Pulling back inside myself
looking out guardedly
lest someone see me.
Our Expiration Date
Miracle Man
9/9/2024
Time has no favorites, passing the same for each,
and at birth God assigns an expiration date.
This assigned time period man cannot breach,
but the life he lives determines his eternal fate.
Man isn’t informed when his last day will be,
and expiration date changes only by God’s choice.
Whether our lives are lived guardedly or carefree,
The clock keeps ticking unaware of our voice.
Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8
The poet comes up the road that the sun has baked to a faded yellow. His collar is open and his throat glistens with sweat. His thin brown hair is damp and plastered down. He's not young and there's no car in sight; he must have walked all the way from Lisbon! Guardedly he holds out a thin book whose hard covers are as thick as the rest of it.
Mom brings him inside and gets a glass of water from the kitchen and a piece of last night's pie from the fridge. He sits back in the armchair, sipping, eating, telling in between about his writing. He was here last year, too, around this time. Mom knows about the poems. She goes to her purse for a dollar and he shoulders his bag back to the road.
Dad has a fit! "You gave him a dollar? For this batch of baloney? He waves the book in the air. "Nobody pays me a dollar to sit around and draw "may..day.
say.. way! Nobody here gets paid to lick a pencil!"
Mom looks down as if contrite but her eyes are not sorry.
(1938)
Don’t your daughter’s skin
Attack with a pin
Nor her blushing wall
Hit for an amusing fall…
And don’t your vibrant son
Leave in improvident sun:
Now playfully moving clockwise
If he ventures out, that’s streetwise!
Perhaps, you’ve your Good Head
Forced to forget what you’d read:
For what a bloke has succeeded to obtain
He should at all costs guardedly retain.
As the second hand ticks away my breaths
a half-clad moon catches my eye.
Was a time when I might've seen
the ghost of half-eaten melon,
but I'm older now, my thoughts less spry.
Dark fear's hobgoblins
were long since relegated
to memory's chuckle drawer;
open windows to warm nights ease my mind.
I must shave and write.
Neither seem as pressing
as the once hormone-inducing prance
in distant starlight,
the hot exhalations of desert air.
Nor do creased page corners
to detective thrillers and t.v.'s prattle
beckon hours with purpose.
I'm the insouciant sentry
at castles in retirement,
the dragon minus annoying fire.
Crows no longer pick eyes of the dead
in picture frames on paneled walls.
My shoes don't guardedly tread
engineered woods of perfection.
Aging brings a basset hound,
graying around the nose,
laying placidly on the rug.
I'll get to tasks eventually.
For now I commune with the moon,
allowing my mind the idyll
of a worn desk in a cluttered room
and the dulcet laze in lyrics of night birds
serenading summer's first hours.
6/19/18
To reach out and touch
Always seemed so much
For this weary soul to achieve.
A scarred, battered heart
Inauspicious start
Ever disinclined to receive.
Mind riddled with doubt
Puzzling it out
P’raps soul, not mind must discern
Heart imperfect too
Good enough for you?
History fills me with concern.
Safety does not sate,
In truth, suffocates.
No longer comfort in reserve.
Contemplate the reach
Guardedly beseech
All that which I doubt I deserve.
Struggle with the fate
Set down the old weight
Challenge that which seems must be true.
Not better off ‘lone,
Old joints creak and groan
Callused hands reaching out to you.
2/28/16
– |Life| +
I recall how I had surveyed you, guardedly from a rocky peak,
And why I left the shelter of the mountains, for you.
How we wandered on those plains together,
Endless long days and shorter nights.
You a gazelle and I an eagle.
Horned and barbed, we;
Leaping from earth;
Soaring heights;
Left behind;
– |Life| +
Right ahead;
Plunging depths;
Chaining us to earth;
To leap and soar no more;
My gazelle, your eagle, less we;
Each day numbered, uncounted nights.
Trudging thru mired fields planted with seeds,
Someone else chose for us and we unwittingly accepted,
Until the mystery of these once sweet green steppes withered.
Copyright 2013
He lay there -- supine in his splendor.
No wonder the wonder in his dead eyes,
shining as black nuggets of perfection
just at the intersection of my drive and the street.
He lay there, just a few feet from where
the rubber meets the road,
the load of breathing too harsh.
The long gash on his neck still oozing
the last signs of life, though they be brash,
for life no longer lingered in he.
The buzzards, maybe forty in all,
indulged my intrusion, guardedly, but polite.
I touched him one last time, my last rite,
for the spirit mother who
set a free spirit’s soul free.
I returned in a week.
He was gone, I did not seek or wonder where.
Such is life. We live and we die. Why !
Only time will tell, only time.
In a far corner of the same field,
days later, peeled and bleached white,
three leg bones, a rib cage and a skull
I find to bring full closure.
To balance the scale of trash or treasure
in the measure of a life.
Thank you Cyndi !