We're at Harvard, the same one as Bill Gates and Mark what's his Facebook, except we're not students anymore and our safety net are passing away from cancer and infection leaving us eating pizza and working long hours on things we're passionate about but if we fail we can't go home again because Love isn't there anymore to cook us delicious food that we pack back to school every weekend because she really did walk the walk and not just the talk, walking in the sand of Christ's Word she believed in so much, loving everyone even though we all have little cheats, private incentives and selfish priorities-- but really, is protecting favorite nephews from a harsh world so that we won't have Viet Minh from a forgotten war haunting our dreams, coming to get you because we're French Colonial bad brand, bad? In the end it makes no sense-- we all become practical capitalist selling catfish to a buddhist America who talks a good talk about free love trade zones but the not so hidden agenda unilaterally transfers wealth with USDA inspected protectionist condoms.

going down a rabbit hole
of obscure references
really?
Good Times is lost?
are we really in our own Lost World
or Land of the Lost
or deep within Inception?

Who's Jimmy Walker, we now
never knew him
and is he still alive a quick search
says yes!
how can we not know
slanted sitcoms?
and blaxplotation with bad
back running Brown
acting totally different
than wet backs another
brown water should we flush
it down?

at least she knows
Alice in Wonderland
at least she's seen
one version on one
mode or another
book tape movie
there's also the **** version

We're waiting for the tactile mode
coming straight to our head
like Natalie Wood
just before she died following her own
Brainstorm into anther world
off to another lost reference
or obscure rabbit hole

You tell me it's not time to make a change,
just relax and take it easy. I'm still not young
And it's not my fault. But in a way it is,
And I know I have to go.
How can I try to explain when all
the words turn away, and
sigh in sadness that it's all the same
Same old story.
Look at me, and what do you see
Neither Father nor Son.

An algorithm
Is but sly slant rhyme
Math encoded rules
Like riding punk rails
Giving a gesicht
Remembering Zorks

The Alert
says I
should take a shower
now
but
the spray comes thin
like Twiggy from
the 70s
like Kate Moss from
magazines that can't turn a
profit like David Lehman's
warm shower trickling down
a cold April back
but
now
it's the tip of March
and the thin rain
comes
like my Blood loving
into mist memories

It's like steps, baby steps
in puffy, winter's clothes
from protective parents
bundles of joy, pushing through snow
white, pure,
in innocence

It's as if seasons ago
we ankle biters collected Maple leaves
as the colors changed
and froze them in between
pages of a college student's
journal full of love and passion,
in hope

that the spring of our lives
will come too soon,
and the dried leaf
and the driven snow
will add up to
something, anything
before the winter sets
in again.

Wake, read, work
and Repeat.

Sounds like a movie
instead of coffee
with my father

distant

with David Lehman
on March 30
living The Best Years of Our Lives

reading again David
things I've forgotten
things We'll only remember

living in the Matrix
of references and inside joke,
literature search
and transposed multiplication
instead of regularized
algorithm

how funny our dad
is who knows only trees
and the bitter cold as Winter
sets in my lips are dry
what do we say
skin like parchment

how funny our Dad
who only knows
streams of information
shows as allegory
"Shaka when the walls fell"

what's a good movie
quote for Failure?

The Titanic?
always the sinking
is corrupted with an interlacing
Rose at the bow
dreaming of forever love

We dads aren't Dana Andrew
We don't even know
who
that is and don't care
We're frantically Raising
Arizona blossoms in concrete
soil two beautiful
daughters
We CK Lewis Dads

Lehman time is
over time to take a shower, work
and Repeat.