The Way We Were

Micro slang in the culture industry

high fashion, always low ideals 

but words, and in combinations

floated to see what they look like

in the snow globe of commerce.

Jarring that we read in this way,

more so now that this slang

is the disrupter - fomo forces

its hand on the table, disrupts

the Scrabble tiles of comprehension.

Fair play to writers and

what they think and how they...

fair play to the shadows that slid

the Gaviscon of literacy

to the rear of the medicine cabinet.

Not quite at the cusp of how

ageing is alienation,

I should be back on the shelf

but I'm not, I picked up this 20 year old

The Face and I

realise I was patronised then too

and none of it is important

and alienation is not responsibility

or my hairline, or my crow's feet,

it's perpetual want and why.

the war on tunnels

why tunnels?

ask the mishna talmud and zohar

as they snake beneath the aching intellect

of a learning complex

why let tzitzis fly in a subterranean draft

dangling yiddish and russian assimilations

are cell phones permitted below ground

who lights gas lights on shabbas

what does the halacha say about crockpots

or the safe holding temperature

when tunnels are for passing through unseen 

death birth consumption regurgitation 

singing is it alive? our compassion for tunnels

whether they hold hostage

the imaginations or concrete pains

i have to imagine that beneath the earth

is a house of learning where all tunnels lead 

and the sojourners bear their true or false

righteousness like bruises from a fight with gravity

Autobiography

In another January
Before smartphones, after Facebook
The kindness of acquaintance proves to be
The key to our survival
Sitting in the stairwell
Drinking cheap wine
Slicing cheese with whatever
We can find in a handbag
Perfume samples
Debit cards
The obvious tools conspicuously absent
Abby Polgardy newly arrived in Paris
Treated to a soirée of bohemian proportions
I'd love to have you in but
My old lover stole my new keys
O, the melodrama
And the steady flow of high fashion 
Passing on the landing   
Glancing at the fortress of luggage
Holding me back from falling-in
It felt so important to be ok
Insouciant in the unknowing
And we weren't dressed to join the crowd
Gathering at my new next door
But we were in no position to refuse
Champagne and caviar
Luc returning from a Russian assignment
Allowing me to stash my baggage 
While I searched for friends of friends of friends
Who expected nothing in return for couchspace 

Dryish Jan

Zooming out and knowing that this

is also something I do with my hands

and that I'm charming once in ten,

excited once in twelve,

bilious usually.

Unlocking cakes is even better now,

slow finger on the crumbs

circles the plate,

next Jan will be about apples,

I'm sure.

#16, 17, 18, 19 & 20January’s Journey: Father and Son Returns Adding parts of Missouri, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida and Terminal Sections 5, 7, 9, 10, and 11

#16, 17, 18, 19 & 20January’s Journey: Father and Son Returns Adding parts of Missouri, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida and Terminal Sections 5, 7, 9, 10, and 11

Perspective Prelude 

In 2020, when Covid-19 began to leach
Sanity  and courage,
And science failed to reach,
The fearful and discouraged,
Son’s remote learning and online sessions
Led to lassitude and many missed lessons.
Mom and he, and a million others in stampede,
That prophecies propelled at frightful speed
To southern reaches, and open schooling,
Warmer beaches and again more carpooling.
The Age of Enlightenment was left behind, and rationality into the dustbin was consigned,
True seekers of truth preferred any kind of conspiracy that through divination only they could find.
The Founding Fathers succored on the Age of Reason
Would not recognize their heirs’ mad season.
This Father and his heir, and Son
Will now down this country run.
A confluence of withheld reasons
Compels a journey in this wintry season.
The time is now, whilst in Father’s company,
For Son to become prologue to their mutual destiny.
While the Age of Sturm und Drang compels an ending tragic,
Father seeks an epilogue to make their meandering epic.
For now, auf Wiedersehen! 
That is, until they meet again,
And happily, they see, 
That each is in the other’s
Private history.

 

1.         Fraternal Farewell

Older Brother provides a ride to the head of trail.
Whoops! Son says he failed to say one tire has a nail.
Sister stops Dad’s caterwauling, calling to wish the travelers well,
But now there is more work to do before the starting bell.
Sons’ pick-up has waited patiently under a snowy tomb,
So Brother breaks it free from that  frozen womb.
While Son collects his clothes and stacks them in the back
Dad unneeded stands stoically and slack
‘Til coaching Son on how to pack
The bulky blue pick-up.
Suddenly the moment for brotherly goodbyes
The fond fraternal hug, a sad hiccup,
Squeezes a few tears from Father’s faltering eyes.
The little boys’ binkies, bottles and blankets and bloated dirty diapers.
Make way for ice scrapers, glacier blue deicer and working windshield wipers.
Citrus from the sunny places,  protein bars low fat, bagged with bananas in a bunch,
Are now the healthier alternatives replacing the Father’s former student lunch.

 

2.         Perpetual Preparation

 

3.         Duo’s Departure: Son to Sun

The youngest son to his sunny home at last returning,
Along America’s interstates he and father will soon be journeying.
Alert! Winter storm Indigo is bearing down,
Hurry the final prep, they must leave town.
But the interstates are not for them alone,
Other taxpayers will also be hurrying home.
Forsooth! Before they are barely rolling
The queues of cars begin slowing.
Like ice floes choking a river swollen
First responders surround a driver stricken.
Down in mangled steel, reflecting lights yellow white and red,
Freezing the faces of those gawking for the dead.
As if creeping past an open casket, thoughtful glances are exchanged,
At the scene yellow tape, and orange cones, are mournfully arranged.
The surface tension is finally breached,
As the macabre point is reached
Where they gazed.
And four lanes finally lose their unease,
Vaulting to the velocity they please
Those mesmerized are now unfazed.
Son’s proud pick up in procession, defies death with its combustion,
Consumes petrol for growing power,
Climbs from ten to twenty, forty, fifty, sixty then to seventy miles per hour.
Farewell!

 

4.         Indulging in Illinois

5.         “Meet Me in” Missouri

Missouri Welcomes You! To boom land.

Epicenter to the New Madrid Earthquake.

Father turns to Son and says, “You know,

That earthquake tolled bells as far away as Chicago.”

“Dad, look!” Lying in the median is a jack-knifed cola truck.

The tractor trailer’s fall traced through the snowy muck.

The broken hulk no wreck from the earthquake long ago,

No, a victim of last night’s mismanagement in the ice and snow.

Floundered cars and trucks sprinkle the interstate’s sunken median,

Forlorn as if discarded during the quake of eighteen hundred and eleven.

Fresh semi’s fill the ranks undaunted, stolidly passed the fallen they roll.

Flashier trucks pull heated trailers full of stomping equine souls.

With morning energy cars mingle, their drivers not yet bored.

Still striving for greater glory, blazing passed an epic billboard,

That admonishes these chasers for the real earth quaker, “Seek God.”

Motoring inside their mobile heaven on earth, Dad and Son plod on

Until Father and Son a vision see, of a Missouri paradise approaching.

Showing secular Hallelujahs and Fourth of July Amens exploding

Emblazoned with the promise in earth shaking words: “Exit Here for Boomland!”

“Fireworks!” Together they consider what detour their timetable can withstand.

Should they take the offramp? What is to be done?

When someone offers to blow you into Kingdom come?

 

6.         Awed in Arkansas

Father says, “Look, a town called Osceola.” 
Far from the old Seminoles, who used to live in Florida.
Chief Osceola frustrated President Andrew Jackson
That “Ole Hickory” who beat the British and their General Pakenham.
Under Osceola the Seminoles roamed free and loose
Until “the Little Magician” Martin Van Buren duped him with a flag of truce.
If Son’s new state be marred by that sad Indian incident,
Then what state in a moral union is not also tainted and complicit?
Father sits up! “Look at that! Son, go slow!
No geographic accident gave this next town the name Lepanto.”
Arkansans must know their religious history.
They named the town Lepanto after a famous Christian victory,
When the galleys of the Holy League in 1571,
Decisively defeated that naughty navy of the Ottomans.
Thus, setting the Mediterranean free
For more holy commerce and Christianity
That paid for Wars of Reformation in the 17th Century.
And timely reformation Arkansans do not postpone,
“War, Divorce, Wealth – what would Jesus say?” A billboard helpfully intones.
Dad says, “That’s a good question.”  Son ignores the open invitation.
As Father fumbles for an answer to the twelve-foot inquisition,
Son plays familiar music to ease the thorny theological imposition.
Son selects soothing songs from Dad’s own century,
That Father may mediate more sleepily
Upon this rude Arkansan inquiry.

 

7.         Ptolemaic in Memphis, Tennessee?

While wending back across the Mississippi River

Into Memphis, Tennessee,

Son points out, “Dad see!

It’s the largest Bass Pro Shop in the world!”

Dad jerks his head from the foamy river far below, stares into the swirl

Of whipping flakes and slashing sleet, and intermittent visibility

Between flashing bridge girders bearing them over the gray Mississippi.

Squinting Dad asks, “Where’s the largest Bass Pro Shop?”

Son says, “Under the pyramid, which sits atop the Shop.”

The pyramid camouflaged by snow and white as bleached bone

Emerges from Memphis shining brighter than the limestone

That covered the haggard, dust storm blown,

Mummy homes in the movies we are shown

Here in America.

Father says, “It’s just a giant tent.” No Hebrew lives were spent

To sit it atop this Bass Pro Shop.

So why shouldn’t Memphis, Tennessee have its own pyramid?

When this Commercial Wonder is not a sop to a single pharaoh’s id.

Memphis is as quiet as the Valley of the Kings

Snow piles up like sand entombing everything,

As frustrated as grave robbers, the metropolis gives up the ghost

On plowing, except for arteries they need the most.

Power reduces streetlights to stop and go red blinks

Father and Son slip out of town as quietly as the Sphinx.

 

8.         Muddling and Muttering while Motoring through Mississippi

9.         Alabama “Is Just Alright with Me”

Son says, “Hey dad you’ll like this.” He smiles too easily.

Dad sees the traitorous flag flying in the winter breeze.

An Alabama landowner flies the old Confederate banner

A 20 by 15-foot cloth flapping in a most defiant manner.

Who can blame this new traitor of 2024?

When Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee in 1864

And his Midwestern soldiers skipped past Montgomery

The proud first capitol of the late Confederacy.

And denied Alabama of its chance to show its bravery.

The South’s persistent State’s rights platitudes,

Chanted in support of involuntary servitude,

Exasperated Sherman’s Midwesterners.

Sop his sixty thousand angry bummers

Scoured a swath through plantations from Atlanta to the sea

Wider than any interstate.

Alabamans watched in horror as the Union Army

Administered the coup d’ grace to Southern slavery.

And so if a white person can fly the Rebel flag on his private property

Can a black person drive by it alone in lanes reserved for high occupancy?

 

10.       Finally, Florida

Florida! Where Covid Carpetbaggers vent their spleens,

Over Blue State mandatory  mRNA vaccines.

And in the sunshine of that State

Expostulate on the merits of Gulf Coast real estate.

While pious in their pews, worshipping the cable news,

Commiserating over border views

Of migrants struggling with little left to lose.

Before basted in boredom they return

Sullenly to the states they spitefully did spurn.

First, they flip those Florida titles to turn,

A tidy profit on their tedious three-year sojourn.

Begun so fervently, and in mimicry,

Of their fabled forebears’ mythic pursuit of precious Liberty.

Maneuvering their overloaded SUVs,

Among their fellow American refugees.

These pioneers piloted confidently, those modern Conestoga wagons,

Until primly bedding them beneath their comfy mini mansions.

Swaggering shelters propped-up and aloof,

“Fear not,” the brokers boast, “They’re hurricane proof.”

 

11.       Terminal Time: Return of the Father

As Father waits, he watches the wayfarers pass through,

Each is seeking solar solace until their time is due.

Father wonders - would he too?

Or what would the thirsty Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon do,

Or think of an average American senior citizen,

Who retires only to expire, conquered by the scorching Florida sun,

When that conquistador himself sought salvation from God’s furtive fountain?

see you next year < 3

I return the way I left

Heavy booted

Swishing a whole body of rain bibs

Thigh to thigh and heel toe to be quiet

I am slink stepping the hallway and thinking about whether

I’ve lost the chance to seasonally savor

Citrus and whether it’s possible to

Be an adult body with no sexual baggage

What if I died and was reborn in this body

Fully grown but entirely unfamiliar 

And with no memory of how it grew and who touched it

I would discover so

Much

More than I hide from now and I would use the everyday and the natural

And I would perform it and keep it quiet and leverage it

Only for gut instinct North Star ocean wave

Loudest tip toe whisper shout

Sleeping sisters with doors cracked open 

I’m home from getting turned on at the movie theater

And waking the house with my clattering secrets

I wide arm crouch into the bedroom 

Toss off boot and rain suit

Set up the projector and blast a home video

Of myself at 23 packing to move out forever from

The house I grew up in

My best friend is with me and directing the sorting

What comes with me to the island

What stays in storage

What goes forever away

The material is gatorade bottles I filled with rum

And hid next to baggies of yellow dusty weed

Letters from high school plot points

Something sexy and embarrassing and my baby blanket

And my first CDs Shakira Bob Marley Kelly Clarkson Eminem

I played with dolls here and made them kiss

I had terrible sex here

I am sweating with the effort of getting it 

Out 

The woman I’ve woken offers me ice cream

And crispy cake almost cotton candy angel 

I have to brush my teeth twice

Before haze lifts and shows me

I am somehow here now 

Seattle, January 31, 2024

now we are thirty six

some red eyed dad sat in white undies

at the breakfast table 

black curls assumed his mullet

coffee stained teeth remembered cigarettes

my ears remember his kisses ringing

how he tousled my hair

put on a lake minnehaha souvenir tee

and read local news

i still hear the voices of piglet and pooh and roo

or when ducks spoke through the side of his cheek

for hans christian anderson's cassette

could only handle so many revolutions

i can't recall where he hid booze

or when he abandoned hair gel

when his eldest forgave abandonment

and asked for a loan on a condo in miami

i must have been up all night

with a chocolate milk tummy

crying loud enough to be heard

lets say i vomited on the carpet near his side of bed 

i slept in the middle

between the margins of a blanched polaroid

waiting for parenthood and looking for clues

slowly

 

ripening slowly,

the skin is softening.

the shape is morphing, 

from sharp to curved, all 

as planned

fragment

i think im getting closer to myself

touching the edges the way art's voice 

eclipses simon's

false spring

or fools, as they call it

snow melt reveals old green

a friend points out the crows returned

what am i apt

to notice? heavy curtains

dance with their weightedness

when sun falls in 

through kitchen window

its radiance is reached for

the poets in my life offer their analyses

of animals, of monsters,

the self retold in caricature

on the split heels of winter

i am being asked to make meaning

what remains: stone, need, 

solvent. i make myself 

weightless

i douse myself with ice's glare

in the art studio

i am asked to color with what

ive been given:

blue, dark blue, red, yellow pencils

i make meager things, draw a soft impression

of hands 

i notice the absence of knowing

myself, how i neck for some semblance

of stasis

o self, embellished

in scarves and gold

come out from formless glittering

fur feast

first you ate fur
then barley, then wool
spitting out all sorts
of fluff

we took you to the doctor
and all they could proctor
was who was calling your bluff?

man

the word fits but does
not sit by itself alone
needs the others, too

constellation (let me live here, too)

the dreaminess of being
the woman by the sea
archetype complete
with long cotton night
gown, with curls piled
on head, with cunt
to signify woman
what happens when we
have more than that
archetype burst through
and expanded, a mash-up
we look the part and feel
beyond it while also of it
the exhaustion of the
multitudinous dance
what if the answer is just
that each is an outfit, a face
to a prism, one not eradicating
the other, slender homes,
temporal interpretations,
yes a code, yes a lineage
and yet how many seaside
women had cocks, too, 
were hermaphroditic
were also men, were 
hungry in all sorts of ways
woman a heartbeat
and starting point
not the only

star dance

corporeal reformation
corporeal forest station
arboreal consciousness
aurora borealis gender
of stars

POEMS I DIDN’T WRITE 2024

LITTLE WHISPER
GOOD INFORMATION
RUSTIC SHE SHED ON BUY NOTHING
THE PASSION OF JOAN ARC HANGOVER 
CHAOTIC PRAYER FOR DAVE (2)
TRYING TO REMEMBER BLEEDING (2)
DRIVING OLIVIA HOME/AURORA/WOLF PUP POEM
COMMITMENT 
GOLDEN SWEETIE
WHY WE DID WHAT WE DID WORKSHOP
MANIFESTING COMPLIMENTS 
RED MOTHER
LASHLESS
ON ONE

LIVING

when time is light
folding in half 
the tub has flaked 
salt not hot enough
i do a lot, i’ve done
taste like a thought 
2 characters share 
against imaginary 
dusk

Ugly Haikus

#28

Wrecked, rusting car husk

Irritated dog on chain

Wall to wall carpet 

#29

They say a picture

Says 1000 words. 4 are:

Faded off the beans 

#30

Stupid depression

Thinks I won’t take us both out

With this percocet

#31

Mood compounded of 

lassitude, submission, guilt

emptiness, despair

#32

Lament the folly

Of longing for that which is

Unobtainable 

#33

Passive aggression:

pantomime fellatio

while rolling your eyes

 

REDEMPTION VIADUCT

on the road between 
the living and the dead
the  smoke makes me sneeze

baby in the hospital  with the beer guzzling smile,
chorus line of Ebay tab worry dolls

world between worlds, is now when we ask
the dolls what to do?

they are hungry.

retrace initiation, imitate handwriting, 
drop your voice when you come
to the clearing, dissolve the rodent 
behind your smile. 

beauty-body fights for balance,
unkempt in her garden.

women make spaghetti
somewhere quiet.

what song to play in the mildew cave
and what to sweep away?

THE HOUR IS LATE

lure of the law
law of the lure
wake up sideways 
to wet ground, wild roses 
jumbo palace burned down
olivia knows about the bad cigarette 
consent to venture
stop for huckleberries 
some things are god’s business 
but we’re also
a little bit psychic

Look Me Up

I want to be found.
The small tinny soundscape
of daily life
replacing the boomboxes
and bell-ringers
of my urban imaginary,
whispering “find me, find me,
defraud me if you must
but find me” keep my number
always just the same in case,
in case, someone always wondered
where I went.
To here, to here, I went where
I never left, where loudness
is a virtue mislabeled as a vice,
Where I might still
find a hammer, I might yet
ring a bell.