porch talk, simmering in a Bud light sauce
everyone chair-rocking, even the boxer dog,
in his self-propelled 360 degree swiveling chair
eavesdropping and spy eyeballing the farm for
strangers and any creatures as of yet, unsmelled

get done with weather, the crops,
the neighbors,
the weird, and the truly neighborly,
grandkids escapades, hopes and desires, comparative literature and regional dialects and philosophical dialecticals tickling,
bs’ing and tall tale telling,  breathing the windy geography of the air over the land that dictates the how we live,
open another Bud for the buds,
did I forget to mention
farm equipment?

skirt politics cause nobody wants any
nothing-to-be-done-****-aggravation,
leaves nothing mo’ to ramble on about ‘cept the

absent women

no worries all above board no secrets uncouthed,
but the mood softens as the pale daylight wisps come rarer
as now
nearer to nine pm, obvious saved the best for last,
a very manly-way of ordering things,
big silent pauses in the converso conversation,
guy-sighs many,
as the last essay of the day is being jointly authored,
denotating the generalized listings of
how they drive us crazy,
listing the repetition of ever changing instructions,
which doesn't recognize bi-coastal mannerisms,  non-differentiating
just  humanism-isms

and the peculiarities of each (a list kept)
in a compare and contrast,
an end of the day summation,
and the boasting-outbesting,
of each of their
specialisms
which is sadly now forgotten and which haven’t been
brain-recorded so cannot be disclosed
other than it’s now ten
and all that’s left is
to sleep, perchance, to dream,
of private things
and bigger and better
John Deere tractors

so now, do I, I do,

he favors the the top of my breast ,
where the spaghetti strap leads
his eye lower, to the fulsome swelling,
curves he favors in a linear
world

these magnets of human flesh are
attributes of me, unsolicited, part
of my “collegial endowment” and
yet,
no denial,
this egg of my accent,
a fullness employable, knows well,
full employment

ah, mon oeuf d'accent,
the accent of my accidental,

for lives are just linear lines
warped occasionally, nicely.
swelling in wonderful frailty,
the curvature of the human
eyes, that draw curves of
human spirit,

thar are drawn by sprites
with wickedly humorous
insight

The Tenderness

My hand slow motion falls, with the soft of the gentlest rain,
sensed,
but not disturbing,  nay reassuring,
by the quality of the sensation, rolling caresses over
the hillocks of her body, outlined beneath the
Sea of Coverlets

My arm rotates and reverses, back forth, up down,
as if it were a well oiled engine, the hand strokes with
a smooth four cylinder stroke, gentle coating the panorama of
her body on the surface of our Planet-of-the-Bed.

The woman does not stir, meaning the dewey doux
intensity of my touch, there sufficient to please but
not disturb, is a perfect ten,  for I intuit, that she attends
to my comforting attentions, with pleasure
by the
absence of objection.

This will not be the first poem I have written on this day,
but though not premiered, the experience is newly born
with each escapade of tenderness delivered, and steel hard
iron of ironies, it please. me as much if not more, for fully
awake and alert, am receiving by the giving and though
she stirs not, my heart does, for the electrical pulses of my
soothing her, soothe me in much the same way.

This is how I make love in the morning.

This is why this Poems is titled as well as entitled as

“The Tenderness”

“teach your children well, their father father’s hell,
will slowly go by”

but not with patronizing
or speechifying,
let the lesson be not a
lecture but an admission
of things parents did not understand
till the experience stained their fingers
in a manner such,
couldn’t be erased

show them the marks
that is all you got,
slow to be thought about,
the moralizing inherent,
the punchline
requires not
a
summation, title,
in the telling
is the selling