the day blinks,
the sunset stinks,
the rhyming is de-fining,
is this how low you’ll go?
to get their blood hot, earn
their likes and hearts, a lot?

your personal side slides,
means you don’t need to
repent, nyet, been sentenced-sent
to the zone of indeterminacy

the day blinks, somewhere
tween day dying time and
maybe nighttime resurrection

unless you been there,
you missed it when,
the day blinks, then all them
souls, sinners and saints,

(oh yeah, the **** poets too!)

sneaky snuck out, went forced marching

into the zone of indeterminacy

the osprey flys overhead, but the baby rabbit trembles not

~for any grandparent-poet lurking about~


the osprey overflies, a regularity scheduled patrol over
our backyard emporium and all its hors d’oeuvre creatures,
he/she has parental responsibilities, beaks to feed, PTA conferences,
the pilot, a wary watchful animal-his-rights guy, catalogues their still living  existentialism, for though they are not fish, his diet of preference, but in a pinch a rodent  or rabbit stew will do, if the fish are running too deep for no warming sun beckoning them to the surface.

Motel^ the baby rabbit, who lives with his parents,
(who doesn’t these days?) beneath the deck,
chews the clover overnight sprung, blissfully i g n o r a n t,
unawares or ignoring the poet be-laureating (him-her) but a mere
few feet above and away, pays no attention to the Poppy’s (grandfather) lecture about the rules of the animal kingdom,
who, eats whom, and to be more attentive to flying raptors.

thunderstorms forecast for the afternoon, severe say
the textured textual phone-netical all green messages, which
of course is a signal signal to the sun his job is done and can
leave the untanned poet in his state of original sin, soooo deliciously
white that he earns an appraising glance from eyes of the osprey,
a privilege he would happily tan away to promote equality ‘n stuff like peace on earth.

Motel, with his thermometer-humidity nasal instrumentation twitcher, decides, after chewing it over most carefully, time to go underneath where the white half naked people domicile, in order to avoid bathing, not his fav pastime, but making the osprey quitter le ciel, which is French for get out of Dodge, they got babies of their own to shelter and protect, even feed.

The Poppy, contented, thinks to himself, god couldn’t be everywhere,
so he invented grandpas to be “En Loco Parentis”  which
Does Not Mean Instead of Crazy Parents,
but easily could,
for who else writes
poems like this?

even temporarily, this day, your emeralding grass handkerchief,
equates our dispositions, so differently identical,
your name, our initials, in opposing corners, embroidered,
your grass tapestry upon this troubled earth, a scented, joint, poetic
remembrance, that though it’s but words that bind us, we! we know!
the songs we sing of ourselves, we sing in synchrony harmony.

reasons not to read my poetry:
1. it does not use cutesy rhymes
2. it usually has more than four lines
3. doesn’t employ emojis, whistles, chimes
4. non-words in poetry, a serious punishable crime
5. ok ok ok!  cause you insist, occasionally sometimes
6. it trying hard not to be depressed, (bad ok, not sad!!)
7. usually not trite, though ‘fess, it is a never ending fight
8. oh dear, daisies so simple, mine, complicated, ‘jes a tad
9. requires periodic use of a dictionary, for words of 8 letters +++
10. adjectives usually sensible, opposed to “croissant clouds”
11. free men write free verse, no need, don’t use f*k, sht
12. a poems shape is circumstantial, not circumferential
13. it’s a lot of work to get it shape shifted kerectly
14. go new, go bold, use heart + **** together
15. never recip nice comments, never fail
16. to send **** to ******* arrocan’ts
17. this is getting boring, nap time near
18. yada yada, you finish this!

anthem

we pledge allegiance
to each other, our state
of-just-the-two-of-us,

hands on each other’s
heart, we cocoon, snuggle,
it’s always warm in our land

like Camelot, never rains,
always in agreement, every
votes never tied, for we are

a colorless world, only one,
the color of the day, is what
we feel, create, and believe

we sing only duets, our music,
only perfect pitch harmonies,
this our anthem, sung twice daily

when the sun should rise,
and when it should set, but,
since our sun never leaves

we do it for pure pleasure

<>

“Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much?
Have you reckon’d the earth much?
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?”


Song of Myself (1892 version) by Walt Whitman

                                                      ­      §§§

A night of reckoning, calculations repeated-checked, sums divided,
did I use too many, or not enough, words to be understood, verbiage eloquent,
did daytime reveal my poetic meanings, or double-occlude it’s essence?

I have reckon’d Manhattan Isle, circumnavigated its riverbed boundaries, a younger me, by kayak rounded it, from the Spuyten Duyvil Creek to the Battery, 14,500 acres give or take, a lifeatime to complete a dead reckoning, an unfinished full configuring.

but haven’t reckon’d that Earth and I will be entwined/entombed in each other’s arms, until such time, one of us or both, will be reduced to cosmic dust, our pride, our poems, will be equally unimportant and irrelevant, I reckon.

in retrospective rear view perspective, come to understand that we spend every moment of our lives, reckoning, determine the odds of which fork we will take, laugh out loud, for each moment, a poem  is titled, the resultant, a poem - who needs a muse, you’ve got choices!

So, yes, Walt, the questing  answers you’ve requested:
Aye, yes, yup, but no to pride, for pride and poetry in one sentence is
a death sentence at multiple levels, pride, poetry, ego, suicide,...sins,
so better no proud for it is the entree, the invitation to fall-fail...
                                                   ­      §§§§§


12:03AM  Frieday
May 15th
my deadline missed,
but what is three minutes,
but empty pride...
Manhattan Island