Sometimes these words are all we have & you
Know I don't use them with a supple tongue,
Would speak as lion if I could, or dog
Or even snake--at least a subtile beast--
While I have thoughts I never recognize
Until it's too late to make any use
And what I mainly want is physical,
This ticking passage of the intellect
Is not about the things that matter most,
Yet here I am, staining the sheets again,
As one who lived a hundred years ago
And hoped to slide between the legs of time.

They got pills now that take the place of words
So I'm thinking poetry should give it
Over, being unreliable at
Best and dangerous used as intended.
No quaaludes anymore so that rules out
Ballads, but with serotonin juicers
We could all of us be Rod McKuen.

It does no good to argue with a dog.
God knows they have the patience of a stone,
Devotion to a feckless masquerade
The wordy breed has ****** upon us all,
While shouldering the burden of the world.

Not all the world is word, you dare to say.
And i can only nod, so slow to see
The difference, who even prayed, when prayer
Seemed possible, in punctuated breath.

We must have love suggested now and then,
Believing it exists despite the pain--
A longshot or illusion I suppose,
The fool's lost invocation, Pan's lament,
Come up to something more than harmony
On fractured lines where we invented words,
Then tore them up, a beautiful display
Of broken things like hearts & window panes,
Notes hanging low and bent beneath the sky
We're also told is nothing more than dust.
But I insist it's there, so blue today.

Your movement to an upper latitude
Has tilted earth a smidgen.  Gravity,
A badly weakened force, reciprocates,
Just strong enough to hold a world in place
But not to stay your drifting. Mountains green,
So far from Tennessee you're orbiting,
While I in place beside my jar, uncorked
And **** near gone, must ride this wobbled wheel.

So deep in the blues the devil couldn't
Wake me up, she said Bob you blow my mind
And I said I don't care about any
Of that stuff you got and I don't think you
Ever loved anybody, least likely
Yourself and she cussed a little hearing
It put that way by a fool who hasn't
Lost his innocence and repeats himself
A thousand times in a bad night like now,
When the wind is up and even the birds
And the insects give it a break.  You know
What I mean, better than I can say it,
Which ain't that good lately, deep in the blues.