March 15, 2020

YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED

I received the invitation today, but I won’t be attending. I’m not inclined to RSVP, for that will only drive home the fact that I couldn’t afford to attend. They have to know this, and if they don’t, well… That really is their problem. My mother said you should always RSVP, yes or no, but she’s been dead two years, never said she’d attend anything again. And anyway I still believe the rule doesn’t apply to any invitation addressed to Current Resident

December 24, 2019

GAME, SET, MATCH

As a child, a Jewish child no less,
December was always a bit difficult.
We had Channukah, which no Jew
would dare claim grew solely to compete
with Christmas, although we all knew
that was precisely what had happened.

The problem was Christmas, but had
nothing to do with Jesus, or the church
or even its historical teachings about
the supposed role we Jews played
in that story, a role for which we
had been paying for two millennia.

The problem was far more basic,
and all you needed to do was drive
down virtually any street in any city
and it would be at once apparent.
Christmas-celebrating homes were decked
out in all colors of lights, while
Jewish homes, those few who competed,
were left with a palate of white
and blue, or up to nine candles,
and that was a guaranteed for sure
last place finish in the December game.

December 3, 2019

LIVES

I have lived many lives,
too many to count, and I
remember bits and pieces
of each, but not necessarily
to which life this bit
or that bit should attach.

It is why I run them
together, view them
as a singularity, easier
to cope even when I
know it is a nice delusion.

I do wonder, at the moment
of death if each life will
flash by in turn, countless
short films, or if the gods
will go along with my
delusion, or maybe just
say time’s up, lights off.

April 1, 2023

ON ITS HEAD

Death has an uncanny knack
for turning normalcy on its head.
My mother was never ready
at the time my parents had to leave
either selecting outfits
or jewelry, the right shoes,
as my father stood by fidgeting
and looking at his watch,
knowing better than to say anything.
Yet she left without notice,
no delays at all, just suddenly gone
so unlike her to make a simple exit.
And he, the man who was always
punctual, who left at the exact
moment planned save for her issues,
he lingered, a slow departure
by inches, fading away, until
only a shell of the man remained
and that, too, finally slipped away.

March 31, 2023

I WONDER

As a poet I would be
most interested in learning
what you read when you
are reading one of my poems.

I know it sounds strange, after all
I wrote it, but often when I read
one of my poems it is different
in small or large ways
from the last time I read it.

I know that each reader in turn
rewrites a poem, its meaning
held close, their filters personal,
never obvious to the observer.

So I am left to wonder just what
I wrote when I wrote it for you
for I am certain it would be
revelatory to know what I was thinking
when I put pen to paper on that day
now quite lost in my past.

March 30, 2023

LONE STAR

I feel like I ought to be
living in Texas again
for everything, they say,
is bigger in Texas and you
don’t argue with a Texan.

So much in my life is bigger now
a computer monitor that would
pass for a moderate sized TV,
with font so large a single page
fills the screen, and the tablet
the size of, but thank God
not the weight of, a phone book,
(for you under 30, look it up),
to read books and news since
libraries don’t carry large print books
(look that up to, probably)
at least not books of poetry.

But thanks to modern materials science
the lenses in my glasses don’t
yet look like Mr. Magoo’s (yup,
one more thing to look up) at least not yet.

March 29, 2023

EPITAPH FOR ANOTHER DAY

When I write the story
of my life, it will not be
me standing by the sea
staff in hand, waiting
for the waters to part.
It will be sand, endless
seas of sand, piled
around my feet.
I will not recount ten plagues
for there is only one
that matters at all
and it was not
terribly exciting,
no generation perished,
we weren’t overrun
with frogs or vermin
save the odd infestation
of cockroaches
and the passing rat
that makes faces
at the cat cowering
in the corner.
I could have climbed
that damned mountain,
but the thought of dragging
two great tablets back down
with the poor footing,
it just wasn’t worth it.
It has been over forty years
wallowing around in the sand
until it caked between my toes
and not a cursed thing
has happened, just sand
and writing on the sand
grows tiresome
after the first breeze.
Actually I don’t care
if I never see this new land, just
get me away
from this godawful sand.

First appeared in KotaPress Poetry Journal, Vol. 2, Issue 2, 2000
http://www.kotapress.com/journal/Archive/journal_V2_Issue1/journal28.htm

March 28, 2023

MOON WATCH

I’m guessing it was
about 2 AM, I can’t be sure
since the only clock
in the bedroom was analog
and unlighted, visible only by day.

I don’t know what woke me,
it just seems to happen, but the moon
was peering in between the slats
of closed window blinds.

I don’t like being watched
in my sleep, certainly not
by some voyeuristic interloper
but there she was and it was clear
there wasn’t a damned thing
I could do about it,
and we both knew it.

On the mesa she might be accompanied
by a coyote, but here she traveled solo
always seeming to want to watch
as my dreams unfurled
across the screen, and Luna simply
didn’t want to miss this night’s show.

March 27, 2023

IN HIDING

The truth lives in the interstices,
increasingly harder to see
amid the morass of desire,
lost in the tides of alternative truths
as some prefer to call lies these days.
If you look for it you will find it,
for it burrows in, refusing to leave,
to be dislodged, transmuted, forgotten.
For most it cannot be seen but need only
be assumed, but those who need to see it
most clearly are those who wish it not so,
who, if they cannot be rid of it
because it blocks them, blocks
the path of their urges and desires
would bury it, or paint
it over or surround it with lies
until the casual observer could not
begin to tell the truth and the lie apart.

March 25, 2023

CONCEIVE OF THIS

No child, no youth
wants to imagine the moment
of his or her conception.
Now, that is the moment of personhood
in some places, a moment when
two cells become one and is
a life of its own, but it isn’t
the convergence of sperm and ovum
we avoid, but the act leading to it.
When you are an adoptee
and only later in life discover
your now dead birthparents
that moment, that scene
is a small void in your life
among larger voids you want to,
but cannot ever, seem to fill,
so it is left to your imagination
of time, place, circumstances
and ultimately action, but you ensure
that scene ends moments before conception.

March 24, 2023

RADIOACTIVE

I cannot say for certain which day
I became the familial isotope,
but I know my parents began
accreting neutrons not long
after their marriage, bound
to their mutual core, unbound
from me, adopted into the family,
and I then became the isotope
of the family but remote,
easily enough forgotten,
when I was not present.
That is, I suppose, one possible
fate for an isotope, it’s familial
half-life up and then forgotten.

But perhaps it was just
that I was the family’s
Schrödinger’s cat, finally put
in a box into which
no one chose to look.

March 23, 2023

AND COUNTING

How many times
had they almost met
over the years before that evening?

What if the Fates
had allowed meetings,
what would have changed?
Likely everything, nothing,
for when they might have met
neither was available,
he a student imagining himself
already in love, or both married
never thinking those relationships
would possibly end in divorce.

And how many times had they
been in the same place
separated by moments or hours,
so many missed connections.

And then the moment of convergence
two lives forever changed,
two worlds merged
in an unanticipated joy.