“Doctors”

New doctors are like puppies.
They have to play with all their toys
and can be wildly cute.
Fresh out of obedience school,
all they know is rules and cutoffs; 
they cannot yet lay by the fire
because they are the fire
and have trouble being still.

Old doctors, like old dogs,
aren’t so eager.
They know our secret heart,
the love we’ve spent against
coming back

and smile
as we wave
So Long.

*

Lake House Memory

The coffee pot sticks a little
to the warming plate.
Sliding-glass door’s a bit rusty.
I love it cracked open,
lake-smell gets in,
grass and summer rain, 
trees on the breeze — 
maybe the morning doves
will come again.

It’s good to feel stiff old shag,
see stacks of books we’ve partly read,
stacks and stacks. 
Your grandpa’s kitchen table,
Ruth’s worn chair,
dusty Mantovani on the player.

Paintings hang crooked, 
curl on paneled walls,
fading in memory and slow-days,

that other house, the city one,
already forgotten.

*

Two Trees

I couldn’t help it, leaving.
It  must be the way I’m made.
They spoke God,
said I'd wreck my soul
with that abomination —

so I chose the other tree,
blue-green against the same sky,
splashed its dark on my face
and fell sound asleep

as they raged beneath
an equally good tree
preparing for my salvation.

*

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Late-Night Lucid

What you discover
after —
after the battered “Yes, okay”
to your heart’s direction — 

is that all of your guns
that once shot enemies and fools
are now trained and aimed
at you.

One Last Chance
to apologize
to recant
to come home.

So you write another poem
as familiar bullets 
speed toward their mark.

*

“Quick!  They’re coming for you!
Call down your god!”

Oh, buddy, if you only understood.
My god runs towards me,
bayonet in hand,
trying to scare me off,
see if I turn.

“Some god!”

Yeah.  My god.
As I take a run at him.

*

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Evolved

You remember it from somewhere:
“The only place now
I can hear myself think
is at the bottom of a swimming pool.”

So you try sitting 
down in the deep-alone.
Soon, no more bubbles to the top;
soon, eyes caressed in water’s well,
arms held — 
strange elongated creatures above,
splashing and splaying
toward cement shores,
over and over,
eager frogs fascinated by wavy light —

and you wonder whether
evolution
was such a good thing.

*

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Game

You know that game
where you walk
around chairs to 
music?

	“Musical chairs?”

and one is removed,
leaving someone standing?

	“Yeah?”

I’m the one left standing,
looking at this dumb game,
this violence-inspired
mirror of the human need
to hurt
and wondering

	“Why you ever 
	started to play?”

Yeah.

	“You think too much.”

*

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Beds

Come make love with me,
my friend.
Show me your self,
	whether you’re fast or slow
	loud or soft —
	curtains opened or curtains 
	closed —
let me know, if only
for a minute or more,
you’re just like all the others
with a few tricks up your sleeve.

*

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Once, Near Big Sur

They laughed and hollered and hooted
wet with fog and chop-surge-crash
waves bigger than a man,
danced and drank the complete sea,
gods — 
preferred words to water-speak,
whiskey to land that’s sand,
dirt and dumb air
beautiful against their fire —

now ashes,
hard poets and mechanics and 
bricklayers
packed up, home with life,
leaving slight and then no
footprints for followers
who hold tickets for the show
and wait for something to happen.

*

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Appropriate

“Had she ever tried to convert any one herself? 

Did she not wish everybody merely to be themselves?” 

— Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

*

They no longer colonize with ships.
No armies arrive on my shore,
war-boots in sea-water until they
sink into wet sand and subdue.

Too costly.  And then you have to
leave a force to force compliance...
It’s ugly.

Instead,
they whisper, those enlightened
who yet carry the burden of rectitude.
A word, a phrase
spoken through the air,
taken in —
and I’m lost.
They no longer act;
they just wait until I
bow my head
beat my breast
seek forgiveness

from gods curiously unprepared
to absolve.

*

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