With Certainty

 I'm going to hell

for the donations requests

that went unopened.

Leather dress shoes commit.

Male pattern balding in a business suit wearing horn-rimmed glasses practically leaping out of a late model high end sedan to run across Bathurst Street and delight in sliding on the Zamboni smoothed ice in the skating rink.

yesterday's poem remembered incorrectly

Cottonball clouds

punctuate a flawless expanse,

The End.

Deep Discount

A woman who shouldn't wear
knits stands scarecrow still in a
flapping of on-sale sweaters.

pillbug comfortable

fine lines frost the window,

the inside

 tracing fingertips with 

the outside 

 through glass.

duvet feather flurries.

waking up pillbug comfortable.

the room going quiet

trees frightened by candles.

people gather to protect 

the forest from harm.

lost thoughts gather no moss

recently a dream stayed with me throughout the day

underlying every sense and sentence was the awareness of this other world

a shadow of subconscious self lurking between the letters of words

the pause in a phrase of an incomplete sentence

not intrusive, a fog not entirely lifted from the landscape of experience

and yet, the dream forgotten in the flow of subsequent days and times

what lingers is the intimation of company, the sentiment of almost

the fingertip sensation of failure

The wind has picked up,

moving through the city streets,

taking attendance.

appearances

the bike locked to the front porch railing

displays a stillness of some duration

standing on two cracked flat tires

and you say you rode it 

as recently as last year

I beg to differ

you disagree

a going nowhere conversation

blank sheet

words that I nurtured

walking across singing snow

won’t come to me now

space

we have the right to
no longer speak of
what caused us so much
 pain

the agitation of a vacuum

housecleaning.

outer space.

it is all dust motes...

aversion

looking away now

expecting calamity

but nothing happens

gust

overt hat
covert pate
until

where words will fail

we have the right to
no longer speak of
what caused us pain

Ready for my next at bat

I am slid into 56.

Free and clear.

Safe. At home.

Clothes dusty.

Knees bruised.

Joints aching.

Crowds cheering.

passion poem

  ~ for pb who asked

charcoal on newsprint
a freshly sharpened pencil
arches 88

today there is no poetry in the trainscape

dirt is dirt

the slanting sunlight on swiftly passing trees sings no melody

a field of beached pines swamped in bullrushes are no eloquent statement of place and time and passage

just dead trees with their feet mucking about in the water

the view from seat 6A populates and depopulates with people or pines, sumac shrubbery or streets at level crossings

no poetry. all is what it is

obtaining no meta

on the side road, there is a stop ahead.

ether

there is nothing like

sending you several texts

and nothing comes back

til death do us part

sleeping in, toes up

who will be the first to be

wearing a toe tag