Category Archives: Poems

Age

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I’m old, don’t start with me
Don’t talk of deadlines
Or complain about the occasional
Twitch of middle age

There are people I know,
Dearly beloved,
Who worry that death will take them
Before their great work is done

Others who panic
Thinking their great work,
Having taken place in irascible youth,
Will fade without recognition

Or that the world, God forbid,
And all its minions,
Might come to misconstrue
Their contribution, mistaking it for exuberance.

As for me, it could happen
That I’m done before I die,
Or otherwise

Timing, they say, is everything.

Why?

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Why do things always go to hell
In a handbasket?
Why not a rucksack, or a bicycle?
For that matter, why not a sailboat?

That way, they could be
Three sheets to the wind
Or at least two.

Then it wouldn’t matter
If they were up the creek
Without a paddle.

Unless we’ve cleared the deck,
So all hands could be on it.
In a situation like that,
Kids who have grown another foot
Since we saw them last would come in
Handy.

Unless they just fell off a turnip truck.

Has anyone ever seen a turnip truck?
Come to that,
A truck hauling ass,
In a donkey’s age?

But enough horsing around
Going forward.

To the editor of my childhood

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Dear Sir
Something must be done
About these ghosts
Who keep popping through the lens
When I try to take
Tourist pictures.

My eyes fill
And I can’t find
The release button

Away

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Voyager 1 is expected to leave all solar influence behind, and slip into interstellar space soon, very soon. It will be the first man-made object to do so.

An inconsequential piece
Of jetsam
Floats miraculously out
From the sun

Out, out
So long, goodbye

We’ve heaved you gone
And yet you write back
Every day
As if you’d found work
Out there
Beyond the heliopause
Where strange bits of nothingness
Collide ceaselessly.

What do they make of you?
Too smooth, too rough?
Too many kinds of things
patched together
To be of any use to entropy?

I do hope
Things work out for you.

Senryu- gardening

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Certainty grows like
Thistles in the grand garden
Of ignorances