crowding midnight are these words
and this sugary (20g) snack
life has love and these absurds
so we don’t irony lack
****
Afterword: publishing this at 11:51pm MST maintains a daily blog-pisting streak begun July 25, 2024.
this sleepy shaver took it on the chin
but does not need a cognac, just a cup
of sweetened lightened coffee to begin
another day. his eyes are wide. he’s up.
Postscript: There is such a thing as too close a shave, even for the sake of a Bad Pun, a play on the ancient saying “With friends like these, who needs enemies?” It took about fifteen minutes to staunch this patch of skin.
long ago our skeletons/were mere calcium deposits on cartilage/but the construction crew brought them to usefulness/in less than a year
and aligned with the spine were esophagus and heart/and twin kidneys singing a riversong/to bilateral symmetry
the bisected and tri-lobed brain/grew a mini-mall of services/to motivate and control and evaluate
and nonhuman migrant workers/were installed in cells/to process oxygen and nutrients
and finally we were brought/from the inside out/innards and all
and there were surprises in every package of us
and we grew more surprises at every stage
(thank heaven and goodness and reality/for the good surprises/and unthank the cruelty of harsh pranks of nature and circumstance/for those surprises that punch and fell)
the best we can do is gird our innards for the wars of acquisition and maintenance and priority
spit in the face of evil and threat
laughing and grinding all the way
showing we have guts
solar promenades
display considerable
flare flair. solar wins!
.
when her fever broke
shattered-fever pieces went
flying all around
.
the warmth of a kiss
may well lead to some heat in
another chakra
.
luke warm luke cooling
luke starting to shiver now
cuts open a beast
.
hearts are never cold
but pitiless souls go to
absolute zero
To Jack Evans on his birthday
In this Valley is a poet/As eloquent as Robert Frost, but warmer.
He manages to be Modest and Majestic with equal immenseness, and a propensity/To shift the focus to his friends, for whom/He produces a neverending supply of care and loving kindness.
His poetry stitches reality-swatches of variable size/into quilts that startle or soothe/or absorb your teardrops/and at the same time, in quantum superposition/the quilt is also a symphony. It is remarkable
What thundering crescendos come from a man/who never raises his voice.
Hardship and grief have never managed/To extinguish the twinkle in his eye.
See him: Walking a hospital corridor as a volunteer, firing up a favorite, obscure film for an appreciative audience, hosting a poetry event with jovial anecdotes and well-deep insights, at home wherever he goes, but most so at the side of his beloved Judy.
Now, please, wish him Happy Birthday, as I do, with love.
the potter is back from hand surgery,/given a green light for unrestricted hand-use. the strictures against water-submersion/and lifting anything heavier than a box of tissues/have been waived goodbye.
now it is time to make stuff./he pretends to be receiving a secret recording á la the old tv spy show “mission: impossible.”
good morning, mr. feldspar. the clay you are looking at is a cone-five porcellaneous clay body colloquially known as “cashmere.” it is fine-grained and will fire white in both bisque and glaze. your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to use two one-kilogram portions of this clay, sculpting a bird worthy of gallery display with one portion, and crafting a sixteen-ounce mug of swan-like elegance with the other. as always, if either or both creations prove to be unremarkable, you must disavow the existence of one or both unremarkable creations, rewedging the clay, which isn’t cheap, for a future attempt. good luck, frank. this recording will shelf-destruct in five seconds.
and then comes the fun part,/selecting his mission accomplices from the tools in the studio./like dan briggs and then jim phelps of old,/he peruses the candidates one by one/and puts his choices aside./soon he has françois garrote, the wire tool;/marlo and nero v., the sponge siblings;/natasha stiletto, the needle tool;/arnold t. thyme, the wood rib;/joe kingly, the ribbon trimmer;/and cannes openair, the pry tool.
he beams.
“are we ready, lady and gentlemen?”
they rattle, squinch and scratch in nod-equivalents.
the mission leader smiles, dips marko v. in the bucket-water,/and begins.
you should know what you are breathing/ just as with nutrition labels you know what you are ingesting
science to a rescue secular/sensors of a size molecular
so one day the air itself will answer when you ask
and its ai will respond with everything from “pristine” to “ay ay ay”
but meanwhile our meteorologists produce air quality indexes
read them and weep and grab on to your windexes
to Roxanne Doty
the novelist has a dozen dartboards/one for gender one for ethnicity one for occupation and so forth
she has thrown her darts and now her main character is a dwarf from lithuania/who is a cis-male entertainer/with three sisters
well, this will be a roller coaster
doing her due diligence she searches on “lithuanian dwarf”/and learns some history/specific to the grand duke of lithuania/known as vytautas the great
he had done time in the german order/and returned to court in 1392/with a taste for entertainment/in the form of jesters and dwarfs
the novelist’s eyes widen
she realizes that writing way-back, way-elsewhere historical fiction/is something she has needed to do
and that the future henry IV fits right in is a fine bonus
but–all that RESEARCH! all that WORK!
she shrugs and then squares her shoulders
i am no stranger to either
it will broaden my horizon
build toughness of character
she was older than i
and it was long ago that we loved. news
of her peaceful death unlocked a room
and in the room was a bed
and in the bed were our younger selves
enjoying each other as if there
were no tomorrows.
i can’t look at them
but i can hear them in their in-betweens,
with hearing so acute
i can hear fingers stroking hair,
fingertips sliding down sweat-sheened flanks.
.
so many tomorrows later
i don’t have tears
and the grief is a soft whisper
of acknowledgment.
.
leaving the room
i wonder about new loves, if any
with an odd optimism
but also the pang
that comes with the knowledge
that with my passing
passion ends.
a fat guy makes a rainbow in his yard
with thumb on hose-end mist w/disregard,
then prisms turn to dewdrops. abelard
abandons eloïse; a cruel dis card.
they’re many poet laureates, and disbarred
attorneys quote them. it’s a vile canard
to deal a friend on wings of mallards. hard
enfardeling a rhyme that leaves it jarred.
One with Clay, Image and Text 