Tuesday, March 22, 2016

IMAX

Guarding against the of-late 
tendency to forget completely,

I sketched the past to scale
on blue-checked graph paper,

putting into an overview perspective
the best and worst iconic moments,

all tops of heads, shoulders and cleavage,
accurate miniature snapshots,

not influenced by expression or words,
no innuendo or facial tics,

just impartial history detailed from above,
creating a rolodex dimension

for the bijou reality of the back 
of the mind, index-tabbed by category,

providing easy reference for the 
rem-sleep dreamer who provides the 3D quality,

plugs back in the bedroom brown eyes,
do-me cheek bones, tongue-licked lips,

that talk dirty to me voice
that sucks inhibition from the room

in the third of our existences,
the sepia toned stream of consciousness,

the cognac noir matinees
where were always our nastiest,

most run-on, most relaxed.

Saturday, November 28, 2015

Refugees

       


They walk down small empty streets
with ruined houses.
The clock in the square has no hands.
Rats at the end of the alleys
eat their dead,
the grind of their teeth in the flesh
the only interruption
of the humid afternoon
silence of retreat.

No more drive-by,
not the carts full of plague
long gone to shallow graves
and cried over,
not the car bombings, no Jihad,
only crippled insurgents
left with limbless occupiers
only gray lines of brutal aging
slow lifeless exit,

and in the undisturbed
brick and limestone
everything quietly waiting
for the nocturnal,
the gutters to run clear
and shadows begin to crawl
as innocence tries again
to sneak in, to root,

to find an infant footing

Sunday, November 8, 2015

Dreamboat

         

going the wrong way
on the Baltimore beltway,
choking on carb-flooded gas -
over-heating over first date curfews
as we left Carlin’s Drive-In
already an hour late.

a death trap ’60 Falcon [appropriately black]
was not only my first car
but the first on the drug store corner -
made him a celebrity,
and yes definitely a ‘He’-
lost half the time, on the make the other….

anyway He’s straining brittle-bone ball-joints
and bald tires while I’m keeping
right white buck and pedal to the floor,
rubbernecking to spot that landmark…
that yes-we-now-know-where-we-are
building or corner.

‘the little engine that could’
all the time switching channels,
constantly on alert for the right hot tune
or ‘Wild Thing’
or anything by the Stones
which was always right.

your father home cursing hippies to your mom
belting shots of bourbon
would have been loading his gun
and waiting in the driveway
if he had seen the feature from our back seat
and those coming attractions in your hair.




Saturday, October 31, 2015

Two friends

   

parting, one young
one younger, and beginning a pilgrimage
in search of himself.

Come with you?
I’m not that young –
though the rest of my life
will not be what I intended,
and I’ve intended nothing.
I would not have wanted
to see you die
but would have wanted
to know you ‘til death.
You know,
men are harder to replace
than women, but women
are irreplaceable. 

Perhaps on my holiday –
only two weeks a year
to visit far-away old friends,
that are always too far.
Maybe we’ll meet again at 40.
In a bar. In Athens.
We’ll drink Ouzou
and share a Greek whore.
We’ll celebrate this moment then
pulling at our youth,
and reflect that every moment
is a poem,
that only need be written down

as a reminder.