poemaday

New World Order

Walking along the Manayunk canal,

late afternoon sun, filtering through naked trees,

bounces off bricks, stuccoed walls,

boarded back windows,

all standing like an akimbo past,

watching our merry progress.

I wonder if trains still traverse the trestle?

The child I was would have taken their whistles

for granted.

But times then were different,

before these factories became warehouses for fantasy,

before trendiness was invented.

My grandfather once worked in a place like this was.

He'd never even contemplated cappuccino,

never tasted escargot, or eaten greens from a crustade.

The mortar of his life

was meat and potatoes,

such buildings meant sweat,

and this light that moves my heart to poetry,

sang to him

of quitting time.

Observation

You can't be pure at fifty

like you can at twenty.

Nature won't let you.

She does to your dreams

what she does to your skin,

causing you to change

your whole notion of beauty.

Night Fall

Relinquishing the reigns to darkness,

Day, heaves a grateful sigh,

slips off its shoes and wriggles its toes.

The mantle of should is removed

and hung neatly in the closet next to the coats.

With the infinite patience of poverty-stricken women,

the undone waits on line,

invisible, ignored, forgotten,

as mind loosens its belt and exhales,

claiming adult privilege

while leaving adult responsibility

balled up on the floor with the socks.

No longer being chased,

the moment has time to contemplate its reflection.

Reality takes off its necktie and stretches.

In the silence that follows, life pours itself a drink

and takes a tender sip

of the wondrous nectar that resides

at the heart of nothing special.

Blowing in the Wind

I sat tonight in sound softly echoing another age

that was so long in coming, and then crept away

like smoke sliding out a window.

Hipness, now hackneyed,

smiled from a stage.

Nothing really had changed

except for me,

and, of course,

the times.

Hot

Summer suckles sweat

that beads upon my lip

and runs

a sticky brine

between breasts

pasted wet with girlish cotton,

longing for the kiss of water

or the cool, tender nibble of the wind.

The Flirtation

Eyes meet and flash.

He catches her zing and throws it back.

His spirit runs wild on the mountain.

How tall in the grace of her gaze he stands,

Yes tickling through him

like nimble fingers on a key board.

Ah, the sublime moment of a tender graze

of shine across a table.

Next to him watching

sits she who also knows the tingle of his look,

who catches yet another flavor

from the fling of his desperate outpouring.

Her eyes cast about for a place to rest,

the muscles in her face doing their best,

she fiddles with her drink,

wondering why he doesn't think

of how small the moment makes her.

J.J. Cale

I played it without thinking

that you'd come seeping in on its strains

pulling a piece of me back through a pinhole

to a leather-brushed cheek and a laugh.

Music shines as a sun on the senses,

casting their shadows in flickers of flavor,

moments caught on the tip of a tongue.

Forbidden both touching and turning away,

never again will I hear this song sung

with ears that are fully my own.