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Dead Stop End
At the end of the lane
By the corner where
my grandparents lived
Was our fishing hole:
Tall reeds, mud, mosquitos,
Small estuary full of fish
My brother and I
Small, new-boned
On bicycles with our pail & poles
Every summer in the warm afternoon
The finest days of boyhood
The turbulence of our home
Forgotten for a few hours
A chance to bring back
An achievement of small bluefish
In our mother’s frying pan breakfast
Those summers now distant
Our mother gone
Father’s fish-fertilized garden
Now with a new owner
I grow guilty now on bright summer days
A sin to waste indoors but here I work
The waters unfished
And I think of my brother
In his own turbulent house
Occasional phone calls now
Our father’s futility echoes
In our conversation
I talk about the present
He talks about the past
And the angers return
Like the wind that kicks up
When the clouds come
To still the bluefish hunger
And leave us to stare
At each of our idle bobbers
Red and white orbs
Lolling and taunting
Not even a nibble
Standing silently
Mud deep
Not wanting to go
Not yet
The fish will start biting
Again
Maybe
But they don’t
We cast our regrets into that water
Empty handed today
Nothing to show for our time
But the rage in the throat
The hung up phone
The silence
We don’t fish together
Anymore
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Notch
People like to say “kick it up a notch.” And they tend to apply that phrase to just about anything with a variable bandwidth. However not everything has notches. So this doesn’t work. It is an unreasonable expectation of notch. However sometimes it’s a matter of degree, so we describe that. Example: scootch it up a skosh. Now people don’t typically say skosh anymore because it sounds pretentious. It is pretentious. However it is perhaps more useful than notch. You could also, perhaps, scootch it up a smidgen, but that hardly sounds optimistic. Incremental improvements are rarely prescribed by Americans. Also some guidelines: you can scootch a skosh but you can’t skosh a scootch, and you certainly shouldn’t smudge a midget, because that is cruel and also politically incorrect. And you certainly cannot kick a midget up a notch, because that’s really insensitive and again, no discernible notches. For clarity, it is suggested that one merely try other forms, such as raise the ceiling, even though people say this outdoors and all the wildlife creatures are like, um, what is a ceiling? And we’re like, hope you never see one mister chicken cuz then you’re dinner. And when we get you in the oven, we are going to kick it up a notch. With just a skosh of salt, smudged gently. And then we’ll scootch over and serve you to our friend. The midget.
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Words for a painting
for Dan
When first man heard the bird sing
He felt something
Then wrote the first poem with his voice:
Ugh.
Then drew the bird on the cave wall
Using burnt bone, spit, dust and blood
To describe the feeling of the sound
The cave wall painting was the answer
To the birdsong’s question
But I always thought
the painting was the question
What is it
what does it mean
what should I say about it
Later write down the words
Maybe there are already words in the painting
It is modern it has words inside images
Announcing metaphors providing clues,
For now the birdsong is words:
each tweet and bleat a color
Inside the labeled numbered frame
The title: “Echo of Mockingbirds”
Imagine now the bird perched and centered:
It looks at the painting
Recognizing something in it
Which expresses mockingbird feelings:
Caw.
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The Doors as Failed Seduction Strategy, part 2
YEAH!
Yeah? Oh hi I’m Cheryl. I work at the bank you go to and I’ve seen you there sometimes…
COME ON, COME ON, COME ON, COME ON
NOW TOUCH ME, BABE
Wow you get right to the point don’t you? I’m not used to being this direct, but yes I suppose I’ve had a little crush on you ever since…
CAN’T YOU SEE THAT I AM NOT AFRAID?
Well you certainly weren’t afraid when you barfed into the deposit slot. I told Mr. Grimsby, he’s my boss at the bank, that you are an artist and I’d take care of those deposits. And no one called the police after your manager gave him some money…
WHAT WAS THAT PROMISE THAT YOU MADE?
Promise???? Jim Morrison we just met. Just now. It’s Cheryl, from before.
WHAT WON’T YOU TELL ME WHAT SHE SAID?
Who? Kim? I just work with her. She’s more of a Beatles fan. So when Paul McCartney comes in and says he’d like a spot of tea, she gives him a cookie. Kim is actually kind of boring.
WHAT WAS THAT PROMISE THAT YOU MADE?
Jim Morrison, I just work here. But I always keep my promises. Again it’s Cheryl, from before.
NOW I’M GOING TO LOVE YOU
Really? Awww I never expected that. I wasn’t sure if you noticed me, because honestly you just seemed to be looking at the pictures on the wall and talking to yourself. Wow! Love! That’s very nice Jim Morrison.
‘TIL THE HEAVENS STOP THE RAIN
Gee. Poetry. That’s really nice. Hi. My eyes are up here. You really are a rascal Jim Morrison. My Jimmy. This is nice.
I’M GOING TO LOVE YOU
I know. You just said that. Wait, are you talking to me? It’s me, Cheryl, from before. You’re in a savings bank.
‘TIL THE STARS FALL FROM THE SKY
Or you know, we could get something to eat. I’m about to take my lunch.
FOR YOU AND I
Do you like hummus? We sometimes go to this place. And I think we could use a place to talk. This is happening so fast.
COME ON, COME ON, COME ON, COME ON
NOW TOUCH ME, BABE
I think I need to call my mother. She knows about these things.
CAN’T YOU SEE THAT I AM NOT AFRAID?
Yes I think we have established that. Wait, didn’t you just say this? I’m worried about you Jim Morrison.
WHAT WAS THAT PROMISE THAT YOU MADE?
You keep going on about this. I’m not sure you’re listening to me. It’s Cheryl, from before.
WHAT WON’T YOU TELL ME WHAT SHE SAID?
Ok, I’ll just say that she saw what you were wearing, and thought you were just another dirty hippy. But I told her, no Kim, he’s sensitive, he’s an artist. You have to believe in him or else he’ll just get drunk and angry. That’s what I said. Then you barfed.
WHAT WAS THAT PROMISE THAT YOU MADE?
Lunch. That’s all. It wasn’t even really a promise. I just thought since we’ve been talking, and it’s about 12:30. I guess you’re pretty busy being famous and all. It’s ok.
NOW I’M GOING TO LOVE YOU
It’s easy to say though isn’t it? If you only knew how I felt. Well, right now it’s a bit confusing and jumbled up inside. Maybe we should just get pizza.
‘TIL THE HEAVENS STOP THE RAIN
You really only have this one line though. Is that all you ever have to say? Yeah, I guess when you’re a big star and you’re wearing those tight leather pants, meaningless metaphors about weather patterns is all it takes. I’m going to need a bit more to go on though. I just got my own apartment, and my mother told me there would be men like you.
I’M GOING TO LOVE YOU
When? I think I should check my horoscope. I should probably be more cautious with my heart. This always happens to me! I’m such a fool.
‘TIL THE STARS FALL FROM THE SKY
I mean, it’s sort of apocalyptic, don’t you think? Does the world really need to end? I was just hoping for a small house in Ronkonkoma.
FOR YOU AND I
Well it sounds nice. But do we even have the same goals? I hate to question everything Jim Morrison (Kim says I always do this!) but this is all happening so fast.
STRONGER THAN DIRT
What??? Are you even talking to me anymore? Where are you going? I thought we were talking. It’s me Cheryl, from before. Oh no….NO! Don’t go near that deposit slot Jim Morrison, don’t do it! And…..he barfed again. *sigh*
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The Wall Street Journal, 1989
In my early days at the newspaper
freshly shaved necktie-choked
I would lean into the morning
cigarette in hand, bad coffee
spilled carelessly on the paper
and dream of the world
Locked to the desk
telephone ringing
taking messages sending
faxes of urgent matters
then daydreaming
I wondered how I got so lucky
After all, they had given me a desk
a computer, paper to write on
Why would I wait until 5pm
to write my thoughts?
To illustrate in words
the paintings I was making
in my mind? Still hungover,
the newness of this moment
delivered from childhood
To ignore the moment
would have been disservice: a sin
When else would I be 26?
When else would I know these things?
To be trussed up in this garment
Wanting escape and women and drink
and music, in a place of cold white
cleanliness and perfect order
My mind ran wild.
Outside, perfectly calm.
The phone: ring ring.
My voice polite, thinking
of mountains like girls hips
The distant honking of taxi cabs
Their orchestras singing in words
Why I was there, why I was anywhere
I wrote it down.
South Orange, NJ
22 May 2025
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July 4
Thomas Jefferson’s slave children
were freed when he died,
without fireworks, left as found
50 years after the Declaration,
1826.
They escaped the home
which was not theirs where
He was buried, unmourned.
July 4, 2017,
The telephone proclaimed
my father had died,
Face down at home in his underwear
Half-empty vodka bottles nearby
Gleaming independently
in a home I had never seen
On a proud American morning
in Fort Lauderdale
We grew up in a one-story house
Squeezed into shadow forms
Along the palisades of his self-pity
There were rules to his temper
Cotton to pick, songs to sing,
Dumb waiter duties to perform
After he left we did too,
To the sound of my mother beckoning:
Come home from the unkind world
Fewer hours yet the greater to endure
So we sang the faraway words,
Disconnected and blanched,
Umbilically tethered to her loneliness.
Later, she died too.
Twenty years passed.
Twenty rounds of fireworks.
Twenty failed attempts to escape the house.
Then one day the declaration was read:
Our former president
Fallen still in his own sick
Was buried in his colonial underwear
Others testified to his significance
While I slipped away, grinning.
I was free.
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Mount Freedom
A mountain cannot be free
It stands there naked,
the upthrust
arrowhead shot
from the first word of time,
forged over centuries by volcano,
endless rains, the thirteen centuries
under heavy seas, its inner core
forged with memories of salt,
its air gaps of broken rock,
root systems cut by ancient trees
now extinct. those trees were free
freedom is only granted
to mortal things
this mountain called Freedom
cannot withdraw into the sleepy
ever-after of the carbon-based
imagination: mortal experiences
this mountain cannot have,
it can only endure
all the rest around it, washed away
what remains is the stubborn, heavier thing
the defiant exhibitionism of an arrogant planet
boasting of its unique gift of light and waters and beings
it points out at Neptune and Jupiter to mock
Even our dead things contain life
We living who have self-knowledge
Can give names to dumb rocks
Mount Freedom:
has a river beside it
has new trees
never looks downward
remains
Elk rut in its shade and bear offspring
Who then experience the wolf,
Leaving bones in the snow
Young elk wrapped in spruce leaves
Later burned by lightning
Enrich the soil of the farmer,
Who will later hunt the wolf
Inside the mountain is the story
Of the birth of the end of time
Long after you and me
But until then this mountain
cannot be free
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Chuck Berry Haiku
Go! Go Johnny Go
Any Old Way You Choose It
In my calaboose
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A Day That Rains
It is a day that rains.
It rains all day, then
it rains all night.
And then,
after that,
it rains some more.
The plants will grow,
you hear them say.
Oh yes they need this.
But you know the plants
will grow anyway.
The world is balanced
on base ambitions.
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They all go
Your parents desert you
Your friends desert you
Your lovers desert you
Even the weather
You have seen the desert
The place of leaving
No one there
Except you
Saying no
I deserted them
I myself am here
Deciding who leaves or stays
I can do not else
And perhaps someone will
Come back
With the baptismal water
Of arrival, of life
To sit here and talk
Laugh at the absent ones
Where are they now?
You cannot say
They never call
But now you are here
And they douse you
But you do not drown
You come back to life
And then they go
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UNBROKEN
You were broken already
it was not what they told you
oh no you were not perfect
forget your mother
she lied, though she could
not herself understand
having borne her own feelings
while becoming unbroken
too late in the end to tell you
just as the moment arrived
her enlightenment trapped her
as the silence freed her
two eyes gazing at you
through a polyhedron
as morning light caressed
the snowy hilltops above
her new home
unbroken, perfect.
for Oonah.
2 March 2024
South Orange, NJ
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Bushy smile
The name is familiar.
a tiny headline
from a distant shelf of memory,
his warm bushy smile, happy.
Here I am, it says. Meet me.
One of the People You May Know
You not know but knew.
Was it sports? The smoking corner?
A shared friendlessness? Unlikely.
We were not alphabetized like the others.
At 16, acquaintance is more than
Casual, less than friendship.
The airless virginity. Math club.
There he smiles, tenured, retired,
The surname like an old song.
He went back.
Mathematics degree from an Ivy.
“Former teacher at”
The place you met. The place of other selves.
Oh no not there. High school.
Were we not all trying to escape?
Was it just me?
Back then it was all I believed in,
Aspiring from the blackening solitude
Toward whatever acts of goodness,
Whatever contribution I might
Author to the winds and the streets
would not be there
That I would leave, at a brisk run
From that flat brick enclosure
With grey windows and absurd blue piping
Employing gaggles of outcasts
From the 1950s, land of corporal punishment
And negro genocide and women
In their place. To teach us.
I hated it there. Every night my father
Scotch in hand, condemning
His co-workers and me.
Yes he worked there.
Yes I knew their secrets,
The older boy two doors down
Less than bright, later joining
the History Department.
I later rejoiced at their neighborhood funerals.
Why go back? The world awaited,
With its open spaces and indescribable
Mountains and valleys and women
And drink and music and it being
Not there. The anywhere that is
Everywhere.
Regrets can be wonderful things,
Especially in others.
I see this ancient face
And know now,
It was not friendship.
It was no memory.
Nor anyone else’s.
He taught math,
Enough for him to correct
The incorrect numbers
And assemble within minds
A cold trigonometry
For lack of anything better
With which to produce
A bushy smile.
South Orange, NJ
1 March 2024
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They Say
healing, they say,
begins when
the pain stops
or subsides
and I have subsided
though healing is a perspective
she once said the best way
to get over someone is to
get under someone else
for a time this stuck in my ribs
like a dagger memory
why the ribs? It wasn’t the ribs
it was somewhere in my throat
the part where the music comes from
the not singing is the healing
they say
but what is life without singing
just healing?
I’m done with healing
healing is tedious sameness
to regain the same sameness
with her I was different
and I wanted to be different again
but not this way
a different different was what
I had in mind
the way that silence sounds different
right after the singing stops.
South Orange, New Jersey
30 January 2024
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A Greenland Viking
When I am, as I am,
bereft of sleep,
I meditate
on the wavelength
of the particle
I give it a value
I ascribe to the particle
some significance
borne of love
and particulate
work, as was done
on his father’s land
who, still at sea
broadcasts against
the wavelength
never to return
the icy coast
in its unyielding particle
becomes the unfarmed farm
naked before
the despised fish
who slowly, imperceptibly
creep up onshore
to the uneaten crops
waving their fruit
along the wavelength
of the particle
I give it a value
and heave myself
out to sea
South Orange, NJ
11 Dec 2023
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THE DOORS AS A FAILED SEDUCTION STRATEGY
HELLO I LOVE YOU WONT YOU TELL ME YOUR NAME?
Oh, Hi! Well gosh, my name is Cheryl.
HELLO I LOVE YOU LET ME JUMP IN YOUR GAME
Yeah, um, ok, I'm not sure what that means
HELLO I LOVE YOU....
Yeah got it. Cheryl. From before. You were just saying...
SHE'S WALKING DOWN THE STREET
Actually I'm right here Jim Morrison. I stopped walking when you, oh never mind...
BLIND TO EVERY EYE SHE MEETS
That's actually not true. I'm actually a nurse, and that really isn't something to joke about...
DO YOU THINK YOU'LL BE THE GUY
Hello? I'm clearly a female. Has this been a huge misunderstanding?
TO MAKE THE QUEEN OF THE ANGELS SIGH
Awww! That's actually very sweet. Thank you. Maybe I was wrong about you, Jim Morrison
SHE HOLDS HER HEAD SO HIGH
Well I try. Listen, that guitar player guy? Can you tell him to stop staring? Its creepy.
LIKE A STATUE IN THE SKY
A sky statue? I don't even know what that means.
HER ARMS ARE WICKED AND HER LEGS ARE LONG
I'm actually a nice girl. Cheryl, from before. Can you stop shouting?
WHEN SHE MOVES MY BRAIN SCREAMS OUT THIS SONG
I think I'm just going to go home. I thought that maybe, oh never mind. Pretty sure I'm not the reason and I could do with less screaming. Oh wait, key change.
SIDEWALK CROUCHES AT HER FEET
Um, that's weird
LIKE A DOG THAT BEGS FOR SOMETHING SWEET
I wish you would stop yelling. Wait...dog? What???
DO YOU HOPE TO MAKE HER SEE YOU FOOL?
Who are you talking to? Oh never mind, Jim Morrison. I feel like I've been caught up in your soliloquy. Yeah that's a fancy way of saying you're talking to yourself.
DO YOU HOPE TO PLUCK THIS DUSKY JEWEL
I should have listened to my mother.
HELLO
Enough already.
HELLO
Seriously though. Leather pants?
HELLO
Also don't think I don't know about your fat Elvis period that is right around the corner.
HELLO
You're just not a good listener Jim Morrison.
I WANT YOU I NEED MY BABY
You need your mommy and have daddy issues. No thanks.
HELLO
Listen it was nice meeting you. I'm going to go now. Cheryl by the way. From before.
HELLO
Ok. Bye.
Bye.
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The New
We would sit together like old men
polishing off another story about that time
when something happened and
you knew the ending because
I had already told you before but
tell it anyway you would say
I want to hear it again the
feeling I had the first time
So I would oblige you and
say the words with the same
rhythms and punctuations
adding a few pauses and possibly
a tangent about what I had thought since
that first time I told you and
you would laugh in the same places
I would laugh along with you
this method of communication
repeated again and again
this story or another
continually over years
the stuff of our life
the events and the time taken
to retell the events and that itself
becoming another event
something new.
When do we crack on toward
an unknown? Which empty
rooms are left to explore
and are we even interested?
It seemed that back then
our ignorance was what bore
us aloft and giggling mid-flight
even when we had that one night
and Bill didn’t make it home
we tell that one too
now and again
because Bill can’t himself
having left the story to
become another story
we cannot bring him back to life
but there within the magic of liquids
and memories sometimes
we can recall the time before
the time after the time between
and the event of his being and
our being and in this being
make it feel like something new.
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Louise
The English Department in the old building,
Brick and ivy, streaked windows, ordinary,
Was a sepulchre of old names of men
and women, former champions of
this field of study. And some still working.
You were one of them, though you remained
in the silence, like now.
Never announcing yourself with alcohol or suicide,
which was a disappointment
for us strictly obedient to the disobedient
misled by some extract of biography
not yet learned, that some morsel of information
was useless to the knowing of someone, even if
famously dead. So Berryman turned out to be
a self-centered jerk, then Sexton the martyr,
And poor Sylvia, whom we thought we knew best,
though I preferred the surviving husband, that rascal
who had knowledge beyond the words.
We were just children, agape with epitaphs.
17 October 2023
South Orange, New Jersey
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