#116: August 17, 2006

Long after Timmy's mom and dad had said
good night, kissed him, and shut his bedroom door
he woke to scratching sounds across the floor
and evil growls from underneath his bed--

The old door let a stream of hall light shine
through its loose jamb, and by that glow he saw
the floorboards deeply gouged by four thick claws,
and streaked bed-ward with some rust-colored slime--

Too scared to scream and too afraid to jump,
he listened to the Under-Creature's groans
and cracks like molars grinding down on bones,
and every now and then, a ghastly thump!--

Hours from sunrise, young Timmy held his breath
and finally slept, dreaming of his own death.

#115: August 16, 2006

When someone writes the history of us--
Some scholar, maybe, hired by our kids,
Long years from now when our bodies are dust
And only stories witness what we did--

He'll edit some and gloss over the rest
For brevity--and so I think he'll miss
Some episodes when we were at our best,
For tales we never told will not persist.

How could he detail moments we've pressed tight
Between us where no alien hand can delve?
Minds meshed, joined through the windows of our sight,
Our molten souls, making one of ourselves?

No pen could write that silent history
Inscribed here in the book of you and me.

#114: August 15, 2006

Don't go--stay here a while and talk to me.
It's been so long I can't remember when
I last had any friendly company.
Pull up a chair...that's it. Now, how've you been?

Oh, I suppose I'm well as can be, dear.
Considering, you know. I don't complain.
Although I could do--abandoned down here
with all this dust and smoke and horrid rain...

Oh, never mind. No use fretting such things
as can't be changed. Time passes, and the world
just goes right on without you, live or die.
See that photo? The babe with fairy wings?
My granddaughter. She's seven in July.
We've never met. But such a pretty girl!

#113: August 14, 2006

If there's wisdom in whiskey, I've not found it;
Just stupor and stupidity inside.
But also happiness--no way around it;
There's bliss in that amber Lethean tide.

An unexamined life's not worth the living,
Said Socrates, who faced death without fears;
It's true, but my exam is more forgiving
of foibles and failures after three beers.

Oh give me booze instead of introspection,
Distill my doubts in bottles, not in verse;
Abet me in this rational deflection
And, if not better, things will be no worse--

Now there's a truth, sunk in this G & T,
Greater than dreamed in your philosophy.

#112: August 13, 2006

I want you to be quiet now--so please
just take a breath and hold it. There, be still.
Lean back, savor the feel of grass, the breeze
across your cheek. Consider this green hill
the breast of earth, and you her sleeping child
pulled to her bosom, nurtured on the milk
of clear blue streams. Try to be reconciled
with trout, possom, and deer, your woodland ilk.

How can we have forgotten this? What kind
of monsters caged in glass have we become?
What noise has made us deaf, what smoke struck blind
our ancient eyes? What poison made us numb?
The cure is here, but we so seldom are,
and cannot hear the old songs from afar.

#111: August 12, 2006

The sky was absolutely biblical
that day we dropped our lives and headed west--
those spears of light through nimbus piled tall
and sharp enough to pierce the desert's chest

with glory. Then the thunderheads rolled in
and lightning snaked the belly of the storm.
My hair erect with static and my sin,
I watched the rain come down, eroding form;

I felt suddenly lost, thrown off level
like I'd never felt wind through my wet hair--
and something in my soul, not quite devil,
told me to ditch the car right then and there

and leave you in it, simply walk away
like Moses. We made Reno the next day.

#110: August 11, 2006

Tommy did magic tricks for all the kids
for extra cash: hat rabbits, floating cards,
the cup and balls. The job wasn't too hard
and Tom was pretty good at what he did.

But then they laid him off down at the plant
and Tommy changed. He wore a poisoned look,
like he was planning murder, and a book
was always in his hand: The Sorcerer's Cant.

At his last party gig Tom twitched his cape
and glowered at the kids. He uttered words
in a dark tongue. A flock of ebon birds
came out of nowhere. Tom could not escape--
they covered him, pecking. When they had cleared
all but Tom's cloak and hat had disappeared.

#109: August 10, 2006

Eli sleeping: mysterious as the Sphinx,
and just as silent on our ottoman;
a riddle in a fur coat--no one can
conceive his dreams or fathom what he thinks.

There's ages writ down in those feline genes,
whole histories unknowable to man
told by instinct, and in the graceful plan
of his bones. No human knows what it means.

Perhaps the past is present as he leans
into my stroke, and ancient desert sands
stretch in his arid mind each time he blinks.
As he naps, Babylon rises and then sinks
into the dust. I think he understands
his kind were worshipped by dead kings and queens.

#108: August 9, 2006

He never would slow down for ambulances,
Ignoring their sirens, lights blue and red,
Denying many dying folk their chances.
"The dying would not stop for me," he said.

He never gave a penny to a beggar;
For homeless folks he had no empathy.
He gave no food nor alms, however meager,
And asked, "What have those beggars done for me?"

And on his deathbed, in his final blindness,
He muttered curses with his dying breath.
"Why should I show my fellow man a kindness?"
He gasped. "Nobody cares about my death."

They covered his face and then put out the light,
And all agreed the old man had been right.

#107: August 8, 2006

When little Mike was only four years old
he leapt from the rooftop, trying to fly;
and for a while hung cloud-like in the sky
(impossible, but he'd never been told)--

His parents saw him floating near the roof
and shouted, terrified, "It can't be done!"
Poor Mike believed them (he was a good son)
and crashed down like a stone, as though in proof.

We're taught this from a very early age
by well-meaning adults, who clip our wings;
who mistake fear for safety, words for things;
who cannot see the outside of the cage--

Who've forgotten what children always know:
the trick to flying is the letting go.

#106: August 7, 2006

When someone said the autumn moon was full
I crouched and curled my fingers into claws.
My body itched with hair; I stretched my jaws,
a sudden fang-sprung trap. I felt the pull
of tides in veins and rode the shift in phase
into animal realms. The smell of blood
spoke to me in a tongue I understood.
I traded clumsy steps for lupine grace.
And if I'd met an old man or a child
I would have ripped out trachea and bayed
my blasphemy into God's silver eye!
But then I looked and saw it was a lie--
I shrank and slunk away, no longer wild,
beneath a new-moon sky where few stars played.

#105: August 6, 2006

The well is dry, its walls not even moist;
no pebbles to suck, no underground lake
to dig to. If you've got a thirst to slake,
look elsewhere, stranger. Once we had rejoiced
in flowing water, danced on singing stones
that rang with our footsteps like bells of glass.
The stream writhed with salmon, with trout and bass
enough for all. There--you can see the bones
cast in the dust like runes. Now our lips crack
and we read in that charnel earth a curse,
as if the very world had died of thirst
and we, the vermin living on its back
were doomed as well--unless a savior rain
redeem us, bring our host to life again.

#104: August 5, 2006

The shadows in the corner of the room
are whispering tonight. The cold hearth flames
turn walls to water; from that fog-thick gloom
the dead advance and rise, calling their names.

The old inn, empty as cicadas' molt
but for this tired old man, cannot be said
to breathe as some homes do. Behind the bolt
it is, like most its custom, cold and dead.

All through the night the phantoms tell of want
left from their castoff lives, but never lost.
There's nothing to disturb me in such moan.
For if I'm haunted here, I also haunt:
a live man in a dead world is a ghost,
and no one in the graveyard is alone.

#103: August 4, 2006

I don't know where it goes when I don't watch it;
It's tricky and nervous, easy to scare.
Though I strike like a rattler, I can't catch it;
I jump and turn around--it's always there.

I've tried windows, but it's too smart for that trick;
I end up looking like a Peeping Tom.
I've tried the old mirror-stuffed-in-my-hat trick;
It winks and blows me kisses, like my mom.

But still I'm sure the moment my back's to it,
Away it flies on some fantastic trip;
I just can't seem to catch the bugger do it!
But I keep waiting for that fatal slip--

One day I'll catch it, and that will remind me
What pleasure to find empty air behind me.

#102: August 3, 2006

Old Man McReady came out once a day
to check his mail. We kids would watch and wait
to snicker at his robe of gold lamé
and his three wire-black hairs greased to his pate.

Sometimes we called him names--Nancy, Old Queer
--though we had little notion what they meant.
But we saw the man's pained eyes, his quiet fear
as he shut the dark door. Then off we went.

We were young then, stupid and careless cruel
as only children can be. As I grew
I learned about compassion, guilt, and shame.
Too late for Theodore--that was his name.
He wound up at the bottom of his pool
and dead ten days before anyone knew.

#101: August 2, 2006

The king walked the old roads, until he found
the flowered path he'd followed long ago
to his fortune and kingdom. His step was slow,
his visage grave as he looked back. The sound
of songbirds made a heaven of the wood,
and petals carpeting his homeward path
perfumed his very breath, sweeter by half
than other airs on earth. He understood
how lucky as a young man he had chanced
upon the path he chose, how easily
he might have been waylaid or lost instead.
The sunlight rained through budding leaf and danced
on streams that babbled softly through the trees.

"I never should have come this way," he said.

#100: August 1, 2006

A hundred sonnets? Jesus Jumping Christ!
Can you believe that shit? I know I can't--
You'd think that half as many had sufficed
To purge my compulsive poetic rant;

And yet I barrel on, out of control,
Pounding iambic observations home,
Torturing rhyme and stripping bare my soul,
For what? Some kind of OCD syndrome?

They can't all be gems, and alas, they're not--
Quantity over quality, I fear.
But if I reach for stars and miss--so what?
You try a sonnet a day for a year!

No, failure in a grand attempt's no sin;
Even blind hogs root acorns now and then.

#99: July 31, 2006

Maybe, just maybe, plans don't have to fail
because they're hatched by me. Perhaps no curse
sits on my efforts, and I might prevail
the next time, or the next, bad come to worse.

Maybe, despite the way it often feels
I'm no more unlucky than the next guy.
Perhaps the law of averages reveals
only mathmatics behind each failed try.

It's easy to believe your shadowed dreams
are poisoned by mean-spirted deity;
some sin that no perseverance redeems
stifles luck, murders serendipity--

A shame to leave a door closed in despair,
and never know Success was waiting there.

#98: July 30, 2006

Once, long ago, before the mighty shift
That split the continents and disarrayed
The seas, on two sides of a growing rift
Two furry creatures, Okk and Enok, played.

Okk was the smartest of the furry clan
And spent his days devising crude machines;
Enok was dumb as rocks (or dumber than)
And carried all the stupid, violent genes.

Poor Enok neared starvation, till the day
The earth opened and swallowed brainy Okk.
And so the dumber ape across the way
Multiplied, once he got over the shock.

Oh, Chuck--the fittest don't always survive,
Leaving the dumb but fortunate to thrive.

#97: July 29, 2006

Don't move too fast. Remember Damocles,
dining calmly while twisting overhead
a heavy sword suspended by a thread
threatened his instant death. Such times as these
require deliberate movements and slow speech.
The time for bluster and noise is long past.
Learn to slow down, my friend, and learn it fast,
or else learn what that keen blade has to teach.

Perhaps there's not long left before the snap
and flash, the last descent of screaming steel
and final darkness. Still, no need to rush
to fling ourselves into that waiting trap.
It's time we learnt to think before we feel.
You can look up now. Consider things. Hush.