I'll be away

for a time, doing some much-needed computer maintenance. I sincerely hope it will be brief, but this will be a full format and reinstall, and we all know how these things can go. (See below.) Wish me luck, friends.

Plans

They say the best laid
gang aft agley,
but if we had to scrap the ones we’ve made
where would we be?

Though it’s arguable
if cooked eggs hatch,
wouldn’t our days be simply too miserable
if we didn’t sit a clutch?

Plans structure days.
A basic minimum
keeps the prefrontal mayonnaise
out of the temporal jam,

yet the structure’s fiction.
Our purest fantasies
are real as our most serious predictions,
our chiseled destinies.

Reality’s rarely kind.
Life is a bitch.
The farsighted reliably lead the blind
into the usual ditch.

So let’s make plans,
have lunch, a drink.
We’ll catch each other as catch we can,
next week, you think?

The Scar

I’m in this. This isn’t me.
In here my crocheted tissues
only find me in reflections.
In here I only feel it sometimes,
a certain tightness as the grafts
draw down, an aching anesthesia.
I own no mirrors. You I can’t avoid.

It isn’t me you see scrambled so.
That surrounds me. I’m inside.
But now the world’s a shot flower,
now my shattered visage eats
at the squeamish citizens like sin.
Those who may have loved me once
have other obligations now.

It was a year before I recognized
myself accidentally caught in glass, but
I, too, felt the clammy urge to look,
absorb it, thrilling somewhere deep
at its livid anarchy. I, too, forced
my eyes from the shameful chaos,
the peeled, eloquent mortality.

Call me Patches. I’m just like you.
I’ll be your jackolantern,
count you lucky in your
pocked and bristled countenance.
Those gargantuan, grasping pores
I’ll take for my ideal. Don’t go.
I’m no different now. It’s only me.

I, too, have in me sometimes
that itch for the button,
you know the one, the one
that answers any question,
the Alexandrine stroke through
the charmed knot of existence,
flash fire in a universe of ice.

I’m like you. Something in me, too, loves
disaster, flames in the sky, flood,
must look when the inevitable
happens, have its fill
of the unspeakable roadside faces
framed in shattered webs of glass,
the startled, comely faces of the dead.

You know you want to. Go on. Touch it.

Merry Go Round

I
have a
dream in which
I wake up, throw
back the covers, step
into a hot shower,
shave, skip breakfast, go to work,
then wake to find myself still in
bed about to throw back the covers
and step into a hot shower, shave, skip
breakfast and go to work, only to wake,
blink my eyes, find it all there to go
through again, hoping this time it’s
real, get up again, shower,
shave, skip breakfast, never
dreaming I’m asleep
but always half
expecting
to wake
up.

Tap

Heels afire, chalice raised,
he doubletimed it to the Bright Lights,
ready to eat or be eaten, but
his act was from like the prairie somewhere
and everyone who was anyone
got real tired real soon
of the way he’d constantly cut up,
shoot his feet off all the time.

He did his part, give him that:
when they called the cattle in, he went,
auditioned for auditions while
his letters of introduction from
Nowhere Terpsichorean
went yellow in their plastic sleeves.

Eat or be eaten? Give us a break.
Not even a day job.
His bankers’ civil chill became
a frozen siege of civil law.
His door was a union hall for wolves.
For awhile there the sandwiches
got thin enough to make him wonder
what was eating whom. Tap City.

But nobody misses all the breaks.
He got the call, from the Bridge Commish,
found himself in charge of rust
on Bay Span three, endlessly
patrolling in his baggy greens,
filing his chits, watching his steps.

Soon he was back on his feet again.
He even stopped a few of the city’s
more reluctant suicides,
even married one, a pianist.
It struck him that, against all odds,
he’d found the perfect place in time,
a hollow in the universe
that fit the space he occupied.

Nights were best: alone, on top,
back turned to the blazing town,
he’d mount the oxidizing wind
with an airy music in his teeth,
bell the bridge a step or two
to greet the pirouetting stars.

The Legend of Good Women

The woman is the better half:
we hear it every day,
but the better half of what is what
they always fail to say.

We all recall Penelope
for steadfastness and tact;
her silken weavings drove them mad,
brought Odysseus back.

But did she pine for all those years?
Was anything amiss?
No. Her heart was wholly occupied
by her Telemachus.

She held him on his birthing day
as a mother only can;
it was then that old Odysseus
became a traveling man.

Birdsong

Filigreed partiti greet
the sunbeams, appealingly antique:
speedy, secretive Vivaldis
key the trees with piccoli,
sweep the eaves with tutti suites
that leave easy sheeted sleepers’
dreams discreetly incomplete.
One weary steeple creeper,
keeper of a peevish three,
piqued by the ceaseless beseeching
peekaboo of her greedy trio
for eked feasts of meaty beetle
or sweet beaks of feeder seed,
cheats for the merest cheeky beat
in her careening, keen career,
wreaks her feces on the screen.

This Lunar Beauty

Wystan Hugh Auden ..................... February 21, 1907

This lunar beauty
Has no history
Is complete and early;
If beauty later
Bear any feature
It had a lover
And is another.

This like a dream
Keeps other time
And daytime is
The loss of this;
For time is inches
And the heart’s changes
Where ghost has haunted
Lost and wanted.

But this was never
A ghost’s endeavor
Nor finished this,
was ghost at ease;
And till it pass
Love shall not near
The sweetness here
Nor sorrow take
His endless look.

--W.H. Auden