Category: Book o’ Verse

Don’t hold on to that wall.
Don’t let it pull you backward
to its fixed side.
Hold my hand
and now we glide.

Airplane seats never fit his body.
Not just his legs,
though there wasn’t enough legroom, that was for sure.
And you lower the tray and it goes right up
into his rib cage, like he’s a grown man
sitting in a baby-sized high-chair. And the day is scraping
baby food off his face with a small
spoon, cool metal, plastic nubbin of a concave
food-holding dip at the end.
And putting that face-warmed leftover vegetable goo
back into a
squat bottle.

I was so angry, so spinning with all my anger
I remember at one point saying to a good buddy
that I was going to tell everyone I met
for the next TEN years:
“if you meet someone named [her name here]
please give her a kick for me.”
I figured the word would spread over time, like a belly.
But now that I know where she’s at
all these dozen plus years later,
I no longer feel the need to kick her.
Or to have her kicked.

I signed a lot of stuff today
and I don’t mean to brag
but no.
I do.
It was the way
I curved that capital “C” in Cecil.
and looped the “l.”
My graceful scoop.
The pen’s hurled weight.
Like I was piloting
a space plane
made of jet black ink.

If we’re all drawing a face together
I don’t want to draw the mouth.
I’ll draw the hair —
just lines, loose and easy.
Or the eyes.
But not the lips.
The way they curve and join
and hold back
her teeth.
Don’t make me draw the lips.

Forgot an old friend's name tonight. I
thought it was "David Shapiro,
of Kansas" but it's not, is it?
It's something else, something
equally
common
unsearchable.
Or maybe it is?

Lordy lordy I've
lost all
confidence.

“It’s a multiple of a lot of different things.”
Then somewhere down the line, you find yourself saying
“It’s a syndrome.”
You’re giving 75/25. Or 65/35.
Holding back.
Not out of laziness but from some sense
that things are finite and you don’t want to spend it all.
When the phone rings, you answer it on the fourth ring.
Or you go to an adult valentine-making class and you say “nice to meet you.”
But you don’t make valentines for everyone. Just two or three.
Your basketball buddies don’t even bring it up.
The way you’ve stopped saying
“That’s what I’m talking about” with your trademark vigor.
So you head on out to a petting zoo — any petting zoo.
Because animals can’t tell the difference.
Except that maybe you’re easier to sit on nowadays.
That goat is so heavy.
Come on now, you big old goat.
Move.

Never gave thanks.
Never had blogs.
Owned slaves. Some of them owned slaves.
Were shorter than us on average.

Yes, some of them fought against it
tried to move things
forward
toward

a blinding
bright world
but

not all of them.

We played with sticks for a while, my people
looking for wood that was strong and flexible,
turning it into specialized sticks.
Sticks for scratching
for digging out hard to reach
infected patches.
Then we made the Torah.

The pencil they gave me
was covered with paint. I scraped at it.
Artisan, whole-leaf paint chips
dropped off
in spidery clumps.
And now I can see, it is an artisan pencil.
Made by a man in the mountains of Peru.
Separated out from the base of a Peruvian Pencil Tree.
Peru.
It is a savage land.
And there’s my friend, the legendary artisan
with his Peruvian pencil-carving knife, its handle
snapped clean off
from the root of some
mountain vegetable.
Most of the knife is edible, in fact.
Even the blade.
But only if you cook it long and slow.
And who would eat such a thing?
Who would eat the knife cooked tender?
Someone with a pen, no doubt.
Or a typewriter.