Become a nowhere to go-getter.
Hope, though you know better.

Diagram sentences in Pali.
Meet Schrodinger’s cat for a drink. Or not.
Strain to break free of quantum entanglement.
Sample hors d’oeuvres with a cannibal.
Exorcise Maxwell’s demon.
Find an affordable cure for entropy.
Stretch the plasticity of time.
Parse the intrinsic syntax of boredom.
Announce a Methodist Jihad.
Invent and indulge imaginary desires.
Chase the orgasms that got away.
Memorize the complete History of Forgetting.
Ship balloons to the south to help it rise again.
Remove the rust from your lawn.
Consider the rain’s generic sorrow.
Add sugar to bitter recriminations.
Abandon your better nature.
Engage in remedial rage.
Snap Polaroids of maggots masticating.
Weep for the sadness of scarecrows.
Find a river you can step in twice.

Escape into anhedonic ecstasy.
Show these endless hours no mercy.

ξαπλώνω μόνος.
— Sappho

Lover, please lie down with me.

Forget society; it has gone crazy.
Mobs, viruses, rampaging armies.
An endless parade of catastrophes.
It is all there for anyone to see.

It lies not in our power to be
the saviors of failed humanity.

The world is fire, smoke, debris.
How it ends we can’t foresee.

Our bodies are a refuge of sanity.
So, rest your head upon my knee.

Lover, please lie down with me.

What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present. TSE

The present…

An instant
quickly becoming
long ago.

A blink
we pretend
will always be.

Closest we get
to eternity.

“Rage Goddess, sing the Rage of Peleus’ son Achilles.”

Vietnam was the
great epic poem
of my generation.

The Iliad of our time,
played out in the
red dust and sticky mud
of a place none of us
ever understood.

No Achilles I.

Just a frightened
and confused
twenty year old boy
following orders,
doing my job,
trying to make it home.

But home to what?

Usury age old and
age thick and
liars in public places?

Racism and Oligarchy?

A divided country
where naked greed
is the only value?

What would my comrades who died so young think of…

Gelid morning.
Walk outside to smoke.
Try to clear my head.
Wake up to the day.

Twenty-two deer
amble past me on
Struggle Mountain,
seeking food in the
deep snow not
ten yards away.

I bow to their
mammalian majesty.

They ignore me,
continue on their
hopeful way.

The deer and
Struggle Mountain
are here to stay.

I’m only visiting.

Old hippy.
Old soldier.
Old man,
paling more
every day.

Can’t remember
books I’ve read,
faces of women
I’ve slept with, or
poems I’ve written.

Where did they go?

Life not unlike
Coitus Interruptus:

Nothing lasting
comes of it.

Poetry makes nothing happen. — Auden

Poetry is curious.

Write love poems and
everybody will love you.

Write about anything
more substantive and
you will be called
boring or pretentious.

Here’s to boring
and pretentious!

Nearly seventy, not
any more love poems
coming my way.

Still, there is so
much left to say.

The new is out there
but you wouldn’t know it.

A brumal morning walk
up Struggle mountain.

Bare trees, fallen leaves.

The mountain does not
notice our counting time.
It remains every day
witness to our triumphs
follies and fuck-ups.

It is not a mother or
or a cop, or a God
that intervenes.

Its constancy gives the lie
to our mindless change.

It doesn’t have to be.
It just is, watching in silence.

I stumble back to warmth
and the noisome world.

Struggle Mountain is
the symbol of my life.

Friends and lovers will
die; my memory will fade.

The mountain will last forever.

Let the struggle be my epithet.
Let he mountain be my tombstone.

I will never be alone.

Fickle time has slipped away,
leaving you alone and still.
So little is left to say.

In rented rooms alone and gray,
so little power left of will.
Fickle time has slipped away.

Short time left to laugh and play.
fewer years remain to fill.
There is nothing more to say.

Why do we stand and stay?
Fading moments left to kill.
Fickle time has slipped away

Seeping out along the way,
all your words depart until,
there is nothing left to say

Decrepitude and decay
fill the weary world until,
fickle time has slipped away.
There is nothing left to say.