“The Happiest Drunk”
 
The orange sky behind yellow leaves
remind me of my own grey hair
and how I used to be
the happiest drunk, smiling
between glasses of whisky
while all the sadness swirling
in my brain could never find
a drain, but now my despair
has become dry like a desert,
where I’m slowly dying
of a thirst
that was supposed to save me.
  
“An Unopened Beer”
 
If I could, I’d sit down with you
and the ghosts you brought home:
smoking cigarettes, drinking beer,
cursing German snipers,
but you died when I was three,
so I never had a chance
to refill your glass or hear
about the dead friends
you carried with you
long after the war,
while too many are content
with it all being
another chapter in history
textbooks, filled with footnotes
instead of dead grandfathers.
 
“Loud Simplicity”
 
I used a towel as a cape
when I was a kid,
and playfully stomped as I pretended to fly,
saving the world with a loud simplicity,
but now, my feet kiss the ground
(a sober kiss like one reserves
for a dead aunt), while the world
prefers to have a screaming match
with itself,
leaving my own frustrations whispering
inside empty whisky and beer bottles, 
before another hangover 
wails like a newborn. 
 

Your Brush with Death

Is it so he can paint you,
position you in the light
to accentuate your best
features, flatter you
with lines & color?
Brush strokes until midnight
or whatever appointed time.
When finished, a masterpiece
to live on in perpetuity.
Your likeness a vision
he has served you
until he serves you up.

On the Poetry Front
I began to write quite late in life,
when the Covid pandemic struck,
to while away my time judiciously.
A few successful poems encouraged me
to persevere, to burnish my technique. 
Oh yes, so keen was I to improve 
I laboured hard and long. My one regret:
I wished I’d begun when I was young.
I might have honed the skills I needed,
for instance, the iambic da-DUM, da-DUM
and brought my trochees under control.
Just as a boxer must develop his skill,
I had to work on the rhythm of mine
instead of reeling from line to line 
like a drunken sailor on liberty
or a punch-drunk Marlon Brando
as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront
who mumbled to his brother, Charley,
in the back of a car: “I coulda been
a contender. I coulda been somebody.”

QUITTING

at first 
modeling nude
felt amazing
like the show
of skin
that would have
been Ruben’s masterpiece
had their lifetimes
been in sync

but gradually
the dreams abated
and the reality
of maintaining a pose
for a group
of ogling amateurs
not only took
the shine off the veneer
but rubbed away
half the surface

not even the money
was enough to compensate
for being rendered
like some cheap harlot
or mishmash of parts
that could have
been anyone’s

eventually
she quit the job
kept her clothes on
her body
no longer a spectacle
but her own

invisible to almost all
for dissection by no one


 

END OF A RELATIONSHIP

a childish smirk holds up your face,
and a viper in the grass will hiss all along
its invisible backbone -what did you expect?

no wish to begin a world that's old,
hold it together with unfashionable glue,
when the cartilage is frail
and the lamb's been slaughtered for the umpteenth time -

beneath my cheeks, rise swollen glands of first love,
on my neck, the tracks your paws have made,
blood the reliever scars my back,
my spine is heart-carved like an old tree's trunk -

you're right - there's nothing worth supporting,
let's return to our homes, cry indifferent tears,
waves of the stuff to prove we've not been wasted on each other
otherwise, we're just beasts –

the buds will burst with sap again,
the oil can't help but fill the lamps,
all creatures must, while there's still life,
not play at being dead -

and, at my age, who wants to be a toothless tiger,
or remember a time of beauty as a year of anguish -
let me believe I'm on some kind of threshold –
is it too much to ask that you push me over now?

 

Ghost Runner

It’s an ecclesiastical mystery why God chose to deposit the longest stainless steel bar in the world in a place as remote as East Grand Forks, Minnesota. Scholastics have overworked their brains wrestling with the question. Hey, I want to shout, too much logic spoils the poem. I’m underfed and twitchy as a result and wear sunglasses indoors. There are things I dislike just on principle: “best of” lists, the ghost runner in baseball, roadside litter, any kind of flavored potato chip. Even strangers will tell me, Lighten up. A fast-buck culture like ours treasures imposters and thieves, remembered moments that never happened. I can’t tell what’s a real name, what’s an alias, but I don’t care that I can’t tell. The sky today is a bottomless blue, dotted with scattered white clouds that belong in a painting, and that’s enough.

 

Days of Future Past

You don't need to
have read Proust,
Remembrance of Things
Past, to have all
inclusive memories
as I do and my madeleine
are all aural ones,
unscented songs from
the 60's and like
I'd be sitting in
this cafeteria, doing
a chef's salad for
lunch and I'd hear
this canned Musak,
Sounds of Silence
and it will bring me
all the way back to
NYC between basic
and The Tour, passing
out drunk on a subway
platform, stupefied by
a summer's bake of human
vomit and piss, my neck
bent by a weight of
last rounds for the long
and winding road that leads
from nowhere to here,
the concrete platform
I lie on shaking out
of control as the express
milk train to hell bypasses
my stop at full speed:
the grit and the dirt,
dried blood and bile in
my throat, fear sweats
and incontinent piss,
scuttling rats and monster
rats, all the details
of a living dt's flash
forwarding my life,
broadcasting the unmistakable
message, the hardest of Facts:
this is the Future now

Morning at Seaside


An old man sits on the beach
Under the cloudless blue sky
His hands worn, his back stooped
The warm morning sun
Brings him memories and fantasies—
Is he yearning for youth again
Or thankful to have safely grown old 

Chorus of the ordinary__

Idle time pounding into days
Unawake unshaved and inevitably
Mortal

Living for the movies
Living for the future
Present

My pen ignites a blue fire
Music that embeds truth
In all action
Idol thoughts over flow
Brim broken
Heart

Chorus of the ordinary
---

Coffee percolates
It’s beast song of spitting
Steam & jittery hands
Lends speed
To the psychic automation

Of the morning
---

Revisionist

“The present wins every battle, but the past always wins the war,” Mick Herron, The Secret Hours 

“It was a successful marriage,” his sister said. 
“We bought a house, raised two kids...”
Sharon let the history hang there,
an almost visible ellipsis suggesting a future
of one accomplishment after another,
each succeeding victory outdoing the others.

Bobby only nodded, not in agreement,
remembering the howling fights, the infidelities,
the tears and picked-up pieces,
but why argue? Why disagree?
Whatever’d happened happened,
no changing any of it now.

If it helped her to rearrange
the living room furniture,
then who was he to tell her 
she’d misplaced the coffee table
beside the wrong chair?

George Frank

had built a house
with his hands in Vermont.
Stone foundation,
gravity fed water from
an artesian spring,
every board milled
from trees on the property.
He was the kind
of laborer who rich men
would pay by the hour
to spend three months
building a stone fireplace.
He’d take a long time
choosing each stone.
He was a craftsman.
Of stone, lumber,
and the needs of
rich men’s wives
for a man who
knew how
to pay attention.

***************************

Jesus

Jesus, I hope the truck runs.
Jesus, I hope the generator starts.
Jesus, I hope the well pump runs.
Jesus, I hope the horse isn’t lame,
the drought ends,
the rain ends,
the hay isn’t moldy.
Jesus, I’m beginning to wonder
if I’m unqualified
to be the atheist I aspire to be.

*******************************