(I) Love Thy Neighbor As Thy
self

~

how I would
honor this with
joy effervescent,
this simplest of methodologies

if only I,
could permission myself
to love myself

if only I,
knew
how to love

~~

(II) redemption: the city of man reinventing himself

busting bursting, this city,
ceaseless change,
old discardation,
how blind am I,
skyscrapers built in a day
how have I failed to notice

the estate changes
a master plan unknown,
the reasoned limits ever stretched.
in defiance of taste and sense,
obedient to Babel tower's net-result,
the miscegenation of language

but this is a ruse issue,
an example of me/man,
this new born spawn,
a wagging tail of

a man I know,
a failed inventor,
nary a patent
to his name

years on years
he patiently awaits
for one true inspiration
a redefinition, a redemption,
a reinvention, a new cornerstone
to lay upon it a new foundation

just a clue, a single block,
he can clean erase
start over, inaugurate
a recommencement celebration
to  begin the same mistakes

here be the rub,
the irritation,
the seed comes implanted
and then
wind spread
can be only repaired, replaced
when cross pollinated

with the love of a foreign body
and his only crime, love poetry,
his crime alone, for unopened
it, and he, both-awaiting the time
when others come impatient

to bulldoze him aside
~~~

(III) Three

three

an oddity
an uneven symmetrical imagery

"only love poetry"

a three sum,
- three legged stool-

there is nothing new under the sun,
whispers the Psalmist


this I whisper
only, alone, one,
be no such!



only love poetry
until

~~~~


postscript

*if only I,
knew
how to love

one thousand poem children



one thousand poems has mine soul commissioned,
a thousand more neath stone vault doors do attend,
patiently waiting revisions, rescission, catch and release permission,
waiting room patients, looking to buy a more favorable diagnosistician

this prolificacy,
nether curse or blessing,
this profligacy,
poem children fathered by single mom mothered,
borne nightly in dreams borne
from the northern, the southern,
the brains twilighted hemispheres,
who coordinate, drawing deep,
consulting a bartender's manual
a creation guide of mixology,
'how to intoxicate the brain'

cheap gin, multi-generational scotch,
visionary vermouth, the reddened cassis of life,
memories in the white grapes of possibilities,
futures unrealized, colorful takes and retakes,
a directors bespoke make-believe tales,
impossibilities, divine and mundane,
all into one admixture into the venous cavities poured,
nerves to blood to consciousness,
courtesy of the ganglia

the brain stem transmits them
fully formed to my
good morning sunshine
cracked and dried lips for re-emission

nigh head upon the pillow,
the hair trigger,
my rapid eye heartbeats, each a demanding sweetheart,
some performed to a discordant metronome,
in a controlled rage, my mental waste,
eliminated

the residuals,
purified with language as the
orchestrator, debate moderator

dreams, once recoded, once accorded,
the disordering tempestuous,  
neurons cease-to-fire,
now just words, just words, just womb excretions

did I admit to a thousand?

more like tens of ten,
one, two per eventide,
have washed  ashore, for some thirty years recorded

my brain pixilated,
its big shot game controller,
demanding purchase of more;
more storage space, more games,
not admitting in advance,
that it filters blends, conflates and purges

by combining
psalms and ditties, infantile rhymes and
new vocabularies of  human aging idiocies,
though newly acquired, immediately forgot,
so always room enough for
one more episode

I study the brain, I study sleep,
study living and dying occurring at
their point of intermediation,
dreams

*this more knowledge gives no relief,
it becomes this poem becoming,
testifying that I prosecute myself
based on the evidence,
and if insufficient,
dream up nascent visionaries
from places that come unlocked,
tales from the vault vivisected,
the proper verdict
assured

sixty six years
of accumulation,
and still know so little of
proper space utilization,
writing poems proper

but nightly come the dreams,
nightly comes the trial,
comes the judgements,
comes a man-made customized
whitewall tired judgement,
and to you
submitted for
judicial review

strange that each one of you
becomes, adopts, adapts my visage,
my words in you, reflected,
a jury of my peerage peers,
which is why my appeals are
always returned in the file labelled
"denial"

until the next nights dream

Like a plane in the
fog
looking for a place to
land
Like a man in a
homeless shelter listening for the rapture
A pelican on a pier
eyeing his next meal
the last apple on a
tree all ready
to fall

Remember I started with blue
skies in front of me
I studied my flight plan well
I knew I'd be landing

I knew for sure
it wasn't going to be hell
I always tried to do so well,
focusing in on innocence
when ever I was able to

But there are failures of compass
The phantom captain takes
a nap

The instruments may keep on
saying you're right on track
But
the only trust I have is
in the Northern Star
and in Mars high
in the sky.

It seems impossible
to be so lost

Like a plane in the
fog
looking for somewhere
to land.

Like a woman working tables
until two a.m.
Her fitness app keeps saying
a hundred years this shift

The fuel is evaporating
The miles to go before zero
keeps hopping

Like a whale without a culture
no one to talk to
The sky is a 300 mile high
air ocean
I thought I was free
to get from here to there

Like a window with a view
of a brick wall

Phoenix in the summer
A tsunami on dry land
A river without a name
A cougar and no game

Like a lover whose left
and no way to find their name

So many aspects of this life
Departures and arrivals
a one way ticket

There is a great darkness
out in the distance
I know it's getting closer
but
I keep on drifting

Like a plane in the fog
looking for a place to land.

~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