"SUMMER"

One red cherry
dangling,
fat maraschino,
with your short
green stem,
juicy, lolling
lazily,
ready for
my
munching
into.

"Ingredients for Serenity"

It takes grit
and courage
to hang long
against
granite
if hungry
and not languish
gracelessly
in the urgencies
and grim,
pale-ish gray
gutters of gluttony.

"Today"

‘Today’


The depressed mind saps
all the juice from a poem,
only thin dry filaments
and cracked husks
of lifeless language
left scattered, abandoned
like dead laboratory
mice decomposing
on the cutting room floor.

Formed in Fun

‘Formed in Fun’

Welcome this time true
to its own form,
foolish maybe but free,
heart pounding wildly
riding your red
paperboy’s bike
with no hands
down ‘Dead Man’s Hill’
daring yourself not
to use the brakes.

This was living on edges with ease,
the day dream of pure animal glee.

Now we’re talking love!
Climbing those forbidden
backyard fences and slippery
roofs of unknown neighbors
shocked during dinner
by you and your pal,
pre-adolescent partner in crime,
stomping big up there
on the tarry shingles
above their houses and heads
bowed, muttering grace
at the tables as we
cooked up a percussive surprise.

And when that thankyouGod
rare snow fell on our streets
glistening all white and slippery
so school was shut down
tight as a new Wilson mitt,
we celebrated by bombarding
the bus and cars dumb enough
to slide out on twenty-ninth street
with acres of snowball bombs
scoring frequent hits,
each white poof on metal or glass
a blizzard of joy,
a mastery of boyhood
delight.

I remember the adventures
in our city those secret
seasons of white and heat
with sleds and barefeet
as the times life opened
her rowdy sweet embrace
all the way,
completely,
all the way
home.

Ergo,Igor

‘Ergo, Igor’

Igor Delahanty from Vladivostok,
half Irish, half-wit, all Cossack.
Flamboyant, erudite, and pompous,
loved center stage,
a clown in the circus.

He married young, had six screaming
Delahantys,
stayed out carousing, thus
his wife he did not please.

Too much vodka and who knows what
else one cold night,
did leave frigid poor Igor,
all ice blue and rigid
with frostbite.

Rain

splattering on
the narrow alley
in back ,

water falling
copiously
from
the grey
sky
reminds me
of home...

drops..

drop
down
like a leaf
in a strange
wind
shorn of place
and yet sweet
in space..

faintly
res
o
nate
with the fate
of simple
things.