It has been a hectic, sad, and wonderful time for the last month. I am pleased to say that there are plenty of grand goings on, errr, going on. I have spent some quality time in New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Northern Michigan, a train through the mountains of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. I have drank and danced and played and written and thought and loved and been loved quite nicely over the past bit of time. It makes for difficulties in trying to post updates on this thing. I remain very busy but have decided to pick this all back up and give it another run. I appreciate those of you, my good and kind friends, who care enough to bother me about such things. I wish you all well and will try to be more timely. Again.
Here are some poems I have been working on. They are all still in progress but they have been finished enough so that you can get the gist fairly easily.
“losses”
1. It can be as small as a key
Or a lucky coin, rabbit’s foot, phone number
On a napkin.
It can be the leaves dropping from the maples along the street
Or the opening of the ice on the bay.
Burying a dog
has sometimes brought more suffering than
Burying an angry man
who happened to share my blood.
I remember
the white ponies that burned in the barn
The black bones.
Thinking
This used to be one thing and is now another.
No certainty
as to what was removed
and what gained.
2. This café is going somewhere
And they are holding the secret close.
The view of the bad traffic pattern
will soon be gone.
It has been a comfortable and dark cave
Where many worthy projects were born
friends and lovers laughed and talked
It had done well, as cafes go, successful.
There has always been, to me, confusion
As to what success actually is.
The landlord was angered by the politics
There was no reason given but this is the one inferred
And rightly so.
This place pays for itself
By itself
In a dead sea of commerce and ambition without soul,
Without thought.
It is too real for this particular reality.
All of the good things are.
3. There is a canadian geologist living in sweden
And an american biologist in france,
A Michigan painter in iowa city
A government aid worker from philadelphia
A sad poet in south bend
And this is what travel gets you:
Movement and missing parts.
4. A weathered piece of paper on the light pole
Surrounded by the tacks of former occupants
Shows what may be a dog,
Maybe a cat,
At least something in the mode of a pet
That disappeared
On a wet and grey day a month before
When a man stood in his front doorway
Coffee in hand
looking out at the bouncing pebbles of water
a slight body brushed past his pajama clad leg
Never to be seen again.
5. This song reminds this girl of that boy
And she moves her head back and forth
Without meaning to
Forgetting that she hates him.
6. Under a crooked stack of books
Is found the one
that was read
during he death of the woman
who fed him,
Cleaned him, loved him, built him.
It was about a crazed sea captain
His crew and a terribly angry whale
Of an unnatural color.
Finding the book made the coffins
Explode to the surface
Open
And allow life
Once again.
7. The chickadee looked at the feeder
And was saddened by the fact
That the squirrels had been the earliest
Visitors to this once perfect place.
8. A mechanic of the brain
Told him a lie
About how things would go back
To what they were.
Money was exchanged for bad theories
And the only normalcy to come
Was the setting of the western sun.
9. A thousand words are shown to her
And she acts as if she remembers
But
Actually
Her history is at odds with the facts
And if
In the evening
She could remember her dreams
She would know this.
Her invented nightmares seem to overpower
Her blessed existence.
Nothing gets better.
She will not let it because there is excitement
In the fictional foundations of her pain.
Happiness is
To her
The most boring of trends.
She would even argue
with the smile in the photograph
Just to make sure it never happened again.
10. As the soul left the fox
Did it ask the question:
“have I lived my life the right way?”
Or
just let out that one last reluctant breath
And cease the worries of its hard life?
Neither question
Stops the wind and rain from bringing down the mountains.
11. That thing that made me jump out of bed
Every day and run from moment to moment
Without worry.
That thing that made me smile at the barn cats
Chasing one another through the shadows
In loft that always had the smell
of july.
That thing that made me take someone at their word
And believe that their mean ways were
Simple mistakes.
That time before my brain cracked my skull
And invaded that fine world.
Here I sit knowing exactly what I want to say
And hating it.
12. A woodcut of clean light through
White pine branches
That I disrespected enough
To put a cup on
And one drop of coffee ran slowly down
The side to create a bronze circle
In the sky
Of the setting or rising sun.
It was given away against my wishes
And now I only see this outline of thought.
I sometimes spill coffee
With the hope that I can rebuild
The beauty
That the dark liquid will grow a tree
And the light
Of the most ambiguous of times.
13. When I did not drink
I was a terrible bastard
And the most judgmental fool I knew.
We must never fear the bottle
For it is the best of friends.
It kills the bastard
And throws away the gavel
And makes us all grow up a little.
Leave the keys on the table
Empty a bottle or two
On a walk through the city
Along the river
Or into the trees.
Commune with that which is hidden
By ugly sobriety.
14. the radio was not always this painful.
It used to play merle, waylon, Johnny, willie,
Some paycheck.
Now we have the travesty of modern twang.
An evil imitation without the busted bones and bruises.
Even the steel of the guitar is tempered.
"routine"
A dusting of hoarfrost on the leaves
Of the maples and oaks
The branchs look like glass
And the cold morning wind
Rattles them without tone
In gorgeous perfection.
I am reminded of a late October morning
When I awoke to the same
Scene
In a different play.
I went to water the horses
And on the trough’s thin skin of ice
Stood a single chickadee
Moving along with the breeze.
A tiny black and grey figure skater
Not concerned by the audience
Consisting of a boy and three Belgian’s.
The horses were waiting patiently
For the bird to finish its routine
And I looked to hills ten miles north
Thinking
“I hope I never forget this”
And here
In this city
With sirens and gunshots and angry yells
Exists trees wrapped in frozen water
Making sounds
Like a small bird full of life.
there is a healthy world under the thin skin
of this place.
“two short stories: a critique”
In the Pretrushevskaya story “The Arm”
the pilot tells the colonel not to be concerned
by the appearance of his decrepit plane
the stump of flesh
that used to be his navigator
or the smell of cooked meat.
“I had a small crash on the way here.”
And the colonel accepts this with military grace.
Murakami’s “The Folklore Of Our time”
is resplendent with outward success
smothering inner turmoil.
The pain of popularity is thrown in the face of the judgmental
and ignorant.
The golden boy never gets his angelic other
although she promises herself to him after she becomes betrothed to another.
They try but they fail
look lovely in their suffering.
the end.
"there is no moderation"
On my travels of the morning
The leaves of three trees
Through some happy circumstance
Found their way to me.
The leaf of the cottonwood was large and rough as a farmer’s hand
But a muted yellow that gentled it
Making it sweet and comfortable
As if the farmer were holding his daughter
After some disappointment or heartbreak
That he knew would pass
But felt her pain all the same
The oak leaf
Fell on me like a stone thrown
By some angry youth who knows not the damage that can be done.
It was a crisp brown
The loss of life was the loss of color.
It was an atheist leaf
holding out for existence but not for death.
The end was the end.
Finally a dainty and serrated river birch leaf
That seemed made of copper and gold
Found its way onto my leg.
Of the three
it should have been the quickest to blow away from me
But it seemed anchored
As if it were a part me
It seemed to have a more serious weight than that of the other two.
It was the runt that held firm to be respected.
The small birch leaf
Was the one that made me
Truly happy.
It fought to be.
it made itself important.
It was a small leaf
But it was also a painting
And a book
And many thoughts
Flowing
From the bending tree
In the wind and the sun
Its brothers and sisters floated on the river
To other lives
To the lakes
To the cities
To the everywhere
While this one traveled with me
Telling me its powerful little philosophy
In a quiet but noble voice.
2 years ago
