I'll climb into the cockpit
of this beast that threatens
to beat the speed of light
though I might disappear.
I have Einstein's photograph
in my pocket for good luck.

We sit in church basements on
folding chairs drinking bad coffee
with shaking bones and shame in our eyes.
I'm Joe and I'm an alcoholic. Hi,Joe!

Christmas eve. Presents wrapped under
the tree. A fire in the hearth. Kids are all
smiles and best behavior. We toast the
scene again and again until it clicks in me.

I'm a ****** up monster full of rage and
I'll never know why. I roar and throw
all the presents in the fire with my life.
I will always be an I. I'll never be an us.

We are defined by many things in our lives.
  You're a good son. A great older brother.
  An eagle scout and crazy *** metal guitarist.
  A firebug and science nerd and my friend.

  I know cancer is devastating and destroys.
  Loved ones collateral damage of loose anger.
  You can't control your cancer. Life or death.
  Your victory is remaining Michael.

I love you inside your mind
  I love you outside your head.
  I love you in solitude or screaming
  stroking you gently or kissing thighs
  in dreams or nightmares bravely or
  shrinking in fear from your anger.
  I love you inside out and upside down
  north south east west night or day.
  I always love you most at 3AM while
  you gently snore and talk in your sleep.

Life goes on.
Not as good.
Still it breathes
wonderful life and
we can still touch and
kiss and god help us
be a man and woman
nearly die out of breath
but survive for tomorrow.
We'll live like this forever.

The march of the chardonnay,
    a battalion of wine boxes at
    attention in formation against
    my bedroom wall ready for war.
    I'm captain. Music is crashing.
    Empty boxes marching on parade.

You're done your share of suffering.
A lamb set afire to fulfill ancient rituals.

    You're cursed with a drawn out death sentence.
        Cancer is your grim reaper. Death with irony.
        The cure is worse than the disease. Poisons in
        your blood hoping to bring this monster down.

        You won the first battle. The war rages on.
        We celebrated and toasted that it regressed.
        It lived to fight again. It invaded new areas.
        Radiation to the brain tried to **** the *****!

        The enemy was routed but not vanquished. It
        came back with a vengeance, determined to
        outlive its host and **** and pillage as the
        victors always do. We hope you'll be pain free.

        I pray for you to die in the rain as it's death's
        Absolution. Forgiven. Reborn into another womb.  
        New lifetime to fill the pages of your life with
        whatever comes your way. We will never forget you.

As soon as I stopped caring about
impressing readers my poetry was
all about writing for me and it was
as it should always be. Poet.

I'm 71 tomorrow and I'm losing ground.
I still run but slow. I lift less weight.
I know we die in increments. I don't want
to live forever and watch my friends die.
I'll take my turn and go on time. I hope
to see Bailey settled in her own nest.

My girl favors sweatpants and sweaters
  like a nun. Under her armor she hides
  Victoria's secrets and pierces my heart
  and slays this dragon with her thong.

If I brought you the sun would you smother it.
  Would you deem a moon unworthy and turn it off?
  If you had redemption could you swallow pride?
  When I die will you forgive my refusal to love?

In no particular order these are
the poets I read and their poetry
influenced mine for better or worse.
Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost,
Dylan Thomas, Langston Hughes,
T. S. Elliot, Ezra Pound, Charles Bukowski,
Stephen Dunn, Anne Sexton, Kenneth Rexroth,
Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Billy Collins,
W. B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams,
e. e. cummings, W. H. Auden,
Theodore Roethke, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath,
Leonard Cohen, Ogden Nash and Fr. Paschael O.F.M.

Comrade, our fragile freedoms are gone.
We just don't know it yet. We've been
betrayed by our politicians who sold
their empty souls for bags of silver.
We send our sons to die in their wars.
They drink Champagne toasting wins
and dismiss massacres as bad luck.
Where did it all go wrong? We pay.

I don't crave attention like other poets.
    I couldn't care less about your opinions.
    You never read my poems anyway. Too long
    or short or blah been done to death yeah.
    I never was published and I'll die on a toilet
    in black and white like Elvis. I'm just you.

My liver is leaking.
   My heart escaped prison.
   I've never felt more alive.
   I'm in the combat zone where
   ****** sell love and queens
   give love away for a song.

Just be my breath and heartbeat for a start.
   Be the stories that made me fiercely weep.
   Every lust that ever brought me to an end,
   the absolute to my doubt, strength to my fear.
   Be my broken vows and promises forgiven.
   Be my gentle ending when my end is here.

We ***** these poems faster than HP can
handle. You need a fire hose to keep up.
We're a chatty bunch with endless sins we
need to confess into your priest hole.
We need to know our penance so we can
wipe our slates and fill them up again.

The night I saw you at Rugby's
was the night I was struck by
a bolt of lightning that woke
me to the wonders of Love.

Staring into death's eye is final.
I have no need for secrets or guilt
or hate for anyone who ever hurt me.
Scars don't survive dead. Scabs on the
heart are delicate food for the worms.
Earth's a distant star where souls meet.
I'm a jar of ash on your mantle. You
think me alive until your turn to die.

There's a calm in chaos
  silence while the world
  fades and clarity of
  reason in madness.
  "There's more good than
  bad in this one", is the
  best they can say over
  this bleeding out corpse.

When I die and they try to separate
the wheat from the chaff they'll find
odd stuff like Love **** and magazines
with naked ladies and gentlemen.
They might find things I wrote drunk
and angry and godawful truth.
Everything is lost in the long run.
Memories die with time's certainty.

Do you remember when the circus came to town?
We all woke from our small town stupor and hearts
beat right again. Exotic animals, people on high
trapezes and high wires almost balanced in clouds.
We had cotton candy and ******* Jacks. Light blinded
and I fell in love with the girl with dancing bears.

I was a hippie in 1969.
A long haired barefoot
freak with yellow stains
on my white carpenter jeans.
I had a lover like no other.
She bumped around my brain
like a pinball machine in pain.
I wonder how she's doing now.

I have no time to listen
to your supposition
of the conversation
of your observation
when you found her ****
swimming in an attitude
she thought it amusing
and started refusing
to name her admirer
who set her on fire.

Where the slaves were auctioned is
      a market selling trinkets to fools
      who don't understand why the black
      man who carries their bags to their
      rooms won't look them in the eye and
      thanks them for the tip and dismissal.

I look in my mirror and talk
to the old man staring at me.
Why are you smiling? Death
is not far away. We wasted
our best years. We chased
her and lived in bars and
racetracks and funerals of
broken souls just like us.
We keep smiling and tuck
another Ace in our sleeve.

In anything? Me or you or us?
Kids or Uncle Reggie's cancer?
War's brutal destruction?
Love's gentle healing?
A kind word to strangers?
A smile on the train and
laughter among the pain?
Dreams? Forever after?

Blink and you might see yourself in madness.
Spent years are stacked like ash beneath you.
You notice the hourglass is almost out of sand.
Mirrors are cruel reminders of sagging flesh and
missing hair and canyons in aged faces.
Death is the final madness after all.

I'll die as many times as it takes to
finally meet you the next time I live.
I live in your vast night full of stars
and your gravity keeps me close to you.

What good are they now? Today pales in their lights.
We live for Early Bird Specials and matinees.
We are cursed with memories of years ago.
So many lovers in the 60's and up all night
******* and smoking and drinking and ******
to help us sleep to do it all again tomorrow.

Raise your beers to us common men.
We wear denim and carry lunches to
rough jobs with rough hands packed
by rough wives in rough drafty homes.
We raise kids with rough love who can
endure in rough times and love men
with rough ways. We are common folk.
We're no better than the rest of you.

I asked to be forgiven.
     You didn't have it in you.
     I'll build a cross and carry
     it 12 lashes and be nailed
     upon it and die in agony with
     a crown made from thorns in
     your heart. Pierce me with
     hatred to die all alone.

He hid in the bedroom I grew up in.
He showed Himself years later when
I visited my parents at 6 Alcott and
slept in my old bedroom. He was there
and made me wonder about all of it.
I put him in my shaving kit and
kidnapped our savior. He haunts
me in my cups every night. I hold him.

We said "I do" before clocks ticked.
That was a time when broads like her
still existed thank all the gods! She
loved with the biggest heart and ******
with the most abandon and breathed fire
that scorched you to a cinder even though
she never would. We danced on tables in
bars long since gone. We partied with the
Fitzgeralds and Hemingway and entertained
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris
when it glowed as bright as noon at midnight.
We died in the fierce light with no regrets.

The day we went swimming in
our waterhole in underwear and
saw us as special boys who had
no rules was the day of our birth
baptized in the muddy water.
Our paths have diverged over
time. We set the world on fire
and made a difference at last.

It plays out on a stage by the sea.
  Violence, money, *** and drugs
  paint the scene blood red smelling
  of copper and naked angels die again.
  I'm left with your artifacts as proof
  you loved me when I was still pure.

She always had a place in her heart just for me.
  I don't know why but she never judged me. She had
  me and my ***** wife stay at her mansion open arms.
  She knew things about my life I was too young to know.
  My war torn father had PTSD anger I was too young for.
  She was gentle and kind. She knew things I never knew.

I remember your touch and I hunger
like the night we became us on the
back stairs as the party faded away
into white noise and my heart beat
into yours and I knew my world just
fell to pieces and broken promises
and broken children were coming.
I relive it one second at a time.
I still look for you everywhere
hoping we can find the back stairs.

I saw it sprayed on a rock.
  "Why Do You All Hate Me?"
  I thought I don't know you
  so I can't hate you but if
  we meet for coffee I'll try.
  Maybe you'll hate me instead?
Maybe we'll duel at dawn.
Maybe we'll fall madly in love?

Everything is fragile now.
  I take special care walking.
  A fall could break a hip and
  send me to death's landfill.

  I used to climb trees and fall
  and bounce up to climb again.
  I rode bikes downhill as fast
  as I could risking everything!

  I smoked and drank all night
  with loose boys and girls. We
  skipped class and ****** in
  impossible spaces. We lived!

  We have bingo and "dances" where
  we shuffle with our walkers.
  Fading memories bent like
  question marks, with no answers.

Write your hearts out.
Tap dance on mean streets
throwing sparks into never.
Your words die wordlessly
rejected corpse buried in
The New Yorker's graveyard.

We have a type. We are mad as hatters
but crazy in love. Yin yang.
We burst into flames at happy hour
screaming about nothing anyway.
We swallow the fire and break the bed
and wake entwined in noon's mad sun.

Lawyers always get paid up front.
  Victims are buried, killers in jail.
  Plea deal for living, prayers for dead.
  Children offered as sacrifices to laws.
  In cold light of day sins are laid bare.
  We dark souls pray to godless heavens.

We poets watch the world our eye
    glued to a microscope. We pick it
    apart and we lecture in slow motion.
    We examine nerve ends as blood explodes
    when your soul mate breaks your heart.
    We've felt your pain and suffer with you.
    We are undertakers dressed as clowns.
    We are clowns who bury your dead
in irony. They never looked so good?
Poets always die misunderstood.

We burn bridges.
We burn us in effigy.
We burn crosses with
no feelings of anger
just ignorant as sheep.
We burn brightest in love
and kindness we share.
We burn to ashes at the
world's end facing
fierce fire together
exiting this paradise we
surrender to the flames.

I look the same day to day like the
dogs and cat and cereal and toast.
I wake a stranger every day afraid
of different outcomes with unknown
villains plotting my demise. You are
the only constant in this universe.
You are my sword and armor and
resolve. You are my Bedlam with
restraints and pills and cruel men
with straitjackets for my comfort.
Strength is deep inside us all.
It's our ever present Hallelujah.

I drop my frozen tears into
my cup of wine for comfort.
I pray for your soul and visit
you often at your grave to
share gossip and heal my
heart just one more time.

can you save me from fires of hell?
were you born poor in a lean to barn?
do you talk to the animals and heal sick?
are you celibate? are you a catholic priest?
who was your father? was he a pharaoh?
was your mother really a ******?
did you attend Catholic School?
are you a time traveller without a watch?
are you mostly carbon, mr. christ?
did you die ****** nailed on that cross?

Not all love is lost as time can't heal all wounds.
   Lust has no use for time beyond a fortnight. It withers.
   Keep your heart under lock and key but your knees apart
   for my midnight wine stoked visit to your sacred chamber.