The world begins again!
Not wholly insufflated
the blackbirds in the rain
upon the dead topbranches
of the living tree,
stuck fast to the low clouds,
notate the dawn.
Their shrill cries sound
announcing appetite
and drop among the bending roses
and the dripping grass.

Parenting

organizing the day,
while the baby room adjacent
makes dreaming rock n' roll noises
siren calls to lay in bed,
semi-alert, on guard duty,
scheming about dis n' dat,
you are sleeping, dreaming,
wide awake seeing,
multitasking eyes closed simultaneously.

lesser of a poet, more a notate-er,
list keeper, note taker,
arguing with yourself inside the head,
actually feeling the thoughts
coursing, lurking, seeing both sides now,
parentally, washing the dishes
of the hours and years ahead.

while the woman-mother
makes her soprano dreaming noises,
you laugh at the orchestra of
*******, sighing somnolent noises,
a cadenza of love dancing in your
irresistible wide awake dreams.

paying the bills, lying in the dark,
you wonder-worry about the agenda
unknown that will overgrow you,
fast creeping up the grain of your skin,
ivy on stone skin walls.

lala lala
you borrow baby's lullaby,
yourself calming,
keeping time, silly rhyming,
organizing the days ahead
in you head, while,
recording the harmonies of sensory inputs.

the dark provides the cloak
where you alone
feel and hear the worry and laugh lines knitting
into a single stitch of parenting.


1/20/2013

reposting a poem from 3 1/2 years ago, when I knew how to write
  
<>
organizing the day,
while the baby room renter in the adjacent,,
makes dreamy rock n' roll noises,
siren calls to stay~lay in bed,
tho status of semi-alert,
ready to relieve Ernie and Bert,
who have the first shift covered

soon on guard duty,
scheming about dis n' dat,
you are sleeping, dreaming,
wide awake seeing,
multitasking with eyes closed simultaneously.

lesser of a poet, more a notate-er,
list keeper, note taker,
arguing with yourself inside the head,
actually feeling the thoughts
coursing, lurking, seeing both sides now,
parentally, washing the dishes
of the hours and years ahead.

while the woman-mother
makes her soprano dreaming noises,
you laugh at the orchestra of
*******, sighing somnolent noises,
a cadenza of love dancing in your
irresistible wide awake dreams.

paying the bills, lying in the dark,
you wonder-worry about the agenda
unknown that will overgrow you,
fast creeping up the grain of your skin,
ivy on stone skin walls.

lala lala
you borrow baby's lullaby,
yourself for to calming,
keeping time, silly rhyming,
organizing the days ahead
in you head, while,
recording the harmonies of
sweet sensory inputs.

the dark provides the cloak
where you alone
feel and hear the worry
and laugh lines knitting
into a single stitch of parenting.


1/20/2013

I die every single day. It comes slowly, gas leaking out of a tank; a river drying up to a trickle. It has taken years to notice, but here I am: On empty. In a muddy riverbed.
    Standing on the short timeline of my life, I look back at the man of the past. The man is not myself, and yet he is more complete than me. He is younger – yes – but brimming with delight. He knows nothing of Walls and Comments and Likes, and yet he is whole. He has no outlet for his happiness other than his own physical canvas. His sadness is absolute and crushing, but it belongs to him.
I am not he.
I am the autumn of his soul.
There is an emptiness inside me.
    It has not grown like the lines on my face nor the aches in my bones. It is something immeasurable.  
    I want to step out of my own identity.
    I want to live in a construct that is more unique than my own.
    We talk of living vicariously through others, but I live vicariously through myself. I live ten feet behind and thirty seconds after my own person. I watch the man in front of me go through every motion, and I feel nothing. I notate the changes, categorize the achievements, collate the emotions, and I feel nothing. On paper, I look quite good. Great things make headlines. Pictures show unforgettable memories, laughter, joy, and contentment.
    And every feeling of inadequacy, vulnerability, shame, doubt, and fear is greeted with a blind eye.
    The more my construct grows, the more I diminish.
    I am the Portrait of Dorian Gray, reversed.
    Each day the picture is more successful, happy, wealthy, and loved.
    And the man weakens and decays.
    I am frightened of what I’ve become.  
    If there is a way to halt this, I spend every day searching for it. Perhaps, in moments of looking into another’s eyes, I can hide from nothing. At those times, the construct falls away, and the man on the timeline comes crashing into the present.
    I wonder who will greet me in the morning. Will the Man diminish, or will the Portrait grow fainter instead?

Their presence sketches like acid,  
almost pythonesque  
point blank opening bus  windows
in the chill of the British  winter
only because  their  ,
over clothed shopping sweat
induced the delirium,
stares the weary answers why not !
If I could only notate your wrongful expression
to sweep away your feigned surprise
the world would  right itself.

~another love poem~

In the thousands of years of Earth’s foregoing,
marking the reign of humans, all seek sapience,
knowing full well, neither first or last am I to mark
this day’s commencement with a need, a desiring,
to notate this not unusual but definitively unique
calendar notation with a tribute, neither requested
but freely given to the person who lies beside me.

Did I wake commanded or so compelled to scrabble
a collection of words, sequences, initially disordered,
into a shape, to chisel these sendings of a chest into a
living disbursement, a statute, a marbleized creature,
that empties and releases a sensory disposition rumbling
into a messy, mediocre utterance of sentience while they
sleep quiet, pockmarked by dreamed mumblings, dreaming?

No, I did not.

News headlines come demanding see me, insistent that
I am urgency, but one displaced by the next, making them
instantly stale by pealing replacements. This poem, a self-
appointed task is now eased, spent and spurted into an
lifespan of a length unknown and untold. Here I end, ceased
and resisting, demurring, desisting another stanza, The hour
approaches the seventh hour before noon, rising time. Go now.

The choring chords of fibrous tasks that stitch existence into
a sustaining impertinent permanence, list-crossing-off, a-nagging.
The itches of living, ask for scratching, 1st cup of coffee making,
but smile bemusedly that this first and freshest to do, newly added,
is done, dispatched with a line-sworded satisfying crossing off.
She sleeps on, while I soon to rise and quiet paddle to the
kitchen where kept the utensils for sustenance,

I am contented, miraculously, simultaneous,
emptied and fulfilled.

4-14-2021
NYC
7:18am

~but, yet, another love poem~

In the thousands of years of Earth’s foregoing,
marking the reign of humans, all seeking sapience,
full well knowing, neither first or last am I to mark
this day’s commencement with a need, a desiring,
to notate this not unusual but definitively unique
calendar entrance with a tribute, neither requested,
but freely given to the person who lies beside me.

Did I wake commanded or so compelled to scrabble
a collection of words, sequences, initially disordered,
into a shape, to chisel these sendings of a chest into a
living disbursement, a marbleized breathing creature,
that empties and releases a sensory disposition rambling,
rumbling into a messy, utterance of sentience while they
sleep quiet, pockmarked by dreamed mumblings, dreaming?

No, I did not.

News headlines come demanding see me, insistent that
I am urgency, but one displaced by the next, making them
instantly stale by pealing replacements.

This poem, a self- appointed task is now eased, story spent and spurted into a lifespan of a length unknown and untold.  But, and  yet, here I end, ceased and not resisting, demurring, desisting another stanza, The hour approaches the seventh hour after midnight, rising time.

Go now.

The choring chords of fibrous tasks that stitch existence into
a sustaining impertinent permanence, list-crossing-off, a-nagging.
The itches of living, ask for scratching, 1st cup of coffee making,
but smile bemusedly that this first and freshest to do, newly added,
is done, dispatched with a line-sworded satisfying crossing off.
She sleeps on, while I soon to rise and quiet paddle to the
kitchen where kept the utensils for sustenance,

But, and yet, I am contented, miraculously, simultaneous,
emptied and fulfilled.

4-14-2021
NYC
7:18am

Shall I sing you the song of woman?
Shall I notate the anatomy that is divine?
Shall I lengthen this verse or shorten,
Of the marvel that is Eve?
Shall I as well cry and sink in despair
Of impact and influence have they left in my being?
Shall I lay my forehead on the palm of my hand,
and lay my liquor in the palm of the other?

God made no mistake, men are imperfect.
Woman, complete me for I am incomplete.
God has made my being a flawed design,
And has made you trace the broken lines.

how long have i been sitting here
just came out of a fog
minutes and hours and years///Dear girl you are so desperately trying to force something out for what, validation? and for what validation? don't you know by now that it's not to serve yourself but serve the Universe
     well yes that's why i took 30 minutes to sit and notate it Keep my fake shades on like the artificial front that they are to shield "me" from a reality check black chic loner with cold tired feet flick some ash onto the curb you feel good when you get it on the first try isn't that everything in your life?...you just said this morning you're coming back to life yet I'm still right here and you lay before me struggling to escape my sweet suffocating deprecating embrace. run from the only things that ever made so much sense in your life, keep inviting fallacies and waiting for him to finally lose his love for you, how when you've found two of the biggest answers you've ever been searching for can you be manipulated into honoring an evil side? you can't possibly still be 80% water at least 30% smoke 20% weakness 10% greed 9% rules 6% haste 4% waste 3.1% not giving yourself credit and just a little bit left over for all the big dreams that wilt in the darkness of your head guess they don't care to know too badly how the sunshine feels

where sorely needed precipitation
necessitates affected population
to perform a collective rain dance
(decked out in electronically smart frippery)
24/7 and 7/52 weeks a year
defies even the most adept meteorologists
(equipped with special magical powers)
to deliver nothing short of a biblical deluge
makes them (the weather forecasters)
appear as motley fools,
when mother nature

presents herself insync
(and well deserved
to be crookedly pilloried)
with handy dandy
blue skies as an affront
even garnering wrath
of Kong and sons of Kanute,
but more horrifically
evincing absolute zero happenstance
to release bucketfuls
of sought after requisite

moisture from the sheltering sky
prodding conspiracists
to put earth in the balance
with the uncomfortable truth
to beg the military intelligence
to draft schematics
to ***** at least one humongous lance
fired away with a half sashay
subsequently poking holes
in the cloudsource,
or as an extreme measure

firing nuclear missiles
high in the atmosphere perchance
hitting hard and knocking
sense and sensibility
in the mindscape of the gods
and goddesses of rain,
(needed to mill whole wheat flour,
raised in the rich bottomlands
of the Lake Wobegon river valley
by Norwegian bachelor farmers,
and are often described

being "pure, mostly"
and "good for you"
due to their whole wheat composition)
or more accurately affecting,
(albeit rendering, and delineating)
countless names representing
aforementioned invisible supernatural beings
(considered inviolable and sacred
and worthy of worship)
into dental sent trance.

In an effort to expound
upon intent to brainstorm
regarding an outrageous modus operandi
to quell the dearth for rain
or synonyms of said word
encompassing Earth, a planet third
nearest from the sun
I, a long in the tooth
and formerly indentured servant

also notate that
temperatures considerably warm
for November, October and September
rounding out two thousand and twenty four,
where climate change
(read warming) in full swing
(your partner round and round),
though mild temperatures
diminish heating expense,
(in conjunction with LIHEAP,

I qualify for PECO's CAP Rate program,
a discounted rate
for residential electric
and gas customers with low incomes),
thus far HVAC unit never turned on
only the LASKO
portable tower heater model 5144
accessed to take out the chill
in our one bedroom apartment
here at Highland Manor.