Boy
			We are closest to God when we laugh.  -- 	Anonymous


			
			The problem people have with me.
			They expect a man.  I can give them
			regular bill payment, hold down a job,
			make reasonable grocery choices.

			
			But I can’t help but laugh
			at things they don’t find funny,
			talk to myself because I can communicate
			with me, still run to beat cars across the street

			
			on my nighttime walks
			just to feel strong
			and boyish again.  Crank the music sometimes
			between classical quietude.

			
			Hell is so close, the silent jaws
			of maturity that surround you with possessions,
			with maturity itself, until like huge gums
			it infects the teeth in life, removes the savor.

			
			I feel the breeze tonight, smell
			the fresh-mown grass.  Ruffling
			the crewcut I had as a six-year-old.
			I have a poem in my mind like a song.

			
			All I have to do is scratch the skin
			and the boy giggles beneath the surface.
			I look at art sometimes and can
			feel it pulsing back at me,

			
			fueled by the laughter
			of a boy
			unafraid to stay young
			forever.


			
			
			Kinetic Zen
			


			
			Bicycles are about dreams.
			In their repose we see
			the power of the human-
			driven sprocket, in their frames
			see the mount for the wheel;
			scanning the handlebars our palms
			feel the turns, the braking, the view
			over top of the routes we choose
			to circumvent motor traffic.
			Contemplate the bike.
			There is no risk.
			It is for the exercise.
			Climb aboard.  It gets better.

			
			The wheels turn, dredging huge chunks
			of death closer.  The possibility for harm.
			We smile, the wind in our hair.
			It is for the exercise.


			
			
			
			Abulia
			


			
			I don’t know music.  But people I work with,
			that I pass each day, never try to understand 
			those complexities of classical form

			
			that I gladly accept without the slightest comprehension
			of the genius, only bow to it as a palm
			slipping its lash into my jalousie

			
			in Key West and saying its small prayer
			as I slept with God whispering the palm slap
			by the window into my clear sleeping consciousness.

			
			I am under the headphones
			listening to rock ’n’ roll, instruments I’ll never
			play, but music kicking its stand into my poems

			
			and roaring into a hallway
			that people I work with, pass each day
			never travel, and something that scares me,

			
			a monster maybe, rams like a tongue
			out of a dark room into the hallway ... to kiss me?
			And I run — what else have I but this —

			
			to meet it.  And it is God, or it is not God,
			but it is at least what I fear,
			and meeting it is more

			
			than what 
			comes from not
			traversing the hallway.


			
			
			
			
			Just Write
			


			
			I can’t slobber over a newspaper
			without licking my news fix
			like a wound.  Furry in the day off morning,

			
			I gambol about the apartment like a dog.
			A magical tongue, an agreeable disposition,
			and a cold nose.

			
			This didn’t start out as an anthropomorphic poem.
			More some kind of comment on hunger
			for the steady diet

			
			of screwballs the world throws us.
			Home is goofy because it’s sane.
			And Goofy is a dog, albeit a cartoon one,

			
			and here we are with anthropomorphism
			again.  Well, what do we do with that?
			Damn, my head hurts.

			
			I think if I bought a sports utility vehicle
			it would all be better.  Shot of gas,
			anyone?  Come over to my big house

			
			for a few hits of conspicuous consumption,
			a munch of emptiness, and so much
			Mickey Mouse® it’s trademarked.


			
			
			
			Transcendance


			
			
			Awake early, writing in darkness,
			the miracle of electricity not lost
			in the lamplight.  The Indian incense

			
			carries me back, centers me here
			on the wafts and whims
			of apartmented air currents.

			
			This scent has more
			to do with the meaning of life
			than this poem, than anything I will read.

			
			And its lack, even more.
			Did you smell the scent?
			I thought not.  Writers, readers, any human,

			
			are limited.  Did you read the poem?
			It doesn’t matter.  The incense
			I lit at its beginning is gone.

			
			So is the poem.
			So am I.  It is only yearning
			and some form of transcendant interest

			
			that stretches it out
			this far.  Goodbye,
			and that is the shortened form

			
			for “God be with you.”
			God, as Gandhi said,
			has no religion.

			
			
			I see the electricity here in the dark.


			
			
			
			
			Speck
			


			
			Striving for God, aching for creation,
			I want to see those light years
			beyond the big bang,

			
			to see if this Nothing
			I hold holy
			is worth its status.

			
			Or if the dreaded
			iota bit beyond nothing
			is true, and I am poised

			
			on a cosmic garbage chute,
			a flea jumping
			in a cosmic circus

			
			its mind
			with no intellect
			but bloated fat

			
			with the blood of doubt.


			
			
			
			Bonnie Raitt On A Repeat of Saturday Night Live
			


			
			This afternoon, you should be at work,
			but this is vacation, and what is vacation but a chance

			
			to cry, to laugh, to do what should be done
			on “personal” days:  Transact business

			
			that can’t be accomplished in ordinary working hours.
			I use this intensely personal day

			
			transacting business, crying over Bonnie’s version
			of “I Can’t Make You Love Me”;

			
			something about the wayward pain
			of a smashed thumb brought home

			
			with the accuracy of a nail driven
			into the only space it’ll ever occupy.

			
		
	*
			
			The sun’s out.  I gather my booty.  I’ve got a rented roof,
			a tan, a beer, and work’s tomorrow.

			
			I’ll take the tan to work and leave the rest behind,
			and because I can’t snare more sun I’ll have another beer.

			
			I dry my eyes as if toweling off from a shower.
			Work looms.  The blues hit home:

			
			Tomorrow is always the day
			when my dreams

			
			
			lose their power.


			
			
			You Call Yourself  A Poet
			

			
			Hopping on one foot
			since its mate took up permanent residence
			in your mouth, looking for sox,

			
			her leaving casting enough
			summer shadow
			on your second dresser drawer
			to make black and blue

			
			blend like a bruise.
			Squint for your so-called
			spectroscopic understanding
			of love or faraway stars:

			
			red, giant, dwarf, white.
			The sun's a worshipped yellow yolk
			paling bland as egg white.
			It was clear

			
			but the heat must've
			fried your sense of color,
			left you groping
			for the right sock,

			
			the left sock,
			the impossibly trivial,
			mumbling 
			like an old man,

			
			something insane, silly
			something to the effect
			you're glad its sox,
			and not sex.