Forty Two Poems

No reason, no real rhyme
Just attempts to encapsulate
Little vignettes, bubbles of time.
Gaseous things.

Some quirky, some foul
Some droll, some stupid.
You know, poems about life.

They say right what you know
And I really know a good cosmic fart joke
And the pointlessness of worry

Forty two songs about things falling apart
Cosmic order that, the arrow of time
Ever to that great Entropic goddess
Singing that eternal knell

The music of the spheres
My cosmic ass to your celestial ear
The heavens sing
With forty two explosions of the gut.

They are the good time gals.
They are the women who make the world,
Who come in many forms,
Who cross all boundaries,
And struggle against stacked odds.

They are mothers born and goddesses chosen:
Some warriors, some healers,
Some brutal, some savage,
Some kind, some rude

• All equal.

This is an ode to the feminine form
in all its guises,
To the women who made my world.
Not all of them birthed me
But all shaped me
All equally,

Equally beautiful
Equally monstrous
Equally stormy
Equally righteous

Some were a passing light
Flittering across smokey windows
Some were lingering lanterns
Guiding the way down twisting corridors
Some were pragmatic nurses
Closing the dead eyes of fathers.

They are the good time gals
The women who remake this world
Who propelled us as a species
And might help us tear it all down.

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 am an interloper.
On this island
That’s one convenient flight away.

I am worse than the colonists.
For I am a post capitalist.
They conquered.
I vacationed.
They killed thousands
My life style kills millions.

My Luis and Clark
Are Apple Maps and Yelp
I am here because I bought a ticket
An all expense paid excursion
Born on a litter of injustices
And the paths by the same racist imperialists
Who figured out this is a pretty nice spot.

They decided to keep it.
I decided to rent it.

Yet, passing islander
With your smile and your compliment
Your direct approval me propelled me
Better than any trade wind

I am sorry I came
Sorry I intruded
Sorry I made things worse because I was bored
Because the pills had stopped working
Because my therapist quit
But, thank you
That smile was almost worth it.

Two forklift drivers and their families
Splashed in the turgid waters of a Puerto Rican jungle tour.
They bonded over an ass-busting slide
Down well-rock rocks and scraped coccyxes
Their interaction, verbatim,
For not even a poet can make it up.

“I’m from Brooklyn. Where you from?”
“I’m from the Bronx. I drive a forklift.”
“Get outta here! I’m a forklift driver too!”

From the tide pools, the wife smeared in zinc
Rotund in her stripe one piece, shouts
“Manny! Come get your kid!”

“Be right there, Cheryl, sweetie. I’m talking.”
Remember to swallow the G
And somehow stress the unstressed syllable.
In a lilt so iconic, imposters are easily spotted.

“Now where was I? Oh, yah, forklifts.”
Don’t go to Philadelphian with it.
It needs to rattle like a passing subway car
And sell bagels, newspapers and heads of cabbages
From the back of panel vans.

“Hey, you know Vito Badacunni?”
“Yah! He’s married to my sister’s third cousin!”

With a Marlboro dipping from sun-burned lips
Beneath a sun hat with broken reeds and frayed brim
That screams second hand Soho summer,
She snaps her fingers
“Manny, come get your fucking kid.
I need a cigarette.”

Like a prima donna orca,
Called by the ring master’s click,
Manny exits his wading pool
Increasing in volume
But never in anger
“Be right there, Cheryl!”