In the Little Park

I go to run
In the little park,
Round and round the stony walk.
Sometimes rain,
Sometimes snow,
More often the hot, hot sun.
Long sleeves and pants
To keep off chiggers;
Counting my breaths,
Forgetting the number of laps,
Wondering how long I can keep this up;
But without it I grow fat,
My ballooning belly
Inversely proportional
To my self esteem.
So, I shall run until I drop,
Or until,
Either within or without,
Something breaks.

Perhaps someday the sky will split,
The bottom will fall out of the world,
And the last trump will sound -- great heavenly fart,
Portent of Eternity,
With Its infinite unbreakable laps,
And no hope for release,
Because the bottom
Can only fall out once.

No, keep running,
But confine hope
To trivial things:
Cups of coffee,
Glasses of wine,
Well-timed rays of sunlight,
The right song playing at the right moment,
Hot baths,
And, above all,
An occasional sincere interaction
With a fellow human being:
I and Thou,
Me and you,
When time is obliterated,
Zapped,
In a moment of identification—
No earth, no sky,
No death,
No apocalypse,
And no Eternity,
Not now.

The Trumpers Have All Gone to Ga-Ga Land

The Trumpers have all gone to Ga-Ga Land,
Where very few ever come back;
They galloped away in a hell of a huff
When they heard they were under attack
From the people who don’t “get” America,
And those feds who are not on the level,
From China and antifa, dark folks and gays
And, of course, most of all from the Devil.

The Trumpers have all gone to Ga-Ga Land,
Where the cars are American built;
Where the churches are bubbling over with grace,
And everyone’s armed to the hilt;
Where the morals are biblical, tested and true,
So old that they’re in black and white;
Where the Math hasn’t changed since the waltz was brand new,
And where teachers can still read and write.

The Trumpers have all gone to Ga-Ga Land,
Where nobody ever grows up;
Where Lassie’s still saving the folks at the mine,
And coffee is ten cents a cup;
Where no one doubts six-day creation—
You won’t find a fool with such nerve—
And there isn’t a single convention
Apostrophes have to observe.

The Trumpers have all gone to Ga-Ga Land,
Where everything’s just as it was;
With the cinemas still playing Gone With The Wind,
And next week the Wizard of Oz;
Where the fathers expound with authority,
And the daughters all listen in awe;
Where the mothers are home, baking sweet apple pies,
And chopsticks are banned under law.

The Trumpers have all gone to Ga-Ga Land;
Of immigrants there, there are none,
Except for the girls at the whorehouse,
Who’ve got Einstein visas, each one,
To safeguard American ladies,
Who never must know such a trade,
Is, thanks to their God-fearing husbands,
Enabled to thrive unallayed.

The Trumpers have all gone to Ga-Ga Land,
Where the reptiles and pedos can’t come;
Where the atheists can’t stand the glare of the light,
Or the beat of the patriot’s drum;
Where the cherubim circle the home on the range,
And the spines of the students all straighten
As they solemnly pledge, wiping tears from their eyes,
With a gusto that scares away Satan.

The Trumpers have all gone to Ga-Ga Land,
Way over the proud purple hills;
Where Old Glory is never mistreated,
And Mexico pays all the bills.
They’re waiting at Ga-Ga Land station;
The engineer’s sounding the bell;
The Ga-Ga Land train is departing:
The next stop and last will be Hell.

Civilization

The peaceful family,
Community,
Nation,
Are soon washed away,
Depending, as they do,
Not on human nature
But on culture,
History.

Eons of experiment, discovery and reflection—
Gone in a thousand days!
It can happen here,
It is happening here.
The sands collapse beneath our feet,
The very sands that Abraham walked,
Because we have not communicated our values,
Have not embodied them.

Civilization is risible,
The father of all jokes,
Until you lose it.
It is injustice piled upon injustice,
Until a greater injustice comes along.
Jeremiah,
Confucius,
Aristotle,
Francis.
We mock them all.
We are hopeless without them,
Children unparented.

Oh Zeus,
Don’t take it all away just yet!
Give us one more chance
To teach kindness and humility,
Respect for facts,
Wisdom.
Compelled to start again,
We might not get this far.
Perhaps this was the only chance.

Oh, to return to the old days
When we felt safe enough
To put a torch to it all!
But we were only cartoon characters then,
Sawing the branch that we sat on.
We must grow up now.

The Children Who Fell Through the Cracks

Here come the children who fell through the cracks;
Here come the whiz kids who went off the tracks,
In between sitters and saccharine snacks.
How will they pay us for being so lax,
Now they’ve come out to play?

Here come the babes that we lost in the wood,
Missing and miserable, misunderstood;
We did what we had to but not what we could;
It’s no use to say that we meant it for good.
Look at them, my how they’ve grown!

We are the pilgrims who went the wrong way,
Faithless and spent at the end of the day,
All of our visions befuddled and gray,
Plenty of learning and nothing to say,
Shining our light from the mud.

Here come the children who fell through the cracks,
Brooding in solitude, hunting in packs,
Showing up just when we’ve all turned our backs:
So many angles for launching attacks!
Now they’ve come out to play.

Our Heaven

Here in America,
We’re all going to Heaven
Not because we deserve it,
But because we are entitled to it;
Such is our creed.
Heaven must be within reach of the majority,
Appeal to the median voter,
The average citizen,
Carrying an average burden,
Making the average number of complaints,
Being cruel only rarely,
And kind only superficially.
Heaven sanctifies moderation.
If saints do exist,
In our Heaven they will live a marginalized existence,
As despised eccentrics;
The exception and not the rule.

You might think our Heaven a humdrum sort of place,
But it isn’t,
Because the amenities
And the service
Are extraordinary:
The pillows are that soft,
The music is adorable,
And you can fly,
Without even a jetpack,
Simply by willing it--
Whoosh!
It’s like living in the best possible hotel,
In the best possible amusement park,
Surrounded by people who, inexplicably, think you're awesome.
Heaven is Vegas on steroids,
And who wouldn’t want that?
Heaven is like being stupendously rich,
But without being miserable,
Like so many of the wealthy on earth are.
Otherwise, why have a God at all?
You can see Vegas from Calvary.
And we are all going.
Gee whiz, what fun!

New Roses

In bars,
Factories,
Forgotten villages;
Through rain,
Wind,
Snow;
Standing at stoplights;
Or going from car to car,
Trying not to get hit,
I have hustled many roses
Down the avenues of the dead.

I sold my roses to young men,
Who gave them to their sweethearts;
I sold my roses to married men,
Who handed them to prostitutes;
I sold my roses to little girls,
Who presented them to their mothers.

Sometimes the dead were gracious and thanked me for my roses;
More often they were hostile,
Or the roses themselves perished,
And joined them.
The blood of the dead
Reddened my roses;
Their thorns
Pierced the living.
I kept up the hustle.

I used to sell my roses for God.
I have new roses now,
But no God to sell them for;
I park them in a cheap corner of the market,
And wait.


“I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.”
Charles Bukowski, Consummation of Grief

For the Aliens

This one’s for the aliens,
So far away,
Who have so few poems written about them,
Though I’d like to think that they’d be cultured enough
To appreciate it
If we bothered.
So far away
That we can probably never reach them,
Nor they us;
But we can think of each other,
Like sailors on different oceans whose routes never cross.
Perhaps the aliens have more of a handle on it all,
Or at least some of them do,
Since there must be billions of races of them,
Unless none at all,
In which case,
They will not be wondering about our poems.
We can still wonder about theirs though,
Because they’re that far away
That the ones they haven’t written
Are just as interesting as the ones they have.

God Who Cannot Be

A God dwells within me—
The God who cannot be.
He offers no eternal life
But only a palpable sense
Of solidarity with all people,
All conscious beings.
He watches over my shoulder,
The God who cannot be;
He knows my inmost dreams.
He is imagination,
Like steel and rock,
But He cheers me on,
And gives me wisdom,
Assurance,
Grace,
Sometimes correction too.
Here he is,
The God who cannot be,
Ignoring all evidence to the contrary—
Not even offended by it.
He is unmoved,
Unaffected even by His own nonexistence;
He has no inclination help my unbelief,
Or otherwise cross my palm with silver.
We wait it out:
Me here,
Him here—
God who cannot be,
Till death us do part,
In preposterous equilibrium.

The Young Man’s Reply

Dear Will, these pretty sonnets that you sent
Were ordered and created all in vain;
I’m of a downcast, melancholy bent—
All thoughts of procreation I disdain.
Though some do say I’m blessed with looks and wit,
The dullest blade might bear a burnished hilt;
Within me, there’s a gloom I can’t remit,
That swamps the praise of those who prize mere gilt.
I’ll not supply another girl or boy
To brave life’s ceaseless turmoils and deceits,
To struggle in a world I don’t enjoy,
Whose fruits are shallow triumphs, deep defeats.
Let’s leave the risks and toils of screeching birth
To those more prone to nurture hope and mirth.

Children of Darkness, Children of Light

Children of darkness,
Children of light,
Children of one cryptic womb;
Dancing together,
Concealing the spite,
Furtively watching the room.

Children of darkness,
Children of light,
Glances won’t tell who is who;
Follow the fiddle,
And have some more wine,
Everyone’s looking at you.

Children of darkness,
Children of light,
Waltzing in endless dispute:
Which is the parasite,
Virtue or guile?
The benefactor or the brute?

Children of darkness,
Children of light,
Everyone toeing the line.
How will the balance
Be broken at last?
Will it be chance or design?

Children of darkness,
Children of light,
Speaking their piece to the court:
Light gets the blessing
And solemn acclaim,
But darkness wins all the support.

Knock Me Down With a Feather

You could knock me back down with a feather,
Or shrivel me up with a glance;
I feel a bit under the weather,
But people still want me to dance.
So, just let me know what your wish is,
Enough with the hullabaloo;
Or send me to sleep with the fishes,
I really don’t mind if I do.

Just grind me to dust with your pestle,
Then blow me away with one breath,
Or lead me where rattlesnakes nestle,
Below in the valley of death.
I haven’t a reason for crowing,
Or even a wing for my prayer;
Today, I don’t know where I’m going,
Tomorrow, I won’t even care.

My body is clumsy, not agile,
My mind gets more spongy, less crisp;
The life that we lead is so fragile,
We waft in the will-o'-the-wisp.
But though I’m all hat and no cattle,
I do what I can, by and large,
So, prop me back up for the battle:
The enemy’s ready to charge.

Corridors

Corridors are tunnels
That we build above the ground,
Between the present and the future,
The known and the unknown.
Corridors are rooms to which Time has been added:
They must be passed through, endured.
In dreams, we find ourselves inside them,
Panicked;
Running against the clock;
Trapped between the observable and the hidden;
Bewildered by constantly shifting connections,
While striving desperately to reach some crucial goal.
Time is always of the essence—
Time that lurks in corridors,
Clutching its silver baseball bat.

Awakened,
We have clocks to remind us
That we are late for something,
But not what we are late for.
The second hands move too fast for us;
The hours too slow.
The satanic, black minute hand is the worst,
With its tantalizing, almost perceptible movements,
Which seem to say that Time is barely out of our grasp,
Like water in a nightmare of thirst.
The brutal Time that persecutes us in our dreams
Is the deranged henchman
Of this dull time that regulates
The monotonous tick-tock of our days.

Yes, all clocks say only one thing:
“You are late!”
But there’s ultimately nothing to be late for,
Except the clock itself,
With its circular reasoning.
The Earth turns and makes its way around the Sun:
There is no late in Astronomy.
Clocks lie to us.
What tyrannizes us is not Nature’s time but civilization’s.

Another dream.
Now we are in a mineshaft—
A different kind of corridor.
We trudge into pitch black,
Toward gold, or disaster.
We see a light:
Is it daylight,
Or something massive hurtling toward us?
What we really want it to be is a lantern,
Swung by a friend.
Miners withstand corridors far worse than ours.
Why is it that they do not all go mad?
Camaraderie.
Brotherhood.
Fellowship.
Those who walk gentler corridors—
The air-conditioned, well-lit, antiseptic
Corridors of power—
Lose their minds quite often,
For want of the same.

Corridors are rooms
In Halloween dress up.
Are we going to let them frighten us,
Or are we going to party?