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Ah, Pradip,
once more, like a 1000 times before,
you submit title, demanding a poem,
daring me to author it's entire body & cell structure,
give it a native language birthmark, and a history unique,
even a name

Un fair!

Is it only me that you burden so, I doubt it.

Each of us has the right to the small tinys, things we see,
the embellishments of our lives,
filling our hives with pure honey,
and letting the other others peek
over our shoulders, as we write to each other,
always one more time until there is no more time

Do words have any boundaries?

How is it that words can cross the seas, the mountains, all the while,
interjecting the fullness of their import?

What time is it you ask?
Here, not yet 5 AM, and once more, here again, roused from sleep after vivid dreams, and finger pointing of my poetic life responsibility to complete this task, you gave me unasked, but know me too well, for well they rang like a bell in the brain,
a burr in the bed,
a gun to the head
Each
and all commanding,
fulfill me!

Do words require a passport to cross oceans? Do words have citizenship?
Why does entry into a different country require each time, a new poem?

yes, the house is dark,
I am alone, but not really…

The words that are conscripted to be issued, in this missive, fall so easily from my lips, that it is as if they were already there,
MRE's
?
pre-prepared, "meals – ready – to eat, "
for voyaging to the Indian continent, not caring if they came alone, or with my body in their person possessed

How is the little granddaughter?
Does she command you to write poetry too?
Does she write poetry too?
Does she learn English as well as her native tongue?
How do you tell her that you love her, celebrate her,
and that her fame and escapades are unkempt  
by real geographical boundaries,
and travel around the world?

Ah, You see
I have charged you now with responsibility!

Ah, the tables have turned, now boundaries must be crossed again with a passport issued from a foreign land (foreign to me anyway),
And I wonder and wander, when they arrive, how will I know,
commit them to memory, and love them with all my heart forever?

Praddip!
Go for one of your walks on quiet nearly empty roads, see the old people beside them, doing the things that old people do,

and memorialize these moments,
you do
so well, so fine, and let the other onlookers hear them spoke, in every language, so many love poems to life, we do not lack for any,
but always, always, always,
demand and require,
n e e d
(he howls)
one more!

Time: 5:1 2 AM
Eastern standard time
New York City
By the Atlantic Ocean
On an island surrounded by water,
That 1,000,000 or more every day pass by,
And here,
h e a r not the flow,
lost amidst
the blaring megaphone of silences
of
city noises, city words, cityscapes, human miracles, and tragedies, it cannot be.
that
I am
the only one so burdened!
And by well traveled poetry,
so un burdened

This semi private, totally public,
Love now,
Love note
is complete as of 5:16 a.m., and after a quick review, will be sent on to you, for submission of a unique-passport for
with its very own
valid entry stamp

nml
please, as usual, advise any typos (toe matoes)
South coast days on end

The ante meridiem
Married to summer

People in constant motion

To the merry-go-round we go
To the merry-go-round we go

In the center
Like the mobile over my bed

Where the heart beats
Where our eyes see in teleidoscope

Inside the lines are brighter
And wider and envelop

The journey in itself
Is the gift
why when we compose
on matters urgent
oh my love

are we not provisioned with
beginnings and endings,
opening and closings?

We know what needs to be said,
the symmetry of butter and bread,
but how to begin and how to end,
these difficulties, not easy to comprehend

how to get
to the heart of the matter,
the door to the hallway
leading and departing
to
the front door entrance,
to the front door exit,

don’t know the words to begin,
the words to end,
which way does
the door open or close?

so read this, please, sit beside me,
while you place your fingertips
on my lips
and encourage me to
just say it!
2/28/25
first, please see the Mary Oliver poem below
<•>
Oh! you you puncture me with your words,
direct to the sticking place, where the insertion wound cries out,
but does not bleed

my life punctuated by the, no!
punctured
bye absence of wild,
did this permit it precocious  
preciousness to deteriorate?

The safe route, the wrong Fork chosen,
The tings impale, my pretend satiation,
My life is nearly over,
should I get plan?

this poetic life struggles within and to get out,
but there is no plan to let it escape,
me remake,
turn me to a peripatetic bee,
pollinating a wildflower as a mere messenger,
a carrier, only to return home to
deliver and die
precious poem
on my lips


February 9, 2025
(1) Poem 133: The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver
Dearest Patty m.,

we admire, admit to raw nailed jealousy
when we read the works superior
with the greatest worn scruffy complementary compliment
a poet
can give to
another scribe

How I wish I had written that,
those very words!


confessing before the world
with our own humility
at the daily dawning of
realization that
morning brings freshness and
insights needy for release and
aborning and the trace of humiliation
that we’ve all  ready
been breached bested
by others,
once again…

BUT
we do not bow!
no courtly arm sweeping,
back bent, at best
a nod of a head
then

privately
we gasp, rent our clothes,
throw the body flat to the floor,

observing seven days of mourning
reserved
for when we morning moan,
daylight groan and loan out our
croissant moon mooing cries to
bemused muses
in the clouds supervising,
as tears of, an admixture of,
an elixir of joy, compassion
and thus refreshed by someone’s
new infant’d christening
we *****. we resurrect, gamble,
throwing ourselves complete like dice,
in to a roll of
stunned stupor of high inspiration
and then make out best work
ever yet

but never do we bow, scrape,
bend the knee, maybe the head,
we mourn our lesser failings
and smile as we flash words
from our eyes,
stored in our mindsets,
our, my best, will
always be yielded up
next
——
addendum
———
seven years ago
in a separate guise,
he ssid it differently
maybe better?
:<•>

epilogue

read my face
incapable of,
deprivation
but how now silent
bow my head to Will
for teaching the way of words
traced upon
a fool or a king's tongue,
two too human,
so that poet may ken
his senses keener,
all for the better,
for the betterment of all
~ for Rob Rutledge -
@ 6:15am
~~~~~
we all are living, reading and writing,
paycheck to paycheck
even if by happenstance, our bellies full,

for the white sheets we lay our words
down and upon, our supporters of
ids and egos of egg shell thin lifes
are the bare emptied shelves
of our unending, still ongoing
pandemic pandemonium,
razing times
of eroding joys

the sheets are blank, but our souls
wearied, helmed and whelmed
by the unending of the unexpected
that demands, orders and commands,
no matter what
pour it out blasting
unleashing the rage
compelled, compiled,
completely compulsing
we
selves ordered to compose

giving form and firmament
to our vaporous innards,
releasing new oxygen from
the tides inside and without,
clashing ideas, irregular notions
that demand we poets responsible
for reconciliation and auditing for
human truths

we awake barren but weighty,
the emotions are rustling in the
now daily, common,
mighty metors of gusts of higher winds,
spreading fire and measles to spite,
not despite
our fragile failings & flailings

oh goodness and grace,
let that be the colors of
our skin, our face,
essay on, sashay with a
swinging motion,
yes, rhyme and rhythm

and deliver us with words
so soft, they shatter the
gloomy desperation of
what confronts our entirety,
when the terrors of our
sleeping dreams cannot be
differentiated from the
sad eyed waking
ones

so write, and right,
these troubled times,
when trolls, dragons
and yet unnamed monsters
seek to take away our
tiny green planet, watered,
seeded and plentiful fruited
plains enough to satisfy us all

if we are so emboldened to choose
all of us over our lonely selfish selfs
6:15am
Tuesday
close by
the Ides of March
(1)some words recently received and rescreted
when you can see the peaks,
know
your not there

and yet…
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