Finally! I worked on this one for . . . maybe four months? Still not sure I "got it right" but I tried. If nothing else, it IS the longest B-day poem for myself that I have ever written. Did a little research too where I discovered
Septuagenarian-ism
“I’m
but a shadow
a
single moment
stretching
Its legs out
as
far as It can before
the
candle goes dark”
*Pamiątki
Alive
inside a dream, it seems. A sugar memory
a
touch, oh, that touch, I remember those scratches,
those
brutally long nails strolling between my thighs.
It’s
late, so very late, deep within a summer’s night
a
hint of sadness swirling in the dark crevasses,
a
silent moon spying on us, the sheer, white curtains
waltzing
to the sounds of a cool morning breeze
and
that crazy-ass black cat draped across
the
far end of the mattress . . . yeah, that’s
what
I recall . . .
Seventy
years . . . almost.
Can
barely see myself through the steamy mirror.
But
I’ve no desire to step from the warm shower
and
wipe my reflection dry, why should I?
Large
canyons, the cracked, waterless river beds,
the
great craters that time whittled into my face?
No
need to visually confirm the devastation,
I
know it’s there as it has always been there
like
that damn cat, watching me with its unblinking eye.
My right hand is cramping . . .
broke
it nine years ago
while
mounting my mountain bike. I swung the right
leg
over the seat a bit too manly and BAM!
over
the top of the whole damn thing,
my entire bodyweight slamming into
the
open palm, smashing the hand I write with
into
the gravel driveway. A nervous Allsup's cashier
stuck
his head outside the double doors, “Dude!
are you alright, MAN! You hit the ground . . . hard!”
Hitting
the ground . . . hard, day after day
from
the first moment gravity grabs hold.
That’s
what living is.
Nicolaus
Copernicus (February 19, 1473 – May 24, 1543)
Renaissance-era
mathematician, astronomer, Spoke five
languages:
Latin, German Polish, Greek and Italian.
Formulated
a model of the universe
that
placed the Sun at the center
o
f
our existence . . . the church was pissed!
I
feel his ghost tap me on the shoulder.
Seventy
years old . . .er, almost.
Still
breathin’ if only barely.
The
legs still work—if only barely— but theycomplain a bit
during
the winter months, the summer’s heat, whenever it rains.
The
heart still keeps the time in concert with the rhythm
that
the good nurse prompted into my DNA with her sturdy
open-handed
slap to my bare ass. I still feel the bruises
e
very
time I sit down in a hard-back chair.
@
Art Walk, April 13, 2018
A
Mystery Kid, a demon, a big smile on his gremlin face.
He
hands me a business card and then POOF!
disappears
into the crowd:
“YOUR
FATE IS IN YOUR HANDS
Readings
by Lena
Palm
& Tarot Card divination
Rated
#1 in OKC”
“Hey,
David look at this.”
“What
is it?”
“Palm
reading!
Hold the card up so I
can take a picture of it.”
“No.”
Why not?”
“Because
you won’t
take
it back!”
“Yes, I will! Just hold . . .”
“NO, you won’t take it back
and
I’ll have to throw it away!”
“But—’
“No!
I won’t touch it!”
Knowledge of the future?
I’ve
no use for it. Neither does David.
To me it’s like jumping to the end
of a good novel just to see
how
it all turns out.
Where’s
the fun in that?
May
23, 2018
This
is THE day, “the big day”
as
my sister would say.
I
wake up, I think, my eyes open, Yes,
I
think they do. The “BEEP, BEEP, BEEP,”
the
coffeemaker nudges me out of bed,
the smell of coffee beckons me “Come drink,
come
drink me all up, all this stimulating caffeine
all
that electricity sliding down your throat.”
Dawn
waits on my consciousness
to
notice that daylight sits awkwardly
on
the dusty windowsill. It has no reason
to
be hasty, to slow down or to speed up.
No
place to go. It never gets old . . .
I
may dance a bit with both broken hands
stuck
inside my robe’s dirty pockets,
my
bony legs knocking together, Dancing, YES!
Dancing
an old man’s version of an Irish jig,
a
country reel, or perhaps a Scottish strathspey!
“Oh, my!” the knees will plead, “we’re not ready
for that!”
I
might even sing this aging morning,
my
gravelly voice crackling like rain against a tin roof,
or
I might imitate a dying dog howling at his last train
or
maybe I’ll bark at the countless ghosts that try
too
hard to make me cry-out about the rude,
unforgiving
nature of a nature that nurtures
youth
and ignores the wisdom of that oak tree
that’s
tasted time, sampled the bitterness
of
each passing year
and
has never given way to sapless tears
for its broken branches, and all those leaves
that
have fallen to their death because winter
demands that it be so if for no other reason
than
it pleases the tyranny of the season.
Crows
gather underneath the elms outside
right before the day arrives and brightens
t
his
dark mood I find myself indulging in.
**Renesans
(February
19, 1543)
Copernicus
sat in his favorite, high-back chair
staring
out the widow to the street below.
In
the middle ages if you were lucky enough
to
make it passed childhood,
IF you were rich enough, healthy enough,
and
not a casualty of war or some other
freak
accident, you might, you just might
make
it to the grand old age of forty.
“Fuck!”
Coper whispered to himself as he
slurped
his morning coffee and watched
the last of the plague wagons roll by. “I’m
gonna
live for fuckin’ ever.”
Nicolaus
Copernicus had a massive stroke
four
hundred, seventy-five years (minus one day)
before
my seventieth birthday.
Nicolaus
Copernicus, dead at 70 years old.
Another
ghostly touch . . . this time
on
the back of my neck.
-
By Woodie for his 70th B-day
*Pamiątki = Memorabilia
** Renesans = Renaissance
