With the Grain

by | Jul 24, 2017 | Poems

     I don’t want to fade into the pastel sunset
            in Vero Beach with Barry Manilow
            playing softly in the background.

I don’t want to look like Dick Clark, Ronald Reagan
            or even Liz Taylor.

I don’t want to walk my two miles every day
            at the mall with all the usual suspects
            in the Golden Age Club.

I don’t want to circle the wagons and get all
            my ducks and IRA’s in a row to defend me
            against the ravages of uncertainty.

I don’t want to spend my whole life erecting
            a Star Wars Defensive Shield to protect me
            from death.
No, I want to let my whole body age and weather
            like an old tobacco barn — showing the blistering
            summer heat of loving, and the gray winters
            of grief in every board.

I want to load my pen, paper and poems
            into a rucksack and spend the day
            tramping the open roads.

I want to fan my tiny spark of existence into a blazing
            campfire under the blind night sky.

I want never to rage against the dying of the light,
            but instead, become a dancer in the darkness.

I want to live every day with my arms outstretched
            and nailed to the grain of experience, dying
            each morning into the innocence of dawn.

Bastille Day

by | Jul 11, 2017 | Poems

Morning fog like a thin layer of gauze lies on the hay field
that is lush and ripe
for a second mowing, and the sun is peaking over
the tree line as I walk home, musing about Bastille Day.
Old Donald of Orange and the French Wiz Kid
visited Napoleon’s tomb yesterday, both of them
bending a knee to the dream of empire, while
the bones of millions
bleach in the summer sun
among the poppies in France, the tundra in Russia
and the sands of the Middle East.
Like Carl Jung, I had a dream of a Great Turd
falling from heaven. Mine demolishes Versailles, the Kremlin,
Wall Street, The White House
and all the other fetid temples of empire.
The chicory and the Queen Anne’s lace along the roadside
comes back year after year,
but the dog shit on the asphalt
will be washed away by the next rain. So let us pray
that one day the pathology of power
and the adolescent fantasy of empire
may be washed away by a flood of liberté, égalité and fraternité!