Grace at the table
<>e
Grace is at the table
sitting quietly
observing, contemplating, collating
She
is shapely & invisible,
inviting, inspiring, intriguing,
absorbing her fill of each of us,
asking no questions, for we tell all,
and all tell,
for her visage is comely, pleasingly, despite
her transparency

Wistful Smile
Single Tear,
Grace
Is At
The Table

come partake,
of
Grace
for she
will follow you
everywhere
take her home,
ask her to stay,
invite her to stay,
you will be pleased, by pleasing her,
indeed,
She will spread her
embracing wings, sheltering, protecting,
for when Grace is at the table,
She is everywhere,
Inside Out
Outside In.
and there is no
The End

every poem gets the exact number
of reads it deserves
<>

nah, I don't think that for
a millisecond,
shoot,
not a ****** nanosecond (1)

truthfully
I'm torn up inside
and my thinking
absolutely
could be wrong
or could be right
absolutely

just like the optionality
of believing in god;
has to be some force
of intelligence that
could create such
microscopic complexity randomly
or just thinking the world
is just a series of accidentally
interactions

so
who's to say what's good,
what's not so good,
and by what standard
one should judge

Is this a poem?
Heck if I know

and what sbout the poems that
get not a one,
a single one, absence of curiosity,
an unheralded execution.
death by silent ignorance,
a master's mastery of exactitude
all because
just because

Is that a collective decision
by an unconscious collective,
the best moderne equivalent of
the unmarked death

of just a single one of
your billions of brain cells (2)(3)

all I know is
that my confusion is confirmed
my constancy is inconsistent
my equatorial balance is
gonzo, dragging me down,
each division wants to piece me up,
and today,
right now
got no answers
at all

how do I define myself?
what categories do I fit
within?

and yet
that answers one question!

do not write interrogatory inquisitions
at 1:15 am
(unless you're a DUMB lucky *******
who believes they got
answers)

~For Pradip~
who reminded me:
We are all God’s Trial & Errors

tender is the tendency,
so finitely human,
infinitely foolish,
to overlook the
obvious,
let us not delve into our
particular peculiar idiosyncratic knots
in our hair and personalities,
all natural,
inherited or ill begotten
in voyages to far away,
like our childhood

Thus,
we are all mistakes of a sort

with natural fault lines,
accumulated dings, scapes, bruises,
furrowed crinkles that took us
years to perfect

We are flawed like diamonds,
valued by these natural flaws
by graders with loups who uncover
our flaunts, our clear air bubbles,
the more flaws the better,
because these attributes make us
most interesting!

you may be blonde,
you may be exotic
perhaps a lovely shade of
iridescence,

but lucky you whose scars speak
out and others wonder why,
they are so interesting

let us design a large animal,
seemingly ungainly, yet keystone to
their environment, so others may
profit thereby,
yet insanely quick on lumbering feet,
no hands, fingers, but a long snakey thinge
that multiple functions  for
breathing, drinking, feeding grabbing, smelling and
trumpeting their presence
to foolish beings in their neighborhood

let’s us not debate
whose design is
an efficacy par excellence

so we be
ungainly, too tall, too
this or that,
even too flawless,
a specialized curse of sorts,
we are the product of
a sophisticated design laboratory
that makes many models,
each variegated, always different

so get down on your knees *******,
and praise the design engineers
who created you to be
full of
& by elephantine trials and elephantine errors,
thereby making
us each,
a special pronoun,
an I
blessed
by definition:
though not in any dictionary:
unique,
flawless!


^you are the most
flawless poem
you have ever written
and will ever ever
write

~inspired by a poem and messages from fellow poets ~
who have ridden beside me here,
for a decade plus,
SE Reimer, & Sally Bayan~

*we take our meds, vitamins and supplements
routinely, faithfully and with a big smile
of self-bemusement at all the times I mocked
those sillys who believed that
hu man
can
override his prescribed
sentencing

record almost every morsel that passes through my portals, reporting quantity and quality to remind me of my human needs, but
more to gauge my wearing weaknesses, and
make confession of
my sins of gourmand commission

and despite this and more, regular checkups, and blah blah blah, No Lies told here, the aging days are upon us, my brow furrowed
by a lengthening To Do list, that is endlessly
refurbished with more additions than
subtractions, ergo, the list grows longer as fast as the days remaining,
grow shorter,
ever faster!

no kidding myself, you feel (really) the cells
slowing their recovery, their fading fastness in every little thing, we squint where we used
to go without trepidation, we twist and turn
to musical utterances and undertones that
are groans and laughter at the old carcass’s
refreshing harmonic epiphany
of time’s passage

and think well,
I’ll do that tomorrow,
handle that later,
deal with that problem surely
eventually,

and the only thing that is attended to almost
instantly, is writing here,
last gasp observations,
that my being demands be issued now!
in time beating to
my slowing heart rate,
or factually,
my rapidly
rising rate,
each a contradictory economic indicator
of the same,
singular portending trend

so here I am ribbing and scribbling myself
before you, prompted by a gorgeously written poem by my friend (1) and the departure of another to a faraway land
where they live, my failure to meet, a shameful delay by an old man’s cautious
fear, that should not be abided…

is this a poem,
a cri de coeur,
a confession -
something of all three, but it is done,
breaths and words rapidly expelled, and for once. I feel like I have, once, now, gambled
against time, and actually

won

“We should like Nature to go no further; we should like it to be finite, like our mind; but this is to ignore the greatness and majesty of the Author of things.”
—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1715
<>
for my dear friends who amply supply
pictures of the infinity of nature
daily
<>

the comfort food of your
living-loving-eyeshot
screenings  of moments preservations of

the delicate and the roughened,
the mystical and magical of
our creative globe’s ad and mis
ventures,
oft far from the paths of human ruination
trafficking

these photos

the first of the day,
signaling white smoke rising or
the full fledged regular milky
insertion photographic
into the mine daily awakening
of the
purpled majesty of the world
when ******* pleasure of
first coffees of life’s days

and how it pleases me,
that there is no
conceptual conceivable,
that there will not be an
finishing enthralling,

a last never-before-witnessed
visionary submission
without
a never finite ending to this
infinite processional!

thus no need to say with
them ordinary wordy pleas of/to:
“keep them coming,”

for by your read acknowledgement of
this here poem,
you have cosigned this
contractual
o b l i g a t i o n

and I say
an ecstatic
Thank You

a quote from Samuel Johnson, or Dr. Johnson, the storied eighteenth-century poet and essayist who once said:

“The sole aim of writing is to enable readers a little better to enjoy life, or a little better to endure it.”

<>
our “sole aim,”

Oh what burden the doctor places on our shoveling pens,
to be earthmovers
that dig trenches, uproot earth,
that lies and hides our faces, entombing our hearts,
eliciting and erupting emotions that cannot be contained,  
nor controlled,
indeed, deserving of replanting in
our shared selves, transplanted into a communal flowerpot
of our multi bursting colored commonality

lift my composing tools,
peer into
winter blue skies guarding the towers of
Manhattan isle, longing for guidance.
lusting for specificity of direction,
how,
how, to easy our burdens
with carefully selected and
careless wonderful words,
words that deal out caring uncarefully,
with a graceful recklessness of abandon
that open thy tears,
lift up the edges of your lips,
so that my duality is your duality,
the burden shared.
the burden eased…

to cry and laugh simultaneous,
lift and lighten,
a momentary distraction,
a cut flower in our vase,
that lasts but brief,
yet with each gaze repeated and
repeatedly,
well stains us with
eyes uplifting