no limericks today
none of my dads amusings

no rhyme no tale no sing no complaining

no dancing no pole
vaulting no dashing yards

blues yes harmonica wailing and the
banjo picking me apart no poems
necessary

got it all
got it none
got it in my brain
cause soul n’ heart
all longtime surrendered

the wind whips my t-shirt
and what was beneath it gone
never know what piece of me blew away but for sure it was not a ditty
something cute
for the blues chased away all
the limericks and there’s are just an
all gone

She is the living embodiment of the cliché,
The song where the male sub-lead
Returns from some second shift, some third drink
To find she has gone, leaving some scrap-paper note,
Hastily scribbled and wholly incomplete,
Some variation upon Don’t try and find me,
And so she is suitably unfound herself,
As she has given great thought to her froms,
But rather short shrift to her tos,
Finding herself north of the Thruway,
Looking for somewhere to spend the night
(The twin motors of adrenaline and anxiety running on fumes)
Happening upon, as if almost by some beneficent magic,
A Travelodge bordered by an expanse of cornfield
(Long since gone to seed, the stalks bowed and spent,
Waiting for the patently overdue cob harvester)
And after she is checked in and somewhat unpacked
(The bored, bemused woman who slumps about the front desk
Mercifully sparing with the small talk)
The skies, which had been late-October slate blur-gray,
Slightly malevolent but only implicit in their threats,
Open up in a cold and unwelcome drizzle,
And, whys and wherefores being things for a later date,
She runs outside and begins dancing in the parking lot,
Unseen and unremarked upon,
And even though the rain is cold, soaking, grim in portent
(The forecast dourly noting the possibility of wet snow,
Nattering that accumulation is possible at higher elevations.)
She is seemingly unaware and unconcerned
As to the upshot of this drenching,
Any whispers of the two or three other occupants of the motel,
Any judgments passed upon her mad danse pour un,
As she has passed beyond any notion of admonition.

men and their egos (I turned twenty this summer) are
inseparable
insufferable

begrudgingly
they admit “guess you were right”
believing that will make them heroes,
by full on confessing they are *******

I turned twenty in the summer

my tan legs in cutoffs (it’s summer) drives them to madness,
accused, you are pitiless, for their dreams of you involve ransom  
still, you
search and quiet plead like Abraham, to the heated air,
while listening to Whitney Houston and Ed Sheeran,
(on your earbuds just so nobody knows your weakness)
for just that one good man in the township of
***** and Gomorrah

my mother bitter sneers good luck with that,
forgetting I am now twenty years
so old, so advanced,
that my hopes and aspirations are no longer those
the ones in my high school yearbook

my poetry fills pages,
a human urban renewal,
laying out a city of hope

recalling that ***** and Gemorrah were destroyed