A long red light
Kick the kickstand down
Lift up your legs
Form into a lotus pose
Palms out to the sun
Meditate

Green light
Kick up the kickstand
Quick turn left
Quick turn right

Into the lane
Graced by a handpainted sign:
Welcome
Noon
AA Meeting

Olive-drab dress, black
Gloves: a brief mambo, prelude
To her last heartbreak

“Oh, my husband has been ill. He just got out of the hospital.”

An unneeded apology for the elderly man's labored pace

I didn't but I should have told the elderly woman that I was in no hurry to collect their newspaper subscription.

I stood patiently

As 40 years passed

And somehow I remembered that old man and old woman in an apartment complex set back in the
desert

Reading about the fall of Saigon, the Mayaguez, Ford to New York: Drop Dead

Fading away

Their names no longer spoken

Like Saigon, Mayaguez, Ford

Only New York persevering

In the same place maybe where

I spot a flicker and a shadow

A young boy and young girl holding hands

The rock slept
Genghis Khan clamped fingers
Over the edge of a land mass
And peeled freedom away from the East

The rock slept
The mob beheaded a woman who aided the American Revolution
Americans denied it later
But every town called Marietta is named after her

The rock slept
A vegetarian who didn’t drink and smoke
Commandeered information technology and chemical engineering
To commit the biggest ******-robbery
In the history of daylight and star-shine

The rock slept
The vegetarian cowered from justice
Committed suicide like the milksop/milquetoast he was

The rock slept
A fourteen-year-old boy clamped his fingers
Around it
Aimed it at High Strength Lexan riot shields
Protecting flesh, blood, and bone minimally paid
Protecting shields of numbers, theories, interchangeable office holders

Until he realized the futility of it
Dropped the rock
Turned south (or maybe north)
And walked away

The rock slept
Snoring unheard through the next spurt of tyranny

The street named after the Spaniard who discovered the Pacific

The drive named after the Spaniard who conquered Mexico

The lane named after the Spaniard who blessed the Americas’ first Thanksgiving

Yielded enough rubber bands from newspapers

To twine a ball

Round enough

Bouncy enough

For a good game of stickball

Until the kid tasked

With finding rubber bands

From the circle named after the Spaniard who painted pictures

An oddball among all those adventurers

And a cluster of dwellings that didn’t subscribe

To rolls of paper

Hit it into the backyard with the dog on a chain

But fear kept us on a chain

As we stood over the rock wall

Looking for a manila spot

On unwatered St. Augustine

And spotting it

Disdaining it for

The angry barks

Bared teeth of the restrained beast

Letting it wait

For an archeologist centuries hence

(Maybe even a few decades from then)

To find it and marvel

“Even back then humans played games -- or so we assume --

With round objects.”

We clocked in
(Punched in the older guys said)
And sat in a circle of orange plastic chairs
Hubbed by a thin morose
Befuddlement of a team lead

“An hour, just what is an hour?” he asked to begin the weekly meeting
I wanted to say, “A unit of temporal measurement that comprises -- or is that composes? -- sixty minutes,”
But held back
Knowing the obviousness of the query had to be a set-up

The befuddlement sighed in frustration
An understudy to my English III instructor
(the one who gave me an F- on the Emily Dickinson test)
Then said, “Okay, just what can be done in an hour?”

Then the youngest kid who always kept quiet
But who had enough scars -- had to toss in a lurid touch didn’t I --
To imply that he might have more experience than the oldest said,
“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“Okay, then just what is that contraption on the other side of the bay?”

“An assembly line.”

“And what does it do?”

“It makes a 30centaurpower indivertible that runs on Gila monster spit.”

He nodded.

He considered.

“Okay, then, let’s punch out and come back tomorrow. Maybe then we’ll really have something to do.”

(And - oh yeah -- putting on my hat as a frustrated teleplay writer:
Those scars showed that he could handle himself.)

Read grandmother's books
Found passages underlined
She lived once again

Waitress carrying
Table in from sidewalk smiles
At a skateboarder

I was just being silly in art class
Me a comedian at age 11
But then on the lawn outside
The kid I thought was my friend
Told me he wanted to fight me
Because he hated me for being a fool
So we grappled shoulders, wrestled
Rolled on the ground
It wasn't much of a fight
But I was still sad that he hated me

Years later I heard he became a doctor
A psychiatrist perhaps
And if he meets a bipolar in a manic state
He says, "Do you wanna fight me?"
So they grapple shoulders, wrestle
Roll on the ground
Maybe one of them,
Maybe both of them
Feel better afterwards

I was trying to impress Ella at the art reception
Telling her a fishing and then a hunting and then a garage saling story
When I notice her looking over my right shoulder
At

A non-descript male
Who like me
Wore no rings
Had his hair combed to the side

And made a somewhat believable attempt to understand
What was mounted on the east-side wall
I dreamed that night of a mob
Me allied with 10 tall strong men

Or at least taller and stronger than him
Tall and strong enough
To corner him at the cliff
by the site of the forgotten Revolutionary war skirmish

As we stood facing him
Trying to think of what we would do to hurt him
When suddenly the ground we stand on collapses and we go tumbling down
Limbs hitting limbs

Torsos slamming torsos
Until we're in a moaning pile
And what does the nondescript man noticed by Ella do
but throw us a rope or some kind of lifeline and pulls us up

And in gratitude I grab him by the hand
And pull
He tumbles
Laughing

And I walked away
Knowing he was okay down there below

Who would want to read the poem that I wrote?

Might it be that man in the red party hat...

(And don't ask me what a red party hat looks like

It's just something I made up and I'm not even

Sure

If it's a party hat that's red or a hat for a red party.)

So really who would want to read the poem that I wrote?

Maybe that woman I saw running in six-inch-high heels in the morning

And then ambling in tennis shoes in the evening

And actually I never have seen a woman like that

But if she does exist

Maybe she would want to read the poem that I wrote.

Stupid
Lazy
Slow
Confused
Incompetent
That’s what you want to call me, don’t you
She said with a mouth that sounded as if it wasn’t accustomed to such aggression

Hungry
Tired
Scared
Unsure
But
Persistent
That’s what I want to call you, I said
With a mouth that sounded as if it wasn’t accustomed to such sympathy

Rivaling gunfire
ten pairs of rock dove wings boom
and greet my presence

I saw an acorn
In the corner of the men's room
Kicked in randomly I guess
By workers rushing to escape
Another tardy


So I picked it up
Carried it outside
And tossed it randomly
On the corporate front lawn
Next to where the executives park

Then I waited to see if a tree would grow

"Do you have any smokes?"
The kid in the Afro asks me.
"No, I don't,"
I tell him.
"Ah, this sun is nice,"
says the woman with what sounds like an African accent.
"Look, Mama, I'm riding him,"
shouts the boy on the sculpture of the frog reading a book
to its spawn.
Then the front door opens
And we walk into the quiet room.

On the skywalk

I saw
Two men greet
Each other with smiles
On the crosswalk

I saw
A young man and young woman
Holding hands
On the sidewalk

I saw
An old man
Cradling a baby girl
On the boardwalk

I broke
From my pause
On the skywalk

Sleeved out with tats
a stud in her nose
tailgating me
in a yellow Mustang
Common blaring
born in 1900
met him in 1855
lost him in 1942
still mourning
still morning
as she throws rocks at wolf cubs
to get to the strawberries
because
for a good meal
call a gatheress
Ancestress
of both
the killers
and the killed

Everyone was told to stay indoors

The fish were “humaning”

Baiting hooks with Xanax and ******

And other pharmaceuticals to help us get through the day

Working stiffs wanting a little surcease

Found themselves descending through water

To who knows what fate

As pets maybe?

But do we put trout in aquariums?

I made the decision

To stop hydrophobically cowering in my apartment

And set out

Forswearing all chemical crutches

Sad to see too many of my fellow **** sapiens

Getting wet against their will

The snowshoe hare hid
In the whiteness but the wolf
Even whiter pounced

Standing on the 10th floor
Staring through a freshly cleaned spotless picture window
At a layer of snow
Over what I remember as
A sidewalk marred with no cracks or graffiti
A lawn going crisp and brown
A street with no potholes
Invaded by a striding
Vertical pile
Of winterwear
Heavy coat scarf ski mask toboggan cap jeans hiking boots
Leather gloves
Sacks of groceries dangling
Like earrings
To preside over a night on the town

In and out of a
Patch of sunlight dragonflies
Flit, backs emblazoned

We live in a town with an Indian name
An Indian name from a language that's no longer spoken
An Indian name from a people who may no longer exist

Sometimes someone will say what the name of our town means in the Indian language
And we'll marvel at that
More likely we'll just laugh

Because our town is nothing like the way the Indians said it is
It's a place with a lot of fast-food restaurants
And it's a place with a lot of sit-down restaurants where you can't buy anything that costs less than $40

If we leave this town
Sometimes we'll talk about how we're from this town
Or how we're going back to this town
And then when we get back there maybe
We'll get a call from a telemarketer who can't pronounce the name of our town
That's not how you say it we'll say
It's...

And that will be one of the only times that a word from this Indian language is ever said

Through the plate-glass window
Of the Fire Bowl Cafe
I see three women in royal-blue scrubs
Triangulated on the parking lot

One holds a *** of yellow flowers
Thankful
Appreciated
Smiling like I haven't seen anyone smile all day that day
(Not even in the movie I just saw)

They distriangulate
And I watch the appreciated one
Put her *** of flowers on the asphalt next to her SUV
I wait for her to open the back door and put them in
But she doesn't
She just drives away

And leaves them there
Yellow and blue
Becoming yellow and black
As I wait for her to return
As I wait for a stranger to stop and steal them
Finally I get up
And leave