There is an
eternal winter
that lingers around
my heart.
It beckons with
icy music,
gray clouds, and
marches by Wagner.
Vultures, like ghastly
puppets picking at
my brain.

I drive it away with
sunflowers and walleyes,
fish fries and the gathering
together of friends and saints,
old soldiers that beat the odds,
and the neutered con game.
Leonard Cohen overcame,
and so did I.
Life was playing chess,
While I was playing
checkers.
Well, baby, it's checkmate.

I didn't need lucky bamboo
or a four-leaf clover, I needed to
use the wisdom that God gave me.
I made some changes in my actions.
When I behaved differently, I found
serenity and a Winnie the Pooh and
Piglet sort of happiness.
I was drowning, so I grew gills and
swam away to a river that flowed
through the Million Acre Woods,
and now when I am on land,
I waltz down Love Street.

Cleanse me from
the dust of
the night, and
the apocalyptic
visions of my
slumber.
Fish guts, ****, or
insomnia may have
conjured these rotting
skin nightmares,
these mosquitoes from
hell.
I struggled to wake up,
but couldn't, and finally,
while I was flying in
a gray land of desolation,
and killers,
of nighthawks and harpies.
I soared through a
hazy wasteland, and arrived
safely back home
in my serene, August Sabbath.

You chatter away like
an angry squirrel,
I watch you scamper
off and finally resemble
a fading flower.

When the
naked branches
blew in
the late
autumn winds,
our love died.
How I long
for the days
of spring,
when all was
alive with
newness.
We lay beneath
the willow tree
and dined on wine,
bread and love.
God,
how I miss you.

We used to talk about
going
to Montana--escaping it all,
building a log cabin and
making a garden.  We were
going to hunt and fish for
food--make rugs and
hats from the fur.

But look at us now.
You live in the
city and drive a Volvo.
Goldfish in a glass bowl.
You even taught your
cat to walk on
a leash.
Can you see the
sky with all the smog?

I'm not any better.
Living under the bridge;
the only hunting I do is
for cans, the rare and
illusive
aluminum nickel, so that
I can buy *****.  

I walk down to the
river's edge and look up at
the expansive sky.
I close my eyes.
And when I open them, baby,
we're in Montana.

I look at the pictures of us, and it's like looking at a paper graveyard.
The smiles, so frozen in time, so distant and temporary.

My memories are of cut flowers,
laid at the altar of us.
Bright and then fading, losing petals
like prayers scattered over fresh earth.

Your eyes have lost their shine in my mind.
I can barely taste you on my tongue.
My mouth starves at your garden.
As time slips away, the pain becomes like
an old rusty machine
on an abandoned farm.

We disintegrate and decompose.
A gentle thundering rain swallows us
in hazy downpouring sheets.
But a new life is carried
through turbulent groundwater currents.
A sprout, seeking root on fertile ground,
where fleeting moments of new joy
will be captured again and again.

And through the death of the old,
we embrace the birth of the new.