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Bus Poet Stop Oct 2023
since I last
rode a bus,

no, poems aplenty
have poured and dripped
from ink-saturated fingers,
here there and  everywhere,
disguised by many a nom de guerre

the bus riding infrequently,
as work no longer demands me,
I ride for the occasional occasion, when legs won’t
carry me the far away distances

they say violence in the city
is random, and just seems worse,
seemingly a newspaper creation,
but I know better, and random violence &
poetry inspiration do not walk or talk
hand in hand, not for the hands that write…

in every crack, lamppost,
festooned
with flyers for concerts years ago,
poems reached out to me, write, right?
I too am papered with memories of long-ago
city travels, picking up scenes & dreams
that became poems, instantaneously, scrambling,
to get home with them retained, untainted,
preserved with the freshness of city smells,
city swells, homeless, rowdies & oldies shuffling,
the interwoven of disparate desperate humans,
fodder once and now for Walt Whitman’s leaves,
each distinct needy for something else,
but for me,
just one city big view, a Cloister’s museum tapestry,
remade, rewoven anew every moment of every day

and a poem-rough tumbles from
without
&
within


,
Bus Poet Stop Jun 2018
~for those who will read this and weep~

the quiet ones,
the silent Job ones,
who quote not from the
Book of Lamentations,
but author their own,
based on-the-job experience

localized versions of cryptic elegiacs
accepting the wooden crosses borne,
stepping up to the
unrequested unforeseen,
then buried under, burnt alive,
yet never relieved by dying,
nailed by words, stronger than iron,
promises sworn, promises kept
with no ending date relief,
promises by and to themselves,
but not for themselves!


the wearers of crystal glass shackles,
adorned with decorative locks for which
no key did the maker make,
nor any divine creator
dare conceive an early release,
never no escape contemplated,
for the lock human, unrepentant unbreakable,
a decorative useless metaphor gesture,
a blunt “life *****” advertisement

I compose amidst a
bus pond of mismatched city folk,
a tapestry of ages colors and differing views on god/no god,
none would believe that as the bus sways me,
it’s in rhythm to holy choral music,
hundreds year old,
divinity masses and motets worships,
where one human can hide temporarily
a safe house,
to calm his questioning relentless
from the horrors of no answers,
for when the mind has no solution
to the rough and tumbling lives,
lived in glass shackled confinement,
the poets desperation equals theirs


summon eagles to transport these imprisoned,
but the shackled refuse,
I come to them but they wave me off,
I go crazy for once I was enslaved,
thirty years war that left devastation,
from which so many poems created

so I speak with heightened regard
of one who planned futures for others where his
non-existence was a founding father (ha!)


but the day came and
I was released by my own inactions,
but means nothing until a way to
away found
to release the yet bound early


got a couch, airline miles, hundred dollars
in my pocket and an unrelenting need
to save them, a consumption disease,
the glass shackled, at ease,
won’t rest till all are freed
this my creed
no one left behind

these cyber words do not mock
for they are unbounded, set free,
when
the flesh connects and the needs of the flesh
are stronger for they are in heart conceived

— The End —