~for Bex~*

in the flesh, not really, but I was...

ordered five bone china coffee mugs for you,
from the Artists Gallery, all scenes of nature,
painted by Canada’s Group of 7,
to go with the Lawren Harris mug,
'Lakes and Mountains'
from which I am currently sipping

for when I thought of you up north in Ontario,
I thought of my mom,
who was Toronto born and bred,
and the caramel oranges of fall
that have not yet arrived
in northern Manhattan,
but have already peaked in Ontario,
in late September

I smile,
while voyaging on the curving line of thought perusal,
at all the things that have already peaked,
someplace else,
and that have may yet, be late, arriving in my life

and I dream of:

all the poets who
I will never meet,
the living and the dead,
all the poems,
I will never finish, perhaps, n'ere to start,
never chance to speak, or chance to peak

all of you, sipping, from those real mugs of porcelain,
that are soon to arrive, via an imaginary railroad,
running on creosote stained ties of caramel orange,
built by a namesake, that I can no longer imagine,
but whom I knew
so well in my youth

my mug is sadness filled by
those stillborn verses that will never chance to peak,
but am comforted by the knowing,
as long as there is freedom to write,
that there is hope for one more poem
to be imagined, sourced from deep within,
drawn from the cool well water
of happy wishing

~for bd~

there is a well in our backyard,
a cooperative well of sorts,
for the water source is a
earth stream deep, an east-west latitudinal,
attitudinal canal,
well traversed, intercontinental and interoceanic,
belonging to no one, free to those who
drink with their eyes

given its diversity,
it's salty sweet earthy soiled provenance,
strike me strange, strikes me well,
its fiercest flavor is its
mundanity,
the plainest cool of tasteless, clear, fresh water,
so easy taken for granted

but therein lies the rub,
for the mundane is the gold vein,
from which we mine our greatest stories,
the best crumbs,
the mineral origins of our words,
to capture the gift of needed inspirational,
for our daily living hymnal
songbook

the aging parental care-taking
wisely and sadly seceded,
the golden child learns lessons of
illness and passing, renewal and replacement,
how to mourn and how to love anew,
when one pet goes, and another comes to
roost and roam in his youthful heart,
and a lover ages and so does she,
for tandem is the ever-changing, graying color of their
fierce attached tenacity

a professor supervises the household management,
grading student papers, grading life,
secretly writing love paeans to celebrate
what it's all about, the visible so oft ignored,
recorded, recored, reordered,
in the observatory of
bed crumb starry words

I,
a stranger never to be seen,
a million miles from the scene,
smile and weep, loving the shallow for its deep,
finding amazement in the complexity
that only humans have the capacity to commit,
all of us captains of the capital we store,
in the small hallmarks of every day living,
and in an overdue,
catchup e-transmission,
a well wish comes true,
a poem born,
a kindness to myself,
the best gift of and to,
those who are both,
well,
friends and strangers

who remind us that hope too,
is a
well

~~~~~
The Message

Hello Natty man....we are all well...but it has been a busy and difficult year, Mum finally went into residentail care, very busy at work, the golden boy grows in leaps and bounds, my surfer dude grows more grey hairs as do I....sadly there has been a shift change in the demigods of the house the little blue cat, got sick (bowel cancer)...and after much heartache..we made the decision to let him go with dignity and he was put to sleep...We are now presided over by a little tuxedo boy (still a devon rex)....whose energy is sometimes insurmountable....he and the golden boy have bonded....*

hope all is well your end
Take care...and be kind to you

when the perennial essential question I proposed,
a temperature taking surely,
a simple request re loving me, yes

it was a dueling pistol shot,
a returning, pressing, single firing
interrogatory of a burr of a bullet  
"how"

she stood in weak opposition

she demurred, evaded, jooked,
pre-tensing with a faint, a feint,
a desperately disguised,
claiming of the fifth,
a refusal to self-incriminate,
with a childlike repetition
 "unsure..."

but was she ever,
ever sure,
ever knowledgeable

for the poem was
"of the people, by the people, for the people,"

we, me, she,
of course, being "the people"
-
that our love
"shall not perish from the earth..."

this particular poem,
this particular address,
was about
the struggle to maintain
our union
-
"our unfinished task"

it was the
first shot and the
parting shot

it was the
warning shot,
mesmerizing,
metastasizing
into a
death shot

simultaneously

the poem was,
this poem

the acknowledgment,
of the beginning
of the
perhaps epilogue,
maybe even the commencement  
of a eulogy

a  breathewell,
a fare-thee-well of this,
as well,
one of his
happiest guises

writer of
*only love poetry

~

walk with me in the
under-grounded passage ways,
the city veins,
that bring the arterial, variegated subway lines
to a consensual transfer adjoining,
permitting the rhythmic, exchanging flow of
***** for cleansed humans

observe the compost of
plasma and a city's red, bloodied cells,
bleached white by the cells called overnight

I travel in these tunnels, north-south, others, east-west,
like most, to and fro, homeward bound,
just another salmon of human capital,
cursed to swim upstream, always

signs adorn, positing hope,
giving out points, helpful directives -
"this way to"

example: this way to the nucleus, haughtily christened
by deaf and dead mortals as the
Grand Central Station

in one such tunnel, cut from the earth with dynamite and blood,
a busily traversed one,
so busy that no one looks but me,
is carved in grey Vermont granite,
high above the
gum and spit stained, concrete sodden, trodden walkway,
by order of some bureaucratic joker
taunting sandblasted "art"
cut into the taxpayer-paid-for-stone,
some of Ovid's long ago words

"dripping water hollows out stone,
but not through force but persistence"

am I the only to ken,,
this is a subtle mocking,
of the rushing, hasty, daily-making-their-way commuters,
whose sentences persist,
but are never commuted, never paroled,
who pass by as if entering under Auschwitz's gates,
where work made no one free

each of us a hypotenuse sliding,
gliding from to hook up from angle to angle,
work to home, home to work,
drip, drip of life to no life,
needy for an overnight charge,
to enable a once more unto the morning breach

for long time  now, my glide path remarkable,
my hypotenuse swinging wildly, ignoring its proposed flight plan,
that presumably shows a proposed radar course of semi-certainty

know it to be a bright screen flashing light
of yellowed missed forecasts,
on a dark green background

my poetic words longtime set aside,
in the lost and unfounded, though they continue to
Ovid drip and drip, agonizingly, persistently
hollowing this man

this ever deepening, eroded void
more keenly felt now by the irritating granulated pecking,
of residual specks of detritus,
minimalist poetic notions, a phrase, a gleaning, a touch,
caught in the grate of my eyes,
yet that make not a whole poem,
or human

but Ovid mocks me true,
my dripping sentence persists,
but, the hollow is not hallowed

my secondhand superficial skin, worn as worn,
a sensual recording of all mine history,
an oral history that speaks from within

can you read my lengthy, literary tears?

a sham, this art,
this tunnel of no ending,
to/from/form of deception,
recording the millions roaring waterfall drops of
drip, drip, dripping, slapping footfalls  

great shovels dug this tunnel, but
the days of our lives erode it ever deeper,
wearing it into a burial ground,
where the ocean of forever,
persists as we pass by
an artisanal lie

~

postscript

*oh Steve, my Steve, guilty do I plead,
too loon, too long this recapture of a walk in a life,
emblematic that it speaks not of solstices,
but of chapters in an unfinished novel,
some finished and some unwritten,
but the ending fully scripted and the plot's author
foolishly thinking the beginning can be
reverse engineered

this poem comes from where the words drip into a soul,
one-by-one, as if to create a single one-a-day one time whole,
a vitamin-poem emerges as a
child born, greeting clean the world,
in black and white word amnesiac fluidity,
measured as one measures a mighty waterfall's flow,
weighty beyond pounds and ounces,,
busting the trusted butchers white scales,
busting into wearied and busting open,
here, ends, worn now, worn by time and time again,,
written on shredded, softened-skin scales

I could not give you less,
I could not give you more...

everything in the physical world ages.
this is the oil of the essence of the physical,
we are born, created, exist, cease and desist
and always,
the essentials exit
stage left

and yet, the met-aphysical has,
no markers visible to the keen eye,
no surface tension to it, neither does time rough hew its edges,
or pebble age it to silken smooth water borne baby skin consistency
with uncountable tongue lickings,
and lay two stones
side by side upon the beach,
fellow travelers,
arrivistes from differing paths

so lets us count.

have we ever met?
no, we have not.

will we ever meet?
perhaps, but no one counts the random< unimaginable<accidental,
for man's plans are more destined to awry then be planned away.

but how long have we known each other?

since the sun rose this morning
and every morning before that

when it rained,
and the drops rode down the window pane, and
two drops became one,
thus, since
a million millenniums before time was recognized as measurable

when the  flower blossoms in the garden,
am I not the descendant of the first bee,
and will not our progeny,
ever propagate?

so I have known you for all time
have honored you for all time
and will do so again,
when I metaphysical choose to,
in a manner unknown and yet to be
chosen

perhaps when the earth circumnavigates a distance of 365
days and nights,
or perhaps, when the need is keen and well felt,
a poem in a breeze, very well hid,
shall caress a cheek, and
that will be an honor arrived,
when next the "time" counted by heartbeats
says

due.

4:15am

once and once again, the clock does not sound,
for in nether time,
there are no material measurements,
no actuality of numerals,
no millimeter notching's on skin for ordering

nether night nor dawn, an orderly dark disordering,
as time quietly flows all about your head,
as if it were an obstruction in
a gentling stream's path,
you, but a modest disruption,
a ripple of disappearing existence,
purposed for erosion

yet the unsociable media anoints me marked,
older, an e-naissance contusion upon the body,
your day of creation, your hour of invention,
has gone and passed

Paul calls,^  
two melancholy men to melt into one
in word, in song, a comforting troubling  
even,
an explanation proffered for the meaning of it all

the grand children,
send a generational appropriate video greeting,
an amorphous, porous, hug of electronic pixels
that will outlast every one of us
even
the last archeologist

nether this, nether that,
the lower register,
the upper hand,
the body, the work,
the body of work,
greeters both, sending morse messages uncoded,
your cracked vessel leaking deep water oil,
reminders that a horizon but another world,
another word,
for unobtainable,
all gone is just, all gone,
a blended beyond, marker of the nether place
of yesterday's and tomorrow's