I think I loved you most the winter your heating was broken
And we’d stay inside all morning
Pretending to complain that we couldn’t get out of bed
Our clothes becoming little islands on the floor,
Ones that we could not quite find the courage to visit

Your hand stayed glued to my hip,
Your breath warming my shoulder
Like a long drag of whiskey
That kind that had a home so far away,
In a glass bottle on top of your refrigerator.
The one that would not be opened
Until that fateful day in February,
When everything went wrong

And on that unbearable night
When you joked that you’d freeze to death if I left you
There was a long silence
Like it might be true.

Now it’s warm enough
That I show too much skin when sitting in bars
And you avoid me like the plague,
Whispering in any girl’s ear that’s near to you
Every time you see me watching out of the corner of your eye

We should have stayed inside when the ice began to melt
Because I think
When those doors opened and we finally ventured outside
The world had changed,
And so had you and I.

Einstein's Relativity tells us that time slows at fast speeds,
So much so that it stops when travelling at the speed of light.
As you look up at the stars tonight think of this:
The photons that travel across the universe to your retina,
Are created in the depths of a star and destroyed within your eye,
In the same instance.

I saw the old man circling the tree trunk
Weather beaten skin, bent gnarled hands
and piercing blue eyes

He seemed to study every knot and crack
in that ancient timber

Then without a word turned and picked up hammer and chisel

The wood chips then began to fly and like confetti on the ground lie soon in heaps some ankle high

Occasionally he would stand back and look but never once a rest he took

Mallet strokes both hard and soft some from under some aloft fell there with unerring skill always busy never still

Long into the night he worked now by the light of an oil lamp and so the tree stump 'neath his hand then became a work of art

At long last he stood and turned to me and said three words " that'll do lad"

I approached to see just what he'd done and there I saw the perfect rose every petal and leaf in place the slender stems in the breeze did sway

With no plan or picture he had made the start
And created the perfect work of art.


So what is creativity? Well that's your next challenge.

No love poems because they've been done a million times. This time something unique

I need to write a letter, in curling cursive blue,
and mail it to me, it doesn't matter what the words say
I just want to see them scrawled on the page, to remind me
I am seventy minus eight, and my symmetry in script
is increasingly askew

I know this
when I press ******* the pen,
when I fold the paper, lick the envelope,
and drop it in the blue metal world where its flat life
commingles with strangers until it comes back to my red and white box,
into my black and white life, where the average of the two is gray,
the growing, groping color of my beard,
and the hair on my heaving chest.

I need not even open it to know I have forgotten
what secrets I writ...the name and address suffice,
showing me not who I be or where I be, but how slanted and sloping
my world has become, no matter how vainly I endeavor to keep things straight,
of late, and more tomorrow, my dysgraphic lines
tell the truer tale, in the simple scribbled letter
I wrote to me

I told myself
I’m going to pull
myself together and
swim until I reach
the surface.
But it’s been six months
since then and I’m still
stuck in this water.
I drowned, and under
the surface I could see the
midnight sun’s glowing halo.
“Grab hold of it”, I said.
But no matter what I do, I couldn't.
I’m stuck in this same place.
There’s dark water everywhere
and the sun never rises.
I feel like I’d been thrown overboard.
But in reality, I jumped into the water.
I said, “**** it, I’m done.”
I left behind the warship I was on.