Random Thought 7/16/21

In the urinal
at work my
piss stream
looked like a
mushroom cloud.

The End of the Holidaze

The Christmas lights have all winked out
And Daley Plaza's bare;
Cards, though few they were, packed up
as if they're never there.
Not a Santa found in sight,
reindeer no longer play.
The Holidaze, though not here long,
are over, sad to say.

Incline

White flowers incline toward the sun;
they know their time is near.
Around them, the leaves wilt and brown;
their time's already here.
The frost comes thick and soon will slick
on flower, leaf and clover.
The branches sigh as seasons die.
The cause? One word: Shocktober!

Shocktober Song

The locust trees in Seward Park
are mostly golden now.
Sharp, small leaves are spinning down
from nearly every bough.
Shadows stretch and often catch
a passer-by in fear.
The sun slides down. The dark swirls 'round.
Beware! Shocktober's here.

Every Picture Tells a Story 4/30/13

Sparrows and robins hop
across the lawn before
La Casa del Terror to
beak the oatmeal bread
I lobbed there on my way
out the beaten door.

Wilt

The sun pummels down
the eastbound avenue
welding eyes and smiles
into well-forged winces.
Just as well since it's
just a preview of
the blistering to come.

Swelter

Don't need the pierce
of the cheap beat-up
Target alarm clock to
let me know morning's
unavoidably here.
The sweat canalling
down my back 'cause
heat is still squeezing
from concrete and steel
from the day before
is more than enough
to pry open one
or two brown eyes
that were never quite
shut to begin with.

Wave

At the corner of
State and Madison
the heat has melted
much of the color
from the world
leaving behind
little but baked air.

May Haiku

Flowering tree sways
fragrant in the filtered rays
just out of dawn's grasp.

August Haiku

Leaves are already
Golding and falling. Autumn
Is just breaths away.

Autumn Haiku

Dappled maple trees
sway along my walk to work,
their leaves soon to drop.

Friday While Shaving

A small black dot
with eight thin legs

executes silken
scrimshaw within

the shadow of my
medicine cabinet.

Equinox

Gold locust leaves caught
in the webbing spread outside
my bedroom window.

Sunday Afternoon

Seven sparrows
hop and dance

between and around
the black wheels of

the cart parked
on the green corner

where the man
in the white mesh

baseball cap and
blue golf shirt

sells elotes
illegally.

Candlelight

The following poem was written a long time ago in honor of a then-coworker who was moving on to another job, and I'd meant to post it here before. This past week, though, I lost a dear friend--a woman with a huge heart who cared about damn near everyone except, unfortunately, herself. The words below seem appropriate to her as well.

At the wood that used to be
Candlelight's desk, there is
a moment just before sunset
when the space west lets go
its reserve, lets clouds become
live things sore with volcanic
attention and nerve. Eyes take
the chance, glance up, know
what causes warmth to swoop
low over girder rust and clumps
of dark gnarl nowhere near
turquoise sleeves pressed
to enormous panes tinted
for keeping out. The moment
drifts through movement of
sneakers over worn office carpet,
fumes, dry weeds in drier sidewalks
without giving notice or regret
for eyes becoming cautious like
always, the air going dark like
always--boxed memories of
Candlelight gone, not forgotten.

Another One

The same notebook has numerous other fragments, most undated but likely written to the left or the right of the New Millennium. So I have no idea, this far out, what woman I'm writing about below--my love life (if you can even call it that) was so disastrous that it could be any one of them.

Sometimes I think
"I haven't thought
about her today"
and light up bulb-
bright until I
realize that
thinking about
not thinking about
is still thinking about
and the light
goes out.

Many Tiny Scratches

I have many old notebooks in various places in La Casa del Terror. Most are old journals (yes, even in this electronic age, I still keep a private, hand-written journal), while others are leftovers from my various jousts with writing projects. In one of these notebooks I found the following poem, which I don't remember writing (not a first, though it seems, from the poems surrounding it a a couple of references in the original draft, it was sribbled sometime around 2000), nor do I remember dreaming all of these things. However, since I know that did dream some of these strange events (the woman in the see-through teddy and the London After Midnight discovery), I have to accept that the others did, too. And since the poem doesn't really end (it just kind of stops), it could conceivably go on forever.

In my dreams and nightmares
I can drive cars, pull out my
teeth one by one and spit them
into urinals, watch a woman I once
lusted after cross a long living room
in a see-through red teddy,
take Amtrak to Philadelphia,
find a dusty but pristine copy of
London After Midnight in
an attic, climb the clock tower
of my high school only to find
its bricks crumbling under my
fingertips, go fishing with my
dad, clone goldfish, piss plasma,
swing a loan shark over my
head with a lasso, use shovels
and pickaxes to cover rat burrows
in an otherwise empty lot, play
center field for the Cubs, swim
Underwater through a flooded
grade school, find a stash of
S&H Green Stamps, eat epoxy
on crackers, get my teeth
flossed by Angie Everhart in a
movie theater by the light of a
Claymation Woody Allen singing
an ode to the Three Stooges,
debate cinema with Gene Siskel,
until he drinks a beaker of
glowing green liquid and becomes
Karloff's Monster and promises
to enjoy tearing me limb from
reddened limb until I trick him
into ramming his head through
the front of a microwave,
escape Nazi Berlin on a
Schwinn Fastback, watch
a porn star named Soft Hart
crawl across a conference room
table toward me and eat a
Granny Smith apple in one bite.

11 Haiku

There was a time a few years ago when I wrote haiku--three-line poems with syllable limits on each line of five, seven and five--with fair regularity. I liked the restrictions of the form--you really have to think about your words when you only have a limited number of them to use.

That's not to say that the haiku below, written over a 10-year period, are any good. Some of them probably are. Some of them likely aren't. I'm not the one to judge, though. I'll leave that up to you.

Unrequited love:
a pain that never ceases
unless you move on.

There are three roses
in the vase on my table.
Only one is red.

Even in alleys
purple flowers can grow, their
fragrance swallowed so.

Barbecue grill smoke
pokes up through the branches of
the full locust trees.

The air is weighted
with the breath of storms to come.
Raise the shades and wait.

For the first time since
my father died, his orange
tree is bearing fruit.

Black cauliflower
heads of storms grow on the dusk
horizon, crawl east.

A woman I thought
I loved was at a party
I declined last night.

The rose sleeps in this
winter yard, only to be
awakened by May.

I bought a cactus
the day Dad died just to hold
something sharp, alive.

Breeze, gentle me this
dark--my mind is rambled and
sleep in nowhere near.

Uno de Mayo

Brown squirrel
on peak of gray

garage roof
reaches up for

dangling green
seeds from

maple bough
and feasts.

January Poems #31: Would

I don't think anyone has ever asked me, "Of all of the poems you've ever written, which one is your favorite?" If anyone had put the question to me, though, this would be the one I'd choose. I think it's the mixture of sadness and longing tempered by optimism--hope, even--that explains my affection for it. It makes me smile. And anything that makes me smile, even after all these years, can't be too bad.

Wherein an angel
who would never

have known me in
my Pretty Boy Days
and would be content

to throb for me
now would never

have existed since
I never had any
Pretty Boy Days

I don't doubt that
there is someone

--not necessarily
an angel--who'd like
to have someone

--not necessarily
me--as a hobby.