake

I was the only thing that didn’t shake

While the walls all collapsed

And the sidewalks cracked.

For I was the fault

And the eye of the hurricane

The tenth of a degree before the flash point

I have been the empty void

That flees just as it gets filled,

The vacuum of space that exists

Only when there’s nothing there.

I am the low dark clouds that promise to make mud

Of your finely raked pile of dirt.

Just you wait!

I’m coming for you, to devastate

This bonhomie of false tranquility.

You were the cataclysm that unmoored my ship.

Our thundering hearts remain as aftershocks

2/16/20

Poem

Orphans

Estrangement is worse than being an orphan.

All the missed Christmases,

The empty seats,

The cards in the mail,

Social media stalking

My how she’s aged.

Righteous rage is always

Followed by a funereal silence.

Ostracization, ex communication,

Exile to the realm of the wronged. 

Church doors locked, 

Keep your hands out of the holy water.

An orphan was never rejected;

His parents are just dead.

A blurred picture of mom in a locket,

Dad’s cologne, that last trip to Hilton Head.

It’s worse this way,

The living undead absence 

Of your mom or your dad.

Maybe you’re just waiting 

For the sad news to arrive.

You’ve already written lovely eulogies 

That your siblings, by god, will never

Let you stand behind an altar and deliver.

When it's over you can write the story,

As the orphan conjures an imagined dad,

A phantasmagorical mother

Wrapped up tidy and nice;

Proud of you boy, good luck, good night.

Or maybe you're just waiting

For your own inevitable fall

Flat on your back

Nowhere to go

No one to expect

Except for them, old mom and dad---
The eternal recurrence of helpless infancy.
At the very last, the real thing,
the old familiar faces looming over you,
Smiling in shimmering brilliancy.

2/6/20

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