Jimmy returns from a grand escapade
Bruised and bloodied and laughing,
His smile too wide and a glint in his eye
“How proud and wild a figure I cut”
He wears the thought like armour
Because he’s a charmer, a rogue,
A brave renegade.
Fuelled by laughs and tuts and praise
Of those he loves, he’s blind
To their concern.

He sees the sighs, the rolling eyes,
The cries of ‘classic Jimmy’
But to him they’re just his just desserts;
An ironic awe. Reserved for he who flirts
With danger, uses outrageous behaviour
With a smile and a wink
So that this charmer,
This rakish renegade can get away with ******.

Oh no!
Here comes Billy
See Billy’s a bully and Billy thinks Jimmy’s a c*.
Where Jimmy is eloquent, Billy is blunt.

Now Billy, this boorish bully,
This hulking brute, leaves Jimmy's flesh untouched
But he creeps upon our hero still,
A pat on the shoulder
A warm tone of voice
He whispers in Jimmy’s ear.
At the sound our hero frowns, but continues to entertain.
He can’t quite push aside
That shiver that climbs his spine
At the memory of sinister whispers
And the pain he had to feign away
With smiles that never quite
Reached his eyes.

See, words from the mouth of Billy cut as good as any knives.
They linger first, but soon
With practiced deftness, cut at the straps,
The leather tendrils that keep Jimmy’s armour in place.
Until it falls, with a clatter, to the floor
And where, not a minute before,
There stood a God resplendent
Now cowers a boy.
And this ugly, naked,
Whimpering wretch gazes up in fear and hope,
And now all he can see are the sighs behind the smiling eyes.

And now every time he laughs too loud
Or unwittingly draws attention.
With every look just a little too long
With every ‘what?’ or ‘huh?’
He feels knives digging into his back
And sags a little lower.

…

Until one day, they’re gone
The whispers are far away
And Jimmy finds he’s come up for air
To a place where things are bright and fair
And laughing means more
Than just a social game - a display to spare feelings.
And there are things to love and cherish.
The sweet taste of wine; the brush
Of a pair of soft and willing lips.

The racing of theories and thoughts
And the meanings of things; shocking
In the clarity of their colour.
Fattening the soul in shades of cyan and amber.
Filling this bedraggled wretch with the glowing warmth
Of a crackling fire. Shooting through his limbs and trunk
Until he expands and stands on legs of iron.

As the furnaces of joy are stoked
A grin begins to spread.
The flames a glitter to light the eyes;
Quenching fears put to bed.

…

Yet still, deep down he knows, that every
Time he comes back up
And dons his shining armour,
He feels just a little weaker.
And the armour hangs a little looser.

You aren’t used to me being away from home.
I could say the same about you.
You call and act normal.
There’s nothing normal about change.
You don’t tell me, but it’s apparent.
I know.

Science can't save you, neither can religion,
at least Popper and Niebuhr, philosophers and poets,
are entertainers, which is why actors and athletes
are paid so much. Thanks for the summaries.
I was teaching Shakespeare's 92nd ridiculous sonnet
to my student who lays blacktop in the off season
Shakespeare bellyaching about dying without her love
a feeling foreign to a modern adolescent sensibility
although many teens are pretty far gone searching
for their mothers or fathers in their dazed lovers' eyes.
Which is why we call it "the wound that never heals."
Or the lesion that's always lengthening. And bleeding.

Muslim fundamentalists and their Christian counterparts
are a mystery to me. Pews and prayer rugs, the airless
indoor environment of religious worship, reading
scriptures, hypnotized by hymns and fainting from staring
at candles through stained glass windows, almost certain
the preacher is faking his certainty about the afterlife.
It's not my problem. A more immediate concern:
receding gums and tooth extractions, swollen joints,
poor lubrication and circulation, wave after wave
of viral infection, the occasional antibiotic-resistant
bacterial attack, usually urinary, and who knows
what internal organs are dividing and conquering
without mercy or cease, i.e. the wound that never heals.

It is wise not to overvalue your continued existence,
good not to be innumerate, unable to compare
a mere 80 years with say 6.0 x 109 or all of time
(to date) times the multiverse. Conversely,
it is interesting all of space and most of history is contained
in your mind (realizing of course it's just a map
of the cosmos not the cosmos itself, or is it?). I'm
unable to wrestle free, tongue in that cavity
and locked in my memories, so separate and disparate
from the biomass in the crosswalks, even my spouse.
Alone, so alone, even your doctor can only devote
limited thought to your situational mortality through
the redress of poetry - also a wound that never heals.

Snow for eternity, that's what this February's been.
All to the good, for someone it's the final February
so enjoy it to the extent you can. By that I mean joy.
Joy at birth. Joy at death. All joy. All times. Anyway,
that was Shakespeare's message: even tragedies are comedies.
May, a Buddhist, chants each morning.
Her husband, Marc, who's Jewish, plays league tennis.
Their son, Aaron, will soon make Eagle scout.
How does that relate to your wound that never heals?
Luck runs out. For D.H. Lawrence in New Mexico
or Ulysses S. Grant in Ohio or Yasujiro Ozu in
Tokyo or Satyajit Ray in Bombay or Rabindranath
Tagore in Bangalore or at the Battle of the Atlantic in the Azores.

The night is a poultice, winter or summer solstice.
My anonymity will not affect the anomie ghettoside
seeing for myself how season by season
vacations and accomplishments accumulate, late in life
and early on, sunrise over mountains or moonrise over Bronx.
Masturbator, prisoner of war. Hospice of the Holy Roman Empire.
Numerous blue notes: the 3 flat, 7 flat, 5 flat,
the 6 flat and the 2 flat too. I don't get
what Wallace Stevens means by imagination.
When groundhog shows up as a totem, there is opportunity
to explore the mystery of death without dying.
This then is the purpose of purposelessness (and of eating less)!
Now what about that wound that never heals.

The Skeptical Observer column in Scientific American
was somewhat alarming when he accepted a paranormal
explanation for how his wife's grandfather's inoperable
transistor radio played music from its hiding spot
in his sock drawer on, and only on, their wedding day.
Now I'll have to believe my father (or mother!) is watching me
perform private ****** acts with (or without) partners
or that they could even know my thoughts. Or aliens
are attending our committee meetings and making
perfectly reasonable decisions given the available information
and the world is rotating just fine without humans.
These possibilities - angels, ghosts, aliens - are better
than holocaust and genocide. In this way,
and only in this way, does doom become endurable.
The wound that never heals in the end is all you'll feel.