From the Lives of Giants

 

In any given room

our elbows poke

from windows

as our feet push

through floors,

bewildered at having

grown so large.

when all we really

want is to fit in.

 

But how can we

when our heads

butt against

every ceiling

as if we were

live oaks

growing alongside

mummified furniture?

 

Unable to see

all of ourselves

in a mirror,

nor others

take in our

entirety,

our bellies

full of

waste or treasure

and no longer in danger

of being loved

we quietly grapple

with the consequences

of all we've been

taught to want.

 

Night makes it possible

to dream some

spiritual leader

has died.

Unable to view

the body

we are forced

to take others

at their word,

leaving little

more than

a deep despair

at the disappearance

of something so

vital to

our meaning.

 

Now, everywhere

we turn

is unrelenting loss.

We become

little more

than soft machines;

gleaners of surfaces.

A cup of green tea

merely a begging bowl

to move the bowels.

 

Having reached

the age

where we leave

a trail of particles

in the places we

spend the most time,

and now that

our great loves

can only be seen

through a telescope,

we’re left hoping

the distant light

of constellations

will finally make

its way to us.

The alternative 

may well be

petrified minds

of stone.

 

But memories can

return unbidden

like acorns dropped

from a height,

falling to the floor

via a gust of wind

as invisible as

they are

unshakable,

each plunk

in the dark

a dance

between sound

and listener,

as if stars

were being plucked

out of the night sky

or cherry pits spat

from a careless mouth

to land and trundle

as lifeless

as pebbles

left for dead.

 

Who wouldn’t wish

one’s heart

open as a flower

or a choir boy’s mouth

singing Haydn’s Creation

with youthful abandon.

But in fact

we wrestle with

leaving any

door open

as other acorns

hit the planks;

closing the circle

between beginning

and end.

 

Our past; islands

we never tire

of exploring,

a place where trees

are named after

our father, where

we can only marvel

at the natural harmony

that rounds

each of us

entwined or not,

dead or not,

each single leaf

a love letter

written

in green ink.

 

One thought

will persist:

Which of us

will stay behind

to sing our last

thanks to God?

 

7/24/23

 

~A Circle of Two~

“Get out of your own way so the angels can fly through you.”

-Paul Vanderhoven

 

This poem is a séance

and I am its medium.

Come in spirit,

do you read me?

Rap twice for yes.

No need for no.

 

This is not

about the dead.

It’s about communing

with that which

makes life

worth living.

 

If nothing fully felt

ever really

passes away,

then why

shouldn’t it be

retrievable for

further parlay?

 

My first poem

was fashioned

out of simple

rope & cedar;

a go-cart made

from a child’s coffin,

its buggy wheels

pried off a pram,

the rope connecting

its front axial

were the reins

for gripping

in my hand

enabling me

to steer, as

childhood sped by

automatically

in first gear.

 

Each poem was

a polaroid

tucked in a book

for safe keeping,

a naked figure

in a window

not caring a hoot

who’s peeping.

 

If memories

could live apart

from the body,

then there’s

our proof

of having been.

So why not

offer them

sanctuary

by calling them

back again?

 

As in dreams

the soul defies

its coordinates;

a kite tugging

at a taut thread

in wind,

while between

madness and resolve

is as fine a line

as the space

between now

and again.

 

Think about it.

If a television can

so easily beam

people into a room,

how hard can it be

to coax a spirit

from its tomb?

As usual, an answer

lies in the lap

of our youth,

between two cans

and a heartstring;

a direct channel

to truth.

 

07/11/23

 

 

 

 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