Everyday, the poet, reading
poems of the century’s best
and brightest, feels the old,
familiar tug on the sleeve and
hears the voice in the ear and
feels the pit somewhere down
south. And so the life-long
battle for the soul continues
in little ways, everyday – a
tug, a whisper, a pit — not
so much in the grandiose de-
cisions regarding war, as
necessary as those may be.

We move along through life feeling no pain.
We are caught up in events, so there is no pain.

Oh, we experience that which is ever so difficult
but really are inconveniences and actually no pain.

And for the most part, barring any unforeseen event,
we muddle our way through creating our own pain,

which we indulge and make into reasons for discord,
but in life, there is the inevitability of real pain,

which bears down upon us like a fast, freight train.
Lost love has happened to me; you, too, will feel
real pain.

Last spring he tore a tendon connecting
his left triceps muscle to the arthritic
elbow caused by falling off his kid’s
skateboard forty-years ago. At the end
of his left arm, the second knuckle of
his pinkie finger is twice the size
of any other knuckles from an old high
school baseball injury. It gets gout
in it quite easily when the man drinks
and it hurts like hell. While he hiked in
the woods near his home his left arm
fell onto the ground near the path, but
he kept walking. Last fall while pushing
against his right thigh to work his sore
IT band, he tore the meniscus in his right
knee. He had to stop jogging for five
months and had only jogged once since
then and the knee really hurt. A little
farther along the path, his right leg
fell off. Fortunately, he had a hiking
stick to hold himself up. He hopped with
just a left leg and right arm. They start-
ed to become sore and fell off toward
the end of the hike. He rolled down the
hill into the pond, saw a nice minnow
and took a bite. The next thing he knew,
he was being pan-fried with potatoes
and onions and heard his dad calling
his mother and sister to breakfast
while on vacation in the north woods
of Wisconsin. He wondered what would
happen to the hiking stick. It was
purchased at a Pow Wow of the Ottawa
Indians in Hart, Michigan and he really
liked it. However, it wouldn’t do him
much good anymore. In the distance he
heard Dvorak’s Largo from Symphony #9,
The New World, “Goin’ home, goin’ home,
Lord, I’m goin’ home.” After breakfast,
his dad wrapped the man’s innards in a
newspaper and buried them two feet in
the ground and well away from the lake,
which was what they did back in the day,
but the raccoons and opossum got to the
paper before he had a chance to read the
obituaries.

He didn’t have many photos of
himself at any age, especially

his youth, but because of a re-
cent reunion, friends, who had

saved class photos, sent him
several via the internet without

his even asking. He saw himself
in fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth

grade class photos. They brought
back fleeting memories of life

for that boy, and there you have
it, that boy whom he hardly re-

cognized. Some at the reunion
didn’t recognize that boy now.

He stepped out into the forty-
two degree, rainy day and said
to himself, “Why did you come
back from Arizona so soon?”
Himself answered, “Because
you had things to do, such as
sign tax forms because you
didn’t have a printer/scanner
in Arizona to print the forms,
sign them and scan them back
into the computer and send them
off to the tax preparer and get
the travel trailer out of the barn
at the county fair ground by a
certain date.” He said to him-
self, “Yeah, you’re right, as
usual, and I did miss the rain,
so I guess I had better be mind-
ful, grateful, live in the moment,
get in the car, start the engine,
turn on the heat and buy new
wiper blades.” Himself con-
cluded the conversation with,
“Right.” The Chocolate Lab just
stared at “he and himself “
who appeared to the dog
as his master talking out
loud. The dog wondered
to whom the man was
speaking because the man
never said, “Good boy or
Buddy, Buddy, Buddy or
Come on, Buddy Baloosy,
want to go for a ride?” But
the dog wagged his tail any-
way in anticipation that the
man would open the back
door of the car. He and him-
self did. Then the man, other-
wise known as he and him-
self for the purposes of the
perfectly understandable
conversation between a man
and himself while his con-
fused dog just wanted to get
in the car, sat in the front
seat and said to himself,
“Now don’t forget to buy
those wiper blades.” Himself,
who usually got the last
word, said, “Well, alrighty
then,” and put the car in re-
verse. The dog stopped listen-
ing and was content to look
out the window.

They say that in heaven we all
are thirty-five and gorgeous.

That, of course, is for those
who die older than that.

Both were older than that
when they departed but not

by much. He was the young-
er of the two at one week

shy of forty-four and she was
forty-nine, but that is close

enough and they were both
beautiful and remain exactly

that for those who are here
and continue to love them.

I think that talk of being
thirty-five is wishful think-

ing, but, for sure, those two
will ever be close enough to

the mythic thirty-five and
the rest of us remain beautiful

and gorgeous to loved ones no
matter how old we get before

dying as we necessarily will do.
There was an eighty-eight year

old woman dying of cancer who
joked that her husband was flirt-

ing with her and that he was.
After she died, he remembered

her as the beautiful thirty-
five year old who flirted with

him and made him feel like a
thirty-five year old, too, even

when he was ninety-three, the
year he died. So I guess all

that talk of heaven is true
right now, isn’t it?

He sat in the back of
class for the class
photo. He wore a suit
and tie and white shirt.
His mother made him dress
up for church and other
special occasions like
class photos, except
his desk was in the back
because he flunked deport-
ment, mostly because he
was nervous about failing
and being lonely in a new
school and it now would be
frozen in time and he would
always be thought of as the
dunce and class clown. “I’m
sorry, Mrs. Allen, for dis-
rupting the décorum of the
class.” He didn’t say that
in those words. After all,
it was only fifth grade and
it wasn’t until at least
eighth grade that he and his
buddies had developed their
own argot, which they used
with each other on the play-
ground and wouldn’t have
used when speaking to a
teacher anyway, and by then
his desk would have moved
to the front row to go
with the alphabetical
order. It was in eighth
grade that he realized
how much he owed Mrs.
Allen, besides the time
she came to his defense
when he accidentally
farted when he sneezed
and all the kids laughed
nervously, the girls
ducking their heads
and the boys all
pointing fingers at
him.

The guy crooning at a karaoke
bar finishes, puts the mike down
on the bar and walks out into the

Thai night. The mike rolls off the
bar, hits the floor with a resound-
ing thud and the booze addled

crowd goes nuts with appreciate-
ion for the slow, easy German ren-
dition of a local favorite. It was

the sound of the mike hitting the
floor that got the crowd’s attent-
ion, just like anything that stops

you in your tracks, gets your at-
tention and then the now require-
ed environmentally friendly light

bulb comes on directly over your
head in one of those cute cartoon
bubbles and you get what only a

nano-second before was under-
stood only in a parallel universe.
Recent studies have shown that

99 percent of all Nobel prize win-
ners living and dead get that and
who listens to the one percent,

even Nobel one percenters, or any
one percenters, anyway? Don’t you
wish it were that way in politics?

In the evening when I watch T.V.
I see that certain shows are spon-
sored by certain people, mostly
really rich couples I imagine,
and I think about how wonderful
it would be to be with them at din-
ner with all the sterling silver
forks and spoons and knives in all
the right places around the plates
and how wonderful it would be to
chuckle at all the right times at
all the glib, really smart comments
and repartee around that wonder-
ful table. It reminds me of what
it would be like being at a Downton
Abbey dinner party. And then I
think about the next program which
is all about grassroots protests
by the growing underclass and dis-
possessed of the earth against the
privileged classes while sponsored
by silver spooned couples and I
begin to wonder what is going on
and if the dispossessed and under-
class get invited to dinner parties
with the silver in all the right
places around the plates. And then
I begin to wonder if I would in-
vite either the underclass or silver
spooned to my middle-class, mid-
dle of the road, humble abode and
finally I wonder if we would ever
see anything about the wretched
of the earth on T.V. if it weren’t
for the silver spooned, privileged
class who probably never would
invite the underclass or me to one
of their fabulous dinner parties
for fear of losing a salad fork or
two at the very least.

The poet said, “They have come in
with bags full of cash and no manners.”
That clicked with the listener.
He thought of the person who,
without a hint of self-reflection
nor a moment of hesitation,
said, “I dropped a ton of
money into this place and I deserve a
private beach,”
and all the Beemers tearing down
the street like they own it,
and obviously well-heeled women
at farmer’s markets blithely
nudging others out-of-the-way
on the way to
the kale.