Poetry

It’s been a pleasure. every hour every day every week every month of every year every decade every pain I’ve ever suffered every loss and every hope dashed to pieces on the rocks I didn’t see or chose to try despite the charts, it’s been a profound honor. I am privileged to have served and…

You get it once. Yeah, that’s right, once. Not twice or any multiple of prime or whole numbers. Forget eternity. Leave all that eon stuff to dinosaurs. You get it once. Give it to me. I’ll give you some of mine. ƒ

We are forgiven. Sometimes softly as now. Other times fast and furious, contradictory through the air swirling colliding eager and precipitous, forgiven nonetheless. Once fallen fresh upon fresh others may leave their imprint of sinfulness. ƒ

Every year about this time we dream a little dream and put a scarecrow in our yard, a friendly fool who doesn’t scare anyone at all. Not even crows. I hear them laughing now high up in the trees. It’s made for fun at Halloween when all the real ghouls and goblins emerge to walk…

Out there, in the middle of the night, on the flats north of some city in the desert, I saw him out of the corner of my eye at a speed I dared not look to see as I flew upon my motorcycle in the middle of the night. A burning light, a flare of…

I did it. I said I would. It needed doing. I wanted to. I did it. The great task, the infinitesimal goal you set before me, I accomplished. Call me anything you like. Call me a swimmer at the shore, the sea behind him. Call me a climber at the top remembering the bottom. Call…

I’m going to paint that son of a bitch. I’m going to climb up there and paint it.   I’m not a young man any more, but I’m not old and I can’t get my motorcycle out of the garage because the scaffold is in the way and I won’t move the scaffold until I…

We are not dead until we are dying and even then, we are free to spit into the eye of fate or chance or luck. Whatever you wish to call it. Be you one more time. Heaven is up. Hell is down. One is a climb. One is a slide. Chose one. Either way, have…

They come, inexorably, indomitably, indefatigably, as soldiers come before the guns to be wasted, mown down and come again until victory is won. Sentinels, they stand waiting the inevitable assault, beautifully disciplined to inevitable destruction, vivid now courageous, brave and true. Like me if I so dare. Like you. ƒ

I didn’t dream of you last night. I woke up screaming, bathed in sweat, gasping for breath, shouting, No! No! No! I didn’t sleep again last night, afraid to close my eyes. I lay there staring into the dark, thinking of you. Thank God. ♥