Cold nights
               It's always Winter here.
It seems this season's stretching on all year.
               The beers are gone
               so let's get walking.
                           Grab
    your coat and let's do some talking.
Loud, through the night.
Know our strides will crunch through old snow
beneath old street signs.

                                              Best
      ­                                   bets aside,
                                    did you gamble
                                       on my days?
                               Did I waste your time?

Days come early,
nailguns out.
Walls go up and ambitions drown.
4 blocks down the street, you're screaming,
"**** the cold and this town. I'm leaving."
                     Sheetrock walls
               and paycheck borders
                     keep us pinned,
                in line, on short order.
                              Cook
                    our­ melting brains.
                        Froze in place
and broke your heart, rinsed me down the drain.

Cold nights
               It's always Winter here.
This frigid season's stretching on all year.
               The beers are gone
               so let's get walking.
                           Grab
    your coat 'cuz them ghosts been talking.
Howling each day.
Haunting all our snowbound steps and
rattling their chains.


                                          Alarms and cars
                                        and pulsing hearts.
                                               Cheapest
                                        prices paid to make
                                                our wage.

                                         The clocks in bars
                                       count tarnished stars.
                                                 Cheapest
                                         prices paid to pave
                                                 our ways.


                                              Best
      ­                                   bets aside,
                                    did you gamble
                                       on my days?
                               Did I waste your time?


Days come early,
nailguns out.
Walls go up and ambitions drown.
2 blocks down the Ave., I'm shouting,
"**** the wind and the snow that's pounding."
                     Rent check walls
               and sheetrock borders
                     keep us pinned,
                in line, on short order.
                              Cook
                    our­ melting brains.
                        Froze in place
and broke my will, rinsed you down the drain.

                                            And I'll move

                                                4 blocks

                                              next Spring...

don’t work no more.

need some kind of distraction.

**** it, might as well try writing

bad poetry.

to the edge and back (inverted diversion)
——————————————————-

your life may throw you curves,
mine, straight edge blades,
lines galore, like sidewalk cracks,
jumping from safe to safe place

but always teetering tottering on
edges, like verses in the next poem,
trying to make it just to the next line
without falling in cracks, China bound

you can follow my lead, don’t though,
if I could, would willingly plunge, deeply,
for there is no safety in safe spaces, only
in the holy dark, cracks is the true safety

you seek, where poems roll on a highway
like Reno tumbleweed, humble before snow
capped mountains, these are the contrasts
where you birth procreations, poems yours

and mine die in childbirth,
returned to sender,
returned for retuning,
despair not, they’re coming
back to this world

guises in a different colored skin,
a different alphabet, script,
the meaning yet unchained and
unchanged, despite the

inverted
diversion

it’s a daiquiri colored morn, countlessly
as I, gazing never tiring, of a vista I’ve seen,
awoken to, endlessly changing, voyagers of
birds and boats, the redecorating minimalists,
moving pieces on a latticed shadow lawn

the Sun eastern, asking the trees to turn and bow,
hence the shadows their branches cast are a waffling,
hopscotch pattern irregular, so jumping from/to
yellow-green sunspots, the children are delighted by a
new game, moving to and from and between an ever
changing crazy chessboard of light-patches unsquared

described, written of, yet here I am, once again, a servant
despairing, looking for new combinations of superlatives,
though I never spoke before of it as a vista,
until today, wondering why, perhaps because
it’s here, one lives, one doesn’t conceive of  being
part and parcel of a vista, humans, just visitors,
pawn observers, gallery visitors, art appreciators,
transient hobos after forty years, truthfully claiming
that they’re merely still, passing thru, passing by

9:40 am, respectable hour to meander over
to the throne room, the four Adirondacks, them,
the year round poetry nook authorities, are equal
sunned, shaded, simultaneous, stately shadowing,
observing, advertising as perfect for composing,
willing to make verbal suggestions, rhyming notions,
especially when the poem pays proper obeisance

and so it does, and so it is, as you can clearly read


9:53am Sunday Jun 14
Year of the Pandemic