This is an edited version of an earlier poem.
The Trouble with Losing Old Poets…
They are starting to go now,
Like the rockstars;
A bunch checked out early,
Not exactly a poets’ 27 Club
But a spike on the graph, for sure.
And now, we are starting to drop.
Turds from an elephant’s ass
Is the only metaphor that comes to me.
This week, another one.
Last week too.
It doesn’t seem to matter,
The fire and the ice both end.
Wind has forgotten how to blow
In Chicago and everywhere.
I wonder at next.
I look at the actuary’s lists.
I know I’m on there somewhere.
Probably pretty soon.
I love who is still in this tent
With me.
Let me say that deliberately.
But the sense of this era
seems to be a growing choice
Between mourning
Or being mourned.
If you are reading this
And you are a poet,
Let it serve as a cautionary tale.
If you are reading this
And you are not a poet,
I take this moment to bid you a conscious adieu.
Maybe read this poem again in a few years
Or next week.
Tag Archives: 30/30
Book of the Dead 11
The Dream of Heaven
I dozed in front of the boob tube.
Best sleep I get anymore.
I’d been watching a documentary
About wrangling, fighting and war.
I dreamed I was on my deathbed
And my lapsed Catholic wife
Prayed that the Catholic God
Would forgive my non-Catholic life.
In a twinkling it was over
And I was in the sky
with Jesus and Mary and a million saints
But I could not figure why.
And there were the Pearly Gates
Where no one stood alert.
But everyone was speaking Latin
And wearing long black skirts.
“There has to be an error,”
I offered to those around
But Hitler’s Pope, Pius Twelve said
“You were lost but now you’re found.”
“I don’t want to be found, sir.
I’m not a Catholic, you see.”
“It happens sometimes,” he said with a shrug.
“Administrative error,” said he.
But I’m not of the laity.
And I never knew a deacon.
Only one Priest in all my life.
Why I’m a Catholic cretin!
No bishops or archbishops.
I have no clue about their miters.
And Cardinals all dressed in red
Are only birds, not holy fighters.
No matter, said the evil Pope.
If I get in, so do you.
Just consider it affirmative action.
Now take your seat in the pew.
But I don’t know the songs!
Or when to stand or kneel.
I don’t know how to pray and
I don’t know how to feel.
I don’t know why there’s incense
And I don’t know why there’s gold
I don’t know why I can’t talk to God
Instead of a priest through that little hole.
And guilt over killing Christ…
I didn’t do the deed.
Call and response makes no sense
In a time when we all can read.
It took almost three centuries
To sort the divine hullabaloo.
And just when the ordeal seemed hopeless
Some habited nun fixed the SNAFU.
I woke from my nap with a gasp.
A preacher was on the TV,
Asking me to send him money.
A downpayment on eternity.
Forgive me, sir, if I pass this chance
To give to the Creator of night and day,
‘Cuz I don’t want to go to Catholic heaven.
Just let me Requiescat in pace.
Book of the Dead 3
Book of the Dead 3
As time erodes,
The past fades.
All our deeds fade.
Memory goes gauzey.
Even morning is translucent by eve.
And by death,
We are making no new fading tapestries.
The image,
The tone,
The scent,
The taste,
The feel
Of fading dust
Is left but shortly.
The dead fade too.
Their countenance,
Their deeds.
Swept away like detritus:
A tie clasp,
A collar button,
A porcelain thimble.
By midnight they can barely be seen at all.
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]
50 words (#22)
The doctor prescribed a device
To practice stretching my lungs.
I catch a glimpse of
My shark dead left eye,
Monocular, in the bathroom mirror.
What damage to my brain
Allows my right eye–believing
it is engaged in life–
To catch my dead eye?
I can’t breathe deeply enough.
Cathartes Aura (#9)
Ancestors in my family
(mostly women–the men are heathens)
believed that when the Turkey Vultures
roosted in the trees,
the lower they roosted
the greater chance of a death nearby.
It was not always a person.
Sometimes a pet or a milk cow.
I have been feeling a step or two
closer to death all winter,
but with the return of the Vultures
and the very late hints of an actual Spring,
I have felt Death’s silent retreat.
She understands her eventual victory
and she is satisfied to be patient.
The Buzzards have been working the back roads
now that the snow is gone,
especially in the ditches by the two lanes.
Winter has conspired
to preserve and to age
deer carcasses
and the hairy lumps of raccoons and opossums.
The Raptors survived the snow that lingered
after their arrival
on a predictable fare of flat squirrels.
The Old Ones are patient too.
All day they have wheeled high in the sky.
They constantly survey eight square miles.
They watch and they wait.
They understand their inevitable victory as well.
They come from miles to roost in loose communities.
They wheel in from on high
in tight arcs, left and right.
They depend on smaller currents,
Invisible to us.
A precise and studied aerial ballet,
they spill air from powerful wings,
which if provoked
can break a man’s forearm,
wheel tight through branches.
Again spill wind,
drop the back of the wing to slow speed, spill air,
drop the black curtains of feathers,
to hug the air to breast and
to stop
with no visible support.
To step
off the wind onto the branch
more than halfway to the top of the tree.
Folding wings, they squat motionless,
hunching their shoulders into the last fading rays of the sun,
black, slender lumps on the limbs of leafless trees.
They sleep
and dream Vulture dreams
of warmer days
and bounty.
Spring Conversations (#6)
In the back pond,
while I am burning leaves
and winter-downed limbs,
two Red-wing Blackbirds
chatter “chuck” in the reeds.
I tried to join their conversation
and they went silent–
two black-eyed parts,
invisible in the wider sytax.
In the next door front yard,
the neighbor’s daughter
is standing in early sun with her new beau.
They also chatter.
Their eyes shine for each other.
I did not try to join their conversation,
although I know the language.
To My Wife the Witness
I must apologize to the vines this year.
I was much too late in the pruning.
Instead of my cuts coming in the middle of winter,
when cold and ice have anesthetized
their limbs on cordons of frozen steel,
I was in my own darkness,
wrapped in a blanket that hindered action.
I merely bore out the short gray days and
stared impotently into the black nights.
Winter shook me like a dog shakes a snake in summer.
Instead, I come to them in a time
more comfortable for me–
A warming day,
knowing
that the necessary cuts come in Spring–
that living sap will leak
because of my tardiness,
that I risk the health,
of buds,
of growth,
of flowers,
of fruit,
the wine.
I am sorry.
I will do better now.
Our chemistry is better applied this Spring.
I vow to better protect against living rabbits and deer,
against a thousand kinds of scuttling bugs,
against the single minded mania of birds
and greedy ground squirrels.
The end-of-the-season Autumn battle
will be fierce.
I cannot be certain of next November
or her cruelest shorter sister February,
But I can offer the summer, still with hope.
Haiku?
These come in from a cull of some old notebooks. I’m posting them here for an archive, if nothing else. Feel free to peek in this archive if you want. If, when you leave, you are still counting, I have failed.
I am unsure of the date for these three. Maybe March of 2017
Is alt-medicine
newspeak for Flint tap water?
Or do you smoke it?
My father enrolled
in watchmakers’ school. He lived
His perfect metaphor.
The rheumatism
has my left leg in its jaws,
Motherfucker!
On November 1, 2017
The old, fat man sees
his penis in a mirror.
“There you are, young Toad.”
On August 4, 2018
Refrigerator
On the fritz. Warm beer’s better
Than no beer at all.
On Ash Wednesday of 2016, I wrote:
No ashes for me.
Why the annual proof of faith?
Faith isn’t on skin.
I also wrote a note that I was glad I got to live in a country and a culture where I can write this idea. Today…eh.
A February 2017 offering a memory of a thing of beauty.
Thicker than bacon
Spanish cheese made of sheep milk
Medium oven.
It seems very odd to post the next two in May. They spoke of a much different experience than now.
At last, it is winter.
I have missed you like mania
Misses depression.
and
Today is too cold
For Valentine’s Day, my love.
My blood fails to heat.
And the marginal note said, “Deb’s 200 miles away anyway.”
On 4/19
Three year old Nora and I walked to the pond today.
We brandished a slingshot to ploop stones.
Deer tracks littered quotation marks
over the sandy approach to the south end.
We found bleached bones in a handful of gray fur–
unlucky young opossum’s night path crossed mother Red Fox.
The jawbone, with most teeth still intact,
was declared “Dinosaur” and ordered for collection.
We also collected three interesting rock samples.
They are polishing each other in my right pocket now.