poem

 Secret Third Thing

Some mornings the sky is an impressionist painting steeped in violaceous streaks of timorous soft light. I pull over to the shoulder to snap a picture with my phone but the result never quite captures. A ginned up pick up truck veers too close and honks. By the time I get to work the colors have dissolved into the yellow orange haze. The sun continues to rise. The day arrives. Everything once again is gray or black or white. And all the others. The other colors. The ones I don’t care about anymore. A painting is an artifact of loss. Museums compendiums of everything dear and departed.If I come upon a dead bonfire in the forest I kick at the ashes until I get a glow. A girl once intoned —we swim through wisps of spiraling smoke. She didn’t realize I was the smoke. Duh, the only one here not choking. I can make a fire from the coldest rock. The secret is to slash it against your shin. From memory alone the artists move their brushes across the canvas. Even Monet with his little travel kits. Nothing creative is ever anything new. Just something that everyone else has missed. Bridges and water lilies. Sunrises in places where nobody goes to visit. Whoever’s there has to be there. They can’t be late for work. The lawn crew is running leaf blowers at 7am again. They’d all rather just roll over and go back to sleep. Even the haystacks are dreams. Every painting is a picture of something now gone. Think of it like that. A place you once saw or visited. Maybe a flash of a purple dress in the corner of your eye. All the places that can only be found without maps. The mapless kingdoms, as I rather unimaginatively refer to them. These are the only true places. All else is imagination, or even worse, your actual honest to god life. Imagination synonymizes with real life. That’s the last thing they teach you. Everything you’re conjuring right now is all there is. They never tell you about the secret third thing.  The bastards. She whispers— a memory is the never to be seen again thing that only YOU ever saw. To paint is to remember something that once was. To love is to love someone who’s always leaving you. In the fading evening light Monet was just painting (haystacks). Before the dawn burns away its purple sashes I was just loving (you). 

8/17/23

poem

Funny, Not Funny

Sometimes it's hard to laugh

Cheeks heavy with Quikrete

Too much of a lift

I‘ve read all the psychologists

There are only four valid reasons for anxiety:

One, not knowing what is about to happen.

Two, fear that performance won't match expectation.

Three, that you’ll be seen as you really are:

A fool, incompetent, boring, a dork.

And four, realizing that the only certainty is your own uncertainty

About anything, anyone, ever again

At least you won’t be able to doubt that 

You're done with funny

It’s not even worth mourning

You’ve entered your spaced out

Lunar eclipsed nihilist goth phase 

The sunflowers in the trash

Look like sleeping witches

I should spend more time in the garage

So much of my life

I simply am not awake

In the unlikely event I actually rouse

Myself from deep slumber 

It never lasts

Sandcastles at high tide

This cube of sugar in my extremely hot tea

Am I breaking any new ground

Here or am I just, finally, seeing

What everyone else

Has been seeing all along?

On the way out of the grocery

With a haul of freshly pressed shirts

Slung over my shoulder like I’m Ward Cleaver 

I notice a young man buying flowers

With an anxious grin on his damned face.

(The goof, as if she wouldn’t like them)

So, sure enough, there I am, stuck 

In the floral line with a bouquet of garish bellflowers

Hours away from turning into baby 

Gargoyles who will require frequent naps 

As I’m leaving I pass an old guy

With a face like hydrangeas

He looks at me, sees my flowers

And bellows out “what did you do?”

And the corners of my mouth rise

Ever so slightly, but lightly,

For the first time all night 

And I say: “this time I killed her”

With a nicely timed wink 

And I smile and, after a beat, he laughs his way

Into the realm of the perpetually unjudged 

And I keep walking, laughing, walking, laughing 

And pretty soon I’m the only one in the whole world still laughing.

From this perspective

Everyone looks so sad. 

8/15/23

poem

 August

August again

The end of summer

The end of something you

Never got around to naming

Nostalgia arises for a Scheherazadean haze

Obscuring the details of what

Must have been your very own life 

Join me for a drink in the Florida room 

Where the ceiling fan rattles like a loose grocery cart wheel

And no one should be forced to endure these chairs

Wasps leer on the other side of the screen

But there isn’t anything to say

We listen, note the inconsistency of odors

Realize we’re out of gin

Out of gas

I should have mowed the grass

It’s high time we harvested the fruits

Of our own forgetfulness

8/15/23

poem

 Modern Love

Modern love is a rat race

Swiping left or right

Lunch dates and dinner dates

Different women, different men

Keeping your options open

Don’t fall in love yet

Don’t fall in love

How do you know 

If he’s the one

When there’s a chance

Of loving whoever’s next 

A tiny bit more?

I’m a little old fashioned

I like to get medieval with my love

Racks and thumbscrews  

Castles and moats

My heart on a shield 

8/12/23

poem

 All the Feelings 

All of the feelings there are to feel

Are never as important as the feeling

That arises when a feeling felt

Severs its homoussion connection to feeler

And becomes just another adjective

To describe a noun we regretfully call self 

Most people miss the importance 

Of this fleeting experience, dismiss 

It as mere interregnum

But you always feel something

Even when you think

You’re between feelings

All it takes is a stopping reflection 

Standing in front of a two-way mirror

In the bathroom of the train station 

Many people spend their lives here

Trapped in a way station 

Somewhere between happiness and sadness 

Checking the train schedule

Making sure they have the right ticket 

What about right now?

Is this the correct platform?

You aren't happy

You aren't sad

You're something though

You’re on your way

You have someplace to go

8/7/23

poem

 Discharge Instructions

You may have clear liquids today 

And nothing but salted meats tomorrow

You may lap from a bowl, sip from a hat

You may go outside and wander aimlessly 

In the morning in the evening but never at noon

There will be no more needles in veins

No blood pressure cuffs

No stickers stuck to your chest

You may piss wherever you like

You may experience a tingling behind the eyes 

A gutting sense of loss each time your mind

Releases another thought. 

You may eat with your eyes closed 

You may hot shower

You may swim in a lake

Of slippery insouciances

You may shave 

You may smile in lieu of lucencies 

You may lick or hug or kiss

You may ice cream after dinner 

You may hold hands

You may never let go

You must eat the cone 

You may lift a baby in one hand

While finger snapping to the beat

Of Manu Dibango in the other

The medicine won’t stop you

From remembering that everyone dies 

You must wash it all down with milk

You may call the doctor after hours

For fevers or flashes of ignorance
You may ask him to repeat the instructions

You may not ask any questions

Whose answers are lies

8/7/23

poem

 Moon Poem

Poets are always writing about the moon

Nobody writes about the sun

The always whole sun

Never waxing or waning

Shining down tyrannical

Arrival so predictable

Like Dad home from work

And you know what that means

Time to get your shit together

Or whatever it really means

In your part of the country

It can mean everything

And where’s the fun in that

Some things are too perfect for poetry

The moon on the other hand

Is only ever occasionally complete 

And some nights it doesn’t 

Even show up at all. 

Ha! we think. That’s me!

Mostly just slivers of myself

And when I do finally put it all together

It’s usually on a cloudy night 

Nobody sees

Or even tries to look 

In the morning I have

To give it all back 

Even when we do shine

It feels like stolen light

8/7/23

poem

 Poem #47

If you fall in love with a poet

It's too late

He's already fallen in love

With you 

If you say something clever

When the waiter brings the tiramisu

The poet will smile politely

He’s etched your words into his white plate 

The poet will remember things 

You’ve long forgotten

The feel of your foot against his palm 

Your cheekbones straining against the silk veil of ecstasy

You have to be prepared for heartache

The poet lives for this

Everything he’s ever wanted 

Are the words pulled from a black abyss

7/31/23

poem

 Dick Tricks

In college I knew a guy named Cochran who could do dick tricks. You had to be well endowed, obviously. Late night, he’d whip it out in front of everyone—fraternity brothers and sorority girls alike—and go through his catalog of phallic machinations. There was the “Sad Turtle”. The “Basset Hound”. The “Gentlemen’s Curtsy”.  He had one called the “Watusi” which I couldn’t ever bear to watch. “Grandma’s Tongue” was a perennial favorite. He would unfurl his redundant scrotal skin into a flat, dry, slightly hairy flap of dirty pink, sort of like your grandma’s tongue when she’s trying to lop up the last of her Sunday peas. The pièce de résistance, however, was a little gem he called the “Heart”. And not the Valentine's Day version. Somehow, via a series of complicated maneuvers he could recreate the precise anatomic configuration of a human heart—the bunched up balls a reasonable approximation of atria and ventricles and the looped shaft a proxy for the emerging aortic root. I was pre med at the time so I could appreciate it. The problem for many such contortionists is that once you finished, it wasn’t always so easy to untangle. So they had to live out their remaining days with heart shaped dicks. As you can imagine this had a deleterious effect on both function and self esteem. Couldn’t piss. Lovemaking was out of the question. You end up afraid to ever ask anyone out. All you are is a late night party trick. A gimmick to roll out when the party started to flag. The psychic damage is off the charts. How could you ever think about anything else? You start to forget you have arms and legs and hair and face. Your mind reels. An entire body distilled down to pure heart. And not even the one that beats. Just the one that feels. 

7/31/23

poem

 Op Note XL

The first case I took an intern through a hemorrhoidectomy. Second case was mostly me with a third year patching up a tricky scrotal hernia. Third case another hernia. Same resident. Fourth case I guided a chief through a low anterior resection. She sees it. She’ll be pretty good someday. Fifth case I walked my son through a multivariable algebra problem. Sixth case I sat and listened as my daughter cried. Seventh case I worked on a poem I thought was dead. Eighth case went all night. None of the sutures held. Kept having to re-do it and re-do it until the birds began to sing and I figured out another way. Ninth case was a quickie. Drank a cup of coffee with my mom. Watched her mug trembling in her hands and pretended not to notice. Tenth case felt like a dream. Nothing but downhill spiral staircases and the ghosts were all smiling and sheet-less. Basic blocks of color. Swaths of red yellow purple. Basic shapes. Triangles like how a child would draw. Dumbass squares. Better circles. Because circles are for adults. Muscle memory pulled me through. Otherwise I’d have never woken up. The eleventh case was a beast. Let’s not talk about it. The ache started in my thumb and worked its way up my arm to burrow in the crook of my shoulder. I held on as long as I could. In the end I got a little lucky. Saw something I may have missed ten years ago. It all just fell into place. I forgot about the pain. Or maybe it it just stopped hurting. I’ll take it either way. I pretended not to hear the pissed off ghosts hissing in rage through the tip of the suction device. It would have been a great case to end on. But there was one more. That’s the way it always goes. I’m never one to end on a high note. Something something desultory and humdrum. Not that it didn’t need to be done. Somebody has to do it. That's me raising my hand. For these we don’t bother with music. Adrenaline all gone. Pizza two hours cold. A perfunctory performance we all could have done without. The thirteenth case was the brushing of the teeth the long stare into the mirror the quiet acceptance the not quite giving up the reluctant fade into 4 hours of sleep.  Then you go back to zero. Thirteen was a record but the slate just got wiped. You have to start all over again. 

4/25/23