Pun Intended

Half a life is
better than none;
They will need you
till you're done.
Then you're sliced
and quite consumed;
crumb trails follow
from your tomb.
____________________________________________________

The Road Not Taken

The head he had
when last he looked
was not the head
that darkness took.

The love he had
when last he cared
was not the love
his true love dared.

The pain he knew
when last he cried
was only pain
for her who tried.

Now when he hears
a church bell ring
he holds his breath
and listening

he fears that soon
his heart will know
that she has gone
two strides below.

_________________________________________________

ENNUI

Like news of plague
the news of corruption filters
into my town,
down my road,
stops at my house.

Rank weeds outgrow my cultured plants.
I let them.

Grapes rot on the vine.
I let them

Dogs shit on my lawn.
I let them.

Boards slip from my house.
I let them.

The years fall away.
I let them.

CITIZEN X

His childhood was spent

in a war zone
with the whine
of incoming nouns,
the shadow shape of enemies
in the doorway,
sudden assaults in the yard.



He dug a foxhole
behind the corn
at the end of the garden,
waited for allies
who never came.



He learned how to live
on the edge of life,
to walk where prey
finds safety: the tree line,
the stone wall, alleys.



He learned to lie,
keep silent, do without.
When he grew up,
he moved away
and became someone
no one ever sees.

Teen Time

Once I stalked the world
in buckskin armor,
Wetzel's horny palm
my only win.
The rules for life I found
in Prose and Poetry
were useless in my time
outside of school.
Mom-Dad became Dad-Mom,
alternating currents of power,
landlords of my soul,
pressing for the rent.

Rebel

The angry man in the street
with his hand around a stone
is aware of the truth
his life has become and unable
to suffer alone any longer,
his dream of peace now dead,
with one smooth arcing motion
relieves the pain in his head.

(His wife moves in her sleep, like fire in the wind.)

Forgive me, sir, for being young
and having faith in things alive.
I should not want your patience strung
between the poles of my life's drive.

(My blood burns, even my dreams are inflamed.)

You are one who likes to ponder
things like net and cost and grosses
while I am one inclined to wonder
if we aren't the sum of all our losses.

(My brain burns, even my thoughts are inflamed.)

How can you claim to be so right
with credentials such as these:
pieties stuck beneath the nails
of men speaking heresies.

I must not ever turn again
from the self that is my own,
and you as well must never turn
from the seed that you have sown.

(Lest our bodies burn, before the world is in flames.)

Lake George 1962

Oh how we learned to love
ourselves, and others.
Fell joyfully into sunny pools,
ran laughing down streets of light,
made our way through the old hotel,
over the porch, across the rails,
into the blue-green bliss.
Oh this is living, we told ourselves
and turned the clock to the wall,
till the bellhop came to get our bags,
Time's up, he said, that's all.

Pfferneuse

Tradition robs any day of joy.
"You've always done." "Must do again."
"There're expecting it", etc.
So I pretend to be glad
to make them, again.
They pretend to be pleased
to take them, again.
But while I wash the pots and bowls
and stow away the gear,
I tell myself 'Never again,
not next year.'

I Wonder

might people kill themselves
from lack of pain
as they do from
too much of it?
Time takes its toll,
nerves become callused,
so much rubbing......

July 20, 1969

Awake this morning after,
I know I shouldn't care
but sweetness fills my head,
soft as summer air,
like an oriental flute,
a clean blue sweep of sea,
flows upon my senses
Awesome infinity.

How can I describe
what we do not know?
I am speakng of ourselves:
the stringy pain of our tension,
Our anxious search for worth,
the constant hunger for comfort
on a warring hostile Earth
proscribe self-analysis.

Philosophy cannot catch up
with our evil restless minds,
and those who are most faithful
to a dream they know is dead,
lost their passion to an ethic
drying up in the head.
But man has primal knowledge:
to probe is to survive.

Those who ignore the dying
are always most alive.
Laughable and laughing
Man forsakes his failing dream.
The desperate optimist
flees intellectual scorn,
with huge fiery thrust
seeks an ethic green, newborn.