Inspiration

It blew in against the tide
with so little fanfare
that it startled the longshoremen
who had taken to rust in the salt air.
Smiles of self-congratulation
rivalled the blaze of the setting sun.
“To patience and perseverance,”
trumpeted a hanger-on
who had practiced neither.

Tonight, all along the shore
the scritch of pencil on paper.

I can laugh now,
but for a time
I was so scared
of my shadow;
that I would only
venture forth at
night, or noon
or during an
occasional
eclipse of the sun.
You might guess
that I’d be ridiculed,
what with carrying
a parasol to school
on sunny days in spring,
but my brother was
three hundred pounds
of muscle, hung out
with the Amboy Dukes
and carried, as a
weapon, half a tree
trunk like a third arm.
From the time I was
six years old, the other
children called me sir.

My mother put an end
to it “toot sweet.”
While no student
of psychology,
she took the time to
reason with me,
as she bent over a
steaming laundry tub,
in her ragged house dress,
like something out of Dickens.
She said quite clearly,
“Go outside right now,
or I will ******* you.”
My mother never hit,
but I took my sneakered
feet down the tenement
stairs, so quickly that they
barely touched the steps,
and then bareheaded,
I braved the April sun.

Searching

I always thought the iPhone
the most human of devices.
I named mine George.
Like an overeager child
George buzzes when engaged.
Spent, he recharges
to the sixty second cycle
of a resting heart.
Last night in a hotel bar,
an accidental altercation
with a roughhousing stein of Great Lakes Lager,
ruined the inner George.
Now, when shaken, George rattles.
No longer able to connect,
the heart-rending message “searching,”
parades across his shattered screen.
How human that yearning
for connectedness?

The Persistence of Memory

And there it is,
something sweet
from who knows where--
an arrival as unsuspected
as finding,
upon your doorstep,
something old and dear
you never knew you’d lost.