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Never fall in love in autumn.
Hear me again,
I beg you
Never fall in love in autumn.

Take it from me,
I have fallen in love in autumn.
And every time, it left me broken.
It seems every time, the passion dies,
Just like the leaves die and fall.

Maybe that is why another word for
Autumn,
Is fall.
Ironically, I'm telling you
To never fall in love in fall.

Maybe it's inevitable for me,
But I hope I can save you the heartache.
Caught between today and tomorrow
My dreams and my ambitions
My losses and my failures
Holding on and making plans
Wondering if I can capture
and hold onto my next dream
Good night!
My vision,
fifty years disturbed,
lines deep grooved,
do my eyes surround,
eye witnesses to all I've seen,
the limited I remember,
and the even lesser,
the clouded remaindered,
I've actually understood.*

By nature,
an accepter, not a skeptic, 
nonetheless,
a squinter extraordinaire,
looking out not in askance oblique,
but for focus, clarity,
unconscious of his
disheveled appearance,  
the crow lines and the forehead furrows
and the crazy hair flying everywhere

Need now two hands to
enumerate the decades of
failed recordings and
misfiled data collections

Stacks of scribble filled yellow legal pads,
black n' white photographs with serrated edges
testify to the existence of the 99% forever gone.

This day's dawn
I squint-eyed watch
as I write,
this day's recording
I squint-eyed tap,
into a tablet,
into a memory.
proof to all,
especially myself,
that my vision,
in both my
mind's eyes and impoverished words,
fail to satisfy history's needs yet again

So I lay awake,
looking south over calm waters,
sun's peekaboo just begun,
realizing that my tainted visions of distant pasts,
of little import,
more **** than treasure everlasting.

T'is the future visions of generations
on lawn playing,
little hands delight exclaiming,
star and bay gazing,
the only vision I e're wanted to deed,
this vision, internal, construct perfect,
resurrected dawn daily, forever

Even if I must squint to see it clear,
its loss an impossible intolerable cost,
an unacceptable fear, all for nought,
even blind in living color,
this vision
persists


Silver Beach

5:53 AM 9/2/12
the vision was eventually realized
Was fun, I enjoyed the poems
I read
Hope to read some more
real soon
no way you could know that
I have driven US 80, when
the Pennsylvania Turnpike
was considered a legitimate deathtrap,
and 80 was a god-send

shuttling back and forth tween
Cleveland (o/k/a The  Burning River City) and NYC,
in the crappiest weather man
could just about tolerate,
and 84 was just an
incomplete dream then,
so we one day,
could skip that idlewild,
Passaic, New Jersey,
back in '69

indeed the Pocono deer that
came through the windshield,
luckily, legs first,
after smashing the radiator,
that I dragged by hooves
to the side of the road,
still well recall, for that
was the first time I touched a
living thing dying in my hands

when I broke my arm in
Tannersville one summer night,
they drove me to the big city,
Scranton,
woo hoo,
cause the break was bad ,
they need to operate,
so they left me there,
w/o any anesthetic,
in the hallway(!) till morn
and a "see ya later kid,"
how they did things in a tough place
known as central Penna.,
which now I think of
semi-fondly as the place where
a piece of me was left buried
and I am still alive to swell tell

but people were tougher back then,
even me, a city 13 year old boy,
cause I had dreams of  girls,
wonderful girls, who had powers in their bodies
that could do things to me in the Poconos forests,
that were unthinkable (for them) after crossing
over the Hudson River,
and that was plenty
anesthetizing

so dem my bona fides,

and Now I Will Write
just another overdue thank you
for Balise, who writes
with a coolest heated blazing detachment,
and then at the very end,
IN ALL CAPS,
smacks you on the head
via the heart

writin'  
of
this n' that,
Mass and men,
worshipping a river called the Lackawanna,
the bleakness of a not quite grimy poverty,
(I worked in  Republic Steel warehouse)
that made grey a bright color,
and the sun was invisible from October to May,
in a world where people PROUDLY,
clung to their guns and religion,
(you arrogant out of touch Harvardian snob,
Mr. Obama prima donna),
you had to see it to believe it

of
herons and beer cans,
of parents and pain,
so exquisitely,
that I would gladly
drive to Tannersville again,
right now,
if I could, if I could,
yet learn that skill under her tutelage,
which by the by, is why some call me
still crazy, still crazy, after all those years,
crazy from a balise,
a wintry blizzard heating the readers eyes, and
who reads my footnotes
and thus
only this woman,
knows, better than she ever realized,
where his undulatin' poems come from...
a new poem (words, words, words but another drug), bolt upright, uplight, reattach yourself to the liquid of the music,
soothe the irritation, slowdown the shaking hand,
give god or his creatures, the nocturnes and sonatas,
a chance to restore the pounding of the chest to a leveling
equanimity

to no avail, the sleep angels have fled from the
forest fires in the chest, and the helicopters must quench
with the commence of dropping clouds of wet words,
when, when will I be released from a life that has no
easements

words, words, words but another drug, a habit that gives
everything but a temporary state, every poem nothing but
another her, another lady puncture in my restless body,
another juncture, where all your choices are the way of
error

the high will last, shorter each one, but the track will exist
for all the time, a token of human foolishness, the more is
the inevitability of the ending, writ, drawn a little closer,
and comes with a hand written spongy-apology begging for
existing

in his notes, motes, dust mites of titles, single verses,
elegies, essays half written, passing thots claiming to
want to be wannabes, this appears and it's a perfect
ending

there is no security in poetry, only the unresolvable

man in his perfect certainty, never was, nevermore, n'ere will be never, and one poet walks a razor's edge, that is his three tenses struggling for mutual coexistence, one of
a calming beauty, a dark glory, a perfect closing, choosing
a final solution, a belief in relief, that simultaneously
engraves, erases, and
equates

another new poem fissures to the surface, and the palpable
is a magician's illusion, a trick, a feat of dismemberment,
an excise of a piece, a drink, a Tennessee whiskey of him,
an emission that never gains remission status, all this fakery,
a new poem (words, words, words but another drug),
excellent, worthless and self-
effacing

{|||}

3:48am-5:46am
9/24/17
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