writing

March 22, 2020

NEWS

The most interesting thing about visiting
websites from foreign news services
is that so many offer content in English
and how deaths that occur locally seem
to invoke the same sadness, horror, belated honor,
and that local disasters take precedence
over our own disasters not merely because
it happened there and not here,
but because the losses are greater, the damage
far worse, the faces far less white.
We hold the world up to the mirror often,
but is only our face we see, and those like us
standing behind, and we are blind
to so much of what goes on around us,
because this color blindness is of the sort
that disables seeing at all rather
than seeing all in monochrome.

March 5, 2020

Jack, for Heaven’s Sake

The truly pious
will never get to heaven
for they don’t know how
to sing or dance.
Kerouac roams freely
like a rogue elephant
unable to get a good buzz on
but not for want of trying.
He thought it would be
Edenic, a garden somewhere
between Babylon hanging
and the lobby
of the Royal Hawaiian
but it bears a closer
resemblance to Grant Park
or rural North Dakota
where the Coke machines
along the roadside
are often empty
and you are rarely hit
by golf balls the size
of hailstones.

Recently appeared in Aurora, Down in the Dirt Vol. 167 (2020)
March 3, 2020

HAVING WRITTEN

I suppose I ought to be glad
that no playwright has ever written
about me, for that is a fame that always
seems to end badly, unless it is a comedy,
and that, too, is dangerous ground,
for such plays tread heavily for a laugh.

Consider Shakespeare, and ask
yourself if yo would want to ever be
one of his protagonists, no doubt ending
up prematurely dead, and carrying all
manner of sin and angst to your grave,
while others gather to note your failures.

I suppose I could try a one-man show,
autobiographical, but only if I directed
myself, and even that would be challenging
as I don’t take direction well, but my early
attempts at its creation failed miserably,
as my audience, the mirror, made clear.

February 20, 2020

BASHO, REDUX

This poem was recently published in the first issue of a new journal, Punt Volat.  You can find it here:

https://puntvolatlit.com/issues/winter-2019

If Basho were here today,
in this America, at this time,

stop briefly and consider what
he might write, how he would

describe the faces of parents
mourning children gunned down

in random urban violence,
the asylum seeker, praying

at the border for entry, for hope,
the homeless woman curled

in a ball in her cardboard home
in an alley no one visits, no one

sees even in the full light of day,
the school children practicing

active shooter drills, while
learning to recite the alphabet.

sitting zazen, I
see one thousand cranes crying.
Their river bathes me.

February 18, 2020

YEATS IF ONLY

Cheever was having a bad day,
that much was immediately obvious.
Perhaps it was the two martini’s in town
before lunch, but he says it only made him giddy.
We all know better and by late afternoon
his mood has soured completely, his emotions
have slipped back into turmoil.
He says a few cocktails will cure him,
or at least make him bearable.
He will soon consider AA again,
drinking dry the liquor cabinet in the consideration.
Elsewhere and in another time, Borges reminds us,
an Irish poet, held prisoner in the last days
of the Irish civil war, knows he will be executed
in the morning, and so slips out of the house
that serves as his prison, and into the water
icy, frigid, now hating the Barrow river.
He swims as best he can, promising
that if the river god allows him to live
he will present her with two swans.
He does live, he does place two swans
onto the river the following spring,
and he dreams one day of visiting Coole.

February 15, 2020

ON THE MENU

The waiter we know so well
tells tonight’s server
that we are poets and she
should ask us to order
in iambic pentameter.
We write him a limerick,
which she delivers with a smile
before returning with our wine
and a pad to take our order.
She seems somewhat sad
when our order lacks rhythm
and I explain that vegetarian
just will not be iambic.
she smiles and says until the meal is done
one night only can’t you just be vegan
even if dessert must be dactylic.

February 5, 2020

LE CINÉMA

Watching French movies
you know why Hollywood
seems less real than
the giant letters stuck
like pushpins into a hillside.
Even in translation
laughter remains universal
but you begin to think
in word pictures that have
utterly no meaning
le neige gris
la belle chat
la lumiere fantastique
and you imagine
dreaming in a tongue
you have never spoken.