Poems

Hollow

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Hollow

I am a hollow man,
my heart and soul scooped out
by worry, wear, and care.
Water fills my bones.
My muscles shake like jelly.

Hope?
I abandoned it long ago.

Faith?
In these changing times
it’s a series of corks
bobbing their apples
in a party barrel.

Charity?
Love grows old and cold
and loses its charms
as we shiver in each other’s arms.

For now, I’ll dodder
my dodo way
towards extinction.

As I shuffle
from room to room
I’ll rest for a while
upon this chair.

My mother went this way.
My brothers and my father too;
I soon will follow,
just like you.

Glass Man

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Glass Man

“I am made of glass,” I said.
“You can see right through me.”

But the harder you looked,
the less you saw.
You claimed
there was nothing there,
just empty air.

“Your glass is an illusion,” you said.
“It’s not half full
and it’s not half empty.”

“Glass is fragile,
I break easily.
Drop me, I shatter;
hot and cold will
make me crack.”

“Your fragility is in your mind,
not in the fact of your existence.”

“When light passes through me
I break into a million colors,”
I said.

“You are a prism,
the colors that you cast
change you and rain
rainbow  lights
that change others
too.”

 

Shadows

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Shadows

My front door stood open,
but I thought it was closed.
I tip-toed in and called:
“Is anyone there?”
Echo answered
‘there, there, there …”
then silence.

I walked from room to room,
startled by shadows.
I opened doors,
looked under the table,
searched behind chairs,
no one.

The house stood silent and empty,
save for the fear,
the silent fear,
that lurked
like a remembered cancer
and occupied each room.

Sous-Chef

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Sous-chef

“I’ll be your sous-chef,” she said,
with a twinkle in her eye,
and she was as good as her word.

She brought me all the ingredients,
laid them out in the right order,
peeled potatoes and carrots,
sliced onions under cold water
to ensure that neither of us cried.

She added crushed garlic into hot
oil, measuring spices and slicing
the chicken into chunks.

I extracted the cork so the wine
could breathe. We sipped sherry
and talked of wind and weather,
of our time together, and how
we would grieve when, early next
day life would force us to part.

Later that night, after dessert
and liqueurs, we climbed up
the stairs and she joined me
in bed, in a sur-chef adventure

that went to my head, with me
as the sous-chef, her as the head.

Comment: Very rare, raw, naughty poem. I wrote it in the garage this morning, waiting for my tires to be rotated. It was cold, I was bored, and I needed warming up. This is one of those poems that I might regret later. I certainly hope not. The rhythms aren’t quite what I wanted, so I may re-do it, and possibly sharpen up the recipe. Your comments and advice will be welcome.

An Old Man

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An Old Man and His Memories

Me and my broken-record memories,
like a vinyl disc going round and round
on the turn-table, and the needle stuck
in a groove, as I repeat myself endlessly
like any old man with his stories and jokes,
told and heard so often that his old lady
knows the endings before he clears his
throat to start the tale, and the ancient
mariner who lives in his brain stops
people in supermarket and street to tell
them, again and again, about life’s doldrums
where no winds blow and the ship is stuck,
like a gramophone needle in a one-track
groove, no moving air to fill the sails,
and life’s albatross lies heavy on this old
man’s neck, and bends his back so he leans
on his canes, and points with rubber-tipped
stick at the falling snow, never as thick and
heavy as it was in his youth, when he climbed
Mount Everest and ran a four minute mile,
though that’s about the time now for his
one hundred stumbled meters, as he leans
on a grocery cart, like other old men who
grin and wink and nod “Nice cart, eh lad?”
and back in those days, every game was won,
except when the ref was biased, and look:
he still walks lop-sided from that collection
of chips off the old family block that he carries
around, like a slow snail carries his house,
always on the move, from face to fearful face.

Chaos

Chaos

Chaos

Chaos theory:
it states that we don’t know
what we’re doing and
it wouldn’t really matter
anyway, even if we did,
because life lacks meaning,
chance rules, and Lady Luck
with her lusty locks attached
to her forehead and she,
all bald and hairless
from behind, must be caught
as she arrives, because later
is much too late, and when past,
she’s gone for good and
our good luck’s gone with her,
and we’re left for ever,
sitting there, head in hands,
bemoaning all that milk spilled
before we ever had a chance
to actually taste it.

 

Spring

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Spring

Winter whiteness slowing now,
and the tide that full bore crashed
white waves against our house
receding to garden’s foot where
warm roots wait their waking.

But winter still stalks the land
and April brings snow, more snow,
as if there will never be an end
to these waves of whiteness,
thinner, trimmer, true, but
unwelcome as spring days grow
longer and sunrise beckons
ever more early with crow
and Blue Jay breaking the morning’s peace
into raucous pieces
as they bounce from branch to branch …

.. and brown the earth, and barren,
and bare, the robins finding no food
and flying on, while the passerines
just call and pass us by, finches at the feeder,
purple and gold, yet singing no songs,
and the robins, hop-along casualties
of this long delayed spring that promises,
but never comes …

Scribblings

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Scribblings

Words and thoughts
and symbols and images and
metaphors and myths
and all things missing and
some present in-between sheets
lined and unlined as a line of ants
crosses the kitchen floor
in search of sugar so sweet
these dreams where truth
and lies and smiles and
sighs seize highs and lows
and the light and
dark of a life as it might
have been and was perhaps
on another planet
in my darkest dreams
and my sharpest awakenings and
if I am dreaming then let me sleep
on and on and never wake up
to what passes as reality

 

Fall

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Fall

 Just one leaf
dropping from the tree
and the fall
a call of nature
and no freak chance of fate.

What throw of the dice
eliminates
Lady Luck?

None at all,
or so the poet says,
lying there,
indisposed,
his ribs cracked
hard against
the wooden boards
and his right foot
caught in such a way
that the hip slips
slightly from its socket
and try as he may
he cannot stand
but lies there
in the chill evening wind,
a lone leaf,
getting on in age,
plucked from his tree
and cast to the ground.

Comment: In light of my last fall, last Tuesday, this is a re-organization of an earlier poem also called Fall, available here. That particular fall took place in 2014. I stumbled and fell off a step on the back porch while I was trying to photograph a black bear that had wandered into our garden and was guzzling bird seed at the bird feeder. We saw this particular bear on half a dozen occasions. The poem was published in my poetry chapbook Triage (2015).

Sinister

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Sinister

What the left hand does
when the right hand doesn’t
know what it’s doing
is an attempt to re-pattern
the brain, to slow it down,
as the pencil spider-walks
its wandering way over the page
like my father’s did when,
stroke-stricken in the right hand,
he transferred his pencil to the left
and sought to-re-establish control
over tiny, manageable things,
and yes, he often cut himself
shaving, but he didn’t like beards
so he never gave in and shaved
every day, died fighting,
and did not go gentle,
and neither will I.

Comment: This is a very raw poem, in more senses than one. I fell over on Tuesday, on the back porch. One of the porch nails, forced up by the winter ice, caught in my open-toed sandal and over I went. My head had hit the deck before I even knew I was falling. It wasn’t as bad as the tumble I had when chasing the black bear and trying to photograph it, but this fall left me quite stunned. You can read about the fall HERE. The actual bruising, not the fictional ones, can be found in #3 of that sequence. I wrote the above poem, on Thursday evening, with my left hand, while my right hand was being iced. Funny how we think of one thing while doing another: I had visions of my father, stroke-stricken as I say, trying to write with his left hand. He fought so hard to do just the smallest things. Oh yes, I have a nice bump on my head, too, and as I told the chiropractor when I visited her later that Tuesday afternoon: “I think I have already had my back adjusted once today.” The other thought that comes to me: how slow we are to heal, once we pass a certain age, or, as my good friend Jan the Stoneist says, “an uncertain age.” With that latest fall, I have indeed entered into The Age of Uncertainty.