Disappointed

I want to deny
we ever existed
but that is
giving us
a cachet that we
did not earn.

We can admit it now:

after six years of dating
neither of us
wanted to get married
but we went on with it
anyway because we didn’t
want to lose face or
our deposit.

Even our honeymoon
in romantic San Francisco
lost its steam after
the first day.

Being married to you
was the hardest
141 days of my life.

Even as it unraveled
and I asked you to fight
for our marriage
you just defaulted out
with silent, apathetic
shrugs.

I always wanted it
to be better than it
ever was
and I was always
disappointed.

Even today,
I gave in to curiosity
and paid 10 bucks
to an Internet company
to show me your addresses
and employment history
for the past 15 years,
and all that came up
was your parents’ address.

So,
after all these years,

Lan Anh,
you’re still a big disappointment.

Anger Island

Don’t look for me.

I’ve gone to Anger Island
and I’m not taking calls.

I hate coming here
because it’s never as good
as I think it’s going to be.

Rarely has it ever
been worth it,
but I am drawn to it
as some are drawn to
Israel or Mecca.

Anger is the bloody river
running through my soul,
separating me
from the higher aspect,
that divine sliver.

I’ve tried to resist
but the lizard brain
is in charge.

Sitting here
I try to reassemble
what this visit
has wrought.

I’ll be back
after I purchase
my return ticket
with regret.

The Last Hit

The temptation is to look back
and bask in the
two or three
positive
comments,

but that is not
what this is about.

Writing is
about moving onward,

trying to dive deeper
and scrape a little more
pyrite from the gulch.

My hero is Lenny Bruce
who felt he was a machine
if he did the same bit
night after night

in his quixotic quest
for the truth and
the uncorrupted
chuckle.

You're only as strong
as your last hit,

and that's what keeps me
going
on my quixotic quest
for the truth
and the uncorrupted
chuckle.

To All My Loyal Readers

I apologize in advance
for the weakness
of the most recent offerings.

Life has been
throwing hell
at me
and I’ve been
waving a white flag.

Give me enough time
and I’ll try to turn this excrement
into gold
but I make no promises.

However,
to all my loyal readers
who see me
and steal my invisibility,
your slightest notice
sends me into a drug like high.

Merely being seen
keeps me going
when I cannot understand
the  point of any of it.

Nothing is better than
someone telling me
I have touched them.

It’s the ultimate triumph
of my spirituality over materialism.

I am transcendent
typing mad fury
these stray thoughts knowing
there is some understood
underlying code
in all this spilled blood.

I keep trying to make connections
because it doesn’t matter
if you’re in public library in New York
or a jail cell in Texas
a bakery in Oregon
a pub in Australia

for a moment
we are in the same place
and it feels good to me.

Hands Digging Into This Earth

Cool Saturday mornings
in spring
I weed the planter
in blissful silence.

It’s simple,
tactile.

I break the
cold hard ground
and sift the dirt
through my fingers
plucking the weeds
as though they were
errant gray hairs.

The same ground
worked and farmed by
my Mexican ancestors
and the Mestizos before them
and the Indios before them
and the Aztecs…

I am connected
to that eternal continuum
of hands digging
into this Earth.

It is almost
a mindless activity,
peaceful,
this private haven
that I own

and I smile
at my self-deception
and audacity:

to think
I own this land
that was here
long before
all my ancestors

and will outlast us all.

My name’s just
on the deed

for now.

It's Still Magic

I've studied
Burt Bacharach's
"Bond Street"
for 40 years -

the quirky, uptempo
funky saxntrumpet
Hammond B-3 riff
that strange Eastern
flavor and the
soaring orchestra
representing
aural transcendence
- even the Gypsy
tambourine

and it's only
two minutes long.

I've played it
a million times
since I first heard it
when I was 7
and it still makes me

stop everything
and surrender
to its mystery.

If you know how
a magician
does the trick,
does it make it
any less magical?

No,-
it's still magic.

Night

Night used to be cells of
unsolicited solitude
but I put the time
to good use.

I read,
wrote songs
and practiced
all the clever things
I would say
extemporaneously,
if I were ever lucky enough
to get a date.

I stayed up
late into the night
beside a static-filled
AM radio
and I imagined
I was the only one
tuned into this
distant AM station
playing old country and western tunes.

Night always told me
"Someday.
Someday, man, it'll
all be different.

Better."

Now
at the end of the day
filled with
my family
who have no hesitation
in claiming
my every waking hour,

I revel in my solitude,
as I troubleshoot computers,
listen to old C&W songs over
the internet,
write the occasional poem,
and sink deeper
into some library book,

I look out
at the blue purple sky

and realize night
was right.

VHS Seventh Heaven

Some people went to
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
and memorized it.

I was always too timid
to venture out that late
among all the self-congratulatory
freaks.

But when VHS came about
I was in seventh heaven:

memorizing the rhythm
the cadence of
Groucho and Chico
bantering in “Duck Soup”

William Holden
leaving Faye Dunaway
with pithy eloquence in
“Network”

Dustin Hoffman’s
grand deception
unraveling with
masterful despair
in“Tootsie”

Richard Dreyfuss
and Marsha Mason sparring
and falling in “The Goodbye Girl”
set an ideal for dialogue
rarely encountered
in real-life,

almost every Woody Allen
film,
(pre-Soon-Yi)
schlmiel neurosis
giving a defiant voice
to this misfit teenager

Ray Liotta as
the amoral narrator
in “Goodfellas”

Bert Lahr in “The Wizard of Oz”

Zero in “The Producers”

Linus explaining
the true meaning
of Christmas

I’ve lived in
and through
these movies
more than five times
each

and now I want
to see them
all
again.

[Posted for http://withrealtoads.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-tuesday-platform_15.html .]

I Come Here for Hope

Laying on the floor
of my walk-in closet,
it is the darkest
quietest
place in my house.

Between boxes and
piles of dirty shoes,
I lay myself down
listen to myself breathe
and pretend
I am all alone.

I come here for hope.

I know there is a way
out of the present morass
but I can’t see it
in the light of day.

I need the comfort
of the dark
where any obstacles
are hidden.

Here,
I am limitless
and aware of my
connection to all
living things:

I don’t see
where
one thing ends
and the next thing

begins.

I open my eyes so wide
they hurt, but all I see
is the monolithic,
unanswering
black.

It reminds me that
there is no me
and there no you
and there is even
no us.

It’s all one infinite
interconnected
experience,
and since it cannot
turn back on itself,

there is only one way
it will all turn out
but I can’t see it
right now,

and I like it that way.

[Posted for Open Link Night at https://dversepoets.com/2017/05/18/openlinknight-196/]

The Enemy, Defined

To people like us,
the enemy is clear:

creativity,
the flight of the feather
is weighed down
by the brick
of perfection.

It can never
be attained
by human hands,

so stop trying.

The quest for
perfection
arrests the dreams
and ambitions
and freezes them
in a cycle of review
and rewrite.

So, stop trying.

Rather,
burrow deeper within
and find the
soft
sweet
center

and then
go back there
daily,

taking everything
you see,
dipping it inside
and then
bring it out,
let it dry,
buff to a high polish,
then put it
on display.

It won’t be perfect
but it will be
yours and only yours

and you won’t be
paralyzed
or feel compelled
to make that

Big Statement,

but you’ll make
of lot of
small honest statements,

sometimes
30 days in a row.

Whatever It Is

Whatever it is
inside every living being
that makes it all
go,

lived in the flower
I saw growing out
of an open bag
of sand and concrete mix
out back by the trash cans.

That desperate,
unceasing,
mad energy
kept it stretching

skyward,

reaching out
to
the other side
of the Sun,

where the
face of God
was smiling.

Welcome to My Mind

Something’s not right,
yet there’s nothing
to point at.

It’s a cold jittery jangle
in my chest --
my limbs ticklish
and waiting to spring
into action.

My brain restlessly
turning over every stone
with no clue
what it is looking for,
but I know it’s feverishly working
because my head
is sweating.

Of all the things
that can go wrong
which will it be?
My wife?
My kids?
My job?
My car?

Popping and jumping,
my mind reconstructs
past events
looking for the telltale clue,
the smoking gun,
the fatal flaw.

What is coming
that will undo me?

I try to predict when
and where my good luck
will dry up and blow away
like daisies
in a sandstorm.

“Trust in God”
“If God is with me”
etc etc etc
holy holy, …

God is calm,
no reason not to be.

God likes seeing me off-balance
every now and again,
keeps me humble
keeps me compliant

and God’s probably right
to do so

because we both know me
and if I am not on my toes
I get lazy
and the pencil remains ignored.

So this anxiety
is the call
to creation
to inquiry
to reconnection.

This connection doesn’t kill
the shivering anxiety
but it comforts me
for a while

as I wait for
the other shoe to drop.

The Sacred and the Profane

Writing about
the grandeur, the mystery
the infinite grace of God,
I get few comments.

Writing about
my misadventures
of trying to quell
my miscreant penis,
these poems are very popular,

which goes to prove
the writer’s first rule:

write about

what
you
know.

[Presented for D'verse Poets Quadrille ] 

Dancing Close to the Cliff (Adultery Suite, Part One, 1998)

We were lost,
searching
for passion,
excitement

and while we knew
this wasn’t it,
we danced
close to the
cliff.
Something
kept our heads cool
as our
lips and tongues
ignored everything
else

and I knew it
was wrong but
it was just
one more wrong thing
in this wrong life

and Teresa
would never find out
anyways.

Thankfully
my accomplice
couldn’t go through
with the crime
and I didn’t have
to cross a line

at that time.

Still, I wonder
about that dark
sweet mystery
that might have
been ours

had she not been
a better person
than I.

I Hope I Am Wrong (Adultery Suite, part three, 2001)

I imagine her house
dark and quiet,

lonely candles lit
in a sadly serene
space.

This is how
I imagine it and she
is sleeping on the couch
with the doors and
windows sealed shut

(she could never sleep
when I was away).

The tv flickers
barely audible
her days quiet and alone
except for the friendly cats
she collects and
confides in

and I hope I am wrong
about all these things
because I didn’t mean
to take away her
laughter
her joy
but it became
a game of survival
and I lost

so I took myself
out of her house
and I pray
out of her memory.

But I know her
well enough to know
that her denial
is her armor,
so she’ll never admit
any loss
in my departure.

I don’t need
to be remembered
anyway.

Please forget me
and fill your space
with light and
laughter again.

Teresa,
you deserved better.

Christian Voting Guide

Christians,
when you vote,
remember that
Jesus wants you

to care for
the poor and the needy,
not just
the worthy poor and needy.

I have 20 different Bibles
and I cannot find
"The Lord helps those
who help themselves”
in any of these
translations.

Chemically dependent failures,
morally repugnant adulterers,
selfish and greedy idolaters:
don’t just belong to 2016,

they lived among our Christ.

He didn’t say clean up first
and then I’ll feed you.

He healed and fed them
and then said,

“Go and sin no more.”

My brothers and sisters
in Christ,

“where are your accusers?”

Try the mirror.

Say Goodbye

Rarely does life afford us
a discrete goodbye;

the pendulum of life
keeps swinging us back
to the sites
of our greatest failings.

We rarely
say goodbye
and mean it
because
we can’t control
who or what
will walk blithely into
the unmade beds
of our lives.

So when you ask me
to say goodbye to my sins,
my false idols,
and to the cursed miscreant
I wish to repudiate,
I fail.

These weaknesses,
these tattoos purchased
while intoxicated,
now brand me
and lay
dull and flat
inside this profaned skin

and they never
say goodbye
either.

To Fit In

The challenge is always the same:

to fit in
without giving in.

My fight springs from something
primitive and undomesticated
that lives under all the schooling
good manners
practiced wordplay
and lucky breaks.

I feel fated to never
fit quite in,
and though it has blessed me
with insight and wisdom,
it is also my curse.

Though I would rather not fit in
and be admired for my principles,
it is often lonely
for the iconoclast who
stands and deconstructs the crowd
genuflecting at the latest empty idol

because sometimes all you want
is just to go home
and sit on your nice soft couch
And look at the lights on the Christmas tree

and sing along with carols
and know the rest of the
world is doing that too.

The perennial fight
grinds away this life

and some days
it is easier to
lay down the sword
and to try to fit into
the box
set aside for you.

Some days the box is a cell,
some days the box is a sanctuary.

Looking For Standard Time

Tonight is the night
we change the clock
back to Standard Time.

Everyone gains an extra hour of sleep
or work – if there on the night shift,

310 million Americans
each gains an hour—

310 million extra hours
is equal to over
12,900,000 days

which translates to
over 35,380 years

over 353 centuries,
35 millennia
will occur
all before sunrise,

all this from going back to
Standard Time

and it
still
isn’t enough.

The Sheer Good Luck of It All

We cringe
when watching movies
of unfaithful husbands
telling their girlfriends
“I’ll leave my wife for you”
because everyone watching
knows it is
an empty promise,
an IOU wrapped
in a chocolate box.

I was that husband
who cheated,
but I eventually left.

After I burned through
the guilt,
I married my girlfriend,
and I can honestly say
I have never been happier,
or more fulfilled
in my life.

Now I know why
we rarely see
this scenario
in the movies:

no one would believe
the sheer good luck
of it all.

Hell,
I hardly do.