Requiem

Isolated notes seep in between the songs,

Discordant sounds go first un-listened

Until the tempo slows, volume rising

Drowns out uplifting melody,

Beats a lonely dirge into heart.

Small things brought happiness,

Speckled leaves graced the ground,

The word was new again,

New words quickened laughter,

Tones resonated more child-like,

Even bitter chocolate was cheerful sugar.

I wait day and week and month,

No one plays redemption. 

Nameless

A young man wanders the world;

He loses his name in wonders,

Dissolved in warm oceans of bright fish,

Dispersed by crystal winds on cold mountaintops,

He scatters the letters undaunted.

All things seem gold and glitter,

Captivating angles of the prism reflect life,

Time brews even coffee into lethargy,

Distills even water from stone.

The world goes grey.

And, all sounds became silence.

Trees black and white,

Moon without a face,

A laughing maudlin beyond our sphere.

The young man walked the world,

Cold earth between toes,

Slime creeping up the back of his sole,

Untouchable-

Still he stayed clean.

He speaks to those around him,

Loses touch, tries to remember,

Asks for whispers of his name,

None know him,

He is a particle unbound,

A snowflake drifting almost melts,

A tree with dead roots waits to fall into shadow.

At last, he comes to an old man,

With a beard as white as his dead eyes,

Eyes grayed by too much sight,

And he asks again for his name.

The old man stares, sees nothing,

And says, son, your name fell here,

Drenched in memory,

I keep it in my heart beat.

Tell me, he begs,

The old man keeps staring,

Unseeing and unbreathing,

For he too had died.

Killing My Wife

A sorrow consumes me,

I seek to rid myself of it.

Like dependents need insulin,

Tight wound strands finger forward

To lock in place and be complete,

Slowly, activate, no half-truths,

No remorse.

I sit here, look at white tiles,

While the hospital kills my wife.

Unborn but bred, disdain the words

And tell of needs, individual,

Unheard. The woman gets no substance.

Ignored, the nightmare starts again,

Only after I awake. 

Into the Dark

These tunnels go far.

Around in lightless sea,

I dreamt of swimming,

Silent waters drifting over me.  

We could take them.

He wanted to see

Vast ways of the underdark.

He wanted to be    

Where stars cease to gleam.

Let’s keep going.

Would you dare?

Listening

I listen to the poetry of Brooklyn and Queens.
Today, I listened every intently to colors,
Yellow, black, brown, red, white, and the un-quantified variations in between—
To language and sayings for telling of the worlds,
Each people a local people,
Every person a version different of his own people.
I am diversity, he/she/you/it is diversity, confluent and collusive,
New York, the city,
Mine and ours, inclusive, definite and conclusive.

The grass is soft and slowly seeping.
The dampness of a fertile ground, irradiated even as it was,
Into the folds on my jeans, cold chilling,
Like an impotent sperm bank, broken,
Uncomfortable. Awaiting and awakening
I listened, soft words, softer breeze,
Light sprinkling in the spout of a passing boat,
Springing. I keep alert, vigilant,
Poetry beguiles and bewitches the mind,
Numbs the fires and feelings of the outer body, even hunger,
Even anger! Even sleep,
Into the dream of the stories we told and heard in too many words,
Too many marks of punctuation, too much of a pause.

I forget to forget.
My mind opened, like a broken vessel,
A shattered dam, spilling
The life that wants to be lived.
I remembered every noun and matching verb,
Simple sentences only, two words divided by a line,
For action is poetry, immediate instrument:
Poems do,
poems make,
poems write.