Hope Trumps by Tom-Toby Barton

H o p e

t r u m p s.

Hope trumps. (some poems to enjoy)

Tom-Toby Barton

♦ Picou Point Press ♦ Maurepass - Benares

2017

Cover design: Živilė Janulevičiūtė-Goodwin editing: Michael Golrick

author’s website (in progress):

www.tomtobybarton.com Copyright: 2017

by Thomas O. Barton Baton Rouge, La. USA tomtobybarton@gmail.com ISBN-13: 978-1546518563 ISBN-10: 1546518568

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for Vicki, she keeps me afloat.

for Aunt Lya, thanks, from all of us.

C

O N T E N T Each poem is an independent work.

The GROUPINGS are to help you (dear reader) feel oriented – and to aid your browsing.

S

MARRIAGE The Three-Legged Race .............................. 4 The Talking Cure ......................................... 6 Autumn Wedding ........................................ 8 PLACES Affirming Life in Central Park ................. 10 Down by the Riverside .............................. 13 A Louisiana Birthday Ballad ..................... 14 FAMILY Familiar Facts ........................................... 16 Calvary – Golgotha – worse? .................... 18 Guilty of innocence ................................... 20 HOME Welcome to My Home .............................. 21 Vicki’s House ............................................ 22 Dinner Party............................................... 25 ROMANCE Why Hydrogen Loves Oxygen .................. 26 The Terror of Dating ................................. 28 The Idiot’s Guide to Affection .................. 30 RELATIONSHIP Quid Pro Quo ............................................. 35 Love’s meant to be incomplete.................. 36 It’s been good to know you ....................... 38 Gay? ........................................................... 40 ARTS Spreading the Word ................................... 42 Ballroom Dancing ..................................... 44 Pop Songs .................................................. 46

-2-

POLITICS

Hippy Elegy ............................................... 47 Gassing the working class, 1915-2015 ...... 50 The Anarchist’s last dime .......................... 52 SEX

Fleshy fun .................................................. 54 Queen Merry-O ......................................... 56 Married sex ? ............................................. 58 SPIRIT

Soul ............................................................ 61 God ............................................................ 62 The Disabled – on Wall Street................... 64 SCIENCE

Global Cooling .......................................... 65 A NASA engineer recalls Apollo 11 ......... 68 ARC ........................................................... 70 LONELINESS

A Love Poem to Myself ............................ 72 The Truth . . . and other lies ...................... 74 Lost in Adolescence .................................. 75 DEATH

Kibitzing with Mom’s ashes ...................... 76 My Father was the W.T.C. ........................ 78 Hamlet’s Question – in middle-age ........... 80 POETRY

Poetic Enterprise ........................................ 81 J. Berryman vs. e. cummings ................... 82 Our Poetry Club ......................................... 84 FINALE

Seeds and Origins ..................................... 86 Meditation on Mud .................................. 100 Matching wits with life ............................ 108

The Three-Legged Race Two eccentrics, one adventure.

Wedded mostly at our imperfections, we limp merrily along.

Maybe shrewd Odysseus could do his pilgrimage alone – we can’t.

We need our common pigments, our marriage caravan, someone to hold the bridle of the failing hopes we ride upon.

A good spouse is a miracle to find.

By a law that’s neither man’s nor God’s, through a Congress all our own, we have bound ourselves over into each others (un)safe-keeping.

In times of panic, we cling so hard to one another that it’s impossible to tell who’s trembling more.

Why can’t our fragile limbs be powerful wings?

Our debts to each other are infinite.

Still, like two cosmic clowns, we never stop trying to keep score.

“Your play, you Cheat. This time I’m focused.

You won’t fool me again.”

marriage

-4-

Often enough, within the mysteries of night, I discover that we’re sleepily holding hands.

It makes me so grateful for our ‘imperfections’ that I want to wake you to tell you that I love you.

I don’t. I’ve learned when to leave well-enough alone.

Marriage is a shared dream, a blank canvas of the will wherein, two painters make one painting – if they can.

Wedding bands are endless circles leading cruelly nowhere, except always, back into one another’s heart.

So, honey.

How is our painting coming?

2007

-5-

marriage

The Talking Cure or “Marriage: the 50 (thousand) minute hour” Our marriage keeps on running at both ends, that’s . . . “We blab on!”

We've built a mansion of our conversation with a thousand rooms.

Maybe there isn't even furniture in most, and if there is, it’s always second-hand.

So what, we still blab on.

Do any of the people that we've judged, condemned, and banished from our private courtroom-bedroom-paradise know or care that we exist?

Of course not.

Will we ever have a tenth the money for the trip, we haven't yet decided on ‘where to’?

Never.

What about that story that we've told too many times, the one that drives the guests away, but makes us laugh.

Oh well, I guess you had to be there . . . and they weren’t.

We were!

Sometimes, as we chatter, I'm the hero and you're striving to catch up.

Then delightfully inverting roles, I become a fool or invalid and you’re a saint who’s nursed me for a 100 years.

And we blab on.

marriage

-6-

When nature calls we battle to get to the bathroom first, but never dream of letting modesty cut gabbing short.

One of us gets the warm ceramic contour of the toilet seat, the other gets the cold porcelain of the bathtub’s edge, but we both get to keep belaboring our points.

We've spent hours running out of things to say.

No topic is taboo.

It’s gossip that we're after, good and wet.

Bashfulness is to pillow talk what lace and crystal tableware is to food, a nuisance to the bawdy appetite.

Sometimes, I’m so appalled at what I've learned to tolerate in you that I begin to hate myself for just not walking out the door.

(The idea, as I remember it, had been to watch your tastes improve, not watch mine slip.)

But in those worst of times, when silence and words have equal sting, even then . . . if only . . . with our eyes . . . or backs, we still blab on.

Because company is company – and loneliness is hell.

Good marriage means a guarantee that someone else: knows you’re alive, wishes you were dead, will help to keep the castle clean, but most of all will listen and will not run out of things to say.

1993 -7-

marriage

Autumn Wedding (a song) We’re a rose that proposes to bloom late in the day, A surprise of fall colors forcing winter’s delay.

We’re a lucky last chance at the gift of romance, Trading on bashful glances, dancing mostly with hands.

I’m an aging bad writer, you’re a beat legal queen, We’re a list of mistakes come from following dreams.

We’re a mixture of fun and each other’s crutch, Getting married because no one else will have us. [refrain] We enjoy the same jokes, haul around the same fears, seem to like the same folks and to share the same cares.

We’re a match made in heaven on one hell of a dare.

marriage

-8-

Whenever cynics snicker because we’re holding hands, We add a sloppy kiss to show that we don’t give a damn.

It’s any port in a storm at every chance we can.

God it’s irresistible to be in love again.

We’re not expecting miracles or fireworks of bliss.

Our marriage vow is to survive life’s ordinary mess, and stroke each others ego with a cheerful honesty that helps our battered self-esteem feel like good company. [refrain] 2009

-9-

marriage

Affirming Life in Central Park

(New York)

Visualize a moment when: one column, “all of our unhappiness and daily anguish;” rises in rotating parallel with a second column, “our irrepressible will to live.”

This is the spirit’s double-helix: two intertwined and fighting colored snakes, a spiral mating of the irreconcilable aspects that attach us here.

Now, assign a value to this moment of vision and relief.

Infinite!

Next, remember what all our experience teaches us: this moment too, will soon grow musty, tired, stale, then moldy, rotten, dead.

Yet while we live . . .

It’s spring in Central Park!

A shower’s come and gone and left a rainbow’s gift.

The ducks are landing on their dusky lake.

The loneliness and failures in my life seem good, because they’ve brought me here.

The quiet is earth’s kiss.

Assign a value to this moment when our over-racing thoughts and actions pause, and we are happy just to be alive.

places

- 10 -

I walked today in the world’s favorite park, found a smooth seat upon a rocky ledge, lay back, looked up, and emptied my sore soul into the sky.

And when my pain had all flowed out and disappeared, I nervously peaked down to see my wounds, then building courage tried to study them, but they weren’t there.

My wounds were gone!

Peering harder, I found that I was staring through myself and back out again to see, that if I was no more than an incident in this world, this world was likewise, no more than an incident in me.

Today I learned again that I’m in partnership with life, that life and I are lovers and not each others problem to be solved.

Today I learned again that life’s the hammock where I sway and rest, and I’m life’s infinitely favorite part, the cradle where the world-baby gets to appraise itself. [more]

- 11 -

places

It’s said: that in the ocean there are water-spouts, a moment when the grey old god’s eternal rolling turns to roar.

How much we humans want to roar, to conquer islands and build, to grasp, feel safe, and know.

Yet in between our latest plans, hatched in fear or strength, in between the latest sweep of tidal strong reality cleaning our castles from the sand, in between so many calculations and there come to nothing . . .

I sit in Central Park on this spring day, a living soul beside my empty winter coat, and I have shed my problems to become a shirt-sleeve wager that life is feather light, made out of air . . . and that despite the power of solid things and the importance of character and endurance, each frail and fleeting moment must remain the only true experience.

1995

places

- 12 -

Down by the Riverside Commemorating: Hoboken’s Frank Sinatra Park, 1998 A park’s a place to gather – or to be alone.

Our Hudson River is the flow of life – the endless generations of us keeping on.

Hoboken’s where we grew up poor – and struck it rich.

Frank Sinatra is the keeper of our hearts – homeboy to giant, cataloguer of our dreams.

The River was once Hoboken’s front door, even the world’s front door. Westward depot for America!

Then container-ships came. The piers shut-down.

The jobs, the cargo, the action, left.

The River grew quiet. Hoboken grew quiet, too.

Two forces in retreat. Both working in their sleep.

Hoboken was changing, mixing, brewing, blending: Italians, Irish, Germans, Artists, Immigrants, Yuppies.

A human stew bubbling, boiling, suffering, and learning to get along.

Gentrifying! Developing a Parisian boulevard from out of a seedy Jersey main street.

The River was changing, too. Shedding its industrial filth, cleaning up it’s oily self, shyly waiting to be found.

First the yachts arrived, followed by sailboats, kayaks, canoes.

Next the crazy swimmers came, then the smart investors, and finally couples, families, picnics, crowds.

It’s everybody, down to the sea!

Water’s fun! The new commerce is pleasure.

This park, this river, this town, this Frankie who sang songs heard round the world are all one tonight.

Grown up a little differently than we expected, I guess, but probably happier . . . and certainly blessed.

Blessed by this park, by God’s magnificent twilight, by our River, our moon river, and by all of our rippling yearnings to be loved.

1998 - 13 -

places

A Louisiana Birthday Ballad Mis’ Billie Picou was born on a farm, Down by the bayous where the roads were logs, Deep in the swamps where living was hard Yet people were happy and love was assured.

Everybody counted their kin by the score.

Billie was reared to be proper and good, Respect her elders, help out when she could, Adore her Papa, but obey her Ma, Always stay busy in old Maurepas.

Never to play till she finished her chores.

There was more to do than you can believe, Hauling in water and pulling up weeds, Hunting for honey and singing at church, Fishing for crawfish and mending old skirts, And caring for critters bigger than her.

Billie loved schooling and always thought She’d go to college and accomplish a lot – But tuition means cash farm-girls ain’t got.

When her every effort had met defeat, She swore that her kids would get that degree.

So Billie switched gears and married Roy, Built up a homestead, bore a beautiful boy Who became the sunshine that grew their crops.

But that baby’s smile hid a real bad heart, And without a doctor, God took him back.

places

- 14 -

Country folks get broke, but they don’t give up.

Fleeing to New Orleans they earned enough To buy a Ponchatoula restaurant.

There they sweated their way to a brand new start, In town where the doctor’s never far off.

Then they reared new children and made new friends, built up a neighborhood, invited their kin.

Billie kept so busy she forgot to cry, Eased up a little asking Jesus why, Had so much to do and so little time.

Chores never seemed finished: house, children, man, Church, scouting, and school, and dirty dishpans, Holidays, birthdays, no end to demands.

No one makes gumbo like Mis’ Billie can.

She was always there with a helping hand.

So life kept changing and staying the same, Some children married, some went their own way.

Friends started passing and grandchildren came.

Whatever happened one lesson remained, Love’s all that matters, the rest slips away.

Louisiana trees are kindly and brave, Straining toward heaven from roots in the grave, Shading their neighbors with the leaves they make.

Billie’s part cypress, part fragile pecan, Sweet soulful Christian with a long sad song.

God’s salt of the earth who keeps singing along.

2004

- 15 -

places

Familiar Facts The HUSBAND: Challenging his WIFE'S Dominance “Shut up honey. I’m speaking. Please let me finish.

That look can’t kill me anymore!

This corpse is going to have his say.

Go on and make your snide remarks about male pride.

The fact remains – this time you’re just plain wrong.

I get so sick of building steeples to you whores, from which you keep on shouting: ‘Men are bores!”

The WIFE: Explaining Things (again) to her HUSBAND “You men have no idea who women are.

We spread our legs much wider for a birth than we will ever do for kings . . . or you.

If I dress up, it’s only so you'll want me to undress.

You whine and beat your chests and threaten us, but without our common sense you'd all be dead.”

The CHILDREN: Insisting their PARENTS are Clueless “No kid invented innocence – We Want To Know!

We use the guilt you have for thrusting life on us to make you squirm, give way, and give us more.

We struggle for the scars you would protect us from.

Of course we know we’re crybabies.

So What! Don't you remember all the pain of growing up.

And anyway, you'll still be sorry when we leave.”

family

- 16 -

The CHILDREN: Considering the Joys of SIBLING Rivalry “The only thing I hate more than my brother is when my sister tries to play my mother.

When we go out, we just embarrass one another.

At home the war begins at dawn and never ends: polite correction, sarcasm, bickering, then blows.

We call it helping one another grow.”

The FAMILY (as a chorus): Proclaims Undying Love “Of course, my family's nothing to write home about.

I still wouldn't trade them in for yours.

We eat together every night – so that we don't forget the ways we irritate each other.

Never a dull moment, and lots of hysterical laughter that feels too much like pain.

But we still stick together in a crisis.

When all the others run . . . that's when the family often comes.”

1986

- 17 -

family

Calvary – Golgotha – worse?

The troops, by blood, assemble in their separate towns: the bachelors, spinsters, nuclear families, 2-year-old atomic bombs.

The drumbeat of a ‘Tribal Need’ is making its imperious call.

Armies roust themselves, pack up, set out, and barrel toward their fated rendezvous.

The swords are out, the guns, the fears, the games, the shames, the interactive blames.

The awful tumult of a primal feast is near – it’s Family Reunion time! – “Halt!” cries the reader.

And everyone, including this poet, heartily agrees.

“We don’t really have to go there, Do We? Not in anticipation, memory, or Fact?

Not backwards into issues unresolved, slights never forgotten.

Reunions definitely are Not a cure.

Our present trials are enough!” the reader closes, trembling.

Resist! HA! Fools!

TRIBAL NEED will have its way!

Mom and Dad may be alive or dead – They’ve Summoned us as pygmies to THEIR shade. ****

family

- 18 -

So off to airports, interstates, bus stations, the beginnings of our hearts we go and make the best of it.

Siblings swallow hard as they view the carcass of each others dreams.

Spouses helplessly compare themselves to one another, and even more helplessly . . . get compared.

Everybody eats too much.

Success tries hard not to condescend to Failure, while in ‘familial fairness’ failure tries (about as hard) to not pick at success’ scabs and scars.

We all ‘experimentally’ rewrite our childhood – to no avail – The kids, of course, are happy.

They revel in a family’s 1st commandment: “Even brats are better than no kids at all.”

And in its 2nd commandment, too: “Relatives = free friends-and-allies . . . guaranteed!”

So goes our family Iliads’.

The trick’s to mix: resentment, laughter, love, the whole kit-and-caboodle into a single glass – then . . . with a smile . . . “Bottoms up!” and pray the mess stays down.

1990

- 19 -

family

Guilty of innocence Lovely parents, my best friends, shapers of all of the things that I am – why couldn’t you find the courage to tell me how mean and miserable everyone is.

Mom and Dad, you woke up to the world too well.

You equipped me for heaven, but not for hell.

Now whenever one of life’s battles begins, I don’t even know it till the other side wins.

You gave me sunrises and beautiful dreams, laughter and weeping and empathy, but you buried the dark side so cunningly that I never see blood till the carnage is me.

I know you were only doing your best, and it’s all my own fault if I’ve failed at life’s tests, but I’ve got to complain – though I wouldn’t change one bit – that I wish you had been less skilled hypocrites.

1973

family

- 20 -

Welcome to my home Come in my friends, you’re welcome here To all I have – food, drink, and rest.

This house is gladdened by your stay.

My wealth’s increased by each new guest.

Come stranger or my dearest friend, Bring your good cheer or injured heart, There’s nothing you can do wrong here, Relax and play your favorite part.

My home’s your stage, please be the star in every room you choose to roam.

I feel so lucky that you’ve come And beg you make yourself at home.

1998

- 21 -

home

Vicki’s House “This is my home. I am its King!

Each room’s a province where a different aspect of my soul can rule.

“My bedroom is the port from which I sail toward oceanic feelings.

It’s made up of a room within a room, a four poster canopied bed.

Inside its draperies sex and intimacy reflect each others heat.

My hope is that the inside will stay warm whatever ice age comes; and cool enough to keep skin smooth, soft, silken, sweet.

“My dressing room’s the armory from which I sally forth each Monday against my castle’s worldly foes.

It’s located closest to the road. Its exercise machines are furthest from my heart.

“My living room’s like a library, or maybe den.

There, comforted by what culture I can afford, I review this world, grant approval, state complaints.

I use my living library’s music, art, and film to build, repair, and rebuild who I am.

If I’m not meant to win at life, my second choice is to retire and never leave this room.

home

- 22 -

“My dining room’s for memories and artifacts.

Mahogany, well polished, sets its tone.

Windows in buffet cabinets display figurines, sculptures, souvenirs.

Photos and china compete for the remaining space – and every year there’s more!

This room is where my mother’s still alive, and I’m a little girl who’s safe.

“My kitchen’s perfect – like I want to be.

It has everything, nothing’s forgot, and all arranged efficiently enough to make spacecraft designers’ blush.

In this stainless order I create: temptations for the palates of the gods, sensuous concoctions that melt the heart, confirm the admiration of my friends, console my loneliness.

“There is another room that’s just for clutter.

This is a corner of my soul I’d rather not have to see, but I’m still glad it’s there.

The clutter room gives me the flexibility to make my castle comfortably complete.

Sometimes, even when I’m alone, I close its door, hiding it away. [more]

- 23 -

home

“Finally, there’s the living pecan tree.

It stays outside because it’s big enough that it would hurt itself while coming through the door.

It’d make a sloppy roommate, too.

The falling leaves, which are my dreams, make such a mess.

But it’s more a part of me than all the rest.

As my soul lives in this house, my pecan tree lives in my soul.

Its timber makes my castle strong, its fruit makes me invulnerable to siege.

Its stately fertile manner of withstanding and enjoying wind and weather is my model for the sweet and melancholy of my life.

“My living room has a couch that looks out through glass doors onto this tree.

I lie on it and watch the seasons of my pecan pass.

That couch is who I really am, a waiting daughter of the lucky and unlucky small town South.”

2002

home

- 24 -

Dinner Party An august priest, the host, prepares the rites to mingle dinner and discourse into rebirth.

Now we communicants to this privilege must brilliantly converse for all we’re worth.

Silence may be a complement to the cuisine, but it’s an insult to the intelligence of the guests.

A well-laid table’s for a meeting of the minds.

The mastication heard should be the verbal kind.

The challenge is: To juggle on the line between public and private, social and sexual intercourse; To deftly alternate convivial jokes with cruel and not be bothered too much by the difference; To eavesdrop and be eavesdropped on in open competition for the roles of ‘wit’ or ‘fool’; To mix our aspirations so successfully that no one ends up going home alone.

Dinner parties are our ultimate social solar system – the host’s the sun, everyone faces everyone, and gravity keeps most egos confined.

1974

- 25 -

home

Why Hydrogen Loves Oxygen The wounded soul retreats into itself, builds barricades, and hopes.

That was us both.

I was a joke that had out-laughed itself: Godzilla, in the three inch model form.

You were a depressing movie script: step-sister, ugly-duckling, Baby Jane.

How much had happened in that house I found you in, I'll never know.

It wasn't bright.

Our early meetings were as bleak.

You looked at me.

I left.

You followed me.

I ran.

You chased.

I hid.

You found.

The only game we'd ever known was hide-and-seek.

romance

- 26 -

Later, we learned to talk and then to love.

You gave me all and as I emptied you, you filled up more.

We grew.

Today, each portrait in the museum galleries (Impressionist, Flemish, Renaissance, Baroque), each portrait in those galleries where I had hid for years, was you!

One portrait showed your face, another caught your eyes.

Some framed your fears, others trumpeted your lust, or pain.

It's renamed now, The Metropolitan Museum of Carol, and I love you.

1989

- 27 -

romance

The

Terror

First Date/Last Rites Let’s not try to impress each other.

Only fools are confident in front of strangers.

Can we make fear the friend that introduces us?

Can we be like two approaching specks on the horizon who, coming closer, become human, then man and woman, smiling faces, sweet fragrances, and finally warmth?

First dates are never safe.

We must be prepared for surprises!

Let’s work hard to stay within each others boundaries for a while . . . until our lies grow soft and melt in laughter, until we see, just for a moment, through the prism of each others thoughts, until we don’t want to run or rule, show off or judge.

Let’s round some corners looking for one another and what we find might help us find ourselves.

1999

romance

- 28 -

of

Dating

Flower I hold with anxious fingers my new friend’s opened hand.

I long to touch her infinitely vulnerable palm, to make it mine, but fear she will draw back, perhaps is already preparing to draw back.

Who am I anyway, so much the stranger, to dare to touch the central pistil of this petalled garden?

There must be unknown qualities that I might crush.

I touch!

She does not wince.

Is not even prepared to wince.

She wants me to take all.

I look into the pool within your palm.

It overflows with our shared happiness.

1998

- 29 -

romance

The Idiot’s Guide to Affection Chap. 1: Insane I'm so unhappy and alone.

Are you?

Could we do better as a team?

Our pride and all of our illusions, keeping them alive to better kill each other, isn't it mad?

I’m so tired of my own knives, come and help build walls between me, make me a different kind of mad.

Chap. 2: A Plan I will, if i find a want, accomplish (being smart as to every mistake) it.

Except that people, with attributes like other things, are not things, but wants and wills like me.

Uncover wish.

romance

- 30 -

Chap. 3: Reaching Out Here, I have pushed my feelings into words, out of coincidence, I want us to know.

You screamed, so I gave you my poem on screaming.

Bizarre? Morbid?

Not more than silence.

If we are trapped in rooms, our voices can meet in the walls.

Chap 4: Listening Naked, hungry, abstract, teasing like a hunchback's arms, these ugly clothes.

Sparrow never landing, is it you that I watch or me or me. .

[more]

- 31 -

romance

Chap 5: Asking Why not, with fear and trembling, sink, beneath doubting, out of waiting, into asking the question that walking in any direction is?

Cripple, sitting is so happy to be forgotten.

Chap. 6: Dating So we begin to mountain dance, to join . . . fall down . . . to rise . . . to cram each others emptiness with Yes, to drink, to sing, to leap at our beginnings . . . dirt.

Then climb again.

To learn with tired eyes, with head thrown back to Laugh.

romance

- 32 -

Chap 7: Mating Raw needing needling flesh to energy.

Twin cries from finally speechless mouths, reborn with the tickling of angel feathers.

Wild skin throbbing to burst its silly boundaries: escape erupt explode!

Too many pieces to have ever been together.

Chap 8: Reverie Tween our toes dear, this morning is feasting so lovely on the wind and the trees and the clouds and the grass, that i wishing, o wishing each leaf were your limb, am lost in the crazy of never-to-be's. [more]

- 33 -

romance

Chap 9: Demands Plans.

Are they ever twisted by our collisions?

A momentary deflection perhaps, not hard to brush away.

I hate with frustrated gestures, lessons too cruel about love.

How have we changed each other?

Chap 10: The Ache In this dream there are smiles that sometimes a sudden weakness makes live, no one's sure in pain, but we still can dance – like idiots holding a wire.

And old ladies are kind and old cats mean, but they get along fine.

So a pecking meticulous scream or a vague yearning to grow, neither know, love just happens sometimes.

1972

romance

- 34 -

Quid Pro Quo I’ve learned to be so grateful for your fears.

They are the motivations that relieve my bent towards sloth and solipsistic tears.

Your cries for help are my means to achieve escape velocity out of my dreams and freedom from my whirlpools of self-doubt.

I need you to need me! My usual schemes of brilliantly commenting about the comedy of life is boring stuff compared to fighting battles for you sake.

When you draft me to keep your struggles up, it fills my soul like mountain streams their lake.

So I’ve welcomed your fears into my heart, to starve my bad and feed my better part.

1973, 2013

- 35 -

relationship

Love’s meant to be incomplete We wouldn’t need love at all if we were perfect.

It’s our weaknesses and faults that make relationships possible.

Our dogged imperfections need a crutch, a prayer, a hope, a partner to share, an ally that will help us wallow through this painful life.

People think that love is a reward to earn, a game to win, a lucky break, a miracle to marvel at . . .

But love’s more like a mirror, a glass (cracked, stained, and cloudy) held by an equally flawed friend, where we can see ourselves and all our blemishes and not be shamed.

You are my mirror.

You reflect an image that helps my homeliness become my strength.

Our love is not anyone’s shining light.

It’s a frail, flickering, determined warmth, an effort to build ourselves a place where we can empty out our emptiness (unhappiness) and know that it's all right.

relationship

- 36 -

Perfectly imperfect love.

It came like grace out of an unknown god, came slipping in to fill us up without a presence or a push.

Came gently in, like brave humanity’s oldest wish, to die peacefully in bed.

Came in without dramatics or despair.

One day I just knew where I belonged.

It was with you.

Our love's a fold in life where we can cuddle out our fears and live beneath the covers of our care.

1993

- 37 -

relationship

It’s been good to know you Good-bye my love.

I offer this last toast, “There is no promised land.”

My other poems told what you'd done for me, this one's for what I've done for you.

I made you laugh. I opened up your sex . . . your legs.

I showed you how to love yourself in spite of what the world might think, and how to go out on the town for free.

I taught you joy.

We buried so many inhibitions . . . digging their graves, together.

The eaglet has to leave her nest, that's true, but why to fly to somewhere else?

We owned the sky!

Our acrobatics should have been enough, like Zorba when he taught the English bookworm how to dance.

You think you've found someone who’ll give you more?

I gave you what I could . . . ourselves.

relationship

- 38 -

We never stopped growing.

What made you think we'd reached the end?

We made mistakes, so what.

We liked each others company – that's gold!

Kubler-Ross says loss is experienced in four stages: (1) denial, (2) anger, (3) bargaining, (4) acceptance (grief).

Is that what losing you is going to be like?

It will be hardest – to not be sharing those feelings with you.

The name I’m now giving my pain is – being ripped apart one memory at a time.

You know, I'm not so sure that I'm the one who'll be the loser in this catastrophic change.

You know that, too.

I'll give you one sure loser though: “The child that was our love – and could have – No! (a poet's word on this) – was definitely – growing up to be a giant.”

1997

- 39 -

relationship

Gay? On not making physical love (during two days of perfect intimacy) with my best friend.

I. “I’ve been absolutely terrified for every moment of my life – but I’ve never let that stop me from doing a single thing that I’ve wanted to do.”

Georgia O’Keefe

II. The exhilaration of our shared experience stays with us as we part.

The hard-headedness of the masculine mind keeps realized wonders fresh.

I am so satiated with love that I can barely stand up.

And so I’m forced to wonder to myself, “Should we two Men have dared to part without our bodies passionate union?”

The answer is in the dignity and freedom (masculinity) of our last embrace.

Nothing, not even an omission, could possibly have been done wrong.

Our love lives in the surrender that never comes.

We are of the same race, each others support, reliable as ladders.

We are songs of rowing together, not sirens of temptation, not consummation.

Ours is the setting out – not the coming home.

relationship

- 40 -

We deny the omnipotence of self and seek friendship through the long sought abeyance of our egos.

The law that there is nothing to be gained out of our love is what we grow upon.

It is the tension that makes purity possible.

We don’t know what we’ll finally get from one another – but as we try, and fail to try, and try to fail, we lift each other higher.

I almost held you in my arms last night . . .

I did!

Yet it was chaste, and I have come away less human – but more a man – better suited for the types of wars that men must fight.

Sex is too mysterious, too feminine, for us.

We won’t submit to its universe.

Nature would defeat our brotherhood.

The gift we have exchanged is to leave each other as free (distant) as we ourselves (our fears) would want to be.

Together, we chose separation, Chose to worship on the belly of the Buddha’s Laugh and not the organ testicles beneath.

Failed to taste the final morsel.

2002

- 41 -

relationship

Spreading the Word on giving away some favorite books to the homeless shelter The stack of age-old pocketbooks fits in two hands, 15 or 20 volumes, Albee, Beckett, Brecht . . . Ibsen, O’Neill . . .

These playwrights are my tuning forks of pain, my human high ‘C’, my hieroglyphs for getting through the night.

I am carrying them – my legal tender – to make a deposit in our city’s orphanage for lost souls.

Will Ice Man Cometh to prop up the short leg of a wobbly bed?

Or Night of the Iguana fill a need for toilet paper, or Tom Stoppard start a fire?

Use these book treasures as you please my vagrant friends, my shadows, my brothers, my twins.

To me, you bums are the Magi – who journeyed to Bethlehem, spent your return fare on presents, then found no God.

arts

- 42 -

Will each play-drama conjure for a lonely wino some instant company? They did for me!

Will Mother Courage give a loser’s pointless pilgrimage another temporary course in struggling on?

Will Bernie Shaw, teach poverty to laugh at wealth?

I hope, I only hope so.

So with this, my sacred sacrifice, it’s all said once again: “Art lives more happily in desperate corners, rubbish heaps, than it can ever do in marble or acclaim.

Art is the public hospital that stitches our torn guts together.”

My books are gone! and gone their loss reminds me, the only book that really matters is the one inside my head.

2002

- 43 -

arts

Ballroom Dancing In dance the body wins control.

The mind surrenders to the song, the trillion separate cells we are join into one organic whole.

Rhythm, beginning in the heart, floods outward, reinventing flesh.

In hips & hands & legs & feet the beat makes movement into art.

Dance is the body borne by love to pivot on invisible wings, & draw in space & color a beguiling image on god’s face.

Thought doesn’t know, the body does, & wants to teach with love and joy.

Learn how to waltz if you would grasp the paradoxes of the rose.

All dance begins in loneliness, but separate figures touch and blend, one dancer meets another & a further blossoming begins . . .

arts

- 44 -

Of give & take, follow & lead, of leave, spin, & return again.

Of two who’ve lost their will to one, that magic moment between them, as there, bewitched by joy, we watch ourselves gain spontaneity.

Commence alone, in fear express the horror of your separateness & soon a partner will appear.

Then as a couple you can dare to show more joy in public than a conquering hero back from war.

Dance is the spirit manifest, cooperating grace that soars, the whole made one, the two made all, the thousand smiles of a ball.

Accept the risk, advance to fun, touch strangers & believe again, romance was always meant to be displayed in proper elegance.

1998

- 45 -

arts

Pop Songs Sweet melody’s the quickest way to learn to swallow all the sourness life offers.

The gold inside guitars and drums confers a common wealth that anyone can earn.

Life’s a lyric looking for a rhythm, a harmony that wants some words to wear, chords and meanings polishing each other give memory the sparkle of a gem.

We need that light to brighten up our gloom.

Tossed up by a mere flicker songs occur just out of reach and force us to defer our cynicism while we learn the tune.

Mount words on music if you’d have both heard.

It’s by the poems we sing that we are governed.

1973, 2009

arts

- 46 -

Hippie Elegy

The poor, the ugly, artists, and the weak, once talked amongst each other and agreed that they deserved a country of their own.

And so they raised a flag to overawe the law that overawing governs men – and pledged beneath that flag their friendly faith in life ability to grin its way to grace.

Beautiful losers, delicate souls, harmless young freaks with solo guitars, strange modern ancient troubadours.

Teaching a dead world how to sing, laughing at guns, snipping at strings, seeking for more than the same dumb old things.

The hippie tribe possessed no armor but each others love.

They were weird losers: to the general world they were mistakes who should have stayed under the rocks they sprouted from.

They were the unpopular kids in high school rising up and saying they deserved sex and adventure, too.

Hippies reached out from loneliness in honest whiney song.

They made their failure to ‘fit in’ an opportunity for freedom.

[more]

- 47 -

politics

If hippies smelled, it was with fragrant innocence.

If their clothes didn’t match, the colors clashed appealingly.

Hippies ‘kept on trucking’, avoided ‘bummers’, loved the ‘far out’.

Hippies thought self-discipline might be good – but not nearly as good as having fun.

They knew ambition was another name for hell.

The hippie tribe believed in ‘now’, not ‘plan ahead’.

They fashioned rainbows out of tie-dye, bell-bottoms, and hair.

Improvisation and simplicity was their show, a wide-eyed gentle whimsy was their art.

“Make love not war”, “do your own thing”, “be beautiful in your own way”.

The hippie family came from friends, not blood.

Its marriages might only last a day, but what a blessed day each marriage was, and every kid belonged to everyone.

The hippie goal was happiness.

Beautiful losers, delicate souls, harmless young freaks with solo guitars, strange modern ancient troubadours.

Teaching a dull world how to sing, laughing off guns, snipping off strings, demanding more than the same dumb old things.

politics

- 48 -

Today it seems so like forever since these modern angels risked their flight.

It wasn’t meant to be. Their airplane crashed.

The more the hippies beat their wings for height, the more they beat those wings to pulp on iron walls.

Publicity co-opted them.

Drugs, sex, and rock and roll turned dark on them.

The need for money bit them hard and finally buried them.

The Law – “the world is too much with us” – held firm.

The hippies bled and ebbed.

They went the way of flappers, Diggers, Albigenses, Essenes; and all the other forgotten flashes in the human visionary pan.

Pride sets special traps for dreamers.

Yet, ‘Once upon a time’ – these strangers did enter our world – to offer gifts instead of claiming ownership, to brighten up our sidewalks and our souls, to spread the word that anyone can write a song.

Hippies played games where no one was the quarterback, no one made an error, and no one won.

They taught us that aggression was an ‘up-tight’ bore.

Then finally, placing gentle flowers into hard gun barrels, they preached the joys of free love, wished us well, and disappeared like rain.

“We’re dust in the wind . . . all we are is dust in the wind.”

1984

- 49 -

politics

Gassing the working-class, 1915-2015 “If you pay bicycle wages, you get a bicycle economy.”

Walter Reuther (union leader)

They want him to think, they let him vote, Old Tony the man with the gas-gurgled head; but it always comes out the same in the end.

So he does what he does and it isn't much more than to manage to wile his lifetime away.

Tony designed to trip, so he tries to stay small, that way there’s less of a distance to fall.

They want Tony to think, they let him vote, but whatever he thinks just washes away to his trench in the “war to end all wars” – and the day that all he saw was gas, as it crawled its way up into his mask (exterminating his ideals) with a smirk that makes him shudder still.

Tony fled that day from his forward post wearing a look like he’d seen the truth and it wasn’t good, and a feeling that every direction was bad.

So all Tony’s hopes for a fair world died and his eyes got the twitch of a tied-up soul.

O the working class wept, while the ruling class laughed, as the Socialist dream drowned in world war one’s gas.

politics

- 50 -

And it keeps getting worse. Tony tries hard to think but he barely can talk, so he curses instead and he’s curses damn good in a million tongues he’s invented himself.

Tony senses these tantrums ought to be union songs – but mass Movements seem to just add his troubles and his musical tastes stop at canned Christmas carols.

Tony’s left to pursue happiness with his vote!

Our ‘citizen sovereign’ inhales the facts of the flatulent media’s modernized gas, as he dutifully salutes its News and its issues.

Then he marches on down to his polling booth to assert his inalienable right to chose the manner in which he receives his abuse – from the bosses who need his work more than his vote.

Maybe Toni could strike for election days off?

1973

- 51 -

politics

The Anarchist’s Last Dime

Can anything human stand up to TV and to tanks?

Can poetry’s mere phrases make our murdered selves feel satisfied and justified?

Can words craft wings for modern souls as we are stamped, stomped, and stuffed into an ever blander corporate garbage can?

Or did the light-dark-hearted Dadaists have it absolutely right a century ago: “The chance for joy to win is zero – our only hope is to destroy it all!” **** I identify with the terrorists!

I applaud the collapse of buildings that have no purpose but to tower over Man and Art. I prefer nihilism and rebellion to sitting in a chair (a couch potato) watching someone on the boob-tube think, act, and talk for me.

I want to be a conspirator.

I want to be one of those un-cowards who swallows his whining, weakness, poverty, and loneliness – and strikes back!

politics

- 52 -

Futile gestures make more sense to me: than concerts, Super Bowls, Olympics, stadiums filled (like turds fill toilet bowls) with fools watching others have their fun for them.

NBC stands for “Nothing But Crap”.

USA stands for “Unbearably Stupid Assholes”.

Make up your own acronym!

It’s useless but it’s fun – it’s existentialist!

Humans are the ones who lost the cold war.

Hollywood won!

I’ve lost! So what! Big deal!

I spit at the money, fame, sex . . . we all don’t have!

“I think, therefore . . .”

I’ll climb into my own black hole to embrace myself at last as an imploding star, who, while apparently disappearing, is actually, gleefully, getting ready to try a whole new universe.

That universe is: “I Am . . . and don’t care who else notices.”

2000

- 53 -

politics

Fleshy Fun I’d like to take this opportunity to celebrate your breasts.

They’re my best friends.

All mine! My favorite toys.

My playmates every night!

I’ve become addicted to your boobs.

When it’s time for us to go to bed . . .

I like to tug them, like they're socks, out of your bra and swing them like cathedral bells, ding, dong.

I like to weigh them in my palm and then explore them like they’re spongy caves (spelunking anyone) or slurp them like they’re melting ice cream cones.

They’re a lot to handle, but I do my best.

Sometimes your breasts are spread so wide across your chest, they’re continents I’m scared are slipping off their continental shelf, and I'm the man assigned to hold them in their place.

Zeus couldn’t do more!

sex

- 54 -

Their mountain peaks, their precious crowns, your nipples are knobs to me from which to run our universe.

Your tits are levers, buttons, flowers, starship controls to turn, to tweak, to pull like rubber bands . . . or kiss.

Erect they’re so resilient strong!

Like elevators poking from their shaft your nipples rise, like weighted plastic clowns they bend and tilt and bounce and always end upright.

The galaxy's finest springs, those tits.

Your breasts are our own royal-family jewels.

When we go out to walk your boobs are what walk us.

Encased in pornographic silk and little else, they raise such eyebrows and such cheers that I feel as if we're following a conquering army through the land, and I’m Cortez leading Montezuma’s treasure by the hand.

It makes me god to lay my head upon your heavenly pillows every night and suck sweet oysters from your aureoles with famished appetite.

1991

- 55 -

sex

to: Queen Merry – O frankly, unabashedly, and delightfully . . .

Mario shows-off what others hide.

He is the boldest color in life’s rainbow of affectations.

Merry-o is everyman hiding in his mother’s closet, trying on her dress, then marching out in proudly swirling grace, “aren’t I pretty?” before the family’s horrified denying eyes.

Mario makes Oedipus look tame.

He is the shadow in men’s souls – turned into boiling sun.

Mario is inhibitions conqueror. He never hesitates.

He’s Samson snapping all conventions and restraints.

Merry-o likes sex with anybody, any time, and anywhere! (and maybe animals – he doesn’t tell) Mario inverts our sanctimonious world’s pretenses and fears into the slippery seeds that plant us on more candid ground.

His invitations invoke a covenant of coy.

They embarrass (mortify) and yet attract us, like a baby to its milk or kids to teddy bears.

Mario’s fertility is not to breed, but to enjoy!

Mario may be a sissy, but he’s not frail.

He’s strong: all biceps, coming straight from the gym, a smiling bull.

Mario is better equipped to break a back than pick a daisy, except that Merry-o, thank god, prefers the daisy and giggling to getting mad.

sex

- 56 -

He’s never angry; he gets ‘upset’ instead.

Yet, in him, ‘upset’ is scary – like an agitated bomb.

His ‘worrying’ can disconcert the meanest bully, and send that bully either running home or into Mario’s ever welcoming arms.

“Old enemies taste better than old friends,” our Merry-o loves to hum.

Mario is sheepishly magnificent, embodying ironic love.

“No one’s so bad as I can’t have some fun with them,” he says, and then he’ll add that “nothing’s sweatier work than being kind.”

Merry-o takes the fairy dust of “not being afraid of what people will say” and spreads it everywhere – and though it should be at a terrible expense to him, he somehow ends up richer than before.

The alchemy of men and women, love and lust, melt into one in Merry-o.

He is a modern marble faun – not only still, white, and hard – but bright and animated like a hundred cymbals tingling all at once.

Mario the Honest.

O Merry – O riding to glory all our fears.

Mario the surfer on the human sewer.

Mario the perfume, not the stench.

1998

- 57 -

sex

Married Sex? (why can’t it improve with age, like wine) Whether cleaning up the overflows, or drowning in the undercurrents, beached whales and wrinkled mermaids don’t often ‘turn each other on’.

Even the artful Swings of technique – throwing our heads back, kicking our legs up – don’t give us half the thrill they did when we were in our backyards, four years old, and pumping hard for height.

Help us, Dr.’s Ruth and Reich, to find handles for a joy that drives us nuts in having, but even nuttier in lacking, It. What makes sex’s harmonies harder to find the longer we’ve been married?

The fantasy begins No spouse is less when their mate’s more, both rise like mountains on foothills to share their peaks of joy.

All life begets cries for release.

Our marriage is a narrative that splits itself to join.

sex

- 58 -

Each night we drag ourselves to bed, wasted in body and soul, yet still yearning for joy.

Growls can call as well as warn, weeping’s grease to ease the pain, our universes break to join.

The center self is in our loins, the rest revolves around life's densest gift of joy.

Our crotch is what we first protect and what we give the last, where separation joins.

When lust’s worn out we call in games and that extracts new miracles on jaded paths of joy.

Sex is a light that shines across the chasm of our inner grief, a bridge we use to join. [more]

- 59 -

sex

And finally our most loyal friend, oasis in a desert world, a flagpole for our joy.

We're never less when sex is more, but blended in the oldest bliss joy finds us as we join . . .

The fantasy ends.

So, if within conjugal traps the point of life can often times get lost, Sometimes our trash of single mind does actually dissolve – and our grey marriages race out (past tired envy, complaints, deceptions) to put us down, so pleasantly surprised, in the vast land of God’s most natural union. sometimes?

2009

sex

- 60 -

Soul The soul is home to what the world can’t know.

It’s larger emptiness is our defense against the details of our daily woe.

Soul calms the horror of our helplessness.

Pleasure or pain depend on neural whim.

Success and failure are another ruse.

Even our precious freedom’s no more than a self-deception we’re compelled to choose.

Yet we still find enchantment in the soul.

The heaven of our hopes can give us wings.

In fantasy we can have any role, soul sails serenely on the sea of things.

Soul is almighty mind engaged in play, to curve the world . . . or make it go away.

1975

- 61 -

spirit

God One. When in a morning mist just being lit by a new day a young bird leaves one branch to find another, vibrating both, I call that God. God's what I don't see and I can't predict, a sort of, “the more I know the more I know I don't know� mystery.

If God did not exist, we'd have to have invented Him (or Her), but God, anticipating this, invented us First.

God is the faith that makes the broken engine run, the engine and the power that it generates, even the car.

We're only passengers that might or might not make it safely home, and yet we drive.

spirit

- 62 -

Two. My human rage is cosmic while my human power's slight.

I’m stronger in an inner looking hate than in an outward giving love.

God is this world that frustrates me, but if I let God ravish me frustration teaches Love.

God gets the credit and the blame.

I get the little I can get . . . and learn to like it.

Three.

God is a refuge from myself.

Someone to trust when I’ve exhausted me.

1986

- 63 -

spirit

The Disabled – on Wall Street

Among the bright cheeked ladies in their alligator heels, between the pin-stripes and their polished nonchalance, in all the thousand floors of clerks pretending to be gods, are cripples struggling, physically, just glad to be alive.

These named ‘disabled’ can’t run with the bulls.

To them AsSoonAsPossible means: “I’ll do my best.”

They shuffle, stutter, maybe reek, yet they still speak with the authority of The System – if they can speak.

The unique hearts and minds which help these wounded warriors keep a desk in earth’s most wildly competitive place, causes their better armored bosses and colleagues to respect and attend upon these obvious spiritual betters with forgiving grace.

– And even to fear them – for these cripples actually do fight, and very often win, with one arm tied behind their back.

Against all odds, perhaps here’s what the Bible meant to say, the lame succeed by staying human while the rest of us go mad.

1987

spirit

- 64 -

Global Cooling It took one scruffy genius, scratching his head in flea ridden perplexity, shivering in inadequate animal skins, stomping around his/her dark cave, and pondering a better way, to tame fire.

Then – later – much, the slime ascending ever upward out of Egypt and every other slavery, humanity worked out an almost better miracle.

This time accomplishing the leap with teams of clean-cut, careful, crafty engineers.

And so the blessed mechanical ‘chill’ arrived.

The domesticated winter ‘wind’ that keeps us sane and smiling through summertime ‘breezed’ in: dried up our sweat, resurrected conversation and sex, calmed our appalling body stench, and ended hot-and-humid’s miserable sticky reign.

[more]

- 65 -

science

Doesn’t this civilizing ‘zephyr’, this indispensable modern servant with its hips of steel, deserve a sexier name than ‘air-conditioning’?

The stone-age word Fire sings out with fear-fear-fear (or friend), assurance or alarm, gunshot and bell.

Meanwhile our industrial-age word, Air-conditioning, merely rattles like an out-of-balance circulation fan.

Where’s our inventor’s pride! *** ‘A/C’s’ new name should have a reassuring ‘hum’.

It should sound just plain gentler than fire.

After all, cooling represents the newer revelation.

It’s about relief not fear, heaven not hell, friendly ‘sighs’ not panicky screams.

It took ten thousand centuries of flames to produce one century of sighs.

science

- 66 -

O father/mother comforting/control: tucked in our windows, our backyards, up on our building’s roofs . . . give us a better label for your glory!

Guide us now. We pray!

Let our minds and bodies gratitude at your ever spreading use find its pure reflection in a perfect name for you.

Help us to flip a brand new archetype out into our spiritual air.

Grant us the right signifier to glorify humanity’s coolest savior.

Bestow us with a new brand name!

In your name . . . **** SUN, lay down your scepter, rest awhile, take a nap.

It’s the COMPRESSOR’S turn.

All on your knees before its omnipresent ‘rumble’.

The power Blackout scares us more than any old Eclipse can do.

1999

- 67 -

science

A NASA Engineer Recalls APOLLO 11 The climbing rattle of equations churn! the mind-ignited burns! the flames explode! the race is on! screw the cost!!

Man’s going to the MOON!!! and my kids yawned.

Damn them.

If I stuck Jupiter in their lap, they’d jump enough.

But war greed pollution politics have given science an uneven name, and so this is a lonely questioning poem.

The moon is lonely, too.

I visited her!

Maybe I said at the time “I conquered her”, but it’s no sin to learn – to grow to understand, after the event, all the implications of an act.

The data teaches if we listen.

science

- 68 -

I now prefer: “We came in peace, For all Mankind,” over obsessively comparing “small steps and giant leaps.”

Science is a flash card of ever new (experimental) perspectives.

Some are right.

Some are wrong.

None are right forever.

I hope that in this new millennium, we scientists and engineers can focus less on improving everything and more on the miracle of balanced systems.

Progress needs to pause and take a long deep breath.

Yet, I still would say to my grand-children, one more time, quietly but proudly: “That mistress Earth once called upon another Lady in the sky, that I, your grand-father, had a part in it, and that is what I want to be remembered by.”

1979

- 69 -

science

--- ----- ARC ---

Covered bridges connecting rural democratic innocence.

Stone arches bearing the brutal will of Roman armies.

Trees toppled, with stone axes, over streams in a primeval forest.

Ropes woven into dangling parabolas hung between two cliffs.

– we are a problem solving species – obsessed with crossing the abyss First, a 1000 craftsmen bolt, rivet, weld, and pour to construct an island suspended in the sky, a spider’s web of rhyming cables, a shadow that will cover half a city.

Then, quarrels of owners bid up that shadow’s price.

Eventually, when the tumult settles, the bridge becomes a happy part of humanities common experience.

Finally, like with every other bridge, the Arc’s strength fails and darkness swamps the gap.

science

- 70 -

But new children learn old songs, teach them and hopscotch to new friends.

Human knowledge gained is never completely lost.

Our bridges get rebuilt.

The whirligig keeps caterwauling on.

We’re knocked down, stepped on, and get up again.

– The other shore – be it curiosity or glory, desire or necessity, invites us to quick-sketch a plan.

We stretch our ideas between the terrifying promontories of our limitations, steady ourselves, and like a bow launch new Technologies upward, in an Arc across another tantalizing gap.

2000

- 71 -

science

A Love Poem to Myself I got so lonely I got married to myself – and so I’ve vowed to cherish singleness.

O how do I love thee, single-me?

To single-me, marriage is hauling who I am along with me while I attempt another self-improvement course.

To single-me, divorce is (in a fit of momentary pique) abandoning myself to the doomed hope of imitating someone else.

To single-me, the quarrels that I’m always having with myself are like the bickering of two old spouses, who can’t stand being with each other about as much as they can’t stand being apart.

I know that I should leave myself, but never do.

Where would I go?

I love my past, for only I could have survived it.

I love my future, for though I fear the torture that’s ahead for ‘me,’ without that future that I fear . . .

I'd cease to be.

I love my present, because it is this poem which makes me laugh.

loneliness

- 72 -

I'm glad that I'm not more, for like a magnifying glass showing flaws, that ‘more’ would make me less.

I’m happier still that I'm not less, for less, in finding less, would keep shrinking itself . . . till nothingness.

And, of course, I can’t agree to be exactly who I am.

For I'm like a damn itch I’ve gotten used to, in other words, life’s irritations drove me crazy long ago.

So do I love thee single-me?

O can I ever love my schizoid self?

We’ll never know, but rest romantically in this: “Sweet reassuring words, salvaged from a lifetime’s loneliness and offered to myself by my own worrying lips, give masturbation just a bit more tenderness.”

1998

- 73 -

loneliness

The Truth . . . and other lies The men would have women be mother and whore, while the women want men to be tender and strong.

So the battle still on that has gone on so long is whatever we get will just make us want more.

O the way away always leads in a circle, and the truth looks little too much like a noose.

The language of love is the language of lies, of pretending we do (when we don’t) understand.

Love’s being with one while we look for another, of cling with one hand while we slap with the other.

O the way away . . . leads to uses for nooses.

Our hopes and our dreams are recycled regrets, where we bury old sorrow underneath some new horror.

We embroider our strengths till we’ve made them a muzzle, as we plan out our lives and get lost in the puzzle.

So maybe we’re squares . . . led around by cabooses.

Success comes from being the right kind of crazy.

It’s amazing how hard we’ll work to be lazy.

Evolution’s an engine relying on stress – our brains get their fuel from our unhappiness.

Life’s a demented circle, spread Vaseline on the truth.

1980

loneliness

- 74 -

Lost in Adolesence My life, unended by its choice of fire will wander – wandering knows the mystery yet – uncomfortably has torn the map too small.

Circuses just lose their little boys.

Overwhelmed (and undermined) by others finer graces, locked in my own unbreakable peanut shell, I’m drifting down life’s river talking backwards, sinking with a dumb grin on my face.

As useless as a broken clock, I wait – in hope some sort of fate will come and find me.

1972

- 75 -

loneliness

Kibitzing with Mom’s ashes You were so big!

My universe! and before that even bigger than my universe, myself.

But now you’re gone, disappeared, like lost legs . . . like no air to breathe.

You’re nothing but an urn and I’m left paralyzed, waiting for the final blow to fall.

How could you leave me with only ashes to hold on to?

What am I suppose to do?

You raised me to be your consort, your champion and defender of what you taught me was the right.

It’s all in shreds!

Could anyone have lived up to those hopes we had for me?

And now you’re not even there to patch me up and prep me for another futile round.

There’ll be no more unexpected fresh cooked meals, no more underserved warm beds, no more morale building conversations with the throne.

It’s over.

You’ll never fill my emptiness again.

I’m on my own.

Mom. Are you sure you don’t have something to say?

death

- 76 -

You always did.

You seemed to have that special knack of making things seem better than they really were.

I miss the way you saved my stumbles, broke my falls.

I miss the kisses that you gave my 50 years of boo-boos.

I’m sorry that you’re locked inside that porcelain vase.

Is your soul still hearing me?

Can such a powerful life-force ever end?

My questions circle out into the emptiness and come back unanswered.

I worry that I’ve forgotten the sound of your voice.

You were so big! the answer to every problem.

And now you’re nothing but a sound long gone, and I’m only an un-noticed cry for help.

You’re not even in the wind.

How can I go on?

Mom, kibitzing here with your ashes, cold now two years, I realize how much I’ve always craved the terrible ferocity of your love.

Love born from out of nature itself, love so much more powerful than me, so much more powerful than anything: individuals, species, law, time.

1996

- 77 -

death

My Father was the World Trade Center Daddy is this panting carcass really you?

This bag of bones?

Answer me. Please answer me.

Communicate!

– if only with your grip or tortured gasp.

Do you really want to die?

If you do . . .

I promise to stay here and say good-bye good-bye good-bye.

Yes, I did try to ignore your desperate pleas, but even my well-trained New York lack-of-guilt finally cried out.

So I’ve come 2000 miles front and center now: to save you from the doctors’ pokes and probes, to send you to a hospice, to have you killed.

Some hospital staff say that you’ve been calling out my name all week.

Some say that you’re a fascinating problem that can still be saved.

I take your 84 year weathered hand in mine and tell the staff that I know what is wrong: you’re tired lonely hurt the disease is life.

death

- 78 -

And so for 3 days I became your complementing half, your other ball . . . and you were mine.

The Barton’s wrinkled scrotum announced that it had had enough mendacity, it wanted out!

We raised our favorite flag – of the last laugh – announced our shared affectionate contempt for life and declared that it was exit time.

I climbed into your bed and held you while we waited on the reaper’s majesty.

The passion was so tender and so sexual.

I would have fused with you, died with you, gone first.

I stroked your silken, silver hair and sniffed erotically your fading scent.

In my minds eye I kissed your toothless mouth.

And the end came.

You, with your children, grand-children, great-grand-child, I, in my bachelors’ sterility, walked into nothingness, together.

Death Poems Fathers Sons . . . they don’t make sense.

The facts lie underneath the skin, forever hidden in love’s brittle bones.

2002

- 79 -

death

Hamlet’s Question: revisited in middle-age I am to old to fall in love with death.

Death ends reality. Period. Kaput.

Suicide’s a song, however sweet, that’s never heard, and can’t be sung.

Its ripples in the world we’ve left behind are pitiful.

We hurt our friends, please our enemies, are nothing but unsightly irritations to the rest.

Alfred Alvarez said: “a suicide labors under the illusion that by killing a part of themselves, they will free another part to live.”

Illusions? Those are gone, too.

Death closes up my book of life and vaporizes it.

I never happened.

Drag on each horrible day, you’re a habit hard to break.

Become more horrible yet, I still be scared to quit.

And if by chance someday, my contract for self-loathing states: “It really is my time to go!”

Even then, your need would still strip all my resolution, for I will always be your lover, Dearest Consciousness.

1995

death

- 80 -

Poetic Enterprise Ideas are born and lean upon mankind, propositions to a lonely poet – to open up new routes to the sublime and help imagination turn a profit.

Poets were first to look up, see the stars, look down and whistle at a girl’s behind.

They founded banking with their tabs in bars, and story-telling to employ the blind.

Poets are innovators of the heart.

They leverage open the unconscious mind by confessing to everything they are and praising all the feelings that they find.

Poems are opportunities to bend life’s rules and grant a second chance to all its fools.

1973, 2014

- 81 -

poetry

J. Berryman

vs.

e. cummings

-

Life friends is boring . . .

-

is such a tiny mystery against compared to our so aweFully big world Life is for . . .

-

For what? Henry asks bitterly, though in his bones he knows not to bother.

-

for love, you old drunk, you’re so deafingly dumb for the strong hands of lightning the caress of rain . . .

-

Everyone’s drowning in their own disappointments.

-

giving, not grieving, is living and living, not leaving, forGiving careFully if . . .

-

This dancing on water just tires me out.

-

me too . . . but the girls really love it!

-

And when hope fails (which it always does) and all our gnawing and screaming is another Fairy Tale for decay?

-

then hum-a-long how do you think delta blues got started or opera arias

poetry

- 82 -

-

I don’t want to sing at my own funeral.

-

sure you do don’t you remember jumping off that bridge Poetry doesn’t get many Headlines

-

I wanted to end the pain.

-

and boost your book sales a little

-

Don’t you know what it’s like to run out of options?

-

no there’s always an answer in/out there . . . somewhere?

-

Well, I hadn’t even had a good clue in years.

-

you closed up/down forgot how essentially-Light we are

-

Heavy.

Life’s something most good men can lift, yes, but it makes them stagger.

-

pshaw our hopes are as easy as clouds to carry all you needed to do was blow the wind of your dreams out towards a different horizon

-

I was already lost at sea.

-

isn’t that where we started?

1974

- 83 -

poetry

Our Poetry Club The secret, if there is one, is in the risking.

We poet-wannabees assemble to communicate, to listen, to express ourselves.

Here is my heart, my loins, my un-winged feet.

Forgive me for not being Shakespeare, though I can’t forgive myself.

Let’s try to make love with words.

Each week we gather around the table with our long sad stories, our painful narratives stretched into song.

‘Lost souls’ wanting to be found.

Wanderers through chilly life carrying the city, all cities, on our backs.

‘Negroes’ picking the cotton of honest feelings, making excuses for nakedness, weaving new clothes for old failures.

We poets-without-portfolio have our own kind of money.

Our purses are worn far too thin to carry worldly currency any longer.

We credit frustration and cliché, anything that’s heartfelt, applaud every word that battles silence.

We freely acknowledge that our poetic self-esteem comes from loyal friends – more than from talent.

poetry

- 84 -

We praise with egalitarian tolerance everyone of us cave-dwellers who’ve managed to avoid the lion’s teeth today.

Our point is to cultivate, indulgently, the cry that started in the pink gorge of the human throat a million years ago . . .

Until, inevitably, our beautiful evenings come to an end.

Our poetry planet ceases, explodes and scatters, returns us into spinning fragments of cold desolate rock.

Yet, even in our most erratic orbits around hope, our human gravity still promises that we will collide again next week – and heat each other up enough in those collisions that once more the lovely planet will grow whole, the rains begin to fall.

Our Poetry Club is not about arguing taste.

It is the original camp-fire orchestra – a vital slice of the symphony of infinite instruments that is the conversation that has reigned since poets (meaning people) learned to talk.

2001

- 85 -

poetry

Seeds & Origins Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.

Walt Whitman [to cross-reference the following annotations: find the poem by page #(p.) on each note, find the note by date at end of each poem.]

Lost in Adolescence

1972 p. 75 Growing up into economic independence, if it happens at all, isn’t easy. I made my journey particularly hard by dropping out of college and ending up a draft evader.

In one colossally dumb move, I plummeted all the way from the heights of a pampered humanities student to the depths of an incompetent dishwasher.

This poem was my cry for help.

The Idiot’s guide to Affection

1972 p. 30 I was living in a commune as a drunken charity case, when I met Diane. She was a gay divorcee, 1960’s style, and receptive to my neediness.

My only real possession at the time was a battered type-writer, so naturally I tried to impress her as an aspiring writer. This 10part poem is a sampling of my ‘love poems to Diane’.

Guilty of innocence

1973 p. 20 My parents rescued me from every sort of peril, all through my twenties – but I could never feel more than partially grateful.

Truth was, they were always willing to support their dreams for me; but never seemed to recognize that I had dreams of my own. Sound familiar?

This poem is an effort to give credit where credit is due, and to express my eternal love for both of them.

origins

- 86 -

Gassing the working class

1973 p. 50 I got through the first semester of my second shot at college by working clean-up at a banquet hall. The crew worked half the night, and slept the rest of the night on the filthy carpet. Room, board, and wages!

An old man with a heavy German accent was part of the crew.

His job was to clean the bar area and never let the rest of us near the liquor. He limped, and had a case of constant shakes. I was told that he was a gas attack survivor from World War One. I saw my future in his present.

Poetic Enterprise

1973, 2014 p. 81 Every poem in this collection has been massaged and improved (or ruined), recurrently, since the day it was first conceived.

In my youth this particular poem was titled The Poet’s Complaint. Since then my attitude and understanding has improved, and now this poem’s about the poet’s contribution.

Every year more business metaphors playfully creep into it.

J. Berryman vs. e. cummings.

1974 p. 82 One way I tried to learn the poetic craft was by imitating the masters. In this poem I take on two of them at once.

John Berryman was an academic poet known for his sarcasm and erudition. He killed himself in 1972. e. e. cummings was an earlier, happier poet, known for lower case letters (“i”), compoundwords, and irregular structures..

Dinner Party

1974 p. 25 Every society loves its dinner parties. Think of bums sharing beans around a fire – or the salons of enlightenment France.

Our Vietnam-era commune had a group meal every night; there were always visitors and intoxicants. My family loved to snare guests for dinner. Movies, too, are full of dinner parties.

I wrote this poem to convince myself, and a college poetry class I was taking – that I enjoyed a sophisticated social life.

- 87 -

origins

Soul

1975 p. 61 This too, is another college poem. I composed it as I was about to graduate with barely passing grades, from a mediocre college, with a useless English degree, during an economic downturn.

I needed to immerse myself in the most hopeful abstractions possible. I needed to believe in mind over matter.

A NASA engineer remembers

1979 p. 68 On the day of the first moon landing (August, 1969) I was the only one of my artsy-fartsy friends interested in leaving our swimming hole to watch the landing on TV. Ten years later, I was in snowbound New England town lit up by a full moon into an other-worldly landscape. Once again, a similar group of friends refused to glorify humanity’s fantastic extra-terrestrial visit.

That night, at least in my imagination, I reached out to a different set of friends, the scientist and engineers.

“Mission control, this is Moon-Base One. Eagle has landed.”

The Truth . . . and other lies

1980 p. 74 Diane was my first, and maybe only, real passion. After years of my chasing her, we finally ended up living together.

For four years, we raised her kid, hunted beauty (me writing, her painting), made a home, and drank too much . . . always together.

We lived-out a version of “La Boehme” in which we both managed to survive – but NOT together. It says everything about me that this last poem to her is so ironic.

O Diane, thanks for letting me love you.

origins

- 88 -

Hippy Elegy

1984 p. 47 Thelma was the only truly gentle person that I met in my computer career. All the rest of us programmers were intellectually arrogant.

Suddenly, inexplicably, she was murdered.

I wrote this poem to solace myself and to please the ghost of my friend. Thelma was cautious and corporate – but she loved to hear me tell stories from my days as a hippy.

God

1986 p. 62 I’m an alcoholic who got sober in A.A. 30 years ago.

The main thing I heard at my first Alcoholics Anonymous. meeting was that I couldn’t do it alone, that I needed to develop a personal vision of a God who would help me.

This poem, from my first days of sobriety, is about that God, as I understand Him. Familiar Facts

1986 p. 16 The gods that truly occupy our heads are our families-oforigin.

The obvious (positive) truth about all of those families is that they did keep us alive and growing for a very long time – even if it was at the cost of screwing us up royally.

I wrote this poem as I embarked on another long bout of psycho-therapy. I knew that I was going to be raking my ‘family’ over the coals, again: and I wanted to keep it as fair and friendly as possible.

The Disabled – on Wall Street

1987 p. 64 I did work on Wall Street, on computer programs that totaled out to trillions of dollars. It was not glamorous, but it was real.

There wasn’t much warmth and good-will on “The Street” – but there were some people who seemed to carry it (goodwill) on their backs, like papooses, and generously share it.

Often I wondered if it wasn’t the disabled, who made the whole crazy place possible.

- 89 -

origins

Why Hydrogen Loves Oxygen.

1989 p. 26 I suppose everyone in life has had the pleasant/unpleasant experience of being loved by someone they were sure that they could never love in return. What fools humans are.

Carol said that she had picked me out of the A. A. crowd, because I was clearly as lonely, hopeless, and unattractive as she was. This was a viewpoint on myself with which I absolutely refused to agree.

Eventually, thank God, I saw the light.

Calvary – Golgotha – worse?

1990 p. 18 I was the definitive black-sheep in our nuclear (and extended) family. That, along with the fact that I had all the defensiveness of a youngest child, meant I always felt a lot of condescension at our family reunions.

I started this poem on the way to my first family reunion in sobriety. I was terrified of all the demeaning encouragement I could expect to receive. I was a set of complexes ready to explode.

This poem was my revenge-in-advance.

Fleshy fun

1991 p. 54 About 6 months into our relationship Carol and I found both of ourselves gainfully un-employed. We had nothing to do for a whole summer, and no money – so we spent the time exploring everything about each others bodies.

We never did do anything we could have been arrested for – but we came pretty close.

I wrote this poem a couple winters later. During that summer I was far too distracted.

origins

- 90 -

The Talking Cure

1993 p. 6 Some people need to talk. I’m one of them. Carol had been taught, by a lonely divorced mother, to listen. As our physical fascination cooled down we replaced our lust with evermore candid conversation.

By the time our affair ended, Carol, who I suppose had inherited the skill from her Mom, could easily out-converse me.

Twenty years after breaking up, we still talk on the phone.

Love’s meant to be incomplete

1993 p. 36 A lot of people hated me and Carol. Two complete losers were NOT suppose to be blissfully happy together. It was an insult to the order of things.

Sometimes we actually felt that we had to justify our romance – and so I wrote this poem.

Our luck held. We stopped worrying about what the world thought. We learned the trick of being amused by each others faults.

Eventually, good-enough became . . . irresistible and perfect.

Affirming Life in Central Park

1995 p. 10 I’d earned an excellent reputation as a computer programmer and I thought I could keep that profession forever. I was wrong.

When I tried to return to programming, after a 5 year hiatus, I was soundly rejected. My specialties were all dead or dying.

I was in midtown Manhattan when I finally had to admit that, once again, I’d failed to solve the economic problem.

I retreated with my grief to the beauty of Central Park. This poem gushed out of me.

Hamlet’s Question – in middle age

1995 p. 80 I don’t see ‘depression’ as a disease. I see it as a mood that sometimes stays way too long. Pharmaceuticals, I’m saying, are a poor response to the bitter-sweetness of life.

I probably started this poem, about suicide, in the womb. I’m dating it from my invention of its current title.

- 91 -

origins

Kibitzing with Mom’s ashes

1996 p. 76 Some feelings are better repressed – at least for a while.

It wasn’t until two years after my Mom’s death, while on a visit to my widowed Dad, that I finally accepted her passing.

The feelings of loss enclosed and overwhelmed me.

This poem was my accommodation to the fact that my one permanent champion was permanently gone.

It’s been good to know you

1997 p. 38 My immediate reaction to Carol’s leaving me was this poem.

It did manage to woo her back for a few months.

When she left a second time, I became so visibly manic that everyone, even strangers, found it easiest to avoid me.

One good friend stayed around long enough to make this useful observation: “Jeez, you two were together 8 years. That’s remarkable! If you’d been a Broadway play, you’d be considered a smash hit.”

Love Poem to Myself

1998

p. 72 A poetry workshop was advertised where participants were asked to bring a love poem that they were currently working on.

Since I was in no shape to write anymore about Carol, and had no other love prospects in sight, I decided to try this ‘poem to myself’. I thought it was a clever twist on the workshop rules.

The group let me read it – but they refused to discuss it. terror-of-dating Flower 1998 p. 29 This poem sounds like a ‘fantasy of scoring’ on a ‘first date’.

It does happen!

Actually, though, the poem’s a fanciful reflection on the moment when a long term friendship almost turned sexual.

I do think that friendships could use the tenderness that sex provides.

Still, who knows, maybe friendship is already more tender than sex.

origins

- 92 -

Welcome to My Home

1998 p. 21 Swimming has been my life long escape valve. To get myself a credential that might widen my available swimming places, I once took a swim instructor’s class at a YMCA. The teacher turned out to clearly have a thing going for young men in swimsuits. I became worried that he might fail me, just because I was old and unattractive.

However, this instructor also had a brand new house which he loved to brag about. To keep from being failed-as-a-spoilsport, I wrote him this poem and framed it for his new home’s wall.

Queen Merry-O

1998 p. 56 Mario owned a boutique candy store in Hoboken. He was as flamboyant and coquettish as his candy was delicious.

I never saw Mario seduce anyone, or be seduced. I think he was probably monogamous with his business partner. Yet, wherever he went, in his shop or out, he playfully promoted sex and sensuality.

Mario was proud of his philosophy – and it wasn’t Puritanism.

“Make love not war.”

Down by the Riverside

1998 p. 13 In the 1990’s my Hoboken rent was so low (thanks Gloria) that I worked very little. I spent much of my free time blissfully exploring New York City.

One day I happened upon a reverential display of manuscripts from the Beat poets. I, personally, wasn’t all that impressed.

Jealously, I resolved to best my more famous competitors.

Hoboken was about to have the opening ceremony of its riverside Sinatra Park. Since I knew the town’s politicians from my short time as a reporter, I decided that I was the perfect person to write and present the parks ‘official’ commemoration poem.

I almost talked those politicians into it.

- 93 -

origins

Ballroom Dancing

1998 p. 44 Ballroom dancing began for me when a woman invited me to join her in a dance class. I thought she was in love with me. It turned out that she got a free lesson every time she brought in a fresh recruit.

Still, dancing turned out to be such fun that that I made it into my new religion.

I wrote this poem as a sales pitch for my teachers classes. I had become interested in earning free lessons, too. terror-of-dating First Date 1999 p. 28 I’ve never known anyone over 40 years-old to say that dating is fun. Loneliness, hard as it is, usually becomes preferable.

I wrote this poem out of frustration, but I did try to use it as a dating tool. It seemed as good a way as any to break the ice Its effect was usually dismal.

Global Cooling

1999 p. 65 Heat waves are an inevitably unpleasant part of summer. Just before the millennium New York City was hit by a gargantuan one, 3 weeks of near 100 degree weather.

While we all waited for relief, I committed my days to honoring the tireless air-conditioners that were making life bearable.

The Anarchist’s last dime

2000 p. 52 I don’t call myself an Anarchist, but I do love them an awful lot.

“Why be reasonable,” they seem to say so perfectly, “in the face of so much cruelty and absurdity?”

I wrote this poem after talking to an Anarchist, all afternoon, in a McDonald’s.

It felt to me like he wanted to join the world – rather than to destroy it.

origins

- 94 -

ARC

2000 p. 70 Some poems (maybe all) are exercises in intellectual whimsy.

One day I started thinking about bridges. Maybe a bridge that I needed to cross was closed? Maybe I saw a painting of a bridge, or read a poem about one? Whatever?

As I wondered on about bridges I pondered how difficult they must be to construct to last – and on to what an ingenious species humans are.

A lot of engineers think they’re dull fellows. Please love yourselves more, good fellows, you’ve made our world.

Our Poetry Club

2001 p. 84 Our club got started when some successful flatterer managed to get a grant to teach poetry in the forgotten meeting hall of Manhattan’s Carmine Street Public Library.

The basement room had once hosted the likes of Marianne Moore and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Their photos, and photos of other less-remembered poets, decorated its walls.

Advertisements posted around the Village drew about a dozen of us students/poets together. When the grant ran out our paid teacher dropped our workshop like a hot potato.

The kindly librarian let a few of us, who had gotten to like each other, carry on.

Gay?

2002 p. 40 Teng Feng was a Taiwanese executive in America to study advanced computer science. He had the bright idea that he would master English faster if he roomed with an American.

This was in the 1980’s and I had an extra bedroom. We became fast friends, endlessly sharing conversations and adventures.

Years later, totally unexpectedly, we were able to renew our friendship for a weekend.

We both took (almost) indecent delight in our 36 hour feast of ideas and memories.

- 95 -

origins

My Father was the W.T.C.

2002 p. 78 In my parents marriage my Dad definitely played second fiddle.

After Mom died, it was a struggle for him to get any notice at all. Eventually he ended up (nobody’s fault) as a fading soul in a back ward of a hospital. It was hard even to get phone calls into him.

One day a kindly nurse answered his phone, “Your father wants to die,” she said to me, “and I think you should come down here and help him.”

Vicki’s House

2002 p. 22 Vicki (in Louisiana) and I (in New York) were put in touch by a mutual friend. Coincidently, both Vicki and I had complained about loneliness to that friend on the very same Sunday morning.

Even on our first phone call, Vicki and I talked for hours.

Three months later we spent a long orgiastic weekend together at Vicki’s house (Louisiana) and decided to tie some serious knots.

After I returned to New York, I began to wonder if we both weren’t the victims of a blind over-confidence.

I decided to put my best guesses about Vicki’s inner springs into a poem – and send it to her.

Spreading the Word

2002 p. 42 I guess I can say that I’ve always had more fun with books than with people. I’ve read most of those books as library loans, but the ones I’ve actually owned have always been very precious to me.

Nevertheless, moving to Baton Rouge with just a few suitcases and boxes, meant even most of those precious treasures would have to go.

It’s not easy to find a home for worn out paperbacks. I finally thought of a place they might be wanted.

origins

- 96 -

Louisiana Birthday Ballad

2004 p. 14 One person who particularly hoped that I would NOT survive my move from New York to Baton Rouge was my new motherin-law.

Where Billie Picou was raised youngest daughters became their aging Mom’s caretakers. I was going to interfere with that.

This poem was my grandest effort to win Billie over. While my poem/ballad barely drew her notice, it did convince the rest of Vicki’s family that at least my heart might be in the right place.

Three-Legged Race

2007 p. 4 Vicki and I quickly found out that two fifty year-olds don’t compromise on their habits very easily. Even before our marriage ceremony, we were scrambling to get along.

Naturally, I thought that some poetry would clear the air.

Vicki wasn’t impressed. She explained that what she’d prefer from me was a higher income and more hygienic habits.

After 15 years of revisions, this poem is still only beginning to satisfy her.

1972 – 2009 p. 46 Poems mostly lose in their natural competition with songs.

Songs are less work to enjoy, easier to remember, and earn a lot more money.

I’d give anything to be able to set my poems to music.

This sonnet is a cheerful expression of my 50 years of envy towards songwriters.

Pop Songs

Autumn Wedding

2009

p. 8 My most-immediate reason for a formal marriage to Vicki was to get on her health insurance. I needed surgery.

Vicki’s most immediate reason for our marriage was to enjoy one last spectacular party with all her aging friends.

This is the poem that should have been sung at our wedding ceremony, but it was written years too late.

- 97 -

origins

Married sex ?

2009 p. 58 I once complained to my most worldly friend that I wasn’t getting any sex in my marriage.

“What makes you think anyone is?” he grumpily answered.

This is another one of those ‘compilation’ poems. It mixes unused stanzas from my youth with some sardonic truths from old-age.

Quid Pro Quo

1973, 2013 p. 35 Here, over a 40 year period, I’ve converted a passionate sonnet to Diane (1973) – into a didactic appeal to Vicki (2013).

The only identical passage [line 12] in the two versions is: “you fill my soul like mountain streams their lake.”

Some key lines from the 1973 version – “schemes that steal sad pleasure wondering about/ my life, and if I’ve given it enough/ to now deserve an alcoholic break” – have become, thankfully (soberly), out of date.

It’s been wonderful watching an old poem become something new.

Also, Vicki has certainly been a more positive force in my life than alcohol ever was.

Seeds & Origins

2016

p. 86 This prose poem, this series of observations that you’re reading right now, is my poetic history.

Poems do not emerge from a vacuum – they each have their stimulations, their causes.

And so, with both causes [feelings] and effects [poems] – poetry becomes an applied science. This applied science’s datapoints are our inner experiences.

Poetry is more than individual imagination. It is humanity’s most dexterous tool in our endless struggle to know and love ourselves.

origins

- 98 -

Meditation on Mud

1973 & on p. 100 Flirting is my favorite activity.

My first college was Connecticut Wesleyan, all male and snotty. Bittersville.

My second college was Montclair State. It had five coeds for every male-student. When I failed at flirting with one girl, I just moved on to the next. I’d died and gone to heaven.

It is true that I was awfully poor and disheveled while at Montclair, so I sure wasn’t any Don Juan – but I did have a sweet self-deprecating way that succeeded often enough.

Matching wits with life

1972 & on p. 108 It was on a late afternoon, in 1972, that I first resolved to test my talent as a serious poet.

My friend Diane had just taken me to see Spring arrive in an Apple Orchard. Suddenly, I had felt reborn with the colors of a sun-drenched hillside, with the fragrance of opening blossoms, with the hum of awakening insects . . . and especially, with the glories of a willing lady.

Now it was time to pay Diane back, with a poem.

The first line that rose to the challenge that I had given myself was: “My name, like dandelions, plays with the grass.” [now in stanza #27 of this poem]. The poem that I completed that evening, in 1972, consisted of 10 lines of free verse.

During the next decade Apple Orchard in Springtime acquired a quatrain format, a loose rhyme scheme, and a lot more length.

Later, over subsequent decades, Summer, Fall, and Winter were added to the Springtime – and the philosophical and psychological entered in to balance the sensual.

In 2000 the poems working title became: A Poet matches wits with life.

2016

- 99 -

origins

Meditation on Mud excerpts from just his side -- of a bar-room flirtation - Hi. You look like you could use a friend?

- Oh. I guess you were expecting someone else?

Anyone else!

Sorry for living.

- Hey, aren’t the meek going to inherit the Earth?

When? Well, the Bible does leave that part out.

- Pride? How does that help?

My only ambition is to stay sane.

- I didn’t say that things aren’t bleak. They ARE bleak!

I said, “Hi, you look like you could use a friend.”

- Are you really interested in, “What to do about it?”

Can I tell you anyway?

I call it mud-ling through.

- The 1st step is to remember where we got our start.

In the primordial ooze.

Mud’s in our blood. nd - The 2 step’s to not all take the crap (mud) too seriously.

You know, make the best of it.

- Surviving means learning the difference between quicksand (danger!) and ordinary mud.

- The point is to keep slogging along . . . to get a feel for the bottom.

If the mud starts getting too deep change direction, or stop, or even back up!

Usually, there’s no need for any immediate panic.

mud

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- There’s a lot of positive things about mud.

It’s a poultice. It draws the poisons out. It heals us.

Speaking for myself, I’d rather take a mud bath than take Prozac.

Mud’s a lot cheaper.

- Remember that incredibly upbeat song, “Singing in the Mud.” No, no. That’s the cleaned up version. (singing softly) “What a glorious feeling, I’m happy again.”

Get it? Happy!

Although the rain (mud) should make you feel dismal.

- I know I’m tone deaf. So what.

Sometimes I think that tone deaf people enjoy singing more than anyone.

The point isn’t to be perfect, it’s to have fun.

A silk purse can be made out of a sow’s ear . . . if all you want is something to carry things in.

- You’re tone-deaf, too.

Bingo! I knew we had things in common.

Our mistakes might harmonize.

Getting drunk might help.

- Actually, drinking wasn’t what I had in mind, either.

Some things are plain better than drinking, or singing, or anything else for that matter. **** [more]

- 101 -

mud

- Uh-oh. I broached the sacred subject.

Now you’re going to leave?

- You’re not!

Mud is a good lubricant.

Wow! I hope I’m hearing you right.

-- Well, it’s not just sex.

It’s the whole project of mud-ling through.

- Like sitting in the mud, as in practicing Zen. Or making a mess, as in mud pies.

Or mud fights. Plenty of action, nobody gets hurt.

And so mud more.

- The mud never plays favorites.

It helps out wherever it can.

- Some people even swim in it!

Oh, the first time they get in over their heads they’re desperate, like everyone else – but somehow these ‘naturals’ manage to keep their wits about them.

They improvise, maybe a doggy paddle, and study their mistakes.

They learn to make their actions proportional to the mud’s resistance.

- They get smooth, slick, slippery, like mud . . . and the mud shows its appreciation with all sorts of goodies.

Life starts going swimmingly.

Success!

- It happened to me!

Once.

mud

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- I got distracted.

My stroke was perfect, my kick was powerful, I was leaving a beautiful wake in the muck – but I kept on wondering where I was going.

One day I looked up to find out.

It all fell apart in an instant, the blink of an eye.

There’s such a difference between racing ahead and treading water, especially in mud.

You can’t ‘stop to smell the roses’ when you’re in ‘deep mud’.

Instead of buoying you up, the mud sucks you down.

Quicksand!!

Swimming in mud can be pleasant.

Drowning wasn’t. It ruined my attitude.

Since then my life’s become nothing – but a search for the shallowest mud.

- Which reminds me . . . can we move on to that key issue . . . you know . . . your place or mine?

- For mud wrestling of course.

The friendly kind.

Lust!

- You’re the one that brought up lubricants.

Well, now you did see how I’d react.

You could see it as a compliment. **** [more]

- 103 -

mud

- Sure I don’t mind if we just keep talking.

Do I look like a guy with a lot of options?

There is another approach to the Life/mud problem.

Reason. Analysis.

- The scientific method.

Designate categories, explore variables, construct and test hypothesis, stay focused and never stop revising.

- Define priorities. Delay gratification. Get a grip!

- The distinction seems obvious to me.

We can view Life as a strategic challenge (conquest!) or helplessly embrace it (appeal!).

We can squeeze Mud into a Petri dish or get naked and hope it comes to bed.

- Our choice is to be mature and goal-oriented or to throw in the towel . . . that’s ourselves . . . into the nearest mud puddle . . . and get a good laugh out of a bad joke.

- I’m suggesting that ambition and self-discipline aren’t all they’re ‘cracked up’ to be.

- More personal experience, of course.

I started out in life as one of those true believers.

I loved school and I loved knowledge.

Before I was half-way through high-school I was absolutely convinced that the world did make sense, and that I was one of the ones who was destined to understand it.

O boy, did I give being smart the old college try!

mud

- 104 -

- I found out that while mud can blur our understanding, clarity can make it absolutely deadly.

Ideas are shards: sharp, dangerous pieces of a shattered whole.

You can float on those shards, even walk on them, but you don’t stop bleeding.

I ended up adrift on a sea of broken glass.

Failed systems.

Screaming.

- And not only that!

If mud’s clingy, intellectual analysis is super-glue.

It got so a friend couldn’t say “hello”, without me attaching some hidden meaning to it.

Pretty soon I didn’t have any friends.

- Of course I didn’t really mind any of this.

After all, the reward was supposed to be a professorship.

Summers off. Short hours. Enough said.

I read till my eyeballs popped out.

I proved that I knew everything . . . and was still learning more.

I wrote completely original papers that somehow . . . still agreed with all the established authorities.

I learned to qualify every intellectual assertion so carefully and so many times . . . that people looked dazed when I spoke.

- Do you know how hard it is to build an ivory tower out of mud?

Oh well. I failed.

Maybe if I hadn’t had a sense of humor? **** [more]

- 105 -

mud

- It’s so great that you haven’t cut and run.

It takes courage to get to know strangers, especially slightly exotic strangers.

But you do want me to stop whining.

Why-y?

- What I really believe in is patterns.

Reassuring compressions. Art. Simplifications that give us a handle on all our depressing inadequacies.

Prayers are a good example. Songs are a better one.

- Listen.

Hum a medley of a few favorite tunes: e,g, ‘Greensleeves’, ‘Ode to Joy’, ‘High Hopes’.

- Life may be a chaos of disappointments, that’s right, mud – but out of the mud comes melodies, patterns, swirls.

- These patterns are our security blankets.

They shimmer and take form in our imaginations, are grabbed by our needs, then gobbled by our hunger.

Art’s patterns feed us more surely than any food.

- There’s the pattern of mud splattered over clean garments.

The pattern of young dreamer’s blood on white sheets.

The pattern of ships in the night that keep searching for hope in a world that always feels wrong.

There’s even the pattern we’re making right now in our muddleheaded willingness to get along. ****

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- Tomorrow? God, I wish it didn’t exist.

Because we’ll have to go to work in the morning – and return to scrubbing life’s deck with our tongues.

- But tonight!

There’s still time to bake up some mud cakes . . . to slip through our worries that nothing is easy and into the mud hole where everything’s fun.

- It’s where we belong.

Why don’t you seem convinced?

- Wait! Don't go. Let's talk about our jobs.

Sports? The Yankees won last night.

I love my dog!

Awww! **** - Hi. You look like you could use a friend?

- Sorry. You’re right.

I’m the one that could sure use a friend.

1973 & on

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mud

Matching wits with life

Why words?

1 We all need cabins where we’re safe from winter wind and human cold, castles against our outer foes, asylums for our inner woe.

2 We build these homes from words we love and lodge in them our infant hope.

Created out of poems we’ve known these huts are what we mean by souls.

3 In metaphor, rhythm, and rhyme we craft ourselves protective charms.

Familiar phrases in our minds help insulate our hearts from harm. ****

matching wits

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Cabin building 4 I found my private cabin far inside the woods and out of view, although it seemed a wreck to most to me its ruin proved its truth.

5 My wounds needed to nurse themselves, my disenchantment to escape the bloody facts of natural law, the sharper teeth of human hate.

6 So I repaired that wasted haunt until it was my sturdy home.

Imagination made the planks, my intellect provided stones.

7 I stuffed the pantry with ideas and made the walls library shelves.

With windows of impregnable glass I framed a point of view to last, 8 and from a chair built out of scorn (yet soft and warm as mommy’s womb) I welcomed snowy winter in – let loneliness cure envying. ****

[more]

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matching wits

Winter hideout 9 My scheme, though it was more a prayer, was to inhabit the ideal and use the lies and legends there to manufacture self-esteem.

10 I dreamed I was: a soldier who wandered the bad world doing good, a scholar-scientist insisting Reason outranked superstition, 11 a merchant in medieval Florence funding his city’s Renaissance.

My thought-cocoon had everything, except a butterfly within.

12 I even gave advice to God, that it was time He lighten up and take the focus off His cross to put His energy toward love.

13 I have escaped, I told myself, just like the wise old trees around.

I have withdrawn my sap from hurt and hid it safely underground.

matching wits

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14 Regrettably, these gambits failed, my playmate truth, she ceased to change.

I was sole god in my own world, but my own world was shrinking fast, 15 and in the end all I had left was contempt, mostly for myself.

My fantasies just made me yawn – in short, I’d bored myself to death. **** Spring breakup 16 Yet even death’s only a stage, nothing ever remains the same.

Outside my cabin life insists upon the restlessness of change.

17 Not bothering to ask at all, the sun starts lengthening each day, raising a stench from last years junk, turning firm pathways into muck.

18 With a hint here, a hammer there, the premises I’ve held so dear dissolve into uncertainty, as cold conviction starts to melt.

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[more]

matching wits

19 And soon this warmth entreats a bud to leave its shelter and explode, while in my turtle shell I hear that same fearful commanding sound.

20 Beyond the windows of my soul (the changing temperature has cracked) a nearby hilltop paints itself in iridescent pink and white.

21 Winter’s beaten, summer’s won, an Apple Orchard’s blossoming!

Cascading colors overwhelm the drab myopia of text.

22 Fertility spreads out across the lush horizon beckoning my hand to slip beneath the dress that hides the happiness of flesh.

23 Hope hurls me running from my hut, pushing and sliding through spring’s mud, out of the wasteland of my mind into the wonderland of lust. ****

matching wits

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Splendid summer 24 I rush with a mad grin to join the chaos of my loins and feel love’s irresistibility demolish rationality.

25 The Apple Orchard is my sea and I’m a child tossed by waves through an hallucinated haze plucked out on psychedelic strings.

26 I’m rolled about till up is down and hardly care, for what I find is I’ve never enjoyed my mind so much as when it’s nearly drowned.

27 My name, like dandelions, talks to the grass. My brain’s washed by the breeze.

My prick, in flower, sprays perfume all over this succulent scene 28 – while senses magnified disclose – leaf veins carrying human blood, insects ascending mountain chains, time lapse photos showing growth. [more]

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matching wits

29 The universe appears so huge I worry that I don’t exist, ‘till looking outward what I see is out-there looking back at me!

30 This wild convergence lifts the earth to kiss its child the human eye, while all around the pieces that have been together spread and fly, 31 arrange and rearrange themselves into an orgasm of form, curving the breadth of time and space back to the point of here and now. **** Harvesting personality 32 Binding together these delights: the bees sing in their constant tasks, making sharp lines across the haze, highlighting colors with their sounds; 33 as butterflies in counterpoint use unseen eddies in the air to glide about on paper wings and sprinkle rainbows everywhere;

matching wits

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34 while birds convene in tree hotels to carefully debate away how far they think they’ve come today, and who should sleep with who tonight.

35 The whole’s alive and every part is rushing on to live and die, no part’s so cruel to stop the clock or dumb enough to question “Why?”.

36 So I let go of who I am, resign control of who I’ll be, risk abdicating separate self to join the universal glee.

37 What this means (to me) is to not give a damn what others think, but be myself in my own dance of jerky spontaneity. **** [more]

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matching wits

The creed 38 The Orchard and this poem are one, or two . . . on to infinity; the seasons and the birds the same, too much . . . yet all in unity.

39 In winter poetry is bait by which we seek to fool ourselves into pretending one more time that we’re the masters of our fate.

40 In summer poetry is fruit, delicious dangling from a tree, an apple anxious to be picked though it’d be better off as seed.

41 Poems are wedding rings and pearls for lovers too poor to buy jewels, or work and purpose for those who can’t find themselves a better use.

42 Poetry is inventing names for the relentless crush of change, then juggling those labels through life’s summersaults of joy and pain. ****

matching wits

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A happy death 43 The end. I feel my art begin to want to take its bow and leave, withdraw into another hut within another winter’s dream.

44 Language gives us the tools to bear the terror of experience, words clinging fast to other words make life-rafts out of our despair.

45 Our victory’s to hold the line of consciousness for one more day and keep on savoring its feast right through the final dish of all. **** Tie game 46 Life sucks, and then you die, that’s true, but there’s pleasant surprises, too.

Survive by loving paradox.

Drink tears until you laugh out loud.

Forgive the world – and then yourself.

1973 & on

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matching wits

The author (me) was raised in suburban New Jersey, spent his 20’s knocking about small cities in New England, and his middle-ages in the big city (New York). I am now growing old (66) in the bible belt (Baton Rouge). My life’s been a desperate improvisation – like most people’s.

It seems incredible to me, but I’ve probably had 50 different sorts of Jobs (boils, trials, and afflictions). The closest I’ve come to a career was 7 years in computer programming. I’ve also been a clerk, a reporter, a janitor, a teacher, a cook, an artist’s model, etc.

There are 3 women (Diane, Carol, Vicki) with whom I’ve managed to share long swaths of my life. They are ‘the chief friends’ amongst the many (not enough) strange/wonderful friendships that I’ve enjoyed.

I have no children. Psychologically, I am probably a needy child, myself. Therapy didn’t help as much as I wanted it to. Does anything?

Throughout my life I’ve kept my faith with words, even as my society has kept its faith with money.

It turns out, of course, that we all need both – but more importantly, that we all need each other.

[One final note – on aesthetics.

I think that poetry should be: 1. as engaging as a comic monologue, 2. as sweet sounding as music, 3. as instructive as an essay, 4. as comprehensible as a cooking recipe, 5. and original.

I hope I haven’t missed my mark by too far.]

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