Crosses white, poppies red,
Remember how, remember when
Pale petals fell from blooming roses,
And padded paths where freedom goes.

Fierce fires doused a would be hate,
To quench dry hearts, yours and mine.
Their love and duty burned paper chains
That shackled in war time.

Wise eyes, bright minds, aged souls, young hearts,
Traded rockers for grassy beds;
Gave up gray for blue-black youth,
Now honored among our dead.

The rose that's guarded by the thorn,
Against the reach of many hands,
Does the same in all God's lands:
Yet still the life sap flows.

This time of year is here again,
But remember how, remember when
Canadian pulses played taps then.
Remembrance Day must never end.

Emerging from a distant dust-up,
A lone rider approaches on horse.
The clip-clop gallop grows,
The panting animal is alarming,
Sweat paints and streaks down
The dark hide.
The rider wears a bandana
Over mouth and nose,
Beneath a once white hat.
His clothes are covered with the trail.

Next, he's in the leather tub
With suds from chest to hair,
Shaving cream covering his face,
Mirror in one hand,
Probably a gun on the floor of the tub.
Eyes and nose poking through the foam.

Later, we see the clean, pressed black shirt
From the back, outlining shoulders we know
Have been busy righting wrongs.
He puts a cockey tilt to his hat and pivots
With a Parodi between his clean, straight teeth.
The champion. The underdog vanguard.
Clint.

You can surely decipher the scratches
On my interior wall, just inside the pile of bones.
There are hieroglyphic reliefs on my brow;
My simian eyes are the windows to my genealogy.
I am refurbished, re-modeled, re-drawn, re-worked;
I am not born again.
Along the hollow trunk, dragged to the bone pile,
Scratches and claw marks attest to the competitions.
On the flip side of the tablet, evidence the wax impressions
Of migrant refugees landing in Hibernia.
Nuclear scan my revealing contours
Of imperishable, ingrained, indelible markings
To unearth former loves,
Parsed and re-read in the morning light,
Not unlike outlines of Mesolithic settlements.
The male landscape is as seismic as the plates beneath the seas,
Where no winds sculpt, no suns scorch, no moons shade:
Only the timeless, steady, relentless currents.

I followed
When you lead;
If you leave
Should I plead,
Will I grovel
On my knees,
Press my hands
In supplication,
Live my life
In degradation?

No.

Should you leave
A floor outline,
I'll dance on it,
Pen a rhyme
To embody you
And your crime.

A tragic love
In pantomime.

That first Christmas,
We cut four branches,
Under the clouds,
From the three pines
On the other side
Of the backyard hedge.
If I went there today,
I'd see the nubs.
The pail full of sand
Came from Daddy's
Circle of cement making.
We firmly planted
The four branches
And wrapped them
With newspaper chains,
Made with the extra edition
From the morning's route.
That night, the moon streamed
Through the bay window,
Spotlighting our tree.
In later years,
We bought trees from the Farmer's Market,
Roping them with twinkling lights
We plugged in.
Daddy never bought a gift or a card
For any special day;
But he annually re-gifted Canada.
This Christmas, the full moon
Will stream again,
And I will tell
His great grand-daughter
The story about the tenacity
Of paper chains,

I buy lottery tickets,
But don't pray.

I curse the drivel on TV,
But own two.

I purchase alcohol,
But don't drink.

I roll stop,
But I flash the bird
(at you).

I don't like Rap,
But do Drake.

I abhor celibacy,
But I dress in white.

I love you,
But I'm not in love.

The sentient clod in Book One,
Sat up, cleaned up, removed his thumb.
With leafless Eve and fruitful tree
(made fertile with Theology)
Gave rise to Sociology.
Of all the ololgies to appear,
Without this one we're not here.
Buy in, ward of tribal wrath,
Empathy's good for a sociopath.

In King James we're told history
Bound in ancient mystery.
The collected works of humanity
Printed for our legacy.
One needs read The Prodigal Son
To know the course literature's run.
Here read Romance, greed and crime,
Erotica, adventure, the Divine.
Its cup spills with poetry.
The best anyone could produce.
The exception being *Mother Goose.

She rides the bus
Near a window,
To watch her world
Blur by;
She sits alone
At the back,
Distracted when she cries.
She grabs her bags of bags
When de-boarding at her stop,
Then sits on her cold wet bench
For her return ride.

This life must fail
In order to pass
Successfully on.

"Wash your hands before eating
Your bitter herbs, figs, and unleavened bread,
Cause it ain't gonna happen.
No Sir."
                                            Moses

The good ole days were enjoyed with ease,
There was less to enjoy because of disease;
There were fewer people to dress and feed
Thanks to childhood mortality.


The middle-class were few and greedy,
Thanks to needs and poverty;
We could find work and be employed,
But tenure turned to workplace injury.

Illiteracy was common,
Innumeracy, our fate,
Due to the high school drop out rate.

Polio and smallpox kept in check
The burgeoning growth of the unelect.

Minorities knew their social place;
Jim Crow was voting in black face.

Heteros ruled the ****** race,
Alphabet people were an outlier trace.

In summer and winter we were outplayed and beat,
With no Air Conditioning nor Central Heat.

Let's leave the past in the past,
Where history belongs;
Where hunger and sickness
Lasted all life-long,
And the poor and ignorant
Were subdued by the strong.

We can agree times were simpler then,
As time came rushing to an end.

Zero One and modern blight
Travel at the speed of light.

We wondered on the Wandering Jew,
Or, in lieu,
Orthon, Urian or Lilitu.

We trepanned our empty skulls,
Searched our humours,
Were touched by Rulers!

Now troubling symptoms of want and need,
Have blighted growth of yesterseed.

Patient Zero left no lead.

East fingered West
(and vice versa)
Was Ireland really the cause of cholera?
Did Blacks languish in Tuskegee squalor?
We christened Mary, but drank the water.
Fracked Incubus and Succubus
From son and daughter.

Patient Zero left the slaughter.

We deprived women of their tea
To cure wandering womb hysteriae.
Deviances and leaking lesions
Were headwaters of women's *****.

Patient Zero has no season.

The barber sensed it might be smell,
So our widened streets became a sulfurous hell.
And wastelands swelled
Where curled cats dwelled.
(no talk of Michelangelo)

                                         II

Our children's blight has a techno name,
Like the rose, IT smells the same.
With zero tolerance I lay blame
On screens and phones and video games.

The world wide box stores flipped their lids,
Touching all who crawl the social grids;
From the base of Mammon's pyramid.

Now Jake believes he's a gangsta dude
Since posting whatever on You Tube.
Nothing to gain, nothing to lose:
No services rendered but expects what's due.

Inflated egos are a system symptom,
Clearing firewalls, reaching children.

Patient Zero is no phantom.

There is no tale of rat or flea
As cause of lost immunity.
There is no open sore to fester,
The Selfie is the X-ray picture.

Patient Zero is so much quicker.

In our gel of techno bliss,
On our elliptic petrie dish,
Bathed in more than we could wish,
Patient Zero will finish,
And with that whimper
All vanish.

The verdict of world opinion
Is in;
*Keep the Peace!

I have declared a detente
After negotiating a truce.
My head is a no-fly zone;
The bombadier chutes stay shut.
I sat at the table
With my privy council,
And we have signed an accord.
Peace in my time.
Peace in my mind.
Forget, to forgive;
Forgive, to forget.
It seeps unmeasurable,
Infectious,
Air borne as a nucleur summer.

Do you hear me today, how do I sound.
Is there softness in my voice,
A calmness to be found.
Did last night's snowfall drown my psalm,
In the chilling winds.
Should I feel wronged.
After all, I prayed so hard,
For some peace, and a little goodwill to men;
For our indulgences to come to an end.
Do I sound hoarse from being up all night?
I knelt humbly, I plead somberly,
Praised the Lord and all his sundry,
That in my lifetime or near future someday,
Peace would reign before Easter Sunday.
That's a story preached to the elders,
Unraveling back through five millennia;
Past the Cross, across Jordan,
Much deeper than the burning bush,
Back to the foot that was to crush
The head of evil.

A crack appeared in my resolve,
A fissure to release my god;
Rise from obsequiousness,
Dust off the knees and do my best
To do my part, to stop my prayer,
For I can start with peace from here.

Peak experiences are now
Flashes of allusions;
The universality thing,
But not spiritual or metaphysical,
The minute and grand have equality,
Or none are equal.
The tree is free from adjectives,
A birdsong nest is superfluous.
Nest will suffice.
When I hear your name
We are together again.
I can't pass a hedge
Without  remembering the push,
The old gap;
It's the push.
There's the poem.
The push.
Each thought a particle,
All particles experiences.
Try it now. No descriptors.
Eyes. Airplane. Clouds.
     (but the story continues):
Airplane. Sunshine. Kiss.
     (there's the peak)
Each word a peak experience.

On Life's superhighway,
I'm parked on the shoulder.

If all the world's a stage,
I'm an understudy
In the wings.

If one's reach
Should excede one's grasp,
I'm arthritic.

If the world is your oyster,
I'm the irritating
Grain of sand.

If a man's stature
Isn't measured by his height,
Call me a Hobbit.

If actions speak louder than words,
I'm mute, and probably dumb.

If a penny saved is a penny earned,
I'm bankrupt.

If good things comes
To those who wait,
Save my place in line.

If beauty is in
The eye of the beholder,
I'm myopic.

If absence makes
The heart grow fonder,
Why did you buy
A one-way ticket?

If a bird in the hand
Is worth two in the bush,
I hunt Ostrich.

A mind is a terrible thing
To waste...
A mime... eh!

If brains are better
Then brawn,
Tell the big, dumb bully.

A drowning man may
Clutch at straws,
But where he's going
There's no milkshake.

If actions
Speak louder than words,
I'm mute and stationary.

If Hope springs eternal,
Then Spring is eternal Hope.

You don't mention whom you met,
How you ripped your small black dress.
You don't share intimate stories;
What caused a smile,
What stokes your worries.
Arms dangle by your side,
You can't slip your hand in mine,
Hold me with your eyes,
Lay your head on my bed
With your good-night sigh.
We don't get our get-aways
As we did in by-gone days;
You left your keys to house and car,
Saying you would travel far;
So you hitched your hidden dreams
To a rising star,
Left my world, but not my life,
Polished your new cultured pearls.
Husbands now call you wives;
But you'll always be
My three wee girls.

The lone pebble
Thrown waywardly
Into the pond,
Cascaded,
Rippled in my mind,
Splashed over
Like lines in verse.

I took up biking down past your street everyday.
I hope to spot you walking towards or away;
What would I do if you spun and said, Hi.
I'd get unbalanced if you looked in my eyes.
I remember how they turned red when you cried,

     Just leave me alone. Please leave me alone.
      I once loved you when we lived in our home.
      I'd have done anything when you were mine;
      Just leave me now and I'm sure I'll be fine.

This ride can never end for me.
I'll  pedal past the street haunting me.
I'll keep my head down as my wheels flee;
But I'll gaze in my mirror in case you call out to me.

Poetry is
A hot knife;
Not a teeth-rattling
Jackhammer.

If you awaken
With a ***-on
Don't be *******
Yourself.
Embrace the moment.

Trump exposes himself
When he minds his
Pees and Q'Anons.

I can be engaged
In anything,
When the sense of shovel comes.
Smothering cold ashes.
I'm looking at your eyes
Til the sockets stand out;
I'm planting gardens
For growth;
When I installed the French Doors,
I heard the lid clap.
Everything's archetypal:
Snakes, cruciforms, swastikas.
Looking up, they become more profound
In the contrails and puzzles beyond my skies.
When Neanderthal heeled the first blade
To plant something or someone,
He didn't know the theory of the chaos effect.
His effect.
This would suffice as my last poem.
My pen is my shovel,
And I'm heeling it now,
Into you.

We've numbers in distress;
We've villains and scoundrels
In need of redress;
Choose any one of one thousand quests -
We're in desperate need of a Hero.

No call for a cape or cowl,
Hidden rings or magic swords;
We need action,
Not placating words -
From a righteous Hero.

Greece or Rome won't be the origin,
There may well be one in Oregon;
At this juncture we'll take anyone -
A home grown or welcome Hero.

We'll have truth without hyperbole,
Not disdain, but hearing dignity;
One to rise up, reach out, lift us
From the swamp of vanity.

We don't need Deus ex machina,
Or anything supernatural;
A woman or man,
Natural or choice,
A sister or brother,
To call us home;
To hear a voice say,
You're not alone.

I understand why we personify Life,
We live;
But why personify Death,
We die.
Attributing Pride to Death
Is senseless;
It's the last thing on the island.

This mortar bowl
With a pestled mixture
Of distillations
And impurities
Deserves a Latin name
For the apothecary's label.

A few causes for the concoction:
Pails, shovels and sandcastles;
A child bundled against winter;
A father's shoulder seat;
A son dressing for his wedding;
A daughter walking her child;
Kids with backpacks;
A soldier's farewell kiss;
The return kiss;
A nursing mother;
The wintery smell of a letter
And the anticipation of opening.

The symptoms are systemic.
The heart cannot contain,
The brain define,
The pit retain.

The symptoms are the remedy.
I am
Ground into a fine dust.

While outside waiting
For night to slide,
The ISS went sailing by.

I happened to be viewing Venus
Dip in the western sky.

The ancients would've
Watched in wonder
At this wonder passing high:
     *Those are demi-gods
     In Phaethon's chariot,
     Scorching the night sky.

I won't hear you breathe
During the night.
My left arm is useless,
My hipbones need replacing.
I make three cups of morning tea
When six was once the norm.
When songs we knew so well are heard,
They don't sound the same:
This has gone on far too long,
I'm spinning on refrain.

I won't see your breath
When you're in the winter air;
I can't forget the way you looked
Retiring up the stairs,
You required lead time,
Before you'd be mine,
In the hollowness,
Somehow bottomless,
Heartfelt phantom pains.

You have said
As a Phenomenal Woman
That
Still I Rise,
and so you must to travel
The Road Not Taken.
But
If You Forget Me
In your
Dreams,
Dearest Annabel Lee,
I will sing like the
Caged Bird.

If,
When Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,
You should find yourself in
A Dream Within a Dream,
Then deny, for
I Don't Love You Because I Love You;
I love you more
As I Grow Older.

I will pass through this life,
Do Not Stand by My Grave and Weep,
You are not
Alone.
You too
Will Not Go Gently Into That Good Night;
For I
Don't Go Far Off.
This is the promise:
Hope is the Thing With Feathers,
or it can be
A Poison Tree,
Casting venom on
Daffodils,
Making
All the World a Stage,
And I,
An understudy in the wings.

Emotions are stripped
from lyrics. No angst
or panting over doves
dresses the lines of verse.
It's dissecting, inspecting,
and by all means one's thinking
on the condition,
for now,
we'll call love.

She keeps saddest memories
Closest to her heart;
A death-like permanence
Keeping us apart.
Like X-ed out family pictures
In an album loosing pages.
She believes there were no good times,
Her memory's gone hazy-lazy.

When I've written something deep;
When I really want your attention;
And I need you to read it with emotion,
With my feelings and my voice;
And I'm hoping you get my meaning,
Because I think you need help,
I use asterisks.
Asterisks.
Ever look closely at an asterisk?
Draw one.
Enlarge it on your screen.
Notice any resemblance to anything you own,
Anyone you know?
It looks like the
*Selfie of an *******.

I play a one-stringed fiddle
To orchestrate my piddle.

Pinch one, your Holiness
Lay pipe, your Eminence.
*******,
Quips Rome,
That's tight.

Across the road
A J-K girl,
Skipped and laughed
On her way to school.
She was strapped
To a big back-pack,
Looking like
A pink pack mule.
Behind her strove
Her drover,
Directing her to quarry
All the stones of learning.

By three o'clock
My minature mule,
A little slower
Trudged from school.
The pack was filled
With rules and tools.
She had panned
The ores of knowledge;
She'll assay them
In days to follow.

Each day my mule
Will turn the grindstone,
Crunching numbers,
Sifting fine poems.
She's mining all the hidden gems
To fill her back-pack
Once again.

Speared on the trident tines
Of a new world order,
Wiggling, dripping,
Unable to close eyes
Staring out both sides of faces
With an astonished, unbelieving pall.
Some will be fried with rice,
Some eaten raw with *****,
Some battered with fries at Disneyland.
Out of water, gasping,
Coaxed from the shallows
With blinding light,
Baited from the depths.

I'm waiting to hear my brother's at peace,
I've waited this way before.
Eucheria was a sister of mine,
Marlene, Jimmy and now one more.
I walked out to ******* my deck.
To say **** this,
To scream once more.

Women abhor the "c" word,
Less than the big "C" word;
So say it with a silent P
Followed by a k.

We're blowing leaves,
Vacuuming leaves,
Mowing leaves.
Using technology,
Plugged in or internal,
To clean up the hood.
Then we bag 'em in plastic
For composting,
To be enviro-friendly.

I won't drink your bourbon.

         Well, I won't buy your beer.

I won't ride your Harleys.

         Oh Yeah. Well, our cars don't need your wheels.

Says who?

          Says you.

Did not!

          Did too!

No way, Jose.

          I'm telling.

You're a scaredy-cat.

          I know you are but what am I?

You're a *******.

          I'm rubber and you're glue.

If you love it so much, why don't you marry it.

          It takes one to know one.

Will not!

Will too!!

La la la la la la la. I'm not listening.

The story I read, some forty years now,
Burns inside my head.
A young woman, ***** violently
By two brothers,
Hands and face mutilated,
The horror on her father's face.
Vengeance was his alone,
As he murdered her assailants,
And boiled down their bones.
His name was Titus.
The story was four hundred years old.
Re-told from a story three thousand years older.
Re-told today.
Rwanda, Bosnis, Syria, Jordan, Dahlmer et al.
Disfiguration with acid,
Limbs gone missing,
Tongues cut out, black sockets,
Missing parts of humanity
In prison camps and resistence movements.
We're still baking pies and feeding on human flesh.
Shakespeare was never so violent.

I was born
With white privilege;
Irish ethnicity at that.
Remember their holocausts!
Occupied, evicted, brutalized, lynched, starved, hedge-scbooled, and,
Refugeed on their own land,
And on and on, and so on
For seven hundred years.
These things were before my time,
But not my Granda's.
It's so very true,  I was born with white privilege,
But not with white entitlement.

There's a darkness tempting you,
I stood still, thinking why
You'd be gone so soon.
I collected my things, my cap and mac,
And you said, Don't go just yet.

Go where?

You slapped your ruby gloves
Against your outstretched palm;
You turned that look of regret;
Then was heard what we knew was absurd:
Please, don't go just yet.

You were standing
By the window blinds,
They were open,
And the sun shines
Through your hair,
And your back
Was bare; the silhouette
Of your fine behind
Brings to mind
Years of sublime yearnings.
I couldn't write this
When ago,
This is how I remember you;
Not leaning on
The kitchen counter,
Singing,
*Please release me.

Dry your eyes.
Fix your hair.
Wipe your runny nose.
Who knew.
Things may improve,
So, don't read the news.
Go about your daily business
As if the sky were blue,
As if you didn't know,
As if you don't care.

Scribbling, never stopping,
Spinning stories you criticized;
Tales you'd call lies.
My truths born from my fiction,
A character of my creation,
The protagonist of my plot;
Making you the antagonist,
With minor characters conspiring
Towards my denouement.
I am the author of rising action,
Embedded in the argument;
Conflicts arose, decisions made,
The crises ensues,
You got saved.
And I am but an afterword
In your novel life.

I don't have pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.
I'll stay away from Yellowstone.
If one's asthmatic in the Eifel region
You don't pronounce the "P."
This won't **** me.

I don't have COPD.
Everyone coughs in blue smoke.
My throaty itch won't **** me.
I won't constrict and choke.

I don't have an infectious disease,
Despite my personality.
I run for shelter in acid rain.
I drink water with ice cubes,
And spray my green out back.
As much as I hate to, I avoid rusty nails.
*** is safe... and at a distance.
Despite being repeatedly told to,
I never eat ****.
The great imitator
Is a snivelling mime.
If I'm bitten, I recognize the marks.
The erupting of the ring of fire won't **** me,
but perhaps I was precocious
To drop the "P" in
Pneumonoultramicroscopicscilicovolcanoconiosis.

I haven't succumb to animal flues,
I stay clear from the bars.
I donate to the SPCA,
Bet on ponies or the odds of SARS.

I don't have meningitis.
I like lights and loud music.
If I get the night sweats,
I turn down my electric blanket.

I haven't the minor or greater pox,
I spurn comparisons.

According to the scoop and scope,
I ascend and descent C free.
But the time spent on Referrals
Might be the death of me.

I don't have botulism.
My smile still concaves down.
Curling convex above it,
A condescending frown.

I'm not a *****.
I feel every poke and like.
My digits number twenty...
Twenty one.
My glasses are smudge free.
If anything I see too well.

Alcoholism can't **** me.
Alcohol can.

I haven't cardio entropy,
But I'd be remiss
To dismiss
The wise counsel Oz gave me:
"Hearts can never be made practical until they can be made unbreakable."
So true.
So true!

Anyway, none of the above will get me.

But, I do have what you have.
The young and grown.
The able and ill.
A hand.
A sweeping hand.
A second hand
Setting those infectious nonogerms
Like diamonds
In my Time-x.

I read a text
Meant for a friend,
One you didn't mean
To send.
Our culmination in technology
Has us now concluded.
A landline would've
Kept me dangling,
But pocket dials don't lie.