Poems March 2019

Now that I know the secret it doesn’t work.
It’s a seance and the ghosts are just some guys you know from work complete with bag lunches.

Talk of mysteries! This guy explains toilet paper, and the flushing process like it’s a demon conjuring.

And angels! Buttinskis the bunch of ‘Em. Dead and wondering what some guy is gonna do? Let him hang out in the bathroom in peace. Go help cripple kids, flood victims.

The fact though, is this, and is a true mystery: I know some corner has been turned. The bike is now cresting the hill. It will pick up speed and create its own gravity.

When you’re alone on Turtle Island
Toes on the edge of an unending ocean
Look out past the horizon
As clouds dip and flutter

At night in your lean-to
The surf and stars commingle
Your fire dies
And there’s the sweet smell of cooking

One morning your toe clicks against a bottle
in the surf
It’s been sealed with wax
The note inside beckons

You read it - it’s faded
...! ...it is your own note

Your story
Your plea

You hurled it past the rocks on an outbound tide years ago
Now it returns to you

Always we find our escape is up to us

So walk out to the end of shallows
And then past the sandbar
To where it might be over your head

Go! Go now!
Go now or you will stay forever

Should I try to write
Halfway up the stair step
The groaning day now over?

Where did you bury my first love?
The one I met on the playground
The one that haunts me this week?

The bitch lisps out Beatles songs
Forever cross-eyed
Waiting for me in any silence

Can’t you go away, old girl?
Haven’t you destroyed enough?
Soon I’ll forget I was ever happy

Once they’re set to ringing it seems they never stop

You people
looking at me weirdly
Don’t hear

Don’t hear me at all
And please, by all means tell me about the days that strangers have
I’m all ears
And hands
And swiss knife for opening your bottles and cleaning your nails

Meanwhile, there’s a sock somewhere that will fit over the clapper
Or
We’ll cut the rope

I’m happiest on mornings when the teeth of the cold snap me awake

On nights I’m a huge gerbil snugged down in a bed nest

On days when lunch is lonely because I can only think of friends

On afternoons when the sauce is coming together and I search for that damn basil

At two am I wake up as a car ambles past, the radiator sighs, and some dream I’ll forget invites me to dance

Thousands of tall round cars
The thing that’s the latest
The wireless humming
Whatever will happen next?
Color photography would show
That not everything was a black and white

Some kid sleeping under a railroad trestle
Fresh meat from home
Because dad will have no fag son

Stop talking, kiddo
It’s schedules and complaints and
attempts to spin the unknown into cotton candy that’s delicious and sweet and actually healthy

What can your mouth do
about shit teenage behavior
that ass in the White House
the friend with the big C

The decisions we agonize over
don’t require agony
and nobody hears our prayers

There is small flashlight in your hand - the English call it a torch - quaint
and you can point it where you want to go
and then walk in the dark following

And gently close your mouth
as one would stifle a laugh at a funeral service

See and hear everything gorgeous and musical about your life

From the last of the potato chips to the first snowfall, this is all you’ll ever have

I forget more and more
Or is it less and less?

Bills
Where my pens are
Where is my hat?
While talking on my phone I look everywhere
for my phone...
Things I promised
Most of the needed groceries

Someday I won’t forget anything because I’ll forget forgetting

The nice ending: but I’ll never forget you

The true ending: I can’t forget the small thoughts that eat me from the inside out
Termites that nest in what’s left of self-esteem
The patterns of a life that holds me where I have never wanted to be
Boat anchors that still have plenty of scope

Maybe the hawsers will be cut in a memory care unit

More likely: I’ll forget how to speak yet remember how I used to make people laugh

At breakfast in a diner
The tv has a map of
The Violent Attack
We all ignore it
There’s unlimited coffee and whipped cream!
And food selfies!
Ha ha! lol!
Back to the tv:
Trump plays his invisible accordion
A snow storm moves in
They found a gun
Some family arrives from church
There’s a chorus of chatter
We all feel good
This is the current peak of evolution
Of everything

That one guy is lonely but fuck it