A Day in the Life

This is a poem that might be three in one, or is it one in three? Not really sure. Basically this piece is a series of sketches in verbal fashion from a six hour stretch of one day. More than that, it is a clear window into the way my mind works. For those finding that uncomfortable there is a bucket of grease by you feet to blot the window dark again.

A Day In The Life

It really is amazing what
once passed for poetry
in my eyes. In a fit
of incredible unproductiveness
today I reviewed a poem
written, lost, lord
knows when really.
Language, style, subject,
paper and means written suggest
at least a decade since
the thing was spawned.
A stolen verse::

I desire:
Saturday afternoon operas,
loons laughing, train whistles,
singing wolves and your moans
ecstatic, that sound so wild.

Victorian, childish, in the height of my
drunken glory. Hardly the words I Desire
to write

Today:

I dreamt a dream of yours, standing
at the end of a bed, You lying -
wearing a white nightshirt making
soft night sounds.
Heat caused you to push
the sheet down towards
hips, your hands gently caressing.
Becoming aroused,
sighs, moans... Wisdom, some thing
else tells me to write no more, yet you see
the trouble of my words today. Perhaps
childish, puppyish, alcoholic,
desires are not so bad. In one of my fits I
retreated to the safety of my railing -
encountered a woman picking through
thrash; hand-me-downs left
on the sidewalk for the first passerby.
A common tradition in this city -
perhaps all cities - I have just forgotten.
I only desired to write passion
today. Yet there is none to read the words;
write the desire for. Instead
unproductivity was the production.
Later, again at post I remembered
the joy of tree climbing watching
a girl on the corner - about ten
dragging a lawn chair to the walks' edge,
tried mounting the heights only
reached by children in trees.
How many were the times
I came home pitched and needled
like a revolutionary Tory from the
days of Revere and Hale? How often
did I fall from the heights only to limp
home to Mother and repeat the event?
The woman wanted to talk of my
disease - her son's CP. We talked of her
divorce and the appalling condition
she called home. How not even
doctors could convince the boy of impossibility
pawing through old shirts, pants, eying them
for size. Watching from eye's corner the girl
gave up on the tree after half-hearted
attempts to enter a forbidden realm. Dragging
her chair back to her stair lest a drunken mom,
dad, find an excuse. How well I remember
that thinking! Leaving at last the clothes picking
woman asked "Do you have a real cigarette? I've been
smoking menthol s--- for a week now - tastes
like crap." Tree climbing children dance
in a wasteland of human canyons
while men and women of all color, creed,
status, pick another's trash apart. Leaving
tattered piles fluttering in the spring breezes.
Through it all cats march silently by observing
outlandish discourses, and My Desire
to write technicality no match for forbidden wittings -
placing my left hand in the small of your back,
gently walking your spine with fingers. Sliding
under elastic and down - slipping until finding
where body meets the mattress. Margaret
Anderson said "It is rarely that you see
an American writer who is not
hopelessly sane."

I wonder with none to hear,
who hears the madness?

_{(For JL 04/16/2009)}