It belongs to those I love.
I'd end it sometimes but I
would never hurt them.
Loss might drive them
to despair and dominoes
would fall on and on.

I'm Okay and all of that.
It was only me that died.
Easier than I expected.
I feel for those poor souls
at my funeral shedding
tears and praying for me.

Your gold hair is a halo in the
     heat lightening of our summers
     growing closer to kisses and touch.
     Our gravity was lost. You drifted
     into other orbits. I heard things.
     I saw tracks on your arms and your
     bones turning tricks on the Strip.
     You still have a halo in midnight
     neon.  I stare from my bar stool
     as you pass in the night searching.
     We're both lost together, just
     lost souls in different places.

They fussed over my birth like a Christ
child born in a manger. A toast to our new
boy with special in his bones and heart.
He'll suffer all our pain silent and with
laughter. He'll climb into many wombs to
find comfort but always birth himself to
slain what he needs to for his old dames.
I love them and raise a glass to toast them.

She was born and raised in Charleston's
rural islands with a view of the world we
could never understand today.
The slave market is a flea market now.

I'm in my cups at midnight
ready to bury my old bones
in bed once more when she
comes around. Quincy my
cyclops my one eye cat
is up all night fixing
my poems. I never could
find the perfect lines.

There's a place among the living
   we've provided for the dead. Remains
   in graves we never walk on. Bad luck.
   Superstition keeps our dead harmless.

   I died helping the sick and dying. Ha!
   I actually died in my sleep. I was dreaming
   of being strapped in a guillotine during the
   French Revolution and I lost my head.

   I've lived a good and bad life. Depends on
   who writes the moral code. Do we condemn
   our lustful desires? Do we arrest for stealing
   a loaf of bread or meds for our children?

   Society has a lot to answer for. Who died
   and left you boss? My chemistry and my
   biology are my puppet masters. I am a naked
   ape who has been "Blessed" with self awareness.

I sit here stunned stupid by wine
   finally happy but still not satisfied.
   What's missing? What will fill the void
   of all the lovers who went wrong?
   I just can't find the right song to soothe
   my savage beast. I don't have a lot of time.

I've fought this war with me in
  flooded rat infested trenches
  I die in me over and over and
  all I see is barbed wire blood.
  I want victory but will accept
  a truce. Pride tears me apart.

Hippie times long haired
****** drunk poet
at a party as my second
marriage disintegrates
I came out of the head
naked with a beer.

You want to see naked truths?

    Look into the sun.
    War makes billionaires.
    Puppet dictators make billionaires.
    Slave wages make billionaires.
    Addictions make billionaires.
    Bought politicians make billionaires.

    Look into the moon.
    Most of us are fools
    who live by rules.
    We wear denim and flannel
    and pray to God Almighty.
    We buy a suit off the rack
    to wear to weddings and dances
    and funerals. We'll be buried in it.
    We eat casseroles and drink cheap beer.
    We stink from the work we do.
    We laugh as hard as anyone, maybe more.
    You'll find us pinching pennies at Walmart.
    We just have one spouse from high school
    and we sleep in the same bed and cuddle.

    Look into the abyss if you can stand it.
    It's pitch black. Blinded by the sun or just
    sick to death of truth's brutality?
Buried in forever midnight.

I'm a stooge on a stage
in a life ****** on me
not of my choosing. I'm
Shakespeare's Romeo to
a lost *****'s Juliet.
We wind our way forward
on a wind most foul
to Bethlehem's manger.
I curse the fools on the
stage tasked with nailing
my son onto his cross to
eat madness we embrace.

She was lovely. She was blond.
  She took me to her bed naked.
  She went quiet guilty nun on me.
  I spent my seed and left her praying
  to whatever deity lived in her head.
  I sat with the living on my bar stool.
I wonder to this day what the proctor
graded me on ******* a lonely corpse.

The woman with the crazy hair
and the neon heart in her window
falls gently beneath me and I
never felt love like that again.

Everybody is screaming into
microphones over each other.
Nothing makes sense anymore.
We're left ignorant wanting more.
Poets used to speak the truth for
us but now they've gone mute.
We need to go to war with words
lead the charge for change to it.

Night defeats the sun
    and hangs its pale imposter
    in its own sky
    to wax and wane
    and woo young lovers
    under the boardwalk.

    Monsters hide under beds
    while skeletons fill closets
    and life gets lived always
    hanging in the balance.
    Dawn beats back the dark and
    makes us live another day.

Quiet and alone snow crunches
  with my steps. I'm coming home.
  You wait. The fire in our bed.
  I'd go to the ends of the earth.

I think of the night we met
  and drink an ocean of wine
  to put me down and meet you
  all over again. I'd die for it.

I lead them with my baton.
   My whole crazy orchestra
   plays frenzied on the sun.
   I hum in ****** nirvana.

I do.

When you stole my heart I was dancing.
  When I was on my knees adoring you.
  When I ****** your splendid **** and
  we spent a night asleep and we ******
  in morning and you wept. Joy or sorrow?
  Never an easy answer to do you love me?

My world's so full of silence I can hardly think.
  At 3 am I finally hear my beating heart
  ticking my mistakes and reciting their names.
  My life passes before me like a movie once again.

Life's a lucky penny found then lost
in life's day to day mayhem of death.
Hashtag all you want. Protest and riot.
History has taught us no lives matter.
Wars waste it. Plague turns it black and
the stench fills the streets. Hunger won't
feed it and it dies on its own vine. Life
kills itself. It's fool's gold after all.

Noun, adjective and impossible to be is normal.
  It makes us hide our nervous tics and twitches.
  I have panic attacks and breakdowns and need
  pills, ***** and endless lovers to feel normal.
  I see shrinks and dealers for the drugs offered.
  I'm a one trick pony that wears out welcomes.

1970 I hid in a shallow hole
as explosions tore the earth
around me with impunity.
Communists tried to **** me
and I didn't want to die.
I remembered the fireworks
on the Fourth of July when
we first kissed and held hands.
I have come to doubt what
I once held as true. Wars are
never moral and sinners are
never forgiven for their sins.

Each click of the second hand
    validates my life. It's seamless.
    I'm here and now. Maybe not smooth
    as time can be reduced to billionth
    of a second.  Slices of time we can't
    even begin to imagine. An incredible
    number of snapshots! Life continues.
    We desperately try to slow it down,
    somehow tame time.  This a beast we'll
    never defeat. Nothing lasts forever.

There's nothing here.
There's nothing there.
I'm gone somewhere
but I don't know where.
I still feel love and pain
and all our up and downs.
Will you appear tomorrow a
visitor from outside the walls?
Will you bring a shadow of us
to fill the terrible nothing?

Old Joe's drumming on the pots and pans
    as someone hums a harmony and starts a
    symphony as others join into the noise.
    Soon dancers move into the picture and
    flail about as only the mad can. They
    are perfect in this human zoo. I love
    every scar. We each own every flaw.
    There but for the grace of you go I.

I'll die when it is my turn.
I won't argue that my coupon
gets me another week or so.
I'll vacate the body known as Bill.

When I die release the doves to
     follow my spirit and have the band
     play 'When the Saints' and a buffet
     table a mile long. I don't want sorrow.
     Forget regrets and simmering feuds.
     None of that matters anymore. If I
     broke your heart forgive me, if you
     broke mine you're forgiven. I hope I
     was a decent son, brother, husband,
     father. I know I fell short at times.
     You'll never really know me. I don't
     really know myself.  We're complex
     and conflicted. I hope on death's
     scale I can come out even at the end.

A cup I fill with coffee in the morning
  or with wine in the afternoon til' sleep.
  A needle she fills with magic potions
  that make her many ghosts for pleasures.
  A razor that calls like sirens from rocky
  shores to slash a vein and join her chorus.

You calm me. You terrify me.
I'm kissed gently at your edge
but your riptide can sweep me
out where love dies 3 times.

Some similarly hideous beast
will offer you stardom for your
wound that never heals.
LA is full of predators who
lust for the young beauties
flocking there from small towns
to be discovered at lunch counters
but end up on director's couches.

I'm around the bend
and up the creek. My
skin is parchment and
my eyes are cloudy and
ears full of lies.
I'm not fragile.
I don't shrink from
the crisis created by
Goldfinger. I'm
Bond. James Bond.
Follow me to my
happy ending.

My skin doesn't fit anymore.
It's 2 sizes too big and my bones
live in a circus tent and my face
gaunt and eyes sunk in my skull.
I'll still write these poems so you
will be prepared for being old.

Maybe I'm just a drunk old bird
complaining from the barn rafters.
I make noise and **** when it suits.
No one pays me any mind.
My world always grows colder.
Peck my carcass when it's time.

You hid your ****** away. I forgot its utility.
  You are still beautiful in certain light.
  **** you for hiding behind matronly flannel
  while I gave up on ******* and beat me to death.

If I pluck the strings of
   my worn out heart and it's
   as though an old man were
   leafing through an album
   with a ghost forgive me.
   I'm living in old photos.

I'm an old poet with a young heart
pleading for an honest appraisal.
Is my poetry worth the time to read?
Do I matter now? Did I ever?
That is the bigger question.
I know the answer. Nothing lasts.
Shakespeare and Yeats and God will
someday be lost to time's cruelty.

I've run a thousand miles at least.
Am I running to or from I wonder?
Am I chasing youth? Do I run from years?
I run from promises I made and I run
to lovers to make more pinky swears.
I'll chase Her until I die in your heart.

Lost love smells of rotting corpses,
  failed battles and the futility of war.
  I wake screaming. I never slept and
  the old grey man in my mirror smiles.
  I think of our magic times. I smell
your perfume. We'll dance in my cups.

Let feelings pass through like weather
    and never mind why caged birds sing.
    Guillotines left talking heads blinking.
    These things are meant to be forgotten.
    My people were starved in Ireland by
    the British who sold the crop instead.
    These things are meant to be forgotten.
    If we let hate marinate we'll burn in
    our own hell we create with gasoline
    and clubs and guns. Only ashes are left.

They trust our blind allegiance to their lies.
    We will bury them with their own arrogance.
    Forget your petty differences with the world.
    We're in a lifeboat, the Titanic ******* us down.

We loved ourselves but loved
us more together and we danced
naked drunk to our music in your
dorm room in a black spotlight
we could only see when *******.
It was the last time we touched.
I'm trapped inside an ancient ruin
from 1967. I'll end my poem here.

I remember the day we drove all over
looking for our perfect graves. We were
18 and determined to never say goodbye.
We settled for under a strong Oak in
fertile ground where our souls grow.
We swore to die together in one grave.

Our masters have given us answers
        abandoned the truth to bend us to
        totalitarian dreams where everyone's
        a widget, cogs in wheels of commerce.
        They have homes for all the seasons.
        We live in boxes with lofty promises.

What am I?
You can't fix it,
can't make them forget it.
You can't take it away from them.
You can only treat it with respect.
It's peoples' pain and they own it.

I watch them under streetlamps
strutting near naked in tall heels.
They remind me of every fantasy
I ever knew and I desire them now.
Married far too long in lean times
I want love's lies in motel rooms.

The Postman and the *******

He was dependable in all weather.
She was a free spirit yearning for love.
Lost lovers destined to be,
united against all odds.
The take away is this;
Miracles happen every day
to everyone of us but we're
too blind to see them.

I'm sane and insane.
I'm honest and a liar.
I'm a thief and generous
with things you need.
I love and I hate you
in turns that I can't
understand. I see you
in perfect halo then
your sun blinds me.
I'll never see you again.