~for Verlie Burroughs, a ‘fellow’ islander poet with a sense of human humor~

walking the reservoir on a warm spring day,
Central Park littered with tourists and pale face,
fellow islanders, all of non-Algonquin Indian descent

released from Rikers Island (of course) Prison,
six month sentence served
behind bars of winter grayscale skies
and snowy steel and grey prison everything

an out-of-townsfolk young lady passes me in a pink t-shirt,
where humans these lazy days declare their entire philosophy,
“I’d rather live on an island”
and thus a poem commissioned

well, rather brought forth from the chilled, deep waters surrounding the brain where winter vegetables rooted but cannot  surface,
the iced ground frozen impermitting bodies to be buried,
no war and death monument foundations to be poured,
flower-powered poems unable to pierce as well,
even with the upwards ****** of cesarean birth
and or, one last push and me begging
breathe
winter strangled

but I walked today
the Central Park reservoir and
all I got was that stupid t-shirt provocation
with
tulips and daffodils, dogwood and magnolias, and
cherry blossoms confirming,
it’s okay today to write of
islands and shoreline once more,
of
boundaries now and again

though the idea had prior brief transversed
the thought canal, was struck into action
when realized suddenly a dawning -

a l l  m y  l i f e,  I  h a v e  l i v e d  o n  a n  i s l a n d

counting backwards seven decades with a
collegial exception, of living by a great lake,
which is but an island in reverse,
poet *** prophet had to always walk on water to get home

<•>

my poems are travelogues,
not pretty words and tonguing talk,
sorry not,
more tales than wagging tongue wordy tails

but dumbstruck by the ocean notion that I live by the
grace of an Ocean that waits patiently to reclaim my island,
stealing my unborn poem children and
tried with a Sandy haired girl a few years ago

hurry home to scribe, and imbibe,
write upon its streetscape
with colored chalk and
upon it once more,
the concrete paths and
a reservoir dirt path surrounding and shorelines
that are all the shaping of me

all my life, and Neverland realized
I am a seagull disguised as human

don’t be jealous  (for a poet, for all poets)

~with gratitude, this one for Verlie Burroughs, verily, whosoever she may be~

the poem titles arrive in banana bunches,
grape clusters asking to be mouthed, tasted,
break their skin, juices dribbling on taste buds,
sometimes the title +  poem fully formed,
arrive on the same plane, that’s a first class
ticket to a poetry symposium somewhere near
the se(a)e.

like a fresh pack of cellophane encased cigarettes,
poems just begging ‘smoke me, **** me, broke me yoke,
the one that enchains, my soul-me,”

the nurse
pronounces a new born weighing 7lbs., 6 ounces,
pouncing, bouncing; first cries a-writing, the title
in the fluid, on the floor, don’t slip, the heavy poundage
and the body a first poem, a flighty aerie of a few ounces
that floats groundward like flavored colored leaves
in the fall, a bird’s feathers summer molting, swapping
old notions for new poem~potions, tips and sips of
Whitman, after Billy. Collins, **** the spillage and...

don’t be jealous, it’s a curse, when they silent labor
breach birth, even pre-named, falling from brain to
mouth, mouth to fingertips, Ipad to ethernet cable,
through brick walls they fly,
cause you can’t hold them and,
type them down fast enough...