Maybe the next time,
someone else will be next,
the next best thing,
adjudged second best.
That’s how it’s been
and might always be.
Silver medal, red ribbon.
Gold and blue in front of me.
Just once more, please,
I’d like to be the one,
atop the podium
and second to none.
I know, sounds greedy
and not at all like me.
Always “Ladies first.”
“No, after you.” Po-lite-ly.
Maybe tomorrow,
the day after today.
Once removed from now,
my hopeful Someday.
That’s how my game’s run,
like I’m somehow hexed.
But if you're willing,
I’ve got next.
Month: November 2025
Beautiful by Moonlight
I cut the light from a full moon
one night and cast a shadow
black as black can.
It was me-shaped and lean, hip-to-hip,
leaner still beneath my feet,
yet I tripped over it in front of me.
So I turned around and walked toward
its full face, falling again
where a treetop lie waiting for
unwary poets there by the roadside.
I laid there, held back by my shadow
and down by a moonbeam so heavy
on my chest I couldn’t catch my breath.
Like that first bright moment I saw…
I bet you’re still beautiful
by moonlight.
It’s Really the Waves
They say if you squint
you can break this shattered
world into basic shapes.
A field of dandelions
could seem an expanse
of green sea all a’bubble,
roiling and boiling,
searching for some shore
to wash up upon. I’d be
waiting on that shore,
not for bubbles nor dandelions,
but for the right words,
not my usual gibberish,
to tell you how beautiful
you are to me. That piece of
gnarled driftwood would
appear the park bench where
we’d sit together and
listen to our music.
The sighs we'd hear might be
the wind blowing through
the dandelions. But I
like to think it’s really
the waves.
Had to write a poem with any or all of the bold-faced words you see in this piece. Therefore, it may actually BE gibberish, but I’m modestly satisfied with it. Photo by Arantxa Aguirrebengoa on Unsplash .
Never Quite the Right Words
Someday, perhaps, our twisted paths
will run straight. To where and
for how long I can’t guess.
But I’ll maintain this out-of-character
optimism for as long as we can
hold off those shadows ever with us.
Let’s not follow those lightless,
Us-shaped cutouts some lunatic orb
tailored to our steps not yet taken.
We’ve faced the morning sun,
now it’s morning no more. Let’s rest
until the moon returns to light the way
to that line we’ve always waited for.
I can hear you humming the same tune
as I am, I just didn’t know the right words
until today.
Supposedly an “optimistic” poem. I’m was almost hopeful (maybe even optimistic) something would stick to the wall today.
The Best Thing We’ve Never Done
We hit it right off,
so that kind of relationship
was doomed from set-go.
Not quite a meet cute,
I don’t like you,
I think I’ll rain sarcasm
on you from mist to monsoon
kind of romcom trope.
No, we were a perfect fit
from the moment our eyes locked
over one another’s shoulders,
as if they reached out,
tapped us and said
“Excuse me. You’re making me
uncomfortable as a warm bath
with lake waves making music
on the shore outside my window.”
What would have happened if…?
Never tried. Why ruin
the best thing we’ve
never done?
A poor pass at a "trope" poem. A Hallmark Christmas film it isn't. They went to the fridge for beer at two minutes to the end.
I See
I knew we had to talk by the way
she wouldn’t talk.
The only back and forth she’d share
were glances. But I could understood
what she wanted to tell me.
“Don’t look at me like that,” said Glance 1.
And then her eyes would turn a corner
so she couldn’t see how I looked at her.
How my eyes tried to do as she wished,
looking away, not make her uncomfortable.
But they’d inevitably turn my head
like hers had the first time my eyes
rested upon them. When my look
caught hers and she blushed because
I’d just told her how beautiful she is
in the only way we could speak on Day 1.
She tried to present a flattened vee
of brows to me to say she was pissed,
but that chevron flipped
under the weight of the tears
she dripped from the outer corners.
They ran away from me again,
quieter now, muffled, so tired
behind her hands. I wanted to
pry them apart, but knew it would
be opening those windows to her soul
she didn’t want opened today.
I moved away from her side-eye-spying
on my expression not of anger, but probably of loss.
Finally our eyes confronted each others
directly and I felt my windows shatter
when suddenly she looked straight into me.
“I know,” she said, out loud this time, and buried
her expression into my shoulder,
staring up into my eyes once more
with that look I’d not seen before that
told me, “Of course I do, and will always.
Just not today, maybe not even tomorrow.
But…someday.”
And through a haze, I looked once more
into the eyes that saw me like no others,
nodded and blinked, “I see.”
And it was.
Day 13. Supposed to be a “dialogue” poem, but I’m feeling kinda introspective and missing something. After reading this, I think it might be inspiration, imagination or talent. I just hope it held your eyes for a staggering near-300 words. Sorry.
(Photo by Jaakko Perälä on Unsplash.)
The Color of Nothing
Now What, Irony
I thought today I must write a sonnet,
something I’ve done when I could no others.
But not to put too fine a point on it,
I’d rather not, if I had my druthers.
So I went back to my first poet days,
when a writer’s block smothered all my prose.
A blinking cursor has a fright’ning gaze
on a blank screen caring naught ‘bout your woes.
Then I thought I’d try to break what was walled
with seventeen beats cut 5-7-5 —
three lines — like gentle hugs — haiku they’re called.
A poet was born, or just came alive.
I’m proud to say this far-fetched story’s true
Now, a haiku, or is it senryu?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Snow fell yesterday,
hiding all my unraked leaves.
Now what, Irony?
How Did We Get Here?
How did we get here, ever
heartbeat close yet worlds away?
Where I see you as you might
wish to be seen, but feel you’re not
and you hear me how you wish
you didn’t, but are glad you do?
Do you look back and see our trails
of footprint memories, too?
How they traveled side by side,
branched off their own ways,
yet always come back together,
often separated by others’ steps
that should have erased ours
but somehow didn’t. Or couldn’t.
I stopped trying to answer How
years ago, you know, after I
became tangled in roots of Why
crossing my path. I untied them
by not caring and that’s what with you
I’m sharing, because it’s more important
the Who than the How and Why.
I’m still trying to figure our way
past what ahead lies waiting.
That boulder of When.
From Day 3 of my scrambling poem-a-day November. A poem whose title starts with “How…” As in “How Am I Ever Going to Do This Poetry Thing Anymore?” But I chose what you see here, borrowing pieces of my nascent newspaper days and those W’s I was supposed to answer.
What Is Jeopardy?
I can’t recall if her eyes were blue,
they might’ve been gray, but her hair
was legit blond. She was kinda skinny. But warm
from her laugh to her toes when she’d come sit
by me in the TV lounge most weeknights.
She swore it was because she liked the way
I kicked seniors’ asses when Jeopardy was on.
She called me Joey. Outside my family, she was
one of only a handful of people I let call me that.
She smelled like Christmas mixed with a little
citrus and a whiff of the Canal Street head shop.
I called her Bon. Everyone else called her Bonnie.
But her given name was Bonita, after an actress
who played Nancy Drew in the old movie serials
and whose name you’d find under
“Produced By” if you ever watched the credits run
during the TV show “Lassie.” Only I knew who
Bonita Granville was.
Jeopardy, you know.
During one of my all-alone all-nighters
where I didn’t study, write or cram for
a test, just sat alone staring at the black TV
screen as it stared back blindly at me, a shadow
broke the dim light through the hallway door window.
Bon wandered into the room and silently sat
next to me on the sofa, legs tucked under her butt
and butt perched across pages 257 and 258 of my copy of
Stranger in a Strange Land.
She kind of glowed like an angel, the light
behind her haloing her short yellow hair
and I could see my sleepy surprise reflected
in her wire-framed Granny glasses.
“What are you doing up so late?” I said.
“Always the questions even when you’re certain
you know the answers, huh, Joey?” Then she leaned
in and kissed me like my lips were the business end
of whatever bottle and joint she’d crushed recently.
“Gin, Wink and Rojo de Panama,” I said, after taking
my own long sampling of her sources of stimulation.
“Why don’t we get out of here?” she answered in
the form of an incorrect but ultimately right question.
To describe the rest would normally require pouring
acid on serial numbered memories sanded clean
half a century ago. But one of the monks in my head
must’ve been hitting the old acid himself, throwing
that vivid dream at me the other night in which I was sure
I felt a long and long-forgotten leg draped over mine.
As my mind flipped just before my body did,
I could swear I felt the warmth of a cute skinny girl,
named after an even longer forgotten movie starlet,
her hair haloed by a desk lamp smothered by a pink
PJ shirt, smiling at me on the bottom bunk of a dorm room
I’d never seen before but occasionally would again,
always smelling of Christmas, faint patchouli, Panama Red
and what I’d come to learn was the signature of what
passed for “passion” in a pair of 18-year-olds back in 1971.
Or maybe what triggered it.
“What is jeopardy?”
This was supposed to be something Writer’s Digest called a “description poem” for on Day 5 of its Poem a Day November. I say supposed to be because it turned into something that is not a poem, prose, prose poem nor any other easily defined literary thingy. But here it is, with my usual array of descriptive nonsense, like a Temu Raymond Chandler. Names weren’t changed because we were so freaking innocent.
A Thing for Words 