The Moon, In All Your Glory

Did we really once move
through the night,
our shadows holding hands
beneath a moon that could
read my mind the way I wished
I could intuit yours?
In those moonlit hours,
it cast shadows so dense
I tripped and fell over yours.
Its beams would cut ‘round you
like a silhouette artist
leaving me these shadowy memories.
We stand alone in the night,
eclipsing lunar light beneath
its face, once-radiant as yours.
Your face, how it gleamed
like alabaster, projecting
its own glow to my glib sincerity
and welcomed lies I always knew
could be final goodbyes.
Perhaps there will come
another tomorrow night when
these clouds will roll away
and the moon, in all your glory,
will extend its searchlight fingers
to fumble and find the missing
you never missed, the supine echo
of a man painted in light, and
a shadow of what he never heard.

Tripping the Tongue At A Target

And I’m forced back to rhymes
just like all those other times,
especially the most recent,
not like back when I was a decent
poet, one full of emotion,
but, like you, that ship’s sailed on an ocean
so rough, tough and wide
that now that ship’s sunk, like my pride,
and I no longer hide
what I feel inside
‘cause I admit I cried
so many times about the losses,
more than all the knots and crosses
I would write for you,
even though they could never be true.

Anyway, I guess here’s the drop,
I’d love to write something besides this glop,
but I can’t without a target
and that’s something no market
stocks, like bras, panties and socks.
See, there’s that sub rosa sex
you say I hide within my subtext.
I had to look up that definition
since idiot savant is my position
in a world so full of real writers,
the love igniters,
the fascist fighters,
who pull all those all-nighters
with real muses providing invention
while I fail without your kind attention.

I know, it’s sounds so damn dumb
to think one person can strike me mum.
But that’s really not true,
because there’s always been more of you
than meets a reader’s eye,
even one who will so closely spy
for what you find between the lines,
as if I was some teen who sits and pines
then struts his hour upon the stage,
or like an old loser who bangs bourbon for rage
but mostly I’m just the guy on the page
who longs to express simple, not sage,
somethings, my second toughest critic,
the one who’d always be so analytic,
as to gauge each poem’s level of misery
when really there’s no mystery
to what I used to do.
I just wrote them for,
not about, but more
like at,
you.

Yeah, I watched too much “Hamilton” this past weekend. So now I’m spitting rhymes in an effort to write anything at all. But maybe there’s something in here I don’t see. So if you do, and if it’s not too painful (I don’t bite and I’m too old and tired to care), let me know you’re there. Shit, another rhyme.

My Figment, Your Poet

Here you are again,
sitting, standing,
floating in front of me.
There but not there,
inevitably as real
as I can make you.
And yet I’m your captive,
one of my own imagination,
one who who lives to see you
and loves to please you,
one who chronicles
the never-weres in clicks
of never-wills,
one who almost never can
without you.
Then I realize it’s time
for you to go again,
fading into the light.
At least until tonight,
when you return, floating
on a river of blackest ink
across my ceiling dark.
And I, your poet, without a pen.

Feeling My Way

I wonder and wander each day at this time,
hoping I won’t need to resort to some rhyme
to chronicle the tour from right brain to left.
Sometimes the scenes are forests or plains wind-swept,
others like deserts, barren of even sounds.
But the best trips are those where I, spelunker
of this cavern, drop into my heart’s abyss
or maybe the bottomless black of your eyes.
I guess that’s because I don’t see as much as feel
my way into these chambers of mystery
where I’m sure there are glyphs of our history
on the walls that echo each heartbeat and blink.
So if, while you read, a tear on your cheek falls,
it’s just irritating me trying to feel
with hands and heart, my way out, along those walls,
imprinting memories I hope I don’t drop
before my wander is done, when I’ll wonder
not how I found my way, but how I lost it.

Like A Picture Drawn In Lavender

The fields of lavender stretch like bolts of corduroy from where we bask in summer sunlight. Their perfume wafts sweet and intoxicating, when we need not their breath, for she knows we must be living in a dream.

A breeze combs the wales this way and that. They dance like rows of tiny willows, swaying to the tunes of that aeolian flute rising from the sea, that brilliant mirror of the sun’s face. Does she know it can never be my face?

“Where are you?” she asks, as if my thoughts are always somewhere else. But I’ll be with her all day. “The light is perfect. Do you wish to draw me? Shall I disrobe?”

Within these purple fronds I’m sure she cannot see my smile. Neither is it lecherous nor amused. She’s not some whore like in the village tavern, nor is she some silly child. She is earnest, yearning, waiting for me to memorialize her today. Some instrument of recollection for when she is old and alone.

Then the tear forms at the corner of her eye, as realization crosses her mind like a cloud.

She’s recalls I’m heir to the darkness, yang to shining yin of this Provence light. I can record my chiaroscuro impressions of her, but they’re fleeting. I’m leaving, evening drawing me in its charcoal-covered hands, drawing me as a stick man of two-dimensions, drawing me longer and narrower as I near my vanishing point out there beyond these fields of lavender.

 

My Not-What-You-Think-You-See

I don’t see it as anything odd,
how I do this or that is just how I do it.
So, why did you get your drawers in a wad,
like you grabbed a rock in your hothouse and threw it?

Do I point out how you study whatever you pick
after going two knuckles deep up your nose?
I mean, c’mon, you’re cultured, not some hick.
Well, at least you don’t eat it, too, I suppose.

Over the years, I’ve used a zillion H’s, I’ll bet,
from all the times I wrote my sneeze-sounding name.
But you have need for none that often, and yet
you skip it for saying These, Them and Those, just the same.

So please don’t pick, peck or parse my idiosyncrasy,
since, about yours, I’ve been silent, not some jerk.
Yes, I zone out, but it’s not what you think you see.
It’s a writer thing — a gift and a curse — not a quirk.

NaPoWriMo Day 22. A “quirk” poem.

Doing Solitary in an Unlocked Cell (With You)

I’ve told you before oh so many times
how this poet’s life is built on alone.
Sometimes it’s baited with meter and rhymes,
but ‘neath them too often’s just meatless bone.

I guess a poet must learn to inure,
grow callused over his isolation.
Not that easy when you’re so insecure
all your friends live in your imagination.

That’s why I whisper, alone in my head,
and try writing all these poems for two.
But if my words make you cry in your bed,
hold on, perhaps these next might restore you.

Your reading my lonely days’ pages shows me,
for one tick, I’m not alone. You chose me.

For Day 20 of Poem-a-Day NaPoWriMo 2020, an “isolation” poem. And, baby, I know isolation. Just click that word in the word cloud down on the right and see how many pieces come up. And that’s just the one’s on the blog, not in the two collections (still available on Amazon, BTW.)

Impossible Dreaming

Did you know, for so long,
it was impossible for me to dream?
My body and mind would churn
upon the bed until darkness
swallowed my consciousness.
And then I would awaken,
as if I blinked and night
suddenly spit me out into morning.

Nowhere in that between-time
did that dream world
reveal itself, only near-sleep’s
breath and breath, oblivion
of a seeming-second’s length,
then emergence from lonely nowhere
to abandoned somewhere.

That was, until I discovered
my problem wasn’t so much
tossing in bed worrying about
the impossibilities of
my dreaming life. Rather,
it was all that useless dreaming
of my waking life’s impossibilities.
Like… you know. And now you know.

Day 15, the Ides of April, halfway point of my poem a Day marathon. Today called for a “dream” poem. Sleep and dreaming, actually the lack of same, used to be way up there on my list of themes. Not so much anymore. Thank goodness.

A Misformed Sonnet Personal of Interpersonal Sonic Dysfunction

I’m sure this line of thought is not the norm,
But I’ll never stop dreaming about your form.

Okay, it’s true, I’ve held other ones close.
That was just about trial and error,
just proving you’re the one for me, God knows.
See what we have in us…nothing’s rarer.

I love how your bottom’s a bit wider
than your top, which is quite ample enough.
And though your waist is small, you’re a fighter.
The wrong finger on you, they’ll hear how tough.

If you’d listen, I’d say you’re my only,
my Hummingbird, my goddess, my North Star.
Held my hand through the times I was lonely.
Wish you were a woman, not a guitar.

Day 14’s prompt for this 30-step regime of daily poetry was for a “form or anti-form” poem. Now, if you’ve been around here for awhile, you know that I glommed onto the Shakespearean sonnet form when I lost (or lose) the capacity to write straight from my head. And, if you’ve been around longer, you’ll remember how I started writing poetry by penning haiku and senryu. So I go to that structural hug or challenge from a poetic form when I need to. Even if it makes me cringe a little. Now, just because I’m me, I decided to twist the prompt into a pretzel by turning the sonnet form upside down and writing about a form that isn’t what it seems. Or maybe you guessed.

Can I Have A Moment?

Try as I might, I struggle to be in the moment.
“Present” is the patch of psychological geography
that whooshes by under my feet and over my head.
But what is a moment?
Does it have a time limit, an address?
Does it smell like the memory of a woman?
Is it made of two, three, or four dimensions?

If time is a river, are we rafting past
these moments where we see it coming
and then it’s gone? Or is it like the view
from a speeding car on the tree-lined interstate.
Behind each trunk, for the tiniest fraction
of a half-thought, we can see the colors
of the houses, the lives of other people,
just as they can see the sun flash
upon the window where we share that glimpse.

I am a simple man, one whose mind is fueled
by imagination, always moving, looking behind,
looking ahead, looking within, almost never
at this present, hardly ever slowing to grasp
this moment you and I share. Except, perhaps,
for those two commas that just braked us like
speed bumps. Or maybe for the coming period
upon which we share a mindful breath.
Here, I’m in the moment.

This is my Day 5 effort (and it was) in my poem-a-day trek through April. The prompt was for a “moment” poem. I regret that I am hardly ever “in the moment,” except perhaps while I am writing. And even then I am more than likely thinking about how much I’d like a beer right now. Or that the moles are back in the yard. Or that I should have, should be, wish I was (something, whatever) instead of dripping imaginary blood on this imaginary page from my wounded imagination .