Constant

Since my dad started putting

A teaspoon full in my milk,

Coffee has been the thing

Most constant in my life.

Hills Brothers I think,

In a red two pound can.

My dad put three spoons of sugar in his,

Except for the era of sugar cubes,

Before Juan Valdez and his donkey,

Around our steel rimmed,

Red Formica topped kitchen table

With matching chairs.

It was in the middle fifties before sputnik,

When I still believed

I would always be safe

And our leaders were good,

And I could grow up to be Davey Crockett.

I wore my coonskin cap with such pride,

And strode around in it

On my little legs

Ready to conquer the world,

And take on all comers,

And always be the good guy.

And now I’m on the other end of things,

The sixties, Viet Nam, the good dying young,

And all my personal failings.

Most of my illusions have been shed with the years,

With the bumps and bruises of living,

But a few of my dreams still hang on,

For good or ill, I have not given up,

And I still have coffee.

Hot Enough For Ya?

Someone ought to do one of those

Frying pan sizzling videos

With the caption,

“This is your brain on global warming.”

I remember those news clips

Of somebody frying an egg on the sidewalk somewhere.

Somebody’s got to be gearing up

For making some kind of fancy soufflé

In Southern California.

They could spin it as

Just another day in La La Land,

They are said to be kind of baked over there,

Or maybe a fix to the energy crisis.

Or maybe they ought to move there,

Convene a congressional study

To see if it’s really hot?

Then they could form a subcommittee

And devise a plan for how to ignore it

For another twenty years,

Maybe a bucket to hang from their noses,

With a hose to divert the sweat

To some poor, thirsty politician in Washington.  

You Have the Right to Remain Silent

You have the right to remain silent

And not mess with our economic plans

Or our summer homes

Or our other privileges we were smart enough

To be born into, unlike you,

Who the god of our design and interpretation

Saw fit to place in the common class

To struggle for your edification

And the chastisement of your forbearer’s sins.

We, from our lofty positions,

By the grace of our god,

See no reason to give you the advantage

Of an equal voice against our better judgment

Of what is right for the uneducated masses.

It is our right and responsibility,

By dint of our place and standing and bank account

To make decisions we feel are for

The good of the country

We believe we are representative of.

Therefore we have decided

You have the right to remain silent

And stay in your place and keep your mouth shut

And not vote about things beyond your comprehension.

Big Lake Dreams

Thirteen hundred miles,

Plus four hundred to get there,

A twenty one hundred mile ride,

For seven days, at three hundred miles a day,

Or nine days for a more leisurely

Two hundred and thirty miles a day,

Up to Lake Superior, around, and back,

A bike ride to remember,

An epic ride, camping along the way,

Maybe some fishing, little hiking,

Lot of writing.

Think of the poems?

Think of never looking back with regret

I never took a big tour,

Think of the energy accumulated

With every mile running into the wind.

 

Crime Prevention

Rain, rain, and more rain.

And rain.

If it’s another biblical flood,

It’s a pitiful attempt.

More a spit bath then a cleansing.

It would take a lot more than this

To wipe evil out.

This couldn’t even handle mild truancy.

I suppose it keeps the criminals inside

As they don’t like to be seen using umbrellas,

Certainly not galoshes.

In a pinch, they might put a newspaper over their heads.

The real evil ones might

Not want to get their guns wet

And the ruffians probably don’t want their hair mussed.

It’s the thugs you have to worry about.

They probably like the rain.

The messier it is, the more they like it,

Though they might even stand under a ledge

In a downpour.

The con men you don’t have to worry about at all.

The moisture messes with their calculations,

And the petty criminals don’t even bother

To get out of bed.

If you don’t believe me,

Check out a prison yard during a rain storm.

I’ll bet there’s nobody out.

Blip

What are the odds a techno geek

Would capture the world’s attention,

Or at least the ardent consumer,

By releasing scads of information

About what everybody who pays attention

Already knows has been going on for years?

What are the odds data mining corporations

Will be charged with espionage

For paying attention to what words you use

Or where you tweet you are

So they can target you with the appropriate ads?

What are the odds all the conspiracy nuts,

Right and left wing,

Will jump on this as proof

Of the coming totalitarian state

And as an excuse to post

Fear mongering photos on Facebook?

What are the odds Edward Snowden

Will soon be a blip in history,

Living in some foreign hovel,

Forgotten and alone

Going to some bar

Talking in his cups to nobody

About the time he really did something,

When everybody really knew who he was?

The Insanity of Appeasement

I’ll try to keep the seas calm,

Spread my hands over the surface

Keeping things nice and flat and uneventful,

Nothing unexpected creeping up.

I’ll find some supersized industrial fan,

Mount it in the sky facing down

To blow away any unpleasantness.

I’ll concentrate real hard

To anticipate any questions that might

Disturb the waters  

And look for answers with no surprises

Causing undue disruption to the universe

Or at least the desired perception

And the struggle to hold it all together

In a neat little package.

On, second thought,

I won’t do any of those things.

That would be crazy.

The Hobbit in All of Us and poems missed

Back home

After a good ride in the wind,

Leaning through the air,

Outside all the way,

Four hundred and fifty miles

There and back,

Eyeing dark clouds coming back.

They were good,

Did not get me wet.

Rain in between there and back,

Watching my sister let go.

We’re all getting on,

With medical conditions and sore bones,

Holding on to what we can.

And here is what you missed.

Thursday - Blink

Up north, thirty miles from Green Bay,

On the Wolf river,

Up the road from Shotgun Eddie’s,

Where lack of camping skills

Failed to signal our demise,

What seems like a long time ago,

Though I’m told, in the scheme of things,

Is the blink of an eye,

Which in retrospect I can believe

Because it seems I did blink

And here I am,

Twenty odd years later,

Just down the road.

Friday – Grousing of a Lesser God

Morning storm rolling by,

Rolling thunder, lighting,

Trees bowing perfunctorily

At a lesser god passing by.

The river barely rises in acknowledgment.

The sky growls over it’s shoulder,

The pitter-pat of its infinite little feet

Lag behind to splash in the puddles.

Saturday – Where the Bodies Are Buried

No one told us where the bodies are buried

During the stories we heard

Sitting on laps around the kitchen table,

Highballs and penny-ante poker,

Certain words and names

Not to be said around the children

Concerning nefarious doings

In not so younger days,

Of connections to the lady in red,

Momo, and the 44 gang,

All the bodies buried somewhere in the past

Before are memories had time

To connect the dots from then

To who we are now.

Cyber Poem

Poem a day will experience a lag

As I will be away from the computer

For a few days and,

While poems will be written,

As yet I have no sub cranial link,

Some kind of surgical wi-fi implant

Enabling me to connect directly to the human web

And beam poems into you synapsis.

On the up side

Neither does the NSA

So they can’t steal them in route,

Compose thought patterns more to their liking,

Or install a logic bomb in my head

In case I might be thinking

Of floating anything subversive

Across your brain waves.

But since none of that exists yet,

Wink wink,

I’ll just update on Sunday

In the old fashion way on the internet.

Be careful who you share this with.

Rahm's Pragmatics

Maybe it’s pragmatism, Rahm’s call,

A vision for the future

Taking into consideration the unfortunate

Consequences of the current economic environment

Dictating sacrifices that must be made.

He does, after all, have to answer to his constituency,

Whose demands he cannot ignore.

Maybe the theory is

The depressed, disadvantaged, urban youth

Are already so far down the food chain

Their demise will barely be a blip

In the political calculations of

The city on the make.

After all, it won’t be Rahm

Across the street with his boys and their guns

Waiting for the children going to school.

He’ll make the appropriate condolences.

He’ll decry the callous disregard of life.

He’ll promise justice will be done.

He’ll ignore his own culpability.

Hopefully we will not ignore ours

And reelect him.

Where the Old Chevy Died

I’m hoping for good weather

For a ride up 45

Past Appleton, Short of Green Bay,

Riding through the wind and sun,

Past the lakes and farms,

With their attendant smells,

Going up the old way,

Before the interstates

Like we did in the fifties,

In a powder blue Chevy,

With the stink of the Nekoosa paper mill

And the scum on the Petenwell Flowage

Signaling our imminent arrival,

Kicking up red dust the last ten miles

To a forty acre farm

Where the blue Chevy died

And the North Woods came down,

Before they were plowed under

And the potato fields went in.

The Proliferation of Spin

These days I can’t tell

If I believe what I believe.

I’m too aware of my ability to deceive myself.

I know what I think, but that’s just me

With the scant information I’ve accumulated

From sketchy sources,

Analyzed through my particular

Emotional and cultural biases,

Not to mention the proliferation of spin.

But, now that I think of it,

Spin is inevitable,

Given the slippery nature of human consciousness,

It’s penchant to blind itself

To what it doesn’t want to see,

To let talking heads tell it

What it wants to believe.

Living in the unknowing is a frightening proposition,

To admit our fragility,

Our position at the mercy

Of so much that is beyond us.

It, easier, much more comforting to believe

The eye of the hurricane is all there is,

Or, at least, it was made to center on us.

Navigating the Dark

I did not like my eyes,

There behind the bottles,

Or how I imagine they looked

Inside the rear view mirror

From your vantage point

After last call,

Weaving on the dark country roads.

It amazes me we stayed out of the trees

All those times we drove with such abandon

You’d think somebody had to be watching over us,

Something else besides the alcohol

Preserving us for who we’ve become.

Self-destruction isn’t something one aspires to,

But something I got tangled up in

Trying to navigate the darkness

Of days gone by.

It’s a long way, growing out of it,

And it is unpleasant leaving others behind,

But I suppose sacrifices are inevitable.

It must be a difficult experience

For a snake to slough off its skin,

Not knowing how long the shedding will take,

Wondering if the new skin

Will fit any better than the old?

MGD

The part of us that used to fit together

Stirred in my brain the other day,

Induced by an MGD tap in a bar

On the Fox River,

Remembering another bar collapsing

Into the creek out back,

While the country collapsed into depression,

And Warpo and an accomplice,

I can’t remember his name,

Drove around one night with a deer rifle

Looking for me.

I don’t remember a lot from then,

But I do remember the wastefulness of it all,

The desperation with which we all

Self-medicated illnesses only time could heal,

Though some did choose a more permanent solution.

While I was drinking my tap

A wistful smile broke like redemption

For the part of us that used to fit together back then,

In there with all the mud and muck,

A little piece that makes remembering worthwhile,

That makes that part of us

Something I don’t want to forget.

Everything is New

My task seems daunting,

Keeping this up for a year.

I wonder how many new ideas I can come up with?

Of course the answer is none,

Nothing new under the sun, and all that.

It will be the point of view that’s different,

If you buy the idea that individuals

Are unique and wonderfully made,

That each person sees through eyes

No one has had before,

Each thought, image, and feeling

Processed for the first time

In whatever it is inside us

We call an I.

No one has ever been me or you before,

Has never lived our lives

Up to their present points.

So, while ideas may be old,

Right now, for me and you,

Everything is new,

And mystery is right around the corner.

Waiting for Rain

Time.

I have leisure today,

No rush to get out the door and do.

Today I can be.

I can sit and wait for the words to come.

I can wait to see what they want to say;

“Being is okay,” it seems.

It’s okay to sit inside myself,

Feel the blood flow,

Feel the sore scale itself back

To the good ache of yesterday’s work,

To wait for the rain to blow in

And watch it come down.

I Got No Time

I’m bent over the keyboard,

Little bastard cursor mocking me,

"What’a ya got?

What’a ya got?

What’a ya got?"

I got letters.

I got words.

I got the whole universe of the English language,

And some other thing outside the box, cabron.

I got rhythm and cadence.

I got spellcheck.

I got a dark sense of humor

That laughs about things

I don’t want to cry about.

I got a country seems to be falling apart.

I got way too much to think about.

I got confusion.

I got a blog and facebook and

I got to get ready for work.

Someplace Behind My Eyes

I look out from my only reference point

Someplace behind my eyes,

Somewhere underneath all the blood and bone,

Where my mask of flesh cannot tell any lies

About what’s going on inside,

Where the inside is all there is,

With no escape from the broken parts,

The old familiar echo of weeping

The sacred laughter few have heard,

All the things heaped with scorn

That don’t know how,

Are unable or afraid to come out,

All the lonely bits,

Hoping.

The Illusion of Ease

In time and space

It’s a never ending mystery,

Who we are,

An unfolding story

Even we have yet to catch up on.

The ink is not only still wet,

There are blank pages ahead

Leading to surprises we only hope are good,

Not to mention the surprises we missed,

Parts in the past we skimmed over

In our race to become

Who we think we are.

How foolish it is to try

And define someone else,

Slap a label on

To give existence

The illusion of ease,

To give ourselves

The illusion of knowing

How to navigate the dangers of living,

To give answers
To questions there are no answers to.

How to read a book

I don’t know how to do this,

But neither do you.

It’s not about reading the right books,

Someone else’s idea of how we should relate.

We should be reading each other,

Not skimming through

So we can draw conclusions,

But reading every page, every word,

Giving the books composer the benefit of doubt,

Trying to understand what the author was up to

Instead of underlining

Where all the mistakes were made,

Crossing out phrases we don’t like

And scribbling in corrections,

Not drawing conclusions

With a partial, cursory reading.

It may be a cliché, but it is true,

You can’t judge a book by its cover.

And, as a side note,

Like reading the bible,

Proof-texting is not the way to go.

It’s about the author’s intent,

Not our opinion of what he wrote.

Uncle

Back when, in the way down, fathoms deep,

Escaping the living dream of death,

Under the switching on of the fluorescent sun,

We played a game of pain and humiliation,

Taking each other down with overwhelming force.

Wild, all out resistance was required

Against the surprise attack,

Holding out against the pain

Of the hard, open palm blows to the belly,

No holding back on either side,

No uncle called to meet the requirement.

The surrender need be a total, heartfelt

Giving up admission of defeat.

Uncle.

Do you hear.

Uncle.

You win.

I give up.

Uncle.

I’m done fighting.

Untitled

I know what I think could be wildly off

In some parallel universe I don’t know

I’ve created in a back eddy of hubris.

I’ve gathered things up and set them a swirl

To coalesce into my becoming.

It was an unwitting act,

A stumbling into the future.

I snuck behind my own back

Through dark labyrinths in my head and fearful heart.

I tried to aim for the light

And the warmth of the sun,

Though with my blindness,

I can’t be sure I haven’t come out

Where all my theories are burning down.

Sidelined by a Nose

I’m all clogged up today,

Head snot infested,

Forehead out to there,

Nose as wide as a delta,

Eyes squeezing skimpy tears,

Throat of wet cardboard.

It’s an old story

Making me gasp,

Making me double over

And puke on the field.

I could have been a great linebacker,

Or a better running back.

I loved running,

Others hanging off me,

Trying to bring me down.

In the end it was my nose

Blocking my breathing,

Tackling my lungs,

Clotheslining me

Short of the goal line.