I saw the sheer length of my generation destroyed,
How I mourned the impermanence.
Are you upset by how vaporous it is?
Does it tear you apart to see the impermanence so gauzy?

Such disorder,
Above all others is the voicelessness.
Are you upset by how much that it is?
Does it tear you apart to see the voicelessness so so much?

A heartache, however hard it tries,
Will always be woolly.
Never forget the muddled and hirsute heartache.

Just like haunting obesity, it is the solitariness.
Belch. belch, belch.

The sullen moodiness,
Above all others is the moroseness.
A moroseness is sour. a moroseness is glowering,
a moroseness is dark, however.

The utter dissatisfaction,
Above all others is the ennui.
Are you upset by how dead it is?
Does it tear you apart to see the ennui so consummate?

The workman told you to bury a curled dark lock

Of your dead baby’s hair in the earth,

A quiet offering to a quieter god

You spent several months weeping to the sky

Your small hands curled into your white frock



Work was left unattended in your colorful house

No food on the stove,

No boiling salt fish, or softened dumplings in murky white water

The pungent smell of cured fish filling the quieter home

The home, austere and shrinking into the long street

Your helper comes to do all this

Your children understand in their small ways



You covered the lock of dark hair with fresh dark soil

Palm fronds wave in the wind

Salty sea air kisses your wet skin

Tears make tracks on your cheeks like a map pointing to

Nothingness, like a page of a book with words of moroseness



Once you had my mother, birthed her into a world of noise

The sure and strong hands of the matriarchal mother,

Your mother, who’d delivered more babies than she’d had her numerous children

Then you cooked, you toiled, swept the veranda with your broom

Left the buried lock of hair in the locked cabinet of your mind



Now, when I make the saltfish, I do it with stilted preparation

My hands form lumpy misshapen cornmeal dumplings

I fry the little ***** of dough for too long, they come out dry

I pop one into my mouth and chew

There, the fragrant smell of your perfume,

Sweet lull of your voice, your birdlike hands.

In the new being that dawns, must I
Console waste and falsehoods;
Used not to my romantic skies,
Nor my Victorian delight, tonight.

In the new human that lives, but I
Run like a murmur, and shadows;
Those misshapen, unnatural forms
Falling away into vernal decay.

In the new soul that breathes, yet I
Come to made solace and comfort;
With no romantic tenderness
And softness that tend to me.

In the new influence, the new smoke
But I taint my arts and visions;
And make blessed sonnets insincere,
Ridding of their appetite for me.

I was born in the modern, caught
Within the naught of being;
What carries this new feeling, I guess
My soul may not find rest.

I was urged to stay, and say
What the morose hold yet to tell
Not the honest of me; the truths
I may have fallen into silence.

I am only able to live at night;
Being true to dark, ******* sights,
That attract but no organism,
Nor living thoughts and modern insights.

I am only capable of misery;
Their arsons are killing to me,
I cannot paint all that rages in me,
They suspend my arts in dishonor.

Their poems bring about nothing;
My delights they have all killed,
Out of my aesthetic will,
Out of sane satire and parody.

Their art charters no bliss;
I am like the quiet of the sky,
In the midst of this war, I only say
None but the imagery of lies.

Their spouses enjoin ill kisses;
Coining sublime in our frights,
But never frightened like our tears,
Dwelling in our drained thoughts.

Their remarks make us dissolve;
Keeping art away like a spectre,
And dissect my love like a sombre,
Like they were the mere sober souls.

What if the poet in me, conformed
To those marks with no heartbeat;
And my angered words lost their form
Ending such good tones of their wit.

What if the worth in me, paid to them
The wanted chords and juggled songs;
For their ****** and erratic admission
But so not my final destination.

What if the written stopped to sing
To leave, and wish me just well;
How could I stay blind to frustration
How would I restrain such fevers?

What if the tune in me, made dead
By the modern’s hustled breath;
Sung by the engrained commonness,
Having lost its poetic madness.

What if the hours in me, silenced;
Made moroseness, and quiet
I have not been recalled anyway;
I have been silence like yesterday.

What if the seconds in me, tickled
And turned and bored me to dust
Would their hesitations ever last
Would they come to the truth?

What if the leaf in me, peopled
All of their impossible periled
To petrify and sicken my desire,
Shall I embrace mossy poems still?

What if the rose in me, tempted
To lose hold of trained purity;
Would my punishment rise in smoke,
Would I be chained to hell?

What if the love in me, stunned
To death, and its cordless vision;
I am never loved anyway,
Nor guarded, nor made of love.

A night of disappointments.
Exasperations and constant
reminders of what could have been.

Why can't Happiness embrace me
for a single moment
without Regret
seeping in
from the sides?
His cold and spindly fingers
eventually seize me;
and I am unmoved
by the sweet sounds and encounters
of Joy;
He tries so hard to move me,
yet, to no avail.
The warm and comfort of
his presence goes unnoticed,
for Sadness enters
after I have been
raptured by Regret.  

As I sit,
crying
Sadness softly sits
besides me;
he whispers,
"just let go; nothing will be resolved,
just let go."
I listen, his beckoning words,
the moroseness, in
his voice
is convincing and enticing.
Happiness, and Joy
are no match for his song.
This ballad of sorrowful peace;
stories with no
happiness
ever
after.

As children we seem to skim across surfaces
Of our days’ tranquil lakes

Like the basilisk running on hind legs
Out-pacing our (lesser than Jesus) predators

Impossibly drowning them in the wake
Of that chase, as we are learning to shield ourselves

By striking first, so as not to feel
that blow of life’s cruel anger and exhaust...

We know how to wade the weeping
Wreckages of our mistakes & missed opportunities;

Mistook with misunderstanding’s book:
"An Idiot’s Guide to the Malady of Mishaps / Moroseness."

As adults we grow the necessary gills
To breathe our own tears' folkloric oceans seeming

Vast as Mithra’s museums of mummified cries,
Drowned moments we silenced inner deep blues' / sky.

We are Merfolk,
Watching here our ebbing tides

How once we had legs like ballerinas, swift & light
Like our worries to aging blight

Stymied timely introduction to Triton nights….
Deftly anticipating the arrival of hindsight’s

Deepest fight to catch the rye and nimble child
Above us now, while we watch them -- Kites

Of memories as in our far away / freedoms
On the surface of our wars' tear filled lakes

Losing our inner / liquid flight…
From youthful wings to fins, and wordless sting

Learning to sink, swim, and breathe
Again-- Life :
                       our unheard Ariel under the sea…

We are Merfolk of dreams oceanic kisses
Voiceless we will lack magic to raise our wishes

We learn to sing in seaweed with
Music of happenstance and waves of need

We are similar to those lost depths
Inequalities and struggles all abyssal deep.

So together as Merfolk must quiet that  loud sea
Loss & histories of mountains / memory

Nautiluses drowning in love’s diminishing poetry,
We are merfolk, submariners toward mystery...

You gaze down at your daughter, Camille, and lay your hand upon her body. She is asleep, resting after a long day, exhausted after the day with Boris at the Zoo, then the café in the park. You wish her father had been that affectionate, had taken the time to be with her, been interested enough to want to be with her and you, but he wasn’t, just other women, other things to occupy his life and mind. You stroke her rib cage; how thin she seems; not a bit like her father, not one ounce of him in her that seems apparent. You gaze at her hair, at the features that you can see, she takes after you, it’s in her face and eyes. Even her temperament is yours, you feel, and are glad, rather than her father’s moroseness, and cruelty. If you had taken you mother’s advice you would never have married Paterson, never have let his hands or lips near you, let alone marry the ****. He’ll be no good, for you, Mavis, she had warned on your wedding eve. You never listened; never took note; you knew best you thought. Marry in haste, relent in leisure, you father had said, in that voice that made you want to hit him, but you never did, although he had hit you many a time as a child, even for the most trivial of things. Dead now, preaching to some other crowd now, wherever he is. You smile at Camille’s sleeping face. Picture of innocence. Like you as a child, you guess. But there had been no Boris in your mother’s life; just your father and his preaching and teaching and moaning and sitting at the table with his long hangdog features and the cane by his hand ready for punishments. You remember creeping into your parents one night as a child and hearing the most awful noises in the dark; like your mother were being strangled or beat up upon, you raced from the room, hid under your blankets in case you father should come and get you. Camille came into you room last month as you and Boris were making love, her voice knifed you, so that you and Boris fell apart like some circus act gone wrong. She had wanted a glass of water, her small voice echoing through the dark, Boris and you panting, going all frigid as if death had claimed. Boris lay smiling in the dark, as you went, took Camille by her hand, fetched her water, lay her back to bed and to sleep. Now she sleeps again. Picture of innocence. Angel of your life. Your precious. Your daughter.

off my shoulders

that has dragged

me down further

into the depths

of the waters

of inescapable depression

and undying insecurity

I just want

to surface from

this mundane moroseness

and float up

into the sky

into the warmth

on top of

the entire world

**-AA

I always walk into social settings not knowing the right way to smile.

the last time I was out, it was a funeral

where uncles and fathers waited for the body quietly,

where mothers and aunts divided their time

sizing up every girl who walked in fresh,

evaluating the contents of moroseness on her face.

did her nail paint make her look well-maintained

and yet purposefully unaware of her manicure?

her clothes, were they the right balance of panache and mourning?

and what about her mannerisms? is she polite and demure,

is she the girl next door? is she an acquaintance? is she family?

well, if she is, why isn’t she in the right colours?

how bold of her to wear eyeliner!

her mother ought to have taught her these things.

cue scrutinizing the parent, the birth giver:

at least she’s wearing white clothes. her fingernails are light pink?

eyebrows rise up in the odd combination of judgement, approval , and the tiniest hint of contempt.

the grandmothers come out from the woodwork

because their experience and expertise in death is unparalleled by the young:

they seize responsibility of the rituals,

tutting at the slightest deviations of the routine they’re well-versed in.

what a business they make of death.

the loss isn’t theirs to feel, the life isn’t theirs to grieve.

‘the head faces the north, the toes to the south! don’t spill the grains unevenly! come, let me tilt open the mouth so you can quench the thirst of the dead with holy water.’

they know it all, those devious grown-up so-and-so’s. we’re still too alive for their acquiescence. they’re so assured in their rites, they’d take over from you at their own deathbed.

they’re watching you very closely, don’t you forget.

they’re not here for the deceased, they’re here to inspect.

I stay under the radar with my tight-lipped smile,

they may not live for too long, but I’ll be here for a while.

strewn into a bajillion little pieces

Unexpected largesse
yours truly patiently waits,
a metaphor of my dire financial straits
courtesy papa's unsuspecting muse
the missus, this wordsmith notates
unwittingly linkedin to his misfortune,
a situation he hates,
especially, an unavoidable crisis,
whereby passage of time abates
negligible onus of penury.

Soon after surrendering
(viz laundering) cash to bitcoin
immediately realized sinister trap
scammer prepared me to enjoin
egregious outcome surpassing
severe case of acne
treatment courtesy isotretinoin.

My ordinarily clear complexion turned wan
imprecation triggered suicidal ideation
overdosing on medication
escape from absolute zero
vanished capital pennilessness *******
welcoming self induced mortality did spawn.

Though weeks elapsed
since scammer
(smoked top of line cigars,
and/or quaffed vintage
amber liquid of the gods
signaling snagging a poor sucker)
made out like a bandit,
the squandered money
I still bemoan,

a grown man doth still groan
moroseness seeps
within his lovely bones
witnessing him curling
into fetal position versus lying prone
forever and anon envisioning himself
cast into the outer limits
of the twilight zone.

As a fool hardy way
to assuage loss,
where illusions of grandeur stray,
I regularly purchase lottery tickets
either Mega Million or Powerball
imagining being the lucky winner
then livingsocial
as a bachelor farmer in Norway

chomping down a delicious plateful
of powder milk biscuits
after countless hours pitching hay
while custom made robot named Barbie
adeptly programmed to prepare
Lefse, Krumkake, Lutefisk,
and Raspeball/Komle/Klubb,
she also doubles up as the abbé
of my fortress domicile.

Ha... an overactive imagination to boot
healthy escape from the maws of destitution
nevertheless, one old baby boomer coot,
who can prevaricate
knowing full well nobody
(especially the folks
from Lake Wobegon) cannot dispute
these marvelous turns of phrases I execute
while listening to The Magic Flute
an opera in two acts
by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
to a German libretto

by Emanuel Schikaneder
and of course after wolfing down
Norwegian cuisine listed above,
I will need (sorry to be cheeky) exercise
thy well endowed glute
(short for gluteus muscles)
a group of muscles
that make up the buttock area,
which group consists
of the gluteus maximus,
gluteus medius, and gluteus minimus.

Wandering
Squandering
When have I not
Failed to reach my potential
And mentally rot
In a caustic
Corrosive
Self-loathing
Moroseness
That worsens
The more
I’ve expended
Resources
Exhausted recourses
And letting her down again
Just reinforces
Alone
I can’t hurt
I can’t harm
I can’t hate
I can’t blame
I can’t claim
I am not the mistake