Posts for June 1, 2021 (page 7)

my father dies quickly on the other side of the country
i buy a plane ticket, buy a face sheild, buy a pack of cigarettes 

my father dies slowly ten miles from here 
my friends sing loudly, hold closely, pour generously 

my father dies as soon as he looses the ability to tell us, 
we patiently wait for the rest of him to catch up

it all takes ten days 
from first to last hospital call, and
i spend february’s reamining 18 days 
in a bassinet of sunburned and age spotted arms; 
grateful for the love that always shows up 
to wrap around me.

I’ve noted
as I walk and walk some more
there are a good deal of rose bushes
       all around this town
places you’d least expect
hidden away
not tended to or cared for
simply existing
blooming currently
I could tell you, if you asked
where to find the secrets
       pinks and reds, a yellow here and there
out there, on their own or owned but left to grow uninhibited
which intrigues and slightly disappoints me
and at the same time delights me
beautiful and pure, all the while
unnoticed except by the most observant
or those like me who walk and walk some more

Over these past years
Maybe when I should have been writing poety
I just put some words in a box
and clicked “Submit Poem”

How would I even know?
I read some Yeats awhile back
His poem was book length
and had an exotic rhyming pattern

It was very good
At least the 2 pages I read

So – this year I’m going to try something completely different:

Entertainment

(this one excluded)

I want to write poems like Lucille Ball
or Josh Brolin rather than 

Joseph Stalin or Chairman Mao
good poets, sure
but I wasn’t entertained

Is it time for fun yet?
I sure hope so

it’s not a metaphor. the fabric
had clocks woven into the pattern
with all different times and circles

overlapping circles and i found it
on the internet from a girl i got drunk
next to on a summer balcony once and you

moved it from her parent’s house
for me and we noticed a bunch of dirt
that wasn’t in the picture and we scrubbed

and scrubbed it away with a special machine
we got from kroger or somewhere and
there were beads of sweat crowning your brow

i should have licked clean and we hauled
it still wet into a new sanctuary and i held
court there, reclining reclining reclining so hard

i broke it from the bottom up and i finally
had to let go the idea of it i accept i accepted
that this morning i had some old lover

haul it to the side of the road and for breakfast
today i sat in the morning curtain light waiting
to watch it be carried away; goodbye, stuck time

eaten in the garbage truck’s big metal mouth;
the man in the jumpsuit mercifully exorcises;
he hangs from the sideboard looking back like

a sailor leaving port.

A last Mayfly leverages
through the morning’s spaces,
not a massive mosquito
like I used to fear.

So sheer. Filament struts dangle
beneath veined onion skin wings,
cottonwood waft of stuff

while daylily spears sag
beneath June’s amassing piles,
brittle detrituses with keratin claws.)

One of these days,
one of these May days
when the breeze is finally warm-ish,
may you raise your face to be bathed
in the light of the golden moon, bathed
in the glow of distant stars, bathed
in the misty morning fog.

One of these days,
one of these June days
when the sun softly caresses,
may you cry tears of
happiness, tears of
tenderness, and yes, tears of
relief.

One of these days,
one of these July days
when stars and stripes are on display,
may flags fly not for retribution, not for spite, but
may flags fly for pride
may flags finally fly for pride
once again.

One of these days,
one of these summer days.

The words won’t come to me. 
They swirl in my head,
just out of reach.
I try to catch them
but they don’t want to be confined,
to be set in stone, unchangable. 

They want to be boundless and blurry,
seen only through the eyes of possibility
where they are nothing more than what could be–
ideas not yet come to frution. 

It’s so much easier to say it all in my head.
When I speak the words aloud
or try to write them down,
they tumble out all wrong,
exposed to a world that might not understand them.

It seems so easy when you think you know where you’re going,
but no one ever warned me how hard it is to get there.

hey, hold down the fort
for me. feed the cats. don’t
let them have that bag of
rice they’ve been eying 
for days. they’ll get high
play with it all night until
it’s in all our shoes – little
legos waiting to be stepped
on. you don’t have to scoop
their shit, but it has that baby
smell, so that’s up to you.

the small one, black with a heart
of a squirrel, isn’t hiding. just
look up, she’s the queen of the 
castle. though truthfully, scared
of everything down below.

the boy who curls his body
against any smile, don’t let him
fool you. he’s the one
leading the rice bag rebellion 
and would purr until his heart gave
out. the big girl, my sweet big gentle
giant cross-eyed baby, she’s just like me –
and will eat too much. mostly out 
of boredom. don’t let her become 
as big as the world she lives in.

she wouldn’t be able to find room
for anything else. there i go,
projecting again. any who
i hope this isn’t too much. call me
when you need. the broom is in the kitchen.

for R.L.S.- who powered my childhood

Last Winter we were masked at night
Yellow sweats by computer light.
Last summer the same dreary way,
Deprived of sun throughout the day.
I close my eyes and still I see
Some people coughing soon to leave,
I hear the tread of marching feet,
Coffins like sharks through dismal streets.
And does it not seem hard to you,
Face down and choking under blue,
Sheet still wrapped in my bed by day,
Afraid of people, afraid to play.

It depends who you ask.

There is usually an active ingredient,
assorted shortcuts and kitchen secrets:
a stalk, an oil, an herb, a root, a spice,
a cabinet of confidences, a blend of seeds.

Plant a few thoughts into rows. Get lost
in orchards and vineyards. Attract wildlife.
You also have math to leverage. Lean
into angles, theorems, and cosigns
and proofs, and repeatable calculations.

Don’t limit yourself to your own voice.
What you think of yourself can
be unspeakable: instead,
call on family trees and glades
of fairies and folklore meadows
to hush the lies and fill in any gaps.

The Universe won’t demand you
show your work.
But the questions themselves
never take a night off.