what the difference if the ***** coffee cups
in the sink get washed now or later or never,
the stains of each imbibing are added, wearing
is a tearing down, cumulative, so refer back to
your calculus practiced on a shooting range,
the long distance to target is an accumulation
of a thousand points, wind, light, eyesight,
combinatory

many short runs if you wish to hit the bullseye
repeatedly in the long run

life is best when you sum up each day for the accurate totality

a headline, a title, an instant self-commissioned
to live on, sponsored by these dying times,
a new poem, a different rabbit hole, a reflective surface
of in-between spaces, that separates letters, I am
that man, charter member, a voting citizen of the

The City That Never Sometimes Sleeps

the new traffic patters, i.e. no traffic at all,
messes up circadian rhythms, no trucks honking,
even the ambulances silenced, asking what’s the rush,
this year the cicadas, them too, took the seventh year off,
the strange silence wierded them out,
so they sheltered in place

our device, informs, it has been employed
20 hours 42 minutes of the last twenty four cycle,
don’t disagree, wonder only where the heck I was for
the 3 hours 18 minutes unaccounted

wasn’t sleeping, of that ‘rest’ assured,
must have been unconsciously
writing poetry, a voyage to my
beloved holy dark, where nightly
he reimagines when things were
normal and empty streets were
a refreshing sight, a welcome change,
not a harbinger of the visible separation
between the living and the dead

up at your regularly scheduled night sky patrol,
the colorful clock says 2:47 and
dark skies confirm which 2:47 it is,
for flecks of blackened peppery light exude at this hour,
a time period for former lovers, those old writes enfolded, enveloped,
hiding an active poem volcano spewing bare feet words in clouds of
kidskin soft velveteen cumulus, fleece-comforting slippers of poems

there are half started poems waiting, more than one, triplets in fact,
waiting to be born in the time of pandemic, thinking quietly,
will they emerge healthy and living and grow up to be adults
contributing to society, additives to the engine oil of human living

but the old familiar, dissatisfaction with quality control leaves them
unfinished, poet lurches from dead roses head hanging, a new blues,
disease as an economic and societal differentiation, that you hope,
believe, poems that in due course, all will emerge, for better or for worse,

poetry birthed in the time of pandemic

the city of new york, where I was birthed and will die, a city of
tall buildings, tall tales, short attention spans there is but one nighttime moving automobile observed in a city that never sleeps but now hides blanketed in weariness of trepidation of what are the

well known unknown possibilities in the time of pandemic

and you wonder in this new, different quietude if poems can be born
with birth defects and survive, breathing on a ventilator till they can
breathe by their own lungs, or were they perma-infected on a supermarket trip, a walk by the East River, a pizza delivery man, even

if inspired by a decade-lover, next, in bed, in the time of pandemic

waving to grandchildren in their second story window, you on the street, keeping them safe from you, a modern Auschwitz train station where they separated, the we-useless out, children and their parents, safe in a barbed wire atmosphere, a demarcated world, where some billion of brimming droplets of tears are stillborn

stillborn poems, or perhaps just poems-in-waiting, to still be

born in a time of pandemic


3:29am Sunday March 22, Twenty Twenty
New York City, the epicenter, crossroads