April 28th - For Sartre

After the Age of Reason

Defiance made his smile
deeper and creased his sweat-speckled brow
like a spoon
dipped into a murky,
long forgotten soup.
And yet, something
insidious, creeping,
entirely involved in its own affairs,
badgered him incessantly,
gnawed belligerently, demanding attention.
It questioned the mindless
refrain of no’s
and bade him be free of that slavery
he knew so fondly, defiance.

April 27th - Every Evening in the City,

vague reminders cry aloud over cold marsala beef.
Every evening in the city, we survive, waiting
day to day, scraping by with fears in hand.
A voice collapses as the night shakes free
and we grew tired, raging.
If we somehow, sometime find a way,
between the entrees and the decaf coffee,
to break this mold and seize this day,
still will we fall into the
same old song and dance.
We're standing in the foyer
reminiscing about the day before,
watching the cheap champagne go flat.
This is the sting of slowing down.
This is the scorn of nine to five.
This is the scent of dreams deferred.

April 26th - Welcoming Spring

I used to know the way to walk
down these long forgotten roads:
I knew the ways back home, but then
the snow consumed them all,
made the world white and cold
one long, lifeless, blindingly bright blanket
where no shadows survive -
not even those I held inside.
the memory bled from my mind
like a waterfall of crimson silk
sluicing decisively along virginal backs
left in ribbons from the willow switch.
now, standing tall, craning to view
over a particularly rolling hill
the serpentine thoroughfare I thought I knew
when I was young and brave.
I'll pry the boards away from that
dilapidated, crumbling house
that held all my follies, secure for ages,
covered in the snow;
the memories tumble forth
and collapse at my feet;
the snows, retreating, slink away.
the shadows crawl back in,
stretching their shoulders, cracking joints,
reminding me the season only
covers, never kills.

April 25th - The Love Song of K. Wesley Eveleth

If I believed my answer
were being given to someone
who could ever return to the world,
this flame would be still.
But since no one has ever returned
alive from this depth,
if what I hear is true,
I will answer you
without fear of infamy.

You and I
Shall walk along empty streets,
And I shall let you in
On my secret,
But this will be my
Last revelation.
TS Eliot was a sinister man: He wrote
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
with my torment in mind.
He knew that in those fledgling years of
Stumbling poetic discovery,
I would see nothing
But a tired, balding, thinning man,
Walking along the beach
Ivory trousers rolled,
Muttering about some abstraction,
Ragged claws, or peaches, or somesuch thing.

All this talk of Michelangelo,
Lazarus, coffee spoons,
Foggish cats in soot-stained alleys!
My foolish, empty head
(Downed with auburn hair!)
Could not comprehend the ever-present question,
Rolling with the universe into a ball
That leads unto my secrets.

But he knew it would settle and assault
Renew and overhaul
Approach me in my dreams, holding out its
Overwhelming Question on a silver platter.
It could be no great matter.

But it strikes me in my core,
Sprawls me on a sticking pin:
What am I?
By what yardstick shall my life be measured? Coffee spoons? Works of art?
Have I really made a start on
Anything I wanted in my dreams?
The gravity of all he wrote nearly
Broke my heart and
Crushed my lungs.
I wept and fasted,
Wept and prayed,
And saw far before me that Eternal Footman,
Wearing his long grin and that same snicker.

The women will come and they will yearn,
Thinking of Mr. Thomas Stearns.

Though I am only twenty-one
I feel as though my days are done;
And Despair, ye mighty!
For we all must die.
But much of life remains for me,
Much of time,
Time to murder and create the poet
That I long to someday be.
My life
I hope
will be counted by all my creations,
And the mermaids will sing to me,
And I will unravel that Overwhelming Question,
Tame it with a dismissive hand
And linger in the sea.

April 24th - Surge

There is an
Acute sense
Of sorrow
In watching the ice
Evacuate lethargic waters
As Spring approaches.
As it thaws, it
Cracks, shifts, and groans,
And the sadness
Seeps into my bones
(Like the cold).
All that's left
On the pregnant,
Rushing river
Is a skiff of abandoned ice, a lingering
Scent of winter,
And a trace
Of what once was.

April 23rd - No Texting in Class

Back in the day
Calliope, Clio, and Melpomene
(Καλλιόπη, Κλειώ, Μελπομένη)
The Muses, sang A Capella
directly to me
I decoded
I transcribed Creation (Θεογονία) as
they saw fit
But in my age
this age of technology and chaos,
strange attractors and erupting tweets
they phone it in
On slipshod cellular phones, or worse
email and txt (τεχνολογία). Half the time
I figure my three
of nine are dead, or worse
buried under noise (χάος)
Sometimes I wing it, sometimes
I'm silent
Always I invoke them, always
(Πείτε μου, o αγοράς, o κόρη του Ζεθς)
I know I'm the
Only one calling

April 22nd - Fair Nike

Your stench could overwhelm a stubborn crow
Who never feared the woes of stink.
Musty, rancid, rank, and fetid,
none of these do justice to your general decrepitude.
The duct-tape, fused into your man-made skin,
has wrinkled, wears the stain of time just like your face,
and somewhat hides your funk --
but not enough to help your case.

When I lift you up to throw you out,
I meditate on all we’ve shared --
mostly against my will, most likely due to your vicious reek --
My flesh and blood, sweat, tears, the mud
of victories from bygone years,
thirteen hundred miles of aching legs,
searing lungs, seething coaches,
spikes in calves and bloody noses.
Dances with the grassy knolls,
or pavement strewn with trodden holes.
Miles on miles in rain and snow,
cars honking while some drunken student
yells Go Forrest Go --
And Lord Almighty do you smell!

You broke me once again, fair Nike --
armless, headless, wingéd, she --
so you shall stay inside that unwilling closet,
turning it miasmic with your gamy breath.
Do not get the wrong idea about all this:
I do not love you. I don’t! Think it all you want.
I only feel the faintest remorse when I look down
and see clean, functional white kicks.

April 21st - To Running

I love the way she plays with my
sanity like it’s dried up
play-dough. I love that she
demands my time and in response
gives me diminishing returns. I love

her way of making sure that I know
that she loves me most
when I miss a date, because
it means she gets to ride my
back like a rabid cat gone apeshit. I love

how she rewards my loyalty and love
by punishing me more than usual, because
I know her attention is sublime and that it’s love
that powers the extra effort given
to make me feel that much worse. I love

that she yanks me out of bed at five
in the morning every morning and lovingly
slaps me in the face, then cutely says
‘We’re going out, get dressed, you’re much
too slow, and we need to go.” I love

that no one else can understand why she and I
keep this marriage alive, except for Tony,
her second husband, and of course all those
people she has flings with when it gets warm or is
new year’s resolution time. I love

how when she’s not a stone cold bitch, she
breathes life into me intravenously, keeps
me strong and holds me up when grief
is all I know.

April 20th - Rolling Boil

She and I fought for weeks: a real barn burn, so to speak. It boiled in our love like a pot of soup left on the stove for days to cook slow. We would hash it out for a bit, prod slights back and forth, test the seas of our slow burn, but once in a while, we would take a break for a day or two. The storms in our hearts rose like dough, up and out, down the sides of the pan, to the hot-stoked fire, then burst in the heat of our brawl. Like a good book, we set it out back, far from our thoughts, to grow and steep and get some steam on its way to the front, strong and a ripe for war. It built while we let it sit and stew, found brawn in long-lost fights of yore, in things we thought we killed and stuck deep down in the dirt, dead to the world and lost to us, then blew like a fuse on a frost-soaked dawn when the heat, the lights, the fans, the bath, all in the house sucks the juice dry.

The rage burst like a slighted soufflé, a pastry overflowing with magpies, a fragile balloon, sniped from afar by something spoken that refreshed everything previously simmering somewhere subconscious.

Explosions abounded throughout the rupture of renewed discontent, leeching from memories that possessed little to nothing related to anger a fuel that during any other epoch should empty distrust from our over zealous quarrel, but currently nurtured an already-roaring disaster of conflagration. Nothing could stultify our inferno, fueled by enough mistakes and misspeaks that neither involved was capable of dowsing aforementioned, passionate rages.

And then, one grey morn in the days just past May, she set down in front of me a pile of flap jacks and a tall glass of juice, with a mate she had laid out for her. I looked at her eyes and saw no flames there, no fight, no hate, just a deep haze of blue.

We ate in the weak, lambent light of the morning, finished, then spoke:

Thanks for the grub, hon. I am as right as rain, I said.
Thanks for the fight, babe. I am as good as gone, she said.

April 19th - The Night Eveleth Lost Religion

After Zimmer

The night was dark and thick
Like licorice
And I felt sick.
We’d made love, but here I was
Awake, alone, looking out the window, resting on the sill,
Thinking God would fly a-raging over some strange hill,
Clenching in his fist a righteous wrath.
I was pale, like the moon,
And traced a path
Through the ochre-tinted gloom.

Every promise was unfulfilled:
I loved her no more,
And yet no less;
I felt no remorse,
Yet was not blessed;
And God was nowhere to be found,
Neither burning up the sky
Nor tearing up the ground,
And I just wondered why.

And nothing came, and nothing came,
And to this day I wait for flames,
Or crevasses to spread their maws beneath my feet,
Engulfing me, to burn the sin out of my meat;
But I know he knows I know better than to think
He would come down to flog me and my ex-,
That he, busy with the rest, would make a stink
About a little fun we had by having sex.

April 18th - Food Saga Pt. II - Nuts to You

To You, On the Anniversary I have with Her.

You would offer yourself up to me
like a ripe & roasted pistachio;
spreading your lips open wide
to offer me some of that
sweet & salty & tangy meat.
I would devour that shit for
breakfast, lunch, dinner or brunch,
an afternoon snack or something
to be washed down with a pilsner.
We fucked like rabbits,
just about every day, twice or thrice
a day, had stock in trojans & it was
always the same:
I was never filled, never satisfied,
always left thirsty and hungry,
eating from between those lips,
because those pistachio meats
never did fill me up quite right.

The girl I have now,
she’s green & tough to crack,
but clean & keeps me sane,
rubs my back & feeds me well.
Her tiny shell spreads to reveal
a meat-and-potatoes kind of love
that’s like Campbell’s Chunky Soup;
she’s a meal fit for LT or
a king, & like such a feast
she takes work to love & appreciate.
But when that work is done, Sweet Lou
do I salivate & extricate & fornicate.
And though it takes effort, I work up
and appetite, and she’s always open
for a meal, & there’s just one more thing:
Loving her fills me up;
I feel sated at the end of the night.

April 17th - Chicago Morning

Blue is the color of this city
Where the wind whips ‘round the skyscrapers
And plants kisses on your face
Like a none-too-gentle slap,
I might add.
It’s the sound of souls left screaming out for sustenance
Dripping weakly from the
Oil-stained neck of a
Life-stained Man’s guitar,
gently weeping.
It’s the taste of the beer drunk here
Best when it’s served up cold,
Sitting lazily in the dark on
some tepid summer night,
like the moon it was named after,
Blue’s the way your eyes look and
The way I feel when I’m around you.
Everything’s been blue so long
That I’ve lost touch
And all I see is orange.

April 16th - Gu

He knows a little bit about
hitting the wall. He's a machine
that choked its fuel down to
the very last glycogenated drop

and sputters wearily into
the fueling station - ding ding -
gripping a twenty in his mitts
and singsonging with his very last gasp

"Sweet Lou, Sweet Lou,
I need a kiss from you,
Baby I've gone too far
and honey I need some sugar."

He grabs a cup of water
and dips his tongue in Gu,
a honey-pot of sweet sensation
and tangy satisfaction,

endless in the darkened well
at the local filling station.
At first his stomach starts to flip
but it settles once it realizes

just how sweet and sour the stuff
he's gulping down his throat
is at this very moment. It's the texture
of robitussin cough suppressant

but the flavor of some exotic fruit,
and it fills his cup to overflowing,
giving him the energy to finish the race
instead of rolling over and falling asleep on the course.

April 15th - The Infected

The virus is insidious
like a hollow smile tainted by a twitching eye
that defeats the politeness and warns
that soon after, your ears will be burning because
someone will be talking about you.
It is indiscriminate
like cancer, meteors, sleep,
and income taxes, and it has
the equivalent lethality of all three
combined and glued together with
the breath of the reaper.
It multiplies and takes over,
a nematode in an ant, clinging
to a blade of grass, or a mist,
clutching the ground,
surrounding it,
and absorbing all the headlights
that drive unwittingly in.
This virus takes the reins
in our simple, broken brains
and makes us pass it on like it's
a biological imperative.
It's incurable. It's infectious.
Each person experiences their own
personal brand of symptoms, and though
some are common amongst the infected,
most all are unique in some manner;
the virus always kills its victims,
and everyone becomes a victim sometime,
but it likes to change its game
and find new and interesting ways
to lay waste to the living.
This disease was given to me by my
mother and my father at the moment
of conception, when 23 and 23
made 46, and that jelly in her belly
became a solidifying form
that shivered into heartbeats
and grew its little fingers
and grew its little toes.

April 14th - Melting Pots

I am an American
by birth: a human, pried
from a ceramic mould that was filled
from the melting-pot of heterogeneous cultures.
I am a mosaic
of traditions, an amalgamation
of peoples and cultures, distilled
down into one whole, homogenized
sentient creature. People tell me
I should celebrate my heritage
but then they slap me in the face
with it whenever they feel
threatened. At home,
I speak my native tongue:
Dia dhuit, mahair, ahair,
conas atá tú?
Dé tha thu ah deanamh?
Mahair hits me, weeping. She has the nerve
to tell me that
wennaeyr ae sey muh wards enna aulden
heilan tonna, noboody kinnaer
kennit, leass daen haida blode, naow, onna'll
never be respected. I had better
learn to cover up that accent --
it's un-American, I guess,
tae knoow wehl ann sweht wenna sei
my words in clear enunciation and when
tae speek thi weigh. My parents
hate it. Neither are from
the old country, and they feel shame
that their son's tongue turned out to be
a quartered blue field
instead of stars and stripes forever. You'd think
my tongue was red and yellow and that
I wielded it like a weapon
with my hammer and sickle
and universal health care. It seems
Mo chroi ta se marbh
in this country that exalts
the impeccably mixed grey of complete assimilation
and spits out perfectly-formed underdogs
who fight for the American dream
just like Rudy, or Radio, or some other
feel-good story of the century. No other
Scot was e'er 'fraid t'speak his mine, and tho
we've been unnerdoogs fer soom taime,
no one seems to root for us.

April 13th - Happy Birthday

In all the years that have ever been,
of all the births that day thirteen
of the fourth month has ever seen,
from Thomas Jefferson, or Guy Fawkes,
to Seamus Heaney and Reverend Al Green,
from Samuel Beckett, or Georg Lukács,
to Kasparov and any in between,
none will be so glorified,
nor honorable nor true,
no year will be as sanctified
as nineteen-hundred-thirty-three,
the year which gave forth you.

And it is true that there were celebrations
across the oceans, throughout nations
on this early April day,
But all those monumental 'ccasions
were merely cheerful resignations
to the splendor that some say
Erupted forth as much elation
to the self-same situation
which you gathered there to celebrate.

Things have come, and things have gone:
In '64, America smiled as Poitier won
Best Actor; Much earlier on,
in the times of canonizing saints,
Spain and Portugal, anon, anon,
in 5-8-5, saw Hermenegild placed upon
the chopping block. They say he won
the Visigoths from Arianistic taints.
And Tiger, Tiger, burning bronze
In the fields of the Masters won
back in 1997 - I was there, among
the family next to you, and no complaints
of turning 64 this time around.

Some say this number has a magic,
which has ever been oft weaved.
Others who know of things more tragic
Know that we are left bereaved.
Today you might have turned seventy-six,
which, in its parts, six and seven,
thirteen makes; alas, no math can fix
that much divides you and I - Heaven
for you, Earth for me, air and angels between.
It stands for the independence of our nation,
the number of letters in those nineteen
words that make the first revelation
of the Qur'an; to ancient Hebrew men
it was how many heleq a rega make.
Yesterday was the Resurrection,
April 12 (76 multiples of that stake
their claim in the Bible), but of those
men who were revived, as Jesus chose,
you stayed dead. Yesterday, no good men rose.

I was ten when Tiger won the Masters.
You were ten when Thomas had 200 years.
I like to think that you, just 76,
and him, with his two-hundred sixty-six,
are palling around up there,
enjoying the few, sitting in chairs,
a pipe and a pint between you two,
chatting of lives so full that you knew
the lives you left behind would be
as empty as my heart, shattered, be.

April 12th - Easter Sunday

Town is deserted today, a twisted
reflection of its former self. The
streets are empty, soulless, and I
am free to go where I please
whether by road or sidewalk. This
freedom is what thrills me,
though I can have nowhere to go
but simply "around." Everything
is closed for whatever illogical
reason we close things today
of all days. I guess everyone
but me is gathered, waiting quietly
outside this cave with a huge
boulder in front of it, asking
breathlessly "why is the boulder
still there? It should have moved
if he hath risen!" And I just smile
from my perch, gazing down on them
as they wave their arms and praise him,
who has not risen, for rising anyway,
just sometime or place where they
could not see it. That's faith:
believing the unbelievable even
when glaring evidence says otherwise -
but we have another term for this
as well. It's called stupidity.

April 11th - The Way to a Man's Heart

Today Meghan wanted me
to try this lasagna pie that looked
pretty tasty. She said to me
while we made it in the kitchen that
"You have to make sure the meat sauce
goes all the way into the pasta
or it makes a crater when it bakes,"
and I know that somewhere in her voice
is an off timbre that tells me
she is strangely satisfied
by stuffing meat into ribbed hole,
like a rigatoni, or something else
which satisfies me. She says while
it relaxes on the counter that it is
so gratifying to have that meat in there
nice and deep and snug, then to drizzle
the white cheese (it's Parmesan)
all over the top, like frosting
on a cake. I stifle a laugh. When
we dig into that lasagna pie,
I have to choke down the double-entendre
beneath the delicious meal, but
she moans in some strange way,
rolling her eyes, then gazing up,
and says "This is heavenly."
I agree: it's fantastic, a long,
deep, moist rigatoni, brimming with meat,
plastered in white cheese.

April 10th - In the Jungle

The last twenty years I have been
in this dense jungle of my mind,
a brave explorer, on the scene
to trim the trees and treasures find.

I seek not either fame nor glory,
but only recognition here,
in this forest where my story
unfolds, blanketed with my fear.

For twenty years I walked a trail,
lingering branches chopped and hacked,
demons faced without a wail,
I bested all that has attacked.

But, in turning 'round to travel back,
I heard a rustle with the breeze.
I realized at the branches I should not have hacked,
but at the roots of those deadly trees.

In that final day I emerge, awake
but broken, quiet, and afraid.
I felt the ground beneath me quake
and knew too well just what I'd slain.

April 9th - Living the Dream

For David Foster Wallace

When was the last time
You did absolutely nothing?

Not laying around, with so much to do,
yet procrastinating,
but honestly, truly, balls-to-the-wall
doing a whole truckload of nothing?

Like, there was just nothing to do,
so you relegated your brain
to sit back and chill, and in that
salty, sticky substance in which you floated

sent out postcards to your pals
that said "if I weren't doing nothing
I'd probably wish you were here?"
It's this kind of nothing. This one.

Not the one that flips your TV
to every baseball game that's stuck
in the sixth, one team smashing the other
while that other lays down and dies;

Not the one that makes you sit
with a pencil clenched in your teeth
staring at the lined paper on your lap
begging your brain to function;

And certainly not the one
that actually sends out those postcards,
or even the one that wishes it did,
because that's more than nothing.

No, I mean the one that just drifts,
like air, like smoke, like you,
just slacks off all systems that don't
autopilot. That is living the dream.

April 8th - Rest in Peace

For Wes Frank

We would have kissed our last goodbye

twenty minutes before the fight

that battle-scarred a fledgling love

and dragged down thunder from the sky;

The devil would have sent a card by post,

admitting he was wrong for acting like a child,

putting his pride away for once, to God,

to say he misses his place in the heavenly host;

And wars would be fought with words instead

of guns, and prisoners would be the brunt

of bad slam-poetry readings. The only casualties

would be the meats sixty-thousand writers would be fed,

If the world were fair, and good.

Men would only need to lie

to their wives to cover up

the surprise birthday planning,

Watching joy go infiltrate her eye;

Everyone would have a job,

and none would have a qualm;

Taxes and benefits would be just

so as to disperse the angry mob;

You would rise this Easter Sunday

like the son of man, from the tomb,

or like the phoenix, burning bright,

from the ashes that were made,

If the world were fair, and good.

April 7th - Loving You is Like

- riding south out of town
on a rusty ten-speed
with the wind in my face
no matter which way I turn

- trying to catch the last bus
before midnight rolls around,
reaching the door only to find
that I left all my change on the bar

- catching that round of influenza
that mimicked food poisoning
and throwing up half my guts
the week of final exams

- running full-speed after a Frisbee
in your ultimate game of the same name,
disc moments from your fingertips,
and crashing into a sycamore

- drowning underwater in a dream
that you know is a dream but feels
too fake to be true to life
and too real to be an outright lie

- the potent venom which was designed
with my particular cellular structure
in mind, which makes me feel both
special and dead at the very same time.

- my favorite thing in the world
because I never know which way
is up, or which door leads
out, or which key opens you.

April 6th - Stolen Bases

When watching pop-flies from second base,
Legs coiled for the second outfield makes the play,
I make eye contact, scan his face,
As if to say: let’s go punk, make my day.

He knows from my look what I intend,
Loads his hips and shoulders, like a gun,
Then fires the ball like a bullet to fend
off my frantic, bonus-base run.

But my coach is bright; he has a reason
for putting me in line as fifth at-bat:
I rack up twenty or more runs in a season
from bonus bases; coach knows that.

He puts me in deliberately
before three sluggers who swing it big.
With so much distance ‘twixt the ball and me,
I’ll grit my teeth, and smile, and dig.

I attack the diamond on every pop-fly,
and my stolen-base average is stellar;
Sure, I make pitchers’ ERAs climb sky-high,
but my RBI total is dead in the cellar.

Once I’m on base it’s a battle of strengths:
The outfielders’ ranges versus my speed.
Enemy coaches have gone to great lengths
To find the remedy they all seem to need.

I’ve faced catchers, lefties, plate-blockers too,
Daring right-fielders, hoping for fame,
Lanky centers trying to stop me at two;
Yet none have thrown me off my game.

Today was like any other of those days.
I rushed on home and the crowd was mum;
I slid hard as the catcher rushed to the plate,
I lay there, dusty, dirt in my gums.

The ump rushed over, mask off for his sight,
and waited for the dust to settle back in,
Then spread his arms wide like a bird in flight
To signal SAFE. All I could do then was grin.

April 5th: The Dread White Whale

Braeburn was idle when I first awoke,
Sitting, awaiting those seven keystrokes
that would allow me access into the system
where I could check all the new updates,
in cased I had missed them.

I first checked the weather. To my grim dismay,
I saw a flat 34 and still snowy on my display.
With a mutter and grimace, I went to the news
updates: thousands on thousands before me,
and I'd not even yet laced up my shoes.

So I swiftly connected to the iGoogle site,
peering ahead at the forecast for night,
while the Youtube widget did load and demand
that I see this penguin get whacked in the head;
so many things beyond my command.

My inbox was there, right on the screen,
Filled with new messages I'd never seen.
A few were all business, though some were for fun,
but most were just junk mail that slipped through the sieve,
so I wrote in iCalendar of my upcoming run.

Then a black pop-up bid for attention,
Tweetdeck, it was, working hard for its pension
of devoted CPU workload. It had to inform
That Twitter and Facebook had updates,
and I let in my throat a heavy sigh form.

Twitter and Facebook, more than likely the same,
Only slightly different in appearance and name.
Each offered the same little pop-up of information
which tell me in 140 characters or less
of the tedium everyone feels at their station.

Honestly, how can it be that in a world so infused
with keeping tabs on our friends, we refuse
to interact more directly than this? Are we
truly so disinterested that we watch for these Tweets
Only to say "it's intriguing, but not happening to me"?

Whatever happened to talking by phone?
Waiting to talk until we got home?
Why are our hearts so frozen with ice
when we have all the means to communicate
in every single digital device?

And why does this white whale cause distress?
If Twitter is down, isn't that all for the best?
Instead of wailing and cursing this internet place,
why not just put down the Twitter, Facebook, and cell phone,
and go to a friend's house to talk face-to-face?

April 4th: Food Saga Pt. I - Caution! This Love May Be Hot!

Our love has dwindled, like a cup
Of rich, delicious coffee:
What we have, what love remains,
Is in a mug that’s nearly empty.

Our love right now is that last gulp
Of cold, Columbian brew,
Growing stagnant, bitter, and old,
Reminding me of you.

Don’t get the wrong idea, though,
As that penultimate
Sip was refreshing and glorious,
And extremely sweet:

Saturated with the remnants
Of some sugar and some cream
Added when the cup was new,
Fresh and hot and full of energy,

It made me think that this last drink
Could maybe be delish,
But I knew from past experience
That such a thought was foolish.

I don’t want to finish this off,
Drink the damned thing down,
For I know that its foul tang will mark my tongue
And fight to stick around.

Yet, I don’t want to get up and dump
Remainders down the drain,
But I know while it sits there,
The chalk white mug will stain.

The coffee left in that damn mug
Will taint it with the flavor,
And when I pour my next hot cup
It’s a mixture that I’ll savor.

At some point I will arise
And rinse the cold batch out,
But as I stand to wash it clean,
I’m struck with fresh hot doubt.

Either way, I’m ending it --
It’s going to be done --
But should I let it bite my tongue?
Or lament it when it’s gone?

Or is this really the point at all?
After I stand to wash it clear,
Whatever comfort lingered with this swallow
Will surely disappear.

April 3rd: Fishing

Consider this, poets
of the world at large:
a man, seated, reclining
in a chair he has built with his own
tools, his own heart and soul
and the callused hands that are
byproduct of his weary vocation;
he stares through a plate-glass window,
out over the grass and the sand, to the lake
that spreads out over an entire world,
separate from this one of air,
like a thin film of glass, the deep
azure and emerald and bright cerulean
mingling into admixture,
stark orange skies stapled to the horizon
at a juncture of the background paper,
green from the woods; smoke rolls
across the beach, fogging
over the water, from a fire
to get rid of those wet pine boughs
because if they rot out that roof again
I just don’t know if we can ever repair it
to where it was before, yeah?
the sun is sitting low in a cloud,
dampened, subdued, and he
feels for Helios from his chair.
The rain is coming. We’d best
put on our parkas before the
fish start biting, because, you know,
they’re already wet, and they don’t mind
what you’re doing; they bite
when they’re good and ready, now.
Looking out over the stern, rain
dripping over the edge of my
beak-like hood, I can feel but not see
his lonely, aged eyes, boring sorrow
into my heart. The thunder starts its low rumble.
We reel in quickly, tossing one last
perch back into the water, he’s a lucky one
today, son. I say
Dad, something’s wrong.
Jeff yanks the cord and the two-stroke
bursts awake, rumbling with the thunder
and the reclining man’s rattling breath.
Grandma’s in the bathroom so she can’t hear
when he drifts off. We could hang on to him,
but instead we toss him back because
he’s the lucky one today.

April 2nd: Running Downhill

I love the way in which snow,
falling gently to the earth, will sometimes
uplift on a warm draft of air, if only
for a moment before continuing down
to the ground; but I hate when she,
normally so demanding and
controlling, cannot make up her mind,
and she, like that same snowfall,
drifts up, then down, oscillating between
decisions which revisions will reverse. I think
it is because the snow, poor thing,
is damned to fall. It cannot reverse
its direction the way a human
may, but is always locked in,
heat-seeking the ground or
the skin we left bare or perhaps
your uncapped hair (you should
really wear that woolen hat
your grandmother knitted for you, she
spent all week getting it right, and
Lord knows you’ll catch your
death of cold. I can see that your
ears are freezing).
She is making the most of
her life, I suppose, moving
laterally between two points
in space, each equally attractive,
each with its own reality to follow -
but in so doing, she wastes the
precious time which we are given,
hanging in that moment, biting
her lip and looking to us
for answers. Unlike the snow, our
indecision, turning fearfully to look
back at the choices we’ve made,
hovering in the sky before we
land with a bone-shattering smack
on the cold concrete - indecision
cannot save us some time
or spare us some momentum as
we plummet to that inevitable
end that pelts the soil with
our bodies, layering us up
like hours of cold snow. Time keeps
pushing us down, even if
we’re looking sideways.

April 1st: Have You Ever?

Have you ever
bonked in the shower?
I do not mean
“bonked” in the way in which
a marathon runner, plying his craft
would mean it, but instead ask
if you have ever
rooted, or
frigged in the shower?
Let me tell you:
It has to be
glooooorrr-eeeeee-yus;
fantaSTIQUE;
magNIFico! Just think:
The way bodies mingle
like two swirling halves of a
yin-yang circle, always
distinct and whole but
still connected in that gray spot
that makes an airtight seal
between those squirming bodies?
OH, EXcellent!
Or how you feel a distinct
dichotomy, a paradox
in the pounding cleanliness
and the pounding filthiness
as one cascades down on your tangled hair
and the other cascades down your tangled legs?
exQUISite!
Both soiled and clean,
like a batch of soapy lutefisk,
singular and plural,
like moose,
refreshed and exhausted,
like that same marathoner,
spent and content,
like scrumping in the shower.

Seven Days a Signer

Last night, I attended a luxurious, free show for renowned teacher and slam poet, Taylor Mali. He entertained, informed, spoke to, and challenged us in the audience, and one of his legacies - if not his love of teaching - has been branded on me. April is Poetry Month, and for 30 days, 30 poems shall be wrought.

They will cover any variety of topics, in any variety of forms, lengths, meters, rhythms, and levels of coherence; they will be written with a careful eye and an open mind; and they will be posted both here and at Facebook. Enjoy.

Note that the seven which we shall see soon will be posthumously published by their dates.

Steps Forward

As reported across the nation and readable in this Yahoo! News post, the state of Iowa has recently passed legislation which will allow the free marriage between couples, regardless of sex.
+More/-Less

This comes as somewhat of a surprise to me. Any who know me well know that I fully support the gay rights movement - I view it as a 21st-century equivalent of the civil rights movement to end racial segregation and the movement to end gender discrimination - but nonetheless, Iowa's decision to allow same-sex marriages is a bit off-kilter. The reason is, of course, not because the issue is inappropriate; it's just that Iowa is about the last state I would expect to lead the charge in gay rights. Iowa has been, to my limited knowledge at least, a perennially Conservative state. To make such a liberal move is astounding and touching. I can only hope that the reasoning for the legislation change is a noble one and not a pseudo-event designed to bring publicity to an ailing state. To the best of my knowledge, Iowa is doing fairly well for itself (Michigan having firmly rooted itself in the Red Lantern position, for those of you in the know about the Iditarod), so unless someone is up for re-election in the coming months, I can only see this as a step forward in the fight for human liberties.

Now all we need to do is convince some choice hard-nosed Republicans that Socialism is not a bad thing at this juncture.

-RKS