To speak all these languages:
Assamese, Bengali, Bodo,
Chhattisgarhi, Dogri , Garo -

Oh, to be able to tongue, "Love"
in Gajarati, Hini, Kannada, Kashmiri,
Khasi,  Kokborok, Konkani -

Or lip, "Desire" in
Maithili,  Malayalam,  Manipuri,  Marathi,  Mizo,  Nepali -

Or whisper, "Good night, Dear"
in Oriya, Punjabi,  Sanskrit,
Santali,  Sindhi, Telugu, Tamil, or Urdu.

You are my secret love
would that it be other,
thus no mailed Valentine
to add to the clutter.

Standing
between me
and you
are many untested
assumptions
and
assumptions
that we
are
not
consciously aware,
were we to meditate lotus to lotus
would that clear
                                the air?

I propose a painting,
on a ground of white,
a band of your favorite color,
a band of mine.
Should we arrange our stripes parallel,
or should we direct them to intersect?
Would the colors compliment or clash the other?

A man that has everything
may appear to have nothing,
or like Janice said,
"Freedom is another word
for nothing left to lose."

Summer camp lovers,
Sad, sad your soring high,
Come autumn,
One of you will have moved on
before the other.

December,
   the whole year,
                     actually,
has whittled my world

d
o
w
n

to a lap
cat
older than me
in fur years,
and this misnomered,
smartphone,
from which
I strain to shave marrow
from stolen bones
in the manner
of a single tooth
                            wolf.

Glacier,
Flake
Time
Crystal
Collective
Mass
Gravity,
Flow
Breakin­g
Celibate
Monastic
Oath
In
This
Cathedral
Tower
Bedrock
Cracking­
Groans
Moans
Under
Exponential
Cave
Crush
Crevasse
Plowing
Scori­ng
Tearing
Mush
Melt
Calving
Diving
Block
By
Block
Headlong
Into
­Wave
Reflecting
Clouds.

Five years before retirement
my father in law
posted a note on the refrigerator,
"Everyday throw something away."
I have come to realize
the profound wisdom of this advice.
Letting go is the enlightened path
to contentment.

As lovers we've learned
that you are the immovable object,
and I the irrepressible force,
though our ****** subduction truly terrifies the natives,
and has spun much aboriginal lore,
they credit us with Monsooning the weather,
but looking back, my dear, see the adorable mountains we've made.

a red moon tonight,
star mat, arch framed in night black,
lunar eclipse.

If I lived in Hawaii
I'd wear a glass skirt,
Panhandle tourists,
or lie on the beach
and get lai-ed by pretty girls.

Forsythia,
here blazing out,
in,
is it tractor,
   center stripe,
      or school bus yellow?
A distant cousin to the olive tree.
Would that a rioting branch,
when offered,
would never fail to restore
tranquility and peace.

You're a pronoun,
I'm a pronoun.
Let's say we grab a verb
and conjugalate ;-)

Your ******* were humming bird eggs,
vulnerable beyond compare.

Remember the Christmas
we rolled our own chipatis,
Indus whole wheat,
like fine beach sand,
an equal measure
of all purpose white,
water, oil, salt as needed,
then rolled thinner
than unemployed hope,
stove top baked on high temp,
topped with fresh tomato red,
and green pepper salsa?
Now, that was bread!

Who can know sweet
When one has yet to taste sour,
Or appreciate salt,
When one eats bread without sodium?

Within a veil of light rain
a redheaded woodpecker
percussively rap drills
his evening dinner.

Next to the iPad,
horn rim readers,
a book of postage stamps,
and a rubber eraser.

Where is the seat of psychic pain?
Are MRI's made to trace the vein
To neuron neighborhoods
Sealed, yet synapse connected,
One to another
By chain link fences?

You and I could be lichen.
You'd be algae
and I fungus.
E plural unis.
I would envelop you,
not to smoother,
but to romance, house, protect.
You would photosynthisize the sun
filling our pantry shelves.
Oh, what fun we could have
if we were a lichen.

Riding a double decker 4B
from Trinity to Terrenure,
one hand clutching
an overhead strap,
St. Stephen's Green
Frames a Celtic redhead,
exciting priestly thoughts.

Eventually all water drains to the sea,
and so to the body's waters drain to its urinary bladder.
But the bladder,
unlike the sea,
must be drained every few hours,
call it a normative ****** rhythm,
taken for granted, as it should be, by the functionally normal,
but the spine paralyzed
must be catherized
four, five six times a day.
**** breaks through an inserted tube,
to which I can personally report,
the ***** prefers piercing
then being pierced.

Relaxed,
content,
all the the knots
have lost themselves looking for loose ends,
I fear the muse
will feel her job is done,
and that would mean the end of me as well.

You're afternoon, my love,
and I'm forenoon,
and the twix between
burrs our saddle.

Eros, on your high steed,
we beseech your Olympian authority
to make mutual our latitudes
so next when the clock strikes twelve
our eyes, yours and mine, my love
shall meet within that same hour,
and there we'll dine upon the other.

Oh, to be a tortoise
and never need a house.
No realtors, no mortgage,
never a call for
roofers, plumbers...
or ever to build a shelf!

A nameless helmsman
Whose fallible hands
Duty calls to act god like
Guiding a ship of life
Off the coast of Newfoundland
Through a night of blue white ice halls,
Until their combined Neptune fate
Entombs nearly all
To an eternal Atlantic floor
Of dark and frigid sea.

I'm eating chocolate,
the kind the Swiss
keep for themselves,
the quality kind
that can only be delivered
by security truck,
Chocolate that the Incas
would **** a thousand in cold blood,
Chocolate that's so good
it will turn a committed ******
into a ******* sweet ****.

*Touring Venice with the Chocolateer is paying current dividends!

When the elevator doors opened
I could see,
Despite your effort,
The mild discus
That washed over your face
Seeing me,
Alone at the rear of the car.

You entered.
Turned your young back to me
And selected your floor.
You were in elevator mode,
And I was elevator polite,
We never spoke.
What I wanted to say,

"Old age is not contagious,
Nor can you open your legs to it
Like STD.
You have to work at it
Everyday,
Old age is something you earn
For grit and perseverance."

I wish you well
Wherever you go
Wherever you are
My desire is you too will age
In your time,
And at your personal pace.

If I saw your handwriting
would I know
whether you were taught
cursive by nuns
or a teacher
on the public's payroll?
Does your hand calligraphically flow,
from a favorite Mount Blanc pen,
or do you print
using a ******'s pencil
made by the millions
by Chinamen?

Laurel, rhododendron,
waxy leather leaves survived
again beyond odds.

Your lapped iPad is the perfect palimpsest,
for an intimate exchange,
with one of your stylist fingers
your lover's words become ostrich heads
whenever your husband
sallies forth for another can.

Lean poem,
Rib caged heart,
Xylophone bleaching under a paper sun,
Casting scorpion shadows across rocky lots,
Resilient, though shattered,
By misread lines or slipshod thought.

In time
twenty years
will no longer be a lifetime,
but an imperfectly remembered fraction
'less you've been the rare one
journaling the everyday
that seemed so very unimportant way back then.

Is it stalking to drive by a summoned apparition?
Imagining you in the back yard
playing with your old dog,
or walking through the apple orchard
reading a book of my love poems,
or my lifting a phantom shovel to dig you out from under that last storm.

The city is loud with chimneys,
bristling with dimpled sky dishes,
afloat in a dammed lake of sunset fenestration,
beneath unwitnessed, unappreciated clouds,
its streets a grid of flowless canals,
to the music of "Hey, mister, got any change?"
Oh,
but,
when the lights go down,
and the pretty people come out!
and the beef bouncers sort snort the buzzing sequin queen queues
for the sparkle dance houses,
the city,
the city,
can one ever get enough?

I saw the best behinds of my generation destroyed by muffins,
strudel hydrolyzed aphids dragging themselves through Chicano streets at dawn for tickets to fix,
bagel headed tipsters yearning for flagrant connection to the sorry dim sum macarena nights ...

*apologies to Allen Ginsberg

Love mourner
Angst angler
Thesaurus eyer
Rip-rapper
Suet idler
Dream creamer
Cascade scribbler
Intro-***-er
Guts gusher
Endorphinater
Sonnet snoozer
Trochee tripper
Iambic lamer
Spondee sniveler
Whisper whipper
Music quencher
Apt-less  adjectiver
Yeast yearner
Simile stitcher
Metaphor monger
Exclaimationizer!

We were cavorting Orca
in a warm Baja sea,
while you dove,
then rose to breath,
I met you at the surface
in a tangle of sweaty sheets.

There are two sides of town

The straight teeth side,
and the crooked side,

The private summer camp side
and the open hydrant side

The bedtime story side
and "get your ******* *** in bed" side

The balloon birthday side
and the birthday frown side

There are two sides to every town
Sometimes they meet on the same street.

Oh, phalo skeptic,
part your wave for skirted ***** surfers,
tho, trout, tripe, and titmice thrill thrice..

Will duct tape save us?
Urge the Zamboni machine,
to microwave ice.

Quince down that pouting sphincter,
Oh, the tides do swell
on the morrow of passing fish.

Wheelbarrow pious.
Swift, awesome biblionauts,
Fire! Fire! Pail, Pail thy watered pitch.

Know this, every potato is somewhere vane ...
I'm busy now, rude duuude,
have you sweated a recumbent lout?

Indent chill mots,
Pete, I'm big in Europe, pal,
Have seen me dance the Macarena?

Fool, fool on that high hill,!
Take care when licking spiny urchins
Oy! I scare myself.

Do not worry about our planet,
Our one mother and only home.
She's seen far worse than ourselves.
So do not worry about our planet.
Nature the midwife will right the earth,
Restore her vigor, and enforce new rigor
From our wasting, reckless hand.
When all human corpus have joined the land
For some, our final story is a sorry matter.
But do not worry about our planet.
For nature will once again amend the latter.

It takes forty sap gall0ns
to 'still one gallon of maple syrup,
boiled down by the sun stored in firewood.
I remember well, my aunt Florence
feeding the boilers in the hill orchard sugar house,
wearing an old going-to-church dress,
that had, some years back, been handed down to workday chores
and on top covered over by uncle Fred's red and black mackinaw.
"Stand back," she said as she opened the boiler door
first the roar, then a bank of fire that painted
her from kerchief to boots flaming red,
her eyeglasses, two pools of glowing magma,
and everything above was steam and rising vapors.
In my mind's eye then and now when I read Dante
I'll think of her, she was and is, the very vision of a devil tender.

If you brush my words with butter,
and put them on a roasting rack,
or better yet, why not spit them,
and string them on a brassier's stake,
you'll always get a tasty serving of
"I love you" warmly presented upon your plate.

===

* No greeting cards were printed subsequent to the composition of the above lyrics, but the poet is open to negotiating first print rights with one or more eco friendly greeting card publishers.  Product must contain at least 50% post consumer fiber.  Native labor input would be a plus.

The apartment neighbor
We never see,
Today,
All I saw
From where I stood,
Was a pair of hands
Place
A bonsai tree
Upon a sunny stoop.

brighten
warm ghost mouth,
sudden crush,
sleepy ;-)

Layout every human endeavor
In a rational grid,
As one would setting up an experimental ag station,
Keep careful data
on all the plot inputs and outputs
and I believe the data will
Indicate that well prepared soil,
Infused with the required nutrients,
The best pretested seed,
And optimal hydration
Will yield over time
Suboptimal performance.
Too many chiefs and not enough
serendipity.
(Hey, is that PC?)
Can you say that today?.
In an  inevitable changing world
You need to preserve strange outliers.

On the mirror
in lipstick
was
written "solipsism"

I date myself.
A rotated heel
in spring soil
grooves an
agate pocket.
Marbles, glassies, boulders
and an instructional introduction
that life is a matter
of skill, bluster and chance.