Posts for June 1, 2024 (page 12)

Time is like water
Tears beaded on eyelashes
A river raging
Carving through mountain and bone
Necessary for life
yet drowning All
drop
by
drop

Second grade, picture day

Grey eyes like fireflies
dare the world to disappoint
all is a technicolor wonderland
tenderly tied with a silk ribbon

skipping barefoot, boldfoot
soft soles befriending
each blade of bluegrass

Look at me, look at me,
I am magic.

Then he came…and came…and came…

draining the innocence
sucking all sweetness
from my fresh flesh
rendering me reflectionless

Third grade, picture day

Grey eyes like winter skies
beg the world for mercy
all is a monochromatic wasteland
wrapped in barbed wire

tiptoeing in steel-toed boots
terrified of tetanus
and broken blue glass

Look away, look away,
I am monster.

The first Dad Joke I remember is my dad saying “I used to know somebody whose nose was always runny. You may think this is funny, but it’s snot.” It was also the first Dad Joke I told, nine years old, on the playground, to a kid who had already heard it from his dad. I heard my dad tell it again when I was forty-nine. That’s part of what makes it a Dad Joke.  

When I was ten, my dad drove away, or my mom drove him away. On Father’s Day, one of her bitter single mom friends bought herself a tee shirt that read “World’s Best Dad.” I felt for her, but she wore it over and over, and I found it sad and trapped rather than funny, which made it a legit Dad Joke.  

Somebody else’s dad taught me the word palindrome, with the example “Did I poop? I did.” I thought my dad would love that one. “Dad, did I poop? I did, Dad” is also a palindrome, but my dad wasn’t around and I never shared it with him.  

The Dad Joke was on my dad’s girlfriend, when she called my house looking for him and I didn’t have the heart to tell her that he was in Vegas marrying his other girlfriend.  

I guess my dad was a swinger. Also a baseball manager who never taught me to hit. “A swing and a miss,” people say when a joke doesn’t land, but also kids said it to taunt me when I swung at a baseball and missed, over and over. How I missed my dad then.  

The Dad Joke was on me, when I learned that I didn’t have any credit because I’m a junior and Experian docked me by mistake when my dad didn’t pay child support.  

The Dad Joke was on the collection agency, who called me looking for my dad. He lived in Brazil, Indiana at the time, so I said “My dad’s in Brazil.”  

The first adult advice my dad gave me came in the form of a Dad Joke. My first serious girlfriend had left me, and he said “They’re like buses. If you miss one, you get on another.”

Dad Jokes are made of words, but sometimes words fail us and sometimes our dads fail us. After twenty years out of my life, my dad visited me and my wife in Florida. Overcome, I played “Leader of the Band” on the jukebox, a song about a son who admired his father, and didn’t say a word. Without saying a word, my father got up and put “Cat’s in the Cradle” on the jukebox, a song about a father’s regrets. No joke, that’s how we made up. Without a word.  

I am a living legacy. When ya coming home, Dad?  

A Dad Joke depends on delivery, but in the delivery room, I wasn’t prepared for how goopy and pointy-headed my firstborn was, and I’m ashamed that I was ashamed, that my first thought was “He’s ugly, but I’ll love him anyway.” My wife looked at him and said “He’s perfect,” a better take.  

The next day I met my buddies for cigars and the Dad Joke was “I’m already a better dad than my dad, because I’m here for my son,” but at that very moment, back in our apartment my wife changed a diaper and wondered where I was. “Dad, did I poop? I did, Dad.”  

The Dad Joke is that after I wrote a book about The Simpsons, I started calling all of my sons’ friends Milhouse. We gave one of the Milhouses our old car and a week later the driver of a dump truck fell asleep at the wheel and drove him into a ditch, which is no joke but maybe an irony. The Dad Joke is that while he was in the ditch, when I didn’t know that he had a concussion and would need brain surgery, he texted me that he was fine, and I texted back,“I don’t care about that; how’s the car?”  

The Dad Joke is that when their white friend told me his name was Rico, I nicknamed him “Soft Taco” because soft tacos are Hispanic but also white. The Dad Joke is that Soft Taco’s dad called me and introduced himself as “Sam’s dad” which is how I learned that Soft Taco was putting everyone on when he said his name is Rico. The Dad Joke is that Sam is going to be a teen dad soon, and I think he should name his son Soft Taco Junior.  

When my sons were middle schoolers, we put together a family band, Dr. Tom and the Mini-Mes. The Dad Joke is that my boys rebelled by giving up punk rock, that instead of making myself the cool Dad, I made punk rock square.  

One of my sons says the Dad Joke is that I just used the word square which was cringe of me.  

The Dad Joke my kids like best is when someone gets personal in an online argument and I type “Jesus loves you. Everyone else thinks you’re an asshole.”  

If you’re an asshole and you get cancer, it’s colon cancer no matter what kind of cancer it is is another Dad Joke.  

Cancer’s no joke no matter how you slice it. The question: “Can you cut it out?” The answer: “I think I can, sir.”  

Cancer’s no joke, but my dad got it.  

“No, you probably won’t be able to play piano after this,” the surgeon told my dad. “(A) You’ll probably be dead, and (B) I know you never could play piano, because I’ve heard this Dad Joke before.”  

What do you get when you cross a Dad Joke with an elegy? Seriously, what? This is not rhetorical. This is not a joke.  

If you’ve heard this one before, you know how it ends. Not with a punchline but a punch in the face.  

You’ll tell your kids that their grandpa’s in Heaven, or if you’re not religious, you may say he’s in Vegas or Brazil.  

The Dad joke is that when I hear someone walking into the room, I pretend I’ve been talking about them, e.g. “That’s why you should always listen to your Mom, kids,” if it’s my wife, or “That’s why your sister is my favorite,” if it’s my daughter, or if it’s my dad, well, who am I kidding? My dad’s not walking into the room.  

If your dad was like mine, he wouldn’t have gotten the Dad joke about Rene Descartes walking into a bar. The bartender asks if he’d like a drink, and he says “I think not,” so he disappears.  

Why did the chicken cross the plane from this world to the next? Because he couldn’t quite make it across the road.   Knock knock. Who’s there? Dad? No one’s there. Not funny. At all.  

One day you ask your dad to subtract two from two, and he says nothing. Okay, subtract one from one, you say, and he says nothing. Okay, but what if you multiply nothing by nothing, you ask, and your dad, all out of jokes at last, says nothing, nothing, nothing. Because it’s true, but also because he’s disappeared, because he’s crossed to the other side, because he’s dead, because it gets told with astonishment, with resignation it gets told, with sadness and with regrets, it gets told and retold, because it gets old, it gets so very old, like your dad, and because this isn’t funny at all, which makes it a legit dad joke.

changing room gossip,

full of laughter and energy for the hour to come,

communal joy and love for this space

lungs operating on overdrive,

heart beating a furious rhythm,

limbs stretched and pulled and searching for purchase

sweat slicked skin,

the comforting ache of well worked muscles,

fresh water running gloriously down a parched throat

fist bumps and handshakes all around,

words of encouragement and praise,

ready to do it all agin tomorrow

the buttons take you places
not just across the room to switch
channels like we used to

click click the magic streams now
into lost lands or coyote deserts
imaginary worlds where
pixels in RGB shine,
light to lose ourselves and be
dragged into mysteries to
fight villains like Dr. Shrinker,
or old man Withers or snow ghost
and be the discoverer of worlds
cityscapes, jungles, oceans, countries,
the complex splendor we never dreamed
we could visit
for real

it shaped us in how we shaped
lives around us into
the truth of our
actual living
to fight evil, do good
make the world better

all gleaned from a tube
sorry not sorry

Today
I know
Senescence is not 
Putrescence With age I
ripen I do not rot
Burnished by life, shining brightly I
Dance wildly, bending, weaving, supple I twirl
Letting life spin me until I topple in
A heap of delight, knowing who I am now
Messy, complex, sagacious, silly is who I am meant to be.

Shucks, the here was only a you and a me
Drinks. Cocktails in front of the tv
And the it was engraved on the glass,
Mr. & Mrs. John Doe-Blast.

Bourbon and maybe some gin.
Whoa Nelly. Gives me a stomach full of schmee
With stuff so corrupt, it peels off all your skin.
Darn weasels legislate what is to be.

Mr. & Mrs. fell down from the sky
in an airplane whose forever engine calls
before rigor mortis stiffens the lie
that jerk-jumbles, turn-tumbles and falls.  

Jinx on their heads as they stumbled to bed,
the sound of their sleeping terribly sounds like weeping.
Run for it, while the words are unsaid. 
Everything wonderful has just started leaking.

Shucks there was only a you and a me
drinking bourbon and ice in front of the tv.

*after Ram Dass

if and when
the end
arrives

and i
suppose
it must

we might
begin to
realize

it was
always
us

we might
whirl like
dervishes

dis
integrate
to dust

but still
will mingle
in mid air,

loose ions
in magnetic
thrust

if we
could only
trust

the uni
verse
just

enough
to whisper
soft

those
words,
then we,

dangling
on rapture’s
cusp,

might walk
arm and arm
into that dusk

Antarctica is a barren, icy Friday with very little phone, fierce sleep, and the manufacturing temperatures on Earth.