What is this thing,
This change in me,
What is this feeling,
That is happening to me?
This possessing of my spirit.
This seemingly lack of control,
That was not always so.

That a concerto slow turn,
Played and heard,
Renders me weak in the knees,
A sweet moment of human joy,
Or actual real grief,
Even viewed on a movie screen
Can tug at my heart so.

So too, a child’s sweet song,
Though sung off key.
A blazing sunset,
Orange and red,
A thrilling thing to behold.
Nature always a motivator,
All of these and more,
Pluck cords of my emotions,
Like the strings of a harp,
So easily reduce me to tears.
Not body shaking sobs mind you,
Just a slow gentle stream,
Nothing my sleeve can't deal with.  

"Men don’t cry",
"Sensitivity is only for women",
Or so I have always been told.
Well it’s taken me a long time,
But I have concluded this bias,
Is a load of unadulterated *******!
‘Cause as it turns out,
I actually enjoy it.
And see no reason I shouldn't.

Not to mention,
It keeps my tear ducts open,
And free flowing.
In touch as I am with my feelings.

a man gave me that phrase as a gift today.
quiver of constant smiles

for well he could,
yet little did he ken
the nature of the present

because
I read the smiles as the
tween the spaces,
in between the words of
anguish that never goes away

how can this be,
how to make sense of this

well I am a father too,
of words and sobs
and ownership of sins
between sons and fathers,
who inhabit
the unfilled spaces within,
the drawers with their name
on masking tape attached

Your fathers's hell will slowly go by

Show me a man-father
whose lips
have not quiet quivered
when hearing those words sung

we ease the grip of

carrying them on our shoulders
when they are five at the
Macy's day parade,
running alongside their first
solo bicycle ride

we ease the grip of
the vise of

not seeing them for years,
or never again,
cause they hold you guilty,
responsible for their confusion

have too, ease the grip,
cause we got more than one
singular responsibility

so we dad draw,
a smile from the quiver,
that like those of the elves,
replenished magically,
strap it on wide,
mile high and move on

oh you teenage children, you babies,
with your endless angst and bravado
of drunken scar talk,
first love lost
and the hard course
of being sixteen

put down your tiresome blunt pens
that revel only in Self-intensity glorious-galore,
read of the self destruction
of love pains thirty years in the making
and fifty in the undoing

write of ancient inescapable feelings
decades in the vat, aging, but drunk in the
moment quick searing of
every life breath you take

and it's Sunday nite
and the work week hell begins
but it is no compare to the other,
but ****, you can't understand

so chant these words,

reflect on them well,
for soon while you dream sleep,
in clean, dry sheets and safe bed
a man will come for a peep,
to make the checkmark
on the all's well list

so chant these words,
a sad violin melody,
the single sole he ever hears,


**Your fathers's hell will slowly go by

Please, please, first listen to this, if you are unfamiliar with this musical piece*

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kllZlF6mB2s


~~~~~~~~~~~
you thought you didn't know it,
but you did

somewhere a wedding, a movie
and you thought how beautiful

I hear it
each note distinct, unique and a
passageway to the next and the next

a transcendence
a generation
an uplifting
an arousal
a smoothing
a calming
a weeping

smithy of words,
I have read,
I have writ
words that gut punch me,
round my mouth into oh's,
cause me weeping endless


but this music
arrests *and rests me,
miracle each time
I walk on its waters

how utter fools we be
to have "lost" this
for over three hundred years!

I rediscover it each time

somewhere a wedding a movie
and you thought how beautiful

for me, a funeral,

play it for me at
my funeral,

hold it in a
wedding chapel,

so with it,
upon hearing its invocation,
I may thee wed

thereafter, when you stumble on it
our vows be timely renewed,

and
though apart,
together,
we will weep, once more,
transcendent, once again,
ascendant, then and now

for Drumhound,
whose poems make me weep in the early morn.

Which drop in the salt sea can say
I am better, I am the best,
only the visceral,
vis-a-real,
truth from the vision.

This drop we cherish,
this drop is serious,
this drop, we keep.*

No man is a poet
to his wife and child.

First Foremost,
he is just theirs,

Then the world can have him
as just a poet,
after they are done,
loving him for his totality.


Drumhound has no definition in the dictionary.

So I wrote this, my own, my visceral, my virtual one,
my vision real and realized,
his word vise on me, surreal.

Plain among poets,
a salt sea drop I keep.

Once anything is defined, it exists forever.

like a single scraggly blade of grass
of a poem I once memorized,
about a child I did not know,
but know so well,
a human-memory survives perennial,
once defined, forever lives.

Somethings false
somethings true
somethings are
too true

the elements looked inside my brain
said this man needs some storm rain wind
to aid and abet his pernicious melancholic

too true

worries list and complain ain't gonna do,
put when a revelation slips out
that touches the highest priority
pain points
writing poetry
can't help
even and especially if

too true

like to tell you I am happy to be alive
but that would be a lie

somewhere behind my forehead is
an amorphous ache that only goes quietude
but Cain marked never disappears.

you can't take it with you,
happiness seems to have a shelf life,
a half life, that cuts the time you get to get it
in half.

but the amorphous ache
you call depression
that I call
desperation
has no life,
it just never dies

Rain, flooding and wind advisories
come to mix and match
the desperation that is
pill-proof

they don't laugh at me,
cause they know
desperation is
too true.