for vicki who loves this poem for the best reason ever: just does...
<•>
read a thousand love stories,
pause, rest awhile,
read ten thousand more,
and then deny equality.

If you ask for no more than you can give,
you ask for not enough

love is imbalance not an equation,
with a single solution

love has both constants and variable factors

so you write of tribulations and tributes
so you write of lamentations and liftings

you think you are on the same page
perhaps
but do we not all read at different paces?

one of you is solid, one is dotted and dashed
one of you is straight, one is bent, forever curving

when you think you are
in balance
in the same place
in syncopation

perhaps you are for a moment
a calculus of one point on a trajectory

and you say I can only ask for what I give
and am given
and no more,
you have miscalculated

this flux
flummoxed
when the old terrain is flayed flat
but thru the windshield you see the
plateau ends, the geography unknown,

when you see unknown
when you seek the unknown
when you give from places you did not know
you had to give from
when you kiss a hand
for  twenty minutes more than than the one minute you intended
when you give more than is asked
when you ask for more than you can you think you can give
the imbalance that  is the only concert
the imbalance that is the the only constant

how do I know this?

what are my credentials?

you are not a teenage girl,
what matters of what you know, recall of these matters?

I am who I am
a diversity of man and manner;
I am past prime and in decline
but this I know
for having failed ten thousand poem times
you must ask for more than one can give

but that's not fair!

silly one, still wretched confused,
even after one hundred thousand poem times

you must ask of
yourself
more than you can give
and ask no less
demand no less

a body in emotion is not a body in rest
when the imbalance is too great or insufficient

then you write a poem
look in the mirror that cannot lie
and move
on
or
move off

  begin to ask
yourself
to whom may I give myself
more than is asked.
then you have finally asked
the correct solution to the
unsolvable equation
---

my Mumbai woman

~~~

to my Indian poets & friends
all be advised,

my piety, my muse,
has decamped me for weeks on end
to your
yon far and fair lands

the red dot beside her
electronic signature
a sign of her absence,
seemingly to have been
magically transferred
to her forehead

so perhaps my love poetry
will become absent, reticent,
quiescent

or perhaps

it will build brighter, effervescing
in my very own Taj Mahal,
an edifice built by great love past
and yet ever still present,
for I testify,
I have many times it,
seen imbued,
lovingly observed
between a certain
men and women here writ large,
who there permanent reside,
and in my heart as well

spend a minute many,
all my fingers and
toes employed
how many, so many,
Indian fellow travelers
on poetry lanes and yellow dust encrusted roads,
in cities unpronounceable
that this illiterate literary fool
has come to know and multi-arm entwine

to you,

I commend and command to you
her safety,
asking immodestly for
an imposition, an interference

pray to the local gods,
your heads of state and highest nature's,
that they be her
beside,
her unobserved
safe-keepers,
as she treks your country's
Northern pastures

let her skin glow from
your brighter rays,
eyes even wider~wiser opened
by the newness of your antiquity,
your glorious,
poetic place
in our world
of words

~~~
"I would look at them in the audience:
the frail old lady with thin white hair;
the big, rough biker-looking guy;
the pleasant middle-aged teacher;
the silver-haired accountant with two young kids;
the beat-up middle-aged woman with rheumy alcoholic eyes who is sweetly gracious, modest, as she moves to give you a seat;
the obese, wild-haired man bursting out of his torn, cracked leather jacket;
the giggly, chatty middle-aged redhead in the NoLabels.org sweatshirt;
the Patti Smith-looking woman, tall, pale and austere; the hunky football player;
the skinny hipster girl in architect eyeglasses and torn jeans. Everybody listening so closely to the candidates.
Beret guy, too, with a white bandage on his eye and a beard that went down to the third button of his shirt.
What a crew we are."

Peggy Noonan, political columnist, writing about a New Hampshire meet-the-candidates Town Hall 2016

~~~

confess here an avowed legally, registered voter,
who fails to vote with almost
perfectly regular regularity

for his solitary voice almost always
swallowed whole,
living in the futility utility of a self-selected body politic,
geographical location where
dissent is a now pathetic revolutionary concept lost
in the new intolerance of a place,
where there is none of the
demanding New England hampshired state
that brooks, adheres to
only the standard highest,

"live free or die"

in the sweeping crush of nationalized,
commoditized would be Commodores,
whose sounds bite,
elephantine donkeys and donkeyed elephants,
leading us to the same slaughterhouse,
by different paths

but I am a crew member here...

proud and free,
proud to be,
amidst this mess of characters,
homogenous in their pursuit
of independent assaying
of the character of men
to whom we would
our liberty, entrust

God, it gives me breathing space,
these unusual common folk, who with the
unpracticed eye of a periodic literary critic,
in their first-in-the-nation primary,
selected the would be revolutionaries extremists,
polar opposites

God bless their orneriness,
though both of their final aisles choices to me,
anathema,
message received,
we are tired of the ordinary hacks,
who think their longevity means success,
want a sea core change,
a fresh revolution
as principled as the original...

but they suit up, on uncomfortable
folding chairs,
willing to listen,
all the while acknowledging
their presence physical,
evidentiary proofs each,
that you can fool some of the people
some of the time,
but you cannot fool
all the people
all the time

a man proud to be a crew member,
of this cantankerous irascible population
who will vote this time
but not on any machine that offers up
more of the same ole insane,
will exercise my vote,
in the most old fashioned now waining way

*the same way
I write poetry,
upon a ballot where I will
write in, write on with
ink and paper,
tag a name of person
good enough for representing the
interests best
of this rag tag crew o'mine,
who I love so....

Upon closer examination,
my hands, my history.

Irregular sized summaries, slightly worn,
like gloves, marked down for the discount table,
my creases covered up underneath genesis survivors,
a 'handful' of youthful blonde hairs,  
failures to depart as requested.

Refuseniks to time's ravages,
mockery makers,
yet, cohorts of, in cahoots with,
wave machines, breaker bringers of tidal decay,  
gray color content providers,
to the balance of my body.

Nicks and grooves, crisscross stitches,
vanity repairs to counting down lifelines,
one million billion cells,  
wreckage of death stars, jails for membranes,  
forgetful fabric memorizers, crumbled fractures,
patches designed by an unknown haute couturier,
failed revisionist of the original conception.

All our hands.

Upon closer examination,
Jubilee finale, arrival day of the  
mythical Halcyonian,
the date, initialized,^
even DVR future recorded,
visible, right there, upon
on all our hands, all our history.

Source coded in a language for which 
a Rosetta stone, yet undiscovered,
but visible, right there,  
on all our hands, all our history.

Halcyon bird,
comes when it comes,
though we, always, surprised,
oblivious to the obvious.

Halcyon bird,
coming, to calm, and to lament loss,
coming, to still wind and wave within
the heart, repair the deepest rent.

So these words, caresses,
coming, to calm and to lament,
from my hands to yours,
asking modestly, for acceptance.


--------------------------------------------------------------­----

^http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/halcyonian

(Halcyonian, a mythical bird, said to have the power of charming winds and waves into calmness, associated with death)

together, more than a century
it occurs to his fresh coffee'd brain,
as he,
sliding in behind, half-assedly,
as in half in/half off the bed,
but the rest, the best, nestled, ensconced,
in a serpentine curvature connected

smiling too loudly,
titter~muffled giggle
at the passing by, a funny bone notion,
that combined, conjoined,
together, more than a century,
well, and well more, than that,
a depository of collections, nuances,
cross filed, so that our recollected told tales,
have been all heard before and will again
be retold with a swelling newness
to newborn readers,
checking out the classics

the roar of my suppressed soundings,
clearly too louding,
sleepy hoarse asks
the inevitable "what's the chuckle,"
so accustomed she be to my,
unexpected laughs expectorated,
menagerie of multiplicity of muckled
roars and guffaws, tee hee's,
she will n'ere be satisfied
with a non-answer,,
with a wiley evasion to
her invasion of my innermost

"occurs to me we are a very historical
(never employing that olden adjective)

library,

two cuddling librarians,
who are compelled
to our shelves,
to add a new book daily"

she laughs and kindly requests,
my immediate departure,
for having caused her by
mine awoking and
her evoking
laugh,
to be kicked out of the
library
for excessive noise making

not the first time,
and not the last,
he laughs,
uproariously,
in the deepest of his innermost,
hidden in the silent stacks of their library,
in a demilitarized zone,
neath two pillows soft by,
lest he be shushed vociferously,
by his once again, softly sleeping,
co-conspirator
librarian