The time has come for me to ramble.
Making every step a sort of gamble.
Crossing paths and making ways,
Cutting ties and sinking quays.

No homefires burn for my kind
Those who leave our hearths behind.
Forever hungry for what we seek
Swimming strong and stilling weak.

I evade an existential unease
With bowed heaed and bending knees.
But not to country, land or time.
I pledge instead to new ardors climbed

Trading stability for tranqulity
We shed our pasts like shed motility
We resist our tap roots sinking down
We find new nutrients on foreign ground.

Since I am drawn to die alone,
give me a death of unreknown.
No one please remember my name,
Someone else can take the blame.

August harvests of grain and gain,
Bountiful plains of slain and lain,
Country meadows tilled till twain,
Dying ideals crossing Oak and Main,
slowly we forget from where we came.

I love you, Mom,
As you panhandle for golden lollies
and scab cigarettes off passersby.

You were beautiful, once.
You were as pretty as the faded floral dress,
hanging, gimbaled, off your bony shoulders.

Unlike most sons, I see you every day.
I watch you bleach and fade and loosen.
I watch your flowers go a little more gray.
I pass by your usual bench
as I walk to work.
You still wear the fuzzy, mint green slippers,
From a Christmas,
eight years ago.
You occasionally bark crude solicitations at the young men.

Yet, you never solicit me.
Even, if your milky eyes only perceive
a motion blur of pinstripes and briefcases and silver wrist watches.
You never bum a smoke.
You never ask for change.
You never say, “Thank you,”
when I press a fifty into your thin hand.

I love you, Mom.

I love golden showers
and I have a vested interest
in seeing the kink normalized.
So, I will write a reflexive ode to it
and sing its praises.

Zeus started it.
He used golden showers
to impregnate
a buried woman.

Think about that.
Think about how that’s stood the test of time.
Then, think of that heavenly ambrosia,
that stuff of legends,
gunneling down your partner -
painting their marbled torso,
etching abs and curves,
sliding downward with
a pungent warmth.

Think about what it is like
to kneel at the feet
of your god or goddess
and receive.

Zeus started it.
Golden showers,
Preserved in folk tales
of the people who
perfected the orgy
and were idolized by Germans.

We used to value grit.
It served a coarse purpose
In the hands of the maker.
It built bureaus and cut curios
and wore away the excess of elephants,
revealing only the polished products
creating something
by removing everything unwanted.

Of course, we valued grit.
It takes a rough hand
to move mountains
and to clear forests.

There is a certain destruction in creation.
A time to be as loud as a blasting cap.
A time to bite like the edge of an axe.
A time to split the core and get to the heart.

We selectively sheer the accumulated layers
Wood and stone,
Blood and bone,
House and home.

We will always need grit
when it comes to the finishing.
That pernicious insidious scraping
The stubborn scouring of the surface
Until all that remains is someone’s conception,
who saw something beautiful and useful
and set to work destroying.