I got my book of riffs,
My bebop hat
Stuffed on my head
What I lack is bread
I got the skinny pants
I drive my Mini past
The twilight boulevard
What I lack is gas, man
What I lack is class, man
The mojo ain’t workin’
The jerky aint jerkin’
What I lack is a clue
We pine not for youth
But for doors once open
Long since shuttered
Each year a nail
Hammered firmly home
Maybe you counted on my sense of duty
To fill in your dreams
Or thought that in the end
All things would come around
To what you found obvious
To me, it was a shabby storefront
Cheap gilding framed the doorways
Loudspeakers blared assumptions
Crackling, as if through faulty wiring,
Or being consumed by fire
Sooner or later, I thought,
Collapse will come
My choices: cower, embrace the rubble,
Or leap free
Aldo was a character in a series of commercials for cheap Italian wine some years ago. A character who needed development, I thought.
Aldo, not a slave to fashion,
Walks in, enslaving fashion
In a prison of gestures,
In a sly looking-glass wink,
As if none of it matters
Except that it does.
As if the curious drape
Of his gaze did not encase
His inner essence
Like a gilded cage
Aldo, little Aldo
Peers through filigreed wiles,
Unaware of the stifling air
Within.
I
Daybreak
Orion long since fled,
The new moon cradles the old,
With Venus, that old voyeuse,
Standing watch,
All the sky ablush
II
Temperatures drop slowly
From the unblue, steel-gray sky,
The promise of snow revoked
In response to some
Imagined slight.
Across the low-slung day,
Footprints.
III
Finally, snow,
Fierce and bitter
No longer willing or able
To hold its rage against
The lingering autumn,
At the tress clinging absurdly
To their dead.
IV
A Sahara of snow,
Windblown and duney,
Bereft only of camels,
Piled like so much longing,
Like so many
Cancelled appointments.
exiles child 