I came back to where I was before
To find nothing I needed to do
And not much I wanted
Except to look out the window
At the sun-toasted hill,
To get a glass of water
And then, to leave
Category: Uncategorized
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Lahaina is burning in a sunny café
Where I sit facing the marketplace
Of a small old town in Germany,
My screen open in the foreground
With flames twisting and waving
In the wind as a woman picks up
Her espresso over there and the people walk
By outside, opening like flowers
To the sun after weeks of fall rain
In the summer-
This land where I sit was razed
And passed back and forth like a tarnished coin
In the Thirty Years’ war,
Even the church has arrow slits
Blankly waiting
Above the pleasure seekers on the square.
Most of a lifetime ago I was in Lahaina
Where one day in a shop on the ground floor
Of a wild-west building
My parents dug into their wallets
For the money to buy a surreal teeshirt
with a cat singing and playing guitar;
Looking down again at my screen I see
That same street,
That building with a second-floor balcony
That used to have a store on the bottom floor
Dancing in flames,
Gone already even as I remember it, sitting here.
Back home, I wore that shirt for years,
Until it was too holed and tattered
Even for jogging out past the browning hills
Into the country.
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March brings snow, then rain
Ice, then slush
Even the weather is confused now.
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My sporadic habit perennial–
To tap out fourteen lines chasing a rhyme,
Laddering phrases as a net for time;
An understudy of the eternal
I tussle with words for ephemeral
Moments that rattle pebbles off my mind:
Like a Madman seeking the final prime,
My lunatic desire to make formal
The day’s shards, the nebula that remains
Of impressions uncountable, a river surging through a straw
Rearranging the debris in my brain,
Fashioning a monstrance of words arcane,
But my puzzle-matched turns can only yaw
At best my lines master a blind refrain.
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Welcome to the turn of the page, New Year’s,
And to the lyrical crown, the Sonnet;
Since we won’t really behind our old fears
Til at least July (these times bubonic)
And with that pox, our elections chronic
(Fevers preparatory to war civil)
What use talk of plans and worthy logic,
Pennyboy of desire, spouting drivel
To please master id, pistol ready
To spout gibberish or leaden slugs?
Better lift a squat pen, scribe words steady
Fourteen lines–against seven centuries’ floods,
Wars, famines, decay, lies, corruption, strife,
Cut Archaic rhyme, beauty’s cup, truth’s knife.
The Cursing Poet 