Poems sore in throat
Scratchy, choked like blank paper –
Inspiration drops
Slipsliding Away
The swing snapped free –
we flew up and out across the Hudson
into the sky over Manhattan
like a helicopter on tour
where people hang out the doors
by a strap for fun, take selfies,
whirling blades spinning,
chop chop merry-go-round
we're getting dizzy –
a playground in the sky,
people in the streets yelling
"be the cow jumping over the moon!"
but just the Chrysler building, no moon
and not actually a cow just
you and me, never really "swingers"
now coming down in the East river
wondering what just happened
wondering if breaking into song
broke the tethers and we
soared.
Trilobite Love, Two Years Later
The Trilobite says Hey Hey Babycakes horseshoe isn't a game for sissies you tossed your luck from across the room and love is a ringer – a shell game after all I return to the sea Dear John Dear John Davey Jones wakes up in your bed with a wink and a nod from his patched eye a soft goodbye is a soft-shelled crab rolled out on newspaper, a soft shoe dance down the beach where dawn is the howl of a lobster red and ready to roll with mayo and a pickle – Evolve baby baby or crawl the ocean floor for millennia looking for love in the darkest places beneath the sea.
What’s My Line
The last time I was a stick figure things didn't go well – I took a hard line. Toed the line. Never crossed the line. And then some kid folded us all up into a paper airplane which was sort of great at first, until he made us into a toy boat and floated us in the gutter. Don’t tell me there is a silver line(ing). just throw me a life- line.
Rabbit Hole
X marks the spot where the sky’s wounds were sewn closed with stitches – Needing heavy rope, hawsers really, leaving scars angrier than dawn, The sun trying to squint through sutures of dead-eye x's, His surgeon says "You’ll never walk again." and Apollo just shrugs, never saw it coming, The bagel-bike riding voodoo rabbit, who knew? would tear open the space-time continuum – Angels ripped from their seats, holes blown in the side of their flight from Tallahassee to Akron, Darkness, that lubricant of dreams, a blot leaking like the Exxon Valdez into bright day, Distant heartbeats heard like furious bongos, from dead and dying gods in the ICU. World leaders demanding to know how did this happen? “Words, Ma’am.” “Words they shout? Words did this?” "Poetry, Ma'am. Crazy language and such." Yet nobody believed that, no-one could imagine that words could create and destroy worlds. Had to be aliens, or the Russians, or the Clintons, or Troglodytes from under the earth. But while the hole was open, the flow went both ways – I saw birds loosed into heaven, I heard singing that went up to the sky Then beyond, I saw a rainbow on stilts step over the river, then walk up a mountain To the promised land. I held your hand as we watched out the window, you read Mary Oliver's Wild Geese to me, and we saw a flight of them wing on, heading home.
B♭
Crikey, I wake up and I’m b-flat! I mean I’m actually the note, 466.164 Hz, it’s Kafka’s Metamorphosis except I’m a tone instead of a cockroach. Holy crap, here come the arpeggios and plink! Blam! Down come the keys! Argh! No! No! Now the bow saws strings across me, Now I’m flapping like a warbler in the throat of this singer. Where, oh where is harmony? I beg musica universalis, music of the spheres to release me, yet here I stay, imprisoned behind bars, banging my little tin cup on the iron staves.
At Least I’m Not a Rhombus
Rectangles always look so miserable there on the page In their boxy squareness In danger of breaking – they can't sleep standing up like triangles Can't play soccer like circles kicked into spheres Always the bridesmaid, framing gowns in shop windows, but never the bride But there is always worse – they could be a rhombus on a math test
Life Is…
A bowl of cherries. And a bowl of cherries is a mouthful of red, tiny fruit bombs, yes! cherry bombs! exploding between our teeth, skins and stains on our fingers held up to the light, juice running down our wrists like stigmata, like some liquor of the true cross – thus I contemplate crucifixion, the Roman soldier with his red cape spitting unlucky dice, only stones now in the bowl, nothing left, the bones of fruit, dead seed – so by the transitive property you learned in High School, "if a = b, and b = c, then a = c" life is... the pits?
Stitching & Unstitching
I find WB Yeats at his labors right under the collar of my shirt. I say “WB, what have you there?” He’s toiling at my seams, like lice, slowly working his way around my neck, stitching and unstitching. I ask the obvious: "But why?" "To save you from a hanging that’s why." "Or beheading. Your thoughtlessness, heedlessness a capital crime." I understand from this how verbosity is a mortal ring around the collar. Yellow stains of over-sweated words. I thank him. It has been said A poem’s worth a thousand words.
Mendicant
I am but a crumb at the base of a mountain of my wife's freshly baked granola Praise? You want praise? I prostrate myself – one small oat Before the redolent brown sugar valleys, the winding coconut paths, the orange juice infused groves Yogurt glacier peaks tower – spoon, oh spoon, take me to new heights! I carry my alms bowl before me, without shame, a beggar.
Scratch Space 