Perhaps
not an impasse

maybe
at two opposite ends

I find myself writing
the same poem

over and over
again

because no matter
what bus I seem to take

and even though
I mean to go crosstown

to get to you

it always drops me off
at the same stop

usually
in the dead of night

Whit Howland © 2020

One might think
this is about

sweeping out the dusty corners
of my life

about letting go
of that pesky dream

of the bus I never seem
to catch

or the class I've been skipping
and failing

it's none of that
instead

it's a simple-minded
obsession

with cleaning agents
antisceptic soap bleach

strippers
floor wax and such

Whit Howland © 2020

Its beauty best expressed
in its guttural

musicality
and that's how I want to remember it

as an ugly sounding place
where you could drink

cream soda
spouted from an elephant's trunk

an escape

Whit Howland © 2020

an unrequited, unrequested poem title that nonetheless,
(a fav. word, so economical) it’s a burr, an *** splinter,
festering, pestering, and it’s just easier to write it, cause
triple antibacterial ointment never cured a finger gone poem-
infectious

had two beers for breakfast, not my usual,
don’t care if you’re a Baptist or a Hassidic Jew,
I’m an ecumenical sorta guy, be informed that,
one was a long necked Corona (light), the other
a Pabst Blue Ribbon, which means I’m a ******* anti-Trump
globalist.

ain’t yet nine o’click, already had two fights with
my woman, is toastier a word? I took the negativity
position, but my heart wasn’t in it, cause I know me
words, was feeling muy ornery combative, a morning existential
verbalist.

the other was too infuriating, she asked for ten cherries,
after checking the calories per, which I knew and told her,
but she’s gotta check hit herself, so I brought a bowl uncounted,
annoyed, she anti-overage, threw the extras rudely on bed, she’s a
precisionist.

that I listen to music pretty much nonstop, even in my sleep,
and my fav. lyric of the late John Prine is from Montgomery & goes:
”But how the hell can a person, Go on to work in the mornin'
To come home in the evenin', And have nothing to say”
Amenist.

The German^^ dishwasher maschine summoned me near round
2 AM, TO INFORM ME  (vich is how de Choiman appliances speak)
without apology, that it was done with its multiplicity of cycles,
needy for emptying bowels forthwith, because that’s the way it is,
and wasn’t I gonna get up anyway, there are poets in Manila and Mumbai, waiting to speak their minds, re burning issues of life and pentameter, ah, them wisdom and wonderful people, all answer
seekers!

cause I’m an economist by habit, drink cups of coffee in trinity clips,
cause it’s efficiently economical, one less trip to the kitchen, and
anyone  who doesn’t drink at least three simultaneously, cannot be
redeemed by the verifiable angels in charge of saving coffee-colored
souls-tices.

my tempo is ironic, write poems too long for you attention deficit
disaffected teenagers, but haven’t read a book in years, cause
reading a poem is all I can manage nowadays, cause I’m a ****
attention deficit diseased old man, justifiable, when you got few days
leftist.

yes, I could go on, and on and on, but I hear your skin crawling and
sighs and moaning, enough already, while I don’t really care cause
every word I ever writ is a South Sea Pearl of something excellent,
truth is God has his ******* foot on my neck, whining way too loudly, “Jeez, enough” echoing your guttural cultural groaning, youse
alreadyists.

so I’m quitting here and letting y’all know, that I authored
the lyrics to American Pie, the longest song ever to be No.1,
the Don stole them, but as you can plainly see, it’s my style,^ when
we were drinking whisky and rye and told him it was copyrighted,
he laughed & said, I’m gonna copy them right down, ain’t that the kind of truthful ******* that drunk writers say because they think they are
“artistes.”

that’s about it for now, gotta do the breakfast dishes, so
Auf Wiedersehen, meine guten Männer und Frauen!


(yeah, yeah, learning German from Herr Bosch, the dish washer-man)

she said:
you are a man knowing cruel, knowing hard,
with strangest soft skin, a funny way of talking,
lick my face with your words so I’ll learn,
to be tough and tender too, this I want, wanted

he replied:
life gave me splinters, broken from rough edges,
left under my exterior to fester, blister, and scar,
life licked my face, taught me mean, and the words
that came with that, were sand papered on my skin

she answered:
I’m not blind, I can feel, smell your contradictories,
want your antibodies in my blood, survival skills,
to be what I am not, and keep too, what I’ve got, to
be infected and protected, knowing words defensive

he listened:
what you desire, is the health that comes after,
after what you don’t understand, until you’ve
loved, lost, been beaten down so that getting up is
miraculous, this unteachable, this licking by words

she insisted:
your arrhythmic rhymes, skinflint perspectives,
this is what I ask, what I need, what you can give,
what is in your possess, what you need to unburden,
making me better for making you lessened

he wept:
and said nothing.

for nothing taught appreciating silence and that,
was the beginning,
of what she wanted,
of what he did not,
of what he gives reluctantly


8:16AM
Wed May 20
Isle of Mind

”And everyone has a heart and it’s calling for something
And we are all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are
Horses are just horses and their manes aren’t full of fire
And the fields are just fields and there ain’t no Lord
And everyone is hidden and everyone is cruel”

“BRIGHT HORSES,” NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS 2019


<>
some of us got a heart, that tries with us to reason,
some of us got a mind, that doubles as a hearse,
taking away, e-thots that were dead on arrival,
electrified by their unacceptable eclectic nature

some of us got word games to pass the day, doublespeak,
some of us illustrate, words that try to litter the literate,
seed the atmosphere, make it rain, confuse our ****** tear railroad tracks,  
those without final terminus, mixing them in, as a subterfuge

reality *****, even bites, of that the philosophers have no doubt,
some say they died for us, never having asked permission,
some say they saved us from ourselves, claiming cursed credit
that historians will purposely ignore, non-truths worthless

what is, is what I got to write down, to remember, to make
my Case for saving grace, is my only purpose, to make
my Case that a woman needs loving, giving her & man the
only Trip-Tik road to living, & children, nothing words, liquor can do

May 12th, eyes opened of their own accord, made a treaty with
them thoughts and prayers hanging round, needy for a go to place,
cause they well aware, their welcome ain’t, so instead wrote these
words purposed to give me reasons to rise and try to make sense,

a Case, that conversations tween my five senses that can be enCased,
that anything I got saying may be worth hearing to one or two, hell,
may get lucky and reach ten, socially distant max, forgetting fools,
now acquainted with my Case, your Case, calling for something

that makes real OK, seeing things as they are, ****, even passable^






9:39AM
nyc
Tue May 12

<>
“Stop this day and night with me
and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun,
(there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things
at second or third hand,
nor look through the eyes of the dead,
nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either,
nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides
and filter them from your self.”

Song of Myself (1892 version) by WALT WHITMAN

                                                      ­§§§

*These admonitions are the ten conditionals
commandments of straight talk,
boy,
you’ve spent a life lessening and lesson-learning
and all laid before you for taking, gaining,
but for what? for naught?

Start this day, having spent my night with you,
possessing less than what is my now
completed,
this,
my unfinished commencement,
provisioned, a simultaneous beginning and finishing,
emptying a void of
fulfilling questioning.

What does this life desire of me,
that it granted and then removed,
the knowledge of perfection?
leaving me striving, writhing,
shivering unceasingly,
in my saddened, bursting, hacking
and hackneyed chest.

I walk the same cobblestone streets,
observing the descendants of your ancestral tugs
portaging, paying homage to East River tides,
carrying those goods,
the origins of all poems,
from where? to where?
unknown,
but always past our conjoined eyes.

And yet do I look, with our merged eyes,
filtered by a century’s discoloration,
forgive me Walt, for now recalling sights
that you first observed,
that I witness first hand,
100 and fifty years later,
sharing a stolen wisdom with you.

Todays new millionth sunrise bids me stand,
observe the river traffic from my kitchen window,
accept that my takings are debts,
a few, even paid back,
yet, most still owed,
for the origins of all my poems,
are oddly and oddity old,
unoriginal, second, third handed
as I look through the eyes of the dead,
and yours too,
this my unoriginal,
original sin....
(pretending  I am a poet)



                                                   §§§§§

6:24AM
Manhattan Island,
By the East River
Thu. May 14, 2020

~for r, just because~


put her in my mouth and she became my
mouth.

put myself inside her and she became my
insides out.

spill good words on her belly, licked & laced us together, then came my 
poetry.

on elbow, she claimed coauthor-ship, demanded her name above        
          mine.


I smiled, answering most matter-of-factly,
surely they’re your creations, you-a-ruler, procreator, foremost, first,

the ABCedarian

the muse goddess of alphabets, all that is poetic divine mistress to
thousands

I’m mortal,
your transcriber, copyist, alphabetically seconded, merest mere,

the ABEcedarian

I’m rudimentary without you, lost midst the masses o’poets nameless.

She snorted, said
“sounds like poetic ******* to me”*
but returned to her sleepy heaven,
mumbling most contentedly.