The sun~poem also rises every evening…

A.P.U (as per usual):
this testimony~phrase tilts me sideways,
to relieve the condition, needy to be righted
one must expel the belly kicking seedling,
looking to be outed as a full fledged tree,
a poem planted, a gatherer of insects,
giving shade, perhaps shedding fruit

the sun bids adieu, self~same~centrifuge
of our solar system, is indeed alway rising
somewhere, though the light of our naked
eyes weak, incapable of trajectory bending,
to follow its course’s curvature, nonetheless,
we know it but struggle to believe just as we
struggle to complete, compare, and compose

replanted words in your heart, words that trigger,
are the notions inherent, of a center, rarely eclipsed,
that never ceases to offer up nouveau hope in each
of the days, a placenta to fret you blood and oxygen,
once purposed, discarded into darkness,
b u t
the words rise again, offering what you seek,
diurnally, need, to find within them, for my child,
is now
our child…

happened upon an extravaganza of spring’s hallmark,
the cherry blossoms outing their munificence of color,
I happened to position myself direct below a tree,
the thicket
of blossoms so, well, thick, that sky was obliterated ‘cept
for pointillistic spots of blue sun, yellow sky that poked
through the
few de minimus interstitial spaces permitted, and was
struck silent, by-for-before shimmering eyes that uttered the
requisite oohs and ahhs,

and

words came to me weeks later,
when the memory, now fully decanted,
reappears
courtesy of a giant tech company’s code tinkering,
merging and splurging the combined images in the
photographic memory
of my devices,
as if to say:
your life is
points of light and color and scent
as you write now
amidst the hubbub of jackhammers, raucous horns a blaring,
the homeless screaming on the street at god,
the fatalistic headlines of hate and
the pallor of a low level haze of perp~gray
between you and your true elfin self,
and you are not surprised,
but sadly, but not entirely,
bemused
that the photo’s true utility was to
remind weeks later
that all that my eyes utter
is not just
woe, double trouble and toil, toil,
but to Hey Jude and George,
step out and see the park on a Sunday
in its entirety and to glory in
your being
by being
a point in that tapestry spectacular
of ingestion, digestion and final comprehension and
a happy
exhalation

Adding minutes to a lifetime (saying magic words)

”And you, dear poet, friend of many years,
have given me so many inspirations, birthed within
us words,so oft, and so well, that your pithy observations,
manufacture time, add minutes to lifetimes”

<>

wrote these words without thinking,
they’re sweet and neat, trivial but incomplete

but upon rear mirror review, Mr Poet
re-thinks, perhaps deserved of another serving,
curvy white, soft-to-the-lips, a moist vanilla kiss,
excellent ice cream in a sugar cone, words irresistible

for the sweetest poem sparks multi-coloration-explosion
of sprinkles ‘pon  a skin’s surface,
uprisings of what lurks in the centrum of your
embodied universe and disembodied soul,
shockingly uprising from an internal fulcrum,
sea~tossed flotsam of a jagged life, now, all recovered
words sprinkling, beach treasures, and yet,
*adding minutes to a lifetime…

reliving old reels, is time recaptured, creating a
certain robust additive to thine cranking and
cranky engine, that’s logged much more than
a picayune hundred thousand miles on a voyage
of e i g h t decades, you employ ten fingers to
calculate your fugue of multi-voiced numerations!

can it be? it cannot be! millions upon millions of
minutes, possess and passed, yet highlight feature
films, enabling reliving so real that by watching,
seeing, believing, re-reading it is as if one is earning
life extensions…adding minutes to a lifetime…

‘tis true, rereading every small scrip, every poem,
returns one to prior-places, each a datum,
a particular spot, a point upon a schema of integrity & integration,
that rule the visions, a message of individualism
in the largest context of a true vision(arie)

“chacun un point dans une peinture pointilliste…”
“each a point within a pointillistic painting…”

in a few years, a stumbling upon shall here return me here,
and I will smile with great gratitude for the life extended,
accepting with gratitude,
these few seconds, a last lasting chance,**
to say some magic words
with a great vanilla whispering
adding minutes to you life as well


nml

Inevitable, that the circle be completed,
celebrating our seasonal return to the
sheltering abode by river, bearing winded
surround sounds to our isle of near-perfection,
where slivered tongued foamy waves deposit
new & used poems on beach, emptied from
now repurposed sea shells and hardened
conchae's, evidence that the truest inhabitants
never leave, always return, with their markers

Inevitable, that I write this in premature
anticipation, amidst the towers of babble,
& honking taxis, imitating Canadian geese,
who await our presence to refute any paper,
that we fool human claimants, before Nature
pretense of ownership, are not mere renters, albeit
but for a few centuries, which by larger definition,
is an interim short term lease, writ in invisible ink, that tho it
yellowing disappears, the orange summer heat magic revives

Inevitable, that decades of worshiping this
place, now mindbound, as temple, shrine, to
a place extant in our minds, wherever we be,
as land that owns us; here, we have buried
super~hero figurines, sanded, polished memories
of loved ones, parents, friends, adventures, times,
confusing generations, for the children of earlier
children, whose children, now too scream with glee
& courageous abandon, familiar+identical to forbears

Inevitable, that we live here, though life demands
our presence elsewhere, in our minds,* for each
year burnishes our genes with sun rays, while sand
smoothes our roughened skin, and we are only refresher
modifications of our earlier selves, when we first were
lost, and stumbled upon this grail, with shovels and
red plastic pails, with which we commenced erecting
foundations, homes, gardens and vines, and images
that are always at home in our minds, living on,

in real time…

“Every moment waking or sleeping/dreaming is a poem.
Sadly there aren't enough moments to write them all.”

back in the day,
(like 5 minutes ago)
I awoke,
and that miracle is

poem enough!
~~~~
the house is overflowing
with floral gifts,
orange roses, scented lilacs,
pink peonies,
and that friend, is

poem enough!

Sunday brings Birthdays,
One is 11, the other 7,
and I must change ~
my passwords will
require-updating,
and that friend, is

poem enough!

And you, dear poet,
friend of many years,
have given me so many
inspirations, birthed within
us words,
so oft, and so well,
that your pithy observations,
manufacture time,
add minutes to lifetimes,
and dearth
not a word,
to be associated with us!

Us,
as in always,
that my friend, is
just
ever a

poem enough!

~dedicated to the heart fixers~

sometimes I smack my head,
when a poem commission is lying on
the ground before me, and I just don’t
hear it, believe it, in order to retrieve it…

many months of physical rehabilitation,
sessions always ended with a certain cutesy
Gen Z~Millenial crossover phraseology:

“remember to tell someone you love them”

the instructors mostly youngish,
so we senior~smile
a tad dismissively, give them a reward~grin, and
head for the locker room,
where we gossip and compare notes,
on the Part II of our in-process-future-realization,
living a grueling new life of self-preservation, 24/7

the PTs & EPs pound you on the machina, go faster, work harder,
eat better, sleep more, take those meds, motion is lotion,
walk the talk, never be still, but race to live longer and
prosper, this hard work is your new job, and resignation
is non~optional

now, it hits me, via a figurative sharp slap on the side of the head,
triggering an actual physical manifestation that reverbs to the toes,
that the most important lesson went under the radar,
evading the former trader’s dimming vision,
flunking himself on the rehab test paper,
a purple F for fool,
a grade, earned and deserved, and herein poetically preserved

the hardest heart work, begins only after you co-
commence the longest road back to where you once
belonged, but where you can’t walk alone, for therein
a recipe for failure; and the work that needs doing,
is on you; take that tear-repaired heart, and give it away, it,
one can be healed, but not if sealed, for the hard-hearted
walls thicken, and “over  time, the thickened heart muscle
can become too stiff to fill the heart with blood; the heart
can't pump enough blood to meet the body's needs.”

so break off pieces of your heart, give them away with
relentless abandon, for this is the heart that self-repairs,
new tissue, new fiber, and most important, regeneration,
the one single reparation that can successfully
accomplish the true miracle of getting by giving,
no forgiving, if you don’t exercise the heart by

“remembering to tell someone you love them”




dedicated to the hard working staff of the
Cardio Rehabilitation  Unit
of Nyulangonge, Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation
who started  me
with a mighty push on the long road to utilizing my heart properly

<•>

“ The reality is that no medication or vaccine
is 100% effective, and everything has risks and benefits,”
(Bloomberg article on the efficacy of vaccines)

<<>
this the larger/largest query,
if not the largesr grandee
of all questions and querying,
is it has no equal!

hopefully
you place expectant parenthood
off to one side
for soon enough the daily double trouble
of learned birth defects
yours, theirs, ours
collectively,
of the most ordinary human variety
will be self-disclosed,
no needed writ of disclaimer,
just a legal
exclaim,
of a suitable profanity curse…



better than who what when where
and it’s a first cousin to
why?,

and begins the conversation
intimating the process,
goal setting,
mostly failing,
cursing your self oft out-loudly
while think-walking,
and the nearby know it all’s are thinking,

what was I expecting?

you don’t understand?
99.9% of us doomed,
doomed I tell you,
to fail…

What were you expecting?

<6:36 AM>


~for Joanne Louise Veronika~

patches of light, snatches of sleep,
cumulative tallies of every 24 hour arrhythmia,
detect heart alarms ringing, watch warnings screeching beeping

who cares!

new commitment, self imposed!

greet the early ones with sooth and java,
a combination, “all across the nation,”
ease them in from sleeply lyrical dreams,
to a clear sky, renew anew, bay waters
running new tide fast, tiny tendrils of water points,
etch-a-sketch paths to a calm souls restoration

the smoke haze bad dream departed,
sun rays warmth for the invisible innards,
waves look like the EKG of human at peace,
resting heart rate steady and rhythmically sweet

and I laugh at myself, preposterous!
this is my secret path to restoration,
please laugh at me, join the raucous joy
of not-taking-yourself too seriously,
meaning of a new light, fresh waters,
of an old friend, the same diurnal perspective,
a new alphabet that spells but a singular duality,
a two-word~poem of
meditative perfection:

calm sheltering