Speakeasy

Coffee in the morning
Listening to the birds
Speakeasy
They scratch their beaks
And I my pen
Growing light declares another day
And I find myself not at the end
What yesterday holds
I give away
What tomorrow binds
Is yet in fray

I like a canvass with lines
I like it in the sun
Writing what happened
And what’s just begun
It doesn’t matter if this is good
I’m writing because I should

The wakeful hours are a mix of dreams
Water, Ice and Steam
Transformation knows an unrecognizable truth
This changes as the knots are loose

A slip knot is happy
Like slippery feet
That carry giggles over the ice
Not like walt disney’s frozen ponds
But more the shinning sidewalk,
Mailman’s bane
Without subversive salt
The sane straight concrete world of men made slick
Allowing a dangerous glee

I don’t ask for time
I have plenty
I don’t ask for clarity
I have too much
But love
Willing the beauty
Displaying the dragon’s teeth
Turning the telescope backwards
And pointing to what we thought we heard
In the crunching, clicking, stalking darkness outside
It’s a box of candy for your bowl

Tonight my dreams will remake today
Alter my memories
Planting needles in my hay
Shinning spikes
Warm in the dryness
Making secret plans
For the empty river bed

The late morning shadow approaches
And I stay ahead
With my expiring coffee
The coolness, stillness, encroaches
Threatening to numb my fingers into lead

Tonight my dreams will find me ready
My pillow soft
My head heavy
And in the dark
I’ll dream of flying through suns
The worlds below in desperate shadow
My ship their blip
My dream their unknown monster
Casting ripples in the starlight
From the darkmatter unseen sideways somewhere

From the deep
On the bottom
At the lowest depth
Where pressures encase
Push and prolong death
There are harder creatures than we
And these monsters look up at us
Our faces backlit and smiling free
In the loosely pack water we call air
And they think,
What soft creatures they must be
What free lives they must see
Why would they spend the day
Staring down at us?

Between depth
From one fathom to the next
Places make their people
And their habits in their nests

And I think this is nonsense
But I don’t mind
Like the fisherman making his 98th cast
It is the last fish he caught
And the next he’ll bring to our loose, windy world
That he holds in respect
Lazily grinning, thinking
Trophies are for fools

I just like to hunt the Wumpas

Perhaps we and everything
Are but shadows cast by some steady nova
Thoughts floating up and around
As bubbles blown from the soul
Pipe in its mouth, gurgling beneath our bathtubs
They way things are seen from without
Objectively
Are perhaps created solely from within
Subjectively

How can a nose be
Cold in the sunlight
This is February
How can a mind be
Alone in the crowd
This is tributary

The Mobb runs together eventually
From drop to pond to sea
Will you share a river with me?
Not Joan nor Johnny
But only on this balcony
Where in the night may we meet
Some fathoms separating
The ocean from my feet
With what name do you favor your shadow?
What waves of the sea do you watch and believe?

I hear a rumbling in the garage next door
I park on the street
And so feel like a whore
I hear a bird in the bush next to me
I sing not so sweet
And so feel like a flea

Animate and still
Like sunlight crossing my window sill
We clean our windows and so feel free
But it is a lie
A conjugation key

Cigarettes in my hand
Burn like a fuse
Because for fun
My body I use

Yoda knew the truth about grammar
It’s only the tree in the forest falling
Just a glamour the ears of men bridging

And so I liken my self in pitiful analogy
That is I
As I see
The mix continues its swirling stir
Pieces, particles, and their attractive blur
One for you
One for me
In this malformed soliloquy

I scratch the skin under my clothes
A rippling relief demarking my fingers and me
What matters is only that I fill these pages
These days
Like water in the lungs
Rhyming badly
And worn down evolutionarily

Too many adverbs
Too many lys
Foul the soup
And force the motions off their stoop
The street interrupts my footpath
Never joining
Conjoining at last

First the message is named hello
And they wave their hands from below
A lonely lighthouse loves
What ships cross the invisible waves
And then streak, then strike,
The light flashes on their course
The rocks or blackness
Guess which is worse

And soon this coffee morning
The sunlight will wink out behind
This house that looms over me
Making my warm spot here
Ancient history

Glad hands start the beginnings
Of an afternoon fire
For this now
For this year
For this yarn
For me
For a time far short of eternity
But forever means little to the mortal being
It’s enough to be here scratching myself
And writing bad poetry