Life wears me out with its
twists and turns, and
hairpin curves.
I keep waiting for
a long, peaceful stretch
of a highway, bathed in
the rising sun.
A golden wheatfield to
to the left, a moss-covered
pond with dragonflies to
the right.
The road turns to gravel
and climbs rapidly uphill.
There are signs along the
way that promise the world.
The road gradually turns
to dirt and ultimately
disappears.

paralytic skies
hold close their embrace
folding in
upon themselves

glaring
burning cobalt eyes

crushing
their despairing captives

whose hollow faces
drag the recalcitrant air
into the cavities
of spiritless lungs

blood and bone
test the bars
of their inherited prison
built with
walls of allegorical stone

they cast
their harrowed gaze
upward

prospecting for pay dirt
through tapped out veins
of hope
and love
in strip mined heavens

SNOW FALLS

She wakes to a morning
with no reason for living

cries in the mirror
to be forgiven.

Puts on her make-up
takes off her clothes

sits there & bleeds
until she can’t feel

the blood in her veins
...runs cold.

The razorblade
bleeds...bleeds.

The cat cries
to be fed.

The batteries in her Walkman
go dead.

The Rachmaninov stops.

A letter she will never read
drops on the Welcome mat.

A mobile rings & rings &...stops.

A member of a minor political party
looking for her vote

rings the doorbell twice
slips on the ice    &   ruins his coat.

Curses.

A man laughs at another man’s joke.
It’s a big laugh...he’s a big bloke.

Laughter invades the square.

There’s a chill in the air.

A friend calls for her
(to go on a blind date)  

...she doesn’t hear.

Snow...
...snow...
...snow falls.

There are moments in
my life that are
too wild and
beautiful to be
tamed or captured by
words or sentences.
Musical notes could
do a better job at
conveying the experience.
D minor
or C sharp major.

My mind replays
the moments,
alive with pentatonic scales
and the taste of homemade
apple cider, and pomegranate
security.
I smell the burning leaves of
late October, and feel
the smooth nose of my
childhood Appaloosa, her
dappled coat, and trusting eyes.

Sometimes the world, and
all its goodness
stupifies me, and leaves
my spirit rocking gently in
a cradle, where I know it's
all going to be okay.

LOVE REMEMBERED

all that remains
her cigarette smoke
crawling lazily to the ceiling

her footsteps
echoing down the hall
the angry slam of a red door

from the pavement floats up
the clickity-clack of red stilettos
the Morse Code for loss

a Focus LP
caught on a scratch
caught on a scratch

the same pale pink
lipstick kiss
on cigarette and champagne glass

rain falling now
in the open window
wetting the still sleeping cat

a church bell
scatters crows
a drunk staggers down the road

the end never appears
to be the end and then
it just is

I stumble against the record player
Focus get back into the groove
"...'round goes the gossip...'.round goes the gossip..."

NEW YORK STATE OF MIND

Walt Whitman
walks by me
somewhere in 1892

I nod to him...he nods to me
lost in himself
Clinton is being inaugurated

Brooklyn Bridge
saunters by
dressed in the summer of '67

the subway
wears its best graffiti
the music of trains and Coltrane

the Flatiron Building is jaywalking
the Empire State
chats him up

a child's hopscotch
almost washed away
a moment's masterpiece

Robert Moses
looks across Long Island
longs to build the city only he sees

he gazes into my future
I look into his past
I pass Robert Mapplethorpe

a man in a white suit
nailed to the darkness
by so many stars

an old saxophone player busks
Rogers and Hart in Central Park
"...I didn't know what time it was..."

two obese Chinese
take up too much of the sidewalk
both speaking fluent - Irish?

"Leaves of Grass"
lies scattered across the road
read now by the wind

a car caught in traffic
blares out Joel's
"New York State of Mind"

I laugh at such
a happenstance
a walk-on-part in my own movie

escaping the borders
of the body
I walk through times

I am all the times
of the world
they intersect in self

Walt and I
sitting on a park bench
waiting to go somewhere else

an 1990's rain
falls on an 1870's NY
they are beginning Brooklyn Bridge

I meet my self
coming and going
an older and a younger me

time held prisoner on the wrist
I turn and walk away
into this the newest of centuries

CREATING YOU

The seconds flock
about me

nibbling at the Who I Am
time devouring my existence.

My dreams walk around
naked.

A sky lies asleep
in a window.

My shadow crawls
up the walls

as if it longed
to escape  me.

The mirror shows a stranger
wearing my face.

In the candle's flicker I
live frame by frame

in a black and white
celluloid  world.

I can only touch you
with language

hold you
with words

create you time
and time again

as you come alive
walk about in my sentences.

As long as I write
you are living.

I dreading the final
full stop.

I see you
walk away

into an ellipsis'
footsteps

you fading into
its dot dot dot

on the snow drift
of a page

the slow slide
down from the stars above. love,

it leaves so fast,
grows so quickly cold.

she had looked into the shark's dead eyes
and found the friend
that waits in silent shadows

that draw the dying
inside themselves and into

the lone, solitary ring
of the cold church bells song.

Sylvia stared with dead eyes
and rode the white horse of death into the fire.