Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
46.1k · Jun 2018
The Glass Shackles
Bus Poet Stop Jun 2018
~for those who will read this and weep~

the quiet ones,
the silent Job ones,
who quote not from the
Book of Lamentations,
but author their own,
based on-the-job experience

localized versions of cryptic elegiacs
accepting the wooden crosses borne,
stepping up to the
unrequested unforeseen,
then buried under, burnt alive,
yet never relieved by dying,
nailed by words, stronger than iron,
promises sworn, promises kept
with no ending date relief,
promises by and to themselves,
but not for themselves!


the wearers of crystal glass shackles,
adorned with decorative locks for which
no key did the maker make,
nor any divine creator
dare conceive an early release,
never no escape contemplated,
for the lock human, unrepentant unbreakable,
a decorative useless metaphor gesture,
a blunt “life *****” advertisement

I compose amidst a
bus pond of mismatched city folk,
a tapestry of ages colors and differing views on god/no god,
none would believe that as the bus sways me,
it’s in rhythm to holy choral music,
hundreds year old,
divinity masses and motets worships,
where one human can hide temporarily
a safe house,
to calm his questioning relentless
from the horrors of no answers,
for when the mind has no solution
to the rough and tumbling lives,
lived in glass shackled confinement,
the poets desperation equals theirs


summon eagles to transport these imprisoned,
but the shackled refuse,
I come to them but they wave me off,
I go crazy for once I was enslaved,
thirty years war that left devastation,
from which so many poems created

so I speak with heightened regard
of one who planned futures for others where his
non-existence was a founding father (ha!)


but the day came and
I was released by my own inactions,
but means nothing until a way to
away found
to release the yet bound early


got a couch, airline miles, hundred dollars
in my pocket and an unrelenting need
to save them, a consumption disease,
the glass shackled, at ease,
won’t rest till all are freed
this my creed
no one left behind

these cyber words do not mock
for they are unbounded, set free,
when
the flesh connects and the needs of the flesh
are stronger for they are in heart conceived
9.7k · Sep 2017
The Bus Poets
Bus Poet Stop Sep 2017
the bus poets

we are the modern day chimney sweeps,
the ***** black faced coal miners of the city,
digging up its grit, toasted with its spit,
the gone and forgotten elevator operators,
the anonymous substitutable,
still yet glimpsed occasionally,
grunts of urbanity
provoking a surprised
whaddya know!

once like the bison and the buffalo,
we were thousands,
word workers roaming the cities,
the intercity rural routes and the lithe greyhounds
across the land of the brave,
free in ways the
founders wanted us to be
us, the stubs and stuff,
harder working poor and lower cases

we were the bus poets,
sitting always in the back of the bus,
where the engines growls loudest,
seated in the - the most overheated
in winter time, so much so
we nearly disrobed,
and then come the summer,
we were blasted with a joking
hot reverie from the vents,
but vent, no, we did not!

no - we wrote and wrote of all we heard,
passion overheated by currents within and without,
recording and ordering the
snatches and the soliloquies of the passengers,
into poem swatches;
the goings on passing by,
the overheard histories,
glimpsed in milliseconds, eternity preserved,
inscribed in a cheap blue lined five & dime notebook,
for all eternity what the eyes
sighed and saw

books ever passed
onto the next generation in boxes from the supermarket,
attic labeled, then forgotten beside the outgrown toys
with our names writ indelible with the magic of
black markers

if you stumble upon a breathing scripter,
let them be, just observe,
as they, you,
these movers and bus shakers,
as they, observe you

tell your children,
you knew one in your youth,
then take them to the attic
retrieve your mother's and father's,
teach your children
how to read, how to see,
the ways of their forefathers,
the forsaken,
the bus poets.
dedication: for them, for us, for me
Bus Poet Stop Apr 2019
spring planting, spring harvesting, spring garlic

One of the great joys of having a job in agriculture
is to think days, weeks, even months ahead,
One of the great joys of having a job in poetry,
like a fireman,  a patient planter of love,
you wait to be called,
then becoming by being,
part of an all consuming burning

come spring, take advantage of the cool, wet weather of spring
to put in multiple crops of peas and lettuce, also a great time
to get your perennial vegetables,
like asparagus and rhubarb, started

the planting cycle is not an either/or,
come harvest thy labored fruits,
nine crops to harvest come March,
kale, pick leaves as needed,
leeks, best left in the ground
and harvested as needed,
parsnips, purple sprouting broccoli,
rhubarb, spring cabbage, spring cauliflower,
and of course, my personal fav,
Spring Garlic

Garlic, like like love, is generally planted in the fall,
before the frost and harvested the following late summer.
But from March to May,
once the ground has truly thawed,
the young lover plants, spring garlic or green garlic,
can be harvested.

it’s a long bus ride to Western Canada
where the garlic spring has come,
ain’t complaining lots of time to write foolishness
and plant a few good bus poems in northern ontario
and even michigan,
the window slides, and the seeds scattered,
but at every bus poet stop,
those that need it,
planted many inches deep


April 2 naught how I wish I was nineteen again
Bus Poet Stop Apr 2015
eye did.   As my prejudices expected, the odd assortment of "characters"were all present and not to be unaccounted for...a romantic comedy on a good Friday, attracts the believers, the well wishers, the ones who think if only the world was.. and I was not re or so tired of life, unemployed, lonely, damaged in some manner of being...

not too many young, just a few... theater darkness is a masque, with a risqué chance of oh no, I've been witnessed by the non-believers.

the infirm with their mobile caretakers and paraphernalia were there.  Odd couples, were there.  If there was one unifying common characteristic, I selected this one.  We all needed haircuts. eye don't know why but it made me think about going to get one's haircut, and the rituals that requires....and it is and is not a bit like being in a almost totally private world inpublic, where you, the individual and some outside force majeure, hairdresser, movie screen engages and temporarily transforms you.  That is why, I, went to the movies on a Friday afternoon, to be transformed and not reformed, in public, in private...
Bus Poet Stop Apr 2015
eye sometimes go to bed wearing an old hoody. It has a metal zipper  to close the front and the zipper is always cold, unpleasantly so, on my bare skin.  After awhile though, my body temperature warms the metal just enough, that it is no longer a cause of discomfort though the metal still remains inherently cool to the touch

While science can easily explain this I guess, I felt this to be a major miracle.  That flesh pliable and heart-heated to 98 degrees could conquer the molecules of metal that were made in China struck me as extra ordinary (always two words, please!) and nothing short of a personal intervention by a personal deity

When I put the hoodie on at first I would think
******* (that's cold)
When I awoke, cosy and warm, I would think
******* (that's so cool)

having studied philosophy in Cleveland,
I knew that the logic of the situation,
what I had experienced was not an
interregnum, but the invisible intervening handiwork of god, who, also knocked my glasses from the nightable to the floor,
just cause she/ he was in a bad mood, on account of having to come such a long way, just,
to reheat me
one more time.
In terre gnum - freedom from the terror of chewing gum discard actions and a phobia of gnus
Bus Poet Stop May 2015
"Many a physics graduate student has gnashed her teeth in frustration over the mathematics of general relativity. Perhaps she should try envisioning a flat, boundless desert, with rocks of various sizes scattered across its surface, whose mass creates dips of various depths in the sand. A sturdy canopy looms over that desert, stretched tightly over a skeleton of tent poles linked by bars, matching the rises and dips in the sand beneath it. The desert is all the matter and energy in the universe, while the canopy is the geometry of space-time. The poles and bars are the equations of general relativity, connecting the stuff of the universe with the shape of the universe. As Halpern writes: “Mass and energy warp space-time, telling it where and how to curve. The shape of space-time, in turn, governs how things move within it.”
-------------------------------------------------------
My mass and my energy are both warped, so the where's and the how's and the eyes of my curves are the poles and the bars of behind which I relentlessly cease to exist, only to seize what lies beyond the constraints of time and space, as eye wait for the bus to stop in the No Standing zone
The Bus Poet
Stop!
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/books/review/einsteins-dice-and-schrodingers-cat-by-paul-halpern.html?ref=review
Bus Poet Stop May 2015
dedicated to all the better poets here...*


don't know much about a quatrain
don't know how to write a refrain,
surely could not compose a
courtyard elegy
maybe after
and still untilled,
I been buried,
'n checked out
the neighborhood competition...

as for limerick,
that is Dr. Seuss
and Ogden Nash's shtick
with whom, eye,
a believed descendant,
cannot compete...

Oh dear me,  
no ode node-ed within,
as for a pastoral,
kinda hard to feat,
where I live,
a pastoral is grass cracks
surviving under,
breaking through to the other side
of concrete and blacktop rulers

Maybe one of you
will haiku,
send us a senryu,
send off, see ya!

the doc once diagnosed
a severe case of inflamed iambic pentametery,
with antibiotics and a diet of Hamletery,
was cured most satisfactorily

this silly pen-man-sinking-ship
ain't capable of dat,
boy how 'bout
an epitaph
for a graveyard stone,
should be plenty of room...
as it will be plenty short...

all eye see and all eye know
is vignettes that birth in me
walking down the street,
that's my bread and butter,
my soul's delicacies...
and moments that recorded
here, for a posteriored posterity,
as noted in my all my living
testaments,
drinking and spilling the vin,
from the uninvented igniting vignettes
that consecrate and connect our
knowing each other though odds are
we will never meet...we can yet
drink together
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Don't know much about the French I took.
But I do know that I love you,
And I know that if you love me, too,
What a wonderful world this would be."
eyes eye eye ** ** ** ha ha ha
Bus Poet Stop Oct 2015
entering arms entwined
a state of grace

offer you body warmth
to burn us together for always

tongue licks your love
the buds of taste blossom yet again

chest beating thrum
celebrates your continued existence

fingers tease you at the junctures
that pleasure reveals the magi's adoration

but

I love you best with
the love of words,
for this is the poet's way,
condense
touch sight sounds smell sensual
into what words he can give that

cost so much, held so dear,

that it is the
cherish

that
is
the
best
of
him
Oct 24, 2015
7:48 am
deep within
Bus Poet Stop May 2015
The dermatologist demands a pre-summer scan of my visual delights fully magnified.

Peering into places where no one else has ever peered, even me, reminds me that this is a potentially "disruptive" process.

Eye don't know what his eyes have seen.  

He works in silence pin punctuated by the occasional mmmm or throat clearing rumble.

Snappy removal of neutrally colored gloves signify conclusion, he opines as follows:

"Were you aware," he inquires, "that the lines, the furrows on a your forehead correspond to the life your have lead?"

"You have three, deep deep tracks, and that's a fact."

Yes, eye know,
and each one is a tree ring notation
of my existence.

Each a different year,
each a different moment fearful,
a death and a birth,
a passing, a regaining.

No, not children or parents,
illusions.

Markers of our lives are the
birth and death of our illusionary,
our revelation minutes, that measure and scribe
what dug those furrows is now officially,
no more.

Until we start anew,
a different Pretense,
a channel commenced to commemorate.

Living the dream, they say,
aren't we all, eye think, and so inform him.

The doctor did not bill for this
visitation.
Bus Poet Stop Jul 2017
months since last eye writ, your eyes most likely have never crossed mine.  still inhabit the buststops, now called bus shelters though they are not a "shelter in place" place, but a crossroads where the poor and rich, the youthful and the nearer-to-god-than-thee sit bearer nearer to each other when they reside in the equality of the moments that are globally know as
    "waiting for the bus"
or as
     "waiting for Godot".

eyes have seen buses in Rio and Delhi that carried livestock and more humans on the exterior than the interior.  

but mine eyes are in a slow fade away mode, dimming in a final
sun setting  so u are needed.  
give me your bus stories yearning to he free and I will give you
my imagined ones
for are not all bustop poems are imaginary?
Bus Poet Stop May 2015
Restless hungry, found a tiny scrap of a brownie in the back of the refrigerator, wrapped in plastic about the size of a large 35 cent quarter.  
Gobbled up and gone.

Eye had purchased it a week ago, maybe more.  
Actually it was more like eye was held up at gunpoint by a sad young face for a large and green single dollar Bill.
In return, was bequeathed said brownie eye dropper-ful.

The  apartment I live in a big city, many apartments were recession empty for a long time.  But in the last few years, the empty apartments in the building were almost all sold to foreigners.  
Now the bldg is an amulet melted of the lucky overseas fortunate, those overseers overseas seizers, who come to reside in the most fabulous site in these United States...and buy a piece of the dream away from the be-headers, secret police or governments that decide you are now an enemy of the state, as of this morning. No judgement.

anyway, this doe eyed child of estimated six or eight years of age accosts me in our large lobby, proffers me the brownie scrap for a Bill.

me a sucker of a salesman myself, and an eye affician-doe, well those doefuls, those eyes, no one could resist!

so eye asked her name,
but all she could say in
Anglais was...

"Brownie One Dollar?"

laughing out loud for no apparent cause,
the hanging about lobbyists looked at me staring...
Why was eye laughing?

laughing cause eye realized
this elfin child had become
fitfully but fully Americanized.

and I loved her eyes in mine, and when I see her periodically, I say:

"Hey! Brownie One Dollar, How are ya!"

and everyone snicker smiles at the old man with the even stupider grin upon his eyes.

That would be eye.
Drinking the vin in vignette
brownie salesman
her profitability now legendary, she travels in a pack and woe be to the poor fool entrapped in an elevator surround by fawns with a hungry look in their eyes....
Bus Poet Stop Jul 2017
<•>

BusBusNYC (A Live Love Bus App)

•<>•

if you made it this far, so fare one,
be undressed with thyself and impressed as well,
for thou joints me in holy matrimony upon a living map

where our presences can meet
in virtual real time as if eye new what that meant

but that blue dot is where this body possessed can be located by the nearest satellite finger snaking down from the heavens to Cain mark my foreheads location,
just like on Game of Thrones

don't you desire me, or rather,
the knowledge of mine
whereabouts?

the who of me, that very useful information, can best be
seen moving crosstown on the M72,
which is a mythological bus for in twenty years eye never
seen it come, go, though all its stops clearly marked

see me moving in fits and spurts of bursts of movement,
leaping streets and avenues in a single
unbounded, unstoppable superbus leap

in a city of anonymity where all who walk it streets,  
ride the tides of its buses,
all ask a single Job-like question,
regardless of age,
"I am desirable, do you want me?"

eye say the ayes have it,
no,
this is not a great poem

but!
this live bus map app is the dating site ever created by
geeky human cells
alll this virtual meeting possibly leading to coitus  
with a stranger while Pandora serenades
with perfect synchronicity, playing and plying us with
Romance for a Violin and Orchestra in F Minor,
a combination musical **** work of
Dvorak-Mehta-Midori

this bus app is
the social media's most immediate,
so meet me on the bus
at Broadway and 86 Street
where our metro cards can be
merged and we will be recognized
as a legal couple(ing)
in the eyes of MTA,
a multi-state agency and be bound in bustrimony
(legally married when riding on a city bus, only)

jeez, a crazy poem, not just, not a good one

but a true tale from the one who rides the buses and only
alights and delights with regaling tales and tellings

of love sortie sorrow maybe tomorrow the busbusNYC
app wil apply itself a smidgen better and
let me love you even with
a good under the hood
bus poem

but!
someday we will,
this, thy poet,
who does desire youalone,
will hijack you and a NYC bus,
and visit the poets from India and
the Great Northwest

won't that be a fabulous poem!
Choudhury


https://appsto.re/us/nxo6H.i
What's New
The bus app can now help subgles locate
compatible mates interested in riding the buses and  falling in love
Bus Poet Stop May 2015
~

a woman, weeping,
at her own wedding dinner,
copiously, bleating sobs,
unsignaled, unprovoked, inexplicable.

misunderstanding guests,
shifting their weight
from foot to foot,
searching for a combo-pose of
of joyous discomfort.

all is well, say the wedding singers,
hymns of wedding songs they perform,
encouraging the standers-about
to dance,
all whom are inconsolably confused about
the wed woman's recognition of a
moment's milestone marker
which distinguishes, her totality,
feeling the differential between
the miles ahead,
the miles already passed,
but cannot answer
the singular considerable consideration question,
is this mine, the right road
and am I
who I am supposed to be,
or the supposition of others

which is why bride weeps at her wedding

~

a sober, industrious, quiet man
of many middle years,
seen sway dancing on the lawn
at 6:00 AM,
to sounds unheard,
was it music, voices,
a breaking point,
the birth of madness?

we, who watched from within,
behind a safe boundary
of glass and stucco and timber,
jealously considering alternate theories
of creation of the universe,
dual roles,
observing guests and voyeurs,
prayed for ourselves,
desirous of his wishes granted,
swayed with him,
in flagrante delicto,
co-conspirators unseen,
but jailed,
behind protective walls of
glass and stucco and timber,
sotto voce confessing priest-worthy sins
while protesting their innocent knowledge
of a man's delightful craziness,
a distraction from
weeping brides

~

the parents posts to Facebook
pictures of children,
warily unaware that their favoritism
is slip showing

oh they favor the youngest son,
beautiful Joseph with many colored coats,
possessing the practiced cuteness
and skillfully employ how to manipulate it sweetly
on suspecting adults

the  eldest daughter,
unconsciously,
is the child made over
into a physical representation,
a manifestation of themselves preserved
as parents are wont to do
just because
they can
~
the swayer wedding guest
pray~dances to the tune of:

give over, her to me, to me,
to replant her unsuspecting
in garden wild,
feed her colors of her as yet unthought of,
foresee her aching beauty,
teach her freedom dancing by the sea,
weeping at her weeping
at her wedding
simpatico with her,
confusion and joy and fear

which is why the man sway dances
on the lawn at 6:00 am and weeps
copious bereft and joyous,
at the possibilities of conquering life
and foresees
the child wedding weeping
and weeps in anticipatory empathy sympathy
at their cojoined
kinship fate

~
2.2k · Apr 2015
how Eye make love, sometimes
Bus Poet Stop Apr 2015
how Eye make love,
this popped into my head
tho questioning this quest,
what purpose served, unknown...

lacking the infatuation to poetry write,
the mind retreats to the basics,
eye write with no destination,
wondering at the wonderment
of this basic actionable accolade...

sometimes,
be the
operative word,
sometimes
cooperative,
is the operative...
sometimes,
is but a
it just depends
who
is the initiate
and who possesses the initiative...

every story has a different
author, ending...

sometimes slow,
sometimes muy rapido
in foreign tongues
in foreign places,
the only commonality be that
wonderment

eye wish this not to be explanation,
eye wish this to be an explication
of the texts of sensual visionaries,
imagining the helping to happening,
the passageway to and from
where the mind begins,
the body completes its origination

oft I close my Eyes,
listening to hers,
her eye voices directing me,
what will be the course of our
course,
miss no Michelin starred landscapes,
through hers, mine Eyes triumphant...
tour guide excellente

cannot explain
why the temp sometimes
solar flares,
why the temp sometimes
is a glacial expedition,
tongue led,
from toes to eyelids...
always buy tickets for a
round trip flight...

how
is a titillation, begging you to read & expose,
there is no how, only sometimes  better,
sometimes different...

why
is a question needs no asking...

when

when the shape of her profiled neck,
reflects shadows of further inquiry,
when her décolletage collects me
as she and her designer intended...

when
she laughs uproariously at my piquant,
suave and debonair one liners,
requiring kissing tickling calming

when
tears spill when reading
a new takeaway poem mine,
needy for a tongue to collect that spillway...
just being friendly appreciative and thanking

where

is when
the how and
the why
intersect

the intemperate weather of
being alone
subtle suggests
auto recollections
now know
the how, when, where and the
why,
my Eyes compose this elegy
of memories of past and present...
1.7k · Apr 2015
Why you are addicted to HP
Bus Poet Stop Apr 2015
this is not a ten stepper essay.  You are, and you admit it, full stop. Addicted to HP.  No help here.

but to answer the question...

the writing of a poem,
no matter what your style,
eye dropper word selection,
slow methodical,
or furious expelling, frying oil
until crescendo is achieved
is clearly a fulfillment of
a ****** type of need.

Afterwards,
after words,
when you repeatedly
check the number of likes,
it is just you asking me

was it as good for you
as it was for me?

Usually, eventually,
the answer is a
quiet, soft spoken,
very few reads version of:

"Uh, just let me sleep"
which means you will try again
in the the morning suncomeforth.
eye put the vin in vignettes
1.5k · Oct 2023
it’s been awhile…
Bus Poet Stop Oct 2023
since I last
rode a bus,

no, poems aplenty
have poured and dripped
from ink-saturated fingers,
here there and  everywhere,
disguised by many a nom de guerre

the bus riding infrequently,
as work no longer demands me,
I ride for the occasional occasion, when legs won’t
carry me the far away distances

they say violence in the city
is random, and just seems worse,
seemingly a newspaper creation,
but I know better, and random violence &
poetry inspiration do not walk or talk
hand in hand, not for the hands that write…

in every crack, lamppost,
festooned
with flyers for concerts years ago,
poems reached out to me, write, right?
I too am papered with memories of long-ago
city travels, picking up scenes & dreams
that became poems, instantaneously, scrambling,
to get home with them retained, untainted,
preserved with the freshness of city smells,
city swells, homeless, rowdies & oldies shuffling,
the interwoven of disparate desperate humans,
fodder once and now for Walt Whitman’s leaves,
each distinct needy for something else,
but for me,
just one city big view, a Cloister’s museum tapestry,
remade, rewoven anew every moment of every day

and a poem-rough tumbles from
without
&
within


,
1.2k · Nov 2015
past tense reliving
Bus Poet Stop Nov 2015
past tense,
past
tense

say it over &
over
wanting
but not believing,
just reliving,
the future
over & over,
in the 3-D
of the
past
tense
Bus Poet Stop May 2015
come to me,
my beloveds
with long nails
and squinting eyes,
spare neither
claw or hook,
delve and devolve,
critique and solve
the words of this prophet
scribbled on plastic
bus seats

give me
my due,
my comeuppance,
my downfalls

will me
to be better
or worse
if that be betterment

so eagerly
will embrace,
grasp, insert
your benailing fingers,
soften, grasp,
repoint thy claws
taking thy earnest joy
at pain inflicted
as my own
as long as you dare
just say something!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A bus poem
in honor of my invitation  
my digital birthing

April 8th, 2015
Bus Poet Stop Apr 2015
Two excerpts, for the full article, see the notes


"It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?

We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones. But our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate that sort of inner light. Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character.

But if you live for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K. But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet."

"External ambitions are never satisfied because there’s always something more to achieve. But the stumblers occasionally experience moments of joy. There’s joy in freely chosen obedience to organizations, ideas and people. There’s joy in mutual stumbling. There’s an aesthetic joy we feel when we see morally good action, when we run across someone who is quiet and humble and good, when we see that however old we are, there’s lots to do ahead.

The stumbler doesn’t build her life by being better than others, but by being better than she used to be. Unexpectedly, there are transcendent moments of deep tranquillity. For most of their lives their inner and outer ambitions are strong and in balance. But eventually, at moments of rare joy, career ambitions pause, the ego rests, the stumbler looks out at a picnic or dinner or a valley and is overwhelmed by a feeling of limitless gratitude, and an acceptance of the fact that life has treated her much better than she deserves.

Those are the people we want to be."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/opinion/sunday/david-brooks-the-moral-bucket-list.html?ref=opinion
Or
Just google David Brooks NY Times
Bus Poet Stop May 2015
an annualized vacation in the mountains with her sisterhood, down in the Mountains of Mexico, hiking (up at daily at 5:00am to drink in the rising sun, climb the mountain literally,  and imbibing the wildflowers so delighting), breathing in deeply, yoga-ing, multiple dance classing, and restoring a body/soul impetus that city life makes harder, tho she does do it so well...
yes, she is lucky in life to be open willing and capable of restoration...

arriving at home around 11pm, me in bed, all anticipatory, get a (very) quick kiss on the forehead, and switching my light off, she heads off to the den armed and dangerous with the TV chicheer ( what we call it for so long, I forget the real name), watch 6(!) hours of accumulated TV, with many more hours as yet in need of curating...

which proves nothing
but that she is a creature of the night...
and that nature without fantasy is simply not,
nurture sufficient...

as for me...fantasy is my nature
and my nurture
eye'm happy to see blonde hairs and nothing but
peeking out from underneath the sheets,
and remain
sincerely yours,
Mr. Anticipatory,
but no longer her,
Mr Fantasy
Drinking the vin in vignettes
Bus Poet Stop Apr 2019
not much he reasons, resonating the question,
in the resounding places where both are congruent kept

we talk of lines all the time, line divisors of our
denominators and our numerators,
but truth and secrets are 1/1
so the rational number is always one indivisible whole,
with liberty for both,
when
the glass shackles^
be broken

but let us not dance around the marshmallow fire,
while watching clocks melt as our memory persists,
so secrets and truths have a rigorous solute/solution relationship,
yet, the dividing line melts over time and the answer

in all the poems that the body worked,
with experience, you can see the works becoming
the body solution blended,
undefined admixture, defined, refined, all just fine,
for the microscopic difference is in the eye of the beholder
but requires breaking
the glass shackles^

for
one will enchain
one will set you free
when their meld is melted
866 · Apr 2015
Ha ha on me
Bus Poet Stop Apr 2015
Ha ha on me.   eye still have a full head, of laughing hair...


eye am vain like you, and though advancing steadily with daily doses of aging, and since I am titanicaly nearer my God than thee, i.e. the finish line...end of days...whatever...having a nice head of hair is a happy happenstance for nothing "ages" an immature person faster than a lack or absence of hair....

some say it is all genetic....could be...but my theory is different...I laugh at myself all the time...my foolish words, my creasing vices, my dastardly prejudices, are absurd in extremis...and am in possession of a willingness to be the **** of my own humor to bring creased smiles in others's to the fore...

though serious, I don't  take myself seriously...and this self disrespect means I laugh at my own pomposity, posterior and peculiarly peculiar peculiarities.

So I laugh a lot as I am one of those idiots who reflects on the state of himself and goes, eye eye eye!

the laughing releases a dosed vial of special testosterone which makes my hair grow and since I fully expect much sorrow and to be living homeless, on the streets, in my end of days, the fact that I will have a full head of hair as I go down into my grave makes me laugh which releases....

ha ha on me
856 · Apr 2015
Loungewear
Bus Poet Stop Apr 2015
tired of my drooping Hanes,
my slept-in choice for greeting
a new morning tad overexposed,
my weekend breakfast table
body's accoutrement,
"coverup" she deemed accurately
as in-suffice,
my nighttime slept-in choice for
welcoming the new morning
as a single continuum,
exposing my true colors,
thus declaring biblically,
"Let there be night, let there be day,"
in a manner of speak

she-woman wryly declares
over her slim sizing
yogurt Greek and half of a laugh
of a banana downsized,

"You need some loungewear"

pondering this ponderosa-sized ponderosity,
grasping its monstrosity insulting me,
coffee pouring, Eye, a
first responder
contemplate irresponsibly,
thinking to reply with bravado,
that on said day,
when Eye accrete
such a class of clothing
so nomenclatured as
"loungewear"
upon my person,
or in my ward-so-unrobed found,
unasked for,
Eye will require transgendering

but my tongue bites me,
so instead
draw down on my John Donne,
on the subject of
food, good taste
and being unclothed,
and instead
He-poet
bequeath the she-woman
this riposte...

"Full nakedness!
All joys are due to thee;
as souls unbodied,
bodies unclothed must be
to taste whole joys.


wisely retreating than be
defeating,
not wanting
a world war conflicting,
with coffee mugged, Eye return/hide,
under the bed's blanketing comforter,
thinking of the taste of whole joys
of her body unclothed,
when later, she creeps in next to me,
to practice the serious art of
*lounging...
Putting the Vin in Vignette
850 · Sep 2018
eye know now
Bus Poet Stop Sep 2018
“eye now know
the how, when, where and the-why,
my Eyes compose this elegy
memories of past and present...
blending into memories of future happenstance”

what is chosen is believed
though the choices are presented -
I choose among the sacrificial burnt offerings  

this, my will is free
though the path is circumscribed, ordained

the bus has a route it follows,
but the speed and timing  governed by
chances made by me
and you
me and random things spliced.and sundered

get on me
get off me
get
Bus Poet Stop Jul 2017
June 6th 1944 was D-Day.

an ordinary Tuesday,
delightful divided into an ordinary gamut,
a potpourri of Earth-Ordinaries,
with me doing my very best job ever,
bus stop eavesdropping.

Buses are for everyone,
but ever since they taught the
city buses to kneel to the elderly
and gave them an additional limb,
an elevator for wheelchairs,
they seem more majoritized by those
who have earned
the discounted fare of senior citizenry.

two prim and rose blushed ladies await the M31,
to head uptown on York Avenue,
where the many hospitals
have elected to build edifices
side by side, to more easily share illness,
and rise far as the Babel elevators can climb.

prime material for a bus stop poet,
and sure enough, these two, mid-eighties,
I reckon, provide me rich veins of
words, matériel, to cross under the arches.

What is the proper way to put in toilet paper so it dispenses
properly, which somehow is super fascinating.

who has had their hips replaced and who passed,
because they did not.

the deterioration of bus service under the new mayor who seems always to be out of town, or late.

a few blocks before bus approached Sloan Kettering,
where one was to be scanned precautionary,
while the other was due an intravenous cocktail of poison,
the more aged of the two changed the subject extraordinarily.

do you know what day this is?

the other replied,
oh yes,
the day your older brother died upon a French beach,
the brother but eight years older than us,
the brother your adored and that I loved, even at age ten,
was to be my shy one, betrothed unto me

for seventy years my darling, we have together remembered,
even in the years that my abusive husband wrested me away
to California, and forbade my seeing your countenance,
and the second, a good man of proud Missouri stock,
poorer than an interdenominational  lmouse,
who wished but could not afford our joining,
have we not always chattered on this day,
of this and that,
so you could ask as if by chance,

do you know what day this is?

this is the day
they chose to name with scarlet ****** letter,
not an A but a black and bold
D,
and redirected our lives,
its tremors and
remembrances,
its directed chances and luck of the draw, and diminishing memories,
knowing that we shall never again be separated till we have word
choice
stripped from our vocabulary.

now our stop has come so let us alight and delight
that we defeat yet again, that deathful enemy,
and even when he must win the day,
we three will be reunited in a victory,
in a victory so patiently awaited.  

missed my stop by ten blocks,
and was thinking maybe
being an eavesdropping bus poet stop
was a more dangerous profession than I could handle.
7/21/17 York Ave.
773 · Apr 2015
Fat mothers, fat daughters
Bus Poet Stop Apr 2015
eye saw an overweight mother walking down one of our avenues. Beside her, a daughter of perhaps eight or nine years of age.  The mother was heavy though once in possession of attractive.  Plump everywhere, thought kindly, was  the daughter. Past obese, on her way to fat.  While at that age you can easily be transformed by a lucky blossom, a passion for sports, both the mother and daughter were holding hands, smiling and happy together, as is...as they were, where they were...

in a big city and universe where skinny is the currency of happiness, I grew agitated, internally.  The mother had to have been injured by the most awful slings and arrows of the world's impartial, unforgiving dislike for all things that were not pitch perfect.  Agonies that children are often the object of the subject of verbal water boarding by bad gene bullies were surely yet to come!  Why did she not as a mother, protect her daughter's future and have her avoid the pressure of a world that pretends to celebrate diversity, but truly loves only the infirmity of acceptable uniformity? Diet, execise, caring, mothering, something!

why did she allow, permit, nay perhaps, encourage this child to mimic her thus? Was it a caustic indifference, a simple misery needs company?

of course, it could have been genetic and I'm just another overwhelming overweight ******* too.

But twenty fours later, I saw them in my mind's eye clearly - holding hands and happy together, and I forgave them my conditioned trespasses, but remained worried about the many nights of tears that no prophet was required to predict.
Bus Poet Stop Apr 2015
What day of the week do you change your sheets?

a question of import,  revealing much of human frailty, arrogance, and your friend's secrets - their most personal weltanschauung

my sheets are (not by me) changed on Friday afternoon, in honor of the oncoming Sabbath. The Sabbath begins according to tradition on Friday night (every day begins at nightfall) since god,  the Lebowski dude created the world, per Genesis, it was done in this order -
"and there was evening, then there was day."

so I figured that an offer of a day of regularized rest deserved clean sheets on the eve of its conception.

some of you who agree with view may prefer Saturday afternoon/evening, since your sabbath occurs primarily on Sunday, and in many parts of the world sabbath is coincidentally purposed for laundry anyway.

that said, you may very well change your sheets on whatever is laundry day in your mansion or dorm room.  However, I defy you atheists to deny that you think when slipping in between two fresh sheets, "there is a god"
Bus Poet Stop Apr 2015
eye am out on a rainy weekend day, feeling  the compulsion to escape the imprisonment of one's living quarters reflecting off of the rain puddles slicks on black city streets, that shine bright like an addiction's craving. For   Single people in a city that values personal beauty and anonymity simultaneous means entering the outside world of a drizzling, more like misting, gloom and be outside dressed as if going to,  and indeed, perhaps some were actually going,  to the gym though for most, off for a Starbucks moment of community.

all dressed to code.  The code says all black, hooded yoga clothes, exercise uniforms of various sort, special string chain mini-pocketbooks  to hold phone of just in case, always all black always, all  of no color, except, by code, by some global understanding of a legislated law, somewhere on the body must be a splash of pink or a luminescent pastel.  

Usually it's the sneakers, but not necessarily. Some pinks streaks were observed in the drawstrings that pulled the hoodies tight around the face or just the laces of the black sneakers...there are rules in the world that must be obeyed though they are never legislated or indeed, never spoken...this is one...the coda of black and pink splash.
Bus Poet Stop Jun 2015
a lumpy bumpy proletariat hardness has harnessed, hitched and stitched itself into my abdomen.

with the precision measuring instrument, Eye calculate with my fingers its latitude and longitude, using my belly button (half insy, half outsy) as a reference point.

a few days after Eye quite accidentally encountered said lump (for Eye am not in the habit generally of belly rubbing), a slight discomforting sensation joined in to make sure I was never not going to forget it's
invasive presence.

soon Eye shall do a doctor's visitation, who will ummm and hmmm, before sending me downward and inward to a
"S p e c i a l i s t."

I am sorta quite pleased with new adventure,for it encourages fantasy in the most heart wrenching, delicioso tragic manner.

Then along comes the Sunday NY Times, in a piece entitled "Imagining the Lives of Others" just how difficult it is for someone to truly put themselves in the shoes of someone else.

"There are certain limits, however, to how far we can go. The philosopher Laurie Paul, in her book “Transformative Experience,” argues that it’s impossible to actually imagine what it would be like to have certain deeply significant experiences, such as becoming a parent, changing your religion or fighting a war. The same lack of access applies to our understanding of others. If I can’t know what it would be like for me to fight in a war, how can I expect to understand what it was like for someone else to have fought in a war? If I can’t understand what it would be like to become poor, how can I know what it’s like for someone else to be poor?"

The solution?

"One approach is to go ahead and actually have the experience."

ahh. So I shall, until the certainty of unobtainable uncertainty is formally declared, the mind is free to roam about the cabin of life, imagining various and vainglorious dramatic outcomes.

More strange, if it is the worst, I shall be happily relieved by the knowledge that I can plan around a certain mental scheme...what a gift that is, knowing how to allocate a scarce resource well.

Eye will stop here, until mine eyes can see this clearer; here, until the
*bus stops for the poet...
or the poet's bus stops...
Bus Poet Stop Apr 2015
weekends these days are what weekends are supposedly meant to be...days of pleasured nothing that fills you with intensity.

The intensity of just living easy, is hard to learn because it is kind of forgiving yourself for not working harder which is guilt melting like a glacier - slow but not too slow.

but eye stray from the topic.  with nothing planned, we drift from morning bed to breakfast (3 poems done before that!),  to what to do and because we never would, we did.  Go see Furious 7 in an empty theater, on a Saturday afternoon.

Awful. Noisy like when your ears hurt cause of a passing ambulance.   Lines delivered in a not how to act corny that all just fall  short of incredible bad funny hysterical....ugh...and the car chases are just ok.   So return home to I get my once a week home cooked meal in a city that never stops eating, or closes, and delivery is 24/7 and almost instantaneous (Chinese is instantaneous) (Fyi)).

before you know it is 8:30pm and we fall back into bed to watch old movies we saw years ago and remember fondly (Mr. Hollands Opus, Hairspray, It's Complicated).

Around 11pm, eye just turn sideways and am gone.  

she wee hours watches, till around 2am, but then eye awaken, and find her almost always, hand in mouth, tablet lying on her chest, and her glasses on...eye shut the TV which means finding the remote hiding in the sheets and isn't always easy. Tablet transferred to the night table.

But the glasses, that is last, hardest.

With two hands, while out of bed, indeed, standing surgeon-like over her, eye remove in one fell swoop her glasses and she does not stir, mumble, utter, groan or notice.

this successful stealth operation is the high point of a perfect day.
522 · May 2015
Hotel S_x May 2015
Bus Poet Stop May 2015
Hotel ***

shortly after we arrive, eye call the front desk and ask them
when was the first time we stayed at the hotel?

2010, five years, usually once, sometimes twice de a year was
the answer.

in their computer, the management records our modest likes, preferred newspapers, the firmness of our pillows and that
we require telephonic advisories to adjacent rooms,
code worded Kilimanjaro,
when we engage in Grade A, FDA approved hotel ***.

noisy, twisted, sheet messed, bubble bathed, wall climbing, chandelier swinging, room device only, do not disturb, full on, hotel ***.

but times change us and this time eye reach repeatedly for her bare arms, and one in ten, one in ten, I dare to gentle, to caress... lest eye awaken her...nothing changes, everything changes, the satisfactions express themselves differently...time zone changes, alter body clocks and needs are not auto-instinctual, more cerebral, and yet eye tend to her both  like my woman and beloved child, anticipating her almost every need...and wonder where that
hotel *** drive got misplaced...
them glory days...


when they ask if our stay was satisfying,
my verbal reply is both invisibly straight and di-visibly crooked...

"holey satisfactory, holy satisfactory"

and ever eye am the pun, the jokester par excellent,
hugging nuggets of previous journeys...
retrieved from cold storage, recollections  of
*ah, hot hotel ***!
Bus Poet Stop Apr 2015
Those little scrapes and cuts that eye obtain just from living; often, no, always, unaware from where or wince, or whence....they came, and more oblivious to their invisible departure...but I do notice this:
their stay, for they overstay their welcome....unlike in my youth, these scratches would barely pass the night, and be gone before the next morn....

now I do not know when they come or when they go,  but stay and stay and stay. For the skin repairs itself so much slower when you are older....and you think just a little how it ain't no different with the heart cuts 'n scars, fresh and old.  Same,  you get older, you notice them, can't exactly recollect when you earned them...but
you feel them hanging on to you, as if they came with you when you were new in the showroom.....but didn't show up till whenever
Bus Poet Stop May 2020
“for when the mind has no solution to the rough and tumbling lives,
lived in glass shackled confinement, the poet’s desperation equals theirs”

The Bus Poet Stop “The Glass Shackles” ^

                                              <|>

~this one for Eliot York, who gave us a great gift - opportunity~

                                               §§§

The mandated city buses are largely denuded of passengers,
so the drivers, peruse the enriched, enforced silenced life of the
streetscape, and as they pass, call-out a fisherman’s plaintive wailing,
“here we are, where are you, do we exist?” Too few nibble “I am!”

Bus Poet Stops, stumbles on an older writ, now seemingly prophetic,
once again, he is back, living in a glass shackled confinement,
his 16th floor perch, besmirched, the mirthless empty outside well matched by the isolation inside him, a new kind of shackling bereft.

For these glass shackles are not new, but different, the glass is poorly blown, cloudy, pockmarked with air bubbles entrapped, useless
for fresh breathing, many containing a question mark, some ask
what, others when/where shelter, all, harsh pleading tones, why me?

“For when the mind has no solution” poet wrote in twenty eighteen,
unaware that this predictive value would return to rent & render mean,
his composure, no longer a savior, now he weeps copiously for thee,
those that he, in prior life, came to save, now too, another faceless face.

no, no!

Your writing saves self, and a thousand more, you infiltrate, penetrate     our conjoined quiet, giving name to each of our unsalted tears, no fear poems that make us say, Merry, Merry to us all; God bless us, every one! Bus Poet head-hung, shamed, pained, looks away, mask-covers-gratitude.

Rough and tumbling times, we discount ourselves blameless, but voices
say time for gifting varietals of solace mysterious, this! is your business!
words, instruct to touch, to transport us on a poet’s bus to Delirious,
enable arrival+survival to destiny’s destination, “for all, a good night!”
^ https://hellopoetry.com/poem/2575579/the-glass-shackles/

Fri May 1
twenty twenty

in anno autem coronavirus plaga
3:00pm
from NYC, the. epicenter
436 · Jan 2016
thought
Bus Poet Stop Jan 2016
Thought
~~~

thought is where our creativity comes from,
our creativity to be
more than mere,
not just, a dancer,  not just, a poet,
but an all-being force for bettering others

in your thoughts, see no naughts,
see it as suitable soil
for planting, sustainable, caressing, encompassing,
purity, the essence of ourselves, yes say it,
ah, goodness!

goodness.
simple, yet so complex, initiate it with that
most excellent thought
that just (a nanosecond!) fleetingly passed by

grab it for
dear life,
hold on,
use it,
to make
life dearer...
Jan 10, 2016
NYC
11:14am
Bus Poet Stop Sep 2018
“”I could hardly ac­cuse George Wash­ing­ton of lack­ing vi­sion for the coun­try he helped found. But in 1790, he wrote a let­ter to the Jews of New­port, R.I., in which he of­fered this bless­ing: “May the chil­dren of the stock of Abra­ham who dwell in this land con­tinue to merit and en­joy the good will of the other in­hab­i­tants—while every one shall sit in safety un­der his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.” With this friend­ship, Amer­ica has done much bet­ter than that.””
Abraham George Newport
225 · Jul 2020
That bus still stops
Bus Poet Stop Jul 2020
at my stop,
but very few getting on,
even fewer getting off, all
on account nobody feels
like going anyplace anyway

I don’t mind,
like stretching out,
and the big picture
sized windows mine,
now all to myself, got
fantastic view of
empty streets

the bus drivers don’t
kick me off at the last
stop anymore, happy
for the company, even
though the drivers are
the sorriest sad sacks,
crying quietly under
the masks that don’t
hide all that much

— The End —