the elbow comes to rest in the soft
skin coverage of my essence

in the dark, it's easy and free to weep
but still never cheap

everyday is still a word, an everyday struggle word,
echoing like a scream in a cavernous void

her elbow comes to be buried in my chest,
preference for an unavailable, sleeping soft cheek,
this elbow sharpened from years of work, worry &
baby carrying

on this day, of pointing,
take-a-hint-to-be-remembering,
the simple honors life bestows
comes like a pointy elbow poke,
across vastness of a bed of whiteout cotton,
freshly filling up
as I am writing,
with thankful years and thankful tears,
already recording newbie memories
freshly forming up

welcome this sharp goodness
all the days
of our lives,
even those everydays
of our lives

nothing greater than being grateful,
and the re-gifting to others
the blessings of plentifull*


5:26am Thanksgiving Day 2016

~


smile and weep,
love the shallow for its deep,
finding amazement in the complexity of life

this prior script-thought
re-arrives but this time,
tonal differences,
a spoken aloud cascading cacophony,
no  protective cocoon of silent email,
jus plainest pain masquerading beneath a tensile casual remark

and how you wish you could poetry, write, torrentially in simple lines,
to match the transverse and reverse
the only two gears,
so overcome with anger worry and pain no killer can
****,
so deep and swift
its haphazard rambling rambunctious
cursing coursing

and all she said was this:

this is going to be the end of us

and you, charged to interpret this sentence,
like your namesake Daniel
the invisible handwriting on the
Babylonian wall
that is under construction for which
you will both pay

equally

posted on Mar. 6th 2016
~~~
"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, am 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 donkey'd 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 and women
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 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....

(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.