Nothing else to offer you
My actual friend
But you ran away
Saying to me and her simultaneously
Ima get the fuck out of here,
A basic so-long for real.
I never think goodbye is forever, swear not
Like my high school sweetheart,
Thirty years ago we loved,
Still I believe we’ll see each other one day
Sit on rock water watching
Presence beyond memory.
But you lived for us as something else
Those moments inside others
Pain, lying, late nights, goodbyes, smoke, drink,
Walks and smack talks
alive along civil peripheries.
Can’t believe you left for the city and damn well
Plan on never coming back, under any guise,
With premeditated no-joy for him who
Tried to convince life wonderful
But no love because
The pain greater than the joy
And lasts longer and I’m running
from that suffering in a sprint,
My new life an improvement,
you said, and anyway
I believe the dominant story.
Harvested Corn
Empty field hard New England morning
Stalks bleached mashed bent cracked grounded
Surrounded by deciduous woods
And a farm in the distance
Across the sky
As it was in Germany then
We sometimes slept next to the Wald
This though Connecticut
And you weren’t there
On morning wind
My sons were
And I slapped a friend on the back to encourage his travels
Language “can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes.” - Oliver Sacks
your mama is a poem
Your mama is a poem.
And I share your soiled shorts
this late into the game.
She is both sad and guilty;
one said to forgive her and you still,
deep into your thirties,
ask why you should care.
You do because your life is one
and your mom is a poem
and any other choice, though your emotions
support them, is incorrectly arranged, enervate
and hopeless; you do because you maintain lasting hope.
She lived her impieties and has suffered enough.
Your pain not inconsequential, but weaker
and less important than hers. Your brother was younger
at the time of transgression –
And that is your problem and it is not.
She left and is gone and she is not gone.
Embrace what you have over that which you do not,
I think: I’m merely rendering guesses, how fancy they are
and how serious your potential for disconsolency,
poor thing: your mama is a poem;
she’s the song of our modern times;
who knows what form of torment she has endured;
and where is your brother now? how is his child?
what are you going to do about it all once?
Nothing, you have said before;
everything hopefulness late at night
in darkness, alone, with the world about you.
Your special form of melancholy is not to you unique.
However, I am not calling for your dismissal of it:
your mother is your poem, your walking
breathing song; might interest you
or behoove your positive direction,
to sing with her some, once, while her time still
enmeshed with yours, her poem and yours, once.
a street along the born and the dead
a street along the born and the dead
live your entire life there whole
from start to finish, crawl from the hospital on one end
and embrace your fire or dirt in the cemetery the other.
along the way eat a cheeseburger and sip a shake
pork the popcorn or not at all while
engaging the small street film house;
fill the auto with gaso
Show me your religion at the big bell church
some saint is his name there is Mary on the lawn;
and a homeless we’re not allowed to call him bum anymore.
shop till you I won’t say it, overpriced or right in there fine for you.
Plebian or dining refined; bring your visiting mother;
coffee house and library and major hospital center;
Chinese restaurant to go or to stay
Japanese sushi in more than one choice and array.
Walk it to a view on a green or brown hill, depending on your season,
and sweep your arm broadly at the entire bay view,
from bridge to bridge, the gate and the mountain.
Toil too gainfully employed pull down the bread for your interim,
your temporary stay on the avenue, as you quickly pass by
one end to the other, swiftly, and the street’s stay
does not threaten impermanence. Your swirl-licking of the
ice cream cone, an old historic spot, is a hurry, is a hurry.
The neighborhood way is small and it offers it all;
find the proper day and you may borrow a book
from the public library: but focus and finish and bring it back,
return to the cheeseburger shack, try if you will (as it may be smoother)
the no look back, and make it a stroll from one end to the other.
How can I create beauty
How can I create beauty
when my stomach is so fat?
A seated body and the folded leg wrinkles
yes splotches, marks, bumps; worried
about importance and beauty in art and cultivation
with swollen ankles and fusing toes;
any form of youthful muscle given over to aging
and indolence, eating over, a shuffle or waddle on flat
feet and groan to ligament and bone;
in the mind is an aim for quality, for freshness, fecundity
is the target and the idea, pondering through the house
late in evening, when I glance in the mirror, one quick,
and its notions fancy and high striving, all of it,
come for this moment dissolved.
For Charley Womack and His
When the boss walks in my neck
When the boss walks in my neck goes numb.
This head well-shouldered pulses and there is indication
of internal hemorrhaging; as happened to a grandmother once
during a time of great unrepentant stress;
there is naturally an attempt at concentration,
then he speaks and a spreading stiffness is my body
as rigor mortis, a quivering plank, an unbending tree;
his peering to my cubicle is an unsuccessful attempt: I am
the busiest worker alive: it is an act: fretfully, there is concern
that he sees through me; and I try to piece together his thoughts;
my bloodshot eyes burn, and one whispered to the side:
coming here is not healthy;
it is an involuntary cringe at the sound of his footsteps;
over my shoulder the look; I am safe for now, he is
visiting the back room.
still water
Abalone. There is a dance on a cove for a rock clinger.
Stand on the bluff and smell the sea.
Know in your heart love is a possibility.
Climb down there, do, toward the sea.
Scamper down the steeps and rest where
the still water shows a minor deviation from its definition;
see how it is alive; place your ankles in the salt and oxygen and life-giving;
give back the life and the slow undulation;
endeavor to be as calm as the water at Stillwater Cove;
forge a style that will afford your knowing; the sea, the sea, and that way of moving.
I breathe the settlement of the ocean.
On the coast of it mingle my tears and my blood in similar patterns,
this ebb and that flow, you know.
We are the ocean. We are this mixture upon it near.
We have our ankles in it, together, in love.
We are this cove of still water.
sweet sense of place
Sweet sense of place
the comforting shine of peace, attempts
to link one precious moment of those to the next
pray that the rigors are effortless
Stand on the precipice of a step on a stoop
in the sea of the serious warm morning shine
and look for the daily paper, early, everyday, your life
and remove the disconcerted flicker when it is not there
See where your comfort is supposed to be
and make it, demand it, force it
among the drying soil in terra cotta pots, dying plants
reaching for infinite possibilities, milking the last of life
Stretching this chemical biological process to its conclusion
as you are here you may well go for it, reaching, an easy
embrace of defiance, not derailed, do not go easily
and bear smooth severe vigilance for the insight that rides the wind.