Skirting The Mortality Issue

How 

Does one wait 
For a flower 

To die? I don’t 
Know but I 

Don’t want to be 
There when it does.

Endgame: Gotcha There, Didn't I?

All through 

Your topsy-turvy 
Life, more than once 
You thought 
You’d always be 
Basking in the 'eternal 

Sunshine of the spotless 
Mind' but where 
The longest day of the year 
Always turned out blotted
By the shortest 

Night. 

Demise Of The Overweening Demiurge

You kept twittering I am 
What I am, God’s gift to you 
I am so blusterously 

Brooding I think 

Said morose twits made 
Of you a blundering 
Twitching dodo, too.

Getting Comfortable With Trying To Write Like Someone Whose Poetry You Really Like

--for J.L., master locksmith


Say he’s called 
Jim (though that’s not his 
Real name) and you want 
To sound a lot like him, 

So after reading reams 
And reams of almost 
Everything he’s written, 
You try your hardest 

To unlock the mystery 
Of his poetic mastery, even 
Using many of his words 
In the same order he does, 

Though you’re extra 
Careful not to be too exact, 
Because in all fairness 
To the poem 

And to your suffering 
Self, what comes out 
Has to be yours and clearly 
Not someone else’s—how 

Else could you live with it?

Votive

After eighty harsh 
Years of living 
Off the inscrutable 
Face of the Earth, 
When it came time 

For him to leave, 
My father took 
The chiseled wrinkles 
Of the centenarian 
Olive with him. 

Will The Real Hayseed Please Stand Up?

Listen up, 
You know-it-all 
City-bred dandy 
Wordsmith—the poem 
You’re writing should end up 
Down-to-earth discriminating, 
Say a finely winnowed product 
Triggered by wave upon wave 
Of gulls lifting off 
From the nearest 
Harbor some thirty 
Miles away only 
To land here 
In the boondocks 
With the first light 
Of day, foraging 
For sustenance 
Amongst bales and bales 
Of—you got it—freshly cut 
Seedy hay.

Irrelevant And Immaterial Spectra

Nothing 

Resembling flesh 
And bones here— 

Just an occasional 

Revenant taking us up 
And back to where

We thought 
We’d always be 

Relevant. 

Tinker, Tailor, Do It Over

My life had all 
The trappings 

Of a tailor-made poem, 
Till I discovered

I had to alter it. 

Ways And Means For Existential Dummies

--“Time passes. Will you?” 


And still it does not 
Dawn on you, literally

That which ends at the end 
Of each of your days, ends in itself 
And means absolutely

Nothing in the end. 

74-Year-Old Strange Bird Approaching Twilight Landing Zone

I'm so 
Old I remember when I was 
A twelve-something Mister 
Cool thinking someone 
Fortyish was a stumbling fossil, 
And an octogenarian was 
A dodo on its last legs 
Attempting an emergency 
Landing with no landing gear. 

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

You poor 
Suckers, 

What we need 
And what 

We get are two 
Sides of the same 

One-sided argument— 
If you’re not 

With us, 
You’re fucked. 

Dumbstricken By A Line From Malebranche*

Playing our latest “smart” 
Game with my six-year-old 
Granddaughter to sharpen 
Our powers of observation, 
We watch patiently 

The dense overhanging jasmine vine 
Above and in front of us 
As it jettisons 
Its white, five-petaled 
Flowers one-by-one, 

Anxious to see who’s going 
To be the first to shout 
There it goes! as each star falls 
Dumbly to the oh so equally
Dumb and patient ground. 


*Attention is the natural prayer of the soul.

Red Herrings Made In America

On top of so much 
Devastating news 

Concerning the Earth 
(about which too few 

Of us are concerned 
And even fewer willing 

To digest), lately 
From the hinterland 

Comes disturbing talk 
Of giant invasive hammer- 

Headed earthworms over- 
Taking the homeland 

By the millions, 
Swallowing 

Our much smaller 
Native fry 

For breakfast, lunch, 
Dinner AND midnight 

Munchies—I don’t know 
About you but for those 

Concerned, I think 
It’s time to come to 

Our senses and hope 
It isn’t just 

Idle table talk.

Read Your Fortune, Sir?

Murky—like the poem you were so 
Intent on finishing you missed

Seeing that fly buzz by only to end 
Up a black dot flailing 

The dregs of your coffee cup.

Tangerine

“The commune of Poetry becomes so real that [the poet] sounds each
particle in relation to parts of a great story he knows will never be completed.” 
--Robert Duncan, Bending the Bow 

The dynasty 

Of Song, tangible as 
The word sounds— 

In this instance 
Joyous, a small 

Round, reddish-orange 
Object plucked 

From a mandarin’s 
Bough. 

Existentialist Angst Is No Laughing Matter

With the world
Exploding

In bloody stitches, you keep 
Laughing at yourself because 

You think laughing is good 
For you, you must be 

Joking. 

Late Deep Sleeper

lux in tenebris lucet

 
What’s with you, trouper? 
On stage

You made many a move 
To draw the curtains,

But the sun’s still 
Waiting in the wings. 

Trickle-down Economics Broken Down By One Of The Haves

It’s this way you see 
His ledger rife with minuses, 
Two plus two never making four, 
This good-for-nothing no-account 
Too poor to know the score he 
Put a double-barrel up his sinuses, 
Nothing made sense anymore. 

Reverie

           “The Jasmine” 

Whether it gets dark 
or light 
the jasmine stays 
always white.
  —George Seferis 


remember

wherever 


jasmine

flowers 


absent

mind


makes

sense


all day,

all night.

"In The Beginning Was The Word"

—for my A and Ω, Eleni—who knows me better than I do myself 

Why is it when I at last 
Give in and grudgingly promise 
To translate a few of my more 
"Knotty” avant-garde poems 
For you, my not-so-comfy with English 
Better half, half-way into them I get 
That nagging sense you think 
They were all Greek to me too, 
From their promising beginnings 
To nowhere in particular 
In the end. 

"There's A Sucker Born Every Minute"

—attributed to P. T. Barnum, American showman 


Believe it or not, 

I read somewhere that 
Some land snails can 

Lift ten times their weight 
Up a vertical surface; 

So if you were as strong as that 
And sucked just as well 

And weighed in 
At one hundred-fifty pounds, 

Hauling one thousand five hundred 
Pounds of suckers would more than likely 

Drive you straight up a wall. 

Bereft

Oh, wanting 
Apostrophe, the comma’s 

Always somewhere 

Here to make you, 
Pause to think about it.