I've been so old, locked in line by expectations
I forgot that love is a $20 ticket to a punk rock show

Sweaty bodies pushing forward, slamming hard,
falling to fall in love with the words of some yelping, grown-out teenager

And we're all drinking ****** venue beer just because it's dirt cheap
and suddenly I remember that I'm only free with ***** feet
and I come alive in mosh pits and I die when I live for paycheques

We're all dripping beads of sweat, making necklaces from our youth
Tokens of everything we love and shedding everything we hate
We'll sweat it out onto the ***** bar floor
We'll keep going until our legs give out, I swear to it

I've never been more free than when I'm dancing to these songs
I've been so old, forgetting that I'm just a punk rock kid, with $20 in my pocket and ****** beer in my hand
Singing songs that mean something, demand change, ooze with emotion, celebrate divine & dingy moments, make me feel that transgender dysphoria blues

I forgot that this is euphoria
I'm not jaded quite yet
Not in this moment
How dare I be
How dare I?

I don’t know about those pastoral scenes
Those bucolic and primordial endless greens
Unspoilt trees and murmuring streams
I know the concrete and the pavement
Uneven cobblestones with cracks in them
With dandelions growing through
Only sometimes

I love the later more
I’m in love with the concrete behemoths
The back alleys of life
The gnarled bouncers (unreciprocally)
The curious glimpses at weathered flyers on the floor
I love the sterile street lights and the worn faces ILLUMINATED by them
The ushers and hustlers and cautious taxis
The drunk geniuses
The night-swimmers
The nudists
The opinionated
Etc

Yet life whittles down these loves for that of the
Calculable
The
Regimented
And
Controllable
Etc

I'll give you shelter
before the rains come

September's settling in
like a setting sun

I can see the dark clouds
coming your way

Let's sit out on the porch
and watch the day fade to gray

There's lightning on the horizon
and thunder under the wind

Why don't you stay here awhile,
it's good to see you again

We'll go inside and light a fire
when the night gets young

I'll give you shelter
before the rains come.

r ~ 9/22/14

Your past is your story.
I will never demand you
Rip a single page
From it.

I'm a very big boy.
Tales of your yesterloves
Scare me as little as
Anything;

Only hurt as much
As they should.
Never burn a picture
To please me.

Never paint over a
Secret, never camouflage
A single regret as
Bad luck.

Skeletons. Dust and bones,
Dead and harmless.
Tell me everything.
Unsensored;

No blur nor bleep.
I want to know
What shaped you into
Someone so

Deserving of my
Interest. Let me into
Your attic. Turn out
The lights.

I'm a very big boy.
Even my ghosts are
Scarier than
Yours.

All moments last forever,
trapped in time, yes,
like pages on a book,
but there, all the same,
reaching out from the past,
indelible memories, forever.

There are dreams,
then there are dreams,
some dreams, like kisses,
have portent, subtle magic,
while some dreams, and kisses,
are just dreams and kisses.

Moments, like kisses,
are trapped in memories,
magical dreams, reaching,
making the day smile,
reminding those who love,
all moments last forever.

©Paul M Chafer 2014

I never dream of you, my sleeping mind does not need to
make up the sensation of your touch: I
already know. the only
moment I ever forgot was while

missing you in air. I am of the land –
the sky is too much,
it swallows me
it holds me and all is static, saturated and humid
I hesitate as rain that needs to fall.

I missed you so much
that gravity had to pretend it was missing me more

there are clouds that are too kind,
feigning love
as a distraction from my loss.

underwater,
your hair moves like shooting stars. I was reminded of
that then – how I had abandoned
you for astronomy,
pushed meteors a little closer to you
and they just seem to float. they lift in slow
motion, they curl
because there is no gap between
your bed and the wall up in space, is no shelter
to feel safe. water and loss and the galaxy

are so heavy
they have to cradle you until they bruise.
I think about you –

I think about you.

Sittin' on the dock of the bay,
Watching the sun slip, Simon-says, slide away,
Cheeks blushing flushing from orange ray-guns,
Drinking blush rosé to oil our eyes
For the subtle story the sky shortly will reveal,
For the subtle story the sky shortly will revel.

Grievous judgement to make,
Thinkin' skills possessed to praise,
When but yesterday I easy confessed,
When at the Blue Canoe (another poem),
I did not.

(The clouds were magnificent. No, I cannot write a poem about the cloud colors. Their shape shifting inexhaustible.  Mine eyes high on their creativity.  I'm just not good enough a poet to tamper with that sky.)

If you courage enough to
Call yourself poet, then
It is audacity, not blood,
Warming your extremities,
So foolishly try, always be prepared to fail.

No impulse. We pledged that tonight, ours,
One hour of sunset over Silver Beach.
Brought the wine, forgot the pillows,
So Abraham & Isaaca went prepared to sacrifice
All feelings in their butts for the greater glory
Of love and one of nature's great poetic challenges..

The conundrum~miracle of every sunset
O'er bay, lake or ocean, is its special,
Only-In-Nature unique way of customizing
Its descent just for you.

No matter where one observes,
No matter where you worship,
Wherever your temple, mosque or church situé,
Tennessee, Rhode Island, the Philippines,
Germany, Colombia, even in the ole U.K.,
(yes, you, know it, yes you)
The very same setting sun we all see,
Sends a magic dazzle gold orange path invitation
To the exact spot you are voyeuring,
One sun, all destinations equal before human.

How can that be?

Trepidation and tremblingly,
The clouds.

She leans on me, a perfect fit,
My back resting against a pylon,
So we see the clouds
With common exactitude,
But it is a quiet time, silence only shared.
Images stored silently within ourselves,
For we see the formation, man, woman,
Precisely and exactly, totally differently.

The clouds.
An armada moving imperial and imperiously
At a stately speed, saying I am awesome, fear me.
The largest cloud bank is an aircraft carrier,
Miles long, painted horizon blue-grey unsurprisingly.

The small white wisps, fast destroyers, stealthy submarines,
Moving fast to protect the mother ship,
Running random to confuse enemy radar and the
Pathetic, limited, human eye.

The colors.
Here I fail willingly, unashamedly.
So many sunsets, so many hearts,
All different, all the same.
Lacking knowledge, I cannot tender,
I cannot offer you tenderness to love
Enough,
The variety of oranges, gold, varietals interspersed
With pinks singeing the cornea,
And mock myself for all my meager brain yields is
Good Humor creamsicle...a delicious irony

You who write after midnight
Of razor blades, pills and shotguns,
And not marked two decades even, on this planet,
You want hard,
Write a poem about a sunset in ways never done before.

You, who are wracked with despair
Speak to the man with no job for months
And mouths to feed and a life insurance policy.
Speak to me.

I want to tell you to get over yourself,
But you reject that old saw.
Ok.
Get onto to yourself.

I have walked the hallways of deep despair,
Heard the bells ring between periods that signal only the next
Hell,
And to this day, still do,
But still I try to write external of sunsets and greater glories.

How many lives depend on you? Are you proud of your weakness?
Do you hate me yet for acknowledging out loud,
We are both cowards?

I have five mouths to feed,
Before I parse a morsel.
One less than two times three,
What do you have but to
Grow yourself?

Yeah coward.
Too yellow to write about a
Yellow sunset, cause that is hard in a way incomprehensible
Until tried.
Or the passing of your mother who could not speak clearly
But you, thru her eyes knew that she had poems to yet recite.
Run away like I did ashamed with frustrated failure.
Why should I coddle, give you easy soft?
.
If you come here to share, well and good.
If you come here to find comfort, good.
So gaze upon these words and feel
The love that only experience has earned.

What do you know of heartbreak?
Imprisoned for decades in a loveless life,
I walked by the water nightly, so tempted
To stay, to not pass by but pass on,
Yes, the same waters where I CinemaScoped
Yesterday's sunset, and walked away.

You can read about it if you look,
Look me up, look here, the story is in my poems, but always,
Look up!

So do something hard, something external.
Fail but love yourself more for just having tried.
Then try something else.

The saddest poem ever wrote
Was not yours, where you titillate with daring words
Razors, pills etc.,
The saddest poem ever writ
Was this one, a meager vanity to capture a
Sunset that keeps trying every day to
Surpass
Supersede
Its previous glorious failure,
Like we should too.
Keep trying

Now, I shall rest,
For I know that soon I shall see, feel, think,
Of something new that will make me eager to
Write a new poem.


August 3~5, 2013
Written and posted here one year ago today. Strangely, it fits my mood exactly, again, today, 2014. Edited for clarity here and there...

*If you courage enough to
Call yourself poet, then
It is audacity, not blood,
Warming your extremities,
So foolishly try, always be prepared to fail.

for M*

never been good at it,
picking jobs, careers, wives,
was not one to
outline the steps,
to goals I could not
speak or define

so I bumped this way and that,
knocked down, dusted off, and
meandering, restarted and may,
unexpectedly,
have to do it
once again

once grooved,
let myself be fooled
by myself,
the best ole fooler I trusted,
that my track,
breeze to the back
was bumble free, straight,
planed and planned
and though accidentally,
what the heck

of course it never is...

you could write it all down,
the before, the softer,
the after, the harsher,
and the middle muddle
of visions hazy,
when you are too lazy
to engage

and to those of you
who see it clear,
on yellow pads and blue lines,
write down step one and two,
god bless you

Know though

there is no such thing
as free and easy
from the curves
that come up fast,
so fast that they
strangle you
near to death
or even past it

you can't imagine it,
I know, you can't,
and those who can,
likely no longer need to imagine it

but when you dare do,
clench eyes and make that ugliest rare bird
come to front and foremost
come to mind, you make it
fly to disappear,
to rarefied air,
where it,
you beg stay

and you do some good,
stupidly think you've collected
celestial brownie points that will
preserve and protect,
but in a flash bang
they have expired
just before the when you
needed them most

so go about your business,
but make no mistake,
others are going about it too,
their surprises the kind that
long term planners call disruptive

sure be sensible,
have a nest egg, a will,
good neighbors if you can,
top off the liquids
that life requires to
make the machinery run silent

work hard, pay attention
to the subtle changes
in your environment,
even hurricanes have a season,
and may you have a
go-bag in a closet,
gas in the tank,
for those days that are the
inevitable
works-in-process

but the only long term plan
that will you true require,
the one thing that will
save your neck,
chance you a chance
to defeat the unforeseen,
is not of paper, steel,
or money green,
it is character

I won't define it. You know it,
You make and or destroy it.

every day set some aside,
climb into night bed,
and recall the empathy
granted and given,
and from that,
build your own storage unit
for it won't be a mere rainy day,
but hail and volcano that will
leave you questioning existence

justify why you daily breathe,
and then exhale,
and say,
I go on
for I am of worth

this is long term planning,
survivor's insurance

This the only way to survive,
the days of reckoning
that you cannot reckon,
the days of wreck and tumult

but if you possess
character,
you will go on

ok, ok
what is character?
why it is that exact moment
when overwhelmed by the tumult,
you acknowledge that nonetheless,
you have the what and the wherewithal
to make it better
for someone else.