Maturity is knowing what your limitations are…(my daily chore)


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“Maturity is knowing what your limitations are. Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.”
Kurt Vonnegut


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maturity comes when you cannot,
even try, to fool oneself,
indeed, you preposterousness,
make you laugh hardest
at your very, fully owned, selfhood
preening mirror disguise

Is this a poem, a lamentation, a pithy regurgitation
of Vonnegut, and you say: “Don’t care, it’s words
that gotta come out, be released to empty the heart”
a daily excess removal of that daily overflow of the
days first words when new day light and nighttime’s REM
sleep overlap, and the music starts of a life time of favorites,
and like a pleasant thorn direct into your temples brain,
the leaking, then the spilling spirals unstoppable onto the pages, and the first true relieving exhalation comes with
the excited exorcism of the stones of your life, come outside
your body and there is a freshly born stripe upon your face,
not yet a scar for it is yet to ripen by healing, but it is your
creature for loving…and it is good company with so many
prior guests who have checked in, stayed for a moment’s
observation, departed after getting an extended checkout
time, joining the many who came and went, disappearing
in to the internet’s ether, where we one will join them eventually,
though you smile at that thought, cause you’re mature
enough, baby, an all growled up dude, to know that when
you reached that stage, you will be, non-stop laughing
at *** serious you imagined you were, and wondering out loud
why it took so long to recognize that mirrored visage as
one big ole fool with a smile upon his face…

p.s so much for that promise to take a break from beating
yourself up, but you know what, it is pleasing, in that way
when upon the grand occasion of waking up to another
unexpected day of living deserves a deep, but rueful,
laugh out loud and others’ look at your self and argue to
only mischievously agree,
you are indeed,
still crazy after all these years…

HIM
what is real for you right now?

ME
hm, you.

HIM
me?

ME
yeah, you. because you're here.
what about you? what's real for you now?

HIM
us, because we're here together.

ME
ha, you win. that's so much better than mine.

I often cry when writing my love poems


this secret, yet-not-so-secret, for the words become
blurry birthed by the amniotic fluid of encasing tears,
and when I write, wearing my emotions on my sleeves,
for wiping my cheeks, nose leaking, because I write of
sorrow supreme, that has no solution, pain repetition-dulled,
yet, provoking each time for the words bubble up, of-course,
it is love, in its thousands of reincarnations, coming to haunt,
the lost, the unfound, thinking of
my parents,
my children,
my lovers,
come, gone and
those who stay…

I bemuse myself thinking, each tear a lost poem, removed
by sleeve or tissue, wiped away, lost, irretrievable forever…
but these yellowed memories forever and ever refreshed
by sea spray and wind, my face absorbs their unique nutrients,
and love and pain rebirthed as if it was the happenstance of
today, and the poem water tank just goes on and on being refilled…

Come On All You Ghosts


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I heard a little cough
in the room, and turned
but no one was there

except the flowers
Sarah bought me
and my death’s head

glow in the dark key chain
that lights up and moans
when I press the button

on top of its skull
and the ghost
I shyly name Aglow.

Are you there Aglow
I said in my mind,
reader, exactly the way

you just heard it
in yours about four
poem time units ago

unless you have already
put down the paper directly
after the mention

of poetry or ghosts.
Readers I am sorry
for some of you

this is not a novel.
Good-bye. Now it is just
us and the death’s head

and the flowers and the ghost
in San Francisco thinking
together by means

of the ancient transmission device.
I am sorry
but together we are

right now thinking
along by means
of an ancient mechanistic

system no one invented
involving super-microscopic
particles that somehow

(weird!) enter through
your eyes or ears
depending on where

you are right now
reading or listening.
To me it seems

like being together
one body made of light
clanging down through

a metal structure
for pleasure and edification.
Reader when I think of you

you are in a giant purple chair
in a Starbucks gradually leaking power
while Neil Young

eats a campfire then drinks
a glass of tears
on satellite radio.

Hello. I am 40.
I have lived in Maryland,
Amherst, San Francisco,

New York, Ljubljana,
Stonington (house
of the great ornate wooden frame

holding the mirror the dead
saw us in whenever
we walked past),

New Hampshire at the base
of the White Mountains
on clear blue days

full of dark blue jays
beyond emotion jaggedly piercing,
Minneapolis of which

I have spoken
earlier and quite enough,
Paris, and now

San Francisco again.
Reader, you are right now
in what for me is the future

experiencing something
you cannot
without this poem.

I myself am suspicious
and cruel. Sometimes
when I close my eyes

I hear a billion workers
in my skull
hammering nails from which

all the things I see
get hung. But poems
are not museums,

they are machines
made of words,
you pour as best

you can your attention
in and in you the poetic
state of mind is produced

said one of the many
French poets with whom
I feel I must agree.

Another I know
writes his poems on silver
paint in a mirror.

I feel like a president
raising his fist in the sun.