current status
outside a little
inside a lot.
living not dead yet.
coffee.
thinking about
everything
all the time
at the same time
and it’s
driving me nuts.
this rash on my arm.
the pain
of splashing water.
cat-less.
a preference
for higher sitting toilets.
cold this morning
on May 13th.
I wonder:
is it melancholia
to remember past
loves fondly?
this rash on my arm.
oh. have I already
said that?
Joe D’Elia was my father’s younger brother
a nighthawk barroom hopper.
fast walker. smooth talker. had his big toe
in the murky pool of Fall River politics at the entry level,
practitioner in hunting down street-wise women
who’d hunt him down right back.
had a steady girl. red-haired Rosie, cocktail waitress.
had a sleek automobile.
Cadillac de Ville which allowed him a roam-around attitude.
smoked Viceroy king size filter-tipped cigarettes
three packs a day.
let's remember Roseanne Marcucci.
well,–– Joe D'Elia was the guy who gave us a ride
to her junior prom in his Cadillac and never came back.
the place closed down after “good night sweetheart”.
a downpour. I was soaked through my tux.
Roseanne's skin was glazed like a strand of limp linguini
dipped in extra virgin olive oil.
the Route 6 motel was lit-up and flashing red across the highway.
the sighting
the virgin Mary
was under my bed formed by a clump of dust bunnies.
she looked younger than when seen tucked into
the half bathtub sunk into the soil in the backyard
near the grapevine’s succulent concords, purple and plump
on the vines overhead near the fence to the junkyard.
1954 was a good year for car wrecks.
the surviving chrome-plated hood ornaments of scantily clad women
winging their way forward from the hood's nub were a sacred find.
but the junkyard dog was a very cranky animal.
a good junkyard dog is always barking and growling like a lunatic.
another day and the dust bunnies under the bed changed their shape
to resemble auntie Alma, older sister to my father.
Alma, thick-legged with nylon stockings and spun-blonde
beehive hairdo, spray-fixed and perfumed like RAID crawling insect spray.
I'd daydream of Alma and under the late night sheets
bypassing the virtues of the 14 year old "Mother of God".
I know. I know. I'm going to Hell in a hand-basket.
work on the ending!! (but the perceived value of certain imagery is measured on
a day-by-day basis. wouldn't you agree?)
made from lemons
"when God gives you lemons…"
that’s precisely how it should read.
check-out the children’s wing.
cancer as lemons:
wake-up and smell the lemons.
listen,.. deodorant with aluminum
works better than sissy deodorants.
about the environment:
I once walked across a field
hand-in-hand asking my early young love:
“what is this? is that mud”?
"no" she replied:
"it’s cow dung”.
how romantic is that?
the sorrow and the pity:
her name was Claudette
straight from the incubators
of Dominican Academy,
as french as they come and real pretty, too.
"lemon-headed":
sometimes I feel as though I am.
so I write poems to deflect my hidebound inclinations
and yes, she said: “cow dung”.
a love poem
vignette 101
I’ve been thinking about sleep.
strolling the floor toward the toilet
in the morning I think about sleep.
refreshed at breakfast, sleep shows-up
at the table like a friend, nodding
and smiling and intoxicating.
in my mind sleep takes me to the place
where nothing motivates, nothing adjudicates
and there’s no disposition, no boss, no antagonist,
no time clock, no deodorant with aluminum,
no yearning to be someplace else, no yelling
and no pressure to get the machine fixed
whatever the machine might be and where
I'm young and pretty.
ahh.. sleep.
goings on in the neighborhood
holy Mary mother of god,
known by her nickname: blessed virgin Mary,
was seen flying her kite
near the left field fence yesterday.
she seemed to be really good at it
tugging the main-string, pulling
her kite southward toward Marzilli’s bakery
then northward toward the billboards.
the kite’s tail looked to be a raccoon's tail
plucked from her only son’s Davy Crockett hat.
(I had one, too. tail attached)
she gets away with murder, that one.
nothing’s happening today, except
Joe the cop forgot his service revolver
and had to skedaddle home to fetch it before
some busybody noticed and squealed.
well, I noticed. but I learned through certain
innocent bystander situations on how to keep my mouth shut.
phase one: how I came to be a poem-writer.
I recently wrote a poem about Katsushika Hokusai’s great wave:
"off Kanagawa" a woodblock print nicely colored and wonderful to look at.
In the poem I mention the waves of my childhood beach
called “Horseneck” beach and how the waves were
"wetter" than Hokusai’s wave which is understandable.
but within the poem, the Horseneck waves were as dry as Hokusai's wave.
I also mentioned Horesneck surfers as a fill-in to the poem where
they really didn’t belong.
but their presence within the poem got me thinking about motion,
about what moves us from one place to another.
Hokusai’s tremendous wave holds a couple of long boats
paddling into it. these are “Oshiokuri-Bune” boats,
fishing barges, each holding a dozen or so oarsmen.
the boats are intended to move forward as the sea moves below them
and against them as the rowers struggle to move against the wave.
this is unlike the movement of an escalator going up with multiple
riders as the escalator moves them, but on the escalator nobody paddles.
inside the busy Buick Roadmaster, the mechanisms of the machine
move it forward but the road lays motionless and flat beneath it
just like the paper holding Hokusai’s wood-block wave print.
when I'm gone the ash will be motionless but it will turn with the Earth.
