Loitering with a vacant eye
Along the Grecian gallery,
And brooding on my heavy ill,
I met a statue standing still.
Still in marble stone stood he,
And stedfastly he looked at me.
"Well met," I thought the look would say,
"We both were fashioned far away;
We neither knew, when we were young,
These Londoners we live among."

    Still he stood and eyed me hard,
An earnest and a grave regard:
"What, lad, drooping with your lot?
I too would be where I am not.
I too survey that endless line
Of men whose thoughts are not as mine.
Years, ere you stood up from rest,
On my neck the collar prest;
Years, when you lay down your ill,
I shall stand and bear it still.
Courage, lad, 'tis not for long:
Stand, quit you like stone, be strong."
So I thought his look would say;
And light on me my trouble lay,
And I stept out in flesh and bone
Manful like the man of stone.

I try too hard to think complex,
when simplicity can be so much better,
We all really do have something simple about us,
We all really do feel the greatness of success,
shoot for the simple goals to succeed the complex,
believe in the simple things that can lead to the hard,
people try to show off and pretend to be confusing,
but I am most impressed by the simple thoughts.

He looked in all His wisdom from the throne
Down on that humble boy who kept the sheep,
And sent a dove; the dove returned alone:
Youth liked the music, but soon fell asleep.

But He had planned such future for the youth:
Surely, His duty now was to compel.
For later he would come to love the truth,
And own his gratitude. His eagle fell.

It did not work. His conversation bored
The boy who yawned and whistled and made faces,
And wriggled free from fatherly embraces;

But with the eagle he was always willing
To go where it suggested, and adored
And learnt from it so many ways of killing.

You keep going until your limbs catch a fever
until your world becomes nothing but this one straining moment
rewarded by a globe of air that you gulp down like instant mercy,
giving you one more curl
one more step
one more crunch
one more push

one more past the number you thought was impossible as a child
back when everything made sense
before the failures and misfortune
and the million heartbreak deaths
that, compared, diminish this hour of agony
into nothing

and for one brief moment, your heart about to burst
it wills your blood to keep flowing, abandoning the past of regret
because time and gravity will never be as strong
as hope.

this is why you are made of steel.
this is why pain is an afterthought.

Looking deeply into pieces of what I was.
Perusing the mosaic of images
That linger in my eyes.
Shards of all shapes an sizes

Moments holding steadfast
So vivid, rich and rank.

This is no wading pool
The depth is great
And the capacity is only fathomed.

It all pulses, sparks, chokes and spits.

There is no hemorrhage
This is all fine
Make assertions
Pound them deep into reality.

Each strike resounds
Like a blacksmith in a cave
Molding shifting
Creation.

Flames that had once receded
Deep into the pit of a forgotten temple.
Stoked sudden & silently by a mere shift of its outer mask
Breathing new life/light
into hallowed grounds.

Can’t wait to be seventy
With knees that hang
Like fleshy skin tags
Over my knee highs
And Custard feet
All squelched into my Clarks.

No prunes
In my grocery basket
Just lots of cheese
Chocolate and beer
Which will make me gassy
So I’ll ask for a backrub
To get my wind up.

I’ll say those things
I’ve always wanted to say
And not come off
Like a social landmine
Because people will just think
I’m batty.

They’ll smile
And nod
And make corkscrew gestures
Behind my back
But I won’t care.

I shall say
**** a lot
Because people
Will not expect that
From a portly granny
With a blue rinse.
But I shall never be unkind
Of all of the ugly words
You can use
**** is probably
The most benign.

I shall read great books
Filled with ideas
And speak to the deaf geriatrics
In the old folks home
And say things like-
So what did you think of that?
And even as they
Clutch their hearts
To prepare for their exit
From this world
I shall say-
I feel that strongly too
And in this way
Everything shall
Be part of my interlude
It shall all be about me
Me
Me
Me

Now I'm in the turnips and string beans of poetry:
It's like, you think you'll grow up some day
And live in a two story house with swimming pool,
And a two car garage, with a six pack driveway.
Things turn out differently, though you might think
You'd spend whole days devouring Dickinson, Keats, and Shelley,
Drinking fine wines with tidbits of exotic cheese.

Then you find out you'll live in a one car rented garage apartment,
Over a couple always yelling or making love-
There's no in-between; and you never know which it'll be
And if you're mistaken for the significant other you might get
Bopped with a lady's spiked heel or an army boot.

Then you find out that you're the couple
But you're always too busy to make love;
Love is no longer scheduled like bowling night,
It all depends on uncluttered horizontal surfaces and spare minutes-
And the wine turns into beer, when you can afford it
And the nightly budget pizza is the only dough you'll get
It's constipating; but the words still get squeezed out.

And the poets you're reading now aren't dead:
They're urbanely unkempt, and you know them personally,
All their quirky habits; writing poems at bus stops
In a voluble rush; writing words on cafe napkins,
On discarded want ads and torn paper sacks;
And none of them are well known, and none of them are rich.

But they're poets all the same, they live and breathe
The written word, and you're no different, certainly no better,
All of you shooting up words and slang nightly,
Weighing out the soul of the latest idiom,
Choking on cheap cigar smoke and wishing you'd written that,
And thinking you could have done it worse-
And suddenly some night, you look around you

You realize you're living poetry, and you don't care anymore
About rich and famous- because now it's your addiction;
None of that mattered anyway, for only poetry holds any reality now.
Everything else is imaginary, and all the poets started out this way;
Nobody knew them or gave a rat's ***,
And they went on writing just the same
As if it were the most important job on earth they'd been given.

NEVER give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy.  Kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.

Orange peel Thursdays and the Velcro shoes
Of children hordes
Who spider up Alice on toadstools in Central Park
Dusted psilocybin shoots my eyes through
With the clarity of ice and sliced mushroom
Steeping in stomach acid before finding blood
The kids are tripping like madmen or halloween candy
Like its time to release and give up to the nonsense
And let your young self congeal to a saccharine sludge

I don’t stroll in the park to keep my mind sharp
I’m here because it’s a riot
My head can throb to the jittery birds
And the blasts of carsong
It’s the right kind of rhythm to walk to

* *

Ketamine days and the lolling slums
To make sure the insane stay insane
And the hobos are washed with spit from the clouds
And the subway exhaust always hangs in our hair
And the old Coney Island burns again and twice more

We don’t pretend to understand what we see
In subway grates thirty feet wide
Like the earth punching out of work for a bit
Opening to you her *** belly
So you can check out the strips of metal inside
Before she slurps you down and with an esophageal squeeze
Shoots you through the turnstiles

The train squeals and grinds down our eyes
With thoughts as slow as ketamine
Makes room for schizophrenia in a conversation
We’re listening to ‘til sundown

* *

Years full of Brooklyn and the assorted pills
Makes offal fit for punks in name brand shoes
Squared off with police in the park
Being beaten for the fun of being beaten
Peacoat locals pass the days in supermarkets
And you grow up to the loony mumble
Of the woman who knows the boat
Moored at the end of the street
Mansion of the stray cat colony
You help her with her daily chore to feed them
Tabbies popping the pills of the homeless
And puking in tandem all over their house
Living off generous dying folk

Voiceless,
In a battle of words, choice less.
The plague of silence is worse than violence,
But yet I cannot voice this.

I must be seriously delirious with the fervor of fever,
'Cause whimsical words play on my mind like some ludicrous lever.
Creating cracks that become chasms
That shake me,
             Take me,
                   Ever deeper,
                        Down the
                                Rabbit hole.