Whole hours slipped away. and later those days
when time became nothing but the tide
rising and falling like a clarinet echoing a concerto.
Night after night, I listened for silver keys clapping  
its melody sewing a soft shroud around my ears.
Its sound bellowed into the twilight with
stars stinging my neck with their glare.
My very existence hurled into a dark shipping lane
with ferries and barges scaring my view, but
sometimes the ladder from the moon’ reflection
beckoned me climb to that astral galaxy.   For there
I was blinking, weeping tears, I was alive                                     .
Then in a moment, my legs would groan.
Suddenly, as splintered arrows they splashed
into the angry waves and then sank into a scrim of water
steering me into a safe harbor, where anchoring
I could bob with the tide and then one day
I winched in my billowed sail
drying my eyes from a night of loneliness
dawn flickered light on my lashes! wind
laughing like a beacon! On the rim of the horizon.

Sixty lives are all linked with thirty kidneys for survival.

Scientists are suggesting sweeping the skies clean

with a celestial broom…. A man has scuffed his shoe

(which was costly)on the sidewalk.  Women

dream of democracy, but the government

burns their children and there isn’t a shroud to see.

I am drinking tea and eating cookies,

it’s a Sunday afternoon, and almost time for

my nap, as my head nods and bobs again.

The world of foreclosures was falling off the page.

I felt as if I was fighting a judge… loosing the battle

my house falling into a ditch. And then the moat

opens into castle walls lined with red liveried men

draped in gold braids. And what magnificence (f/o me).

A postscript to my dream, my dream of a white stallion,

harnessed to hoof over the moors.

All our greatest presidents were lucky.

They inherited national crises.

All but one preferred a Nerdgasmic life

a life that can be supplemented

with a Gallup poll approval rating.

So late in the afternoon and already

a dog has been fed and walked down

the road to *** on a walnut tree.

Poem

I watched a truck churning under a wire convergence
and the sky above doped entrails coming from Europe
Where had the turtle gone, the one puffed in the curve of the fox?

Now clambering onto the icy porch
I open the door into
smells of brass polish, wood polish
pots full of bones.

Winter’s wind rattling time holds me in
I must make marmalade with Seville oranges
with their thick rutted craters, sadly moon-like

a little sweetness of the blossom
worn on bridal veils will come back
as the flesh boils soggy with pips
and Demerara’s sweetness pummels

and I’ll be beaming ear to ear, beaming, full
of a sugar high, then fall.  I don’t think I’ll be flying
to Jamaica, but at least I have a box of jars

My house will be dressed
of stiff forsythia branches, blooming
while I pull on stupoods of wool
socks, and wax my boards

I watched whirling snow collapse, loshing
on my face, signs of a dream, unsettling
separating mills and boon from reality.

If I had cast a spell stirring boiling sugar
And whispered ancient simple words
And as spring soars from
the dirt he would say agapa me

and my house full of worms, fat as fingers would dissolve
which is why I must plant, for butterflies to flutter
O my mighty easel, you are not like nature

though you are like a highway
of roots, clamped with straps
Supported or shaded, you reveal
all that I am.

The light begins to drop out of ticking stars
onto the snow bank behind the studio
the place where crimson and ochre mate.

I am really a painter
and my brushes are words
which glaze accidentally across
vellum, spurning censure.

Poem

I watched a truck churning under a wire convergence
and the sky above doped entrails coming from Europe
Where had the turtle gone, the one puffed in the curve of the fox?

Now clambering onto the icy porch
I open the door into
smells of brass polish, wood polish
pots full of bones.

Winter’s wind rattling time holds me in
I must make marmalade with Seville oranges
with their thick rutted craters, sadly moon-like

a little sweetness of the blossom
worn on bridal veils will come back
as the flesh boils soggy with pips
and Demerara’s sweetness pummels

and I’ll be beaming ear to ear, beaming, full
of a sugar high, then fall.  I don’t think I’ll be flying
to Jamaica, but at least I have a box of jars

My house will be dressed
of stiff forsythia branches, blooming
while I pull on stupoods of wool
socks, and wax my boards

I watched whirling snow collapse, loshing
on my face, signs of a dream, unsettling
separating mills and boon from reality.

If I had cast a spell stirring boiling sugar
And whispered ancient simple words
And as spring soars from
the dirt he would say agapa me

and my house full of worms, fat as fingers would dissolve
which is why I must plant, for butterflies to flutter
O my mighty easel, you are not like nature

though you are like a highway
of roots, clamped with straps
Supported or shaded, you reveal
all that I am.

The light begins to drop out of ticking stars
onto the snow bank behind the studio
the place where crimson and ochre mate.

I am really a painter
and my brushes are words
which glaze accidentally across
vellum, spurning censure.