expertise irrelevant, a knowing
recognition where & when & why,
venn diagram inflection points
intersect, and also confine

the nirvana nexus on a line of dots in a
movingly motion connected by a formula that
has an equal 🟰 in its muddly middle the man’s best sole instructions to her only

solve! me

when in an moveable interaction
the power of rushing baking cake & it’s filling
is akin to trying to hold back a bucking stream that cannot both be ****** or dammed

running words, making
you obsessed to remember
every detail, but commas only,
never a period interrupting continuity no
essential points of exit and entry

and yet…

you cold stop to breathe
wondering how came you
to be a container intertwining
motifs and motives, desires contradictory,
control contrives to be a
controversy pressured pressed
together, and you want to stop, go,
turnings to touch,
she be tablet and he the pen,
and you wrack to remember each
detail, the poem complete or will
confusions reign supreme
and all the fantastical
schemes are shot to
hell, ink spilled,
house doused

and she good naturedly laughs at you,
cause she knows poet better than himself
and forgives him his inspirational
dazes and gazes of confusion
because it is hard to give when
giving birth to
a dream’s obsessive demands
to love one more
than the other

each deserves no rival, just a final fini,
she wants the same, but the heart
is where he keeps hid, exactly
what she needs, so forgives a
little, because loving a crazy
man after all these years
is taking the excesses
costly cause that be
an insanity desired,
what she loves,
the dusky duo
inside him
a constant
battle re
fusing
resolving
the man’s contradictories,
that she cherishes him for
more, his mired mind, more and
laughs at mores, cause it is never ending;

his more is feature why she loves him very best, she showers and laughs, he rushes in
puzzlement featured on his face, so invites him in and as he falls to his knees in a watery
embrace, while grasping her hips, she
states with a finality: “‘
*”let us discuss the importance of proper endings”

~it feels good to keep a promise~
~for AV~

<>
my expertise is at the PhD. level
for mine own experiments have
been less than successful by the
feedback periodically provided
O & Co-vertly over forty years

but a poem triggers, go figure!

and making morn coffee,
a task that teaches well,
that doing the prep is essential,
no shortcuts
for which we spend/waste years
looking for, and
realize that’s a hint to settle in
with a hot beverage,
this feels like it’s a longy coming

we know so much,
most i m p o r t a n t l y,
even how little we actually
do comprehend, and that
is importabt beyond belief,
learning to
choose counsel
that should be allowed
to pass under the bridge that filters
the crapshoot crap that pretenses
as smart and sound,
that should be
burnt & buried in an open pit

so what do fathers know?

- that finest firsts are so youthfully
under loved, under appreciated,
misperceived as endless,
the flush the rush the the thrusting
piercing of your composite composure
practiced protective skin,
cherish them firsts cause
they don’t last
because axiomatic that come
lesser, fewer, with every wrinkled day,
and sorry, time doesn’t make you bolder

- luck is a lottery ticket, the odds preposterous against you, but we
buy a ticket weekly because you
thinking this time is your time, sorry,
this lady sleeps around, a lot, a  
borderline *****,
who never asks
honey what’s your nane, because
they are thinking ‘bout the next
customer,you want it? you work for it,
and that never ever ends,
the odds
against ya never improve

- invest in discipline early and big time:
later when it will be desperately needed,
and twice as hard to obtain (can’t be bot,
no matter how much moola
you will
inherit)
and it make it habitual;
and discipline
is the entry card to unlocking the
unknown, the exceptional adventure

- thinking ‘know everything’ is a giant
no-no; this body of knowledge
you think you’ve earned by being
learned, is not as
valuable as one might
think (or feel)

cause knowledge is like a breeze,
on its way to somewhere else,
the cooling skin it leaves in its wake,
cools too quickly
and when you whine
“I know”
think this
”I no NOthing”

- that fathers oft say little, wordily,
so keep an eye out
for a raised eyebrow l,
a crinkling around the eyes,
a wrinkling nose,
they be  clues
meaning
ask me
more, later, when we deux
can pas alone

-peace of mind is
like watching waves
coming in;
ithey are long in the forming
and faster in dissolving,
they arrive piecemeal
but they keep on coming
in different shapes,
from different places,
but they do keep a-coming
and their power,
(erosion)
is the result of thousands individual
moments,
additive,
so you get pieces,
thru the unconscious
habit of accumulation
/\
here I’ll pause
to preach
makes a father thirsty
a fresh cuppa
seems highly desirable

oh yeah,
warmth can be received from blankets,
expensive ski jackets, wooly socks,
but its best when freely created
from within,
worn as you own & owned creation,
a reward for being wide open
ready,willing & able

one more thing:
find the best addiction
that bests you,
that thing will live
within forever,
like
writing poetry?
😉

so what do fathers know?

a lot, too little, never enough,
sometimes too much,
mostly good,
some awful,
just ask
find out
wonder
who will be more surprised
when you
do

~for maddie~

the inference need not be discerned,
plain clear like a perfected blue sky
that took a millennium to craft so
well that you take it 100% for granted

even God needs trial and error to get it
right, and more to create a perfect anything
and any
body
and any
elephant

it’s just me…funny like that…

~for touka, just because…~

my foibles are little pretty doilies,
all dressed up in preparation for
getting stained, as is their due,
their birthright, for they wait in
service for the slippage and the
crumbly stains of strange lyrics

wait! this poem has. gone astray,
my intention to make confession
about my quirks which are more
than numerous, repetitious, and
a little crazy, which is why my very
few friends delight in homaging me
”still crazy after all these years…”

‘tis truth, for better or worse, I’m
not superstitious but don’t step
on cracks or any lines between
the in between, always retrieve
pennies on the street, cause the
Benny Franklin about a penny
earned makes smile because
he stole it from someone prior,
and it goes with friends in the
tip jar at my corner bodega,
where they save me
a raisin scone,
knowing full well, i may not appear
till quite late, or never on bad days
when the poem urges kick me out
of bed, and inspiration is a 3am
pastry…

make me repetitive cups of java all
de day long, wander around from
zoom
to room doing odd-jobs, thisnthats,
never recalling where my muggle is
sojourning till I hear the call of the
microwave “here,  here ye old man…
where else would I be so lovingly
reheated?”

put my wallet, watch, spectacles &
testicles (an old rhyming) on the nite
stand in prep for the next day, but oh,
the keys have their little own ceramic
cup lest they scratch the ochre stain,
and I catch holy hell, so ipso-facto, I
am more often than not locked out…

we won’t talk about the too many times,
my phone has gone astray (1j many
countries where recovery was hardly
assured, but have never suffered its
loss, or consequential identity theft,
but then again, no one seems to
want to steal my name, till Paul Simon
up and done it, after sitting next to me
on a Redeye flight from LA to NYC.(1j

it drives me nuts when pompous men
pontificate on the obvious but forget
to pull their tie up to mind the gap tween
knot and the top button, making their
words look..how shall I say it…sloppy,
and my shouting out at the television
at the sartorial stupidity of news “anchors”
for naughty

Making to do lists is my artistical métier,
which only grow longer with age and the
wisdom that their purpose is to taunt me,
my failures to face the difficulties that
reverberate in my guilty conscience, so
that when I remember something to do
and actually do it because the deadline
has passed and I fear her wrath of and
disappointment
which is worse than
disapproval
which I can often
dismiss
with a historical, practiced, “easy peasy”

and if said item even doesn’t appear on my
lists (plural), I add it and derive copious pleasure,
when I cross it out with great
red inked celebratory deliberateness…

ok, okay, (you choose) I’ll wrap and rap it
up, as I go on too long as children oft tell
me when I’m being regaling with my stories,
(is there a point to this story?)
well because…it’s

just me…funnily like that


(1) somewhere on HP is the poem/story

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more”
(Henry V, by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE)

Morning into Mourning

<>

I speak it softly, for though battlefield is steeped in quietude
of the lively greenery, endless lawns of healing fields
surrounded by multitudinous shades of blue waters,
my eyes piercing , joining in
as sunrising separates the veil
dividing light from dark, new from prior,
a went-before and a
soon-to-be
and a familiar-what-to-be-hereafter,
but a skyed breech it is,
with sun ray stairs inviting my
upright ascension into this newness

Welcoming the exposure of my trembling, though it is not fear that causes my shaking, but the colored warmth barely warming, yet,
stoking, stroking the drape of chill
away, away! from my night-sealed pores

the majestic surfacing of the waters peinture impasto, with its roughened but genteel thick, dabs, dots, swirls, swishes belie the overall atmosphere of calm it conveys, and Shakespeare’s rallying cry of men rises to the mind forefront, for the bay is my battlefield,
the day’s new light the breeching of the sky’s
envelopment of our world, summons to rise and
step forward intimately into the tableau of morning

into the breech, into the unknown,
to lift one more poem from breast,
shed tears of welcome, and death fears banished,
a battle to the unknown from the foretold past,
and, but

you shout
no!
<>
tis a day like all others,
of rectitude sans gratitude
another quantity of known drudgery, another,
“Woke up, fell out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup”

The breach is within me,
a splitting of the head,
laid flat out upon my desk,
writing down scrupulously
officiously,
the same figures inconsequentially,
letters deranged, daily merely rearranged,
prison vista,steel and glass appearing with
the same exactitude of every day ever prior,
the sun invisible, the unceasingly unchanging
dark deep of the shadowy of manmade canyons…

speak to us no more of views, vistas,
but the fistulae, the empty places
where interconnected dots and dash’s,
light and ombre blends of dark ochre  
gradations of bland de~gray~ding
are our time’s patchworks of familiarity,
cursed with annualized daily reciprocity,
a *** for a tat,
a woolen watch cap,
a  black Balaclava,
drawn over our heads
lest the drudgery be too readily apparent!

<>
mere mortal am I,
mortal wounded by our disparate
and desperate differing points
of view,
and we split ourselves in two,
hoping for a way forward of
reconciliations,
successful hostage negotiations,
pushing these contradictions,
back inside my heads,
until confronted
once again,
and find new words coming,
to bind me of the divisions between
or even,
to blind
me to the gaps between
my left and right
brain.

for I am both men,
one and the same,
forever
battling

until the morrow, then…