Goodbye Bedford Falls
Maybe a dream is all it ever was,
The very very very nice house?
Work hard,
Scrimp and save,
Pay your dues.
It seemed real enough,
Brick and wood and plaster,
Paint and the woman’s touch,
Keys to lock the front door.
It’s not like the old days,
Sheriff of Nottingham, out with his henchmen,
Compelling your duty to the king.
It’s a whole new setup
Prophesied by Capra,
Except Clarence never got his wings.
The other end of too big to fail
Is too little to care about.
Welcome to Potterville.
Kicked in the teeth, metaphorically speaking
I’ve become a cliché
The would be writer with a novel in the drawer
I suppose it is some accomplishment it is finished,
And, for accuracy’s sake, I should say
It’s in Dropbox
Which is somewhere out there in the net.
I have heard once something is out there
It never goes away,
So I have achieved, to whatever pitiful extent,
Some form of immortality.
It could be true.
They also say thing out there
Come back to haunt you.
That is true.
It didn’t take long at all.
Chattanooga Choo Choo
We dream of Chattanooga,
Not that I do it when I’m asleep.
I dream when I’m in my basement shop
Wrestling a full sheet of ply wood
With a less than eight foot ceiling,
Pushing my machinery around to make a cut.
I dream of three car garages, no cars.
Not Chattanooga proper.
A little further out, thirty miles,
On the side of an old mountain,
With a little space to roam
And a night sky filled with stars,
Instead of the light from street lamps.
She dreams of a master on the main,
A walk out patio filled with guests,
An efficient kitchen,
A mountain to pray.
We dream of it all soon
Before we’re too old
To fix up what we can afford.
Is this a prayer?
Are you listening God?
If you are, what difference will it make?
If you’re not, where else can we go?
Penny-anti
Scrapin is in my genetic memory
Having come from a long line of criminals and nare-do-wells
Doing what you have to do to get by, my ma called it.
My dad called it conniving.
I grew up with furniture that
Fell off the truck,
Eating government cheese and butter,
My dad throwing a few extra 2-by-4’s on the truck,
An uncle who rode the rails
And did time for stealing a loaf of bread.
None of us knew,
On the other side of the tracks
You could study economics,
Go into banking,
And become a bigger crook than we ever dreamed of.
POV
What your point is
Depends on your point of view.
Where you stand
Looking down or up or sideways,
Where you come from and where you want to get to
Says a lot about where you are.
The privileged few,
The unwashed masses,
Perspective determines the labels
We choose to wear.
I’ve heard tell
There’s three ways to look at things;
What you think,
What others think,
And what actually is.
Did I use the semicolon right?
Did I even spell it right?
Who says?
Fear and Trembling
Gnostics have the secrets,
Allude to knowing how to reach the plane of enlightenment
If you climb their ladder in the prescribed way
Usually requiring a monetary show of faith.
Faith is never monetary in nature,
It cannot be bought.
Some promote the notion it can be proved with evidence,
Line your ducks up in a row
And come to the logical conclusion of belief.
This is another form of gnosis.
This is the opposite of faith.
There is no such thing as a Christian with all the answers.
Faith is a wild leap into the unknown.
It is the embrace of mystery.
It is throwing yourself on the mercy of what you hope is good.
My Actual Size
I dream of a forest trail, the up and down,
Where city lights do not obscure the stars,
Where things bigger than me prowl,
Where I might walk all day
And hear no engine other than my own heart
Beating in time to the old rhythms
Of wind and rain and breath.
I dream of the good ache of muscle and bone,
The pure smell of uncivilized earth,
The wildness of a place not meant for my comfort,
But surely made in riotous, creative joy
Reminding me of my actual size,
The limitation of my thought and action,
My hubris when I think I am in control.
Southern Idyll
There’s a house
Spread out and open
With room for week long guests
And the freedom to choose dinner
Inside or out.
I see you walking through our little bit of wood,
Enough to be surrounded by trees,
Able to imagine long ago
When technology matched your Luddite leanings,
Or you are on your riding lawnmower
Mowing down the underbrush too make your strolling possible.
Maybe there’s a creek you walk to
Where we’ve set up a place for you to read and write,
With a little overhang so you would be undeterred
By a gentile rain.
I see a low green mountain,
Your wistful, determined glance.
Working-class
Here’s a definition.
Its nine degrees and you need six sheets of plywood
And the plywood is stored in an unheated shed,
And you struggle
Because you really don’t what to go get it
In the below zero wind-chill,
But you haven’t worked for a month
And you can feel the overdue payments
Squeezing the back of your neck
And you’re procrastinating, justifying it
With this promise you made to yourself
To write a poem a day and, besides,
You tell yourself, after I’m done with the poem
It will be warmer
And, after all, I write poetry for Pete sake,
And I saw on Facebook someone said
Art was work, too,
So actually I am working
And I’m not being a whoos about going out in the cold,
But just balancing my job functions efficiently
And doing a public service
Explaining how if you have to go through all that
To keep from going out and working in the cold,
You’re probably working-class.
The Non-working Class
Non-working is a difficult subject to master,
Though there is much growth to this broadening field
Through government sponsored initiatives
Promoting creative solutions to the concepts
Of sustenance, shelter, and warmth
By eliminating such outmoded and sloth inducing ideas
As safety nets and quality education
People will be incentivize
To think outside the box they’re living in.
No comments:
Post a Comment