I want to cry on the subway.
I want to dance in the ocean with the waves crashing on the rocks behind me.
I want to see a lemon purple sunset mirrored in my mother's eyes.
I want to eat the whole cake.
I want to read a thousand words and learn every one.
I want to sleep in the desert, in a truck bed, staring at the stars.
I want to buy the shoes.
I want to wear the shoes.
I want to break the heels of the shoes on a long walk up a hill, drunk, shouting into the early morning air.
I want to collapse in bed before the sun hits the skyline and dream I was driving up the coast and my car took off into the air, passing up the birds, the planes, looking over the houses and the people.
I want to actually mean it, whatever it is.
I want to wake up and know that I did it, glorious me, did glorious it.
I want your ****.

Eye on the morning rose
shine and go touch it not!

Leave it for the day.
Make rooms to smell
flowers from the other planets.

the irises have passed,
their existence, entirety,
a three week, 21 day, gun salute,
to which I was witness to but an
abbreviated four short generational
days

the Kabbalist among us say Kaddish,
and a-Buddhist chants so-be-it,
both celebrating the brevity cycle
of natural things, both notating,
that death makes room for more

ugly yelloe'd and black now,
these irises are now
misfits on a breezy,
dancing summer lawn

today, shriveled and misshapen,
they compare and contrast
on a normative, glorious,
June Sunday that
picturesque presents
the living and the deceased,
side by side

all comrades,
all summer sundries
on a dancing grass blanket
half-graveyard battlefield,
the half-heaven

oft I have writ of the beach detritus,
the shells, the sun burnt *****,
a recycled funeral rectory where
no one utters prayers for the
no longer alive historical artifacts

what has this to do
with that human construct,
artifice of memory,
a string on the finger
of the mind,
a pausation, a man-made creation
to momentarily recall another of
nature's cycle -
your children

Have children.
Am a father.
Had a father in my youthful days.

this is a boy scout qualification medal,
marker of me as Expert,
permitting me to commentary
with gravitas, now that I’ve graduated
to grandfather status,
I enjoy superstar freedom
to opine inanely on such matters

of my father have I writ,
of my sons, those remain unseen,

likely neither will mark these day
with a telephone call
or an all-I-got-was-this-lousy-t shirt
gift of gall

I say that's ok for what else is there,
certainly not an unthinking, dismissive
whatever

it saddens me some for sure,
but it makes judge myself as human being
on a gradation of one to none

but more than this internal reflection,
I ponder this hallmark'd day,
as life cycle point notarized,
in verse and rhyme,
for that is what I do best

for before,
many father's day
in the priory passed,
most unrecallable,
just another ceremonial checkmark,
habitually acquitted,
but somewhere
in a drawer of shirts,
in a home I store stuff in,
I do believe, there are some cards
from decades past,
that prove nothing,
other than life goes on,
and we best capture
what we can, as best we can...
with small, objet d'art of sorts

Perhaps one will call after all...
in any event,
to honor the dead,
to mark the existing,
the bannered ship's bell rung,
its sonorous sound,
notable and onerous,
fades as well

but man and animal,
plant and tree,
a living fraternal sorority,
who all look over my shoulder
as I compose on
that Adirondack chair you
by now, we’ll acquainted

they know,
for whom the bell tolls this day,
and why as well,
as we all pause and contemplate
where we are on this day,
on our own overlapping cycles

The will o' the wisp is
displayed on the screen of
conventions. There are those
who pretend to decipher it;
by borrowing philosophical speculations from the great
thinkers, they formulate a
critical reading, justifying the
poverty of the lexicon.
They dare to do so.
On the other hand there is
Poetry, sat on a bench
in a park somewhere, on a
rock nearby the ocean, on
an old chair in a remote room
without any other furniture,
on the pillow made with papers
of a clochard,
on the cover of an unabridged
book nobody wants.
On the trembling hand of a
young lover who picks flowers
for her, that remain forever
between the pages of a diary.
Poetry is in the multiplicity of life,
in the thousands layers, either
red or grey, that compound the
variety of the existence. It can't
escape feelings, love, roses,
tears, grief, graveyards and
gardens. And, even when it turns
to be redundant with naivety, it
keeps the greatness of its end
which is nothing else but itself.