Cold water
tastes of black;

warm tea,
redolent with spice-red brown;

all cheeses
contain a trace of green,

and meats of all varieties
are purple as they go down.

Landscape art
on the teeth and tongue,

a portrait within me later.
There’s a golden tinge

in the bourbon that follows;
there was shell gesso

in my former hunger, orange bile
in my gluttony’s later gut.

I live like this, in agony,
stunned and overwhelmed by every meal.

I can’t stop the pictures.
I can’t eat enough to get to

the absence of light
I so long for.  And

I have tried, Lord,
I have tried.

What does it say about me
that I’m still happy under your bed?

What does it say about you
that you know I’m still here
but won’t even look?

I am still your imaginary friend.
Do you remember my name?
Why are you are not thinking of me?
There have been whole years
where I mostly
can’t stop thinking about you
and the times when I can are not
predictable.  So why
am I so easy to forget?

I never told you this, but
thank you for your skin.
I liked your skin a lot
and when late hours blind my hands,

your skin still lights up
the ceiling and the walls.
I need that. Thank you.
You still give and give
even if you don’t want
to know me.

Oooh, so
creepy you have just become
with all that shield around you.
Did I touch you?  I did. Then,
and just now.

I can’t make you remember my name
but at least you know I’m here.

Once in a while
you really should peek at me
down here.
I’m just a little shiver now,
no flinty danger.

I’ll take a short time slot.

Please?

You have a long life line,
said the palmist.  I know,
I replied.  I’m already old. 

You have a symbol of great power
there too, she said. I know that
too, I said.  Tell me something
I don’t know.

Your hands
are empty, she said.  They were full
and now they are open
and waiting for the next gift
to fall into them.

That was news to me
who had never felt anything,
ever, of any weight or substance
in there.

Did you not feel my hands in yours,
warm, soft, and ready, she asked?
And I had not.

Ach, she said,
What is one
to do with someone like you
who asks for his fortune
to be revealed
when he cannot feel the one
that is already there?

An ancient gentleman
in a cap
sat outside the cafe
and said to me, out of the blue,
in what I suspect
was an Albanian accent:

“Best friend. Fifty years,”

and held up a burning handrolled cigarette.

“I no speak English much.
I no speak without at all,
best friend, tobacco,
fifty years…”

And he laughed through brown peg teeth.

I could see what he meant.
Hell, we were talking, weren’t we?
And we hadn’t been.  Not till then,
and here he was being perfectly clear —
two friends laughing, perfectly clear, two of us
smoking together, holding our cigarettes
like talking sticks, taking turns
agreeing on friendship and sociability,
bridging gaps and silence
within a cloud of friendly, acrid smoke.

I delight
in the way my town shines
in moonlight.

It seems
that the buildings and yards
are freely enjoying themselves,

which is why all my money
has crawled under a rock
and my gasoline has disappeared

back into the soil
to cry as it longs for cars
and travel

and a return to the days
when I only got by
by thinking about leaving and not coming back.

I delight now
in the moon shining
on the empty road outside,

on my closed garage
and depleted wallet, useless anyway
now that all the stores are closed.

For once, I don’t want for anything
and it’s enough to pretend
that this feeling will last.

Tags: poetry, poems, meditations

Fast
as a car on a banked oval
going over and over the same ground;

fast as the slide
at the amusement park
that drops you into water
so quickly you at once want
to do it again;

fast as the fatal words
falling from your stunned lips
into the face of your traitor boss;

that is how fast it will happen
when you reach the point
of breaking again
in the same place you broke last time
this happened.

Slowly,
in the afterglow of the failure,
you come to see how awe-inspiring it is
to fail so well.  You are an expert, after all,
at the craft.  An inspiration
to future failures
who will look to you
and say

that’s how it is done.

And that makes you a success at something,
you fast speaker, fast in the grip
of blurt and impulse.
Did you know there are people
who would kill to be like that?
They imagine, of course,
that it will work out well for them —

which it might.
And you ponder that for a long time,
racing through the possibilities.

It is possible
that you are no failure,
but a genius of the moment.

It is possible that speed
is your violin
and you are Paganinni,
it is your guitar and you are
the Vai of the retort and the Hendrix
of the sudden move.

It is possible
that every move you’ve made
that dumped you, every spin
on the track after a hard charge,
every splashdown into bitter chlorine
was a masterpiece of the art
of playing a bad hand.

That it hasn’t always worked out
may be as much an illusion
as what would come from reasoned thought
and measured speech,
but that is something
you’d like to know for sure,
as fast as you can.

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations

Odin
sits on a stone
with one eye on the Tree
and the other rolling on the ocean’s floor.
The meanest of the gods
is half blind but
nothing escapes him.
Warrior days are coming.
The same old Trickster
is still pulling the strings;
he can tell by the ache
in his half empty face.

He adjusts his robe
and pokes at the empty socket,
inside which he swears he can feel
the messages sent here by the roots
piercing the sea bed
and plunging all the way
to the core of the earth
without burning.

What they carry to the limbs of Yggdrasil
is the taste of the smoke of the axis
as it grinds down.
He can do nothing about that —

if the Tree is poisoned,
if Asgard falls,
he’ll sit here
and think about war
and pestilence
as any old man would,
as they all do
in the twilight of their years.

There’s a reason he holds
his robe so close
against the eventual cold
that will follow the Burning
that will surely come.