Experts

Why is it we all know the people
Who drink
                                            a fifth a day
Who smoke
                                            3 packs a day
Who eat
                                            bacon and fatty beef
Who live to be 95?

Everything bad is good for you
Everything good is bad for you
Everything is for you
Good and bad

Live
     They who eat like shit
     Smoke like chimneys
     Drink like fish
Don't care
     About anything but
     Eating
     Drinking
     Smoking

Laugh

What is a good laugh? Does it hurt?
Do you remember the sound
Years later in darker times?
Does it call you back to light
When things go wrong?

The best laughs you remember
The ones that make the sun dance
The ones that make the soul dance
The ones happy cannot describe
Like Mr. Faulkner's laugh
A gleeful living, breathing sound within
A bearded piano tuning language arts teaching
Genius

That laugh meant we had done something special
Brilliant when we did not know our own abilities
In high school we would wish ourselves
Into hearing him.
"Faulkner's Here! Faulkner's Here!"
Shining eyes,
Dancing souls

Hearing that laugh.
 

Bar Riff #1

Ever try __________________ (insert beer here) it
Is damned good fuck they're all good when I can't tell
If I need or want another one.

Can the Sharks not suck for once?
                (The Sharks have been in the playoffs like 8 years in a row)
Can't test that at all but I believe it as
I don't follow the hockey at all anymore, not since
I lived in Washington and watched Don Cherry
in those obnoxious fucking awesome vests
Slightly less loud than his mouth

Daisy, Daisy, friends with the beautiful
Waitress with more tats than her boyfriend who
Looks like a guy from a Flynt fuck flick
With arms like marble from some Italian museum.

If you get sick, man, they'll take your house!
And these people vote Republican!
       I want a million dollars right now!
       It's my money and I want it now!
       IF I FIND OUT THEY FUCKED UP
       I'LL CALL THE LAWYERS
 The cavalry of this age with briefcases instead of guns and suits that make everything right.


                                                                                                                  March 2012   

Bum Sonnet

For Iowa Blackie, National Hobo King 1993

A lonely, warm railroad soul winters down

Among the forgotten educated

Margins of the soft and dirty river town.

His eyes are creased with dances of the late

Summer road. Now a patient stream of words

Thumps from him in a happy hour

Giving the gifts of experience and burns

Which tumble him to rage sweet and flower.

The last I saw of him was hate of me

For cutting him off at the stroke of two.

I said "Get out" with malice rarely seen

And he struck me with such awful truths

I could not bear the sight of him. This life

Is too short, Iowa, to hold such strife.

                                                                          July 1998

On Reading David Lerner

I write
"find, borrow, steal" by his name
in the Anthology contents.
Steal should have been first.
I feel shame being late for his game
But feel better for having
Shown up at all.

These are the best poems I have ever seen
And I read them again and again
Increasing astonishment at the idea
My soul could be so deeply known by
Someone I have never met and
Someone who did not exist until
twenty minutes ago.

Meditation on March 5

So much is correct today, so much is correct.
The sun shines on the spring grass
The clouds are behind the hills and
Will not arrive before work is finished.

So much is correct today
My medication is spent, told to leave
And shown the door.
Myself? I am found, misplaced these years by anger
Misspent in hate, misspent in fear
Misspent in needing everything to be perfect.
Nothing is, but so much is correct today.