Just...Some Poems
Falling in Love in the Middle-Ages (When You Were Born in 1970)
Walt Whitman Practices Holding Up a New York Deli
Humor Essay
Thumbs up to heartache
and pain!
Visual Essay
In Art We Trust:
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Paradox
Teachings
A poetry appreciation class for adults of all experience levels. Inner child required.
Bluebird*
Blue bird, blue bird
take me away
to a land where things
are far from grey.
A land where things
are nice and quiet,
a land where no one
makes a riot.
Blue bird, blue bird
you've been so kind,
take me away
to the land
that's on my mind.
*I composed this poem when I was ten. For the record, my childhood was idyllic, spent in the lush suburban wonderland that laces New York's Hudson River Valley. My backyard was a forest. Still, I had a Snoopy Brusha-Brusha Toothbrush. A Spirograph. Lincoln Logs. A Lite Brite. Friends! A St. Bernard. My Holly Hobby Oven kept me occupied (or more accurately, mesmerized) for hours on end. Visits to the local library were frequent, and long, and every mad dash I made into the childrens' book section conjured the sensation of Christmas morning. I do not recall looking at birds.
Sammichele di Bari
The non-chance glances
of the old Italian man
who keeps riding by
on the world’s most battered
bicycle do not in any way
creep me out.
They might, in some other town,
on some sorry-we’re-closed side street
stumbled upon in the unplugged hour
of a neon night, time-keeping dream
teams lost in transfixion, happy hour bros
who know the score hashtag you’re it one bar
three bars two bars hey we won! hey pretty lady
but not
here.
Here,
inside this corridor (have I sauntered all night?)
unpretentious ceremony
marks the occasion, again,
of the Puglian dawn. Prima luce…
sparata…onto cold medieval stone
and that man is wearing a pin-striped
suit as he chariots a loaf of bread
inside a threadbare basket fastened
to two tarnished bars he handles
with a sincerity
I may never know.
I wonder if he stood in that schoolroom
last night, in that crescent of brass-playing
gents who crescendoed right through
the midnight moon…
Perhaps he played the tuba.
It was a dusty window
I peered through.
Falling in Love in the Middle-Ages
(When You Were Born in 1970)
Stupid little smart phone - - shit! - -slipped
onto stone. I am eligible for an upgrade,
but it’s enough just to know, and stone
feels like home these days, anyway.
And it still works, anyway. What doesn't kill you
gives you scratches, makes a knee
purplebursted and those are two mating Monarchs
I might have otherwise missed.
This,
I told you, through the phone that slipped onto stone,
and you, you wanted to know
more,
so
I sat down in the woods on the leaves on the dirt
and spoke slow of saying no, the undertow of being suddenly
older, the “it” of worth-it-all
unearthed between us and yes,
I can hear you now. Yes,
as sun&moon split the unlimited minute
I can, I do, here and now,
affirm your tone.
Ground, blood, and bone.
Fixed, in the azure
abracadabra of love’s
rotary unknown.
Lazarus
I’m always amazed that people take what I say seriously.
I don’t even take what I am seriously.
—David Robert Jones
David Bowie died last night.
I propose he was a poet
above all. How else
for the words
cell phone and ass
to be placed
inside a song
composed upon
the last mattress
his bones would know
only for the whole of the piece
to speaksound&satisfy
in a flash
like a classic…
to hover&delight
as if a star…
but even more than all that,
as if it were the blackness
behind the stars—
to lure&disturb…
to transmit the shimmering grit
of a bluemoonward riff
in service of us fools
still confined to the establishment,
where you is misconstrued as you
and awe a thing too precious
to access from our dream-numbering beds
in which we
lie, and rise, and lie, and rise,
all the while burning deep
beneath the secret
of the infinite night for that
one
gasp!—
song,
love’s to-be believer
who will honor all our oddities,
undress all our scars,
and fuse the ghost notes of beauty
into the blood-beasted circuitry
that pumps the miracle epistle:
>> - - Live!- - ->>>
into our playful homo
sapien bones
and cells
and asses.
Walt Whitman Practices Holding Up a New York Deli
You!—grab that tiny crate of clementines—you!—
Hand me that deodorant—no!
Make it a tomato. Yes! That big, slightly rotted one,
And while you’re at it, dip your notions of hope into that Sabra hummus.
Also, take off your clothes. Have a seat.
Let’s talk of moles! Everything is headline news when you
Think you are about to be dead––come on, people––cool it!
Remain calm! Compose your soul before you do or do not die, let’s
Sweep the nation into that dime-store dustpan
and speak only of dreams while we still can!
Of ants! Moles! Cracks in the sidewalk, in faces, there’s one in everything!
Listen. Nobody make a peep.
To the roof!––let’s go. Bring your multitudes, we’re not coming back
You there, with the pungent pits I beseech thee, king,
Undrape! And you, there,
There is e’er among us, a you,
Impotent, loose in the knees,
Open your scarf'd chops till I blow grit within you,
Spread your palms and lift the flaps of your pockets,
I am not to be denied—
Step forward.
That’s right. Everyone!––look alive! Atoms!
Strangers in boots!
Look as alive as you can
and nobody gets hurt.
Full Circle
As I lean forward to kiss the tip
of the nose of this equanimous
creature who just carried me inside
the cradle-crescent of his back
for three hours—
the weight of my bones
burdening his
as four rusted talismans
nailed to his hooves
took on hillside after hillside,
creek after creek,
broken meadow after hinterland trail,
and then, finally,
that wide dirt road,
all so that we’d end up
right back here,
here inside this
sun-spoked barn,
a stone’s throw
from a rooster’s comb,
no fertile plain settled,
no cavalry sieged,
just me
and Showdown,
dustier versions of ourselves,
but just us, standing here,
back where we started—
I can’t help but think of
my mother,
and of my father,
and before I even have the chance
to wonder why they come to mind,
I am lifted onto that pony
in Wildwood, NJ,
and I am four,
and the man with the camel-hump hat
who took the money
is barely holding the rope
just ahead of us
as we pulse,
three times around is all we get,
so I will savor the third time, especially––
the boardwalk rides in silhouette,
the sky both blue and orange,
the shore the stars the crescent moon––
and as we make our final circuit,
hands crossed tight on the saddle horn,
cantle securing my back,
with a smile that may never be duplicated
I trot back towards my parents
who are sitting and watching
from the white wooden fence,
dad beneath “Pony”
mom beneath “Rides”
just like last summer
they sit and they wait
for me to return with my tale,
only, what I don’t know is, I leave
the best part out, the turn
that is some distant day away,
some tour leg when I’m forty
and unsure about the rent,
certain only that the questions
have the reins it’s great to feel
your passion, it's so inspiring, from
that man at the packed concert last night,
or the empty cafe ten years ago,
or back on that beach…
and as he lifts me off the saddle
I close my eyes
and here I am,
settled once again
inside this golden barn,
here inside this sanctum
I may never enter again,
I tender my lips to this bridled being,
and so, to a heart
fifteen times the size of mine,
and with a gratitude too vast
for even the Black Hills of South Dakota,
I whisper thank you
and tell Showdown I will
see him again
as particles of matter glisten and orbit
in the sun’s last ray of the day,
the way they might do
in the gleam of a movie projector
or a searchlight.
Room in New York, 1932
Dear Mr. Hopper,
I know that you died in 1967,
but as I stand here
breathless before
the pureporcelain landscape
you have illuminated
and draped across
that woman’s right arm
all the way up
through the arc of her neck
and into the eclipse
of her low-lying gaze,
I see, you are
not dead.
And so
I just wanted to write
and let you know,
I am quite sure
this painting
would have been
itself enough
had you captured
that woman alone,
sitting as she is
at the upright piano—
her stance remote,
skewed yet stable
atop a small
wooden perch,
the weight of a day
of a thought,
of a word unspoken,
all at once released
and dispelled
into the transparent tapping
of a middle C.
But that you would
decide to
slant that man
into this urban diorama,
hinge him in that armchair
(who refuses such plushness)
extending the vacancy
of that oval table into two
crisp white shirtsleeves, a vest
a tie a face, unreadable
as it pays no mind
to…the daily news?…
is to have complicated
the source or the cessation
of not only that woman’s
melancholy, but mine.
I will work hard to render
the truths I imagine.
The questions I see.
Those muted notions
born of lit interiors.
