Did you imagine this when you were young — that one day you’d be sitting, crippled by age and poor circulation, and be wondering about what was left?
Did you imagine this — that you’d be sitting, head wobbling on its post, and be certain that whatever comes next, you would break in its teeth like a sad nut or an old fruit?
Did you think of this — a rubber band on your wrist, snapped till it hurts, can make your life wince for hours?
~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward, T
Note — think this will be the last public post on this forum. Not getting a lot of feedback from regular readers here, and I do think that’s critical. So I’ll be limiting who sees the posts.
I’ve also decided to release yet another chapbook of just poems written since my strokes in March of 2024. (I know, I know…said I was done. Call me a liar, a dreamer, a fool…you get to read the poems, right?)
Last, my poem ” Winter And Spring” made it to the Worcester Magazine spring issue…many thanks to Victor Infante for inviting me to contribute.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Listening to the Beatles,
knowing there are two left
and they’ll die sooner or later,
likely sooner, most likely
in my lifetime.
Thinking of Jill Sobule
dying in a house fire, and she
was a year older than I am,
just a year…
and all the others
who died before me, older
and younger…and I’m still here
for the most part,
part of me
went with each of them,
part of me
lingers a while
with a shrug and a smile
and says it won’t be long now
before I go too, thank
perspicacity, thank indifference
to consequences, gratitude
to the powers above and below
for letting me go.
Singing tunelessly to myself:
It’s been
a good life and in the end
the love you take is equal to
the love you make...
as the hibiscus leaves are just
starting out, as the blooms
are yet to come.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T
I don’t have the right words any more. Just an urge to write. The Work may be reaching its end…
I don’t have the right words any more. Just a knowledge that there isn’t much left in here. The Work took me far but it didn’t take me deep. At least, not deep enough…
I don’t have the right words any more. Just a need to sit without thinking, trying to come up with any words at all. The Work was a body without form; I tried like hell to add some to it and it resisted me, resists me, will resist my efforts…
I am trying for the right words here but the Work says, “no.” Just need some words I don’t have, a list of the right words, a roster of words I never had…
I don’t have the right words any more. As if I ever did; it was a folly, a fever, an analog mistake in a digital world…
The Work will go on without me. I ought to be satisfied, to let it go on. Just…I wish I’d had one poem to take me into it, to be carried away. All I want…but it can’t be helped…
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T
4/18/2025
On the horse,
a pair of lenses
swollen to fit the nose.
Handsome in silver.
The frames slick with promise
that this attempt wouldn’t embarrass.
I stood there embarrassed.
I suddenly had scant idea what was required
but I swore this attempt would not fail.
I swore this attempt would matter.
It didn’t matter. The horse
attempted closure. I did not.
We two were alone with our failure
since all I could do was fail.
We stood, false-lonely, loose-limbed
on her part; I wept tight and shaking
with unease and frank horror.
I could not, would not.
Did you know this would happen?
I did not, should not.
As ordinary as shattered glass?
As customary as any mistake?
I should not, would not.
The horse and I stood there
in the stall until someone came
and took us back to our places.
I lay down on my bed
and wept till I knew I wasn’t wrong
and this was the way of things,
how space and the universe were supposed
to unfold and that being right
would take a long time.
The horse doffed her glasses,
shook her head. Wondered
about the taste of sugar as if
it was supposed to be sweetness.
It was supposed to be.
Anyone knew that.
The nourishment of the illegals is at hand, the Karen Read trial proves it, you can hand feed the test feed of media bits and let it hang, you can dance as if it matters, you can hang your jaw over the words for your own purposes and pretend it’s for Passover and remain invisible? What difference does it make?
The ravishing of the system is at stake, the white faces of the defendants are at hand, the Donald Trump trial challenges it, you can hand test the offspring for proof of the ravening and the lusting, what of it? What of it with the great grey lull of power gnarling over it all?
You can challenge it, is all. You can imagine it all in power, all invited to lust within, all incited to yearn with invertebrate longing of grand glow and globs of deep glow. It won’t matter at all. It won’t and it can’t. The sun will shine, the rocks will glow. You’ll be fine, or you will die. Thank Jesus for that one. Thank someone, for Chrissakes.
Did you think it could go on forever, this whole art thing, this creativity at all costs, this longing for words to improve the atmosphere, this lust for rhythm in the tongue, this leapfrogging over bills to get to treasure, this break in the responsibility for material survival, this fantasy of music on the lips even as the big heart inside is faltering, this open invitation to peek at your shit, this diving, this digging, this stink of flop sweat, this perfuming, this velveteen drama, this pose you pretend is purely accidental? Do you understand how close you still stand to where you born, to how you came out squalling and stayed squalling? At least you got — what was it you got from all this again?
The messiest fever dream I’ve ever had just pulled me out of an afternoon’s nap to take myself out to the kitchen and open the fridge to reach for one of the water bottles I keep full in there against needing to take drugs without running the faucet and waking up the neighbors with clanking shuddering pipes or the sound of me choking in the pre-dawn.
Not that it’s necessary in broad daylight like this but old habits die hard. Sometimes they even outlive you.
See, it’s possible that one day a subsequent occupant of this apartment might also have an afternoon fever dream and stumble into the kitchen to spot an ordinary-looking…thing…like a brown dry oak leaf clinging to their bare foot. They’ll try like hell to shake it off but it won’t budge. Panic will ensue and they’ll assume it’s some kind of flashback or the bad fish they ate for dinner last night. They’ll medicate it away and pass out.
It will happen a few more times. They will mention it to the landlord who will say, yeah, the guy before you mentioned that would happen now and then and we never figured out where it came from. I’ll look for an exterminator who knows about these things. In the meantime stay hydrated. Try not to scream in the night if it happens. Try to hold on. Let me know if it happens again. If it keeps happening. If it happens more often. If it never ends.
They have quasi-flamenco shapes to throw…hands flexing like kids talking high-school Spanish in cold snap Arctic air.
Honestly, I think I do them better.
Do you recognize my gestures as being more authentic than theirs? Are mine quasi? Are theirs pseudo? Vice versa?
Ersatz hipster throwbacks, reading Lorcaesque poems to each other and pretending we’re not from Leominster, Massachusetts or Chepachet, RI.
I’ve known exactly one real hipster in all my time. He smelled awful from all those years of walking the walk. I showered him with my fawning admiration. It didn’t make him smell better.
I promise you, my fellow fakers, that this too shall pass. If it doesn’t so be it, but I think you’ll be glad it did.
I know
I think I am glad
that I think
it did.
Here’s a video of me doing up one of my recent prose poems.
I hope you enjoy it.
Redemption is a fickle beast; chooses its own schedule. It’s an animal hiding in a hollow log, or behind a 55 gallon drum rusting in the woods behind your home. You know it’s out there somewhere, but you can’t decide on what direction you should go to find it.
You stumble on it by accident. You flush it out from its hiding place. Perhaps it’s just had enough of you being stuck in misdeeds and mistakes for so long? Maybe it’s disgusted with you, fed up with your wallowing.
One way or another, it’s out. From out of nowhere an audience appears and applauds a redemption arc, a wrong colored rainbow that springs up from where you are standing as the animal — a fox, a trendy red panda, a binturong —
bounds away from you.
You are left behind trying to classify your Redemption, give it a place in your personal taxonomy.
Don’t just stand there. Start running, let the nature of the next steps decide what to call it.
“It’s too late, she’s gone.”
I watch an old clip on YouTube. Clapton without Duane on the Johnny Cash Show, country-blues riff on Brownie the legendary Stratocaster that sold for half a million dollars decades ago.
“It’s too late, she’s gone.”
I watch Bobby Whitlock on furious background vocals and piano. I watch killer Jim Gordon on drums. Carl Radle on bass, probably on smack as well — and Clapton on Brownie and blues and Patti Boyd and yes, heroin. Thinking of Johnny Cash offscreen in a ruffled shirt.
“It’s too late, she’s gone.”
I’m digging the song, if not the era. Nostalgia is lost on me. I like living in the moment and half or more of the people I have known are dead and don’t live in that moment or any moment now.
Classic rockers are good, are bad. It takes all kinds to make a moment. This is a moment I am making by myself in the living room before dawn — Jim Gordon is dead, Carl Radle is dead, Johnny Cash too. We do still have Whitlock. I try to pretend we don’t have Clapton.
My guitar hand is gone but my nostalgia for it needs to be kept at bay.
Sunrise coming, this hemisphere’s feeling so cold, feels like the world closing in.
Tell me it’s not too late.
Well, I’m here — who have expected that I would have made it to Heaven? Here I am, though. And it’s just as it’s been described. Clouds, pink light, music from an unseen source. And yes, angels. All with two eyes, all with two wings, white gowns, plucky but serene demeanor.
Welcome to Heaven, they say without speaking directly. Flashing Morse code off their haloes. Communicating without words, communicating nonetheless clearly and directly. Welcome to Paradise.
As time goes on, I notice I’m not becoming an angel; the angels I’m seeing seem to have changed a bit — still with the wings, still the gown, still the demeanor but less serene, more morose. In fact, they’re often stock still and weeping, or twitching and wailing. The music of Heaven goes on with an undertone of that.
I’m no angel. Heaven’s full of people-shades who thought it would be joyous fun and they’re finding out there’s a death-sameness to it that gets to you after a while.
As it is, I’m holding it off. No desire to succumb to this numbing joy. Holding it off with a Jerry Jeff Walker song. “If I could just get off of this L.A. freeway without gettin’ killed or caught…” The sad wings of sad angels, beating guitar time as I hum along.
The floor is always lava. My feet are always burning. No one ever knows what’s happening. No one else feels the heated floor, the measured melting steps I have to take.
I’m going to tell of what that’s like, but not today. Today I have no choice but to keep it to myself because to explain it I’d have to open up and let the flames out of my lungs to which they’ve risen — up my legs the fire goes and there is a burning within.
It’s clear to me that some people like to read about the burning. It’s clear to me that I’m their choice to feed them the fire. It’s clear to me that they think my fire can counter theirs. It’s clear to me they are wrong.
The floor beneath me is always lava, and with that awareness as public knowledge now, I will keep my mouth as closed as I can until I can no more.
I finished my term today and when I stepped out the door afterward I looked up at the sky and thought about that being a form of graduation. Reflected on what I’d learned. Tried to choose a life’s work. Tried to think about who I wanted to be.
I finished my term today and the final grades are in. I seem to have passed all the critical tests, the crucial exams,
the certifications for the New Life. I looked up at the sky and reflected on what I was supposed to do — what shone upon me now, what I attracted unto my self under the grand roof of Heaven.
I finished my term today and realized I had no idea what to do next. Reflected on direction, considered standing still for all the rest of time. Instead I looked up and began to rise. Ceremonial to the end. The writer of ritual endings. The knife wielder, my hands moving above my head. The only tassel to toss is the one on the scabbard of the athame.
This is how a long semester ends — uncertainty and a fall back into superstition.
This is how I discuss my lost youth. This is how the aged degenerate.
This is how it’s done. This is how we do it.
The first step is to take the list out of its resting place in an old fashioned desktop tray of dark wood which sits to one side of where one would normally place what they were writing. Writing comes second. Comes after the list. Lists of any sort must come first.
As one goes over the list, checking off (with small relief) boxes of those items which are complete and fretting over incompletions and forgotten or delayed or avoided ones, one begins to think of what should be next on the desktop; what should be centered after the work of checking items on the list and becoming desperate over that which is left unchecked is complete.
One begins to make another list of writing needed for one’s ultimate completion. One then goes back and adds the monitoring of this list to the first list. One must be sure to add the second list to the inbox. And now there are two — the list of things to do before writing, and the list of things to write once you begin to write.
One’s pen has become now empty of ink. One should add getting ink, or choosing new pens, or thinking about pencils over pens (one now needs a new list of pros and cons) and what of using a typewriter versus a computer? Making a new list now: writing instruments, technology…the lists must have formal titles. One needs the skill of titling to become a writer. Are there tools, are there workshops, are there blog posts and opinions — fountain pen or ball point, Mac or PC? What of using a gerund in the title? What of the capitalization and punctuation wars?
The second step is to die with lists upon lists to be shoveled into one’s grave. One will lie upon them for eternity. One will be so comfortable at that point. One will sleep very well on the pile of intention — so soft, like feather snow, like words one never pronounced but only dreamed of inventing for others to marvel over and snuggle with.
Dark Matter 