one thousand poem children



one thousand poems has mine soul commissioned,
a thousand more neath stone vault doors do attend,
patiently waiting revisions, rescission, catch and release permission,
waiting room patients, looking to buy a more favorable diagnosistician

this prolificacy,
nether curse or blessing,
this profligacy,
poem children fathered by single mom mothered,
borne nightly in dreams borne
from the northern, the southern,
the brains twilighted hemispheres,
who coordinate, drawing deep,
consulting a bartender's manual
a creation guide of mixology,
'how to intoxicate the brain'

cheap gin, multi-generational scotch,
visionary vermouth, the reddened cassis of life,
memories in the white grapes of possibilities,
futures unrealized, colorful takes and retakes,
a directors bespoke make-believe tales,
impossibilities, divine and mundane,
all into one admixture into the venous cavities poured,
nerves to blood to consciousness,
courtesy of the ganglia

the brain stem transmits them
fully formed to my
good morning sunshine
cracked and dried lips for re-emission

nigh head upon the pillow,
the hair trigger,
my rapid eye heartbeats, each a demanding sweetheart,
some performed to a discordant metronome,
in a controlled rage, my mental waste,
eliminated

the residuals,
purified with language as the
orchestrator, debate moderator

dreams, once recoded, once accorded,
the disordering tempestuous,  
neurons cease-to-fire,
now just words, just words, just womb excretions

did I admit to a thousand?

more like tens of ten,
one, two per eventide,
have washed  ashore, for some thirty years recorded

my brain pixilated,
its big shot game controller,
demanding purchase of more;
more storage space, more games,
not admitting in advance,
that it filters blends, conflates and purges

by combining
psalms and ditties, infantile rhymes and
new vocabularies of  human aging idiocies,
though newly acquired, immediately forgot,
so always room enough for
one more episode

I study the brain, I study sleep,
study living and dying occurring at
their point of intermediation,
dreams

*this more knowledge gives no relief,
it becomes this poem becoming,
testifying that I prosecute myself
based on the evidence,
and if insufficient,
dream up nascent visionaries
from places that come unlocked,
tales from the vault vivisected,
the proper verdict
assured

sixty six years
of accumulation,
and still know so little of
proper space utilization,
writing poems proper

but nightly come the dreams,
nightly comes the trial,
comes the judgements,
comes a man-made customized
whitewall tired judgement,
and to you
submitted for
judicial review

strange that each one of you
becomes, adopts, adapts my visage,
my words in you, reflected,
a jury of my peerage peers,
which is why my appeals are
always returned in the file labelled
"denial"

until the next nights dream

The autumn dawn
has fainted,
****-frost shines
through my eyes.
Ghostly mist
from pine to
pine is
beckoning,
like a silver
breeze to
hallow all.
Our burdened
breath, it haunts
us everywhere.
I feel the silence
tearing up
my lost soul.
Where nightingales
do not sing
and dream the
blue skies of
the North,
I drift through
that middle air,
magic
is blazing
in my auburn hair.
And in these lonely
hours-ancient spirits
reflect within me.
Faces carved in
dead wood
walking on
my strings.
A seashore
howling below
the mountain
dew glen.
But i do not fear
to run in woodland
memories,
Into this autumn day,
Far, far away...

The autumn dawn
has fainted,
****-frost shines
through my eyes.
Ghostly mist
from pine to
pine is
beckoning,
like a silver
breeze to
hallow all.
Our burdened
breath, it haunts
us everywhere.
I feel the silence
tearing up
my lost soul.
Where nightingales
do not sing
and dream the
blue skies of
the North,
I drift through
that middle air,
magic
is blazing
in my auburn hair.
And in these lonely
hours-ancient spirits
reflect within me.
Faces carved in
dead wood
walking on
my strings.
A seashore
howling below
the mountain
dew glen.
But i do not fear
to run in woodland
memories,
Into this autumn day,
Far, far away...

~for Bex~*

in the flesh, not really, but I was...

ordered five bone china coffee mugs for you,
from the Artists Gallery, all scenes of nature,
painted by Canada’s Group of 7,
to go with the Lawren Harris mug,
'Lakes and Mountains'
from which I am currently sipping

for when I thought of you up north in Ontario,
I thought of my mom,
who was Toronto born and bred,
and the caramel oranges of fall
that have not yet arrived
in northern Manhattan,
but have already peaked in Ontario,
in late September

I smile,
while voyaging on the curving line of thought perusal,
at all the things that have already peaked,
someplace else,
and that have may yet, be late, arriving in my life

and I dream of:

all the poets who
I will never meet,
the living and the dead,
all the poems,
I will never finish, perhaps, n'ere to start,
never chance to speak, or chance to peak

all of you, sipping, from those real mugs of porcelain,
that are soon to arrive, via an imaginary railroad,
running on creosote stained ties of caramel orange,
built by a namesake, that I can no longer imagine,
but whom I knew
so well in my youth

my mug is sadness filled by
those stillborn verses that will never chance to peak,
but am comforted by the knowing,
as long as there is freedom to write,
that there is hope for one more poem
to be imagined, sourced from deep within,
drawn from the cool well water
of happy wishing