Sun burning
the right side of my face,
cold on the left.

I’m awake this morning
with furniture gotten from others
all around me —

nothing I bought, all of it either given
or lent; here after it served its purpose
for someone else.

I am here without
apparent purpose for another or myself;
a drifter, left behind.

Sitting now on a borrowed chair
and working on a twelve year old computer
while wondering if it will be enough.

Sitting on a borrowed chair; half burned,
half frozen; typing on an
old keyboard.

Until then, I tell myself. I must do
this work until then and someone else
will take it on.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
onward,
T

The screen says,
“Add a post.” But
I can’t write a damn thing,

except for this and perhaps
the next phrase, and
then the next.

None of it is
a poem, no matter
how much I wish it was —

none of it matters,
as does a poem when captured
in midnight and rushed

to a page. When one
reads such a poem
afterwards, I sit back

and sigh, “there it is;
there’s what I
meant to say,”

and then I seize my guitar
and play clumsy notes,
my hand stumbling.

I wrote something, though.
It is not a song. It is
a poor sort of poetry

laden with a lack of music.
I sit back and sigh. There
will be another chance

to get it right. There will be
(likely) another poem, a second
from now, an eon from now.

The poem yet to come
is the only poem
that keeps me alive.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T

So. I let go
the bad eye, the good hope,
the indifferent falso banner
of triumph and defeat —
let them off and left them sitting
by the tracks, waiting
to be lifted by another —

and I went on, singing
uncertainly at first
but more and more surely
as time passed;

although I did not know
the words at first
they came to me
first slowly then in a rush
so hard I stopped knowing
ahead of time anything
about what they meant
until after they tumbled
from my suddenly unfamiliar
tongue, lips, and mouth.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T

(apologies to Dave M)

Right now,
at a poetry reading,
everyone in the audience
is white. Everyone on the reading list
is white. Everyone, everywhere,
is whitey-white.

Right now,
at a poetry reading,
everyone in the audience
is white, and old. Everyone
is old and white and half the audience
is crippled and old, white and
disabled and old, whitey-white
cripply-crippled and moldy-old
and you are too
so it works for you.

Right now,
at a poetry reading,
the poets and the audience
are white-old-semi-messed up
and luminous with the heat
from their poems and the burning
their papers give off as they light them
on fire and worship the blazes
out of them, or they are glowing
faintly with the cold that’s coming
and they are passing strange people —
these poets, their audience,
their ordered world-view.

Right now
at a poetry reading
somewhere else someone else
is reading or declaiming
a poem or something like one
and it speaks of their sobriety
or establishes their fucked-up-ness
and they aren’t white or straight or whatever
and never wished that on themselves
or anyone else and the manners
the world demands are not clear
and someone from the first reading
still wonders at a poem’s upbringing
and wonders why they are here.

Right now,
at a poetry reading,
a man wonders why he’s there
and thinks hard, so hard
about his cane and his lack of
empathy for anyone at the readings.
He’s not white, not not-white,
getting old, feeling young, only stroke-dinged
a little bit, not fading (he desperately
thinks about himself); he still dreams
about the dragons circling the walls
and the dangers of the wrong President
and the whiff of climate catastrophe
and on and on about his own lack of
empathy — didn’t he say that already?

Right now,
at a poetry reading,
an aging poet wrings his hands
and hangs his head.

I wish
I could write like this, I wish
someone would listen to me,
I wish for a future and a fury
to consume me and take
my poetry to heaven where
it will be consumed,
consummated, remembered.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T

Think there’s any Jesus
in the poem? Trust me:
there’s not.

Jesus is staying away from this
the way that once upon a time the fish 
on either side of the Red Sea learned to avoid 

their former space in the divided waters,
no matter how they longed to be
with their loved ones on the other side.

The dry land between them,
the lane of separation and escape,
offered them nothing while it offered others 

everything. But don’t assume
there’s any Moses
in this or any of my poems.

Deliverance is for the future
and this poem
is in the moment.

No Jesus, no Moses.
Just you and the fish
wondering what’s happening.

Me too, friend.  Me too.
All this Biblical stuff,
the walls of water on either side.

Whose poem do you want it to be?
It won’t be the one I wrote.
Whoever you find there sneaked in

when I wasn’t looking, I swear.
You know how water distorts.
Those fish could be anyone.  

Don’t be fooled. 
That’s how I wrote it.
Anyone could be in here.

Morning work:
cat kneading on
its daily blanket,
now and then
anguished or delighted
but finally completed
work from me.

If no one ever
sees any of this I know
at least one cat
is happy.  The blanket 
might not know it
but it has played its part
as well as it always has.

As for me: what do I call
the feeling when some work 
of mine is complete
and it was misery,
it was ecstasy or outrage
or all three and more beside:
or more to the point
what do I call the feeling
of it possibly being
the Last or nearly
the Last One?

The cat is content,
and the blanket just is.
I’m driven to keep going
into their space and then
getting up and going
elsewhere into the day
without ever knowing if tomorrow
will be the same. 

Who will read this poem of blanket and cat,
anyway? Why should such compulsion
drive me? Am I the cat, 
simply assuming each day will be the same?
Or am I the blanket,
there when the routine is not my own?
Are all of us just the means
to a still-unknown end?