If all the world were playing holidays

To sport would be as tedious as to work!
(Shakespeare from Henry IV part one if memory serves)

Tomorrow

Your best friend is gone,
your other friend, too.
Now the dream that used to turn in your sleep
sails into the earth's coldest night

What did you say?
Or was it something you did?
It makes no difference---the house of breath collapsing
around your voice, your voice burning, are nothing to worry about.

Tomorrow your friends will come back;
your moist mouth will bloom in the glass of storefronts.
Yes. Yes. Tomorrow they will come back and you
will invent an ending that comes out right.

Mark Strand

Smetena "The Moldau"

You paint on my canvas
swirls in water and air
using violas and cellos.

You hug me warmly
with triangles where
the sun glints.

You jam my senses
like a radio signal
satiating pleasure

WRM

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

(Robert Frost)

Skagway Respite

Hurrying freezing streets,
between uninteresting gift shops,
I am sucked into a large,
warm, bookshop.

Canned music fades,
the air fills with something
instantly recognizable.
The smell and feel of live music.

Searching for it among narrow,
rickety bookshelves, a hole
in the wall leads to a coffee bar
overcrowded with silent listeners.

The musical epicenter is the drum -
a table - serving as, instrument, stage
and music rest, tightly bound by
singers and guitar players.

Standing at the entrance
I am drawn in by the music,
excitement and warmth
held back by an invisible wall

Endemic people's gazes
and feelings burn
as they shine on me
snooping on their worship

(WRM in Scagway Alaska)

Slow Children at Play

All the quick children have gone inside, called
by their mothers to hurry-up-wash-your-hands
honey-diner's-getting-cold, just-wait-till-your-father-gets-home---
and only the slow children out on the lawns, marking off
paths between fireflies, making soft little sounds with their
mouths, ohs
that glow and go out and glow. and their slow mothers
flickering,
pale in the dusk, watching them turn in the gentle air, watching
them
twirling, their arms spread wide, thinking, these are my children,
thinking
Where is their dinner? Where has their father gone

Cecilia Woloch


Suicide Soldier

I'm a civilized soldier not
a suicide bomber
I don't have killing equipment
round my waist
no gun, no bullets, no grenades.

My family won't get paid
when I die
I don't ask God to bless me
or America


(WRM)

A Winter Morning

A farmhouse window far back from the highway
speaks to the darkness in a small, sure voice.
Against this stillness, only a kettle's whisper,
and against the starry cold, on small blue ring of flame.

Ted Kooser

Kids with Wives

Born only to cry and take.
Parents only too pleased to give,
children adopt skillful giving
to their tool-kit.
How much and when to use
is perfected by trial and error.

With estranged parents
donating and accepting
are mainstays of relationships
as parents seek to smother
with alternate currencies for company

When sexuality matures
and damages or displaces
the neatly organized tools in the box
their existence is devoted to
pleasing someone else before
themselves, or worse, me

The situations allowed to develop in
my sexual relationships
which you would erase
you have to witness, reenacted.
You dare not interfere.
For theirs' is not my world
and I fear rejection as
they feared mine.

The rope slackens
no need to drag them
they gather their own momentum.
After they pass me,
the leash tightens again
as I become the burden.

No more camping, games, rides,
cooking together, no more
rides home or girlfriends
Kids with wives aren't as much fun.

WRM (written before he became a grandparent!)

On a Child Learning to Talk

Methinks 'tis pretty sport to hear a child
Rocking a word in mouth yet undefiled;
The tender racquet rudely plays the sound
Which, weakly bandied, cannot back rebound;
And the soft air the softer roof doth kiss
With a sweet dying and a pretty miss,
Which hears no answer yet from the white rang
Of teeth not risen from their coral bank.
The alphabet is searched for letters soft
To try a word before it can be wrought;
And when it slideth forth, it goes as nice
As when a man doth walk upon ice.

Thomas Bastard 1566 - 1618

November

No

No sun--no moon!
No morn--no noon!
No dawn--no dusk--no proper time of day--
No sky--no earthly view--
No distance looking blue--
No road--no street--no "t'other side this way"--
No end to any Row--
No indications where the Crescents go--
No top to any steeple--
No recognitions of familiar people--
No courtesies for showing 'em--
No knowing 'em!
No traveling at all--no locomotion--
No inkling of the way--no notion--
"No go" by land or ocean--No mail--no post--
No news from any foreign coast--
No Park, no Ring, no afternoon gentility--
No company--no nobility--
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member--
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds--
November!

(Thomas Hood)

Memory

Arrangement of nick knacks on shelves
chosen by you and stored in locations
familiar to you alone

Classified by color, size or time
linked as firmly and randomly
as branches in a tree.

The dist of time paint over everything
when disturbed, shows clearly
what has been touched.

A word, piece of music, face, smell, transports
through time, distance, life and death.
You have no control

(WRM)

Ladder

A man tips his chair, all evening.

Years later, the ladder of small indentations
still marks the floor. Walking across it, then stopping.

Rarely are what is spoken and whit is meant the same.

Mostly the mouth says one thing, the thighs and knees
say another, the floor hears a third.

Yet within us,
objects and longings are not different.
They twist on the stem of the heart, like ripening grapes.

(Jane Hirchfield)

Who Made Sedona?

Rocks are grey or brown
everywhere except here
Arizona stole some red
intended for Mars

The sculptor here
not water or ice but
a lonely arid wind
defying convention

No regard for scale or accessibility
top heavy phallic chimneys
unsupported floors and roofs
overhanging liabilities

Myriad life forms abide
birds take unreachable ledges
plants the soft white seams
scorpions build cities in cracks

Homo sapiens, the valley floor
hiding his complex trappings
with rounded shapes
And rock-red paint

Bright cars, flat black roads
fragrant juniper smoke
and never-ending noise
herald the most arrogant animal.

(WRM)

Willy Wet-leg

I can't stand Willy wet-leg,
can't stand him at any price.
He's resigned, and when you hit him
he lets you hit him twice.

(D H Lawrence)


Cape Horn

Withering finger
leading eyes
to the globe's
southern pivot

Mountains, coffee,
tangos and beef
finally drown in
un-named waters

Atlantic and Pacific
disputing boundaries
Perpetual pugilism oblivious
of collateral damage

No room for future here
overcrowded with history
albatross, petrel
and cormorant

squeeze between
Magellan, Darwin
and six centuries
of shipwrecks.

(wrm)

Diner

The time has come to say goodbye, our plates empty except for
our greasy napkins. Comrades, you on my left, balding,
middle-aged guy with a ponytail, and you, Lefty, there on my right,
though we barely spoke I feel our kinship. You were steadfast in
passing the ketchup, the salt and pepper, no man could ask for better
companions. Lunch is over, the cheese-burgers and fries, the
Denver sandwich, the counter nearly empty. Now we must go our
separate ways. Not a fond embrace, but perhaps a hearty handshake.
No? Well then, farewell. It is unlikely I'll pass this way
again. Unlikely we will all meet again on this earth, to sit together
beneath the neon and fluorescent calmly sipping our coffee, like
the sages sipping their tea underneath the willow, sitting quietly,
saying nothing.

(Louis Jenkins)

Tidewater Glaciers

Floating frozen pre-historic garbage
Collected every second by barely liquid
Pure whiteness polluted black and blue
Ten thousand years fighting mountains
Milky murky blue gray water

A mess of bright destruction
Pan dimensionally immense
Cocktail of effluvium
Regurgitated ice cream
With fake coloring meringue
Might majesty dominion and mess.

(WRM in Alaska)

Autumnal Air

To Autumn


SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness!

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.



Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers;

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.



Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

(Keats)


Fall Tree Ball

Bored with the greens
sported since spring
each chooses a new gown
of yellow and gold
better to reflect the ailing autumn sun

Casting jealous eyes on neighbors
they change outfits daily
ever more daring and revealing
darkening orange red and brown

After wild dancing with the wind
wearing copious frosty make-up
they finally stand naked
bold frozen ballet poses
ankle deep in discarded clothing

(WRM - who's teacher said "avoid the passive voice")

Flock

It has been calculated that teach copy of the
Gutenburg Bible.... required the skins of 300 sheep.
-from and article on printing

I can see them squeezed into the holding pen
behind the stone building
where the printing press is housed.

all of them squirming around
to find a little room
and looking so much alike

it would be nearly impossible
to count them,
and there is no telling

which one will carry the news
that the Lord is a shepherd,
one of the few things they already know.

(Billy Collins)


Arizona Finale

Drowning sun
Behind distant hills
Sends its shadow
Up the red rock
Bedroom stairs

Layer by layer
Extinguishing colors
Inky sky darkens
Not to dazzle
Ascending eyes.

Only crimson tops now
Boast of sunshine
Like expensive Italian cars
Reporting a red-shifted bias
To shadow dwellers below

Featureless grey now
Barely contrasts with
star seasoned sky.
Caves, cracks, trees and birds
Prepare there morning show

(WRM)

Awake!

Awake ye blog
from deepest sleep
and once again
your ritual keep

From limey shores
homeward lately come
for weeks ahead now
travel's done.

(WRM)

Seven Deadly Sins

Behold the systematic GLUTTON
who eats the fat first off his mutton,
and while the blessing says, "we're grateful,"
he's asking for a second plateful.

This man is also AVARICIOUS,
finding the smell of dough delicious,
and takes a fierce, uxorious PRIDE
in one possession, his young bride.

His neighbor just across the fence,
a man of strong CONCUPISCENCE,
ENVYING the husband his fair flower,
would buy her favors by the hour.

ANGER inflames the husband's face,
but AVARICE takes the higher place.
He says, "don't let my ANGER trouble you,
Take her-I'll take your BMW."

The deal is struck, with on car more,
the final sin completes his score.
The sinner says, "I'd shoot them both,
were I not such slave to SLOTH.

(Virginia Hamilton Adair)

Selecting a Reader

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
"for that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned". And she will.

(Ted Kooser)

Firsts

When does the first new car
get scratched
begin to rust
go to the junkyard

When does a new house
acquire spiders
witness arguments
conceive children
hear lies
when does the paint crack
when do the weeds grow

when does the new pan
first become stained
burn its first food.

(WRM)

Solomon Grundy

Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Grew worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday.
That was the end of
Solomon Grundy.

(19th century nursery rhyme I learned in the 50's)

Hoping for a better end to the week!

Recent readings on Haiku suggest that the equivalent to the 17 syllables of classic Japanese Haiku is around 15 syllables in English - because the entire structure of the character language is different.

Haiku about Human Nature, as opposed to nature are called Senryu
So here are a couple of free form ones

Plough rolls back
Green carpet
From chocolate earth


I am emperor
Of this empty
Starbucks

Scanning for familiar eyes
unlocking smiles
at airport arrivals

Welcome stranger
To put your makeup on
in my motorcycle mirror

Some Men Find it Hard to Finish Sentences

Sometimes a man can't say
What he ---- A wind comes
And his doors don't rattle. Rain
Comes and his hair is dry.

"There's a lot to keep inside
And a lot to --- ""Sometimes shame
Means we ---" Children are cruel.
"He's six and his hands ---"

Even Hamlet kept passing
The King praying
And the King said
"There was something ---"

(Robert Bly)


Glasses of Wine

Can loosen the guy ropes
of convention
allowing a clearer vision
of the world

But it is like
tuning a distant
radio station
a narrow peak
easily passed and difficult
to retrace

One sip too much
and the world
is blurrier
than twas
afore ye started

(WRM)

Theory of Laddertivity

Things that get more
whey you're
aloft

Barking dogs
Talking loudly passing cyclists
Itches you can't reach

Things that defy physics
Flicked paint can
land on the inside
of your eyeglasses

Long awaited parcels
requiring signatures
arrive

(WRM on top of a long ladder in California)
(no more piss-taking!)

Wednesday Words

Open Plan

Homilies for families:
Advice-card on colours.

Catonic pinks/
Stainless-steel sinks.

Paranoid blues/
Blocked-up flues.

Catalepsy yellows/
Soft feather pillows.

Schizoid browns/
All day in dressing gowns.

Neurotic reds/
Extra wide beds.

Household paints
For Newly-weds.

(Alan Sillitoe)

Search for Love

Those that go searching for love
only make manifest thier own lovelessness,
and the loveless never find love,
only the loving find love,
and they never have to seek for it.

(D H Lawrence)

Urine

Might and inventor
This century
Perfect a disposal method
For male urine?

This unhealthy malodorous
corrosive staining carrier
of disease
A million gallons daily

Destined for floors clothes
Usually close to
The intended place
But not close enough

Such an easy task
Spacemen deal with it
But not earth men
Is it asking a lot?

(WRM)

The Leaky Faucet

All through the night, the leaky faucet
searches the stillness of the house
with its radar blip: who is awake?
Who lies out there as full of worry
as a pan in the sink? Cheer up,
cheer up, the little faucet calls,
someone will help you through your life.

(Ted Kooser)

Lover in the Aether

Available when I want you
living in all computers
but only I have the key

To my automaton's
ignition
user name
password
instant synergy

(WRM)

I Have a Little Shadow

I HAVE a little shadow that goes in and out with me,

And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.

He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;

And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.


The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow—

Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;

For he sometimes shoots up taller like an India-rubber ball,

And he sometimes gets so little that there’s none of him at all.


He hasn’t got a notion of how children ought to play,

And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way.

He stays so close beside me, he’s a coward you can see;

I’d think shame to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to me!


One morning, very early, before the sun was up,

I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup;

But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head,

Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.

R L Stevenson

Chairman William Say

Modern Communism like
Modern Christianity.
Forget difficult bits.

Communism OK, provided, have
Class distinction

OK have working class
Eight hundred million
Farmers with piss buckets

Pay for my apartment, car,
clothes, cellphone, restaurants,
skyscrapers, maglev trains

Copy the West
right down to the corruption
but don't tell anybody

Dining Alone

John Berryman (A favorite American poet of mine)

Dream Song 4

Filling her compact & delicious body with chicken paprika,
she glanced at me twice.
Fainting with interest,
I hungered back and only the fact that her husband & four other people kept me from springing on her or falling at her little feet and crying
"You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes have enjoyed, Brilliance."
I advanced upon (despairing) my spumoni.
-- Sir Bones: is stuffed, de world, wif feeding girls. -- Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes downcast . . . The slob beside her feasts . . . What wonders is she sitting on, over there? The restaurant buzzes.
She might as well be on Mars.
Where did it all go wrong?
There ought to be a law against Henry.
--Mr. Bones: there is.

(J Berryman)

Looking around Restaurant Tables

Is she saying?
"why did I marry him?"
or
"Shall I marry him?"

Are they?
Cousins?
Sisters?
Twins?
Lesbians?

Do you remember
before the kids were born?

(wrm)

Diary of a Church Mouse

Here among long-discarded cassocks,
Damp stools, and half-split open hassocks,
Here where the vicar never looksI nibble through old service books.
Lean and alone I spend my daysBehind this Church of England baize.
I share my dark forgotten roomWith two oil-lamps and half a broom.
The cleaner never bothers me,So here I eat my frugal tea.
My bread is sawdust mixed with straw;My jam is polish for the floor.
Christmas and Easter may be feasts
For congregations and for priests,
And so may Whitsun. All the same,
They do not fill my meagre frame.
For me the only feast at allIs Autumn's Harvest Festival,
When I can satisfy my wantWith ears of corn around the font.
I climb the eagle's brazen headTo burrow through a loaf of bread.
I scramble up the pulpit stairAnd gnaw the marrows hanging there.
It is enjoyable to tasteThese items ere they go to waste,But how annoying when one finds
That other mice with pagan minds
Come into church my food to share
Who have no proper business there.
Two field mice who have no desireTo be baptized, invade the choir.
A large and most unfriendly ratComes in to see what we are at.
He says he thinks there is no GodAnd yet he comes… it's rather odd.
This year he stole a sheaf of wheat(It screened our special preacher's seat),And prosperous mice from fields awayCome in to hear our organ play,And under cover of its notes
Ate through the altar's sheaf of oats.
A Low Church mouse, who thinks that IAm too papistical, and High,
Yet somehow doesn't think it wrong
To munch through Harvest Evensong,While I, who starve the whole year through,
Must share my food with rodents whoExcept at this time of the year
Not once inside the church appear.
Within the human world I knowSuch goings-on could not be so,
For human beings only do
What their religion tells them to.
They read the Bible every day
And always, night and morning, pray,
And just like me, the good church mouse,
Worship each week in God's own house,
But all the same it's strange to me
How very full the church can be
With people I don't see at all
Except at Harvest Festival.

(John Betjeman)

Soul from Seoul

I have experience of careers going to the dogs
Now I have experience of a dogs going to Korea


Right next to me
in a bag
twelve hours
on a plane

Wednesday Words

What the Buttocks Think

Don't tell me that nothing can be done.
The tongue says, "I know I can change things."
The toe says, "I have my ways"
The heart is weeping and remembering Eden.

Legs think that a good run will do it.
Tongue has free tickets; He'll fly to heaven.
But the buttocks see everything upside down:
They want you to put your head down there,

Remind the heart it was upside down
In the womb, so that when your mother,
Knowing exactly where she was going,
Walked upstairs, you weren't going anywhere.

(Robert Bly from Morning Poems)


Haiku (seventeen syllables, three lines with the middle one longest)

With a wave
My heart joins an unknown child
As the train speeds by

(WRM)

Song

The chimney sweepers
Wash their faces and forget to wash the neck,
The lighthouse keepers
Let the lamps go out and leave the ships to wreck,
The prosperous baker
Leaves the rolls in hundreds in the oven to burn
The undertaker
pins a a small note on the coffin saying "Wait till I return,
I've got a date with love>"

And deep-sea divers
Cut their boots off and come bubbling to the top,
And engine-drivers
Bring expresses in the tunnel to a stop,
The village rector
Dashed down the side-aisle half-way through a psalm,
The sanitary inspector
Runs off with the cover of the cesspool on his arm --
To keep his date with love.

(W.H. Auden)

BIG NUMBERS

Million a seven digit baby
Measured in seconds
Just a couple of weeks

Billion has ten keys to press
Enough seconds
For thirty four years

Trillion has thirteen numbers
If you started saving
A dollar per second

During the last ice age
Thirty four thousand
years ago

You would
now have almost
a trillion dollars

The pile would
reach beyond
the moon

Two hundred
Seventy one
Thousand miles

A trillion atoms
side by side as long
as a football pitch

(WRM)

In The Evening

The heads of roses begin to droop.
The bee who has been hauling his gold
all day finds a hexagon in which to rest.


In the sky, traces of clouds,
the last few darting birds,
watercolors on the horizon.

The white cat sits facing a wall.
The horse in the field is asleep on its feet.

I light a candle on the wood table.
I take another sip of wine.
I pick up an onion and a knife.

And the past and the future?
Nothing but an only child with two different masks.

( Billy Collins)


Photographer

Remember me?
You asked if I minded
You hugged and smiled
At my command.

Do you even know
what I look like?
Do you care?
Was the picture any good?

(WRM)

Stalin's Ghost

The Prologue

Winter was what Muscovites lived for. Winter knee-deep
in snow that softened the city, flowed from golden dome to golden dome, resculpted statues
and transformed park paths into skating trails. Snow that sometimes fell as a lacy haze, sometimes thick as down. Snow that made sedans of the rich and powerful crawl behind snowplows. Snow that folded and unfolded, teasing the eye with glimpses of an illuminated globe above the Central Telegraph Office, Apollo's chariot leaving the Bolshoi, a sturgeon sketched in neon at a food emporium. Women shopped amid the gusts, gliding in long fur coats.
Children dragged sleds and snowboards, while Lenin lay in his mausoleum, deaf to correction, wrapped in snow.
And, in Arkady's experience, when the snow melts, bodies would be discovered. In Moscow that was spring.

Martin Cruz Smith 2007

Tuesdays Words

Boarding House

The blind man draws his curtains for the night
and goes to bed, leaving a burning light

above the bathroom mirror. Through the wall,
he hears the deaf man walking down the hall

in his squeaky shoes to see if there's a light
under the blind man's door, and all is right

Ted Kooser (US Poet Laureate)


Let Me

Let my eyes feel you
Let me wave lusting heat lamps
From above to below you
Overheating chosen places

Let me in through your eyes
let me feel my welcome
Let me probe your intimate thoughts
Give them to me

Let my sight roll over the undulations
Of your face, shoulders, breasts and arms
Feel my imagination as you stand
Naked and proud before me

Watch my eyes melt down your thighs
Yield to me as I ascend you with my gaze
Let our eyes consummate
Let me

WRM - a while back

Monday Morning Mourning the weekend.

Budapest

My pen moves along the page
like the snout of a strange animal
shaped like a human arm
and dressed in the sleeve of a loose green sweater.

I watch it sniffing the paper ceaselessly,
intent as any forager that has nothing
on its mind but the grubs and insects
that will allow it to live another day.

It wants only to be here tomorrow,
dressed perhaps in the sleeve of a plaid shirt.
nose pressed against the page,
writing a few more dutiful lines

while I gaze out the window and imagine Budapest
or some other city where I have never been.

Billy Collins


Sexy Little Black Number

I dress in special clothes
take her out from
my secret place
pull her top down

Broad and squat
hugging, like a jellyfish,
anything below her.
Sticking like spilt tar

Testosterone boosted shoulders
the extension of my puny figure
embracing driver and libido
in a single compactness,
she carries me and my ego
At different altitudes.

Intimate with weather,
and parking lot conversations,
smelling trees, barbecues
exhausts, perfumes,
hearing birds, radios, wind
in a frapped blur

WRM

Santa Fe Easter Morning

Outside the only awake
Native jewelry sellers and
Paper man in the middle
Of the street
Selling in both directions

Inside Starbucks
French music competing with
Infinite permutations of size
Strength foam fat flavor blend
Temperature and soy

People arranged as atoms in a
Crystal lattice with mathematical
String lengths between them
Fixing precisely their allowed
Balance of intimacy and privacy

Glances, the human
Equivalent of dog growls,
Inhibit threatened infringements
Of sipping Sunday paper reading
Oxygen using space time

(WM 2003)

On a Lighter Note

Languor

I have come back to the couch -----
Hands behind my head,
Legs crossed at the ankles-----

to resume my lifelong study
of the ceiling and its river-like crack,
its memory of a water stain,

the touch of civilization
in the rounded steps of the moulding,
and the lick of time in the flaking plaster.

To move would only ruffle
the calm surface of the morning,
and disturb shadows of leaves in the windows.

And to throw open a door
would startle the fish in the pond,
maybe frighten a few birds from a hedge.

Better to stay here,
to occupy the still room of thought,
to listen to the dog breathing on the floor,

better to count my lucky coins,
or redesign my family coat of arms-----
remove the plow and hive, shoo away the bee.

(Billy Collins)




Free Waits

Take the free way
Take the freeway
The only way
To the free weights

Wait while I work out
With free weights
Fitness is free
Fitness freak

Freak out
Waits are free
Waits are frequent
On the freeway

Weights are free
You don't have
To own them
Lift them

Free me
To flee with thee
on the free way
to the free waits

And the free weights
And the blind dates
And slim wastes
Of slim waists

Slender pickings
From the date tree
Fat free
Flea free

(WRM)

Dylan Thomas and me

The hand that signed the paper

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;

Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,

Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country:

These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,

The finger joints are cramped with chalk;

A goose's quill has put an end to murder

That put and end to talk.

The hand that singed the treaty bred a fever,

And famine grew, and locusts came;

Great is the hand that holds dominion over

Man by a scribbled name

The five kings count the dead but do not soften

The crusted wound nor stroke the brow;

A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;

Hands have no tears to flow.

Dylan Thomas.

The Bomb Maker

I make explosive devices

Dropped, hidden, trodden,

Handheld, mailed, custom,

I do them all.

Proud of my profession

Its' effects outlive me.

My favorite is the land mine

A child with a limbless lifetime

A dead parent

An unrecognizably damaged

Face on a beautiful woman

My clever prodigies

Made from plastic

Live forever waiting

In beautiful beach or dessert

Undetectable

But detonated

By the tiniest footprint

I can blow off feet or legs

Kill instantly

Rise to face height

First and then

Spray chosen parts

With maiming

Shrapnel.

Tell me what you want,

Anything is possible,

At a price,

With discounts for

Quantity.

WRM 2002

Poet of the Moment

Frederico Garcia Lorca


Six Strings

The Guitar
makes dreams cry
The sobbing of lost
souls
escapes through its round
mouth.
And like the tarantula,
it spins a huge star
and tracks down the sighs
that float in its black
wooden cistern.

(Lorca)



Dark Sides Of The Moon

The moon wakes first today
Beaming my wake-up call
Silver sickle in black sky
Seasoned with stars.

Floating on pre-dawn light
Still hidden from my eyes.
The winking eye
Clock watches for the day

shift to come in
Staring the sun in the face
Never turning
Walking backwards

As if from a queen
Until extinguished
By the same flame
Driving me from bed

(WRM 2002)