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O sleep, what a strange mistress you can be
when I think of all our savage nights and long embraces.
I have cursed and blessed you with bellowing cries.
I hated you in the green of youth, when the backyard
was my kingdom, and the dragons needed slaying.
You invaded long afternoons in the sun with nap time.
As my years flew by, like crows in autumn and I grew
out of my backyard sanctuary, the dragons became
bigger and new beasts arrived on the scene; brutal
beasts with no mercy, and much harder to ****.
I looked for you on long, lonely, brokenhearted nights,
when finding a star in the sky was like panning for gold.
I found your dreamy kiss and silent embrace far less.
O, sleep, what a strange mistress you can be.
In Marriage
Is not what I found
A loving
Caring man
Around

No
I was pushed
Around
Shouted down

Made
To feel
Less around
This man
I found

But I stayed
Around
And was
Again knocked
To the ground

And with children
I found
More I was
On the ground

Although my
Love for them
I found
I stayed
Around

And was still
Thrown
To the ground
Lack of esteem

I would lay down
And try not to
Frown
But this got me
Down

But one day
I turned
Around
No longer

I would be
Pushed around
I got up from the
Ground

And turned
My life
Around

And now
I have found
What life Is
Really about

Standing
Strong
Alone
 Jun 2020 grumpy thumb
Perry
Goodbye
 Jun 2020 grumpy thumb
Perry
A lost black and white picture
-Misplaces forever
A protruding tree in a pond
-Endlessly drowning

But I showed you a strong face
Yes, I showed you a lie
I thought for you to leave in peace
It was necessary for my burden
To find a place to hide

Home in your eye veered north
A rebel endeavor to outrun
The fire that is your skin
Like a shooting star

A star that had to die
For my unremarkable eye
To catch a glimpse of light
Teaching me how to say

-Goodbye
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.
Title suggested by song by Wild Cherry: "Play that funky music right/Play that funky music white boy/Lay down that boogie and play that funky music till you die..."
a truism, an overused, abused entrée to the first poem of the day,
they always are night-born, from a slow passage of dark to a light-triggering recording event, a 6 hr. poem period, gestation, incantation

and a sort of relief, temporary

many the miles voyeured, a mentaller feasting sated,
simple rhymes to covet, rephrasing the complexities of
our other lives, where our sub-selfs exclaim, out loud!
this is me unchained, this is me chained, this is...someone


besotted by the rottenness of honesty, once air-exposed,
eyes fixed, no away-turntable, all that well hidden spoilage
in dreams reverent, forsaken, my ashamed-ness, is willing
taken to the scaffold, and by daylight first, perceived, conceived


we may examine the half of me, nay, the all of me, open-face
secrets secreted in my nighttime travelogue, of crimes, revelations,
insects, drownings, strawberry moons, all the fraying edges of a
linen covering, my cadaver pouch of well used words


inscribed thus:

”human born from a sac, and to earth returned, in sackcloth
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