We thought we knew what loneliness was
Until our universes collapsed
into an impregnable bubble
When our borders contracted out of fear

Suddenly, we were trapped with people
Who we weren’t entirely at home with.
Time plus distance made the hearts grow fonder
But what happens when the space contracts

We worked to escape a lot of the time
Carved out niches reserved solely for ourselves
We bargained and maintained for a shred of self
We all hoarded little quarks and quirks.

Now, we all must turn inward.
Regulation, guideline, doctor-prescribed selfishness
We must spend time with each other
And embrace the decision’s made.
Summer’s almost over.
And a lonely winter isn’t far.

Siddhartha, my brother of a different mother,
Nirvana’s road is paved with your sole intention.
Your ideas are conceived to strike like lightning,
Flashes of fruition that force isolation.

Siddhartha, you locked me up in a far cloister.
A cell built to foster my love’s abstention.
To teach me detachment through holy internment
You bade me choose love or face annihilation

Siddhartha, what did Janapada do to you?
She was my royal wife and my heart’s true attention
You made me compare her to your hand picked devas.
Who’d make any mortal seem rather simian.

Siddhartha, I was better off as a donkey
Chewing sweet hay rather than enduring transcendence
You brought me salvation through forced isolation
And left me bereft of my souls’ occupation.

Her mouth touched him
like a whiskey’s kiss.
The cool brush of a ringing rim.
A moment’s anticipation
her warmest touch of amber
on his dry cracked lips.

Then, she burned.
Oh, how she singed and sang.
She warmed his cold lesions.
She scorched his grand eloquence.
She doused his innards in fire.

She had been Roosevelt’s courage,
When he departed his wife’s bedside.
She had inspired iconographic hangings,
When the muse’s rope snapped short.
She had given the suitor succor,
As he pondered where the ring went wrong.

Now, he kissed her.
Then, he drank her.
Always, he needed her
Whiskey kiss.

The Northern Lights dance in unreachable ribbons
above the head of a dead bull moose.
Stuffed and mounted on wall of tacky pine,
positioned above a false granite hearth,
He’s forced to stared out double glazed windows
and forever watch the shifting skies,
while the winds susurrate solar cinders
and stream like a Styx of souls -
slain by excesses of encroaching sportsmen.

His tufted brown ears perk up at the howl of the huskies
but its only wire forcing form into his preserved pelt
with his thick brown fur stopping abruptly at the neck.
His killers in their regicide cared not
for the long legs that carried him thousands of miles,
nor the broad shoulders that pushed down trees,
in a passing attempt to scratch an itch,
His only crime was his broad branching antlers -
His crowning expressions of sexual prime.

His jaw is pearled with gentle round teeth
ringing a false mouth that hangs slack in mid bray.
He tries to greet the shimmering skies
to bugle forth one more call of clashing battle
as if he could rear up on hind legs and clatter his hooves
to declare this territory, “Mine!”
But that plastic mouth was molded in Texas
And mass produced into expressions of realism
speaking through acrylic gums and tongues.

His glass eyes cannot perceive the heavenly hues
as they cavort above conifers encrusted in ice.
He cannot see the silent parade of his scion,
marching by in a secreted trail known only to natives.
His great grand son following in his hoof steps
through the woods of an inherited kingdom.
In another two seasons this one too will be dead,
by a paid and pampered safari of some rich hunter,
who slept warm inside instead of looking up in wonder.

Sometimes, I rather wish you died on the table,
That you and I had not been survivors.
You, the cancer statistic,
Me, the product of my childhood.
Then, we wouldn’t be a moral and a fable.

Yet, you continued to defy logic.
A defiant dervish, sallying and rallying,
Whirling, through the horde expectant.
Cockroaches deserve more praise.

I mark my wedding anniversary
that’s my most successful failure yet.
With poems and songs
That delay the inevitable mistake.
When my partner realizes
they should have never signed the paper.
That licenses lifelong disappointment
And guarantees resentment.

I mark my wedding anniversary
that’s my most successful failure yet
When old signs and unkicked habits
Stoke like pernicious coal fires
perfect for cremation.
Too much time together
Reveals that we can’t be together
And spend all our time wondering whether
Our lives were nothing more than ether.

I mark my wedding anniversary
that’s my most successful failure yet
With affection turned affliction
From isolation on borrowed time
That makes me wonder
how long will I have
love and life.

I mark my wedding anniversary
of my most successful failure yet.
A few more words to save things
A few more chances to be better
And then I will have a book full of failures
Penned for the cops to find

I am a bicycle in the rain
Everyone has given me a turn
Chains rusted
Rubbers busted
Frame still desirous
And a seat well-used

All that’s left
Are gaping holes
Wore out tires
Abandoned, locked to a parking meter

Who are you?
A bike mechanic?
With a can full of needed lube?
Here to junk me
Or make me your fixer upper?

Always,
I am rusted in the rain
Delightfully broken from all the rides

Hey, Fuck Up

I am talking to you, reader, author, everyone alike.
And I don’t mean that in the drunken uncle sort of way.
It’s not that same Budweiser tone
Shouted from a vinyl arm chair
Submerged in a leaky kiddie pool

I mean the collect we. The special fuckup.
Ever notice that? “Species”, “Special”
We the people who evidently fuck up.
Why are we like this?

Why do we act the way we do?
Why do we practice anonymous violence?
Cling to outdated and exclusionary ideologies
Try so hard to make everyone else different

It’s not the homeless woman
Trying to score whatever necessity makes this life bearable.
It’s not the trans boy or girl or non-binary
or whatever combination of forces and factors they are
It’s not the downtrodden, the lame, the destitute,
The unwell, the insane, the malfunctioning or the
dysfunctional.

It’s the rich people.
It’s the ones with the money and the power and the say and the platform
And the means and the privilege and the education and the connection
And the alma mater and the 401k and the trust fund
And the summer house.

It’s them.
They’re the fuck-ups.
But so are we.
We let them do it.
Hey, fuck up.
I’m talking to you.

It was an alright day.
I bought a used wheelbarrow
There’s no rain water or chickens.
Nothing depends on a spent morning.

Trying to patch the slow hissing tire,
I give up because the whole thing is rusty and second hand.
It makes a better decoration.
A little dying Americana chique
Where pastoral dreams meet unexpected ends.

I won’t ever use it.
So I gave up and took some acid.
As I fly like a humming bird,
I realize my arms won’t ache
beneath indolent layers of sun screen.

The truth serum says I am lazy.
I lay here slathered minerals that keep away select cancers
As new ones, the unplanned demises, bloom in twisted cells.
I realize I could die here. Sudden. No safety precautions required.
There are things more fatal and exclusive than a pandemic.
There are those inevitable ends monogrammed in our honor.
A bird drops out of the air.

Its feathers suddenly inert by an explosion of its heart.
A prefabricated anomaly born out of an unlucky lottery.
It falls dead among the the pink flowers
Next to my dilapidated barrow.
As I am reminded of my own mortality
And the sunset coming for us all.

He went away for the holy day
He took a Hajj holiday
But he never got there
He never got there
He never got there
He never got there they say

The NSA took the Imam away
They put him away
They put him away
In Guatanamo Bay

Now we don’t know
Where the Imam has been
They took him from us
They took him from us
We don’t know
Where the Imam has been
They took him from us
They took him from us

Ringy, ringy, ringy
Up the President
And remind him to close
that illegal residence
Ringy, ringy, ringy
Up the FBI
And ask them to stop
Making Jihad

Yeah, yeah, yeah
No no no, no no no
No no no, no no no

He went away for the holy day
He took a Hajj holiday
But he never got there
He never got there
He never got there
He never got there they say

He went away for the holy day
He took a Hajj holiday
But he never got there
He never got there
He never got there
He never got there they say

The NSA took the Imam away
They put him away
They put him away
In Guatanamo Bay

The NSA took the Imam away
They put him away
They put him away
In Guatanamo Bay