“We could never see tomorrow
No one said a word about the sorrow”
The Bee Gees

a simple rhyme, a plaint familiar,
for those who have never stared
down train tracks, which is a lesson
in recognizing
the uncertainties of
living,
even if linearly visualized,
t h e o r e t i c a l l y

can veer to destinations unknown,
worthy of being dreaded, thinking
what are the odds today is the last,
and maybe now and then, not just
dismissing,them so easily

but it always brings on pain old
and familiar, recollecting of the
way life never asks you first, the

swiftness of two life lines colliding
with the
s u d d e n e s s
unfathomable
of 2 locomotives crashing,
head on
and leaving behind
a desolation breathtaking

it is a well lit winter morning,
cold light, but the direct sun
leaves a general okayness,
and you trudge along,
head bent, respecting the chilling,
calculating the distance to
the warmth of a planned
destination,
but here I remind
all of us:

”No one said a word
about the sorrow”

~inspired by a poem and messages from fellow poets ~
who have ridden beside me here,
for a decade plus,
SE Reimer, & Sally Bayan~

*we take our meds, vitamins and supplements
routinely, faithfully and with a big smile
of self-bemusement at all the times I mocked
those sillys who believed that
hu man
can
override his prescribed
sentencing

record almost every morsel that passes through my portals, reporting quantity and quality to remind me of my human needs, but
more to gauge my wearing weaknesses, and
make confession of
my sins of gourmand commission

and despite this and more, regular checkups, and blah blah blah, No Lies told here, the aging days are upon us, my brow furrowed
by a lengthening To Do list, that is endlessly
refurbished with more additions than
subtractions, ergo, the list grows longer as fast as the days remaining,
grow shorter,
ever faster!

no kidding myself, you feel (really) the cells
slowing their recovery, their fading fastness in every little thing, we squint where we used
to go without trepidation, we twist and turn
to musical utterances and undertones that
are groans and laughter at the old carcass’s
refreshing harmonic epiphany
of time’s passage

and think well,
I’ll do that tomorrow,
handle that later,
deal with that problem surely
eventually,

and the only thing that is attended to almost
instantly, is writing here,
last gasp observations,
that my being demands be issued now!
in time beating to
my slowing heart rate,
or factually,
my rapidly
rising rate,
each a contradictory economic indicator
of the same,
singular portending trend

so here I am ribbing and scribbling myself
before you, prompted by a gorgeously written poem by my friend (1) and the departure of another to a faraway land
where they live, my failure to meet, a shameful delay by an old man’s cautious
fear, that should not be abided…

is this a poem,
a cri de coeur,
a confession -
something of all three, but it is done,
breaths and words rapidly expelled, and for once. I feel like I have, once, now, gambled
against time, and actually

won

~For Pradip~
who reminded me:
We are all God’s Trial & Errors

tender is the tendency,
so finitely human,
infinitely foolish,
to overlook the
obvious,
let us not delve into our
particular peculiar idiosyncratic knots
in our hair and personalities,
all natural,
inherited or ill begotten
in voyages to far away,
like our childhood

Thus,
we are all mistakes of a sort

with natural fault lines,
accumulated dings, scapes, bruises,
furrowed crinkles that took us
years to perfect

We are flawed like diamonds,
valued by these natural flaws
by graders with loups who uncover
our flaunts, our clear air bubbles,
the more flaws the better,
because these attributes make us
most interesting!

you may be blonde,
you may be exotic
perhaps a lovely shade of
iridescence,

but lucky you whose scars speak
out and others wonder why,
they are so interesting

let us design a large animal,
seemingly ungainly, yet keystone to
their environment, so others may
profit thereby,
yet insanely quick on lumbering feet,
no hands, fingers, but a long snakey thinge
that multiple functions  for
breathing, drinking, feeding grabbing, smelling and
trumpeting their presence
to foolish beings in their neighborhood

let’s us not debate
whose design is
an efficacy par excellence

so we be
ungainly, too tall, too
this or that,
even too flawless,
a specialized curse of sorts,
we are the product of
a sophisticated design laboratory
that makes many models,
each variegated, always different

so get down on your knees *******,
and praise the design engineers
who created you to be
full of
& by elephantine trials and elephantine errors,
thereby making
us each,
a special pronoun,
an I
blessed
by definition:
though not in any dictionary:
unique,
flawless!


^you are the most
flawless poem
you have ever written
and will ever ever
write

this semi-seemingly sad refrain~reflection, more truth than
one can even understand,
for my physical self slowly
disappearing, diminishing
though no visible pieces
as of yet,
gone missing

few of you have come to visit me
in NYC, so you cannot be sure of
anything you’ve been told, for the
great liar claims,
the internet bleeds
disinformation,
believe this
if nothing
else

for I’ve been a dream from my very
naissance, a vision imaginable by
those who contemplate my whereabouts,
my visages, we bemused, while
you imbibe, tongue |taste
mes
written bouche amusante

well,
if you want them pieces & parts,
poems in the fleshes,
seek outa one eyed guy patched
by a rivered walk path,
see a troubadour on his soap box
amusing the real peoples
who pause to reflect
cause
them
give respect to his peculiarities,
listen to his truths bout
himself and them
selves too

if you can’t camp this far,
then believe in your dreams
cause my come and go,
fly out the window
and have reached as far as
the Phillipines, New Zealand &
the Land of Oz

I’m their break from the news,
indeed call me ‘the new news,’
which so cool, makes us laugh,
cause there ain’t no much new
by this foolish OG, ‘cept for the
rhythm of and blues, I spin, the rhymes
that they fet/met/net me with dollar bills,
loose change and half used joints in lieu of cash-is-trash

So I dream, they dream,
together we scheme,
each of us composing,
in separate and equal
prepositions preposterous
and share all who to be heard,
especially those who wish to also
have their dreams be
seen