One morning out cleaning drains and gutters around the house, doing manly things
Basically just messing about
Suddenly it hit me, yea! I had a moment of clarity
"There's still time y'know, Yea, there's still hope, you could still meet her/ find her
And she'll kiss you and suddenly your hair will start to grow again
And your eyes, they'll grow clearer and brighter
And the cherry trees they'll bloom again in your heart
Your whole world it'll be transformed....."
Then as I bent down to do something
Suddenly I jumped back with a start
Something had moved, just there, just then
Something had well...jumped out
Was it a mouse or worse still, a rat
I couldn't see anything,
As I looked closer though, suddenly there! well camouflaged
There was this big frog
Hell I thought, I hadn't seen a frog in years
Wasn't that strange, wasn't that a coincidence
I was just thinking those thoughts and suddenly this frog he jumps out
Maybe it was an omen
(Probably meant it was gonna rain),
But then I thought wasn't there a story once
Yea, The Frog Prince
A lovely princess kisses a frog and he turns into this beautiful handsome prince,
I wonder I thought, I wonder could there be such a thing as a Frog Princess
If I were to kiss you would you turn into a lovely beautiful Frog Princess,
So I bent down close to the frog and whispered
"Are you my little Frog Princess"
Suddenly the frog he takes off, starts hopping madly away from me
As if saying "Gotta get away quick from this feckin' ******"
Don't go! Please don't go!! I shouted after him
Come back! Come back to me, you are my destiny!
Finally he hops into a flowerbed full of weeds and is lost forever
Alas! I thought to myself, Adieu, adieu, sweet sweet adieu
Obviously I thought, obviously he must have been a Frog Prince and not a Frog Princess.
Then I thought, y'know at my age and with my luck
And I called after him 'I would have settled for a Frog Prince!".

It’s been a prolific day
David Berman and I spent it together:

Me on his Wikipedia page,
Wondering at his language
Broken hearted over his final great collection of art,
A self-titled album released under the moniker Purple Mountains;

Him a genius
And dead
Tortured by his inability to change the world
Self loathing and addicted,
The son of a gun and liquor lobbyist who is quoted as saying, “I will miss him more than he was able to realize.”

It’s the ultra absorbent ones who make the best artists
Walking around in a store somewhere and wanting to die for the brutality of it all
Nothing brings the raw desperate animalism out from where it’s buried in the Stone Age like good old fashioned American capitalism.

(Last week I ate a gummy before going Christmas shopping and had a panic attack in a cute little boutique while buying a puzzle for my niece.
My sister-in-law told me I looked like I was seeing things
But it was the loosening of the barriers,
the flood of conflict and dissonance,
every person a song and all the songs playing at once,
tidal wave,
a cacophony of primary and secondary emotions.
This is why I don’t eat gummies).

It isn’t fair
I guess
That the ability to be so penetrated by truth isn’t beautiful
It should be beautiful
Like that shrimp, right? That can see a whole universe of colors unreachable by any other animal in existence.
An elevated understanding of truth should be like that shrimp
-The mantis shrimp, I remember now-
Truth cones like with sight…every texture and flavor of enlightenment.

In David Berman’s case, he piled substances onto the fire of his brain to ***** it out
And haven’t we all lain in a dark room on a sunny day
Haven’t we all found our habits

Instead of lamenting the curse of the truth addicted artist, as I have done most of the day,
I will tell a story
(this is true)
of my 17 year old niece Sophie
Who, when she was 9, demanded to know the Real Truth about Santa Claus.
Her friends were insistent, and she didn’t want to be left behind.

My sister, not one to mince words, told her directly and plainly,
and when Sophie asked, who then? Do you buy all of our Christmas presents every year?
again my sister gave it to her straight.

Sophie’s eyes began to swim, just as my sister suspected they might,
But when she went to comfort her daughter,
to try to convince her that magic isn’t in the elusive but in the every day
She was met with simply,

“Oh, thank you, mommy. Thank you.”

The violinist
fiddled
The fragrant
flowers
of the vase
wafted
The sweet
sound
merged
into the flowery fragrances

Saturn is in
line with
Venus tonight
but, nothing's easy
when you're down.
The clowns walk
around, dressed in
yellow; fast food smiles
and cheeseburger
souls, and nothings
easy when you're down.

The dancers with poles
and sadness, that Halloween,
fires burning, childhood
perfumed dreams,
kind of sadness fills the
navy blue night.
I can't find the North star,
and the jack-lanterns lie rotting
in the streets of Nebraska
and Kansas, and the candies
all gone, and the kids wait.
And I can't find  
the deep blue shirt I bought
at Goodwill, and Billy Burroughs
is filled with worms and earth,
and Bukowski looks at Satan
and says, "what do you
mean, we're out of whiskey?"

I've never been much for the stars,
and family and Thanksgiving are
painfully overrated,
and nothing's easy when
you're down.

Please excuse the boundary
of my sadness;
it's not normal, I'm aware,
maybe, even maddening.

But, the horses need hay.
They are hungry.

Long evenings
full of shadows,
surround my blood
stained lazy bed.

The horses need hay.

Let's gather our
senses, and get to
the fields.
Make-believe we
have purpose and
direction.

Isn't that
the mindset we need
to overcome the largest
lie of them all.

poetry put down and forgotten
life moves on...a river
never been here before
and its not so bad
you are better than you think
eternally lovable eternally loved.

a silver lining
only shines after the rain
the clouds are a gift