Don’t eat chicken noodle soup from a saucepan leaned back in a recliner
because your neighbor could hit his wife in the back of the head
with a cue ball and the cops might siren down your street
causing you to flinch and spill hot broth on your
chest;  I have a bone to pick with the coward.

1
A seed grows in my Heart.
                (no more than a summer melon’s)        
        Black, brilliant, roots
        crack veneer shell and sprout
        propagate
        deep into the marrow of my very life.  

Tender flesh juicing red,
Replace my sinew!
Take what once fueled the industry of vanity,
        the fell machinery of your demise,
        the coffee life,
        the algorithmania,
        the I deserve,
        the trite Insta-filter,
        the like and friend and tag and share
And cast it aside!—as you once were!—
And make me the vessel of your deliverance
And teach me again
        to see you
        to breathe you
        to feel you
        to love you
So that I may redeem some future, some place
        where my son can pull the blade from his stone before it is sent to quarry.

2
How I long for you!
        For air!
        For sun!
        For solitude!

        For green!
        For radiance!
        For decay!

        For life!
        For rot!
        For fungus!

        For bark!
        For sap!
        For dirt!

        For some well-wish,
        some clue,
                that we haven’t dug too hastily
                with spite and ego and industry and greed.

3
Henry! Let me in your house!  
        Show me to fish and to bake your bread!
Walt! Chant for me!
        Sow me a path with your electric melody!
                (you understand my dilemma, boy of the city and soul of the Earth)
Allen! I cry to you!
        Put your sunflower in my eyes
        And wipe away my tears through dusty gray.


        Arthur,
        It may never once was, yet let the future be.

I find
waking
at 2am
provides
a convenient window
for two or three hours
of pondering
on my myriad shortcomings
as a husband,
father,
teacher,
writer,
musician
and human being

Conveniently uninterrupted
by the slightest opportunity
to do anything
about any of them.

Poets Like Me..

Suspended at portals of rigid
and well-defined
thought reclines most whimsy,
which poets like me
welcome and use to un-stick
rusted up vision.
Freeing the mind we care not
where reality ends.
Wonder notices even the tiny
and gasps at gross,
the newly dry gossamer wing
seen as fillagreed
diamonds with eyesight, night
versed with ghostly
metaphor, the tides as emotion.
Humanized nature
allures the inventive in scribes
bent on perception
where real meets make-believe.
Awe, understood
as a lever appeals to romantics
like me addicted
to all ethereal's seducing fancy.
Idealized love
presents realms of impassioned
expression, themes,
versing spirit personified holds
complusion, creative
vision awakens to other worlds
where, finally winning
utopia becomes no mere illusion.
What feels real merges
and mixes with linguistic flights
of beguiling imagery.
Life through the eyes of all poets
like me changes
at will from the galling mundane
to that which excites
inspiration for evocative writing.