The sun~poem also rises every evening…

A.P.U (as per usual):
this testimony~phrase tilts me sideways,
to relieve the condition, needy to be righted
one must expel the belly kicking seedling,
looking to be outed as a full fledged tree,
a poem planted, a gatherer of insects,
giving shade, perhaps shedding fruit

the sun bids adieu, self~same~centrifuge
of our solar system, is indeed alway rising
somewhere, though the light of our naked
eyes weak, incapable of trajectory bending,
to follow its course’s curvature, nonetheless,
we know it but struggle to believe just as we
struggle to complete, compare, and compose

replanted words in your heart, words that trigger,
are the notions inherent, of a center, rarely eclipsed,
that never ceases to offer up nouveau hope in each
of the days, a placenta to fret you blood and oxygen,
once purposed, discarded into darkness,
b u t
the words rise again, offering what you seek,
diurnally, need, to find within them, for my child,
is now
our child…

happened upon an extravaganza of spring’s hallmark,
the cherry blossoms outing their munificence of color,
I happened to position myself direct below a tree,
the thicket
of blossoms so, well, thick, that sky was obliterated ‘cept
for pointillistic spots of blue sun, yellow sky that poked
through the
few de minimus interstitial spaces permitted, and was
struck silent, by-for-before shimmering eyes that uttered the
requisite oohs and ahhs,

and

words came to me weeks later,
when the memory, now fully decanted,
reappears
courtesy of a giant tech company’s code tinkering,
merging and splurging the combined images in the
photographic memory
of my devices,
as if to say:
your life is
points of light and color and scent
as you write now
amidst the hubbub of jackhammers, raucous horns a blaring,
the homeless screaming on the street at god,
the fatalistic headlines of hate and
the pallor of a low level haze of perp~gray
between you and your true elfin self,
and you are not surprised,
but sadly, but not entirely,
bemused
that the photo’s true utility was to
remind weeks later
that all that my eyes utter
is not just
woe, double trouble and toil, toil,
but to Hey Jude and George,
step out and see the park on a Sunday
in its entirety and to glory in
your being
by being
a point in that tapestry spectacular
of ingestion, digestion and final comprehension and
a happy
exhalation

Adding minutes to a lifetime (saying magic words)

”And you, dear poet, friend of many years,
have given me so many inspirations, birthed within
us words,so oft, and so well, that your pithy observations,
manufacture time, add minutes to lifetimes”

<>

wrote these words without thinking,
they’re sweet and neat, trivial but incomplete

but upon rear mirror review, Mr Poet
re-thinks, perhaps deserved of another serving,
curvy white, soft-to-the-lips, a moist vanilla kiss,
excellent ice cream in a sugar cone, words irresistible

for the sweetest poem sparks multi-coloration-explosion
of sprinkles ‘pon  a skin’s surface,
uprisings of what lurks in the centrum of your
embodied universe and disembodied soul,
shockingly uprising from an internal fulcrum,
sea~tossed flotsam of a jagged life, now, all recovered
words sprinkling, beach treasures, and yet,
*adding minutes to a lifetime…

reliving old reels, is time recaptured, creating a
certain robust additive to thine cranking and
cranky engine, that’s logged much more than
a picayune hundred thousand miles on a voyage
of e i g h t decades, you employ ten fingers to
calculate your fugue of multi-voiced numerations!

can it be? it cannot be! millions upon millions of
minutes, possess and passed, yet highlight feature
films, enabling reliving so real that by watching,
seeing, believing, re-reading it is as if one is earning
life extensions…adding minutes to a lifetime…

‘tis true, rereading every small scrip, every poem,
returns one to prior-places, each a datum,
a particular spot, a point upon a schema of integrity & integration,
that rule the visions, a message of individualism
in the largest context of a true vision(arie)

“chacun un point dans une peinture pointilliste…”
“each a point within a pointillistic painting…”

in a few years, a stumbling upon shall here return me here,
and I will smile with great gratitude for the life extended,
accepting with gratitude,
these few seconds, a last lasting chance,**
to say some magic words
with a great vanilla whispering
adding minutes to you life as well


nml

“Every moment waking or sleeping/dreaming is a poem.
Sadly there aren't enough moments to write them all.”

back in the day,
(like 5 minutes ago)
I awoke,
and that miracle is

poem enough!
~~~~
the house is overflowing
with floral gifts,
orange roses, scented lilacs,
pink peonies,
and that friend, is

poem enough!

Sunday brings Birthdays,
One is 11, the other 7,
and I must change ~
my passwords will
require-updating,
and that friend, is

poem enough!

And you, dear poet,
friend of many years,
have given me so many
inspirations, birthed within
us words,
so oft, and so well,
that your pithy observations,
manufacture time,
add minutes to lifetimes,
and dearth
not a word,
to be associated with us!

Us,
as in always,
that my friend, is
just
ever a

poem enough!

It’s good to be hated!  But I know my name…


hate, blackened, misshapen, ugly, unnatural,
yet
how it clarifies the mind, like a cupped hand
carrying clear, cold, brook water to dry mouth,
to shock, enliven, resets resets, all your priorities
with alacrity, a word I prefer cause it is an intuitive
combo of eagerness + alarm, suddenly much of the

trivial is no longer worthy of your  ‘to do’ list,
you, without thinking, DNA filter your filters,
those screens that digest, then reject & reflect
the inputs ongoings around you, and you are now
reclassified! by the hate surrounding, it declassifies
the time wastrels, reinterpreting most everything 
on a bipolar scale of  1  or  10, there are no shades,
the middle ground of gray be fully eliminated,
just like those who wish to
eliminate
                                                                ­                   me.


in a palette of black or white, your
e +e,
(essence and existence) cannot be ever
a gray area, yes, of course, the sunshine
is yellow bright, and the grass is spring
flushed green, the multicolored daffodils
newly define colors varietal, and the waves
of the Sound, roll relentlessly, but hate can be
coated, camouflaged and subtle disguised, but
we  know, oh how we know, and how we wanted
to forget, our “sins”, our original liabilities of
our multi colored skins, our religion, our race & ethnicity,

but NOT our names!

the Rabbis tell us that God nearly did not keep
his promise to Abraham, to rescue his progeny
from slavery in Egypt but saved them only because:

‘On account of four things Israel was redeemed
from Egypt: they did not change their names, they
did not change their language,  they did not speak
slander and not even one of them was found to be
promiscuous.’^

I know my name; and though you cannot distinguish
me by dress, know not my moral life, but now you
know my name,
given to me by my parents, in the language of my ancestors:

Mordecai Netanel ben (son of) Eliyahu Chaim**

Per my family lore, as told to me by my parents, our
family fled from Spain because of the Inquisition (1478),
settled in a small town in Germany on the banks
of the river Lippe; and from the shtetls of Poland,
and those who survived or avoided the Holocaust
ultimately left Europe, came here, to the land of
the free, the United States of America with names,
in their language, with memories intact.

I will not flee this country,
for I know my true name,
inscribed in my pores, in my
DNA

<>
(but should I have to…there is a sanctuary.)
May 2 2024

~dedicated to the heart fixers~

sometimes I smack my head,
when a poem commission is lying on
the ground before me, and I just don’t
hear it, believe it, in order to retrieve it…

many months of physical rehabilitation,
sessions always ended with a certain cutesy
Gen Z~Millenial crossover phraseology:

“remember to tell someone you love them”

the instructors mostly youngish,
so we senior~smile
a tad dismissively, give them a reward~grin, and
head for the locker room,
where we gossip and compare notes,
on the Part II of our in-process-future-realization,
living a grueling new life of self-preservation, 24/7

the PTs & EPs pound you on the machina, go faster, work harder,
eat better, sleep more, take those meds, motion is lotion,
walk the talk, never be still, but race to live longer and
prosper, this hard work is your new job, and resignation
is non~optional

now, it hits me, via a figurative sharp slap on the side of the head,
triggering an actual physical manifestation that reverbs to the toes,
that the most important lesson went under the radar,
evading the former trader’s dimming vision,
flunking himself on the rehab test paper,
a purple F for fool,
a grade, earned and deserved, and herein poetically preserved

the hardest heart work, begins only after you co-
commence the longest road back to where you once
belonged, but where you can’t walk alone, for therein
a recipe for failure; and the work that needs doing,
is on you; take that tear-repaired heart, and give it away, it,
one can be healed, but not if sealed, for the hard-hearted
walls thicken, and “over  time, the thickened heart muscle
can become too stiff to fill the heart with blood; the heart
can't pump enough blood to meet the body's needs.”

so break off pieces of your heart, give them away with
relentless abandon, for this is the heart that self-repairs,
new tissue, new fiber, and most important, regeneration,
the one single reparation that can successfully
accomplish the true miracle of getting by giving,
no forgiving, if you don’t exercise the heart by

“remembering to tell someone you love them”




dedicated to the hard working staff of the
Cardio Rehabilitation  Unit
of Nyulangonge, Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation
who started  me
with a mighty push on the long road to utilizing my heart properly

<•>

I believe in poetry tho most do no not.

that it is a special social way of
communicating that kidnaps the heart,
seduces the soul, best when whispered,
tho the cadence is the key, lesser is the
volume

we do not teach our children well enough,
the hows of it, for if we did, the whys would
surely follow; no one can be a bully, or give
in to overwhelming sadness entire, if a line
of the spoken can yet bring forth a tear to
the most hardened of hearts

the high heat of the first sip of the day
asks for encapsulation, rememberance,
insignificant as it may be, it dislodges
the stale of sleep, stimulates the muscle
fibers of the tongue. snaps open our now
wide eyed eyelids, and lets us appreciate
a poem of our existence by its poking us
from homeostasis to, by the slightest touch,
the slow running of the tongue upon the
lower lip. the eyes filled to the brimming
by your beloved deep dreaming … and so,
we break our day into sequences of fragments,
though sometimes fractured and divisible,
if not even divisive, yet each a stand alone
momentary affirmation that though our
natural state is still homeostasis, it is the
highs and lows of our minuta of minucia,
that mark our minute minutes of never
ending poetical composition…

<>>
Jan. 13, 2014
<>

a  flawless poem

if such there were,
will always be,
the next one

my poor soul,
my rag tag heart
has no censor,
so careless, reckless,
as if words were but
frivolous treasures,
easy spent, easy get

if only, how I wish I
could harvest my best,
with golden cutlery excise
the single flawless poem,
that I know is in my possess

lay down this hand so weary
from cupping tears,
be satisfied at long last,
so much so,
that when my casket lowered,
hands in repose companioned,
clutching his best, easing his rest,
a paper record to join his dust
with ash,
his flawless poem,
at longest last

the inherent harmony of the Arthurian phrase,
always charmed me, and by it, herein employed,
to wrestle/rassle it to the ground, like two preteen boys,
in a do or die, which prohibits ****** harm but releases
the testosterone that helps them moves them to the next,

Once and Future

stage, more a platform, to leg up further, to the next step,
that will be the once and future reforming, for are we not
always wrestling with our Once, this imprecise but prescient
point when we have arrived, knowing intuitively, it is not
a terminus, but just another way station to I-do not-know,
but knowing with genetic certainty that
when you get there,
that you have reached and met the requirements of what it means
to be, to exist as, to be so noted on the continuum of a

Once and Future

existence.

~for all the old poets,
especially one so denominated, my old faithful friend…~
<>

the
THEY,
emboldened and italicized,

are whispering and whimpering,
even
whining
that I’ve gone
wimpy,
lost possess of mine
facilities and faculties,
no longer able and capable
to command, demand, in hand,
import
a decent poem
from & in the English language(s) to
purport,

lost my edges,
hide behind the hedges
of inconsequential ancestral
and incestual rhymes,

these
THEY
do oft appear as voices in my
now emptied and unemployed head,
but familiarity breeds contemporary
contretemps of contempt,
for they are remiss,
in dismiss when the eyelids
flutter,
the noble temporal lobes
mutter,
’tis thy~thyme ole man,
for spillage of your
FPOTD
(first poem of the day)
thus kneecapping the cancer
of a restless dark hour period
where failures and faults,
of lines
crossed and uncrossed,
bear you to pieces,
bare your lifetime
laundry list
of pulsing, palpable,
fulminating and always ruminating faults
of which penance cannot be bought
by the bags of pennies and sordid assorted coins
that THEY
will find in the back bottom of thine closets,
along with the manuscripts
of the discarded and forlorn,
unloved and unpublished poems that you chose
to have buried with you,

lest you think that
eternal rest
will best
them voices,
they will accompany you
to permafrost of forever dark,
their once and future demise,
a travesty of
justice…

enough.

lists of to do’s;
the exercise of delaying death
for one more day,
by trodding on the treadmill
that postpones the inevitable
that can
always tun longer and faster
and cannot be outdone, outrun,
but
this poem
disgorged and disbanded,
it’s bytes,
will not bite mark me
in the forever future
their bytes are alive now,
free to be chomped and well chewed,
and once fully digested,
be return to our Mother
Earth
where some disclaimed poems
go to be buried
within it’s eternity