Ten Poems
I have to salt my verse with dirt to keep my audience. Catullus
Skydiving
Not for the lonesome eagle’s sake
do we make
our way above the clouds.
Nor to evade the time traps made
To press us into crowds.
For when wildly soaring high
We pass the earthbound eagle by
And cry our own new notions
to the sun.
1976
The Old Road
A long drive through dry country.
I've been here before.
Yonder, my boy, the two-lane
we took in 1963,
and the bridge where
Starkweather and Fugate felled their last victim.
We looked for blood in the grass.
We shot at rabbits and hunted agates.
I see my father's fair pink face in the sun,
Thrust there by his ruthless curiosity.
Roadside deer dead, legs up like sticks,
Bellies bloated without dignity
gave a sharp smell of death.
There is the farmhouse where we dreamed
of living with horses
and dogs in the yard.
Where do smiling faces go?
Another smell of death.
I turn to my son
and all i can say is, "I've been here before,"
and struggle to say more.
He looks at me with blank incomprehension. I talk to my boy,
He talks to his toy.
Will he notice, will he remember
or feel gouged by a bore?
More coffee and ice cream
together toward home,
to country we both know,
up a driveway we own,
And there is the door
i still have a key for.
#1
Curious of form
is the word fuck;
It starts like fun,
ends like yuck.
#3
The penis is a
sometime bone;
Held as dubious
by woman,
Joy to man alone.
Poem to Age
Let it go, leave it alone.
Sit back and feel
the sweet sun on your face,
Feel the cool wind
in your hair;
if you still have any.
Once you become geriatrical
No need to be theatrical.
2015
Hunger is the Only Truth
How do we get along
With all the people of the earth;
the people of the trees,
the people of the seas
and those who stare from crannies with eyes
full of hope, fear and action?
Have you ever noticed that everyone is edible?
We are all food.
2018
The Word That
Makes small minded bigots
feel bigger,
Makes drunk frat boys bark
and swigger,
Makes sore losers hang 'em or pull
the trigger,
Makes me love the broken children,
go figger.
2020
Manosphericals
V P Vance has only one ball.
Warrior Hegseth has two, but they are small.
Cash Patel wrings his own bell
While DJT has no balls at all.
2025
A Photograph of Our Mother
Standing behind our father’s grave stone,
hands tense on her purse,
The purse with a western scene
his hands tooled into
damp, dark leather;
She didn’t want to come,
Then didn’t want to leave.
Difficult to read when alive;
on that windy day a rare
dreamy look;
Where is he, truly, where have
they all gone?
Here lay half her life;
His breakfast of potatoes and
eggs, coffee and a cigarette.
Her tea and toast,
Afternoons slowing
a pace, reviving,
Into evenings full of
children on wings.
She loved the man
despite his faults;
he provided.
She loved work;
work with people.
She loved her home
more than going places.
She sleeps now under his stone;
Again she is with him at home.
* * *
I took this picture 40 yrs ago.
I was then half her age
And like all youth, immortal.
Now seeing through her eyes
more than mine
I think she thought
Not of the stone
or the bones
in hard dirt,
But what the wind has
blown away. 2023
Hey, Plant
Hey, plant, what do you know?
Loneliness and sleepless grief?
Hate?
Do you feel powerless?
Window potted,
You grow all day grow,
drinking sun, adding cell on cell
Until too tall
You’re clipped and sauted,
Or uprooted for compost.
Outside the pot
does anything matter
to you or any other plant?
What do you think, plant?
Listen, if you have ears;
You are ordinary, like me.
Grim fact, our being common,
growing in many places.
We both wait, wait to be trimmed,
plucked and used by the world.
Two friends died,
were plucked.
They got sick, tubes fed them
yet they dried out and died,
perhaps insufficiently watered.
Except then they were planted.
Now taking root,
Are they learning what you know?
2026