DEEP ANALYSIS

COUNTDOWN

TO SOLITARY WALKS

GLORIOUS HOURS

A DREAM OF A MOMENT

beauty, if it exists,
is young, still, an image

locked in time, captured
at rest, exposed to con-

quest, protected behind
glass, a dream of a moment

that sings, "this cannot
last." beauty if it exists

is born in the unconscious
present, yes, but lives purely

in the sentimental
past.

WITHIN

would that i could remain
among the clouds, sane just
a few moments more

but the air is cold and thin
and I am only up here visiting.
the earth far below is my home

full of warm air and family,
varied rancor and calamity and
so i descend sneaking a piece

of the vast indifferent sky
hidden safely within me.

BEST BURDEN

fatherhood is the best

burden i have

shouldered; we say

we raise children

but truth is we

carry them always

our hearts nearly bursting

from the strain, and just

when we set them down

they need back up again.

old people have been known

to shrink under the weight of this

glorious

unrelenting

perfect

pain.

WHERE IS EVERYWHERE

MAYBE YOU HAVE A PROBLEM

WHOLE

the shorts were shorter then

and my chicken legs

stuck to the bus seats,

flesh spreading out

like shiny cutlets ready

to be dragged through flour.

“i’m fat,” I thought.

“you’re not,” mom said.

i started banging my head

against the bus windows

on the ride home, wanting pain
to prove i could take it. 

older now i no longer seek

to suffer and when i break

i know enough about looking

whole to fake it.

TIME

when we talk about loss
we invent things that were

once here, thought to be
possessed, yet now

somehow
gone, left.
fortunes.
spouses.
hope.
innocence.

behind every great loss
is an illusion of time

that never erodes,
always arrives.

nothing can be
owned, least of all

time.

ESCAPING

more and more my core i tries
to find someplace to hide as the body

survives a noisy bazaar of pains
and mismatched parts, this shoulder

firing false alarms down that arm,
this old spine no longer aligned,

and degradation arises as cottony
constellations of suffering, emulsified

silver that whispers of my dark slide,
breath escaping from the inside.

DIFFERENT STROKES (1980)

my body went electric on me
in 1980 -- all that basement party
french-kissing and adam ant's

ambiguous dressing made my face
break out; i found the logistics
of making out distressing, soft

flesh pressing hard against my
shy insistent parts, the pounding
of our craven hearts, craving more,

surrounded by low art and high
hopes, the groping pleasures of
dark places i'd never felt before.

DAMN

"nothing you write before
40 is worth a damn."

10 yrs past yr damn dead-
line, get a load of me now

still writing, still
don't know how.

1980

who expected j.l. and j.r. 

to disappear, shot down dead 

in an uneasy year? a cliffhanger 

and a bed-bound bohemian

brought together by bullets, 

fictional and delusional as pac-man

and post-it notes began to stick, 

predicting pokemon go and facebook: 

YES! we believed in a winter miracle

although NO, we would not go to moscow, 

and so we iced summer dreams 

of soviet gold while deciding reagan 

was not too old; we sentenced a killer clown 

to death and suffered saint helen’s
 

fiery breath. as macaulay culkin was birthed

in manhattan, stuart goddard was reborn as adam.

FEVER DREAMS

fever dreams of bees and teeth
scattered across the bedspread

fading light and ragged breaths
rising from the deathbed

airtight calls and all-in hugs
climbing stairs and waiting chairs

pulling close and fading fast
nowhere left, cannot last

gathered love
rise above

never gone not
coming back.

AFLOAT

you are an oil slick
tucked in the corner
of a perfect pool dug in-

to the hillside of a Costa
Rican mansion. the noise
of construction rises from below

your vacation, as your mother looks down
from the balcony, counting your beers with love
and a swirl of toucans, buzzards, and monkeys above

disrupts the monstrously blue sky.
triumph and loss commingle
and the ineffable imperfection of life

lands from on high
and keeps you

down no matter how
you try to fight, rise, deny.

HEFT

our hearts beat most meaning-
fully but a few times --
born, in love, fluttering just before

death, sustained by the unseen
humility of breath, weighed down
always by mortality's obscene heft.

DIEHARD

i’m ashamed

how attached

i am to my image –

how slowly i pass 

by windows and mirrors,

post all those posed moments 

online, engage in constant self-

evaluation: how’s the jawline?

i can see stark focus is no longer

my ally. i’ve become better off

touched up like an aging celebrity:

and let's face it,
my only diehard fan is me.

WHEN YOU FINALLY COME OUT

as a poet you may lose friends
not to mention the respect
and trust of other men. oh,
fear of verse is real, poem-a-phobia
so palpable you might feel
like an electric eel: the mass of
men flee from sentiment and
seek spaces less public
to drown their gloom.

THE APOLOGY

sunrise is
the apology
the earth makes
for sleepless nights,
the return of grace
to a world endlessly
turning away
from itself, hiding
from the truth.

THAT'S FLYING

mid-flight in your fever
dream you decide to pop
up and say hello to the chap
smirking in the cockpit

wearing pilot's clothing.
lurking there your fear arises
as you surmise he has no flight plan nor
more than a cursory knowledge

of aerodynamics. granted, he has some
great stories, and he's nice enough
to pin plastic wings through your shirt,
breaking the skin. bleeding

you plead with him to land.
"it's plain to see we are nearly
out of gas. "the stewardess
has free beer," he replies.

"go back to your seat,
the movie is about to begin.
and when it's over someone will be by
to tuck you in."

"we're dying," you say.
"that's flying," says he.

I'M FINE

as a kid when it comes
to risk you require
a safety net, soft
limits on damages,
nobody needs to die
just yet. you get

older, hit the hard high
ground of mortality: nobody
lives through this. give me
the car keys, i haven't had enough
to drink, we are all going to
die anyway. hope-
fully not today.

FRANTICALLY (for Nick Zeckets)

younger, i was a fort-
builder, hunkered down
in doddering bunkers
made out of blankets and old

boxes; constructing solitude within
which i could imagine myself
the lord of something far
larger, a new world order
 
absent bed times or neighbor-
hood borders. now i find myself
a desk-dweller, a free-time hoarder,
stuffing novels inside notebooks

frantically
growing older.

SLACKER

are we to apply ourselves
with laser focus
or drift though life
lacking aim and purpose?

i'm not sure it matters.
i choose the latter.

ILLEGIBLE

my sons rise Monday
mornings creaky with complaints --
school's cold comfort
registering with the chill
of illegible potential.

(photo by Gemini)

DUMB WAITERS

loss and more loss,
the matter of everyone
who mattered
rejoining the ethers, the rest
of us dumb waiters
conveying empty
thoughts and prayers.

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE

these days the suffering surrounds us
like a biker gang, cloudy thoughts
hanging like exhaust over the roar
of our pain. punches rain down

from toothless fools, fueled
by our actual sins, yet caught up in the false
violence that arises from the fear
of loss, an accumulation of tragedy

and the mounting burdens
of old age and empathy.

LESS

 

don’t apologize

for silence, that blank non-

space where the brain takes

a break to circumnavigate

the detritus of so much

stimulus. and don't say sorry

for being alone sometimes.

we go away to get 

sane again. solitude and silence

save us, the absence of pain

in the form of people and ideas,

a place full of less
where we can really listen

to all of the nothingness.

AROUND AGAIN

most of those vain
vagabond bombshells i chased in

youth wanted nothing to do

with my abstruse poetry,

its pimpled pain. now older,

shelled by the abuse

of less sensitive men, here 

they come around again.

ANIMAL NATURE

the first people you made out with

were defined almost wholly

by willingness – their hungry mouths and yours,

blessed, holy “whores” who pulled your

sexuality loose from its moorings, attacked

the mysteries of the body

and the boredom of religion.

you feared them then, for sure,

until years later you thanked God

they accosted you first, helped you over-

come your worst fears

and regain your lost,

innocent animal

nature.

(image courtesy of Ryan McGuire)

COLLEGE

i had no use

for knowledge.

i ran wild then curled into

the protective ball of the gifted child.

i preferred to under-

play my true potential,

rather than prove it

was illusion. hiding, everything

seemed so binary.

everything. i craved

grayness. i confess

i wanted to stay

in between

kid and adult,

dabbler and professional.

i wasn't ready to practice

a vocation. i was so young.

it was

awful.

it was

wonderful.

it was

college.

BORN (for Stuart Paul)

you wake up in a soapbox
derby car released

on life’s steep slope,

picking up speed

hurtling downhill,

no steering wheel,

for god’s sake

keep your head down
and be very still.

VACATION

what passes for work these days has us
up in the air too often, getting high
enough to hurry better, wi-fi minds
keeping us tethered to whatever
priorities can be pursued most
profitably. wanna get away?

EXPOSED

we call it business because
it really is just an abun-
dance of busy. keep moving, you,
musing isn't performance,
we do do-ing here, not
intellectual indulgence!

how badly all of us wish
we could drop the whole charade,
this seemingly real hand-
wringing parade past meaning-
less numbers and goals.

nobody needs any
more of those. tell you what,
only on this sale, we'll throw
in a brand new
garden hose. how naked
must ambition become
before it gets exposed?

START RUNNING AWAY

for years i was a squirrel
whose nut was engagement;
i would send your mixtape back
with track-by-track reactions. not that

you asked. i would dedicate this poem to you
to force you to read it. i would not give up
until you did, and then i would

blame you for your will-
ful refusal to parry.

i was a content
machine always chasing
the world, begging it
to marry me while burying it

beneath my neediness. mean-
while, over time, i unearthed
a better way: if you want someone
to run to you, better to
start running away.

LASSITUDE

i hate spoken word
poetry -- i prefer you

crack these puzzles,
sculptures standing in

for meaning. make your own
head music through your eyes.

i'd rather leave your ears
alone for now.

REMAINS

i have awaited my un-
expected death since the first
night i woke up to it.

i found myself giving up god
like a loose band-aid, stuck
in vain over a blister of doubt.

i chose pain over impossible
stories, inherited a prayer-
ful longing, and now

i cling to the kingdom
of worry that remains.

DOWN THERE

let go your dead-
lines, your expectations
and good intentions. be
as bad as happenstance
and wayward plans can
make you. and lo,

so shall you grow, your head
straining upwards toward pure
air, the better to escape
all the accidental manure
that always seems to accumulate
down there.

KITE

i am growing fear-
less as i get older.

all that i consume
eats away at me:

music, drink, the fucked-
up friction of attraction, chasing

satisfaction, everything becoming
fertilizer for the next

generation, sucked in
by mortality's churning,

relentless anonymizer.
try this: let go

your memories, your babies,
your wives and your wise ideas, go

fly a kite while there's still time
and wind and trivial string

to hold us aloft, tethered
to life, dragged up by love.

THE PAIN OF PARENTING

the pain of parenting isn't so much
personal, physical suffering. it's more
referred ache -- a blurry, persistent
stress that puts us on
sea-legs, makes us feel

like we awoke on deck
in a nightmare, a drunken ship-
wreck imminent, a portent of falling
that never comes true. our children
don't really grow up. they move in
and out of clarity, of being
able to answer what exactly

is wrong with you? with me?
and so finally together we
reconcile ourselves with this sad
fact: quite often it hurts
simply to be. life itself is
a queasy shared malady.

GROUND STOP

running through life and airports

we dream of nothing
more than a moment
to pause, an instant

to reflect on every other  
harried happenstance
that has left us

bereft of perspective, cut off

from our souls; we are like

tops staggering as we near

the end of all this

spinning, still straining to go

round, willing these final

revolutions before everything
stops and we go

to the ground.

OH YOUTH

oh youth, you ill-fitting
clothing, so quick to go
out of style. would I could
return to you to linger
an uncomfortable while.

OTHER DAYS (for Dave Wilber)

some days i happily put on
the sad sweater, play old

songs that have me  
staring out the window like a dog 

longing to be owned. other days
i feel the itch of despair

around my neck like a funeral procession, a receiving line of fleas
 

parading past the deceased and nothing,

not even music, eases the grip

of this melancholy; all sounds

become dull tones of surrender,

like the baying of a dreaming stray who's

had enough of waking up alone

legs flailing vainly to find whoever

and wherever once was home.