Meet Chuck: a sixty-or-so year old sweetheart, a retired chemist with   puppy-dog hazel eyes, the occasional mucus glob caked in their cracks



What he wants: the usual: a sweet tater, salad with thousand isle, warmed loaf of Portuguese bread, glass of water with a slice of lemon



What he actually wants:   someone who will listen.



Footnotes: get ready for this week’s stories of old travels, re-runs of grown kids’ work endeavors, and that one time he visited Chicago for some chemistry conference…


The spice: a lesson on removing professional masks of insincerity, or over-sincerity, as fake as the hanging plants in this place. a lesson on meeting mid-way to realize our chapters are not palimpsests, but offerings to the Book of the Universe, forever in composition.

Cars are now perched birds in treetops
who shimmy back and forth like dancers ready to fly
Phone poles & oak trees had a night out dancing, they
are now black-out girls that couldn’t hold their liquor at frat filth parties.

They are unwanted ***** scattered on dead grass and dim streets.
The twin palm trees from mom’s backyard are now divers in the pool.
The sun, the sole light source, now
radiates in waves, darkness to light to darkness, that stays.

The air is now a stench, rank like kitty litter from the not-quite running water.
My mom’s safe deposit box the only thing unchanged, untouched & standing.
She is now parking her Buick in the spot with the least ashes, & strolling towards
the bank. Its walls are now spread on cement as debris.
The teller’s desks are now ghosts.

She is eyeing the security guard who is sitting in a folding chair at the front.
He wears the same clothes as usual, asks the same question,
“How may I help you, ma’am?” the words exit his lips as if it’s any
day at the bank. She is now telling him her business, and as she starts towards the back, the guard is now trigged, “Enter through front door, ma’am!”

Her feet guess where the door once was, begin once more.
Mom is now collecting her savings, and leaving out “the door.”
A crescent moon now replaces the guard’s solemn mouth.
Is it better to be Don Quixote,
to find bliss through deviant imagination?

When they came to my island, the
hero and his crew (more like
an invasive species
of uninvited animals)
The rot from their unwashed feet spilled everywhere--
infestations of foul--
They plucked grapes from my vines slowly, with pride,
as if they kept them themselves,
They came into my cave and stole sheep’s milk and cheese--
The blessed feta: vanished!!
And you wonder why I snacked on two--I had nothing else!
They disregarded emptied wine bottles in clusters in the sand,
Kept me awake in the evening with boisterous, hoglike squeals.
And when I let out a scream myself,
A cry to my native land, to my father,
I spotted my herds scurrying from the cave,
with little hands floating atop their fur,
Then came the electrifying pain
I see a staff, feel the hit, become
disabled.
They took everything and left me blinded
And he is still the hero?
He told me he was Nobody.

on a sapphire lawn,
a glass vase of mushrooms
stands on its head.
a platter of crème custard naps,
while a bunch of grown
sunflowers tease us with their posture.

the moon is low, drunk, & stretching its borders,
over oval bushes, a little lorax hides behind them.
by the flower patch, a golden mushroom statue
is squinting. the black beam on his head sprouts tall,
arches, then dangles the celestial chandelier.

i am laying on the grass,
under the bubbled & weeping cerulean tree.
come and join me
for a dinner of daises.

I am sentenced to stay
in the pockets of your face.
No need to ask me if I agree
with your thoughts, for I know
you don’t consider me much,
as if I’m not laboring away,
flipping reality on its head,
creating the images that swim
through the cords of your memory.

You have taken me to
dark places: rooms with rank nebulas
of smoke, toilets in underground
bars caked with ****, bedrooms with
too many occupants…

I will sit and be sour,
in my God-given pocket.
You will stroke that raw pork
in your freezer, then stroke me,
unconsciously.

Sweet street lamp, you dwell to ***-
ide the left & right hemispheres of the fall tree’s
mind, your lone arm reaches out, fixed,
like one of an aspiring actor,
acting like a soup ladle; your light nourishes,
as the neighbors’ broth in the night.

Sweet street lamp, you craft shadows for
puppeteering in little Ann’s bed-
room, the Rorschach ray on her wall
does the Peter Pan, creeping in through the blinds,
manifesting a makeshift nightlight.

Above you, branches move in mazes:
All in the possibility of the dark.

The drive home--too soon--from the evening’s celebrations:
scattered street lights, golden hues moving in epileptic waves
the unconscious coast on the interstate
for you, the half-drunken dance with raw chicken giblets
which fell to a ***** floor, with a flying, broken peeler,
skins of butternut squash, my
confidence.
Four hours pass, I stay on the couch with my wine,
the cat, & fresh salt streams ‘til sleep arrives.
You left me to be
with a dead chicken.
Lonesome Saturday eve.