THREE
COINS IN A FOUNTAIN
Don’t
be the greeter at the Faith Walmart.
The
mega-churches will have your life for lunch.
I’m
just saying.
The autumn leaves
are drifting by
everyone’s
window. The grey skies of Toronto
copyright
the poet.
I gave it
all
to
the English Romantics. Or rather,
they
gave it all to me. A motion
and
a spirit, indeed. Mind-forged manacles
and
the priests in black gowns.
And
if I say “G-d” I mean
“group
of drunks.” Are my strength
and
my resolve. The Universalists say
Hell
doesn’t exist.
Nor would a
loving god
create
one.
DIFFICULTY
AT THE BEGINNING
It’s
hard to live in this world,
difficult
to face and embrace
the
awkwardness of love,
the
ravages of desire,
the
numb cruelty of appetite.
To
be or not to be a being,
going
it alone
through
the swirling mass of contradictions,
born
to die and bound to fail,
beneath
a majestic night sky full of boundless stars.
PLACE
POEM
When
I get to the place
I
need to be
the
stores are usually closed.
Abandoned
streets
are
sweet in retrospect.
Looking
back on lost loves
feels
awful too.
If
we were meant
to
feel good all the time
we’d
already be living
in
Paradise. Or so
some
might say.
I
say it’s all right
to
hitchhike out of
any
place that isn’t feeding you.
IMMENSITY
All the quiet bricklaying
came to nought. We were lost
in an immensity too vast
to be comprehended by anyone
beyond the open-hearted.
I watched them squander their lives
on hopeless projects of self-importance.
It all came down to the beautiful ministers—
what could not be possessed, only touched.
The shapes of clouds,
that had been changing
since the opening days of existence,
were going by, unnoticed.
And the freedoms were so easily
given away. By those who were born
in chains, only to die in chains.
HAMMERHEAD
I get lost on these shores,
listening to the ocean waves.
What’s out there.
The
mind sketches a horizon.
Any
time of visible day.
I’m
back to an old methodology
that
never did work for me.
Calling
upon the angels,
looking
for their footsteps in the sand.
ALISON
There’s
going to be life
after
baseball, but not
pretty
life. I encounter
a
song that brings
tears
to my eyes,
though
I cannot remember
any
time it applied
to
me or anyone
I
knew. The name
drops
and the tears
come
down, though
I
don’t know you,
and never did.
LAST
BOOK
Last
book I was troubling myself
with
how to build a bridge
over
the river of time.
Everything
I looked at
seemed
real to me.
And
I was wanting to
go
back in time,
to
memorialize
the
little acts
of
love and theft.
Now
it’s raining
as
it always seems
to
be lately.
The
present’s tense,
and
I am proceeding
without
a plan.
