HOW WILL THEY REMEMBER ME?

Will the living dishonor me?

Will my worn bones be dishonored?

Will voices chide with tired humor

...sick enough of the subject of my life...?

...that one extra chore

among many

dead or dying chores.

Have tears of love gone dry?

among the eyes of a multitude of friends

and wives

and whores

whose saved my weak and frightened graceless form

from ruin

...and hid it like a coin

unspent

...once upon a time...unable to relent...?

One small worry!...one too many kept!

...for that great jury

in the churches and the stores

...working, buying, and surviving

for a few brief days

beyond the hour

of their debt.

And little time for poems and prayers

...just enough to laugh

more than they wept!

NEW ENGLAND

For a literature of Puritan witchery!

A fall rain comes

battering the acorns

from above.

That cold wet seed of our birth rite!

...and burning leaves

on a coastal mountain.

PITY THOSE WHO NEVER CAME

Brisk outside,

and warm within!

...those who built the fortress wise

gaze out

on the haunted skies

of harvest cloud

and harvest fire.

Yet, given this, the dead live on

with jeweled eyes and bricks of ice

wiser in a fool's device

that all of the good men fortune found.

Listen to their empty song

echo death with longing sound.

Pity those who never came

to fall and rise...or even fail

but shattered in a strange demise

which the snakes of ancient gods foretold

with strange stars leading from the east!

For, who knows love...without desire?

in a long ago city made of gold

or at harvest time which the Moon foretold

in the sacrifice

of man

and beast...

RUSSEL'S UNNATURAL PLACE

A hedonism of dogs and parks!

A baying and howling

and running fast

in brown and purple fields

...the needles of the pine all fallen

in the stitched Autumn edge of the city

...laughing that way with his friend and lover

...boys gone off to a country hideaway!

But there is also

that quiet

sometimes dark

inebriation of bitter wine

staining the scrawls

of articles found

in journals

or printed from blogs

where a difficult sadness

has found its alienation

in childlike solitude

watching the world grow up

into that monster

which has forgotten itself

and gone off

to war

against people

and nature

and the sacred tribes

who touched

in a distant periphery

the life

of a lonely child...

SONG OF ICE AND FIRE

Undo the buckle of the belt

and melt

into a huge blond draft beer!

And suck a cigarette down

to ashes

and a tear.

An ancient man by Sixty!

choking on his own

gray decaying meat!

Oh winters with your unforgiving cold!

Oh summers with your unrelenting heat...