prompted by a Rockwell-like painting of three women at a kitchen table, a mother, a daughter, the daughter’s best friend, happy in the moment, the connection, but Life has a way of changing Art, like the message I received at dinnertime, my wife and I at our table with the dogs nearby, also Rockwell-ish, an anguished note from a long-time friend in Australia that his husband, also my long-distance friend, both of them brothers together with me on this Path, is dying, in palliative care, the day after their sixth wedding anniversary, a long time legally coming after eighteen years as a devoted couple, so instead this is a poem to celebrate the virtual times we’ve spent together, from our places at kitchen tables half a world apart, to offer Peace and Love to all whose lives we collectively touched, and hope we’ll meet again on the next Path.

My walls may be infested
with brambles and my gutters full
of wet leaves but when the sun shines
through my oval frames and causes
my shingles to glow, I know
for a fact that I’m lucky
to have been built, and lucky
to still be standing.

NOTE:  Title is a line from “Sweet Lovin’ Man” by the Magnetic Fields

after Terrance Hayes’ poem, “How to Draw an Invisible Man”

1.                     And when the scene sets just right, the trees 
grey wind bursting from my father’s cuticles, i discovered 
he had been hoarding his mental strife in the silver capping 
of his iridescent crooked teeth all these years
2.                                                                                  raw & reeling,     
boyhoodpast shiny film noir under his eyelashes, mumbling 
about his dead & gone parents’ grey hairs, grief left on the back 
burner of his daughter’s developing mind 
3.                        transparently,                             he has been here 
many times before, sweeping tactile trauma into the mouths
of tiny bullets, soaring into a void of clinical darkness setting
on a night full of whistling teeth & empty echoes bouncing 
off a house cooled by fire                                 his darkness is
mine & my mothers’ to hold & coddle to sleep, it’s my turn
to face the burning of our shared mentals, melting into the
same sickness, freckling onto our faces, my beauty mark is a
blackhole mirroring my mother’s pupils, blown wide & searching
for imposter in his trained smile                             avensburg court,
a cul-de-sac of cracking appearances & corked up wine trembling down
scarred arms, he thinks everyone wants to know each story shrouded
in his infantile hands        impressing white people         a hot pass time
4.                                                 but they just want a glance of his pseudo 
whiteness on the backdrop of his daughters’ darkening face, they 
want to hear her speak back in tongue foreign to her bio makeup, 
wanna close their eyes & see their own children’s laughter sprouting 
out her mouth, her aura’s codeswitching phantom stuck to the back 
of her neck like a leech
5.                                                                                                he’d gladly watch
her emotionblood pool if it means he can gloat about the obedient 
walkingcorpse left in the wake of his zealous & lost identity 

Fascinate mistakes—miscalculations, small breaks.
Slippages, outages, errors of way. In awkward moments,  

lean in. Study tension, missed sarcasm, ill-timed
jokes. Count the cacophonies of a sidewalk’s crack,  

send a collision into unaware arms. Pray lucky
the life that gets led astray. We weren’t built  

to make it one flawless motion. When we try, we miss
the jolt of endless delay. Lightning up the coastline—  

like the pineapple, the salt crystal, our brachial lungs—
let life implode into fractals of everyday fault.

Tit for tat
This or that
Yes or no
In or out
Yes or no
This or that
Tit for tat

is it all that bad

for my hands to have sparkles

and tiny flowers?

I wonder if the public even knows how close we are to overdose on a customer service model plan that values feelings over lifespan. Because those feelings translate to donations which empowers most the administrations. If you have the money in the green, your situation is pristine. But we have a system that tends to creep up on our people as they sleep. One day they wake up needing care and realize the problems everywhere. They rant and rave in a room to a nurse who really has to zoom. Because that customer service model plan needs us to round on every. patient. every. hour… understand?

Be sure to greet them 
with a healthy Bonjour,
all your readers that is,
all that clicking for your wisdom
which you have none
and thus a good thing
you’ve no readers

*****

But I digress
for it looks as if
my exile to Alligator Lake
may be interrupted.
I’ve been called to attend
Penelope’s marriage vows
at my former home sweet home,
the houseboat on Herrington Lake.

Ah the Dix of the Bluegrass.

*****

Autobiography 
is a geography of one’s heart
with its regular tic-tocks,
skipped beats, flutterings,
and even congestive failures
which can be Lived With.

Autobiography
is a topographical map
with its isomers
giving the illusion
of a life with peaks and valleys.

*****

My sister, Helen, says
there’s nothing more boring
than someone whose father
left when they were five or mother
died when they were eleven.
Maybe so.
Helen is a nonagenarian,
she should know.

blue-sky celebrations. i sit
on periwinkle swing, enveloped
in oversized yellow sweatshirt,
absorb nature’s radio songs–
cheer-cheer-cheer       here-here
that echo from white-tipped crepe
myrtles.              hur-up hur-up
whoa-whoa-whoa          whoa
from red oak. three cats bob
heads from tree to tree to bush.
kentucky speaks from very near–
purty purty purty.         clear chirps,
flirty chirps.      drum-roll-echo
pecking.      also from afar–
caw-caw-caw        wha-wha-wharp
from an evergreen who
has withstood decades of ice
storms, new disease.   witt–witt-split
hoo-ah-hoo-ah           hoo-ah
caw-caw.   but then i spot a tick.
oh-dear oh-dear.     yes, nature also
comes with tiny-dot bloodsuckers,
eight legs of nasty.    for today, 
i smash my demon with mighty
force.    and the trills start up again.
wee-hoo wee-hoo wee-hoo

SCOTUS taking bribes

Judicial philosophy

Negotiable