Damn Reality
Here I go again reading
Bukowski’s clear vision voice
poems lacking picturesque pastoral principles,
with plainly different aesthetic dispositions
of attitude nobody loves.
We know that deep inside,
his way is part of us;
part of him, hides in us.
How many ways
can we paint the same picture,
or tell the same story.
Look both ways reading anyone’s poems.
Mind the gaps hiding deep within when writing your own.
When does it happen, if it happens at all?
The innocent child becomes a troubled teen,
Then a vicious young man with an M-sixteen,
Or a rivetted young woman focused on his fall.
Is this the formula of a coming dystopia?
Is the excitement of the fight so much greater
Than desire for tranquility and gods’ opium?
Is power over people the dark masturbator?
Some change. Many don’t. Over time
We all morph and grow to some degree
For better or worse, but will I ever be free?
Human life’s permanent paradox of paradigm.
Look both ways with conscious contemplation of then and now.
Mind the gaps for lessons of fortitude,
not the comfort of fear.
You can only die once, Bukowski notwithstanding.
I Admit It
Sometimes I don’t understand, or
(and it’s not the same thing)
I misunderstand, hoping
somehow to be brought
to correction and truth,
by way of clarification,
minus animosity.
Like one day
writing to prompts.
A young lady made clear
her (pre-pandemic) intention
to complete
the several months long hike
of the Appalachian Trail,
Georgia to Maine.
Starting in February,
finishing in May (unlikely),
by hiking
twenty-seven miles
every day for months.
She had done eighteen miles in one day,
no more; none
during March or July
on a rocky or muddy ascending trail.
I wanted to say,
that’s a marathon a day,
every day, for at least three months
(more like five to seven)
bearing a pack, food, and water.
But I didn’t. Is it for me to say?
Lest I dash her dream with reality.
Is it for each person to discover
our dreams? To defeat challenging demons?
Not with wisdom but with grit.
Each of us must, on life’s long wander,
one day, one step at a time, take the risk.
Look both ways on every trail.
Watch where you step and mind the gaps lest you find a limp.
Follow your dreams.
Wisely.
Booklovers
Unlike the discomfort people feel toward harmless book collections, fearful of those pillars of civilization, even dumb readers are smart. Readers aren’t rich, poor, intelligent, or stupid. They zestfully relish reading books like the ignorant cling to guns and unread bibles.
Look both ways and cherish lifelong learning. Mind the gaps and be who you are and what you are, enjoy life, and read on into eternity.
It was unthinkable, back when
my without-resumé or bona fide
job was Dad: our father,
leader, wizard, fixer of all
things and people broken,
savior of my tribe; shaman,
vet, and driver out of all demons.
Despite my foibles,
hidden as many were—
we managed to cope.
Burdened with adversity and misguided history
we owned our piece of the world,
we held the keys that controlled the universe,
wherein I was (am?) suddenly
no longer the center to which they would turn.
Call it what is, that’s life, dismissing
whenever shit happens, when I’m forced
to admit I don’t know why. To say
I was wrong about so much.
I think and think again about it all,
the ultimatum. It wasn’t you. It’s me.
Look both ways when seeking the mysterious purpose of life,
or finding of the true self, or taking on the vocation mantle of service.
Mind the gaps for the distractions of relief are dear.
Mission
Never liked real or imagined
spotlights
except from the catbird seat.
The Spotlight movie—
religion’s villainous clergy
and journalism’s reporter heroes.
Look both ways to find the sorry ass truth.
Mind the gaps but tell all to make a better world.
The 2015 movie trailer, if you’ve not seen it.
Call Alice or Jody Call
Hurry up! and then wait
might be a cliché to some.
Army’s GI Joes claim it
as their own,
but we’ve all been rushed
and rushed, hurried along,
forced into quick-step like
anthropomorphic white rabbits
through Alice’s wonderland story
(not Arlo’s restaurant one)
and Grace’s slick psyche-song.
Rushed to somewhere
only there to wait,
and wait some more,
and then wait longer.
(‘twas no rarity, either.)
On top of that,
just like the mad hat,
they’d (we) add five minutes,
early
plus five,
and then five more,
(if not ten) minutes early.
A military obsession
greater than want of
any weapon
or crazy-ass war.
Embrace the suck
if it makes it
better how ya feel,
about it all,
been there,
done that,
was not late,
but had to wait.
We’ll all be early
for our own
funerals, unless
it’s Oxford
(not Tulsa) time,
when late is just fine.
Look both ways if you’ve had “some kind of mushroom.”
Mind the gaps and “remember what the dormouse said, feed your head.”
Pointless vers libre
I wrote this poem
impromptu, an
extemporaneous literary
ejaculation written to a prompt,
which, oxymoronically, means
improvised unprompted.
An unemotional, virtuous
pronouncement, to wit, I was
fully unprepared
by the fulness of time
to provide profoundness
of contemplation.
In my vernacular,
I pulled it out
of my ass.
Look both ways even on one-way streets.
Some contrivances must be assembled quickly.
Mind the gaps because the Russians are coming.
My final 2022 NaPoWriMo challenge was to write a cento. This is a poem made up of lines taken from other poems. For my cento, I took lines from various poems in Donkey Gospel and What Narcissism Means to Me, both books of poems by Tony Hoagland.
Heavy Humor
We were drinking beer with the sound off
Greg said that things were better in the sixties
when I was pale and scrawny
and we soar up into the summer stars
but I admit that in the dark
(where a whole life can be mistaken) cavern of that bar
where men throw harpoons at something
costly, beautiful, but secret
jockstraps flew across the steamy
rickshaws gliding through the palace gates,
an act of cruelty which we both understood
the dreams rising from the sleep of children
far out from the coastline of America
a ten-foot sign says, WE WILL NEVER FORGET.
which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.
Look both ways (forward to May, back at April) and wonder.
Mind the gaps for those chores left undone.
Today’s prompt was to write a concrete poem. I wanted to do all 30 prompts.
What I did instead was intended to be a black out poem in lieu of the prompt, I’ve done concretes before. Not today.
I decided that rather than black out unused text to create the poem, I would extract the lines from the first few paragraphs of a longer story. If I had more time, I might have attempted some art to overlay the blacked-out area.
If I included the entire narrative, it would have been too long with entire paragraphs blacked out. So, I extracted the parts/words/sections that made up the poem.
I selected the first few paragraphs from the titled section, “On the Rainy River” from the book, The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien © (published in 1990 by Houghton Mifflin).
Drafted
one story I’ve never told,
it would only cause embarrassment,
a confession…
makes me squirm,
I’ve had to live with it, feeling the shame,
it’s a hard story to tell.
if evil were evil enough, if good were good enough
I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage…
Courage, comes in finite quantities,
it offered hope and grace to the repetitive coward.
I was drafted to fight a war I hated.
(You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.)
…I assumed that the problems of killing and dying did not fall within my special province…
The draft notice arrived on June 17, 1968.
I was too good for this war.
Too smart, too compassionate, too everything.
I was above it. A mistake, maybe…I was no soldier.
Look both ways for reasons why and why not.
Mind the gaps. That’s where the booby traps hide.
Our Literary Journey 