Posts for June 3, 2022 (page 4)

I’m sorry
I’m sorry for not coming when you called
Your letters landed on my doorstep
The doorstep of a young aspiring college student
Independent of family  

Please forgive me
I hardly heard the voice in your letters
A call to your side, to listen
A call to me, oldest living grandchild to carry on the name

I love you
Please know that
Please excuse my absence
There was no absence of love
Call it youthful folly
Raised without the meaning behind deep family connection

I’m grateful
Grateful for having met you, known you, loved you
Cherished you  

Remember the fresh young boy with his brother
Greeting you at the train?
“There’s my boys!” you told the porter
We smiled with great joy as we hugged you dearly.

The bones go 

Into the box

With all the expired

Grocery list

Choking up on drool

Passing asleep on

A bored to death bed

Waking up to a life

Back to condoms

And divorce papers

And no time is lonelier

Than six P.M.

and no one else

Is home

I can’t trust my knees

Or heart anymore

All our past loves

Left parked in the

Red zone

Three A.M is child’s play

So many things lost

Buried and towed away

Smeared contusions

Where our love use to

Laugh and laid

To rest

Broad awake
Lying in a fitful unease
Taste of churning stomach 
   coating swollen tongue
Hot to touch
Shivers
Hand tremble cannot be still

Made sick
   in order to not get sick
This one might kick you
   the nurse said

Second day body ache
   bends me into fetal position
Pervasive malaise 
   as undefined as death

I wait for its ebb

Little people hurry along
throughout the lives
they have deemed worthwhile,
racing against time as it slowly
beckons them back to the 
darkness that they came from.

Red River water falling over
Creation Falls on a June Friday
after two years away from the woods …
traveling back in time,
both in millions of years of
geological formations
and to the past life I lived
within minutes of this place.
Peace comes like an old friend.

Out of my back pocket a poem limps, letter-frenzied, cowlicks to page.  

(Note: An American Sentence is a variation on the haiku invented by Allen Ginsburg.)

Night walk in winter:
there—through those sleeping branches—
there—is that the moon?

Touch and be touched
in gentle ways
the bliss of life.

Life without bliss
like swallowed glass.

-Sue Neufarth Howard

the sun beams hot on my skin,
drying my damp hair

& leaves curl
around an oak

i breathe
& listen to the birds

&, maybe, i feel my mother’s arms
cradling me

routine walking
and now I sit atop
above the sirens, mowers, sounds
cars are passing, moving faster than I care to this evening
I ask myself how I am, as if I am two people seated as opposed to just me
if there’s any concern about the happenstance and my composure
fine, I’m fine, I tell myself
and it’s true
I’m looking ahead
realizing there is more, much more
I needn’t rely on memory or reminders
the good stuff happens when I surrender while simultaneously moving
forward or sideways but never back
and that’s the crux
the familiar, though bland and often ugly, is behind me
a place I could easily return
like a dive motel on a no longer traveled route
I refuse and pay the price for something more
mostly, simply something serene
     no need for concern