HIM
Often he wakes
yelling to the walls,
"What kind of shit life is this!"
He lays there awhile thinking
about what he had screamed,
as if it wasn't him who said it,
but some great unkown voice.
It's very slowly and relunctantly that he
gets up out of bed on these mornings;
sometimes, he just lays there for hours.
He don't dare tell anyone
about these mornings
or the meanings of their days,
they would only say things,
things he's heard many times before
after revealing much less.
"Why don't you try
some other kind of work?"
"It's all the same, a certain death."
"why don't you find a woman,
get married and raise a family?"
"Cause then I'd be screaming
insanities day and night."
"Why don't you give God a chance and
read the holy bible?"
"The same reason I don't let a man shoot
an apple off my head with a shotgun."
"Life is what you make of it...
why do you have to be so negative?"
"You're absolutely right,
and that is why."
It's these same ones
that cringe at the thought of
his constant alcoholic consumption,
his relentless smoking of cheap cigars,
the oddness that rolls off his tongue
for no apparent reason at all;
it's quite apparent to him.
And it's the evenings that he enjoys,
alone in the comfort of his creations,
the sounds of the stereo humming low
as fingers stomp across the keys
revealing a portrait that they see
as something so dreadfully ugly; him.
**********************************************
AN IDYLLIC DARKNESS
It seems like an odd thing to be
sitting here at 11:52 at night
and only be on the third wine,
and though it's almost done
I stare blankly ahead
on this night off,
tired of it all,
only to notice
an older black man on PBS
holding a sax while saying,
"The only rule is to make it work."
And I remember
Professor Merideth May,
the editor of Riddle Magazone;
one of the top 5 poet mags,
indignantly writing,
"Works for who?"
As if a systematic
meter of metaphors, and other
trifling
details
meant
more.
She had been in the game a long time
and it was hard to believe
she still didn't know,
so I told her,
and after that
she stopped returning my letters;
I miss those flowery rejections stating how much talent I have,
though my words are not poetic;
if only I'd study under her.
And as I smear
the cigar bud
into an ashtray,
draining the wine,
I too become done,
turning everything off,
lying within an idyllic darkness,
smiling at the fading thought
I share with the jazz man.
**********************************************
SPARE CHANGE FOR MEAGER SOULS
We all know one plus one equals two,
so surely we can reason
that no one really knows jack about
THE AFTERLIFE,
or even if one exist;
dying will solve this mystery.
Still, many get sold
by the man who claims to know;
it sounds so good
that they buy it up
like rising stock,
thinking they have nothing to lose.
If we were to manage
our finances this way,
we would all be broke
by the end of the month.
Meanwhile,
these nickel preachers
jingle parishioners hopes
like coins in their pockets,
making all that righteous noise,
as if their didactic dogma
actually added up to a great sum;
spare change for meager souls
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