Category Archives: Poetry

Poetry

Nine Nights on Prednisone

The great sin of my life
Was committed out of greed.
Because I wanted it.
I lied to all of us about it.
Dressed the lie up in glittering raiment
To disguise its petty nature.
Called it Love.
But it could not last.
It could not hold.
No plan was forged in the long nights.
No sacrifice on my side
To offset the gains I lusted for.

And so I lost,
Our way.

I stumbled over miles and acres,
Tore flesh and clothing
on rocks and brambles
And psychic snags.
Fell full-faced into debt-sodden mud,
Caked and sticky for decades.
Lost my shoes and then the path.

There is no gift after sorrow.
There is but greed with grasping.
There is no holding–no caress.
And every gain is met with loss
And every hope is dashed by retribution.

Guilt fails,
And fails again to re-prove itself.

I am diminished.
I am smaller than I might have been.
I tell you a true story.

[201]

Parody, song lyrics, Uncategorized

Chocolate Sprinkles

You know I don’t write these things to rip off famous people. I write them (and “sing” them) as an homage. I mark them as parody for legal purposes.

I adore Tom Waites. He and I are on parallel developmental paths. His involves more fame and money, but the aesthetics are parallel. This is called

Chocolate Sprinkles.


I have to get chocolate sprinkles
on my ice cream when you’re away.
If I don’t get chocolate sprinkles,
I’m bound to have a shitty day.

Chorus
I thank God for chocolate sprinkles.
I thank God for vanilla ice cream.
I thank God you don’t leave me
Except in my worst kind of dreams.

Chocolate sprinkles can’t hug and kiss me.
They can’t even stroke my cheek,
But they liven up my whole demeanor
And make me smile when I am weak.

Chorus

I don’t want no hot fudge sundae.
I don’t want no banana split.
I sure as hell don’t want no sorbet.
And waffle cones taste like shit.

Chorus.


[130]

Is this REALLY singing?

Parody, song lyrics

Banging and Crunching

I wanted to see what AI could do in terms of writing a song. Here is the prompt and the result. (The first one is AI. The second one is me. It’s probably a tie.)

Prompt: Write a classic rock song about a retiree’s narrow life in a universe that expands infinitely.

Verse 1:
Woke up one morning, feeling so darn old
Got aches in my bones, my story’s been told
Been livin’ life in the slow lane, same old song
Watching the world fly by, feels like I don’t belong

Chorus:
In a universe that’s ever expanding
My life seems so narrow, suffocating
Gotta find a way to break free, to fly
Before my time’s up and the whole world passes by

Verse 2:
I’ve been stuck in this rut for far too long
Wasting my days in a routine floatin’ on
But the universe out there is vast and grand
And life’s too short not to make a stand

Chorus:

Bridge:
I may be getting old, but my spirit’s still young
With the fire in my soul, I can’t be outdone
Gonna take that leap of faith, spread my wings and fly
In the face of a universe that refuses to die

Chorus:

Then I watched Monty Python’s video The Galaxy Song and this happened.

Banging and Crunching
(Since You’ve Been Gone)


Verse:
I’m a 73 year old retiree.
I spend my day primarily making tea (and pee)
Though there’s no one here with whom I converse,
I’m the center of the expanding universe.
We’re a hundred miles apart since that day
Three years ago when you went away, (far away)
Like drinking good cognac,and hiking up a track,
Getting gone takes less time than getting back.(that’s a fact)

Bridge:
The math is undeniable, Sweetheart.
Since you left we’ve drifted far too far apart

Verse:
Einstein’s Relativity cleared the path.
Hubble marked the signposts in his math. (so much math)
It’s not that everything flies away.
It’s the space itself expanding every way.
From right to left to up to down to back
You are speeding out away into the black.
From my front to to your front, however, dear,
A red shift is apparent, seen from here. (It’s clear.)

Bridge:
My only hope is to see the start of the Big Crunch
In a 100 million years or so we can shout and wave a bunch

Verse:
I’ve done some calculations on the cuff (off the cuff!)
To see if this distance is enough
At 42 miles a second per megaparsec,
And under this much gravity—double check— (what the heck)
The father away, the faster you recede
The longer gone, the greater is your speed.
Like raisins in the rising raisin dough,
We’re sitting still all while we’re on the go. (Sooooooooo)

Bridge:
I’m rooting for the Big Crunch I’ll wait right here for you
And in a billion years or so, you’ll be right here with me too.
Until the Big Crunch I’ll wait right here for you
And in a billion years or so, you’ll be right here with me too.

(90)

song lyrics

Beer Drinking and Deep Thinking

I sit with my deep thoughts while I’m drinking.
No need for any friends to interrupt.
A pop top on a beer can starts me thinking—
Like what went down and now what is up?

A beer can change your mind if you let it.
Two beers can erase a joyless frown.
Three beers can often help forget it.
(1) Four can make you howl like a hound.
(2) Four makes everything go out of round.
(3) Four can make it easy to fall down.

Sometimes I have a beer and sit, just thinking.
I often think deeper most the day.
I think about life and how I end up blinking
At how it all turned out this-a-way.

If you don’t think it through on the first one
A second or a third may help a bit
By 4 or 5 or 6 you’re having some fun
By 7 you’re just a drunken shit.

Refrain

I’ve found there is truth in a beer can
But it takes a lot of time to get it out.
You can’t chug a thought like a keg stand.
You have to sit and struggle with the doubt.

Did I do the things that I shoulda ought to?
Or did I just waste a lot of days?
If I could get to do all this stuff over
Would I just end up old anyway?

[89]

Poetry

Chronic Pain

When you wake
It is sitting on the edge of your bed,
Waiting to be put on
Like a new suit of clothes.
It is too small.
It chafes at your neck
And pinches at your waist.
It shrink wraps itself
To your joints,
Stiffening your gate,
Chaining your hands and feet,
Wrists and ankles
Knees and elbows.
It has enough electrical charge
To freeze an appendage
And force the involuntary utterances:
Oh,
Ow,
God damn, for example.
It is small like electrons
Racing up neural pathways to the brain,
Always leaving damage in the synovial joints.
It is as wide as the sky
Filled with tumbling lightning,
Rolling and rolling through tangles of nerves.

It travels with you
To the bathroom.
Will your knees get you there in time?
Will your arms reach yourself
In the bath?
Will fingers hold out long enough
To rinse your hair?
To trim your beard?
To hold your toothbrush?
The warm water helps.

Eventually you must negotiate
The cold.
You towel off where you can reach,
Contort into real world clothes.
Begin your day.

But one day you cannot sustain the defenses.
You let it pierce you
And you cry and stamp your feet
Like a six year old
Who keeps wetting the bed
And who wants his mama
To make it stop,
Only Mama is dead
And the pain doesn’t care.
It throbs with your pulse
In bones
And joints
And synovial tissues.
It pierces
Then overfloods.
It seeps out of your bones
And it flies in your hair
And sets your scalp on fire.
Your knees ache
But your shoulder pain is sharp.
Your elbow locks
When raw bones clash
Like broken gears in a broken clock.
Your hip grates,
Grinding something down
That bleeds and erodes.
And you gnash teeth,
Gird loins
and you ignore it
And ignore it
And ignore it.

But eventually you understand:
It is not your pain.
You do not own it;
It owns you.
You are its reason for being.
It is your possessive lover
And it hurts you where no other may touch.
It is intimate
When it electrifies your nerve gardens.
Its fingers pry and dig.
It seeps salty vinegar into open wounds.

So you and your lover
Face your day with new understandings.
It is a jealous lover
And you dread meeting new people
With firm handshakes.
You give up any intimacy with tools.
Hammers may as well be cattle prods.
Rakes and shovels become abstracts
Hanging on your garage wall.
Even books are too heavy for your wrists.
Instead you begin a new study of drugs.
Your days get measured out in pills:
The morning pills, not coffee.
The afternoon pills, not lunch,
Maybe some weed.
The evening pills.
And you offer more changes for your lover:
You drink less
Or you drink more,
Some drink a lot more.
Each day is measured in organ capacity.
Will too many pills kill your kidneys?
Some days you root for liver failure.
You begin to understand the Oxy crisis.

Finally, it is bedtime.
Your lover crawls in with you
Wrapping you up in
Child-sized flannel pajamas
On flannel sheets.
They grip in your crotch,
Pinch in your groin,
Squeeze your chest
And armpits.
Lying still hurts.
Turning over hurts.
No pillow fits your neck.
No quilt lies easy.
You curl, feeling close to Heaven,
Still outside the gates.
You lie there a long time.
Eventually gray light seeps through the window.
You see the figure on the side of the bed.

[87]

Senior man with knee pain
Haiku, Poetry, Uncategorized

March of the Haiku

This spate of haikus comes from a prompt offered from the FaceBook page of friend and bard, Terry Wooten. That’s him in the photo performing at his unique venue, Stone Circle. He wrote:

Bi-polar April.
Peepers singing in snowflakes.
Change lawn mower oil.
(April 18, 2022)

I shared his poem on my FaceBook page with the following comment: “It is a nearly perfect example of the the American Haiku: 5-7-5, presents something funny and/or surprising, it contains nature and makes a comment on humanness. It goes above and beyond by banging two things together that don’t belong together (twice!!) for a little “contrapposto.” I took it as a challenge to write my own April poem. I thought I could take inspiration and match his genius. Not today! I’ll keep trying.”

The rest of the day I continued to put out haiku and some are better than others. I’m not certain any rose to Terry’s level above.

Oh no! I just drank
six gay beers and I liked it.
Please don’t tell my wife.
[68]

Heart doctor gave me
(prostate the size of a peach)
Mass diuretics.
[69]

What makes a haiku?
In America, mostly
Humor and surprise.
[70]

Ski masks make baseball
Look like bank robbing–
Another stolen base.
[71]

It’s hard to see things
If you don’t do anything.
Bad haiku! Bad ‘ku!
[72]

When the sun peeks through
on a snowy April day,
don’t believe the lie.
[73]

A Fox News headline
Is a lie that might happen
In Bizarroland.
[74]

Matter/energy
Cannot be made or destroyed.
Where’d the ice cream go?
[75]

Poetry

You’ll Never Get Me!

(Written on April 4 while waiting for Donald Trump to surrender for arrest in New York.)

Why am I always surprised?
It’s not like they haven’t been there.
Every April in Spring
The frogs start screaming:

“Ha Ha, fuckers!”
“I’m still here, ya bastards!”
“I hid in the mud.”
“I closed it all down,
I shut down breathing,
I sucked air through my skin,
I let the heart beat slow,
And slow,
And 
Not
Quite
Stop.
For months I willed thought to cease,
If I heard at all
it was a low hum,
Kind of electrical
While snow and ice and wind and gravity
Made its winter show
On the margins of the waters above.”
“And now it’s April, fuckers.”
“Squawk, peep and triiiiiiiill, motherfuckers!”
I’m back 
and ready to propagate!”
“Where my lady frogs, huh?
“Fine specimen of man-frog, right here!”
Peepeep
Peeeeeeeeeeeep!
Poetry

What a Ride: A Proposal

Looks like we might have made it to the finish line.

At least we could walk it from here.

Well, you could. I have some doubts.

And it wasn’t like it was a smooth ride.

Lots of couples hit some bumps in the road,

But we skidded out more than once,

Saw the ditches way too close 

When I was driving a while ago,

And I know we caught air this last time.

You were driving.

But I think I can see the route ahead

And now that we know we don’t speak the same language,

But we think we’re heading the same way,

I’ll try to navigate if you’ll do the steering.

Deal?

[44]

Poetry, Uncategorized

Admonition

My elders were very poor teachers,
Or I was a piss-poor student.
So much about aging was left unsaid
Or unheard:

That pain is ugly
But it’s only pain.

That your heart will heal
But it might be a little crooked afterwards.

That the injuries from the Spring of youth
Return in the Winter.

That you can weep when one who cares
moves on—
And still wish them every goodness.

They also didn’t mention that
Mentors grow in age,
That gardens aren’t about vegetables,
That owning a dog isn’t about owning.

And shame on them for not telling
How an old heart can swell,
not just with edema,
But from the full panoramic view of life
As it plays out on the faces of children
And then the Elfin magic of grandchildren.

I’m writing this down today
So no one else forgets to say
Or hear.

[43]

Poetry, What'sit?

A Gift From the Cosmos

I don’t know where these came from. They seem to be characters in a music/arts scene somewhere. Two are recognizable as characters I’ve known from Ann Arbor. That’s George Bedard of George Bedard and the Kingpins above. He seems to belong with these. I don’t now if there are more of them or if they interact somehow, but I put them here so they won’t get lost.

Rocky
Low blare of the bass sax.
Get back to it, man.
Cats wearing shades.
Collars up-turned.
Black pants.
Black pants.
Hepcats in the wings.
Rocky croons a vibrato.
Her name is Wynona.
Rocky never gives us rules,
A right-hearted man.
Wynona was all warm.
Her hair with wine.
Her voice full of no-nah, no-nah.

[32]
..

George danced like a question mark.
It was always the same question.
The cat snapped his fingers
And kept the burning stump of a Lucky
Between his lips,
Smoke curling into a squinted eye.
George had been around a couple more years
Than the rest of the hep-cats.
A pioneer with a question
That never got answered.

[33]

(PS This is not George Bedard. This is another George who may very well have gone to listen to the Kingpins.)
..

Billy
Tough Black cat with a white guy’s name,
In a scene that’s pretty white.
Took the bias both ways.
Talks code to cross over
When he hangs at the last juke joint.
It’s all Blues
And Rock-a-billy with him.
He’s a Blues-Billie.

[34]
..

The Ardog
Beat poet
Black coat
A fucking beret,
Do you believe that cat?
Clove mutherfuckin’ cigarettes.
Does percussion on road trips
From the back seat
On the backs of the front seat.
Long hair flailing
But it’s getting thin already.
He’ll look like a monk in ten years.
Talks a hep game
But he’s a
One trick pony with eyebags.

[35]
..

Jake.
Whatchew doing here?
You gotta get some strings for that thing, man. Whoever heard of a man playing the three string?
The hat
The shades
The trenchcoat.
Those beads.
Alcohol did that to your voice?
That ain’t mouthwash.
You’ll never change, man.

[36]
..

Marcie,
Seems so French.
Holding her smoke upside-down
Pinched between her thumb and finger.
Also with the the black ankle boots.
They are French too?
your French sounds American.
Champs Elysees doesn’t sound a “p” in it.
Sometimes.
With Magyo,
Tough one,
Speaking Island French.
Holding Marcie’s temple
Against her bare shoulder,
Marcie’s neck in the crook of Magyo’s arm.
Marcie pouts.

[37]
..

Lyman
Likes beer.
:likes wine.
My old lady left me
While I was paralyzed six months.
Don’t hit me with no bus.
I’ll sue yer ass.
I’m set for life.
Now she wants to come back.
Lyman says no.
But he’s mad he has to say it.

[38]
..

Lump,
Everywhere he goes
It rains.
It finds him in the park,
In the alley.
He oozes the gloom.
No one smiles to see him
Or buys him a drink.
Keeps his hands in his overcoat.
Self-fulfilling prophet.

[39]
..

Jimmy Hot
Best dancer
Best fighter
Best racer
Best car
Best piano
But he’s boogie woogie, dontchaknow.
Too big to be a back-up.
He’ll beat your rockabillies
With a baseball bat or a piano.

[40]
..

Sweeny
Like all vixens
That look
That walk
That way of listening
And acting like there must be something better to do.
Used to be in the life
Now she’s kept.
Angling for Lyman
But with a man the age of
Lyman’s father.
Lyman’s father is dead.
So will this guy be
Before Sweeny is done with him.

[41]
..

Smitty’s on Alto
Plays it like a clarinet
Squeaks it
Lets it drone
He sweats
And he finds that one riff.
He plays it again
Again
Again
Again
Again
It breaks and the guy on the drums
Brings the band back.
That cat’s always there.

[42]
..