IT'S a jazz affair, drum crashes and cornet razzes
The trombone pony neighs and the tuba ******* snorts.
The banjo tickles and titters too awful.
The chippies talk about the funnies in the papers.
  The cartoonists weep in their beer.
  Ship riveters talk with their feet
  To the feet of floozies under the tables.
A quartet of white hopes mourn with interspersed snickers:
    "I got the blues.
    I got the blues.
    I got the blues."
And ... as we said earlier:
  The cartoonists weep in their beer.

Musings of a Police Reporter in the Identification Bureau

You have loved forty women, but you have only one thumb.
You have led a hundred secret lives, but you mark only
     one thumb.
You go round the world and fight in a thousand wars and
     win all the world's honors, but when you come back
     home the print of the one thumb your mother gave
     you is the same print of thumb you had in the old
     home when your mother kissed you and said good-by.
Out of the whirling womb of time come millions of men
and their feet crowd the earth and they cut one anothers'
     throats for room to stand and among them all
     are not two thumbs alike.
Somewhere is a Great God of Thumbs who can tell the
     inside story of this.

When I was a younger man,
there wasn't much that I can't
But as the twinkles turns to wrinkles, in my eyes,
expectations dies
All in time and in some time,
there wasn't much that I can


Its man's fate to wither in time,
what's the use of saving every dime,
you came alone, you go alone,
this change in view, is what it does to you,
When I was a younger man,
there wasn't much that I can't


You value things that you never knew,
like relationships and then a few,
Love, Loss, regret, memories,
life is empty without these,
Believe me when I say to you,
these are the things that makes you YOU


And in time if you find someone,
blessed be you, for all I can tell,
a life lived loved, is sublime,
I wish I had some more time,
when I was a younger man,
I would have cherished all I can

Existing in this infinite stream.
Observing the towering waterfall above me.
Seeking a peaceful habitat,
liberation and re-birth anywhere except here.
This excessive baggage I bear,
fighting against the current.
Wondering why I started at the bottom of this waterfall,
while others, at the top.
Detained by unrelenting forceful water,
drowning me to the shadowed ground.
Rubble marking and defacing my skin.
Hiding and scared from the revolving threats.
Burdened by understanding my surroundings.
Currents throwing me around with availability.
Examining the colors of life sparkling through the reflection of my water.
Trapped in chaos,
Starved for happiness,
Losing hope in this dark stream.
One day I will see the calm sunlit waters,
I will swim past this abuse.

© Jl 2015

"...He said he'd be home tonight. Knowing his two little daughters were there waiting, maybe even praying with their small hands that he'd come home tonight. Even in the minds of the little girls they knew it was unlikely. He was going home that night, he must he told himself! To him home was the bay where he planted the tree as a child. He was going home to watch the leaves blow off the dying tree as if it's his reflection...."

Spite contorted smiles
And lips
Drenched in green
Sought the satins that never
Satisfy – Sheets, fallen,
Wings, blistered,
And holes burnt through the
Bottoms of shoes.

So I pace myself parallel
The corner of one left
Eye, peripheral and
Gazing to the
Two-step-stumble
I now partake;
An answer to
Her dance with
Impending desire.

Me, being the reluctant,
Me, being the timid, the torrent
And soon to blow over.

I know I’ll leave,
She didn’t,
And more importantly,
I know she’d find home,
Discovered, empty
With little more than
Lint in pocket, abandoned,
Just one lonely shiver
And looking for warm.

So if my cold hadn’t taken over
Not quite yet,
I’d give her a
Blanket,
It’s the best I can do,
It’s all I can do,
But at least it’s
Something I can do.

a scientist on the radio
says in three decades  
a coastal town will      
be submerged in water.  
i picture seaside resorts
& promenades absorbed
& know the same fate
awaits this city, as sea
hungrily consumes
coast it looks to us,
our bones, our docks
& ports, parliaments
& courts, our isle added
to a pile of things extinct.
a future where children are
driftwood blown ashore
with foreign tongues
& dreams of sea;
reluctantly coming up
for air jealous of all the
creatures that get to
stay down there.