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Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Along the Road


Non-elected candidates
live on
on bumpers
while colleges
stick to
windows

along the road



People pull up
in parking lots at parks
where you know
they go to meet
interesting new
friends

along the road



Yesterday’s machines
lie scrapped,
smashed
and leaking oil
in rusted hunks
adorning a hill

along the road



You can tell the age
of politics by where
it once parked itself in
concrete slabs, patches,
potholes, and
jet-smooth stretches

along the road



An overpass overlooks
faster means of travel
while lot after lot of wasted space
adorns the street like banners stretching
greed along with disregard and
time discarded

along the road



Acetone gas escaping
from freshly-painted, double-yellow
lines and little arrows, words
and lines of various means, direction
and import

along the road



The gaps between beginning and end,
no longer the act of going,
cars plugging along declaring:
“I am here”
sit back buddy
“me first!”

along the road



Sitting in traffic
going nowhere
a sea of fleeing cars
thinking of that time
when movement and air
came together

along the road.





Tuesday, March 29, 2016

The Last Light



The last light tingles
with its tart taste for
nuances not scripted by
tongue or finger –
as elusive as an
unlit candle waiting
for the moment to care –
daring the receding mind
to formulate in functions
beyond its dimmed dexterity
A trickster’s gleam
denying sleep
surrender,
the death of
a day.



Monday, March 28, 2016

Disintegration




                        I

This
is the time of day
that has meaning
twenty-four hours wasted on
fifteen minutes
and tomorrow morning
it may suck

                        II

“Suck”
is too harsh a word
but I shall leave it
and see how it feels

                        III

notepads
self
storage
reminders
that I am

                        IV

Just as I rob
each empty page
of its purity
so does the empty page
growing up through
my daily life
threaten to
overwhelm me

Take a glance
at midnight

                        V

Words arrive
where sleep eludes

                        VI

curses
distractions
gaps.





Sunday, March 27, 2016

All the Little Pack Rats





All the little pack rats
pop their heads into their pillows
and puff the filtered air
as if innocence could float
through foam and feather
to and fro
as easy as a breeze

Follow them
for all they think
there’s more they know
no less than all forgotten
and all that we’ve been taken for
as we’ve pulled ourselves along
a trail of knots
both fresh and frayed
as twisted as any
sign of light might be
to the night-weary eye

Glittering shadows of dust
greet the sunlight
in dance
as dreary as anything that glows
yet still
as peaceful as the gentle pull
that glides us through here
and as easy as a breath

The sordid whines and screams
of daytime deserve no less
than to desert us
unto ourselves
if only to have
us listen
to the muted breathing
of innocence
muffled as it may be
yet with its depth intact

World-weary
after a full week
of drenching rain
the only sounds left welcome
are those that echo
silence, those
that greet you
like a single wave
tracking to the edge of
of an untouched morning lake
one pulsation from the beat of life
sent to stroll its rolling way
across the perfect stillness
as if a rat
had held its breath
just long enough
to jump

So there it is
arriving as it will
in the dusted light
of afternoon
or here
pulled through
from morning
on its way
to wherever it
may take us

Forever riding
on the fluffed and foolish
fantasies
as we find them
in the soft
near-silent breath
of such innocence
as lies tucked
into their pillows
as safe
and soft and caring
as any trusted cloud
could be.


 Maine 8/92
                                                                                    


 

Friday, March 25, 2016

Late Days








There was a song she sang with her eyes
if only in passing
a lullaby sculpted in sadness and yet
   sung with celebration and joy…
and this is what I knew of her

And so the morning sky squatted down
with overcast tones
cracking open only to give birth to
a confusion of sun and cloud
lying naked across the table, crying

I sat at a chair there, staring at a cup
empty enough to count,
swathed in light and shadow and thirst,
unsure of what if any
meaning even the least of it might hold

Beginnings must beg their endings, I guessed,
rising up to no occasion,
pushing myself from the table
with little resistance
and no really clear sense of where to go

It was later in the night that the candle would ignite
golden diamonds in her eyes
on which she delicately balanced all caution
against the passion of the flickering light,
encapsulating the questions of the day into the mysteries of the night

I arose from the table and stepped back into myself,
turning only not to see
in another direction, as the splinters of light
strewn across the table behind me
slipped and faded away into the distant corners of the room

Late season cicadas sang of summers lost
as I opened the door to step out
into the world in which we only pretend to own control
the purpose and direction of the path
lying before me partially obscured by overgrown weed and grass

The hours were due to drift by too slowly
before coming to an end too soon,
the designs that my mind had held the days before
to be obligations on these very passing minutes
had lost all color and focus between then and now
  
And yet she would hold the evening in her hand
as if it were a brush
with which she might create the very vision
of every human emotion
without so much as a conscious thought of doing so

There were things to do – I knew –
places to stop without going,
thoughts to capture before their outlines
dissipated into the shadows,
simple things now too complex to figure out

In a way, this day had a sense of needing to
start over again, maybe more than once,
there was nothing there to see past it with,
no glass clear enough through which
it might pause long enough to reflect upon itself

If this is it, this is what it is, it might have told me
as if saying such a thing could be
what it would be like to be imbued with wisdom,
but there was not conscious truth to
each step that I had taken or would yet take – they simply were

Time, when it arrived, would find me neither
sitting, standing, knelt nor dancing,
there could be no determined approach into,
away from, or around
the song with which she sang her every move

For now, the ground simply slipped away beneath me
with more direction than intention,
simple, sweet sunlight streamed past like a series
of post cards sent as if to suggest
that there might yet be other places toward which to go

But I cannot remember now quite where it was that
I did or did not quite get to,
   only that faintest of choruses of distant sounds…
the saws, the cicadas, birds and crickets, the
whole host of breeze-borne voices muffled by something to the air

Set two places at the table and wait
for an empty chair to gain meaning
conversations come and go without the need
  for someone to share them with –
It’s never the words themselves that crave the company

The greatest accomplishment of some late days
  is simply making it through them –
eventually our bearings will remind themselves
of what and where they are,
eventually something in everything will make as much sense as we allow it
  
Talk’s only talk – traded across a table with
   someone who is or is not there…
at the same table I rose and stepped away from hours before
it is the evening sweeping down around me
it is the light in the evening that will capture me for all and more than I know

She will smile with a shy sincerity that will beguile me
she will allow me the pleasure
of aching for places unknown and unseen
and I will wonder how it is that I might touch such a thing
even as I wilt before the glorious sparkling of its light.


Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Misplaced Letters





Down in the middle of
whatever might have happened,
where even ambiguities
get all muddled up,
someone placed some words
into an envelope –
shook it once or twice
and shoved it in the mail

It was an especially foggy morning,
even the mist didn’t know
where to go, a
morning in which the patterned steps
of a carrier’s feet
disappeared into the confusion
and, with that, all was lost

There’s a sea of scattered
leafs out there:
rocks, limbs and human garbage,
things both tossed and lost –
and, out among it all, there must lie
a misplaced bundle of decaying letters,
scrambled thoughts
that never found their way.






Monday, March 21, 2016

On the Tilted Water





A lost bell of dusty brass
  rocks slowly on the tilted water,
    leaving the gentle evening to its own company

It becomes anybody's guess
  whether it still has the gumption to sing,
    ring or clang with any clarity at all

Fog horns lifted from dreary spirits
  chase their fading selves across the
    dimly lit surface of this particular dream world,

Never catching anything
  beyond some diffuse sense of themselves,
    as directionless as the dark itself

Lovers twirl by in sweeping dances –
  churning tides and tight-knit eddies
    in search of sounds that rise yet never fall –

While barely-floating spirits
  row their aching bones along the
    way the wind might have carried them

Had it been there to guide them
  through the quiet calm of approaching night,

    in search of shining reverberations of the soul.

Sunday, March 20, 2016

Intro


He rode his solitary mare
down through the far away,
up to the crest of happenstance
and then beyond, to the point of departure

There below him, the sea crashed
against a bitter wall of rocks,
salt-stained granite heaved
high up against its swells

Against the endless pounding of mercy and anger,
backing and slapping, backing and slapping,
stealing away a grain of sand at a time
from the fortress-like faith of invincibility

He sat astride his saddle of solitude,
caught by the rise of the wind off the bluff,
gusts of air hurled by the raging beasts of ravaging storms
beyond the dark gray cloak of the horizon

He sat thinking about how there are places like this
where no man belongs for long
but to which some people adhere themselves
for a period of seconds

How there are places like this
that the conscious mind cannot understand,
but that the heart accepts as they are –
unseen and untouched

Accepts them on dim days of distant strife,
on mornings kissed with the sweetness of the sun,
in the bold light of sunsets reflected off eastern skies,
in the coldest darkness of a howling night

He was an artist
painting his lines in circles and swirls,
hoping to catch the heart of the wind
that lifts and carries a falling leaf

He was a lover,
lost beyond the far edges of his canvas,
ready to rip away his own flesh
to suffer the purest pain of love

He was a soldier,
shed of uniform and marching in isolation,
weary of life yet far too full of it
to shed a drop of another man’s blood 

And he was a stranger unto himself,
awakened by the least intentional of dreams
and left to sit, bathed in salt and sweat,
high above the churning catastrophes of life

And he was the man who came from all of his other worlds,
searching through the sweetest depths of insight,
striving to reach across that last expanse of air,
aching to seize whatever was there and hold it, as a single breath.