i am growing old —
many leaves of my memory
have yellow’d and fallen —
so that i am beginning to have
many secrets from myself —
poems
Desert weeds after heavy rains
Some weeds are nourishing, and some medicinal;
Some are beautiful, colorful, and downright flowery;
And yet others, even those that pop up one fine morning
as the tiniest innocent young sprouts of green —
are relentless, run riot, and are one hundred and ten percent determined as @#!% to @#!% up your @#!% yard if it @#!% kills the @#!% both of you!
Green grace
as earth sways us from winter to spring
nature begins her grace of glorious green
Leavings
silently but for the rustle of wings
swooping death flies off with its prey —
a feather drifts down from the empty sky
for left-behind hearts to remember by
The Poet, II
My body was once a beautiful house of marble,
Kissed to pale rose by the passionate heat of the sun,
Wherein through cunning channels flowed forever
Health-giving crimson blood in steady tides.
My eyes were then quick to see and to welcome beauty,
My lips smiled often with gratified desire,
My hands shook not, but were fit for caress or grapple,
My arms rose and my body moved in strength.
Then not a single line of any poem
Had my hands raped from my brain, but untouched and pure
They abode in the land of distant visions where no man
Heard my voice calling for them at eventide.
My blood lies in great black lakes now, sluggish and frozen,
Or fumes in like some boiling, stinging, poison brew
Till it suddenly stops in a lassitude unspoken,
Or bursts through my pores and covers me with red dew:
My eyes are bleared now and dull with sleepless midnights,
My lips are shrunken purses—their gold is spent,
My hands unsteadily clutch and paw and tremble,
My arms are as strings of macaroni bent.
And as for my chest, ’tis like a leaky air-box
Fixed to some cheap melodeon out of tune,
The bellows creak, the loose and brown keys rattle,
And the music that comes is like a dog’s sick moan.
But in my brain there seethes an adulterous hotchpotch
Of poems clean and disgusting, mad and sage;
And pain, like a dry fire, keeps them ever a-boiling
Till they splash over and blacken some wasted page.
Yes, I am a poet now to be mocked and applauded,
A turnspit that turns and must never taste the meat:
Behold how great I am, but I wait for a greater,
Even Death, who will silence the march of these crippled feet.
—John Gould Fletcher (1886–1950),
Emptiness
when we lose someone we love
it’s not that our hearts are empty —
they are so full with that someone
suddenly everything else feels empty
Clock work
flowers don’t open to the clock
but to the sunshine spontaneous—
for modern humans that manner
of instinct is now extraneous
Truly lost
All these years
I thought ‘barren’
meant of the womb —
but now my body
has threatened me
with menopause
and I realize it
means of the heart.
Silence in the poet
after a lifetime of doing almost nothing
but collecting words, now — here i am
finding that my life has become all about
that which cannot be expressed by words —
after a half-life of a burning desire to write
in order to find myself, suddenly i’ve found
an even more impassioned desire to write
by leaving behind that moulten shell, and
in this moment i find — silence is poetry
when the poet has nothing more to say
Weighed down
the scale now shows me
one hundred sixty-eight
but in those simple digits
I see rejection and pain
sugar, laziness, exhaustion
hormones splayed out of whack
menopause ready to rumble
plaque buildup and repressions
anxiety, regret, some depression
the past, the future, sheer panic
tension, disoriented expectations
ice cream, sweet junk addictions
griefs, hurts, disappointments
bad habits, cliffs, fear, falling
the eating of all my emotions
gluttony and gorging ghosts
turbulent raging blood glucose
sleepless nights, too-busy days
nerves, toxins, worry, age
unwelcome rapid-fire change
lack of trying, trying too hard
loss of control, culinary excesses
no longer fitting into my dresses
Fantastic shores
in bed at night his mind had a ferocious imagination
reality and unreality haunted his turbulent brain
the years ticked, an infinite clock of destiny
searching moonlight for the promise of a future
his reveries of heart were coasting on a fairy’s wing
as the world and universe drifted by fantastic shores
but the sea, work, and women — physical outlets —
were his anchor — something old, hard, and soft
scrambled blackout poetry created from F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Stone-faced
Wailing, bearing flowers
and collapsing to her knees,
her hot tears fall upon me—
But I remain unmoved,
stone-faced, above it all—
her face etched with grief
and mine with the years,
weathered with past life—
Gently she touches my face
and presents me the flowers—
I’ve seen her cry many times
but it is in my nature to be
rough and cold, grounded
in reality I know nothing else—
Still she keeps coming back to me
and though I cannot give her love
I will always guard hers.
They’ll be back
you can shout it to every star
bare your soul up to the moon
cast your problems nightly afar —
but they always flood back by noon