Touches of pink
on skin and sky.
Silhouettes of swifts
pivot a perfect slither
of crescent moon.

Garden sprinkler
spits and splutters -
fearing winter
on the edge of summer.

all my life
wanted to write just
the way
Joni (Mitchell) sings

seesawing
rising unexpected,
write the changing temperament
in the pitch,
of now

yawing, oscillating,
speedy slow,
enunciating the whip of
love crazy

twist to fall into a
double-time
bass baritone insane
from and into a higher pitch,
switch on the
en garde,
blue ink
onto cloth napkin poetry

plain plaintive,
rendering the scene,
rendering my heart,
it's crazy high-lows,
emotion backyard
swing set

Oh Joni!
I could drink a case of you

that is was what I
told the single girls
when I was a wooing man

send me home,
high and crying,
thinking uneven,
creatively,
drinking you,
pounding the dashboard,
sing our palpitating poems

thinking up
the in-between
songs of
till next time

that they loved so much
they begged,
sing it again and again

I drank them all
and think now of poem love songs,
vintages that never caged,
never aging,
those songs I wrote for them,
back in the day
when Joni
taught me how to
see life in verse

for SJR
who lets me borrow his voices, a good man, asks for nothing in return
and therefore, is given all I got...

~~

“She's as sweet as tupelo honey
She's an angel of the first degree
She's as sweet as tupelo honey
Just like the honey, baby, from the bee
She's my baby, you know she's alright.....“

Van Morrison


~~~~~~<<<<<>>>>>~~~~~~~~~

old folk listen to old folk
and rock,
stung and sprung
from Pandora's box

someday
maybe,
you'll understand,
certain phrases,
from certain phases,
first tasted at a flavored oxygen bar
where youth drank,
worshipped and adored

and when those certain
word combinations reenter,
slipping in from unawares,
recalling easy the first time
you tasted with your ears,
Tupelo Honey

but what you remember is

that differentiating phrase

and
what you believed,
what you needed,
why you existed,
all because there was a new knowing,
that
an angel of the first degree,
was out there waiting for you...

Days getting colder,
My heart a big ball of broken down smoulder,
Ice all over.
My heart clear, see through, the whitest cellophane.
My heart aching in reminder, May rang.
A phone call like no other, rather a goodbye.
Winter later called in to say hi.