It's October 25 for David
and the 3rd of August for me we
both had always known
that graduate school will be
the best of times as David
reads Auden, Freud and
Lionel Trilling who? while we
read mysteries about NFAT, Fos
and Jun who? we
both imagine a wondrous future with dolphins
in Space and Uplifting worlds we
had so much time
to binge and watch
Netflix being born
as DVDs through the mail before streaming consciousness
remembers our Dads taking us to see
the Yankees lose
or buy comic books we
lend out to friends
not realizing we
haven't asked them
to please take great care of our
small instance of the Love class

I hardly new a girl once
in High School she was a Home
Coming queen in her late
forties now probably
married with kids
and a husband spreading
out a little
but when he stares into
almond eyes he still sees
a petite girl
with a raspy voice even though
she's never smoked
a day but maybe inhaled the Hours.

Dreams they drown
under the Stone
under the Star

At least we
Stole The Show

Our Houdini act
of failed dedication
defiant to the End

Fragments float
up scenting a
stream with rotting
love locked
in the truck

Cancer takes us to dinner
then ghosts me never
calling again

The anger, sadness
and disappointment
metastasizes to every
node of our social
network

In desperation we rip
me out leaving wires
frayed

Eventually, new growth cones
form and try again to connect me
with we but perhaps the two
scared ends have given up
hope

And the fibers connecting us
will fade in a slow Wallerian
walt

Cancer will never know
and never cared

if we're blue right
it out in a left
handed jaundice
sky a golden sky sky
key yellow way

like we're creeping
banana wallpaper pealing
off heaven in claps
of thunder clawed
off  beneath tiny
media sausage paws
of a black & white Terrier
we've dressed

in unnatural
sarcasm difficult to rightly
see in the tall indigo
grass we're

green again if mixing
blades with lowly plain Asian
tone is a thing

A man comes into Starbucks
and says to the barista "I
want 3 coffees-- One for me
One for you and One for
YOUR MOM!"

The barista is slightly annoyed
but serves the coffee; the next
day the man comes
in and says "I want 3 coffee-- One
for me One for you and One
for YOUR MOM!"

Now the barista is really ******
cuz he's kinda old school
Eastern European momma's boy
but he controls his anger
serves the coffee anyways; the next
day the man comes in and says "I want
3 coffee
One for me
One for you and
One for YOUR MOM!"

The barista loses it jumps
over and starts beating on
the guy until the other customers
separate the two; the next

day the man comes in with his right
arm in a sling and bandages
covering several lacerations he
says "I would like just 2 coffee One
for me and One for YOUR MOM because you
CLEARLY can't handle your coffee"

it's the old Lehman
interlace again I
wonder how many I's
might some day buy The
Daily Mirror making
David the first poet to become
rich but like so many artist long
after they're dead

we're like nerve fibers
fasciculating fine word
that juxtaposes well to fardels

we bear-- words
heavy with too much bass
restricting us to only 3
degrees of freedom: Music
Word and Color

we' ld build a higher Babble
if only unbound from
a flat syllable world

we'd settle the Prometheus score
with 4D notes like cut-red-Bminor-spin

we'd render the higher ordered
flesh with 10D swirl-syncopated-reflect-bass-kisses-Lorena-Tom-***-soft-cookware­
to a fatty shard able
to cross synaptic chasm but maybe
we shouldn't for there's the rub in our xenophobic
extra dimensions

we'd find Superman
banished enemies or Buckaroo
aliens waiting to invade they always come from that extra
dimension don't they the ones

we don't fully understand the ones
wavering on the edge of perception of curiosity of fearfulness of exploring
a neighbors yard watchful for their dog
ready to run back
to safety back
to our one dimension back
to one Word
Singularity

A son of a Sun
we of light
hoping after
warm change
bathe here
in measured persistence
moving masses
of resonating germs
dawn's gun
our only voice

we write poems about the Sun
because long after we
are gone long after
We have changed
She will be still be here

perhaps the poems will persist
harder than any stone or
ring any steel germ
or marriage guns

perhaps the pink voices
of early morning dawn
will resonate
faster than momentum
because our measured
lyrics are lost bathing

we write warm
golden octaves hoping
the Diogenes light
will find an honest Son

did we know that today
in 2016 we'd be reading the future
about the Great American
soft
depression interlaced
August 16 with Lehman
Goldman
Sach King David
how this time it will be
different but the bubble
starting
in 1995 always burst
even if its only two years
later Elizabeth Montgomery
died we were joining the Academic Mafia
around Circle Drive
Korean BBQ
Blues Caravan and
cruising around East Los
in a Blue Toyota pickup truck
now
there's a parked Prius
because we're too busy
running
numbers a racket
in Cambridge that leaves us
just a bit of fried egg in the morning
with coffee vorleser-ing and documenting
just
as any moral Hannah would do
in 1939 to say hey this is the way
we wanted right boxcars leading
to abattoirs today we do our best
imitation
of a weak McNamara
mea culpa

all I wanted was a Coke
with careful tendency you

call me a loser suicidal
baby
so why don't you **** me

cuz at
19, 19, n nn n, 19
I'm not gonna do it for you
anymore the days

to be more patient tries
my patients separated

by hospital bed
and hospice care into
one love and loved

ones separated by popstar
Purple curtain Rain
call

This is my life compressed time
SVG Maginot lines

that impossibly pixelate under
our modern scrutiny
they Blur

under
the heat giving off distant
Mirages that promise

reunions in death's
false Oasis

a coffee breakfast last
year dad had just passed
away last month ta ree
the year before i'm away
from Home again i think
I can still call
them and talk update dad
on work ta ree for a recipe or how
to cook something I remember
everywhere there's food
and habit and repetition they
are there like the coffee
everyday

I live in a dark coal-de-sac
giving off Bonnie Tyler sparks
the Rod Stewart of loneliness,
feeling heart arch at Market Basket

I go up and down elevator
music with hooks
and loops bringing
back Ghost and Word

Modern interlacing
ritual and food
in my head and in our
breaking bread

Why do you think the feast
is movable?

Weekend food shopping;
stocking; cooking some,
but most of it,  wasted,
rotting away even with
modern coolness

It's just me. It's just she
The time is gone,
the nest is empty
wish I had something more
to say

It's just Dad visiting
every weekend
to sit with his daughter
to watch his granddaughter
play soccer

It's just Mom cooking
a minor chord meal,
nothing like the Major
meals of her missing
older Sister

It's just weekend sushi
or Pho in Simi Valley
modulating one
Key memory to another

The voices go
ghosts fade
and yet the ritualistic
love persist in my
looped head in my
OCD play
at every meal
repeatedly self cutting
our geometric thought
Elements within a Euclidean
subspace

Soldiers fall in line
To sacrifice life
In cause least relish
mustering love
for moral purist

Wake up
Eat that Black Coffee
Drink up Hot Omelette
Listen to Cool June Rain
I am still the Bop King
at least for Awhile
at least till the New Crown

I'm interlacing with Lehman
again what does
that mean I
don't know but maybe
the answer connects Dean
with Ella and
him with us in Film
on TV through VR
singing Broadway Medleys
in a cool Grandfather's wobble
in a crystal Voice
like Mom's clarion call
a silver thread
running through our dull
tapestry I'm mixing
metaphors
muddling music
weaving songs before work
before heatmaps
Seurat R packages
multicolored modality
in higher dimension
again what does
that mean I
don't know but maybe
we just keep interlacing

A blond girl walks in front
and I fall in love
not with how she jgiggles
(that comes later walking home)
because she doesn't
in her neat two short
French braids,
petite flat black shoes
and a rolled up, no
it can't be no one reads
printed media anymore
but it's there, in her purse
as she walks fast
fading into the future
I can't catch up with even if
she doesn't turn left or right
while I'm a centrist so our future
diverges splits into
parallel universes identical
except our minor chord variation
in the Music

Another grey, rainy day
in Somerville
maybe that's why Patsy
Cline loops back
in baby's arm
bringing back Tom
ole Brentwood roommate shortly
after OJ murdered Nicole
and Bob who wrote the song
died in 2014 but it didn't
ripple through any brook
of our shared nook

Strange

Strange how we can only tell
stories with other peoples
stream
Strange how yours still in all
my dreams

How strange

We're at Harvard, the same one as Bill Gates and Mark what's his Facebook, except we're not students anymore and our safety net are passing away from cancer and infection leaving us eating pizza and working long hours on things we're passionate about but if we fail we can't go home again because Love isn't there anymore to cook us delicious food that we pack back to school every weekend because she really did walk the walk and not just the talk, walking in the sand of Christ's Word she believed in so much, loving everyone even though we all have little cheats, private incentives and selfish priorities-- but really, is protecting favorite nephews from a harsh world so that we won't have Viet Minh from a forgotten war haunting our dreams, coming to get you because we're French Colonial bad brand, bad? In the end it makes no sense-- we all become practical capitalist selling catfish to a buddhist America who talks a good talk about free love trade zones but the not so hidden agenda unilaterally transfers wealth with USDA inspected protectionist condoms.

going down a rabbit hole
of obscure references
really?
Good Times is lost?
are we really in our own Lost World
or Land of the Lost
or deep within Inception?

Who's Jimmy Walker, we now
never knew him
and is he still alive a quick search
says yes!
how can we not know
slanted sitcoms?
and blaxplotation with bad
back running Brown
acting totally different
than wet backs another
brown water should we flush
it down?

at least she knows
Alice in Wonderland
at least she's seen
one version on one
mode or another
book tape movie
there's also the **** version

We're waiting for the tactile mode
coming straight to our head
like Natalie Wood
just before she died following her own
Brainstorm into anther world
off to another lost reference
or obscure rabbit hole

You tell me it's not time to make a change,
just relax and take it easy. I'm still not young
And it's not my fault. But in a way it is,
And I know I have to go.
How can I try to explain when all
the words turn away, and
sigh in sadness that it's all the same
Same old story.
Look at me, and what do you see
Neither Father nor Son.

An algorithm
Is but sly slant rhyme
Math encoded rules
Like riding punk rails
Giving a gesicht
Remembering Zorks

The Alert
says I
should take a shower
now
but
the spray comes thin
like Twiggy from
the 70s
like Kate Moss from
magazines that can't turn a
profit like David Lehman's
warm shower trickling down
a cold April back
but
now
it's the tip of March
and the thin rain
comes
like my Blood loving
into mist memories

It's like steps, baby steps
in puffy, winter's clothes
from protective parents
bundles of joy, pushing through snow
white, pure,
in innocence

It's as if seasons ago
we ankle biters collected Maple leaves
as the colors changed
and froze them in between
pages of a college student's
journal full of love and passion,
in hope

that the spring of our lives
will come too soon,
and the dried leaf
and the driven snow
will add up to
something, anything
before the winter sets
in again.

Wake, read, work
and Repeat.

Sounds like a movie
instead of coffee
with my father

distant

with David Lehman
on March 30
living The Best Years of Our Lives

reading again David
things I've forgotten
things We'll only remember

living in the Matrix
of references and inside joke,
literature search
and transposed multiplication
instead of regularized
algorithm

how funny our dad
is who knows only trees
and the bitter cold as Winter
sets in my lips are dry
what do we say
skin like parchment

how funny our Dad
who only knows
streams of information
shows as allegory
"Shaka when the walls fell"

what's a good movie
quote for Failure?

The Titanic?
always the sinking
is corrupted with an interlacing
Rose at the bow
dreaming of forever love

We dads aren't Dana Andrew
We don't even know
who
that is and don't care
We're frantically Raising
Arizona blossoms in concrete
soil two beautiful
daughters
We CK Lewis Dads

Lehman time is
over time to take a shower, work
and Repeat.

Only in last year's glow,
could this year's Red
chorizo salami come,
and I haven't gone yet.

Gone over the edge
of these Breakfast tables,
in empty cup
or full of caffeine.

Gone over to home not yet
cuz the Brain keeps
me here in a dish,
in artificial cerebral spinal fluid,
or let's just call it
Recording Solution

Don't mix the salts!
Cross-contamination
is a killer for these Recordings.

Does our family speak to us on cold winter's night?
Even if there's no creek to crackle,
no stiff spines, no furry trees,
nothing but a Van Gogh room
in Somerville
and digital clocks ticking.

Does our family still speak?
Chattering away,
Background processes,
Garbled noise, garbage without
wisdom because we've lost the sophistication
to crack ancient encryption.

We hear the history,
and mimic vocalization like a song bird,
dolphin or elephant
each with converging neural circuits.

Members living the same stream?

It's easier to hack the data line,
when we've trained on same sets:
a missing wife,
black and white photos,
and a grandfather clock.

There's an elegance
to the math

but

it's too complicated for
us to understand much less
make a career of writing
ring looped code
or father toddling

equations.

At best, we fancy Newtonian
relationships,

common sense ones that any 17
century young Romanticist
would Realize

The faster we accelerate into Love the greater
the Force of our relationship
and the Mass of our egos multiply the effect

A Love in motion stays in motion

If only we live in vacuums

our fairy tale would never end
and the forever after is locked,
safe behind Castle doors

But our stories are more like Grimm Tales

Impulse
forces of liberated Egos
change the trajectory
of our real

love.

Random white cue *****
bounce us into a side pocket.

And who's to know?

Are the cul-de-sacs
any worse than
landing in an odd corner,
bunched in with only
a stripped
or solid ball?

At least we didn't scratch
against some misshapen Black
eight

Alert!

Oh. It's only a reminder.
Automated, automatically sent
to us.

An email, a text.
They pop on devices,
trained that way.

Tomorrow's a birthday.
Always tomorrow an Alert!
Someone's born.

Yet, the helper has become a daemon.
Friendly assistance
become nudges of melancholy.

A Daemon for grieving?

How many Alerts
can the heart take?

Yearly jolts,
automated realization
that our family is fading.

Not tomorrow's children
born into midnight's Alert,
but the child father,
mother, sister, and brother we
remember in bleaching photos.

Chemically fading away,
decaying like data
on hard drives.

Our stormy lives
remembered with
a half-life of gentle reminders.
Remembered as
ghostly background processes
sending alerts of birthdays so long
ago there's no trace except
in shared memories.

They go thru flow cells
and return a million read

Weekly poems sent
anonymously to be sequenced
in a massively parallel
batch job

The hits come back
in blinking dots,
ephemeral likes, individual
happy flashes from
bar-coded singlets.

But how to know
when a solitary spot
has read our entire
genome?

Have you binged
on the DNA
of our identity?

Can you tell us
who I are
and
where I are going?

It is a measure of time's passage. An ancient way intertwining all cultures, and yet this time the changing is different. The leaves cycle colors and fall from the branches. I heard the chainsaws the other day, and thought that they were trimming the bare branches back for next year.

I was wrong.

They had cut down the entire tree.

It made sense.

All last winter, I heard it scrape against the building during stormy nights. My modern utility agrees but the monkey is lost with old rhythms cut from the base, and looking out a reflecting window gives no sense of where the time is going.

It's a valley carved by moving water
It's a face wrinkled by time's current
It's a hike across the valley's face
It's a trek in through our granite life
It's a shout into the cool mountain air
It's a spike tracing our cloudy memory
It's a familiar echo bounced  
It's a family reverberation gone
The mountain has moved
The river is still

I thought
the carbon monoxide detector
was malfunctioning,
her pulsed chirps
pierce so sharp
unlike any stray
songs of carousing
cat

Supposedly, she brings
good luck like rain
on your wedding
day

A dreambot cricket
more machine
in sound than any slumbering
Kafka insect
bed bug mate
I've every slept
with

She wakes me
in nightly false
alarms but when her short
life is done
maybe I'll miss
nocturnal jolts
like I miss
cold misty
rain

This daily Trial
has transformed
tadpoles to chicken
liver-- a Metamorphosis,
a selection process
most Unnatural.
Darwin's joke,
light humor
to ease our
quest for Waze
into the Castle.

the leaves are changing colors fast!
just two days ago, they were green on the inside,
fringed with yellow, gold and crimson edges.
today the jaundice seeps in bunches and bushels,
reaching in along the veins and branches
into the capitulating green core.
tips of exposed twigs reveal
falling, failing tribal leaves
in the autumn cool air.
skeletons of Halloween start to stick
their bony hands into the even darkness.

And what about the days
that don't come,
or the Hours not spent
buying flowers from Edeka?

Where do they go?

Do they join Walter
in some daydreaming
intermittent reality?

Is the Time
evaporated by Entrepreneurs
burning our candles
at both ends to turn
steam driven carbines
for our adiabatic work
cycles underneath Caves of Steel?

Is it enough to live
part of someone else's
dream because we know
that our's Comes this
way Wicked?

Actuators, cogs, brain bit,
and organoids all on Chips
or ships setting sail
into rosy fingered robots
of dawn.

Ahoy mateys!

We set sail for a Manifest
Destiny without O Captain,
My Captain; though the civil
struggle continues dressed up
in some ******* suit.

we read enough poetry
or short stories from steve
Millhauser, the "as if"s
become like

splotches there, interstitially
holding visceral fragments
together as if by
logical cement.

it's as if our heads have become
saturated, or supersaturated
till the now and then moments
crystallize around "as if"s.

we wonder why
our loves doesn't nucleate
like <from> a more solid rock
metaphor
or why
our agreeable phrase
spreads as creamy cream cheese
on thoughtless bagels?

Is love like riding a horse?

Is it like straddling big
powerful steeds, jumping
over rails, and lazy
brown foxes?

Sometimes we need a crop
to whip our pony to that final
spurt, stretching a Black Stallion nose
across spent finish,
glistening with sweat at besting
the crowded rest.

And if we fall
we're suppose to just get
right back tall
into that saddle set
Superwoman like

rather than some crippled
ghost rider, a Ritalin
paraplegic Reeve coming out
only to fake her maudlin bout
around another racetrack night.


Maybe love is like jumping
out of a perfectly good aeroplane
without a parachute
hoping
falling
watching
to see if a ridiculous Bond
James will HALO
drop
us desperately out of danger, a ripping clutch
released
at ten thousand feet.

Love sure is like an action-adventure movie!

Our love in mundane lives
spills laughter till our sides
burst,
till our hearts explode
sending
pieces too far off
cities
shell-shock
amnesic
and hungry for new horse races
with a spotted Mustang.

The clay comes from Earth
just as we
clay motion people Wurm
our way up

In a miracle we fool
ourselves
thinking transmogrification
has Calvinized calves
into bronze molded
legs shaped by a wise Maker

Instead of fast steel Forge
industrially heated
within Narcissus' Crucible

Hot from the oven
our Make-over face,
rouged from fused
sand calls
us Beauties silicon
-enhanced

How many Dolls might be in the Valley?

Can you breath heavenly still
    so I can count top your holy hill?
It's just me come sightly so  
    working Charity back and fro
    my true badge of rite
Stitched across a tongue's bite
    a neighbor's door
    and between insults of a *****.
What vile eyes you say,
    but hey, don't fret, fear nor fray
    for whatever reason we surely
Can sew a new button for Suri's
    innocent nose and dust
    off the corruption to prove
    that I never wished to move.

<quote>
Do I ******* or hate you?
...
<quote />

Money doesn't grow from
poems
or sprout forth from
jazz
trumpet, sax, nor
bass
line chord and
key
progressing flatly from
B
to some more curvaceous
tonic.

My Momma told me
shop
around for a wonderful
life
and I look and heard
choirs
singing common Gospel
words

Giving more than taking like
free
service that ask for only
donations
in return for daily
bread

So we say best wishes to all
who can conjure
cash
from our daily
*******

Cuz it's never produced a single
cash
record playing on college
radio
but if I listen
freely
I think I hear our Fruitcake
music!

Eyes without e
or she or he
or perhaps a genderless
E
beckons
because without
e
we mingle, chat
and must lifely confess
eYes without e
whispers a desperate
Yes

Who knew of Gwendolyn
as if I should know
as if it were February
on the history channel

Is it odd that Ed
finally introduced us
after so many years
as if he should be
suspiciously Caucasian

like Ed who
I really don't know
from Baltimore
growing up white
against black because
that's how America was
and is lovable,
hardworking, left-leaning
with a racist mother

or not like Curtis
who's Pusherman
from Chicago deals
I don't know waht
because I've got no
streets but enough schoolin
than most deserve.

I didn't know Gwendolyn
and that's not ironic
motivation to deal
more poetic *****
up for us to huff.

Aren(t) could be what we are
but not

a function passing time that
could be anything goes
the argument

Don(t) likes Juan
the fat one in a Chevrolet
riding alone

Haven(t), Won(t), all negate
the haves and what nots
of me doing

I(ll) passes me a double deuce
a good hand to start

but let's wait
on the flop, turn
and our river

Only fools believe in Abominable Snow
and no one does good broken hearted Man.

A Rock gazes upon pebbles looking four Silicon Gods
and no one does good on perverted side Sand.


Are we criminals or cannibals, eating on bread people
while calling post-X generation right?

Should we lie in Fear of stuff, Snow or rock
as we dip our tip and take winged flight?

O the Security of States win point
as only captive Joy and Jacob can rejoint.

Over fitting curves
to Noise. There's a drought in Puerto
Rico and Los Angeles.

Water from the Rio La
Plata is low and wow is Sierra
in her young days,
with full snowy capped
*****.

How the drooling Mangos
all crowd her on a Carnival Cruise
-- a blinding which Sun?

Somewhere even in the noise of Umma
crying, even along a low river gurgle,
a yowling true love
Signal is found. Maybe.

Probabilistically.

Crazy for advice from an artificial seat of Intelligence
called Iiamd.

The way of Sinners.

Why not meditate on night, sun, and delights
of adjusted fruits, borne and evolved
by the side of the River.

Crazy.

Is this not the case?
Chaffs blovingly removed
in a Way from Us standing with sinners--
So Bad, not bad.

My Man he's one true or sinner
Wayward God knows the way.

And another day starts pushing
first poetry like lines
from a retired Marine
Larkin cookbook who stops
singing because I asked
if he was Army

I've never heard Das Veilchen
but Mädchen hitch hiked to hear
Reggae Prince far wide beat
in and around
Aalen perhaps the softest sound
from a Brother I've never
heard or had.

Joan and her Wild punk song really
icon and cult forms
from Assisi 142
Mercy mercy was
it my whole faith then
and now

Help Believers O righteous children,
but not in Vanity, a neighbor of trembling double lips
and proud vibrating tongues saying
Winners are our Lords.

We poor complaints with fiat money have yet to wake safely
sterilized seven times pure in a Central Bank's furnace.
This forever implemented generation is protected thus
from angry steps down both aisles of withered white men.