The following two poems were read at the Gay Pride Celebration 

in the Ellington Room on June 23rd 2023. 

Confessions of a Town Crier

 

I was 6 the first time I cried at the cinema. 

I wept so hard the sobbing impaired my vision, 

so hard that my poor mother leaned over 

and asked if we should leave.

She thought I was unhappy, but I wasn’t.

Not at all. 

The minute the movie was over 

I wanted to feel whatever that was 

all over again.

 

So began my love affair with 

crying amongst strangers in the dark. 

I don’t mean being reduced to tears,

because that’s no reduction.

Crying for art is an honor. 

It’s applause with mucus and salt. 

I suppose it falls to the actors themselves

to guide us away from any awkwardness

we might harbor over  their

dissolving us into tears.

The willingness to be vulnerable before the world:

a kind of ritual sacrifice.

Tears as holy water.

I’m thinking of that lone tear that Denzel Washington

releases as he’s whipped in “Glory”;

two centuries of exploitation in a rivulet 

of vicarious mortification.

  

Less and less we are attending

the cathedrals of crying. 

Instead, I fear we’re numbing ourselves. 

Even our lacrimal surrogates in Hollywood 

have been turning their backs on us

towards age-defying procedures that 

culminate in faces that can no longer 

approximate our sorrow. 

I see a crisis of deadening being passed down…

Why are we running from ourselves?

Evading the inevitability of emotional difficulty?

What if my mother had yanked us up that day

at “E.T.” and insisted that a boy inconsolably weeping

was somehow inappropriate? 

What other beauty would I have become dead to? 

What truths?

 

When my dog died I cried so loud 

I worried my neighbors might call the police: 

It’s a peculiar experience, crying that way: 

undammed, with your entire self, 

with everything in you, roaring out. 

If crying distinguishes us from the animals,

it also arouses the animal IN us. 

I didn’t know such a creature, 

a werewolf in my case, 

resided in there. 

Not a hulk but a hurt. 

You won’t find it on your “to do” list.

In other words you don’t access it. 

The wolf finds you. 

It proceeds to drag immense sorrow

through the tiny openings

of your nostrils, eyes, and mouth. 

Its release as healing as any peel of laughter.

Think of all that’s happened to us

in the last few years.

 

I think it’s the animal inside us that needs to speak now…to cry out.

IT’S waiting, ready for a mass howling. 

I know I’m ready, what about you?

 Never Give a Cat a Woman’s Name

 (for Clementyne)

My cat and I have agreed not to love each other.

It’s better that way. No really.

The very touch of her fur disturbs my equilibrium,

nothing should feel that soft 

and abruptly walk away. 

Eyes that seem to stare through you 

can hardly be trusted.

She’s got a face like a sarcastic Mona Lisa, 

there’s no telling what she’s thinking

at any given moment.

She whines about everything 

yet couldn’t care less what’s troubling me.

She doesn’t consciously overlook my problems, 

she ignores them. 

I bet Selfishness is her religion, 

the hell with all that’s holy.

She probably prays to her water dish.

She’s above wearing jewelry 

as she is her own accessory.

She sticks every landing like a gymnast 

executing a heist. 

She licks herself as if her whole body were an open wound.

The look in her eyes says: You did this to me.

Frankly I’m tired of putting her on a pedestal

because she always lets me know she couldn’t care less. 

I suspect she has many Gods, 

but I’m sure I’m not one of them.

God of sunlight on the floor. God of the insides of shoes.

God of sideways Trader Joe bags.

God of dark spaces. God of the red laser dot.

My GOD.

She wakes me every morning 

with an agitated call to arms.

I might as well have joined the army.

Bugles are more delicate than her barking orders.

So then why…WHY does my heart melt at the mere thought of her name.

My darling Clementyne.

 

                                        ~painting by Banksy                                     

My Own

Private

Alcatraz

(For Eric Moreland R.I.P.) 

i

My body is an island.

My skin, a stretch of sand.

My hair a tangled grass in wind.

My eyes, in search of land.

 

My nose, a trained cadaver dog.

My mouth, an unlocked door.

My lips conceal their teeth

like bones beneath a floor.

 

My tongue, a saltwater eel.

My throat, a secret tunnel.

My hands can sink or swim

while my fist can form a muscle.

 

My feet, good for standing ground.

My toes, the first to go.

My mind the next to follow

what my heart already knows.

 

ii

My body is a vessel.

My skin is watertight.

My hair, a signal flare.

My eyes, a glass for sight.

 

My nose keeps its own diary.

My mouth conceals what’s valuable.

My lips remember other smiles

since my own has long grown fallible.

 

My teeth are left to untie knots,

my tongue for tasting brine.

My throat’s now sore from crying out.

My hands best make a sign.

           

My fingers are for letting go.

My feet for flapping foam.

My toes for dipping into water

before braving the sea for home.

 

iii

My body is a lifeboat.

My skin, a watertight hull.

My hair a waving seaweed

reflected in the eye of a gull.

 

My nose reads this world

like a book my mouth recites

with lips wrapped round each word

so as to guide me to new heights.

 

My tongue has now a taste

for a solitude I’d never known.

My hands now ease into their prayers

though I know not where they go.

 

My soul was made for dreaming

with the intention of escape.

The fact that I‘m no longer prisoner  

leaves me free to reshape my fate.

 

5/2/23

 

 

                                       

                                        

                                                       ~painting by J.T. Thompson

The Hidden

Predicament

in the Living

of Every Day

 

“We do not see the world

 as it is, we see it as we are”.

                      ~Anais Nin

 

We pass certain thoughts like stones

most of which are hardly our own,

but instead, some coagulation of

narrative bits curated closer to home.

 

Our thoughts think themselves

with such a narrow sense of purpose,

they’re writ larger than life as they arrive

solely to help their thinker thrive.

 

We counteract mistaking the world

for ourselves by continuously doubting

our conclusions because uncertainty

of anything is to admit our infallibility.

 

In the mind’s effort to parse

the world, it inadvertently severs itself

from the full spectrum of beauty

which by contrast includes all strife,

tensing us from the tenderness of life.

 

Imagine reducing the unitary wholeness

of the vast universe by selecting one

tiny segment of it and calling it “I”

and narrating life in the role of “my”,

 

A delusional gulf gets created

between things as we think they are

and things as they actually are.

I doubt such a view can take us far.

 

Still, off we go mistaking the real world

we’ve made with our own thoughts

for the real world minus personal faults;

some shadows are born to cast a pall,

and the God’s truth is: that’s not all.

 

Evil and dysfunction or obnoxiousness

occur in proportion to how solidly

a person observes that his projections are

correct and aggressively acts toward that effect.

 

And so it goes: I think, therefore

I’m wrong. My wrongness falls on

someone else’s wrong thinking

leaving us both thinking wrongly

and because so few of us can bear

to think without taking action there

and doing only makes things worse,

I offer the following consoling verse:

 

Best to resist our version of others

as insightful as they might be

because we’ve an invisible axe to grind

and are too for or against to see

or not be biased or unentrenched.

 

Our solution is to deny ourselves

the comfort of always being the same;

one who arrived at an answer

some time ago but takes no blame

or has reason or chance to doubt it

because the world is full of sleepers

who eat, walk, and witness life

without a corresponding conscience.

 

 

04/24/23

 

     Cryptic      

(A Tryptic)

 

i

The body remembers

what happened.

A perfect burial ground.

The mind,

not so much,

busy as it is

with self-administering.

The heart grieves

the loss of each moment

only to keep

them suspended 

inside a jar

like so many

pickled eggs.

 

What do you suppose

weighs more?

A moment in 1975

in September

on a Wednesday

afternoon at 4:17

and 11 seconds,

or the one now whizzing

past like a telegraph pole

outside a speeding train?

 

A moment buried

safely in the earth

is a moment

that is sure to grow.

Expect

a new shoot

any day,

followed by a blossom

foreordained to flower.

 

Welcome to the garden

of buried delights,

each seed a holy relic,

a holographic snippet

containing the whole

of a life in

a negative image

of a positive moment

in time. Or vice versa,

as both will have

aged to perfection.

 

Just as a life well-lived

transpires from

grape to raisin to wine,

there’s a glory in the cellar

waiting to be imbibed.

By watering

what’s in stone

with our tears

we bring

back to life

hours made

of minutes 

and stand them upright

like turgid statues

to perform the play

of those we loved.

 

ii

 

Yes, a sanctuary

lies beneath us.

Or I should say: within.

Our bones form the cross

we see through stained-glass eyes.

Below that, a crypt

full of unused altars,

while no worshiping

they abide,

only prayers unfurled

from folded hands

anxious as a dream.

But don’t forget:

remembering is a discipline

and memory itself

a cathedral in miniature

recalled via one's

mental masonry.

 

iii

 

Where else will you find

a steeple underground?

A belfry beneath

where gather all

one cherishes and holds dear.

So, unsheathe the crowds

of cloaked

stone statues

inside this darkened room.

Tucked in a corner

sits an alabaster urn

ringed with celebratory dancers,

and inside that urn

the radiant smile

of imperfect youth. 

04/4/23

 

Poetry as the Soul’s Self-Diagnosis

“We write to taste life twice,

 in the moment and in retrospect.”

                                 ~Anais Nin

Rumi once wrote:

Sell your cleverness

and buy bewilderment.

I think I know why.

 

Yesterday on the television

a tornado

destroyed everything

in its path

as it meandered

willy-nilly

through Rolling Fork,

Mississippi.

Did you see

how objects

held out

no safety?

 

Inside the hospital

I, too,

am an object

ill at ease

in my body,

illogical in

my dreams.

My mind, its own

round the clock

news on channel 5.

 

Had it been possible

to be this strong

if my heart

had not been broken

in innumerable places;

a smashed clock

thrown against the wall

of youth,

or am I meant

to decipher

the timeless

with my own 

two hands?

 

This nose bleed

would like to

return me

to the sea.

Why keep

my blood

to myself

in so red

a world?

If everything flows

downward

toward

what's left

behind,

then why

all this

clamoring

uphill?

 

When my body

betrays me,

and it will,

I intend to

be my own

medicine.

Either way,

I am best

in small doses,

diluted

by intervals

of silence.

 

Meanwhile,

to the doctors

who misspend

days on end

trying to reconcile

the mystery of

my soul’s reveries,

I leave

this poem

at the edge

of a ruin.

 

03/28/23

 

 

                                                      Painting by Salvadore Dali

Confessions in the Sand

 

Marooned on the island of this moment

I sift through the debris of what came before,

artifacts buffed smooth by a million waves.

 

Here, poems brew like storm clouds on the horizon

despite beginning life in an empty sky, they are

determined to use this beach for their SOS.

 

This shore won’t keep my letters alive for long.

I know because I’ve seen things come and go,

so many true tries and false starts

blown open like pages of a diary in the sand.

 

It is an art making use

of the detritus of the departed.

I fashion a wire coat hanger

into a makeshift antenna

and try to contact the living.

Come in, Mother.

Do you read me?

 

Racked with a survivor’s irony,

I’m reluctant to covet a sole souvenir,

doubting as I do

that anything ever

belonged to me.

 

Island life is not without its pleasures

though joy is a rare sighting,

I cling to my grief because of its buoyancy;

the only logical response

to all I’ve left behind.

 

Dreams are now my source of travel.

Every dream is a foreign country, and

it’s true, they do things differently there.

 

I've learned to speak a language

made of rubble, shards of sea glass

and desire strewn like broken bric-a-brac

longing to be reborn

and take up life anew.

 

This moment’s island culture

is a microcosm

where prayer is still

preferable to sleep.

 

Will I ever get out of here?

Where else is there to go?

I will have to work to wake.

 

And so, I’m doing my pushups

on the beach until it hurts.

This is how I’m making

myself stronger.

 

I say a man’s sorrow

can move mountains

because the heart

is a muscle

that needs to ache

or better yet break

before it's made able.

 

03/03/23