on monday evening it

was mostly black on black

while the man, hiding

behind riot gear, shot gas

into the crowd. tell me

the old, old story isn’t

supposed to be this

old, old story. what will

black friday look like

on thanksgiving when it

starts at about

three in the afternoon?

wasn’t there another

black friday that got real, real

dark about three? there

doesn’t seem to be

much for which to give thanks

this thanksgiving for anyone

except for the

DEVIL OF RACISM

who keeps putting kkk’s

for amerika into the handbasket

of hell purchased as the

clock strikes midnight and

people buy the lie and

crash the door

to get to trinkets

and continue to ignore,

ignore, ignore.

He said he thought

the T.V. guy was

handsome. He wasn’t

used to doing that. He

was much more into pointing

out good-looking women

on the screen, but sometimes

his wife would frown,

so he thought turn

around is fair play and,

aesthetically, the guy

looked pretty nice —

good hair and all,

so he said it. Is that

really turn around? Her

response was that the

T.V. guy was too

perfect. “Too perfect?”

“Yeah, I like a little

bit of a bad boy –

not too much, just

enough.” He smiled

a sheepish, shit-eating

smile and said, “Really?”

“Really,” she smiled

back and that was

that for then.

The reader and writer of poetry

diligently reads

the Poem of the Day, everyday,

along with the biography of the poet

and then he peruses other poems

by the poet and other poets’ poems

and he thinks to himself, I don’t belong

here. And then Billy Collins comes

to the rescue as if the Holy

Spirit had sidled up to the reader/writer,

taken a seat at the counter next to

him and said,

“The coffee is on me.”

He sat at the bar

engaging a young

couple

in conversation.

He mentioned that

recently he

turned seventy

hoping the couple

would remark about

how young he looked.

Silly boy. It was a

young couple staring

back at him. Instead, the

young man, a big

Chicago Cubs

fan, glibly, perhaps

innocently, responded,

“Ah, the seventh inning

stretch.” Easy for him

to say. Whoa, that means

only two or maybe at

best two and a half

innings to go,

he thought.

He hadn’t

thought of his age

metaphorically,

but it turns out the

young man was

also a professor

of poetry. Seventh

inning stretch? Hmmm.

He couldn’t even hear

Harry Carey sing,

“Take Me Out To The

Ballgame,” because

old Harry finished either

the seventh or eighth but

certainly not the

ninth inning of life (How old

was he when he died?)

himself

a few years ago

in but one more

proverbial

Cubs’ loss.

He just knew there

was no Northside

World Series

in his future.

Now into life

as a baseball

metaphor, the

newly minted

septuagenarian

thought, at least

the young prof didn’t

say, “Strike two!”

You,

I’ve really been thinking a lot about you and feeling a lot for you and with you.

My heart goes out to you as a fellow traveller on the loneliest journey of life.

It took a long time before I laughed with a genuine laugh.  It took a long time before I could see colors.

I want you to get to the genuine laugh, to see the vivid colors of life.

It will take time.

Me

He had just seen Patti LaBelle

belt out “Somewhere Over The

Rainbow” for the President of

the United States and he felt the

tears well up, not for Patti, who

certainly doesn’t need his tears —

she’s going so strong at seventy,

and not even for Judy Garland,

who is way beyond his tears,

but for Eva Cassidy who sang

the most beautiful, heart-wrench-

ing version he had ever heard

and who died at a young and

tender age from skin cancer

and, of course, for all those

who cried, why, oh why can’t

I and then died young and may-

be a bit for himself as he sits

here missing them.

A single pair of sneakers for a kid

about four-years-old were found

in the desert on the US side of the

border with Mexico. A baby back-

pack was a little ways away. How

far away are the jowly, double-

chinned, booze bloated public

servants who sometimes sit in

their places along Pennsylvania

Avenue in those hallowed chamb-

ers of the Republic wearing their

Allen Edmond shoes polished

by the shoeshine boy who is

actually a man in the lobby?

The Lab chews his bone

and then he looks up at me.

I look. His tail wags.

The dog hears something.

A snow blower roars loudly.

The dog’s ears perk up.

He loses interest;

looks back at me for some food.

I shake my head no.

The dog quickly sleeps;

he awakes and chews his bone,

then nudges my arm.

He’s hungry and bored,

and I don’t help the matter

by just typing this.

He speaks wordlessly,

“Come on, Bob. Get me some food.”

“Sorry, Bud. Not yet.”

Resigned, the dog turns

and walks to the sliding door,

looks out and then sighs.

No reason, arbitrary, capriciousness —–

chased by an eighteen wheeler of death, the

man has just had a recurring argument with

his wife, mundane, frustrating in a broken

down Plymouth Valiant (metaphor anyone?)

valiantly enters the Southwest duel, on the

road not at the corral. He cries, please, please

– up and down the desert highway of life, the

man indomitably, shrewdly draws the death

machine to the edge and then over to its dino-

saur death. Score one for the ordinary, some-

times argumentative, all-times fallible family

man; zero for death, for awhile. He sits in the

desert overlooking the severe drop to Dante’s

Inferno and ponders. Humanity vs. the deus-

ex-machina of death versus the compassionate

God of Jesus and Sophia. Please be careful on

the via, the highway of life, the man thought.

The roadway had killed too many of his loved

ones and there were way too many crosses on

the side of the road along the way.

Madison Avenue knows it;

porn producers produce it

with more honesty — put

a really, really, good-looking,

sexy blond up front on T.V.

and every backwater, back-

woods Neanderthal male in

America and obedient, pass-

ive, do as you are told Christ-

ian women as viewers and

the news on that channel

magically becomes Gospel

Truth. And so goes the

grand delusion as we walk

our way, ironically, to the

guillotine of Robespierre, the

revolutionary who became

the mass murderer of the

masses when he got to be

the one percent of the one

percent and all this at the

urging of the one percent

of the one percent who

think, delusionally, that

that will somehow benefit

them, which, of course,

even Robespierre must

have known to the contrary

or there would have been

no one left in France to

make, let alone buy, French

fries and all because that

ultimate one percenter of one

percent Marie said the poor

could eat cake.