there are songs and songsters
but all slowly
- coming together in tune
under the one conductor.

The under shell of
the tortoise looked
like a sunset.
Blasts of color:
orange, maroon, burnt sienna.
I caught them in
the garden at
sunrise, eating a
tomato or chewing into
a head of lettuce.
They always looked so
serious.

I was just a
sunburnt boy, with
cutoff jeans and a
straw hat.
I caught toads too.
But when they peed on me,
I let them go.
I loved that land.
Ponds and streams,
fishing and climbing trees.
oh,
sweet, green
youth.

nothing is any good
you know
unless you
share it
so Tom has brought back the bar:

the Elvis impersonator
who almost
played las vegas,
the hair dresser
come future race
car driver,
a sufi
and a seer.

the seer
tells me she hit a cat
the cat was still alive
so she ran it over
again and again,
"and that's when god
talked to me."

"was that before or after
you ran over the cat
the second time?"
i asked.

"She talks to me every day,"
the angry divorced seer
tells me.

is god talking, now?

now, elvis
joins in,
"what if camus and nietche
met. what would they think
about the cat?"

"nah, who cares,"
the race car driver-
hair dresser,
says, snorts another line,
"what if they
started
a rock
and roll
band."

the Sufi wonders,
"who would play
what?"

"nietche on drums!" tom interjects
with a smile.

"yes,
and camus,
a gibson semi hollow."

"vocals???"

"god!" exclaims the seer.

"right on," i say, everyone smiles
and the seer is looking better and better
after every beer.

sometimes the dead
travel the road
to nowhere
with a smile


and i've got to get
up at 7a.m.
i'm a college
educated
toy store clerk

it's closing time at the circus

don’t make me write another poem
with fancy words cause I don't know ‘em

I’ll write a book or short article
make science notes about a particle

a brief speech or an opinion piece
type a travel blog of sunny Greece

I’d gladly pen a romance novel
if poetry’s asked I’d sooner grovel

I’ve lost the power of rhyme you see
as fork and spoon sound the same to me

but now I see what I have written
it reads like Edward Bulwer-Lytton

I’m stuck in couplets what a curse
but what the hell it could be verse

My head is resting on the fog
that cushions Pillow Mountain.
My eyes are streaming waterfalls,
flowing like a fountain.

This misty dream, it seems
was but illusion, fleeting;
A second saved within a lifetime
on a random meeting.

The silken mist embraces you:
my feet are bound by clay.
The coldness of the Earth you left
binds me day by day.