Sunday afternoon
her best bud,
our dearest friend,
coming over for
a television marathon:

appetizer, a glass onion,
a ****** mystery to whet,

NFL football main course,
accompanied by her pasta bolognese,

plus a tasty choice of English after-dinner treats,
with chocolate chip cookies, candied pecans,
a platter of  BBC sweet treats,
even one Viennese,
some creatures large and small,
a Victorian female most scarlet.


I proffer:

I will wear my
best pressed
bleu jeans,
my new Kit & Ace bleu sweater,
(that she bought me)
actively participating in all
activities, even keep my cussing
to a tolerable minimum,
and if asked, will gather in a taxi,
no matter it raining bitter cold.

She weighs my terms,
excepting
her acceptance:

Responding that my
dress code excessively formal,
sweatpants will be
infinitely more comfortable,
than jeans, given the intense
intensity of couched exertion.

A sole thought courses through my body:

Lord!
what a magnificent creature
you have planted in my garden.

The Privilege

rare s/he who contemplates the
painting that can only seen from
frame, looking to outside/from within

expelling words, expecting sounds
felling forest trees, a-seizing, but
listening, waving… hearing silence

For we mistake who’s the audience,
we are the audience,
we are

The Privileged

the Privilege
accepting your acceptance,
taking your listening,
listening to your taking


That This! was Granted,
you to us,
The Privilege,
astounding!
for you gave us
art
to create


JAN 8 2023
1:25pm
thank you
for the privilege.

when does the poem end?


creation is never ending,
the earth is endlessly morphing

but you lean back and say
enough
not because the poem
is finished,
for it is never finished,
because an exhalation feels
satisfying, releasing

but the poem never ends,
nor does the need to

exhale

not with the final .


the next poem is

but a

continuation

of the previous poem;

a continuation

of you~poem,

inhaling

and

exhaling

& morphing.

Sat Jan 7
7:57am

a long time ago,
when poems fell

from my mouth like easy tears &
excited eyes revealed more hid
in the cracks of city sidewalks,
just trying remember/recall all the
airy compositions that flew from the
inhabited urgent pulsing of creativity
from/of a living duopoly, heart + head,
was ironical, the greatest challenge;

it was easy to give my excess to
nurture the young ones, bend their
path to higher plains, testing resolve,
my wingspan span so lengthy room,
to tuck, hold, encourage even lend
to the raw, the preternatural talented,
my self-pleasuring, a weedy high (five);

nowadays, there is little now in my day,
pinpricks of light suggest, but the juices
fail to follow the lead, leashed, restrained,
s t r a i n i n g, to believe my words possess
3V’s - validity, value and vividness deserving,
scraps are heaped in the corner awaiting my
incineration, permanent~premature incarceration;

wondering, who will nurture me now,
cloak me in arm-round-shoulders and murmur
sage wisdom snippets, refill, reattach my quill
to the paper with no time or space interference,
but I wait not for your soft & silent rejoinder;

whatever I can draw from an infernal and infertile
weakened pulse, is this meager complain, I once
gave freely to others, who can - who will - payback?
those who gave nurture understand its healing  prowess,
so I beg & ken you, nurture me, in my old age, give me
commissions, order me to compose, I daren’t disobey…

Sat Dec 31 2022
LPOTY

the ink of succinct…

is this a poem?
is it a sufficiency?
it self, itself is in
possess of two f’s,
two i’s and two c’s,
thus, is it necessary?

necessity, a quality qualification?

the moment, this moment
is both over and forever,
a sufficient and a necessary
condition for art, for your art,
think - is your condition,
necessary and sufficient?

then you are an artist and a poem…

Last Best Shot

July 31, 2020
8:07am

the morning sunlight. high enough to lighten first café & the future.
warming, mellifluous, biding good tidings, a head, ahead for the day.
sun-in-sky-low, so trees stand taller, shadow-makers, just for now.
grass blotched, pockmarked, alternative hints of hope & mystery.
the bay wave waters stilled, unrolled, unroiled, no-thrashing, omen?
is this wellness? is this a green tea soul and soil infusion, calming?

my mind wanders to that remains unaccompanied, unaccomplished.
unwashed breakfast dishes, miles of mail urgently unattended.
poems half-composed, some decomposing, resurrection on the list?
these unwashed word-shards, cry out, if not today, then when?
passerby’s, yachts, kayaks pause, turn, all bow-me-pointing asking?
is today their finale, burial by deletion, or their last, best shot?

my reflection, neutral-neutered mien in 19oz. Blue Mountain
black coffee, in a Canadian Macintosh porcelain mug, provides
no clue, accident or incident, but inquires: why the adrenaline?

“They say everything can be replaced,
Yet every distance is not near”

”I shall be released” Bob Dylan

                            ~~~~~~~

this fragrant lyric,
burro-stubborn, hot burr burrows,
into an old man’s deteriorating brain,
one who spends nowadays, mending,
stretching short hours to feel lengthy,
by reviewing the distances he has travelled,
means/meanings to/for unalterable endings

when time hurries
to shrink distances
tween them points,
of incidents logged,
forking roads, always
wrongly chosen,
safety over bravery,
easy pain over hard love,
miscalculating time
and memory,
prioritizing avoidance
of the unknowns ******* up
the risk of the best laid guesses,
those things that come to be
the chiefest fete of contradictory
ironies, the travelogue nearly done,
what never happened
cannot be replaced.

he sings dirges
for the remains of the day
and other things vaguely recalled.

2/2/2022 ~  7/17/2022

~but, yet, another love poem~

In the thousands of years of Earth’s foregoing,
marking the reign of humans, all seeking sapience,
full well knowing, neither first or last am I to mark
this day’s commencement with a need, a desiring,
to notate this not unusual but definitively unique
calendar entrance with a tribute, neither requested,
but freely given to the person who lies beside me.

Did I wake commanded or so compelled to scrabble
a collection of words, sequences, initially disordered,
into a shape, to chisel these sendings of a chest into a
living disbursement, a marbleized breathing creature,
that empties and releases a sensory disposition rambling,
rumbling into a messy, utterance of sentience while they
sleep quiet, pockmarked by dreamed mumblings, dreaming?

No, I did not.

News headlines come demanding see me, insistent that
I am urgency, but one displaced by the next, making them
instantly stale by pealing replacements.

This poem, a self- appointed task is now eased, story spent and spurted into a lifespan of a length unknown and untold.  But, and  yet, here I end, ceased and not resisting, demurring, desisting another stanza, The hour approaches the seventh hour after midnight, rising time.

Go now.

The choring chords of fibrous tasks that stitch existence into
a sustaining impertinent permanence, list-crossing-off, a-nagging.
The itches of living, ask for scratching, 1st cup of coffee making,
but smile bemusedly that this first and freshest to do, newly added,
is done, dispatched with a line-sworded satisfying crossing off.
She sleeps on, while I soon to rise and quiet paddle to the
kitchen where kept the utensils for sustenance,

But, and yet, I am contented, miraculously, simultaneous,
emptied and fulfilled.

4-14-2021
NYC
7:18am

This day will start out mostly sunny with temperatures near the high 70s. Then expect a chance of showers and thunderstorms late at night, with temps dropping to the high 60s.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until June 20 (Juneteenth)

by
God.

(who is relieved that we humans will celebrate and honor Juneteenth,  by not having to rise early to move our cars to the other side of the street to enable the horde of street cleaners and free men and women to sleep late too in honor of the emancipation of enslaved people in the US.

The Confrontation

he is stirred by buzzing thoughts, irritating him to wakefulness;
mobile, random and annoying for they last but a moment and
his sticky flypaper hands cannot capture and eradicate them into
existence fast enough to make them permanent, shareable and eased.

5:54am
Tue., the seventh day of the sixth month of MMXXII

postscript

he desperately fails to recall the world word labyrinth that urged him to rise and capture the wild animals that roared and removed his half-notions from the lifting fog of consciousness. Alas, they are just like specks of new sunlight upon a linen of grassy, newly watered wet greens; here today, instantaneously, gone and gone and gone. Instead,
he writes of their early death and mourns the brevity of their beauty,
and thinks not of the wasted times of the last seventy years.

Of a Certain Friendship by Elsa Gidlow

Odd how you entered my house quietly,
Quietly left again.
While you stayed you ate at my table,
Slept in my bed.
There was much sweetness,
Yet little was done, little said.
After you left there was pain,
Now there is no more pain.

But the door of a certain room in my house
Will be always shut.
Your fork, your plate, the glass you drank from,
The music you played,
Are in that room
With the pillow where last your head was laid.
And there is one place in my garden
Where it’s best that I set no foot.

Have writ of the return to our sheltering place so oft,
sanity suggests move on to a topic lesser revered, yet,
the throb of compulsion is irresistible, immovable, irrefutable!
so the fingertips tango step over a white screen dance floor,
looking, for old steps, new combinations, awaiting reincarnation!

as if self-denial was even possible, sanity and need are irrecusable.

Every exodus requires a commencement miracle, ours annualized,
the small SUV engorged, supplies-swollen, a Chanukah oil miracle,
time & space expand - always enough, calm stating, ¡más! accepting
all offerings and longings, rolling merrily along the worn paths and hamlets of Indian origin, voyagers, port to port, till we are destined,

free forced to isle~ferry, to-exhale relief; Here! an embraceable peace.

Water~bounded, isolated isola, surround~sounded tween two spits of land, two forks, two tines, define/defend its in~between persona,
welcoming but skeptical, welcoming but take note, we all become an islander, even by osmosis, distinctive, in~possession of a collective history of heroes memory, inscribed names, on our ferries, highways, & eyes

we all become sheltered islanders, serving by remembering….

Memorial Day 2022
Shelter Island

If we are mark’d to die, we are enow
    To do our country loss; and if to live
    The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
    God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.

    By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
    Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
    It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
    Such outward things dwell not in my desires:

    But if it be a sin to covet honour,
    I am the most offending soul alive.
    No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:
    God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour

    As one man more, methinks, would share from me
    For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
    Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
    That he which hath no stomach to this fight,

    Let him depart; his passport shall be made
    And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
    We would not die in that man’s company
    That fears his fellowship to die with us.

    This day is call’d the feast of Crispian:
    He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
    Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named,
    And rouse him at the name of Crispian.

    He that shall live this day, and see old age,
    Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors,
    And say ‘Tomorrow is Saint Crispian:’
    Then he will strip his sleeve and show his scars,

    And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
    Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
    But he’ll remember with advantages
    What feats he did that day: then shall our names

    Familiar in his mouth as household words:
    Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
    Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
    Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d,

    This story shall the good man teach his son;
    And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
    From this day to the ending of the world,
    But we in it shall be remembered;

    We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
    For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
    Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
    This day shall gentle his condition:

    And gentlemen in England now abed
    Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
    And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
    That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

April is in my mistress' face
April is in my mistress' face
April is in my mistress' face
And July in her eyes hath place
And July in her eyes, her eyes hath place
Within her *****, within her *****
Is September
But in her heart, but in her heart, her heart
A cold December
But in her heart, her heart
But in her heart, her heart
A cold December

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/15/books/review/what-is-poetry.html

an excerpt…

“From time to time I’m asked, with bewilderment or derision, if this or that poem isn’t just “prose chopped into lines.” This idea of the free verse poem as “chopped” prose comes from Ezra Pound via Marjorie Perloff, who quotes Pound in her influential essay “The Linear Fallacy,” published in 1981. The essay encourages an oddly suspicious, even paranoid reading of most free verse as phony poetry, as prose in costume. The line, in Perloff’s view, in these ersatz poems, is a “surface device,” a “gimmick.” She removes all the breaks from a C.K. Williams poem to make the case that a stanza without the intentional carriage returns is merely a paragraph.

I find this baffling — as if chopping up prose has no effect. It does have an effect, the way putting more panes in a window changes the view. The architect Christopher Alexander thought big plate glass windows were a mistake, because “they alienate us from the view”: “The smaller the windows are, and the smaller the panes are, the more intensely windows help connect us with what is on the other side. This is an important paradox.” To state the Forsterian obvious again, adding breaks to a paragraph is not always going to make an interesting poem — but most poets don’t write that way. They write in the line, in the company of the void. That changes how you write — and more profoundly, how you think, and even how you are, your mode of being. When you write in the line, there is always an awareness of the mystery, of what is left out. This is why, I suppose, poems can be so confounding. Empty space on the page, that absence of language, provides no clues. But it doesn’t communicate nothing — rather, it communicates nothing. It speaks void, it telegraphs mystery.

By “mystery” I don’t mean metaphor or disguise. Poetry doesn’t, or shouldn’t, achieve mystery only by hiding the known, or translating the known into other, less familiar language. The mystery is unknowing, the unknown — as in Jennifer Huang’s “Departure”: “The things I don’t know have stayed/In this home.” The mystery is the missing mountain in Shane McCrae’s “The Butterflies the Mountain and the Lake”:

the / Butterflies monarch butterflies huge swarms they
Migrate and as they migrate south as they
Cross Lake Superior instead of flying

South straight across they fly
South over the water then fly east
still over the water then fly south again / And now
biologists believe they turn to avoid a mountain

That disappeared millennia ago.

The missing mountain is still there. As for what is on the page, the language that changes the shape of the void, I’m of the opinion it can be almost anything. One of my favorite books that no one has heard of is “Survey Says!,” by Nathan Austin. It’s just a list of guesses ventured by contestants on “Family Feud,” arranged, most ingeniously, in alphabetical order by their second letter, so you get sequences like this: “A bra. Abraham Lincoln. A building. Scaffolding. Scalpel. A car. A card game. A cat. A cat. Ice cream. Ice cream. Ice cream. Ice cream.” We get the answers; the questions are missing. “Get a manicure. Get a toupee. Get drunk. Retirement fund. Get out of bed. Get ready! Let’s go with manuals. Get sick in there. Let’s say a pet. Let’s say shoes. Bette Davis.” The poetry seems to perform hypnosis, the found rhymes and assonance and anaphora enacting an enchantment, a bewitchery; it seems to be giving subconscious advice. Get ready! You must change your life.”

~another love poem~

In the thousands of years of Earth’s foregoing,
marking the reign of humans, all seek sapience,
knowing full well, neither first or last am I to mark
this day’s commencement with a need, a desiring,
to notate this not unusual but definitively unique
calendar notation with a tribute, neither requested
but freely given to the person who lies beside me.

Did I wake commanded or so compelled to scrabble
a collection of words, sequences, initially disordered,
into a shape, to chisel these sendings of a chest into a
living disbursement, a statute, a marbleized creature,
that empties and releases a sensory disposition rumbling
into a messy, mediocre utterance of sentience while they
sleep quiet, pockmarked by dreamed mumblings, dreaming?

No, I did not.

News headlines come demanding see me, insistent that
I am urgency, but one displaced by the next, making them
instantly stale by pealing replacements. This poem, a self-
appointed task is now eased, spent and spurted into an
lifespan of a length unknown and untold. Here I end, ceased
and resisting, demurring, desisting another stanza, The hour
approaches the seventh hour before noon, rising time. Go now.

The choring chords of fibrous tasks that stitch existence into
a sustaining impertinent permanence, list-crossing-off, a-nagging.
The itches of living, ask for scratching, 1st cup of coffee making,
but smile bemusedly that this first and freshest to do, newly added,
is done, dispatched with a line-sworded satisfying crossing off.
She sleeps on, while I soon to rise and quiet paddle to the
kitchen where kept the utensils for sustenance,

I am contented, miraculously, simultaneous,
emptied and fulfilled.

4-14-2021
NYC
7:18am

~for Steve and Marshal~

they crouch round,
white wide eyes,
their skin, *****, like
the darkness that
completes their near
invisibility.

new child arrives when
it declares I’m here, not
seeking acclaim, just a
witnessing to its slimy
amniotic messy, amnesiac
birth.

what does it say, what,
does it know? the stilled birth
of permanent incompleteness.
though hardly alone, it has no
siblings, though, it has much,
much company.

these half-writ poems predestined
to never see light of any kind, neither,
sun or moon or bare bulb glare, bred
to never age, never die, their ultimatum,
to be discarded when the bytes, their
geophysical representation is tossed
into the crusher bin, recycled, reformed,
but still always half-breed, half-writs.

nml
Apr 2, 2022
nyc

Listen to the stories

men tell of last year

that sound of other places

though they happened here
Listen to a name

so private it can burn

hear it said aloud

and learn and learn
History is a needle

for putting men asleep

anointed with the poison

of all they want to keep
Now a name that saved you

has a foreign taste

claims a foreign body

froze in last year’s waste
And what is living lingers

while monuments are built

then yields its final whisper

to letters raised in gilt
But cries of stifled ripeness

whip me to my knees

I am with the falling snow

falling in the seas
I am with the hunters

hungry and shrewd

and I am with the hunted

quick and soft and ****
I am with the houses

that wash away in rain

and leave no teeth of pillars

to rake them up again
Let men numb names

scratch winds that blow

listen to the stories

but what you know you know
And knowing is enough

for mountains such as these

where nothing long remains

houses walls or trees

<~>
“I would recommend On Hearing a Name Long Unspoken. This poem is from Cohen’s 1964 collection, Flowers for ******, which deals with the trauma of the Holocaust and its legacy in 1960s Canada. In this book Cohen describes himself as a ‘front-line writer’ trying to understand totalitarianism, and the poems aim to critique his readers’ complacency in the violence of the world wars, anti-Semitism and colonialism. In On Hearing a Name Long Unspoken, Cohen asks his readers to consider how atrocities ‘that sound of other places’ also ‘happened here.’ He wants us to remember the lives of real people, to remember where people have found solidarity and protection, as well as how they have been oppressed because he is concerned that the stories that are told about the past will make it feel distant and unreal.”

KAIT PINDER, assistant professor of English at Acadia University

~for Robert C Howard, inspired by his “From Many, One”

I know nothing of poetry…

or ballet or symphonic works; a ******,
a passerby, a glimpser of other’s artistry,
neither can I add, nor delete, just observe their
intersection, a triplication, and yet, a snowy
Saturday Sabbath is colored now by their story

a  story of many, a symphony playing a concert
of harmony, the notes are grunts and shoutouts,
the high notes of squealing tires screeches, the bass
of growling heaving hearts, engines-beating revving,
music growing louder, to a crescendo of resounding success

sudden silence is the fiercest applause, a reverbing
mark, echoing in a forested heartland, quietly absorbed
into the scarred bark of the witnessing trees, adding a minute moment to their long playing recordings, approving  an
endeavor of many unasked, self-tasked to help, many into one…

a merging of a singular memory

the missing accents (in a poem composed in French)

~for Elisa Maria Agiro~

are neither missed nor lost,
are neither essential nor essences,
for the heart of the poem dazzles!
for the life well dreamed, dazzles!
the simplest truth needs no spices,
life, it is glorious, the glorious spark
of god, living and breathing within us,
no matter the language, no matter
the accent, that is our mission!

T.S. Eliot: "Last year's words belong to last year's languages and next year's words await another voice.”


<>

exactly.  

the old words are salty, unexpectedly coarse, unrefined and unsuitable for staying and surely not for going. The words are stamped with an expiration date.  

the evening is calendar-redlined, wobbly but outlined & finite, but the words are resisted, non- transferable. Stale.  

and I drink and wonder whose voice, with  artifice of a new vocabulary, all next year’s words, will bid me farewell and will I understand the spoken sounds of a new long division






Dec 31, 2021 4:07 PM

“Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art is of ending”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
                                                      ­  <?>

how we age is both simultaneously
conscious and unconscious,
uncontrolled and uncomfortable

we never fail to recognize the mirror image, yet,
always thinking out loud in our brain that’s not me!

some remember their successes; others, do not,
perhaps they cannot recall the few, or more likely
acknowledge them as triumphs, as the scale is a
canon always in flux by time grinding us fine

we readily admit, or do not deny, the lines upon our bodies
are highway markers of journeys, yet we know not
who built these signposts, how they came to be here,
but that they ours, unique and accumulated, undeniable

Longfellow’s observation above hits me
with the  fullness of a wet washcloth;
intemperate and stinging,
but not unpleasantly so.

each of our beginnings are artful;
full of promise and worthy tales;
we think this. is normative,
the way a young life is proscribed,
meant to be enjoyed.

of course, this is not necessarily so;
indeed, the exiting is a violent decay,
unrelenting and foisted upon us and
we try, to amend it, our transient departure,
so that we remove the artifice, keep only the art,
the skilled communication of what we valued,
the things that are progeny, living or material,
those clues to whom we are, to whom it may concern, 
we were…

Dec. 25, 2021

“Poetry to me is emotion strung on Christmas trees,
it's that delight that rips through paper
and bows to find the treasure hidden inside.

I love the thoughtful topics you bring to us
to delve into and ponder. As holidays near
I wish you warmth and caring and

childhood delight…

hugs,
Patty”

Mark Twain to Helen Keller


“Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that “plagiarism” farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul—let us go farther and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances in plagiarism.

For substantially all ideas are second hand, consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them any where except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.”

Mark Twain

“A poet's qualifications include common sense, knowledge of character, adherence to high ideals, combination of the dulce with the utile, intellectual superiority, appreciation of the noble history and lofty mission of poetry, and above all a willingness to listen to and profit by impartial criticism.”


Ars Poeti a (ll. 295–476).[10]

“I read to find inspiration.
I write to restore candor to the mind.”
N. Scott Momaday

                        <<<<<>>>>>>>>>

Find Inspiration:
a phrase that diodes light, a one-way current within,
making me a selectman, “of thee I sing, of thee I write,
of thee am I composed and fodder for thy dissection &
”my decomposition.”

a phrase that reads me more than I read it,
jumps onto my ontological eyeballs, a great leap
forward, and I suppose humdrum you could call it,
inserted inspiration

Restoring Candor:
thus begins expiation+ excoriation+ exhumation;
a longish road to candor restoration, where plausible
deniability is denied, Jedi verbal mind tricks are
just in movies, and candor is really “can-do(r)!”
but
no one dare say that
for fear of being laughed at,
a cancelled jingo-lingo-patriot.