Remind yourself
How far you’ve come this year
Reminders of how much you’ve lost to grief and fear
How many seconds, minutes and hours
That landed you
Here
You are now at Point Nemo
For the laymen that means it’s just you
And you can’t swim to shore if you want to
So this poem is me
Staring down the next 30 days or so
Of sobriety
My final attempt to stop the buck
And with that I bid you all
Good night and
Good luck
When I think I’m done
my mother tells me,
you have at least seven years.
Seven years of blinking
& having spent another five dollars
on another brass cow pin. Two years
of the dream where you hand me
30 brook trout & I slice open all
of them. On my final cut I look at you
& find that’s not what you’d wanted at all.
Seven camping trips jumping cliffs
into brittle water & biting knuckles
to stop myself calling about nothing
except a sunrise I saw over the lake:
pink flaking in the water & fog
& cows lying down in a far-off field.
Mostly just muscle memory. Some
furious & immature. A one-month stint
reading Neruda’s Song of Despair drunk
at dive bar open mics sort of hoping
it goes viral. Thirty inconclusive
doctors’ visits. Every waking from
a headache, thinking it’s over.
Then the dream about the 30 brook
trout. Ten months combing through
memories under some excuse
wondering at which one I’ll finally
feel that internal tugging let go.
Maybe this: reading late
at Boston Central Library.
I felt something cold on my wrist.
You’d pushed up my sleeve
to check my watch, & said
the time in another language.
When it’s not just the close of a chapter, but the close of a book—
one that had you hooked—
it’s sometimes hard to put down.
Series are the hardest.
After investing in each new work,
falling in relationship with the characters, and spending hours upon hours in your nook…
It was entertaining, climactic, serendipitous, dramatic…
Then, the last page appears.
What do you do now?
To move on,
or to keep turning back the pages of time?
An author’s style can be predictable,
yet comfortable.
It hooks you.
Then comes alignment…
Until you want something fresh.
Holding on to the book can add unnecessary weight.
The next release may not be worth the wait.
Everything has a shelf life.
Whether for a season or for life.
Whether pausing and coming back later in life.
As hard as it is,
Nothing’s wrong with being open to what’s next.
Live with no regrets.
I choose to close this chapter, this book, and this series.
Fin.
He took me with him to the woods.
I sat cold in his dump truck,
reading my small town library books,
listening for the Pileated Woodpeckers.
I compared them to the thuds
of my Daddy’s axe. Chop. Chop. Chop.
Blue Jays called through the
dead of woods. Gray Squirrels
ran around, up, and down
the trees, Daddy said were too green to cut.
They gathered their acorns and seeds.
All of us preparing for the dead of winter.
Daddy loaded up his dump truck
like the Gray Squirrel held seeds in its cheeks.
Together, we delivered to the elderly,
the sick, and the cold. They all thanked him,
offered what they could. More often than not,
pocket change and a sorry smile.
Before we left, Daddy started their fires,
said, “Don’t worry ’bout it,” and took me home
with his own pockets empty.
Mostly, you cannot understand agony
until there is a new rabbit, stiff breath
slowing, lying across your lap on the
wet shoes towel. You look at the dog’s nose
against your knee,the rabbit, the empty
back yard spots, and then you sob because
you are an expert at making grilled cheese
sandwiches, but you cannot anchor
this brilliant, thumping life
When your thoughts are naked, do you feel
exposed? A rugged mule, mud stuck and angry,
do you bite the strap of your wisdom’s mercy or
cling to the breasts of your folly’s supper?
Fairness is love.
We all go walking…
On roads, through the woods,
to empty houses and open hallways,
in our minds. You do not want to
wipe spit from your eyes any more than I
wish to see you embarrass yourself by
choking on the crumbs of your arrogance.
Please. Everything sags on everyone, eventually…
and cats always eat sardines, canned or fresh.
You will not give me a $20 without a favor in return.
Why should I share my air with an
unnecessary pollutant? Seriously.
A poem is…
A poem is a proclamation…
A poem is a proclamation meant for…
unusual celebrations on a cloudy day.
So many poets, both modern and ancient,
remember to invoke the muses
as they dance into the ballroom of poetry,
and almost none of them remember
to release you back into the world
after everyone celebrates the work.
English has so many words
for announcing our farewells,
yet few of them capture the need,
the opposite of an invocation,
where we thank the world for all the brainstorms
crashing against the shores of our concentration
while we look towards the borders of our creative reaches
and pray you will visit us again.
Whether our muses are spirits eternal
or starlit events that drip down on us from above,
they deserve our acknowledgement and attribution
so that their beads of wax might collect and form
other candles elsewhere.
Please accept my benediction
for this past month of making
that you need not have bestowed
on your most unworthy of supplicants.
Know that I will spend the rest of my sanity
looking for you in my daily life
to spare you from listening
for the harried calls of artists
too inane to tell you goodbye.
Health wise
I’m back where I started from
at the beginning of the month,
my poetic output waylaid
by a vicious virus.
Today is my first day out
and naturally I go to Felicitous
Bookstore & Cafe where the waitress
is truly felicitous to this old man.
It’s a magical time of no customers
and she sits close to me to read
from her current book: Thoreau’s Walden
I’m all in, her voice
is soft with an almost imperceptible lisp
with which she holds the words
for just a little more:
Our whole life is startlinly moral.
There is never an instant’s truce
between virtue and vice.
She fills me with a deep sense of loss.
I miss all my old lovers, men and women.
I miss my days in the Navy with Dr. Tom.
I miss my life at the houseboat
on Harrington Lake.
I miss my great grandaughter Penelope
and her brand new baby I have not seen.
But here I am with this young woman
and it is enough.
Five days after the fact
You listen,
and something in me
stops speaking
as though it must
prove its existence.
You remember
the small,
unremarkable fragments
of my days,
holding them
with the reverence
usually reserved
for relics.
You reach—
and some forgotten thing
beneath language
looks up.
As iron
knows the pull
of its unseen north,
as rivers
remember the sea
before they have seen it,
as migrating birds
inherit a map
they were never taught,
so does the heart
recognize
what the mind
is still
trying to name.
(Choked up)
An ai of Lou Reed performed
at Big Ears…it was like he was there
His wife designed him
Then performed with him
I take all that in, the great emotion
I wasn’t there. What would I have felt?
I respect being moved
In fact, I respect nothing more
which is exactly why
I hate AI
And here the conversation ended
But in my mind they asked me
Why?
Well, I would have replied
I don’t hate it actually-
(Be more precise)
I hate it replacing a human.
It’s like a fake flower
versus a flower.
There’s doubtless a few reasons
someone might use fake flowers
and those reasons
may justify the plastic
leeching into the lungs of the planet,
settling in our brains,
ending life in an earlier
and more painful way
But a flower is an experience
(must I use the word real?)
A soft touch,
a transportive smell
a medicine of the heart,
the soil, micro and macro life
a reminder of the cycle
we inhabit on earth,
the preciousness and precarious
of each eternal moment-
I could go on
An ai does not do or say things
a human would do or say
No matter how
it is programmed.
If you want to meet Lou Reed
listen to his albums
That is much, much closer
to meeting or seeing him.
And me, I am humbled once again
for I misspoke. I don’t hate ai
I just would rather there were
a lot less fake flowers
a lot less plastic
and what I hate is that I myself
am taken in occasionally
but what is worse is thinking that
the experience of the fake flower
is somehow the same.
Although
Laurie Anderson could have
Created a digital “painting” so to speak
And maybe that “painting” was moving
as an homage.
I guarantee that no ai program of me
taking into account my entire life
will ever answer any question
the way I would answer it
and certainly it would not
create art that I would create
I’m probably going to have nightmares
imagining a dead and digital facsimile
of myself
Sometime in the future.
Will the audience be real then?
or will they be fake too?
