poem

 The Dead Don't Dance

The old dead trees don’t move an inch

In the summer gusts

At most a doddering stiffness

The punch drunk stagger

Of an old prize fighter

While all that whirling curving sway

Of green limbered branches

Whooshing in the winds around them

The dead don't hear the music

Only the living can dance

Brushing the dust from the air 

In billows of undulating rhythm 

Only the black crows pay me a visit

Perched high up on skinny brittle limbs

Cawing back and forth like estranged sisters 

The song birds never alight here

Only scavengers allowed

Scanning the fields for carrion

Before launching their diving attacks

I pray for a storm

The violence of wind 

To snap my hollow trunk in half 

7/14/22

poem

 Narcissist

I think I’m pretty interesting

Someone worth getting to know

I’ll sit and hold your hand

I'll try not to let you down

I notice when you’re sad

I pay attention when you speak

I'm not exactly criminally underrated;

Maybe a blip just off the radar

More a flash in your peripheral vision

A rough draft version

Of an eventual revision

You might tape to the corner of your mirror

I have a few assets. 

I think I’m ok

I think I’m doing ok.  

I'm afraid to say it out loud

Someday I’ll ask you if it’s true

But I’d never insist

I’ll leave it here in a poem

Lest you think me a narcissist.  

7/12/22

poem

 Genie

My plan if I ever got my hands on a lamp

Would be to ask last for three more wishes,

The classic cunning ploy of the rascal,

The dumb kid who doesn’t know anything

About love or loyalty or friendship,

Who'd say it with a conspiratorial smirk.

Of course the genie wouldn't dig it

A thousand years locked inside bronze

And some wiseass is gaming the system.

The disappointed disgust on his face would 

Dissuade anyone from taking advantage.

Probably just let him go, never see him again.

It’s another one of those gutting lessons of life:

Some people will offer you the world

Or at least everything they have to give 

And you’re the blind jackass to the core

Cynically calculating all the angles,

Always holding out for more.

7/11/22

poem

 Heaven

My son asked me what heaven was like.

For his sake I hope there is one.

Not that I’m expecting to spend much time there

Nor do I think I would even want to.

I just need to know it exists

Somewhere up there beyond all this.

I’d be content to lie on my back

On uncut grass on a warm June day 

Bees buzzing in and out of the milkweed

Leaves politely applauding in the light breeze

Just gazing upon the blue expanse

Slashed with wisps of white clouds like terrible mustaches

Until I was able to suddenly see through 

The best that reality has to offer

And recognize there’s something even better—

A sanctuary for all I’ve loved and lost

With room for all the good and kind and soft

Hearted people of now, the past and all to come 

Doing whatever it is one does in heaven.

I don't think I belong there,

Not that a hell would have legitimate claim 

Either, but give me an afternoon like this

That’s all I would ask

A few hours spying on Paradise

Just to know it was there

So I could tell my boy.

That’d be enough, that would suffice  

7/10/22

poem

 Ghost Cave

My mouth is a cave where sounds won’t echo

Even the yelps and wails get muffled 

I’m just a hole in a stone wall

That only bores halfway through

Wandering down my dead end path where

Silence and darkness have shuffled

Won’t get you to the other side

There is no side. There isn’t a wall 

I am the ghost of absence

I’m what the universe points to

When it asks itself what it isn’t 

So it knows the extent of all that it is

7/9/22

poem

 Teague

In college Teague told me

I had to get an identity

I was pissed

He’d seen right through me

That I was a fraud

An emulator

Devoid of substance

A clever fake 

So I went out and got one

More my style

A witch's concoction

Of weirdo loner intellect

But then that one

Got a little stale

So it had to go

I found another

Churned through 

A whole succession

Of ill-fitting personas

Recycled a few of the old

Meanwhile time passed

I did this and that

Made a family

Bought a house 

Figure I’ll run into 

Teague again someday

How could I forget that shit-eating face?

Sit down for a beer, get soused

Tell him I’m back to square one

No clue who I am

I hear you man, he’d say,

Sort of in the same place.

We’d part ways

A good firm shake 

And head home to the ones

Who could tell us what we’d become 

7/7/22

poem

 Op Note XXVI

I like to think I’ve gotten better at this as time goes on.  Fifteen years a surgeon, you learn a few tricks.  Whip out a gallbladder lickety split. Slide smooth along the planes of action. Spot the hidden vessel before avulsion.  Some cases it’s almost elegant.  But never anything close to art.  The best we can get in this gig is mechanical, the cold uncanny beauty of something approximating a machine. Actual machines of course are never beautiful.  Awe inspiring, maybe. Useful. Precise. Remorseless.  A hint of indescribable dread. Dogged relentlessness. The perfect soldier, in other words.  Art is something else. Only we can do it. But once you strike those heights how do you match it?  Do it again, someone says.  Only “again” isn’t enough.  It has to be something else; higher, better, more extraordinary.  Imagine that, toiling away the rest of your life in the drudgery of mediocrity when only the sublime counts.  End up like Hemingway, never evolving beyond that perfect first chapter of A Farewell to Arms, the dust powdering the leaves of his trees, repeating himself in ever more derivative patterns, down-spiraling into self parody with a shotgun poised against his head.  Me, I could operate all day without a single glance toward posterity.  Line ‘em up. One after another. Fill up the foreseeable days. No one pays to watch. It’s the work of the preservationist.  Nothing destroyed, but not a single act of creation. No manuscripts to self loathingly burn. No canvases to smash. Just this: a morning clinic followed by an afternoon of bread and butter cases. Then, inevitably, ER add-ons that take me far into the night.  I’m not a machine but it's pretty damn close.

7/5/22

poem

 Porthole

Love is a porthole

In the giant iron box

We’ve all been born into 

First you find an embrasure

To see what everyone else sees:

This is a tree

That's a dish washer

There’s a squirrel

This, we call a street

All that above is blue

While below we deem green 

Millions of tiny gaps

In the firmament 

Of isolated lookingness

Gazing out on the world

Agreeing on a language

That is cold and precise 

While love is a less lonesome view

From a rip in the screen

Shared with someone like you

Where I can say

You know, the grass 

Today has a purplish hue

Dusted with splashes

Of blooming clover 

And you touch my hand

In a gesture of assent   

Which means:

Yes my love,

I see that too 

7/2/22

Poem

 Van Gogh

At the Van Gogh exhibit she 

Turned to me and asked why

All the great artists seemed to succumb 

To madness or suicide.

Bruised swaths of despair swirled 

And looped into skies of trembling flesh.

I saw that her forehead had coiled 

Yellow into a writhing full moon.

Everything was vibratingly alive,

Walls melting into the floor

And I was now part of a screen

Where everything played out.

Every color

all the forms

that Thom Yorke song

I recalled the dive bar

Packed with squinty-eyed derelicts

In scuffed boots and flannel shirts

Where we’d stopped for a cheap drink.

We felt like interlopers

Trespassing on burial grounds

Traipsing around in the frontier slivered 

Between debasement and transcendence 

Between the broken and the healed

The limp and the lame

The sadness and acceptance 

The imagined and the real

I whispered back that some whorled 

Souls experienced the world

Exactly the way the Creator 

Had always intended 

But the world pushed back

And made them feel weird,

Taught them to believe such

Whirling visions were things to be feared.

6/29/22

poem

 Reunion

By a fluke of circumstances I was able to meet up for lunch at a trendy downtown brasserie with my past self and future self.  We didn’t know what else to do. Neutral territory, I guess.  Have a few drinks. Break the ice. The comfort of knowing there would be a well defined end. Split the bill, I assumed.  I certainly wasn’t inviting them to my house. Act like they owned the place. Drink all my wine. Make fun of my shoes. Try to fuck my wife. Golf was out too.  Past self played to a 10 handicap but I hadn’t swung a club in years.  Future self didn’t like his chances, given current trends. We thought about meeting at my old childhood neighborhood.  Walk around the black top streets like three weirdos, shooting the shit, cracking a few jokes, getting all caught up, remaining reasonably sane. Future self lagging slightly behind, unfamiliar with this terrain. But past self said that wouldn’t work either.  The closer he gets to his beginning the more unstable he becomes. He starts shape shifting.  One minute a 10 year old boy sniffing the leather of his old hand me down baseball glove, the next a lonely 19 year old calling dollar a minute singles want ads from his father’s office phone, turn your head for a shake and then he’d be a 4 year old boy lumbering around a yard with a giant yellow plastic bat bothering all the adults at the party to pitch to him then transforming into a 23 year old ex-frat boy with a copy of The Sun Also Rises in his back pocket at a bar, hoping by chance some cute razor witted girl would notice and want to strike up a little friendly conversation vis a vis what he really thought of Lady Brett Ashley then getting sucked into the mind of the 34 year old man fully resigned to a future he'd have to fake his way though.  So distracting.  Old me and me fell into an easy rapport, though.  We had a lot in common.  He was a little worried I’d be mad at him for a few things but it was funny, the things I was angry about he couldn't even remember and the things he was worried about I just started laughing. That girl? You didn’t even know how to spell love then.  Besides, she had a lazy eye.  She was from Missouri. And she was obsessed with Koi ponds.   It would have never worked. And that time you turned your back on writing the Great American Novel?  No worries. I ended up a surgeon. Which is pretty good, not spectacular, but not a bad consolation prize. And that manuscript you were working on really sucked, man. I mean, unreadable sucked. First thing you use for kindling on a desert island sucked. Out of paper, need to print this somewhat important document oh here's a stack of pages someone left we'll just print it all out on the opposite blank side sucked. Future me seemed a little standoffish.  He didn’t speak much.  Sort of a cipher. To be fair, he technically wasn’t really quite there.  His time had yet to come.  But we always knew where he was.  Always aware of his impending presence. His future judgment. Of course, I'm future self to past self. Past self doesn’t even know there’s someone beyond me. I promised not to tell.  Of course I got stuck with the bill.  Past me pleaded inflation.  Future me didn’t have a body let alone a wallet. At one point it was clear he had gone.  We knew he couldn't be far. I left the tip and we went chasing after him again, spilling ourselves headlong out into the darkest of nights. This time we were guided by stars. 

6/27/22