Accusatory glance.
Something I said.
I do not know her.  Does she know me?
Maybe I’m just another man who appears
dismissive.  Maybe I am,
and don’t realize it.  Don’t believe
it’s so — right now she
has all my complete and fearful attention
but listening is hard
when the language between us is this
fractured.  One word, two words, three and then
there are fifteen different meanings for each
and we are not communicating,
it’s a jaw clap fest at best. So,
I shut up and down.  Crawl into
the snail house inside, as far up
as I can go head-first.  Run away,
away, stay alive, alive-oh, alive, alive-oh;
crying cockles and mussels…maybe I am
being dismissive.  What is common ground anyway —
apparently not a song, not a folk song, not a good old
classic folk song, maybe there’s nothing at all —
when every bit of the culture has long smelled this bad to one
and has started to smell this bad to the other
maybe it is fine that we don’t speak.  I’d like
to think it is curable but I might be too dismissive.
Maybe it is fine if I crawl up in there and die.

Early fall window open 
means 
a fly gets in.

It may be the last big bluebottle
of the season with a droning voice like 
a Dangerbee.  Should look
twice to be sure it’s not
but no time —

kll it with one smack
of a carefully selected
heavy, already read, soon to be recycled
magazine.  Done.  And lo —

learn it was
Honeybee.  How did it seem
so huge?  Tiny, golden thing.  

Quick: brush it into the gutter of the window
and then lift the screen to push it out

onto the ground
with some small regret.

Lie to us, saying
this would have been done
differently
had you recognized
what this was.

My endless boyhood game: try to say something
around Dad without him coming back
with a homespun cliche.  

I’d say, “Well…”
and he’d say, “Deep subject for
such a shallow mind.”  

I’d say “I wish…”and he’d say,
“Wish in one hand, spit in the other,
see which one fills up first.”

“If only…” always led to
“If only a frog had wings, he wouldn’t
bump his ass when he jumped.”

Or my favorite, the all-purpose
“Shut up and give me
that Philips-head.”  In other words:

“Son, you’re better seen than heard,
keep that imagination on simmer,
hand me the damn screwdriver.

There’s real work to be done
for a real man who is busier
than a one-armed paperhanger

with an itch and madder than a sore tailed tomcat
in a room full of rocking chairs.
Real men live in a real world

where we don’t waste time
wishing or dreaming or coming up with weird ways 
of saying the obvious.  That’s

not work.  That’s not real.
Quit thinking of poetry, son.
I don’t know where you get that from.”