an au revoir here penned,
man on a cliff doing a spring, fall over cleaning

a few rusty drafts still needy for completely
but you know times up when tide rushing out
and on your leg is a big red rash that wasn’t there
when you waded in a few minutes earlier

tastes changes, like seasonal entrees on a restaurant menu,
seasons come and go, reappearing, but last years dish,
out of style, except for the occasional recalling

the body and the work must together concert,
poetry like a lifetime of lovers, you leave them behind
for loving them too well, using up the verses left inside,
then comes the time when love dries up and the words concomitant

the nighttime scraps will still be kept in that sewing box,
that storage space rented on a 99 year lease
but now for my eyes lonely only, this nub is stubbed,
this last one, at last, succinct

au revoir mes amis

fresh coffee
bagel with shmear to go,
don’t forget the napkins,
oh, I’ll take a dozen lovers also....

mixed please
3 happy
3 ****
3 faithful and true
1 dark
1 light and
1 plain

a bakers dozen^ you say!
an extra lover?
ok!
if you will,
just another plain, if you please,
cause a plain lover is all
I’ll truly need

good poetry, good poets:

you are all so o v e r confident

“ceaseless, your poetry will never cease”

<>


but the heart, the engine, the brain,
even the decrepitating body,
gives many visible warnings,
we can be done in so easily,
we can be seized.

by a tick bite, the sugar’s refusal to convert,
the minor cuts, that take months to heal,
everything small as dangerous as an artery blockage,
a single cell of an illegitimate growth,
the small easy, too purposefully ignore,
but that does not mean no registration

this, then, about me and a bud of a free-thee-well

<>

Variations on OK: “I'm ok... as in just okay :)“

ah, me making the global rounds,
with the poem interns in tow, observing poet patients,
me, the anti-troll meme, asking the lonely legions,
“what’s up, just checking in,”

responsa included the nuanced range of variations
of the simplest terms,

Variations on OK: “I'm ok... as in just okay :)“

the normal curve of emotional disturbances, falling mists,
category 5 storms and verbal cover-up girl makeup all represented by
OK

this, then, the OK stuff of human poetry, the plain, the innocuous, inadmissible guiltily non-confessions that are the infectious complexity of heartache, humongous jealousy of those surficially
just innocently happy, those who fear of failing,
longing for what was and can not be true once more,
so with not-even-a-serious-word a reminder of our masks when meeting Quo Vadis,
the replies come in summarizing shades of:

OK: “I'm ok... as in just okay :)“

a perfectly good response, shadings and gradations
that shout volumes deserving of interpretations, talmudical exegesis,
across continental contestation,^^^meaning obviously that the contra-opposite is likely what’s meant,
all indirect giving access when delving into their abyss,
as in the rock n’ roll verse states,

“just dropped in to see what condition your condition is in”^

okay.

yes, it’s true okay is better than not okay,
which is better than the catch all meaningless of the
OK....the one, that dribbles off into air hanging, silent albatross

but the insertion of the modifier

just

makes the meaning of the fully, half born, sentence summation diagrammable except
OK
is not valid in life size, grownup version game  of Scrabble(d) hearts

this is how I spend my everyday vacation days
exploring everything human

the graze of a hand, the longest slow journey of a singlet tear,
a child’s shrieking glee, the nightmares gasps
when they woke the awoken,
the intelligible whimpering vocabulary of the new born innocent,
the spackled, patching of the speckled cracking of the
semi-autonomous, wish-it-wasn’t human,
my, busted-heart

so when two lovers continental shelves do not meet,
but graze each other, altering the landscape of emotions,
OK, just, okay is
sedimentary weak but perfect

you are the interloper ghost,
who now asks “how ya doing,”
the famous just “checking in,”
and
in the sliding spaces where mountain ranges get created,^^^

the O in Okay is a black hole disguised

I'm ok... as in just okay :)”

though this is a Buffalo Springfield “ain’t exactly clear”
you accept and understand for aching hearts are the
specialty of the maison

and that is all I have to say on the matter.

OK?
<>

3:21am Monday September 30 ~ 10:38pm Friday October 4, 2019