This Is Your Life

Night takes you apart.

Morning repairs you.

If making your bed

and lying in it 

is the best medicine,

darkness is your doctor.

Tonight he’s a stranger,

tomorrow, a dead friend.

With your bed a hospital,

the only remedy  

is a discharge

and a return

to light.

Mind’s an open house;

every thought a guest.

You entertain angels

and devils with the same

willingness to please,

as if accommodation

were your salvation.

Tonight could offer

answers.

In night’s amphitheater 

the spectators gather:

the grade school teacher,

Mrs. Sherman,

the mother coifed by clouds,

the father gray as birch,

the teacher clutching an apple,

the best friend thumbing

through a book.

Yet all you can manage

is to make a fort 

in your father’s arms, 

each hand a foothold,

his mouth, a hollow

without a heart

decidedly

helping you

to climb.

No recurring dream

can spare us the repetition

of ordinary days. 

But here, nothing can happen

and everything will.

If dreams break the law

then a dreamer

is lawless.

Sleep brings no rhyme 

or reason, just free verse.

Your mouth, too slack 

to form a smile

speaks in fractured verbs.

Those you lost faith in

clamor for provocative words,

blatant bids for 

intransitory attention. 

When they speak, your

listening lets them in.

Were you on a bike 

going up Amsterdam

or was that a dream?

If you don’t understand,

how will we?

All you’re sure of is

you go into labor 

at the drop of a hat,

christening a cab

with your broken water,

elevating elevators

with delivery pangs.

A park bench adds only

insult to your beautiful

injury.

Standing in the checkout

of a grocery

timing your contractions

you make a break for it.

Ducking into a bank

to find 

your deposit refused.

Finally in the lobby

you give birth to a hare

with bloodshot eyes.

Try and remember.

Abandoned as an infant 

in a closed room 

with one open window,

you’re found by 

law enforcement 

whose flashlights cast

your first fairy

on the walls 

surrounding your crib.

Is this how

fairytales begin?

Orphaned until five

you learn becoming 

desirable is your best 

chance for survival.

Chased out of

your neighborhood

by bullies afraid

of your androgyny.

you escape out of

the clutches of

the insensitive

only to land

in a fire

held safe

(or is it captive)

by an alchemist’s retort?

Your adulthood will mean

in order to transmute

you will need to

transmogrify.

You take a job as 

a sex worker

knowing eventually

all scum rises

to the top.

You wed your opposite

in a marriage

of inconvenience,

two wrongs

destined to make a right.

Your guilt leads to priesthood.

But the dreams persist.

Each morning you wake,

an amnesiac struggling

to remember 

how to love.

9/24/21

 

P r i s m

Go into it.

Serve your sentence.

Don’t resist

the pain.

If you begin 

to sense

the suffering 

of life, 

you’ll awaken 

to a deeper 

reality,

a truer one.

Suffering smashes

to pieces 

the self satisfaction

of our 

ordinary fictions, 

causing

us to 

come alive 

in holy new ways.

To see 

more carefully,

to feel 

more deeply,

to be touched

by the world 

in ways we

had hitherto

meant

to avoid.

Now we are

nuanced,

with a reference

point

for all

the colors

we will

encounter;

in every cell

of our being,

we are sprung

fresh from

our

prisms.

09/20/21

 

~Newest Posts Appear Following "I Will Be Your Guide"~

I Will Be Your Guide

“Let the beauty we love

 be what we do.”

                    ~Rumi

To say this was

built in 2021

isn’t quite true,

being that the

man who built it

was himself

on loan

and may

be measured

only by what

he has done

with what

was availed

to him.

From this

vantage point 

we can see

how the abuse 

over time was

effected by

thought, word, 

and deed

as he attempted 

to be more

valuable than he

misbelieved 

he was not, 

but how he

himself resulted

in becoming

the very feeling

we are now

receiving

on finding

ourselves at rest

within the ruins

of someone who

felt he must

make of himself

his own

work of art.

Here, it is possible

to witness the history

of all his striving.

See how the arch

barely stands half

dappled in irony 

by morning light.

Notice how 

the sunlight

plays on the

amputated arm,

in tandem with 

the subject’s

headlessness;

a statue too 

stilled by time’s 

passage

not to try

and still 

speak.

Which one of you

thinks this stone

is marble?

Anyone?

Well, I can tell

you all manner

of stones

have been known

to give themselves

away in hopes

of being made

more useful.

8/31/2021

 

Memoirs

of a

Well-Meaning

Antagonist

This is the story of a man 

who tried to sit quietly in a room

and failing miserably, made

trouble for himself and others

by believing that “doing” 

something, anything, all the time, 

was the way to live 

a proper productive life. 

Intent on being generous he began

giving money to assorted vagrants

he saw living on the street

who then managed to save and raise

enough funds to buy firearms

and rob every liquor store

within an 8 block radius.

There were 4.

On hearing a neighbor was dying

he went to the local parish

to ask the preacher to pay a visit

possibly to perform last rites, 

resulting in the ill man

infecting the clergyman,

sickening both he and his wife

and killing their infant son Stuart.

Reading every self-help book

he could get his hands on 

to build up his confidence,

the man began lecturing

a neighbor who he felt was not

living up to their potential,

prompting the tenant to overdose

on 40 phenobarbital tablets,

leaving behind a note confessing

utter shame for having failed others.

Determined to help a hoarder

he met at a suicide center

after being invited back to meet

her tabby cat, easily concluded

that owning too many things

was like owning nothing of value

and offering to help bring order 

to her clutter, was promptly 

told to go F%#* himself

as she preferred living

in harmony with her

own eclectic

yet happily 

lived-in mind.

Needless to say

he was not invited back.

Hoping to be of assistance by

giving back to his community

he volunteered at a soup kitchen

twice monthly, dressing down

so as not to offend the poorest

amongst him, only to drop a full ladle

of steaming hot minestrone

scalding a homeless woman’s foot

so bad she worried a limp

for weeks.

Then one day

convinced he could fix

what ailed a fellow co-worker

who was not meeting his quota

and not following proper protocol,

but by now having figured out

no good turn goes un-stoned

and that its best to leave 

well-enough alone,

sat down on a rock

beneath a tree

in leu of a breeze

and held his tongue.

09/15/21

 

Time Passes and Other Fables

Lying in my bed before being 

dismantled by morning light,

I untangle myself from a thousand lies.

None of them mine. 

Dispensing with maps & calendars

I do what every dreamer does, 

defy the horizontal

for more vertical climbs. 

My best thoughts arrive

as a mockery of assumptions.

Awakening will involve

seeing my confusion more clearly.

Every night an egg dispenses with it’s shell.

Dreams, even the most casual ones, inseminate.

This bit of earth, of land, of space,

is not a confessional.

It’s a crucible. I clear away debris 

hoping for a glimpse of your face 

peering out from some felonious past;

an actor awaiting an entrance 

that may never come.

What are you waiting for, 

when we both still have 

so many lines left unspoken?

But the man I was, you were,

 has fallen away

and the one we’re to be 

has taken his rightful place

as if we were a story 

the other meant to tell.

I am a discarded philosophy,

an abandoned body

requiring a re-thinking 

in order to return

my heart to its original chaos.

So let us be strangers who agree on the same truth,

and as time passes, we’ll move on to other fables.

09/13/21