Walking with my fingertips
along your beaten spine
each vertebrae reveals a story
long since lost in time
oh, how you laughed as a child
playing hide and seek 'til dusk
the way your rosy cheeks lit up
like flowers ripe to pluck
the bairns you bore
the one that died
forever loved eternally
held in your heart and in your breath
as waves upon the sea
walking with my fingertips
we are together after all this time
words I speak do not do you justice
so I have sprinkled them in this rhyme

this trip
homeward bound,
riding the Q (subway) train
from the messy grime of a
never fully repossessed
cesspool misnamed as
Times Square,

to our apartment
near but yet far,
a poem short & sweet was
born complete, on an 8 minute
fast track victory lap to periodic
successful urban planning,

that even and
even though
with and/of
which
no speedy highly
disrespectful witch
on a broomstick,
nor a midnight traffickless
auto trip,
could ever hope
to compete
<>
roses red, violets blue,
all the passengers, revelry tired,
both becostumed & be plained,
Hallowed eve festivities
again, lesser than expected,
life be, eager awaited
legal moment of crazy-
-inness-inward-permissed,
never quiet or as good
as hoped,

we tired riders
all look worn from the
aggregated
infidelities of a
a hoped-for
missing-out happier life

nearing midnight,
the new immigrants,
in subway platform
patrolling,
offer us candy for sale,
their toddler children,
beside them
at this midnight hour,
to drive home
the desperate willingness to

survive in a city oft hostile

no longer eager to be
beacon beckoning
to the world, we rethink
to our minded selves,
our Statue of Liberty
engraved invite:

"Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door”
<>
we exit the underground rout(e)
and the walk from subway to front door
is another 8 minute travelogue segment,
we cover the quarter mile on foot,
covering a skimp of distance that
our urban transport  
of many mileage covered
in the same units of minutes
in flyer miles

<>
late at night,
we walk fast, with eyes wide,
our lives to hide,
from the risks of the
unpredictable
when the street parade
of stragglers
gives not the comfort of a
rowdy crowdy,
and the existence of crime
is not
entirely fabricated

<Did>
I offer short and sweet,

Oh well I only misled,
the trip 16 minutes
and the poem
in my head,
complete emerged
with minutiae attending
et. al.,
in far far less mini~minutes,
for it was
a product of
silent back labor,
from first staggering
screaming pain
to
successful unexpected birth
that can take maybe
minutes five,
to mentally survive
plus,
physically complete the birth,
introduce this poem to life.
when the photos of my mined mind
make images from negatives
into words,:

collect, sort and report the
output picturesque
now in colors black & white,
of a trip from a Broadway theater
through to a high rise building
astride the river
which gives me
a theoretical cleaner space to breathe
<>
rather than short and sweet?
I really reseed,
redeed it as/is:
not too long and a tad
bittersweet

a night in the life of
the mixture of successes and
failures of our troubled world
in
living technicolor,
a few seconds of film
of which one could fairly,
and in fairness
bless/write/curse/
each sight
twice,
uttering:

”mine eyes have seen the glories,
as all come to look for America”

“What information pertains:
The thought that life could be better
Is woven indelibly
Into our hearts and our brains”
<>
Paul Simon “Train in the Distance”
<>
a songwriter inserts a precise scalpel cut
in the nether part of the brain
where we bury
things we-wish not to recall, but
that particular
poem-scrap-dagger/byte

must remain a permanent
guest on a cruise ship
going around the world that can
never return to your
hailing port

“indelibly”
that which we hope
that cannot be
removed or forgotten
or in a reverse
of a kinda curse,
this hope stabbing
is springing eternal

when I need to be bleak,
quiet on all fronts,
silence the voices
desirous to speak
in tones moving me
from down sided
up, to up and away

that **** thought
life could be better
“if f—king only…”

is a cut that never
ceases to bleed~leak,
can’t be curettage away,
never healed,
it’s indelible

it’s a saturday morning
bright and chilly
indelibly
incurable
stamped and stampeding
on my mind
that this arctic exploration,
is self-exploitation
and curse my
heart and brain that won’t
accept my explanation
nor my pleading pleas
wet knots of
begging to anyone in particular
to please
leave me alone
&
this is how the week
ends

October 2024

“You are under no obligation to remain the same person you were a year ago, a month ago, or even a day ago. You are here to create yourself, continuously.”*
Richard Feynman
<>
perhaps
you are among the many who state,
I will do things differently today!
or
amidst the few,
who actually do

most of us satisfied by our resolution,
go back to sleep and let our
daily dissolution succumbing
pleasantly ****** us into
the nirvana of familiar
repetition

We speak not of the little compromises
that satisfy for periods too brief:

denying yourself a meal,
or having just one less cuppa
of English Breakfast Tea,
Blue Mountain Java beans,
or skipping breakfast entirely
a face saving gesture to the
odyssey perpetual
of losing those friendly
five pounds that “just”
snuck aboard

<>
know that we all peer
into my famous
bathroom
mirror
conducting a head to toe review
of our very deepest buried
burdensome “to do list”
that charge you to be changed,
that discharge your guilt long lasting,
Oh, those things that truly matter

to which we,
thanks to Richard,
we reorganize and add a
first poem, the top priority
of this new mewling twenty four hours:

today,
I will continuously
wright/write
be a maker & builder,
yes, writer,two,
of
myself anew
and not copy
all that I wish not to;

here goes my first daily,
a myself poem of every new day
of my
interval upon this green Earth
a seed step tiny
to grow a forest
continuing