Christ! When I was in high school
a band made a song that reached
through the years and touched my
70 year old self and I'm stunned.

I write this sonnet for you
purer than our midnight
full moon, *** act one, in
the dead bed in motel 6,
you left for other tricks.
Afterward I got my fix
the purest of any mix
I ever shot up for kicks.

I wrote my soul word for word
on a grain of rice big as Mars
and called it my Suicide Note and
plastered it on windows of my bars
they took my ashes once they cooled
packed them to sell in Jelly jars.

I'm a son of god.
I'm a broken drunk
puking in gutters.
I'm your ex.
I'm your lover
always hungry.
I buy your drugs.
I smell your incense.
I feel your pain.
Be crucified like me.
Escape the tomb then
we'll compare scars.

I bring you invisible to the party to
   meet my friends on an autism spectrum.
   They drink every third beer and **** on
   the hour. They avoid eye contact and guess
   your IQ and love your smell and fear you.
   They like us. They invite us to come again.

You can keep your sun.
    My moon's on fire tonight.
    I'll keep the laughter and
    let you hold onto the pain.
    Pets are going to be our war.
    You take the house. I keep them.

I was conceived in the wrong womb.
  That's my life in a nutshell.
  It was one I never wore well.
  Greenhills, OH. Suburbia writ large.
  Lovely family and all but Bumpkinville
  so boring I took up smoking 8th grade.
  A swimming pool but I craved an ocean.
  I wanted a boardwalk and carneys and girls
  bold enough to kiss me like I needed.
  I wanted canyons of skyscrapers to wander
  and junkies and perverts and hookers who
  knew the price of meat. I wanted a library
  with every book ever writ held out for me
  to devour and digest so I'd be smarter than
  my father and teachers and the *******
  Parish priests who loved their altar boys.

What stage could contain my passion?
What life could the bard write for me?
What lover could tame my wicked  lust?
I'll swallow a pill of my sins and die
while the world spins on its axis
in the darkness and stars guide us.
Bury me in the shade of an oak tree.
Visit me and I'll whisper secrets.

It wasn't love. It was confusion.
Harvest moon's shadow all along
shifting in the midnight surf as
we walked to our forbidden bed.
Stain of ******'s surrender bled.

      there's hope in despair
      fear in bravery
      ignorance in certainty
      doubt in forgiveness
      love lost inside love.

Each poem is stained with wine,
   sweat, tears and sometimes blood.
   I'll write gently of my doomed
   loves. We were sincere and naive,
   too young to taste death's smell.
   Promises were made and abandoned
   for lust. My only friend after all.
   Never trust poets for truth, just honesty.

I shine as brightly as I can.
     You don't see me in your night.
     If I explode will you notice me
     as I die spectacular star death?

We all exist from random atoms
pieces made from star dust
billions of years ago and a
billion years out of reach.
We dig coal from the Earth
and plant our seeds into her
soil and love our women and
plant our seeds into them.
The seasons come and we
dance in barns Saturdays
and pray on knees in church
Sundays 3 blind mice eating
our harvest in silos all that's
left to hold onto after all.

Steel wheeled chairs we spend our days in
  "marching" in parades on the 4th of July.
  Little flags wave. Fewer each year as the
  memories die like our fallen brothers.

I fought my way through her
****** and saw life pass before me.
Maybe it was my disaster or hers.
I screamed my breaths in anger.
I missed home like Dorothy in Oz.
I never found the yellow brick road.

'Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone'

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

W H Auden

We all have bunches of stories that
define us. We tell them in our cups
when truth comes easy forgotten in
morning. I stand naked for a moment.

I stand naked in a strange light
in my bathroom in the mirror
looking 35 but I'm 79 so what
magic does a young lover cast?
She thinks I'm moon and sun.
At death's door I've just begun.

there's so much pleasure
inside pain that's hidden
by thick walls of guilt
we can't hope to overcome.
we must live within shells
taught us from birth by
religion and parents who
were taught it from birth
and on and on until a bright
child might refuse to believe.
He'll write of straw men, men
who breathe dust and live as
dead men with pulse and vitals.
He will survive the riptide and
attacks from brilliant fools who
embrace ignorance for the power.
He will bleed for truth and die
again and again until he's heard.

They caught my stray heart.
   It went into a kennel and was
   put on the auction block where
   women would rescue it and try
   to keep it. It always jumped
   their fences and got away.

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.

Everybody struggles.
Rich, poor or in between.
Some have everything.
Some have nothing.
We all fight our demons
and suffer in our own hell.

The world keeps spinning
   against my will. I stop time
   in my secret world and live
   barefoot in summer grass.
   I build dams in the creek
   and play with crawdads and
   steal change for candy and
   army men from Rathman's.

   Mom never really got me.
   I lived her script when
   I had to. Boy trapped.
   I smell summer's grass.
   I live in a hospice bed  
   and smile big morphine
   grins as my boy trapped
   dies in the summer grass.

That time you burned so bright
   a star I could never stop watching
   was the time I fell in love again
   but this love was forever after all.

I give up. I've tried all my life to find
Love that sweeps me off my feet.
West Side Story Maria and Tony love.
The only thing I find is lust.
It's loves' villain that kills families
and innocence and my hope after all.

I lived as long as I could.
Life wore me down day by day.
Pills and shrinks and shocks tried
to solve me. My poems put my
puzzled life together but all they
saw was crazy girl lost in modern
times without a north star. I
died with my head in their oven.

Plant your flag in your soil of choice.
I don't love or hate you for politics.
I like you if you like me. I'll laugh
at your jokes and love your poems.

politicians recycle their tired clichés
plastic Christs with plastic pulpits
pitch platitudes like mucking stalls
to a million suckers ready for saving.
pockets bulge with lucre. Lambs slaughtered.
the guilty dance on innocents' graves.
Rod was always gentle calm a lovely man,
a friend dead with AIDS before we knew.
Breath rattled inside his chest and skin
hung on bone like tired faded curtains.

Coney Island, Cincinnati

   You were glorious and spectacular
   more fun than a barrel of monkeys
   a thrill a minute with roller coasters
   and Ferris wheels and side shows, cotton
   candy and near beer to persuade dates
   to the tunnel of love and a kiss or 2.
  
   Now the splendor is just rusted iron
   and rotted wood and peeling paint and
   graffiti and broken windows. We live
   old and fat and bald in misery we got
   used to long ago. We ride this Beast in
   terror and thrills to our bitter ends.

As honest as it gets. That scale
gives you your money's worth.
Weigh my love for you. Is it
even? Does your love balance?
Do my tears weigh the same?
Does my misery weigh the same?
Will my suicide move the scale?
Will your tears even it all out?
Love's a slaughterhouse. We
die in chutes always in love.

We worship on bar stools in smokey
  churches with neon gods and clergy
  behind the altar with the holy blood
  bottled in rows in front of mirrors.
  Our hymns play on a jukebox while
  we sway in harmony feeling the grace
  flowing between our souls as one.
  Our bible is the newspaper and we
  confess our sins to each other.
  At last call we're given absolution.

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.

Someone will die tonight.
Someone will be born and
someone will be admitted
to a mental hospital.
Someone's going to jail
and the City eats them.

The letter comes in the mail you've
been waiting your whole life for.
We want to publish your collection
of poetry you submitted and you'll
be famous and the toast of towns.
Women will swoon and you can
be as drunk as you want and
misbehave. You're celebrated.

I step obedient in the line
  to the train waiting for us,
  the Jews. We took what mattered
  most. Children and old family and
  we tucked small sacred into pockets.
  Who'd do genocide in modern times?
  I lost my family. I lost my mind.
  I lived an afterlife, an abortion.

He mourns all the anonymous souls
   buried randomly in the potters' field.
   How do we become that distant from them?
   He has tears enough for the entire world.
He is us if there's a chance for redemption.

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.

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.

Like used rubbers old lovers haunt my bed.
  As I drift to sleep I hear words like Love,
  Need, Forever, Till Death. I take a ******.
  I sleep a fitful sleep and wake with ghosts.

  We eat breakfast and shower and I
  have to get to work. They visit me
  through the day and remind me
  to never disregard another heart.

  After work I go to a bar stool and
  proceed to lobotomize my brain with
  alcohol and smokes and small talk.
  The laughter burns bright and I forget.

  We cab it to my place and drunk and naked
  play at love forever for an hour or two.
  She goes and I try to sleep with the ghosts
  but their numbers! I take all the ******.

I came to the same fork as Frost
but took the worn path and never
looked back or wondered what if.
It made all the difference after all.

A mob lives in my head some nights
screaming like my angry lovers sounding
like sirens echoing down alley ways
going to emergency or going to jail
when I try to sleep at night.

   They shout angry slogans and
   scream ******* all night long.
   Sirens sound like bitter wives
   whining loud as white noise now,
   and some lives matter sometimes.
   Some never mattered in the womb.

I'm over served and under read.
   I'm almost every poet ever lived.
   We thrive in squalor and denim
   and body odor and the stink of us.
   We've been banished from polite
   society until we are published,
   feted and rude to ******* snobs.
   The rich love slumming with us.

It gets hard to hear over the noise of our times.
Everyone screams their bedridden complaints over
again like we've never heard. We're blind not deaf.
The Voice whispers at 3am when I can't stop thinking
long enough to sleep. It sounds like mom and god and
lovers lost long ago and old men speaking of old wars
and young pups who want to taste blood of new battles.
I lament and repent and resent and relive my life told
in dead night quiet as I listen with laughs and tears to
The Voice That is Great Within Us.

It can't be silenced. It echoes
louder than thunder and guilt.
It roars inside the conscience
and makes us all beg for mercy.

It was poised to erupt in flames.
Every group with agendas poured
gasoline on the whole **** thing.
The spark was always gonna' be black.
Will it have to burn to the ground?
Can love even exist in rainbows?

Plague has shut the world down.
Everyone is suspect. Family and
friends and dogs and cats are lethal.
Move to lonely and sad and live alone.

This old poet poses with his worn out lines.
     Tender poetry of youth and love's beginnings,
     faltering steps beyond puberty's uncertainty.

     I've pounded my love on typewriters, each letter
     has a part to play in this drama with a weight
     all its own. Smash a key and it opens old wounds.

He stands behind the podium,
   grand and pigeon proud. Poet
   for the ages. Long dead but
   died young a poet of drunk
   appetites ******* with passion
   fitting a poet after all. Dylan.
   I try to die on your cross to
   write. I only kneel at the grave.

I never feel as helpless.
Thunderstorms and dogs shaking
our night apart. I curse gods
of thunder and try to comfort
my dogs in my arms to no avail.
Our love's never enough.

We all throw love at your feet
all you do is walk your street
strutting like the Queen of hearts
with all your pleasure arts.