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.

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.

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

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.

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?

“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!”

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

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 ***!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

“”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.””

~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

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.

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."

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.

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

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"

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...

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.