Your Sweetness

I stroke his head. His tail wags wildly,
pink tongue flicking up at me, politely
begging to touch my face. Yesterday
he met a baby bird that swelled
its feathers in fear before his solemn
curiosity. When I dawdle too long
before our walk, he talks to me
in a deep sweet questioning lilt.
In Bosnia, Afghanistan, Somalia
men slaughter each other. At home lies
burrow termite tunnels beneath social
smiles. Old dog, it is outrageous, it is
intolerable, your sweetness.

Note: This poem is not recent, but only the names of some of the countries have changed, plus the dog died in 1996 -- aged 16. He was much nicer than me.

High Potential

I am basically
nothing at all,
which makes me

very flexible.

ZIP!

The clouds break open.
Sunbeams streak up each tree
like squirrels.

Self Knowledge

Know myself:
Lean forward enough
to miss my belly
when I spit.

Gulls

Gull wings ripple the sky,
bits of loose wave
escaped into the air.

Note: Gulls in flight here seen from behind or in front, where one sees two curved concavities facing downwards, like eyebrows.

A Class Act

How do you follow
an act like Hello.


Note: I suppose that's why we linger over goodbyes, trying to wring a few last drops of drama out of them. A live, real hello holds such promise that, having failed, in our 2nd and 3rd acts (conversation, dinner, movies, love-making, etc.) to live up to that promise, we must hope for a tragic farewell. No wonder we get so many of them.

The proper act to follow hello is hello, and again hello. Even goodbye should be a form of hello.

NOW she's naked

Just when we thought the stripper
had taken everything off, she shed
a tear.

Do It To Me, Poet!

All my women agree
that I'm very good
in print.

Before Television

When I was little I'd sit on the rug
before our huge wooden-framed radio
with glowing orange dial (as if
at the feet of a master). I'd peer
into the dial, trying to penetrate
its translucence so I'd be able to SEE
The Lone Ranger, Sergeant Preston, etc.
It's like that when, trying to see you,
I look into your eyes.

Note: I became a radio addict around age 5 (1947), at which point I'd never heard of TV, nor did we own one until 1952 (one with a tiny black & white screen). The floor-model radios were huge -- 3 or 4 feet tall. The wooden console of this one had trim that was fluted. It was originally dark, but for some reason my Dad had painted it a light yellow-beige color. I remember pealing bits of loose paint off the edges (hope it wasn't lead based).

What else do I remember? Going to the cookie jar and stuffing my hands AND my pockets with cookies (especially if they were chocolate chip or peanut butter -- oatmeal raison were just tolerable), pulling threads out of the huge pink easy chair in the corner of the living room by the radio and getting cookie crumbs in all its cracks (beneath the cushion), while listening to "all the good shows" I hated to miss.

About two feet off the floor at the center of the radio was the dial, behind which glowed with a soft orange light. I thought if I looked into it carefully, I might be able to see the people I was listening to. When our first TV made vision possible, the result was at once thrilling (wow! So THAT'S what the Lone Ranger looks like) and, of course, disappointing.

Looking into "your" eyes is more thrilling, less disappointing (at least with the main YOU's of my life), probably because you look back. The radio didn't, though it let me imagine a great deal. I also thought there must be images in the radio vacuum tubes I saw on occasion, with their delicate filaments and plays of reflected light.

The TV not only didn't look back, but pretended to and kept mistaking me for some idiot. (Hey, Kids, What time is it? It's Howdy Doody time!" C'mon, you smiling condescending vacuity in buckskin, I'm ten years old and have spent years listening to Gangbusters, Suspense, Tarzan, Life of Riley, Our Miss Brooks, Tales of the Texas Rangers, even Gunsmoke and Dragnet (monotonous, so "adult"), so don't talk to ME as if I were a little kid! (Poor Buffalo Bob, I was way too hard on him, right, Boys and Girls?)

The Witch Which Was

When I was a kid, we called
the miserable old lady on the corner
a witch because she'd shoo us off her
lawn and call the cops about our "gang"
for running across the yard she bent
double over every day battling weeds.
Now I am 50 years old and a poet,
shabby, but gentle. What would you do
if you looked out your kitchen window
and saw me playing in your backyard?

Note: This is an old one. When I originally wrote it, line 7 had a different age -- 35, I think. When I printed it in Deanotations, I updated it to 50 (that must have been in 1952). This time I'll let it be. (I'm 65.) After all, bodies age, but one hopes one's poems do not. (But they do; may they age well.)

WHOOSH!

The leaves of a whole treetop
lift off--
starlings!

No Joke

Wake my life...
please!


Note: A variation on Henny Youngman's joke: "Take my wife...please!"

GET IT?

Look, I'm telling you everything I know.
Why don't you understand it
so that I can know something new?


Note: Ever go on talking at great length to someone because you feel that person isn't getting it? Perhaps because he nods and says "uhuh" at all the wrong places -- before you've finished your sentences? Perhaps because he glazes over or says something non-sequitur?

One way to look at this situation is to see the other person's failure to understand or failure to indicate understanding as a trap, holding you stuck in what you are trying to communicate. Truths, as we articulate them, are moving targets: they can go rotten on us if we hold them too long and too tight.

When we go on too long, we are begging our listeners to understand us so that we can be free of what we are trying to say and get on to new thoughts. When we've gone on long enough, we give up and put our attempted communications on permanent automatic, continuing them when we are alone, this endless mumbling to ourselves.

This suggests, when we are bored listeners, that we need to indicate more clearly that we GOT IT! Thus the world "closure". Closure is how I closure (close your) yap!

Hazy Purplish Tinge -- May I Have Your Autograph?

On the horizon bare trees
make distance
famous.

Note: This one's a bit obscure -- not really intended to have a title, but I felt like being explanatory. May as well say more: Sometimes a view makes distance real, like the opening up of dimensionality if one has been viewing with one eye for a long time, then opens the other as well. Also sometimes beauty strikes one unexpectedly, or strikes me that way (I get tired of "one" -- why not two or ten or a thousand? -- sometimes beauty strikes a thousand unexpectedly), and it's like meeting a celebrity in the street in one's (or one thousands' ) home town. I'm looking at the familiar -- trees across the Mississippi, an early winter day, cold enough to sting the nose with each breath, but no snow, little ice, the sky that thin blue with a few long, stretched-out clouds along the horizon, the branches of leafless trees blending in the distance to a rich brownish purple (what the alchemy of distance and air do to rumpled gray), and I can't look enough, feel I'm seeing something I've seen before, but not noticed. It's a "scene", something from a glossy magazine cover, but I'm not at Grand Canyon, just out for a walk in St. Paul, not a very big or picturesque city, hardly a hang-out for the jet set or for major stars like distance.

I've felt this way often. The first time (in this lifetime -- not counting when I was a baby) that I got to stroke a woman's breast -- Oh, yes, I wanted that autograph. So you're that famous boob I've been hearing so much about, looking at pictures of you on the sly, and here you are! And soon after, I met other famous body parts and felt I REALLY had something to write home about, except home (for the first time in a long time) felt like right here where I was.

We tell ourselves so many stories about ourselves that it's always a relief to realize, from time to time, that we are really here, and something is really happening. Wow! So this is what it's all about, all that stuff about being "in love" -- yeah, this is it! It really IS being in love. (Remember that one?)

A Deeper Silence

We drive 200 miles to a national park,
to a motel room with carpets and lamps
where we argue some more the same old
arguments.

(But when we stop fighting,
we are in a redwood forest.)

Where's My Medal?

I drive through the city,
narrowly missing hundreds of moving cars,
signs, pedestrians, parked cars, hydrants,
trees, buildings, statues--I do this
every day, never hitting a thing.
God! I'm good!

A Rude Riddle

How is flatulence after eating cherries
like a crooner tripping on the stairs?

Both are Bings
that go thump
in the night.


Note: Some poems have no redeeming social value, unless a good groan can be as wholesome as a laugh. For my friends, the pun-impaired readers, the crooner here is Bing Crosby. And in my poems, it is logical that if things go bump, Bings should go thump. Why the cherries? I had BING cherries in mind, and cherries, eaten late, may cause farts in the night, which are perhaps "thumps" (smothered, as they are, beneath the blankets and against the sheets). Well, I just couldn't be satisfied with a single spoonerism. Had to double it.

Is it a poem? For whom? I don't know, I'm just the writer here.

When people ask me how many poems I've written, these days I answer "About 100,000" -- just a guess, but not far off. But that answer is based on my estimate of ALL the stuff I've kept (not counting obvious prose works). And I keep almost everything. If it sits on the page like a poem ("Sit! Good boy!"), I call it a poem. I don't throw back the little ones (how unsporting!). I count the puns, the jokes, the lampoons, the witticisms, the limericks, palindromes, riddles, etc. And (in the other direction) I count the long discursive essay poems, slightly denser than prose and taking riskier leaps of logic, but still, to some readers, too prosy for what they're used to calling poetry.

I've had people who admired many of my poems scold me for mixing my "true" poetry (or "serious poetry") with witticisms and puns that "trivialized the serious poetry". In my printed poetry letter, DEANOTATIONS, that went out to a few hundred subscribers for 20 years (1984-2004 -- sample issues can be seen on http://www.blehert.com/), I would follow a lyrical poem, even a tragic poem, on some topic with a silly poem on the same topic, playing leapfrog with emotions and attitudes. I had the idea this might do us some good, free us up, enable to move into and out of our customary mind-sets more easily.

But I've never bought the idea that "serious poetry" is superior to silly jokes. I don't know that a fine poet is better than a fine stand-up comic or that Lawrence Olivier beats Laurel and Hardy (I prefer L & H myself) or that the Beatles need to roll over for Beethoven any more than Beethoven needed to roll over for Chuck Berry.

What I do is write, and if I'm feeling "profound", I try to do the profundity justice. If I'm feeling silly, I try to do the best silliness I can do. I do recognize that sometimes I feel fraught with poetry ("inspired" -- though I do all the breathing around here) and pour poetry onto the page as smooth as milk from Vermeer's maid's pitcher (that thread of pearl). (Just thought I'd throw in that fancy simile, since that's my favorite painting. If this were a TV show and if Vermeer were a corporation, I'd probably be mailed cartons of, say, Vermeer cigarettes for smoking the product on my show. But probably no one will send me a Vermeer original for mentioning it in my Blog. Life is not fair.)

But I digress: So sometimes the poems pour out. I used to believe that was the only kind of poetry -- back in high school and college -- so I'd wait for the "right time" to write, and one day I'd go for a walk and feel noble and lofty and infinite and bubbling up with ideas, words, perceptions, rhythms, like a character in a musical about to burst into songs, and I'd go home and write, as quickly as I could move the pen, seven or eight poems whose eloquence surprised me, finding voices I didn't know until then were mine and thoughts I hadn't realized I'd thought.

And that was so much fun that I'd try to extend it, force out a few more, and find myself squeezing, dribbling the last drops onto the page in the form of trivial wit, puns, self-conscious thoughts about having nothing to say, a sort of afterbirth. Then I'd reproach myself for thus polluting true inspiration, and hover over myself for about 8 weeks until the next burst of poetry bubbled up.

Later I discovered that I could simply decide to write, then write. And that the trivial stuff didn't have to be tossed or invalidated, that it was fun in its own way -- especially after I found that many others got a kick out of it.

I also discovered (from critiquing groups and from being dilligent about inviting feedback from readers and maintaining communication with them (you), that if I were going to decide what to write based on the opinions of my fellow man, just about anything I could write would be wrong -- or right -- for large numbers of readers. For one thing, there are many who reject a poem that lacks rhyme and meter. And there are many others who consider that rhyme and meter are antique encumbrances that ruin a poem.

So I soon learned that I might as well go with what pleased ME. I listen to the opinions of writers only so long as they are talking about ways I can get the poem to do better what I intend it to do.

I still have days when I come up with ideas that strike me (and later many other) as brilliant, followed by days when, having reaped that crop, I'm fallow. But even then, I can play, can generate out of sheer determination a sonnet here, a limerick there, a terrible pun, a brief comment on a politician (who knew, for example -- before the dictionary told me -- that there's a word, "algor" -- so close to Al Gore -- that means "a chill felt before a fever", and what could be more appropriate!), etc.

And here's the funny thing: Sometimes one of these relatively "uninspired" or "artificially induced" poems or trifles turns out to be terrific. One of them became my single most published poem, "How Poetry is Done"; I was going to leave it in my notebook -- my back burner -- but my wife read it and cracked up and said "This is great!" So I polished it a bit and sent it off, and the rest is as close as my poetry has yet come to being "history".

And sometimes, in the middle of a fallow period, playing with words as idly as a child toys with his food, I come up with "the real thing", some realization that opens me up.

In other words, when I don't reproach myself (or let others reproach me) for my trivial stuff, when I treat it all as poetry, I have a lot more fun, get a lot more written and come up with more of what my more serious friends would call the real stuff.

(The major change in my attitude toward writing came when I realized that what opened me up as a writer was having someone else to receive the communication, and that when, as I wrote, I put someone else there -- as we all do when writing a letter to a friend and/or a lover -- THAT'S when I had things to say. And when I got in better communication with the embodied people in my life and freed myself of most unwillingnesses to communicate, I found myself always in a state similar to what I used to call "inspired". And for me that's the only reality required to make poetry real poetry. Whether it takes to form of a pun or a sonnet or an epic is irrelevant to me if you're there and I can find you with something.)

Therefore I often throw groaners at you and hope that you won't think less of yourself or me when you enjoy them, if you do. But will you still respect me in the morning?

I'm a Facile Fossil

La Brea Tar Pits: Full of mammoths,
saber-toothed tigers and other
cherished skulls:

Spines of out-of-print species.

Please teach your children to survive
and to remember our poems
so that we don't have to
write them all over again.
____________________

Note: The transition from lost species to lost poems is "spines" -- possessed by fossils and books. But the real burden of the poem is to suggest that nothing is lost, if, in fact, we survive to rewrite, as needed, our poems.

Since my full name is Maurice Dean Blehert (I've never used the first name for much), and since a skull used to be called placed on a desk or shelf as a "memento mori" (reminder of death -- to encourage profound contemplation), and since a Maurice usually becomes a Morry on the tongues of pals, I suppose this poem is a memento Morry. (People who make such puns, however, seldom have pals.) Well, in the immortal words of that other Dean (Dean Martin), "That's a Morry." (For those born too late, Martin's sung words were "That's amore.")

Profound or Prolost?

"You're so prolific!"
Not pro-choicic?


Note: I'm also in favor of friendly dogs -- that is, prolix (pro-licks).

Poetry -- a Kind of Loafing?

Some were paid in beauty,
some in strength,
some in jewels.
I got poetry.

Now that a billion poems
won't buy a loaf of bread,
I choke on poetry
while others starve
on bread.

Silly-bad?

Each madman's epically mad:
His oddity is the ill he had.

Note for the pun-impaired or pun-resistant or simply civilized: While some of the people society calls "mad" are very dramatic about it, perhaps even epic in the scope of their madness, I'm playing here with the two epics used to describe most madness: Psychiatrists spot an oddity and define it as an illness: Hence the madman's oddity (a word suggesting "Odyssey") is the ill he had (Iliad).

The poem has another meaning, which is that one's oddities are based on past ills (not necessarily illnesses).

(Since the Illiad features the sack of Ilion (Troy), I suppose it suggests a sacro-iliac problem.)

A Child's Thought?

If I could, with a thought,
destroy the planet,
I'd only do it once--
just to see.
__________

Note: Oddly enough, the people most careful about their thoughts are those whose thoughts are LEAST likely to impinge on anyone -- even upon themselves. These are people who, after many years or decades or centuries of being careful what they say to others (for others are dangerous to them), have become so careful that they don't even trust themselves, so are careful about what they think, lest they give themselves away to themselves.

They are so painstakingly fortified against any possibility of their thoughts making them responsible for anything in the universe, including their own states of mind, that they can no longer create (at least, not knowingly and willingly) effects on others or on themselves. They can't stop their own thoughts or start them, are simply the victims of automatic thought patterns.

Such people are more likely to destroy a planet with their inability to think than with a thought. Those whose thoughts are powerful -- who can turn an idea into a reality, who can decide things and have those things come to pass -- are those least likely to destroy a planet. It takes a high level of responsibility to do something like that, and people with high levels of responsibility are not likely to go around knocking off inhabited planets.

Though maybe a very powerful child with a lot of curiosity...

No, I think such a child would be more likely to create some new planets. Just to see.

Just some thoughts. My own, but you can have them if you want.

Fuels Enter In Where Angels Fear...

To help us break our dependency
on OPEC oil, we have developed
the bookburner. It runs best on poetry
books and magazines, which,
like oil, consist mainly of compressed,
refined fossils. Plenty of fuel.
But we must proceed cautiously
and not commit ourselves to this
energy source until we've established
contingency plans for containing
potential spillage of raw poetry
into the community, contaminating
our children with literacy.

Note: I wrote the above during the FIRST Gulf War, at a time where most poetry still was published in printed form on burnable paper. These days most of it is on the Internet, harder to burn, but still, mainly, kind of fossilized.

Agreeing to Disagree

On both sides of every war,
rabid enemies agree
about death.
_____

Note: When we think of war, we think of disagreement, as utter as disagreement can be; yet war is mainly a matter of agreement, even "war on terrorism". Imagine something is moving somewhere in this universe, and you decide to oppose it: First you have to be on the same time continuum (not, for example, in some parallel universe or in its past or future), then you have to position yourself almost where it is (carefully gauging its motion so that you can position yourself in front of it and oppose it), and you have to be a lot like it, sharing its solidity (or lack thereof) or somehow managing to constitute an opposition to it. And you have to be of comparable force, close enough in scope that you can create an effect upon it, can perceive it -- even to disagree with me here, you have to wrap your mind about these words first, putting your eyes about in the same place mine are now with respect to them.

All this is magnified with the complex disagreements we call wars: We have to place armies to face the enemy armies. We have to learn how they fight and have comparable resources. Think of two huge armies digging in opposite one another, or the battle between two submarines, the crewmen of each going through similar routines on similar instruments, listening to each others beeps against the same watery silences.

The more the differences between the two sides, the less like war it is -- more likely a rout, the German tanks crushing horse-riding Polish cavalry. A real, all-out, murderous, long-lasting war requires far more agreement than one is likely to find between man and wife -- in a GOOD marriage.

Which makes me think we have wars because we WANT to have wars. Because it takes an awful lot of work to have a war, and much of that work is towards achieving an agreement with the enemy. And if we can achieve the fine agreement required to poise force against force with such exactitude that they can remain balanced long enough to become a solid thing, a war (very much like a wall), then we must be able to achieve the far simpler and cruder agreements that permit people to go about their businesses peacefully.

But then, "we" is a broad pronoun. Me, I am not at war with terrorism. And it seems to be working: I don't feel terrorized. Perhaps I lack imagination: It's hard for me to understand how well my nation is able to agree with terrorists. Especially about death, which seems to be the gold ring on this merry-go-round or gloomy-go-round.

Death for the other side, I suppose. But how can you use death as a threat effectively without first agreeing about what a terrible thing it is. Which, since it's a part of living, makes life a terrible thing -- that ends in death. In other words, to fight terrorists, we must be terrorized -- or dead. After all, how could we be terrorized if we didn't consider death a big deal?

I wonder if, instead of blowing up our buildings, the terrorists had flooded our communication lines with great works of art -- poems, paintings, movies, dances -- would we have been able to respond? Thank goodness, they just killed some of us. We knew how to respond to that!

It's so easy to agree about death, which is a lot like agreeing WITH death.

How long will this agreement last? Don't hold your breath.

(Inhale and exhale if you disagree and don't have a horn to honk.)

Despair

Despair:

Can I help you?
Is there something I can do for you?
What can I do for you?
Have you been helped?
Have you been helped yet?
Is there anything you need?
How can I be of service?
Can I be of use to you?
Can I help?
Is there anything I can get for you?
Can I get you something?
Is there anything you'd like?
Have you found anything you want?
How can I help you?
Can I help you?
Is there anything I can do for you?
Can I help?

Note: At the end of my last posting, I referred to "Can I help you?" as "another story." Here's that other story: I wrote this poem when I realized how -- if taken literally -- the most banal questions of hotel clerks, waiters and waitresses and others who "serve" us become voices of deepest despair. We want to be of use, don't we? What greater despair than coming to doubt whether we are of any use to anyone, wondering weather any of our attempts to help have done any good.

Most artists (and particularly poets, since poetry seldom sells, and the fact that people are willing to pay money for an artist's work assures him that SOMEONE thinks it is of use) -- most artists from time to time slip into this despair, wondering if anyone cares about their work, if anyone notices it -- but really fearing that their work is of no use, doesn't help anyone, doesn't befriend anyone, doesn't make anyone's day or life more joyful or aware or alive. We, too, are a service profession.

Such despair is not just sad: It's dangerous, since when we feel we have failed to help others, we are likely to attack others. Those who are most rote in asking "Can I help you" are also most bitter. Want to stop terrorism? Persuade the terrorists that they are needed and could contribute to the welfare of others. These are people who once wanted to help, but failed. Or they are still trying, but with mad desperation.

Please, is there SOMETHING I can do for you? Anything at all? (Blow myself up, perhaps?)

Reminds me of an old elementary school joke:

"The whip!"
"No! Not the whip! ANYTHING but the whip!"
"Anything...?"
"The whip."

By the way, there's a great study of how a person recovers from failure to help others -- it used to be on our TV screens every week, for about 12 years. It's the NYPD BLUE series, and it shows over those years (if viewed in sequence, as is possible now for seasons 1 thru 4, available on DVD) how a cop named Andy Sipowisc moves from below despair up to being a responsible guy who knows he's of use to others.

It shows him, at first, out the bottom (a vicious drunk). It shows, gradually over the years of the show, how he became a cop because he wanted to help (make the world a bit safer, provide justice, etc.), how as a result he must confront a great deal of stupidity and evil (the two being hard to separate), both on the streets and in the police bureaucracy, finding most of his efforts wasted: He occasionally achieves small vengeances, but seldom is anyone helped. He becomes increasingly bitter and cynical, etc., until all he has left is, when sober, his keen sense of when he is being told a lie.

You get all this just by getting to know the guy (better than just about anyone else in books, movies or, certainly, TV), and you see him gradually climbing out of it.

At first his attempts to fight his despair lead to more difficulties. When you put in order on a messy life, a lot of confusion and pain and terror emerge, pounce on one like the Furies of Greek mythology. Similarly Sipowisc's attempts at sanity lead him into relationships with others who are then endangered by his rages or by the criminals he deals with. But he persists (with help), and bit by bit, finds moments of hope, people he can help just a little (though he's inclined to make a snide joke of it at first -- always best, think the despairing, not to get one's hopes up, just to have them shattered). In one episode, just the sight of birds taking off from a rooftop (after a missing child has been located) lifts a weight off him.

By the end of the series, he's in pretty good shape as people on this planet go. He's handling what comes up, helping where he can, taking responsibility for the training and supervision of others, caring for a wife and son, and when he helps, he knows he's helped, and that the people around him are surviving better because he's there.

After all, it says on police badges that their purpose is "to Protect and Serve." Some police (the ones we call "bad cops") don't have a problem with this, since they became police for other reasons: To be powerful, to be in charge, to beat up "scum", to keep down people they fear, to stop things -- mainly anything that moves and isn't under their control. These are guys who gave up on the possibility of helping people long before they became cops. They saw a scary world and hoped, by becoming cops, to be even scarier than that world. (Often they succeed!)

But for a cop who really does want to protect and serve, the reality of the job can be devastating.
And in a small, less dramatic way, I suppose if a waiter really wanted to help others, he'd find it discouraging to think that all he could do for them is feed them mediocre, overpriced meals. He's seen people served the best he can offer who chew quickly at reluctant mouthfuls while ignoring one another or insulting one another, thousands of sullen faces refusing to look at the faces around them, eating without tasting.

I remember the mixed feelings I had about being a cab driver (NY, 1970 and 1974): On the one hand, the help I gave people was obvious and palpable: They wanted to go somewhere; I took them there. On the other hand, most of the people who hired my cab were frozen solid in ancient attitudes, stuck. And all I could do for them was move their bodies from one avenue to another.

It is remarkable how little most people are changed by moving them from one point in New York City to another.

The distance from the top to the bottom of a poem is far less than the distance from Lincoln Center to Canarsie or JFK or Harlem or Times Square. But I hope my poems move you more than my cab ever moved anyone.

Found Wanting

The waitress asks
if I want anything else--

as if I wanted what I already had,
as if I could remember wanting.
____

Note: This poem is perhaps a bit too simple, needs more context for most readers. The waitress's question simply jolted me into awareness of how far I'd become estranged from my own desires, how much I was ordering the food I was used to thinking I liked and eating it without much enjoyment, how little "wanting" had to do with my life at that point. One orders apple pie because once as a kid it tasted great. One "enjoys" eating it (even though the crust is like sugary cardboard) because one is supposed to, as if telling oneself with each mouthful, "This is apple pie -- YUM!" -- or one gobbles it down without noticing it except to score a point for oneself in the battle against the universe for having achieved another apple pie a la mode. Buddha said we should rise above desire, but first I think we need to rise TO desire and learn, again, to live with gusto.

Then there's the clerk who asks, "Can I help you"...but that's another story.

Consolation: Birth is Not the End

When my time comes to live,
give me a simple burial in plain flesh,
don't make a big fuss--give me a name,
milk, trinkets to toy with. Don't
grieve long for me. I am not lost.
I go but to another kind of death.

Free of Decisions

We are here to give. Even the beggar,
busy being a self-fueling belly,
can only give. He gives his street
an ugliness, a shadowed intricacy
that must be looked at or away from--
in either case requiring of us a decision
until habit slips him into a hole
in our universe before we can see him,
as we, too, become free of decision
and rich with shadowed intricacy.

Note: The hard-to-confront complexity we call a "street person" or "beggar" is, for must of us, a shadowy presence: We don't usually look at or recall a person, a face, an individuality. Such a person makes him or herself hard to confront. The point here is that we, too, become harder to confront as we erect automatic defenses about ourselves that permit us, for example, not to notice such people. The poem says it better, but over-explaining is such fun!

Friendly Fire

Booby-trapped, mined, burglar-alarmed,
draw-bridged, alligator-moated,
invincible!

Such a monstrous rightness
clicks on to defend us when we are
betrayed. Save us, I pray,
from our machines.
________________

Note: I've had this experience. Perhaps you have too: You've been around the block, think you know yourself pretty well, see yourself as tough-minded and free of delusions and self-righteousness, but then something goes really wrong: You get betrayed, double-crossed, jilted, dumped. And you're smart enough to know better -- to know, for example, that the person who did this isn't worth the grief, that violence, vengeance, self-pity get you nowhere except deeper into the hole, that there are other, better possible futures, that you got yourself into it, refused to see things that had been obvious from the start... -- you know all this, yet find yourself a spectator to all the mechanisms of childishness, all the automatic defensive devices switching on, all the traps sprung. There you sit reminding yourself that all this is foolishness while you dream elaborate dreams of vengeance, of having the last word, of taking her back and forgiving her with wise and wonderful magnanimity that brings her to tears, of torturing her, of going off into the woods and living in a hut and meditating for the rest of your life, of jumping off a bridge (that'll show 'em) -- what a revelation! All that insanity is still with you, lying in ambush, waiting for the opportunity to pounce, not at YOUR command, but when life says "Boo!" You thought you were grown up and beyond all that, but you're pricklier than a Swiss Army knife with all blades extended.

Such experiences are valuable if they lead you to find a way to do something about them. (I found ways to vanquish those machines or most of them. You might say I've built up my spiritual immune system and have high resistance to being a victim. I wish the same for all of us. Here's one of many web sites that deals with the methods I found workable.)

Walls and Freedom

If we knocked down all the walls,
we'd be free--until all the ceilings
smashed us into all the floors.

[Note: Well, we could demolish the ceilings and floors too. That'd work.]

[Note: Not that I'm opposed to eliminating some walls, but a game requires barriers as well as freedoms.]

[Or, as Ludwig Wittgenstein probably never said to Bertrand Russell: "I am the wall, Russ." (Can't you hear Russell Crowe?)]

Not a Penny for my Thoughts

In the good old days most poets
were consigned to oblivion. These days
even oblivion won't take poets
on consignment.

[Note: Most of you probably know that when a bookstore agrees to carry an author's book in stock, that book is said to have been "taken on consignment". Bookstores (especially the large chain stores) are usually reluctant to carry poetry books by living writers who aren't famous. But only because bookstore customers are reluctant to buy them. I can understand that. Who could possibly afford poetry? That's why I usually give it away.]

Deja Vu Manque

In my dream, dying, I was reborn,
not in the future, but in the past,
to be the same person all over again,
but with subtle variations--but not
too subtle to be spotted...at first,
and even later, when I'd been persuaded
I was nowhere but where I was,
nor had ever been elsewhere, still
certain things didn't fit:
I met you in the wrong place
or at the wrong time or not at all,
and even when not at all,
I knew you were supposed to be,
were somewhere,
were.

Days of Our Lives

Poets Who Give Their Poems To Strangers:
Next On Oprah!
_______________

Two people share a seat on a bus,
but one is having a good day,
the other a bad day.

The moral: take care
in choosing your side of the seat.
_______________

She seemed mysterious, standing there
(waiting, as was I, for an elevator),
swaying slightly, eyes far away,
smiling. Then I noticed, obscured
by her earings, the earplug, the wire
leading to her small Sony--heard (tiny
and far away, but free of mystery)
the music to which she swayed.
_______________

Back from a morning run, dripping sweat,
my reek fills the elevator. All day
people will ride up and down here.
Later, meeting me for the first time,
they will feel they've known me before.
_______________

Wisdom

The loud drunk on the corner
thinks he's wise
because of all he's been through.

He'd be wise if he ever got
through
what he's been through.

Where Dreams Take Us

Reentering the bedroom unexpectedly,
I surprise my wife in bed
with my body.

Mort, Al and Tim

"Be careful!"
"Don't be silly!"
"Just who do you think you are!"

Intimidations of immortality from
recollections of early childhood.
_______________________

Note: The last two lines are my variation on Wordsworths ode on "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." For Wordsworth, childhood was full of a glory hinting at immortality. For most of us, childhood is when parents and friends remind us (helpfully) that we might grow up to be somebody (or some body) if we ever realize that we don't quite exist yet.

Four Brief Meditations

If cockroaches could talk,
we wouldn't listen.
_________________

There are heroes among us--
a perfect hiding place.
___________________

It's an old movie trick:
First (with close-ups of anguished eyes)
they get you inside a head.

Then the camera backs away
to place the tiny body
in a vast reach of red sunset,

but the whole thing is still inside
that head, which is, of course,
inside yours, which is inside

wherever you are or maybe are not,
all of it, maybe, inside (now)
that little imaginary TV head.
_____________________

Saturday morning, men mow with motors
sunny suburban lawns, no children
on the street. How easily fooled!
Just because, when we get to suburbia,
we are each given a power mower
and a jogging outfit instead of harp
and halo, we don't know we're dead.
________________________

Scary

The sweetest human smile
consists, for the creatures
who run from us,
of sharp teeth.

What's Behind Door B?

Just when you think you're safe,
even safe enough to exchange pleasantries
with strangers in elevators,

you hear that someone has been upset with you
because of something stupid
you are supposed to have said
15 years ago.

And elsewhere perhaps someone you've
utterly forgotten (or remember only
a smiling face in a crowd briefly
frowning)--

someone daily cherishes
the rosary of your misdeeds
and hones a dagger.

Hold Your Breath -- 15 Seconds of Fame is an Aeon

Lime: That's what you put corpses in.
It eats them up. What, then,
is the effect on artists
of limelight?
_____

Photo of Andy Warhol:
Impressive enough that savages
can shrink heads, amazing
to see one recovered to lifesize.
_____

Note: I put these poems together because both deal with the liabilities of celebrity, especially celebrity for its own sake. Also, the celebrities in poem one are apparently already dead, which particularly seems to me to fit Warhol (I mean when his body was still slouching about).

The first is simply a pun, since the "limelight" associated with fame is not literally "lime" (lye). The second is a bit more complex: Warhol is a fame-aholic of note, made a personal industry out of it. Looking at a photo of him, I realized his face had characteristics of shrunken heads I'd seen -- the sunken cheeks, flat slab lips, dead eyes -- squinty enough to suggest the sewn-up eyes of the heads. If that's not too alien a thought, then it leads to the idea of his turning himself into an item of merchandise (like a Campbell's soup can), which, somehow, fits with the promotional wording of the last two lines ("Amazing...lifesize"). If you can't visualize Warhol as an enlarged shrunken head, this poem is pretty stupid. I don't want it to be stupid, so please go to http://movies.aol.com/celebrity/andy-warhol/115970/main?sem=1&ncid=AOLMOV00170000000009 and scroll down to near the bottom of the page, where you'll see a small photo of Warhol that should persuade you.

Three silly puns

If all my words from you I've nipped,
O muse, am I the man you script?
_____

Envy is a disturbed state,
and so, in short, is NV.
_____

Kinky sex saps an artist--you can see
the craft ebbing.
_____

Notes: Re the first one -- one day I realized that I'm the one who writes my poems. I've eliminated the middlelady muse. I'm not the "man you [muse] script" -- and not the manuscript, but the writer of this script tease.

Re the second, maybe too obvious to mention, but NV is "in short" because it's two letters shy of ENVY.

Re the third: Some of you may not have heard of Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing ("craft ebbing" -- though that's not how "Ebing" is pronounced, alas), a German Neurologist (1840-1942) who wrote a notorious book (or books?) detailing the oddities of sexuality. It's a "serious" work, but also, for many, a source of exotic erotic items to leer about.

TIME for Milkbone

Hollow "CLOQUE!" The dog's teeth
glom a milkbone from my hand.

Four poemlets (or proselets with short lines)

(Note: Probably my poemlets are really proselets, because I'm always proseletizing.)

(Note: Missed a few days, so will make it up today)

The movie critic says it's a bad movie,
inane, one-dimensional, infantile, etc.
Before I read this, I saw the movie and,
alas, enjoyed it. Please don't tell
the critic.
_____

I went for a long walk in my heart.
Everyone I met was eager to know
my opinions and
all
my reasons for them.
_____

"It's an amulet -- it protects my spirit."
How can she have a spirit? Didn't we
outlaw slavery. No wonder we meet
so few free spirits --
everyone HAS one.
_____

God, help us help those
in whom God has ceased
to help Himself.
_________________________________

SPEAK! Peace, Good boy, Peace!

Peace Talks?
Peace is a puppet.
Money,
the ventriloquist,
talks.
______________

Here's a one-liner related to the above, a battlefield variant on Gerard Manley Hopkin's line in his poem "To Margaret" in autumn:


...and fields of wan men warmeal lie.

[Hopkins said "...fields of wan wood leafmeal lie."]

I'm Sorry, But I Can't Do That...

Remember
before you worked for a
bureaucracy,
when you thought evil
was passionate and intense?

Tomorrowland

At last Disney solved the inner city crises
by building walls around ghettos
and charging admission
to GHETTOLAND,

where tourists can cruise
in bullet-proof cars,
buy plastic bags of harmless white
powder and perform drive-by shootings
with blank-loaded pistols.

Comment on Friday's poem

On Friday I posted the following:

Suicide is murder.
When you killed yourself,
you were not
yourself.

For title I put "Self's Laughter". A couple readers have since asked me how that title fits the poem. Answer: It doesn't, really, just a silly bit of wordplay, the sort of temptation to which I readily give way, which has led some to tell me my puns "trivialize" my "serious work". But perhaps I think suicide it taken a bit too seriously these days. After all, we only live...how many million times?

Anyhoooo..."Self's Laughter" spells out "Self Slaughter" (suicide), and isn't suicide often an attempt to have the last laugh? (Is a daughter dafter?) (Who is she ofter aughter?)

Self's Laughter

Suicide is murder.
When you killed yourself,
you were not
yourself.

Adult

Adult books,
adult magazines,
adult movies:

All deal with what
fascinates little kids.

Office Building at Night

Towers of lights,
each light a cubical
containing
someone who worries.

Oops! House Guests

"Shhh!" cuts me off
from the head of the stairs:
"They're still sleeping upstairs.
MUST you talk to me
from across the house?"

Forgot again.
Hard not to: I use my voice
in the alien morning
as a dog uses piss:
To lay claim to spaces.

Sleep Faster!

Nights I'm fast
asleep, mornings
slow awake.

[Note: Isn't "fast food" an oxymoron?]

Take My Opinions, Please!

Arguing, pfeh!
Not the disagreement,
but being left in such solid agreement
with what someone else disagrees with.

(Note: Hmmm, I think "pfeh!" is Yiddish for "Ugh!" Or maybe I made it up myself.)

Friendly Feet

Blackbelts pulling their savage kicks:
No mean feet.

(Note: In Karate the fighters "pull" their kicks and punches -- at least in practice and most tournaments. The idea is to score with a blow that WOULD have been damaging had you not stopped it just in time. Thus the kicks and the kicking feet are, literally, not "mean," just menacing.)

Metal Gets Lonely

Rust and tarnish:
metal trying to be
less standoffish.

Contraband

Under cover of darkness
the rain smuggled in
billions of beads of light.

The Spirit Bird

Most birds flap their wings
to stay aloft,
but the spirit bird flutters frantically
to hold itself near the earth.
If you shoot one,
it falls into the sky.

Wild Geese

Overhead
an arrow of wild geese
talks to itself.

Daze of Deses and Doses

Note: The following variations on a Julie Andrews song in "Sound of Music" would be better sung by someone like Jimmy Durante (except someone still alive as well). The last line refers to "Flatbush" (nickname for Brooklyn and name of its main drag), but the dialect in the poem (for which I'm indebted to the works of Damon Runyan) is found in all sections of New York City and much of neighboring New Joisey.

Daze of Deses 'n Doses

Does is deers and dames is dears.
"Dis" is when youse don't respect.
Dese is "Rep.", but dose is "Dem."
Which a' dem should we elect?
"Day" is when dey sees da sun.
Dere's a boid! A goil! Some Hon!
Dee's da grade I got for dis.
Dis me if youse dare, ya wiss!

"Dose" is what da doctor does:
Two a' dese and one a' dose.
Dats da data to recall.
Udderwise youse overdose.
Dough dey hates to interrup',
Still dey tries to wake youse up...
When dey sees it ain't no doze,
Den dey hangs tags on yuz toes.

Youse is useful when youse helps.
Dis sun shines; Datsun's a car.
U's is turns youse should not make,
But youse does -- dat's how youse are.
Doze is what youse done in school.
Dats why youse is such a fool.
Dese is woids what people use,
Which in Flatbush bars buys booze.

Are You There?

If I dial the right number
and you"re home, you'll answer.
Why else have a phone?

So I keep writing, thinking,
why else have a language?