One By One

One by one, the rituals remove

My good deeds countered by my faults

She cannot read my writing, this old friend

To whom I wrote each week.

“Will you type them?” she asked

Innocently

Not knowing that my fingers on a

Keyboard do not say the same words

As wrapped around a pen.

Not knowing I choose not to do much

Personal stuff at work

Where everything personal becomes not so.

I miss the tiny steadiness

Of reaching for a pad

Of buying stale cards at thrift stores

Of watching the words emerge in ink.

Thus both lose.

I can no longer write her,

She can no longer receive

My epistles about funny stuff:

Finding the plastic alligator head in the pool,

Getting my foot stuck in a trash can like in the old cartoons.

Soon she will say why don’t you write me? Are you okay?

What shall I say?

Bringing It On Home

Few know how I pull apart my life

Like making jerky, the strips start lean & tender

Stringy with juices, tasty on the tongue.

Sometimes I examine them twirled on a fork before ingestion

Sometimes I just cram them into an open maw

To chew for the texture,

Devouring my life for the nourishment

Derived from death.

As if.

Long Haul Covid

Executioners – Death By a Thousand Cuts

I can write now, of food, having achieved the space

Where taste is gone, where smell is a quick pat to the memory only.

I spoon the soup

Knowing it needs salt but why bother? I cannot enjoy it,

Only feel the spice upon the outer edges of my tongue.

Tho I crave just that feeling, that rapid glance of

Rounded taste. So soon removed.

These round-heeled bastards

Who have stood over a witchy brew

Of hate & harm & laid it upon my (no more) senses,

Now deprived two of five or maybe six.

Me, who has none to talk to

Except pieces of paper,

Except computer screens,

A.I. faithful to the last

Like some I Robot, some Elysium “Humans need help!”

I weep, eyes filling so I close them as fingers know their way

These keys true in place, holding still

For constant batter, for endless barter

My thoughts lifted into blue light

Also harming me, but what else is there?

Without these I may not exist beyond life.

Nor will I after too much time.

But Freddie sang it best:

“Who wants to live forever?”

Isn’t one Eternity of dying enough?

Bravely Do I Face Each Day

Pulling the world behind me,

A mule of effort & bray

Harnessed into the money straps

Living a life where I claim my due on Saturday

A life of stolen glimpses of a sunrise here,

A star inside a flower there.

My eyes do not so much as see

As look beyond – there must be a beyond

Or I am well & truly lost.

That this is illusion I do not doubt

That this is only a frequency I found on an old radio

A melody of sonnet & sound dislocated from source…

An afterthought from the mind of solace…

I live & do not die today,

Balanced at an edge I do not well perceive,

The Fool dancing the abyss along the arroyo

Defining gravity.

Falling away into Time.

What’s In A Poem?

Another poem breathes out, like a sigh of words

That do not rhyme

“Don’t poems rhyme?” ask outsiders.

No, Virginia, or at least mine do not,

Scraped as they are from the raw undersides

Of a lonely life

Made livable by no expectations of more.

The water wings of verbal misbehavior

In a pool of living light

Holding me in suspense

Will anyone hear? Will anyone see?

And, saved for last,

Will it ever matter?

I have crossed the tracks of positive thought

To existential angst

This 3 a.m. of a potential new day.

Why did I ever peel off from God

To come here, of all places?

Where the only realization is unreality?

Why would I leave rational thought

For the insanity of trading death for life

To eat & live &  breathe?

Movement powered by the lost & found, by sea wrack

Seeming so useless, yet sustaining in its way.

Life For The Living

My appetites stay with me

All that’s left

Now there is no life, no best friend, nothing

But a Universe of spirit to bathe in

With a body incapable of perceiving this element.

Is it to the good I continue on?

I would not know,

My nose pressed to the window of eternity

As though I will dine at table there.

The machinery remembers me

I have no doubt my car still feels my foot feathering the brake,

Mashing the gas, no matter  who owns her now.

I have left poems in unlikely places

On circuits of memory which knew my bank balance,

My destinations, my ideas & my names.

No initials carved into wounded trees

Once thought to live forever,

No tinted-rose lenses

No petals strewn on aisles nor elbows fitted into mine.

I have learned not to be lonely, a lesson unsought indeed.

Too much attention to the singular

Teaches separation so well it’s no longer felt

The proprioceptors dulled to route & routine

I arrive through neither fault nor favor

But a foolhardy trust

In a system I cannot even prove to exist.

I live & move & have my being

Like a fish, being asked, “How’s the water?”

I have no answers anymore

Even questions are dull, cutting no edges

Drawing no eyes.

I tire of energy fields

Wanting to power down

To rust in a field

Open to the sky.

Reprise

It’s the death of a thousand cuts

The littlest wounds bleeding

I do not notice seepage

Only its results

And these only in the long hours

Awaiting second sleep’s

Uneasy dreams.

I cannot lay my choices off on others anymore

But sit with them scattered all around me

The winds of salted time

Peering under them, lifting edges

To find other sides.

A 52 Pickup of a life

Having played every card.

The End