Poems April 2021

Let’s sing something dumb
About love and sex and being everything

To some someone
About tomorrow and forever and it doesn’t mean a thing
About tomorrow and forever and it doesn’t mean a thing
About tomorrow and forever and it doesn’t mean a thing

The talkative 7 year old has tired me out

Constant questions that he’s asked before, and for which I have no answers.

Constant comments and observations about everything.

And funny, cute, even seductive. I mean, how can ya not give the kid an ear?

He doesn’t like this bit of writing. Fuck him. I’ll post it anyway.

Why not speak in code? So many ways to say so little.

A bottle wrapped in a bag results in a bag shaped like a bottle. All the words make clear the shape of what isn’t be talked about.

I’m trying to say nothing these days, so I can glide invisibly, and weave my way through, a mackerel in shark water.

Your past is clean garbage
We can be rag pickers and pull interesting things out of it
The day 40 Aprils ago that put such a twist in your circuitry
That woman at the car wash
The time a firefly landed on the tip of your nose
Why you love pancakes

We can pick your garbage
But stay the hell out of mine.

At his end he was far down his personal hill.

The struggle for hope and something decent takes a toll, as dreams dry up and mistakes pile up. Crying to no one but yourself in the kitchen. How to get through ‘til bedtime.

Remind us of our duty, which is serve and protect. To recognize what is right, kind and merciful, and then do exactly that, regardless of what came before or comes after.

There are ever hills to climb.

There is a clock in here

It’s ticking again

It could be a bomb I fear

Counting from ten

When it’s zero

We’ll either wake up or explode

Ah! Just three seconds left

So soon we’ll know…

The news is presented by handsome people. But the news is ugly. And so often sad.

Who would sniff a flower that looks like shit but smells of newly remembered old love?

It’s not the flowers. It’s the nature of the ground and the gardener.

Dangerous country you shouldn’t be in it again you were in it before and it did you no good and now you’re back and looking for that lost house you left your things in only now it’s more hidden than it was and the woods crawl with teeth and claws

“People die easier than some promises and some dreams”

That’s what’s on the sign post that’s miles behind you now

Where do you go when it rains?

Do you find a nook somewhere, a branch, an overhang?
Are you by yourself or with others?
Do you count the minutes, and is it excruciating?

I’ll bet you merely sit somewhere, and wait, and watch, and the rain
goes as it comes
Barely noticed, just a thing that happens when it happens

It’s over now—you get a drink or take a bath
A puddle is good enough

I stand outside, looking for you
Looking for the simplicity of you

Everything rains on me
I wish I could wait, and watch
But what I see is the passing of the time that is left
And the water that spoils it

I was enough
Was
Was was was

The younger me, blind and ignorant in the moment, was sufficient. Generous. Transcendent. Charming.

Today I’m less
Less

Less is not more

I’ve shrunk against your yardstick
And you know it
And measure me every chance you get

Between what I am and what I’m not is the problem

It’s never the measuring, is it?

Today the plumbing came alive and tried to kill me.

You wouldn’t think a toilet would be so angry, but I suppose someone sitting on you and crapping into your open mouth… it would piss me off.

The drain system was fed up. “You guys do too much laundry and I’m caked up with soap and grease.. and use different tolet paper. I hate that quilted shit.”

We try our best, but… you are plumbing, you know. And we are not, uh… “drain whisperers” that can lean over a vent, listen intently, and then sigh sadly: “Much pain… much upset… much build-up… years of having to take it, in whatever form was dished out…”

Well, said the drain system, in the smart house of the future, we are going to have a voice. We’ll tell you what’s going on. You’ll be in a meeting, and you’ll get a text from us: There is a floater in upstairs Kohler Flushmatic. Press 1 if you wish us to take care of Number 2.

Later, plumbing calmed down, and let me do the dishes and the wash. After I hired a masseuse for $300 to give the drain system a happy ending.

There’s a wind inside me
Blowing me all about
I could be a slip of paper or a water bottle
Bouncing down the street
Landing at your feet
Utter garbage
Kick me to the gutter
To be lifted up and recycled into something gorgeous
Perhaps a pair of pleather shoes…
On your feet I’ll pinch and bite you
That’s what you get for kicking me in the gutter!

And I’m still full of the wind!
And I’ll make you wander and wonder:
“Whatever will I do I’m so confused!”
And tumble you over into bad decisions and unreliable lovers
Til you can’t find your spot on your mattress and your inner head bangs off the ceiling

But one night you’ll shiver with the open window cold on you
The wind will sashay in like a big-dicked king and take what has always been something that’s been borrowed

What would be very cool is if we all looked so different there was no way to compare us to each other. You couldn’t say, “His nose is big,” because no one else would know what a nose is. Fat? What’s that? Cockeyed? Bald? Black?Thin lipped? Buxom? Huh? What are you talking about?

Take every species and make it a singular thing and that’d be us: people shaped fluid like jellyfish falling down stairs.

We would have to recognize each other in deeper ways — by the colors of our minds and hearts.

At night on my street I can stand under a street light and be the only person in the spotlight. Be the only person on the planet. Be the only person in the universe. Be so huge that I can’t tell where I begin or where I end. Be all knowing, because I am everything. The total power that is me.

But it gets cold as it gets later, and I have to pee, and to do so I have to make myself small enough to fit in the bathroom of a little house in a little neighborhood.

You should go back to forest school
Find a desk near a nice bird and copy her songs and her sweet voice

Hang out with the grass
Learn how to be stepped on all day and then pop up all refreshed like you felt nothing

Run with squirrels
Back and forth, doing the same damn thing everyday, in any weather, and always surprised and delighted by the same outcome

Or live a day with a bug — do the full routine: hatch, molt, hook-up, die — and then you’ll know just how little you get done across all of your human days

I do not know what anything is anymore
Water
Food
Sleep
Love

It seems melodramatic
But it is a cheap penny dreadful
With too much unneeded drama
Arguing over who should wash what
Who said what
Who thought what
With sad violas floating over the mess that it is
Everyone traumatized like it was in the Middle Ages
Before tv

By a cold shore
With blue eyes
Is now the time to give up?
It circles around in every space available
Doubt is the packing peanut

One must be cagey and merciless
To bring the king out of his castle and cut off his ears

Loaded into the car, driven for miles and hours
Dumped on the road without even a puppy blanket

Do I think someone will ever come?

No. I’ll still hope and have vivid dreams, but no. What we think and what we hope for are often two different things.

(You can always tell hope because it’s artificially sweet. It’s a candy that makes promises like a politician, but in the end, you’re in the same shit neighborhood with the same shit job, and beside that road.)

I can stay here forever, though. It’s not so hard. There’s plenty of candy in the dirt. I’ll get poems out of it. And I know you’ll drive back. And I know the sound of your car. I can hear it miles away. And I’ve already dug myself a hidey hole.

Best remember this:
It alternates between sun and cold
Like flipping a coin
That falls uncaught
Through a grate
Into dirty rainwater

That becomes your wishing well
Half through the year almost:
What do you want?
Will dirty water genie grant you a wish?

Or are you playing with a monkey paw, and the more you want, the more you pay?

To find beauty in this day
Is to walk towards the sunrise
Knowing it is behind the clouds
That ugly houses
House beautiful people
And every car that passes
Is driven by a fragile organic ball of doubts and hopes that might or might not survive till sunset

Why isn’t that enough to keep your mind from picking at the scabs of things nobody remembers but you?