Ultimatum

She sat in
the beanbag chair

guilty but not
contrite,
a child caught
in a lie.

“You gotta decide
whether you want
to stay married to me.”

She just stared into space
not taking any
responsibility,
just wanting it all
to be over.

Then I issued
the ultimatum:

“I’m giving you
two weeks to decide:
it’s either him or me.”

The Lesson In Retrospect:

if your beloved
takes more than

three seconds

to decide
if they want to
be with you,

RUN!

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.

Phoenix, Arizona

We snuck away
on a business trip
and she really wanted
to be with me
as she had a fear of flying
and we met at the airport.

That evening
safely in another state,
we went straight
to the hotel
unpacked only desire
and made love
with all the lights on
as the tv flickered
it’s muted blue witness.

She let me eat
the ice cream sundae
we ordered from room service
right off her bare bottom.

She was my kind of girl.

The next morning we walked
and chanced upon
a tribal pow wow drumming festival.

It was strangest, most beautiful
music I ever heard,
and I knew it was no coincidence
she was there.

Providence smiled further
as we saw the Norman Rockwell
retrospective was also within
walking distance
and we marveled at the original print
of “The Marriage License”.

We stayed up talking
all that night
and somewhere in there
I realized
she was no longer some
causal hit-and-run.

I started thinking
in longer, broader strokes

and it awakened
something fiery
and powerful

that had been
asleep in me
for a thousand years.

For Open Link Night - read others and enjoy!

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.

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.

Twin Serpents

Take this desire
and tie it to memory
and purify it in the flames.

My ego is a zombie
of unquenchable thirst
and it needs more brains
than I have to feast upon.

I do not want
a mirror made of
website hits
and reader posts.

Take these
twin serpents
and wash me clean.

Lord, hold me under
long enough
to drown
all these predictable
demons

and raise me up
through this baptism

anew,

without memory,
a virtuous
happy
amnesiac.

No Escape

Somewhere else
is what I want

but right here
is all I'm gonna get

and all I need
according to God.

So I'll walk through it
without booze
or pills
or illicit thrills.

You walked through
this howling madhouse
of no escape
and let them
nail you to the cross
where you died for me.

Jesus,
you suffered for me
and now
I pray
I can
return the favor.

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.

My Plastic Heart

My heart no longer
is bloody or visceral.
I fear it has become
through sheer repetitious
brutality
colder immune and
surprisingly plastic.

A plastic heart
isn’t bad at all.

It can get thrown around
and it doesn’t break
years won’t fade
its beauty or texture,

It’s durable
and isn’t connected
to guilt or obligation.

It doesn’t get stuck
on one person or face
and is never
delusional enough to think
“is this the one?”

I can mold this heart
into anything
I want
and it remains
mint unbroken flexible.

Plastic was invented as
a triumph over nature.

Plastic is man’s legacy
and is the logical
consequence to the problem
of human existence and
all the pain that comes with it.

Plastic will keep me safe.
Plastic will keep me uninfected.

I used up
the original heart
I was given
so this heart is a good
substitute.

The plastic heart
never breaks,
always fresh

disconnected from the
teardrop place,

I hope you never
need one.

Calling Home

"First off, I know
I haven’t called in a while,
and no, I’m not asking
for money.

It’s just that
my heart finally got used
to your silence,
so I decided
I wasn’t very important
to you.

Please please please
somehow
hear all the things
I cannot say.

Sometimes I see
it’s you calling
and I let it ring.

We both know when this happens.

The few times I’ve called,
you see it’s me
and pick up on the first ring.

Sometimes you tell me
things I don’t want to hear,
and sometimes
you tell me things
nobody else will say

and sometimes you just
let me ramble and ramble and
you say you understand.

I’m sorry I only call sometimes
when I need money
or when my car is broken

but I just don’t want bore you with
all my insignificance.

Forgive me,
if it hurts when I don’t call,
but I just don’t know
where to get the strength.

Sometimes I just want to tell you
that I had a good day,
that I resisted getting drunk,

and some days
I’m just grateful
it wasn’t as bad
as it could have been

and some days
the skies are just
so damned blue and pretty
all I want to say is
“thank you”
to someone.

I used to think
you were codependent
and you needed me
to check in on you.

Now that I am
someone’s father,
I know
you just want to hear
from me,
you just want to know
if you can help.

So forgive me
if I’m rusty at this
as I get down
on my knees
and dial you up."

The Angry Dandelion, Part 2 (January 2009)

When her biological father left
she dove head first
into depression.

The counselor provided by
my insurance said
"well, let's just handle
her problems as they come up"
not realizing there were
five screaming meltdowns
just on the car ride over.
(This therapist was in
over her head.)

Her next psychologist
affirmed that she had
depression and anxiety,
and she was referred to a
psychiatrist who
prescribed Prozac
which she took dutifully
for three years
along with cognitive therapy.

Her darkness grew
kudzu-like
into every part of her world.

Then came the snipe hunt
of diagnoses:
oppositional defiance disorder
attention deficit hyperactive disorder
obsessive compulsive disorder
borderline personality disorder…
they had the best of intentions
but they were throwing darts.

The sadness hovered unabated.

Her mood became darker,
more foul, violent
with flamethrower anger
and suicidal threats.

Her room became a cell
and she threw everything
she could
at the walls and doors
trying to escape.

Something hijacked her
and she cried long and hard
into the night, pleading
with me to make it all stop.

Her general practitioner
wanted to rule out
bipolar disorder
so she spent
the summer of 2008
enduring hours of
neuropsychological exams.

The verdict:
dyspraxia
and frontal lobe syndrome.

Yet, on she rages
with a new psychiatrist
who disagrees with
neuropsych assessment
but still cannot offer
an alternate diagnosis.

The new doctor prescribes
new medicine
and tells her to try and
“get along with
the people you live with.”

I try to hide my disappointment
as I feel we’re all stuck in this:
me, her mother and
this sad, suffering Angry Dandelion.

Unexpectedly,
her mood brightens when she
asks about
her upcoming birthday party.

She’ll be 12
next Friday.

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.