We pine not for youth
But for doors once open
Long since shuttered
Each year a nail
Hammered firmly home
Time
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Category Archives: Poems
How it was
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
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.
A winter quartet
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.
Death, and all that
Only one thing is certain, and it is death.
Forget taxes: political posturing.
Plenty of people right here
in the land of the technically free
and occasionally brave
are too poor to pay taxes.
No one is too poor to die.
You will die,
and so will I;
all the people you’ve ever known,
and all you’ve never known,
will die.
You’ll miss them;
it will come as a shock.
Friends, enemies, bothersome acquaintances,
those you love, those you despise,
no matter.
Death will touch your heart,
because you will remember
that your own time is not yours to dictate,
that your death is not so remote.
When it happens to be someone you love,
who has been a part of your being,
it cracks the structure of your universe
from end to end.
You see a life severed, amputated.
There is a terrible urge to step in,
to finish things for them,
to see out their destinies, to hell with your own;
it will wait.
But you won’t,
you can’t.
The things undone, the lives unfinished,
the afterthoughts left adrift,
these will haunt you.
These ghosts will be your companions;
be good to them.
exiles child 