all compositions © 2012 Jeff Deitchman

I was privileged to sponsor the Creative Writing Club and to teach a Creative Writing course at Sherwood High School, in Sandy Spring, Maryland. I always wrote along with my students after I’d given them a prompt, or after they’d decided amongst themselves that they wanted to write on a particular theme or in a specific format. With a few obvious exceptions, below you’ll see some of the pieces resulting from those meetings. For the most part, I’ve left them unedited, and where I’ve made changes, I’ve made them slight.

For teachers, I’ve compiled a long, long, long list of the prompts I developed to appeal to my students’ imagination, complete with all the set-up information and fine points to get the best writing you can from your students. With the prompts, I’ve included an extensive teacher’s manual: what a creative writing instructor should know about the craft. It’s essentially a book. If you’d like for me to send it to you, OK. Just make a donation of any amount you wish, and I’ll e-mail it.

What Girls Need to Know About Guys: Six Easy Lessons

1. Sure. We can talk. About anything. Except our relationship.
2. If you ask us what we’re thinking, we’ll say, “Nothing.” That’s not true, but it’s not because we’re thinking anything bad about you. It’s because we’re not thinking about you. And you don’t want to hear that.
3. Treat us, in every respect, as you would space aliens, and we’ll get along fine.
4. We don’t say anything about how you look or what you’re wearing because we don’t notice how you look or what you’re wearing. We’d prefer you wear nothing, frankly. As long as you don’t drool, you’ll look fine to us. You may drool if you’re having pizza, though. We will.
5. No matter how many times you tell us the names of your extended family members, we will consider them no more real than we do your stuffed animal collection, which is blocking your car’s rear window, incidentally.
6. Never expect a gift from us to be wrapped at all, let alone wrapped well. Asking a guy to wrap a gift is like asking a coyote to use a fondue fork.

————–

Open letter to Future Educators of America upon my being nominated FEA Teacher of the Year (2008 or thereabouts; my mind is a steel sieve.)

Hello, FEA –

First, an apology. I’d explain why I’ve taken so long to write this thank you note, but that would take forever. I will say, though, that I did write you one a few weeks ago but the dog ate it.

So, thanks, but I think you’re nuts to want to become teachers. The pay is lousy, the hours are interminable, and the working conditions, primitive. If you want to earn much more money, why don’t you become a lawyer for the tobacco industry, or sell munitions? There must be twenty thousand legal forms of larceny you could engage in and earn in a day what you’ll earn in a year of teaching. About the only rewards teaching offers are the knowledge, in your soul, that you’re doing something helpful, something that might really save real lives, and something that will carry your positive influence on for eternity. Big deal. That knowledge, plus two bucks, will buy you a cup of coffee.

Why would you want to work with children? They might be hopeful and beautiful, but, as one of my favorite writers, Fran Leibowitz, says, very few are “in a position to lend you an interesting sum of money.”

So, you’re crazy, but go ahead and teach if that’s what you want to do. Leave it to someone else to get rich off of turning the world into a foul-smelling landfill. You’ll be lying in your cheap little chipboard coffin while the real players get to rot in mahogany. On the plane to heaven, you’ll have to travel coach.

Any time you want, stop by my room for the real lowdown on teaching. I kinda like kids, too. We can be crazy together.

Thanks again,

Jeff Deitchman

—————-

Blue rain,
slow train,
rivers down
the windowpane.
Slow moon,
girl gone,
left alone.
Farms, fields,
singing wheels;
let them ring
‘long the track.
Nothing bring
my baby back.

————

If there’s nothing beyond this life,
I won’t be around to miss myself.
If the inconceivable is true—
that my consciousness will vanish
as mysteriously as it emerged—
no one will know.
I will not be astonished to learn that
in the blackness
between the stars,
no souls float
or breathe in the silky cold,
no one remarks
on the ease of travel,
the collapse of distance,
the sluggishness of light.

—————–

The word sometime
floated to me,
appeared like
a blue rowboat
adrift.
The blue water
was the question
that kept it
and carried it
to the horizon—
the horizon, a blue line
that offered no answer,
no apology.
I won’t know why
I saw this.
I am hardly allowed
to ask.

————-

The presence of God
I liken to listening
in quiet moments
and realizing,
suddenly,
that the refrigerator
is running.

————-

At once, I hold back
and leap into,
the waves of laughter,
the disturbances
in the air,
the jostling of molecules
in this high school library.
Tomorrow, I will sit
in my chair at home
and miss the crisscrossing
of our eyesight
as we glance
with nervous affection
across the wide spaces
between us.
Where our gazes intersect,
I think,
bits of something
scatter,
ricochet like bullets
off rocks.

————

It’s the same old story—
You’re walking down a street
and out of the corner of your eye
you see a guy,
and you catch your breath.
For a second there, you thought
it was you.
My best friend’s father
used to say that if he met himself
on the street,
he’d turn and run as fast as he could.
We thought he was joking.
I know now
you don’t joke about things like this.
There are so many things like this.

————

Five syllables and
seven syllables, and then
five again. The end.

—————-

The Poem I Didn’t Write Speaks

Well, I’m pissed.
I thought I was a pretty good idea
I, the gloss on swallows’ wings
how I flash in the sun
on these skywriters
these stunt pilots
as they scribble gibberish
against the sky . . .
but no,
he passed me over
for the one about the dreaming dog
cocking just one eyebrow
while the other sleeps.

——————-

Ghost Writers

I am learning to love emptiness.
I no longer fret over those long silences,
the ones filled with the faint purr of a motor
keeping something going;
filled with the humming of my blood;
filled with the wheezing of nosy angels,
the slow, buttery whisper of their wings;
filled with their murmuring, murmuring,
“Mention me; write my name.”
The distances between the stars
I no longer find imposing,
knowing as I do that,
at any time, I may fold inward
the black curtain of the heavens
and pull the farthest corners close round me.

—————-

No Child’s Behind Left

Sixteen more students committed hara-kari today in the Math Office. They did this publicly, they said in a statement, to protest the “ridiculous pressure of simply trying to be a kid and having nobody understand that we’re just, like, y’know, kids.” The math faculty watched as the students—some using the point of a compass, some, the metal edge of a wooden Westcott ruler—disemboweled themselves. Said O. Welles, veteran math teacher, “I can’t blame them. That’s why I didn’t try to stop them.” Nyland Nada, department head, wondered aloud “. . . why several of them were on cell phones at the time.” She noticed that these students were having a harder time carrying out their plan than those who went about it two-handed. “I didn’t say anything to them about it,” she quipped, “after all, my mind was occupied by a particularly quirky formula I’ve been working on. In fact, only the louder grunts caused me to look up from my desk.” Nada offers as a possible solution to the growing problem of teen suicide, x -13 √r∞=‰.

—————

Coon Skin Hat

Shot this coon
three four week ago
Ate his insides
Hung his hide out to dry
Made a needle of his shinbone
Used his gut for twine
Stitched him up
Stuck that feller
on my head
Let his tail
hang down behind
You don’t like me,
I don’t mind.

——————

I’ve kept a list of what you left behind
and what you took.
You left a billowing curtain;
doorways I cannot enter, or leave;
barrels of rain I’ve saved—
I don’t know why—, it rains so much.
A watch stuck on Friday;
a drawer full of spare parts,
I don’t know to what;
buttons, no two alike;
things without mates—
one bookend, half a wishbone;
a blue candle;
a pencil without an eraser,
an eraser without a pencil.
The lid to a jar I broke long ago.
A ghost,
yours.
Mine, you took.

————-

This little tile on which I stand,
waiting to lose my balance,
but not my place.
I will lose my loves, but not my love;
I will lose my patience, but not
the patience to look for it again;
I will lose illusions, but never
ones to replace them;
I will find keys, but not what they open;
and my name I will lose—
I will speak to the stranger in the mirror
and chide him for aping me,
for echoing my every word
as we once did as children,
aces in the art of exasperating the enemy,
leaving him no recourse but silence,
and stillness, and shallow breathing.

————

I want to tell you about a dream, last night,
but I don’t recall anything about it. Nothing at all.
Still, it left a shadow,
footsteps following me,
a shy child poking his head around a corner,
then pulling it back when I turn to look.
I feel nothing but his eyes falling on my back,
two small birds
the branch
on which they alight
weighing them.

————

My daughter
I cannot protect you
from these winds
any longer.
The sands are swirling
and when they settle
the desert will have changed.
Changed again.
Do not ask about your father;
I didn’t know him either.
My bed is cold
as the sky between the stars
and it stretches forever
like the sand.
Perhaps you will understand
one day. One day
you will open your tent
to discover the desert is again
unfamiliar. Last night’s winds
lifted the world
and set it down
in someone else’s heart.

————

Conversation With Self Over What to Write About

First, let me say, I think you’re an idiot.
It doesn’t matter what you write,
it will be stupid because
you are dumb dumb dumb.
Your best is only as good
as the note that Robert Frost
left for the milkman.
Whereas you would write,
“1/2 gallon of 2% and
a quart of cottage cheese,” he
would have said,
“The old cow looked at me
with somber eyes, a mild regard.
Her soul was written on her face,
the wisest
say the least,”
and would have forgotten to tell
the milkman what he wanted that day.
Actually, he wouldn’t have had a milkman.
He had cows,
at least for while.
I’ve heard he was a lousy farmer,
that he left his cows
screaming to be milked
while he wrote in perfect symmetry
the symmetry of a leaf
or the industry of an ant.
It’s a good thing he made a name for himself
and began earning enough to live off his poems.
How many poets starve while their souls
overflow like a river in mud time?

————-

The slimmest cuticle of moon
hangs above the lake.
I’ve never seen the lake
this still
or heard the crickets
so loud. The line of trees
on the far bank
just a zigzag of black
against the black sky.
Our footsteps do not match,
not any longer.
Yellow funnels
of headlights approach us
throw two shadows against
the still water’s surface;
we watch them arc
and lengthen
and finally fade.
Think of that.
Someone has somewhere to go.
Someone has torn free.
Someone has chosen a road.

————-

Learning to Make Argentine Pesto

Have a woman who has recovered from breast cancer sit next to you at the lunch table. Listen as she tells you,
“Use olive oil and the rest, like for regular pesto, only substitute half parsley and half cilentro for the basil.” Feel how important this is to her. Let it be that important to you.

————

Advice from Myself as an Old Man to Myself as a Young Man

You have imagined me,
often; and now,
you must know,
I have imagined you.
You thought yourself
a puppet,
a tamed lion,
and I have watched you
with these dry eyes,
the corners of my dry lips
in a wry, compassionate smile.
I have been whispering all the while to you,
saying you will know me
soon enough—you have no need
to know me yet. When we meet
you will learn
we were both right,
you with your mistakes,
I with my dry hands
cupping your face
saying go on, go on
you cannot make a mistake.
There are no mistakes.

————

Who were they
and why did they leave?
Women I have kissed,
friends whose hands
I have grasped
with a kind of greed?
All those ghosts
in borrowed bodies,
forced to read from a script
or stand, back turned
to me, arms crossed?
What of the disturbances
we caused in the air?
the tornados we set in motion
the earthquakes we made
shouting and stomping
as if that might announce us,
bear witness to
the importance we sought
the solidity we never had?
Where was I when
you were here with me?

—————–

Moikku

In Finland, before the person with the camera presses the shutter, those posing are told, “Say moikku!” Moikku are small, freshwater fishes, quite tasty. One Christmas season, someone will research all the world’s words designed to make us smile for the camera, and compile them into a pocket-sized, illustrated booklet which you will find right by the cash register and which thousands will buy on impulse. I don’t know what they say in Brazil to make you smile. Maybe it’s a word that means a type of insect they have down there that we don’t have up here. In Sardinia, we might learn, people smile when they say the word for the toe next to your little toe. In Laos, we’ll laugh to hear that a pancake stuffed with a blend of honey and oily local nuts makes people smile. Latinos will find it amusing that we smile at the word “cheese.” Upon this book’s publication, the world will improve by just this much. I might write the book myself and give it to God on his next birthday. I hear his next one’s a big one. I shall bring my camera.

——————–

Used to be the land of cotton,
but old times here are long forgotten
the TV erased our memory
the beltway pierces like a sword
and cuts our ties to the places we’re
going, to the places we’ve been,
the place we are not in right
now, here on this road from nowhere
to nowhere lying in the heart of
nowhere I lean on the wheel I
smash the gas to escape my car
I drive to drive out driving
I can’t wait to get to
I can’t wait to get to
I can’t wait
No one can not wait like I can’t wait
We are the busy people of
the beltway
the crazies who barrel down
slam into our own rear ends
tailgate the tailgaters
flip fingers
leave them like litter
in the filled in
dirty ditches.

——————–

I learned long ago to expect
not much
certainly not
the butterflies
you can’t quite touch
certainly not the
red bicycle’s
silver spokes
and not the candy apples
dunked in chocolate
or red sugar
so slick
they glistened.
I put my wishes somewhere
too secret to find
and I forgot how to look
and I buried the book
with the secret code
that would lead me through the wood
and now, I even wish I could wish
I don’t expect I ever shall dare
You may have my wishes
if they’ll listen to you.

————-

What I was going to say
I never wound up saying.
Somewhere between the impulse
and my lips,
the thing had
too many checkpoints
to clear.
It needed to pass
all kinds of inspection stations,
to produce its papers
for a thousand wooden soldiers
trained to look at you
in that way they have,
joking about your banjo case
in the back seat
but all the while
watching your temples
for involuntary twitches.

————-

Let us compare our circumstances.
You speak of the sky—
how the blue of it
falls upon the shoulders
of your country’s people,
lies like a curtain,
fallen in folds
at your feet.
I think, that must be so lovely,
so sadly lovely; to live in such
literary sadness. You say
you don’t feel as if you’re lucky
to live in a poem,
even one that gives me
the chance to nod with you
and sing melodies you
can understand. You say
you are no happier to learn
that your blue world
is so like mine.

————

This morning
a line of crows
perched on a rail
the sun
just coming up.
I wondered what black secrets
they shared,
how they regard
any instant
any appearance in the frame.

———–

After all the
formulae and laws
after all this time . . .
and not a moment
explained.
The glance of the crow
still disquieting
something unsettled
at night
when an unfelt wind
bends the candle flame.

————

We are the first victims
of our own suspicions.

————

I agree to wait.
I have nothing better to do.
The words I find,
these words I write while I wait,
I needn’t write them.
No god has handed me a tablet
and a chisel.
The world will spin without them,
and I will not go unfulfilled
if I merely watch
as the little airplane
trailing the banner
disappears;
no one will know
that I let
the skywriting scatter
and spread
until I could no longer
make out what it said.

————-

Looking back,
we should not have been surprised.
Wheelbarrows are often red;
chickens, perhaps not so often,
but often enough,
white.
It can rain
anytime.
And looking back,
it’s easy to see,
how someone
seeing all three–
the wheelbarrow,
the chickens,
the rain–
could have thought of them
as at the center.

————-

So, this guy, I’m not sure where he lives—they wouldn’t tell me—steals my identity. So, I e-mail him, tell him, “It’s yours. See if you can do anything with it. Heaven knows, I’ve tried.” A couple days later, he writes back, “Take your identity back. It’s awful.” And I say, “Nothing doin’ pal, you stole it, it’s yours.” A week later, I get a letter in the mail, registered, from his lawyer, ”Can we maybe work something out?“ He’d like to settle out of court, save me the trouble and expense. I write back, “What’d you have in mind? But don’t lowball me, I’m no chump. With my old i.d., I was a chump. But that’s his now” His lawyer writes me back, “Let’s meet in my office.” “Nothin’ doin’,“ I say. “You come here.”

—————–

The dream I had last night
is gone. Nothing to recall.
It left a weight so light
surprising me, for all
we know of shadows—
their substance, and their freight
the momentary pall—
cannot explain the fallen
feathers in our waking,
footsteps from behind,
echoes in an alley,
shy children, little eyes
around corners, thieves who flee
as we turn to look;
two small birds, a gently
dipping branch, a leaf, shook.

————-

They learned to enter each other’s dreams. They were young, and their parents disapproved, so they agreed, tonight, I come to you, tomorrow, you come to me. We will meet at the gate and we will have time to speak, to kiss, to walk by the river, and take the slow rowboat to the other bank—the one in the sun.

————-

Villanelle for Summer

When to swing, where to swing at a knuckleball?
It’s there, right there, you see it, you swear;
a puff of air, a dusty shirt, that’s all.

Of course, she was young and blue-eyed, small,
with hair like sunlight, like summer air.
Where to swing, when to swing at a knuckleball?

I bought her rings, popsicles, hung round the hall,
balanced plates on picnic chairs, aware.
Ruffled air, ketchup on my shirt, that’s all.

She kissed me, that spring, it didn’t work so well;
something not quite right, not quite there.
Where to swing, when to swing at a knuckleball?

The summer grew dreadfully hot, the screeching call
of tired crows in flight; they seemed to tear and riffle air,
disturb the earth, they mocked us all.

We wished to bring the season round to fall;
we wished to weep at how unfair
our far-off swing in empty air, the galling
rumpled shirts, dirty hands, three strikes, that’s all.

———————

How My Father Came to be Chief

My father was first to spot the lion. He did as he should—looked away, walked away slowly, never looking back. When he got to the village, he told us, as he should, about the lion on the little tree road. But he said we should be unafraid. He didn’t at first think to say why the lion would not hurt any of us. He said, only, when we asked, that the lion was waiting to die. He was in no pain, but he was certain to die. How did my father know? He said he did not know, but he could tell. He was only about eight years old at the time, and we knew he was still young enough to know these things. We went, without spears and arrows, but we went cautiously, to be certain the lion would not approach our village.

When we got to the little tree road, we saw him, and he was just as my father said. The lion stood slowly and walked toward us. We were not afraid. He stood before us. He bowed his mighty head toward my father, lay down, and breathed his last. We saw his spirit rise, make wavelets in the air, and float toward my father. The lion’s spirit fell upon my father’s shoulders, like a cloak. He wore it humbly. It rose to heaven upon my father’s spirit when he died. This was before you were born.

—————–

The cadences of grief
are international
This Korean funeral
for a seventeen year-old
killed in a crash
needs no translator
She spent a year
as my student
struggling to understand
my language
If I’d spoken in grief
instead
she would have understood
perfectly
just as I know
these familiar syllables

8/24/94
to Sieeun Shin

————

At the Gate

The country lane, a dance to the banjo, the fiddle,
she looked long in my eyes, said yes to my offered arm
we stepped to the tune, laughed like kids at a riddle
The moon hung full, a shimmering silver charm.

Before the caller cried it’s time to go,
her eyes said “later, by my father’s gate.”
And now, for thirty years, it seems, I wait,
though by my watch, but a minute or so.

———————

How Twanging String Got His Name

From the first, he made us laugh. His long, slender fingers fidgeted forever, and his liquid laugh was the song of the river. He stood on his head long before he ever stood on his feet. We never saw him when he was not singing, and when we heard, one day in spring, a concert that sounded like six coyotes at full moon, we ran to Mad Hunter’s tepee to find him plucking his father’s best bow and bellowing a song like we’ve never heard. We called him that day, and evermore, Twanging String.

———————

Where to Look

Don’t look to the next sentence
to find it;
find it in this one.
Wherever you stop and say,
“Here is where I shall find it,”
you will find it.

——————-

Now we must guess
whether you would want
the monument—
the room of stone—
or whether you’d had enough
of stone.
In the moments when you could
see outside,
you wrote hard
of what you saw.
The brutal eye you had for all
was the brutal hand
that had wrung you,
made you wrap yourself
about yourself.
And the brutal world
saw this inward girl
and thought her
shut of love.
You told me, though,
hard as it was,
and I saw
you behind your eyes
and in your bruised lips.
What could I tell you
except that I didn’t want you to hurt
any longer?
not for what was done to you
and not for what you had to do
for yourself.
Not for what you had to do
to yourself.
I said this, though I use
on myself
those same whips.
Who is so sure that he doesn’t
become his own torturer?
some, occasionally;
you, relentlessly.
But I see you
when you let go
in that last moment
when you opened your hands
and closed your eyes.
The weight of pain
drops away from you
like a silken robe—
an empress’ gown,
the unwilling empress of the dark,
who never wanted her station.
I hear your words
to yourself, faintly,
something about
the lightness of turning your eyes,
finally and forever,
away from the darkened room
where you rocked yourself
in your own arms
and told yourself you couldn’t
let go
wouldn’t let go,
not if you were to survive
the memory of the black uses
someone outside
had put you to.
I don’t think you would want
stone now.
I think you were finished
with everything locked.
I think you needed the opening
you stepped through.

For Rachel Kim 11/28/2010

——————

The skulking,
distrustful
bassoons:
all the gravel in the world,
piled;
the wind when it dies;
a drawer full of jar lids;
a closed door;
the inverted
thought bubble
of a little brown bat;
the losing side’s dugout;
everyone’s heart
from time to time.

————————

Eskimo Kiss

Kids Eskimo kiss
promiscuously.
They want to Eskimo kiss
with you, and they
disregard
your gender
and age;
they don’t ask first
if you’re
an Eskimo.
They’re almost
never
themselves
Eskimos.
They don’t care
if Eskimos really
kiss like this.
The important thing
is to kiss like
the Eskimos kiss.

————

Really, what we’re talking about here
are amounts. Y’know,
quantities. Weights,
dimensions,
what have you.
I say, for instance,
I want to buy a bowling ball
and right away, you want to know
what’s my average.
And if I say
I don’t keep track,
you think I’m just not
a serious bowler
maybe not a serious man.
You’re gauging me; taking the measure
of me.
I mention
in innocence,
an angel sat next to me
in the park yesterday.
I was reading the paper
and an angel, wings, halo, and all
asks is anybody sitting next to me.
I mean, she says, I can see there’s nobody
at the moment, but am I
expecting anybody, can she sit here?
and I say, no, I’m not waiting for a soul
please sit down, you want
a section of the paper?
and she says, sure,
nice of you to offer,
and then, get this,
she says,
are you finished with the sports?
I want to check on a long shot,
a dark horse,
a hunch.
50-to-1

——————-

Snow Day

You’d think the Messiah had come
bearing onion rings for all
the whoop went up
when Cooley broke in over the PA
school’s closing early today.

The buses, just gone,
will somewhere find room
for a three-point turn
and soon bear us home
to cocoa and cake,
the singing phone,
and “Whatcha doin’?”
and the sweetest answer
known and unknown:
“Nothing, man,
just chillin.”

—————–

Spokes

Spokes seem to go backwards.
We learn to accept that
though who can recall
when we let go the outrage,
let it settle
like a billowing parachute gives up
its propping air and slides sideways
upon itself to rest,
all that held it up
now holding it down
in a magician’s flick
of a face card—
another joker.

——————

Winter

The trees will be bare
The crickets will not scribble
across the night sky.
You will love me yet.

Ice will still the stream.
Crows will hunch
cold on a branch.
The world will slow.
Your eyes will not set.

———————

Why hell is not cold—
why we don’t all decide
that hell would be a
closed globe of
freezing rain, and we
naked in its center,
I don’t know.
Certainly if we
were to dance
amid flames,
we would still
feel a kind of love
in them
God’s rebuke.
But in cold
we would know
ourselves orphans.
that the stars have been
blown out
like birthday candles
and all our wishes
with them.

————-

Between

There. That.
The flash between
thoughts, reflections,
that is not itself
a reflection
but the pure apprehension.
We can try to catch it,
write it
or we can have it
by letting it fly.
Let it fly.
Write, for joy,
of something less—
apricots,
or the spokes of
an unimportant man’s
unimportant apple cart—
but mention only
that the wheels roll,
and do not claim that,
thin as they are,
they hold up the world.
What holds up the world
lies between them.

——————–

The Future

The future begins to look like a man standing on one leg. He does not know how long he’ll be able to hold the pose. Concerning what he does know, however, we can say that, though he knows more than you, perhaps, he knows no better. For instance, he cannot piece together how he came to be standing on one leg, though he has studied a history longer than ours.

——————–

Cancion

A young Spanish girl
with budding breasts
and black eyes
black lashes like
whispered secrets
understanding hands,
and a beauty that
already asks black questions.
Will she delight in the torment
she causes those little caballeros
who sing violent love songs,
wounded wolves under a full moon?
Will she dress in black lace
for mourning?

—————

Preparation

The stillness is the horse’s stillness,
the horse’s eye, and the horse’s patience
his soft breathing and slow approach
for which you must make
equal preparation
Beneath your hand
a warm flank
will ripple.

——————–

After Ice Cream

After ice cream
slumbering.
After arguing
ice cream
After dreaming
the rusty gate
and holding hands
with Penelope.
My mother says
your mother said
I’m getting too old
for the little rowboat.
But I float with Penelope
and we whisper
and listen to the
clock clock
of oars in oarlocks.
She catches frogs
and I think about clouds
They float above.
I worry below.
I’m getting too old
for the little rowboat.

—————-

Waiting

It’s not waiting, unless you let it be. The waiting can be the being. Try being while you’re waiting; then, gradually, give up the waiting part. Notice little things—smells are fun. Sights can be deceptive, so try looking without being deceived. There’s almost always something to rub your thumb over. If you write, the spaces between sentences aren’t at all like waiting. They’re like spacewalking without a tether.

—————–

Getting Real

I was being real, without trying
until you told me to get real.
Then, reality slid away like a snake.
Reality, I’ve begun to notice
is a slippery bastard—
it’s there—like a quark, or love—
but only
when you cock your head to the side,
or look a little up and to the left.
Not like worry, which is always there,
or truth,
which is rarely there,
or the fictitious there, which
when you get there,
turns out to be here,
and it’s been here all along.

But I want to put everything aside
for now, and talk about the diamond
in the middle of the queen’s ring—
the one with sapphires all around.
I want to talk like its clarity.
I want to say something like
the white dot of light
under a magnifying glass,
the dot that can set fire to paper.
I want to translate into colloquial English
the sentence that God spoke
when he got the ball rolling;
I want to show everybody
that this sentence is an anagram
and that if you rearrange the letters,
they’ll spell your name
and everybody’s name
even the name of the snake
the snake with the diamond-shaped head
and eyes like sapphires.

——————

Explaining Life on Earth to a Space Alien

What shall I say to you, a stranger?
Shall I tell you of my people?
I hardly knew my people,
but I knew deeply,
despite so much,
that they were innocent,
that the worst of them
were the worst because
no one could touch them any longer.
Do you know touch?
Can I tell you about touch?
can I ask you to picture
a bar of silver, icy and hard—?
At the touch of a hand
it turns to saltwater
and seeps back into the sand.
We tried to love.
Isn’t that funny about us?
That we had to try so hard to love?
Some of us could not,
those who needed it most.
Is it anything like this
where you are?

——————–

Aboard the Arrogant

I’m sailing on the Arrogant
pirate ship of Snigg’rin Magree,
greasiest cuss on the twenty, thirty seas
meanest bastard ever lost a
leg below the knee
and plugged it with a cypress stump
breath like a dragon fart
fingernails in spiral curls
hairiest, scariest, scabbiest
son of a bitch ever sailed
the forty some-odd seas.

————————-

Background

Music that cries for us,
who have lost our voices,
crying out our share
so many years ago;
the aching blue
of northern lakes;
the cloaking blue
of impossible,
distant mountains.
We have painted
them in watercolors.
We had nothing
else to do
those lonely Sundays,
and nothing else
we wanted to do
until we had the strength
to try once more,
against a blue background.

——————

I know that I am deceived.
I know that walls are not solid;
that, were I willing to view them
correctly, I would pass through them
like smoke through a screen. I would be
unafraid of scattering in the still wind.
I would see myself as I am, unnecessary,
stripped of my preferences,
belonging to the weave of things;
not one, but all of the strings.

——————–

Wishes

I wish that you could go back
whenever you wish to that
island of happiness you left
when you got on on the rickety raft,
a couple of coconuts,
a ladle of freshwater,
and a fish, all you had.
And the clothes on your back.
I wish the long trip from
there to here
to this pigeonshit city
and dogchain highway,
had carried you
to TogoBingoBongoPagoPago
or to the FarWinnebagos
where all you have to say
could fit on a pennypostcard.

——————-

But perhaps knowing that I could
do nothing to keep happiness
by my side
was part of the happiness,
was maybe the whole of happiness.
I don’t know.
I’m not allowed to know these things
and neither are you.
So, I drifted on the log
on the green water
the warm, syrupy water of a
hidden lagoon
somewhere in Pennsylvania
somewhere I will never
find my way back to
and the sun peeked through
the oak canopy
and the laughter of the children
echoed in the blue
and the woman I loved that day
who I knew I would not love tomorrow
kissed me
and I held her and let her go
in the same instant
and it is tomorrow
and where she is
Lord knows and he also knows
I love her still.

—————

I’m 56 or 57, I never can remember which, and I still prefer my dreams to my waking life, for the most part. Except that I can’t read in my dreams. That’s not often a drawback, for generally the landscape and the cast of characters, and of course the plot, are fascinating enough. I don’t have to read to amuse myself in dreams. It’s only when I need to read something important in a dream that I’m bothered by nocturnal illiteracy. Psychologists probably call it something else. It’s merely irksome to me, but imagine if somebody important, somebody like Moses, got his visions in dreams. What if God said, “Here’s a bunch of commandments; give these to the people when you wake up.” He’d grab the tablets, scamper down the mountain, rub his eyes, and say, “It looks like #1 says, ‘Thou shalt not smell like a hacksaw’.”

——————–

After the war
the vanquished said,
“That settles it.
You were right;
you won, fair and square;
we now believe
what you believe.”
It was all so simple.
Everyone rejoiced,
especially the dead.

____________________

Once, we hurried because
a rhinoceros was running toward us.
Now, it only feels that way.
We didn’t complain,
you might recall,
about the real rhinoceros.
Why is this imaginary one
so much worse?

____________________

Radio Blue

From my restless bed
I reach for the switch
when the backdrop of crickets
can console me no longer.
A blue voice on the air
tells me what I know,
You are listening to Radio Blue.
The man cues up
the song of yet another
sleepless lover
caressing the curves
of a blue guitar.

____________________

Teenagers are so self-involved, and it’s a damn good thing. If we don’t allow them self-involvement when they are teens, they will become self-involved adults, which are much worse. Self-involved adults, generally, will do everything they must to own a major league sports team or an automobile dealership named for themselves, or a city, or star in a snide sexjoke TV show. They will crave vanity plates and hope to die on a tanning bed. The SUV they drive to the mall will have far more than ten cup holders, but will certainly get less than ten miles to the gallon. If possible, less than five. They will own pets that tremble. They will forever be on the phone and will always have one more thing to say to someone who agrees fully. They will never understand how someone could possibly feel differently from the way they feel.

_____________________

Here we are,
prattling like penguins
when, in the background
black locomotive smoke
smothers the poor prairie dogs,
chokes the playing antelope,
plucks the woodchuck
from up his hole, sneezing
and wheezing and upchucking
in splinters
and it’s just the fall
before nuclear winter

_____________________

Hey, man,
I’m god.
I don’t gotta
apologize for nuthin.
I give you zebras,
didn’t I?
and stretch pants.
Let me tell you sumthin:
I don’t gotta
tell you nuthin.
You think it’s easy
keepin all these
numbers straight?
The stuff I gotta
keep track of.
You think that little
coin of foil
off a roll of Lifesavers
just disappears
into thin air?
It’s in the Lazy Boy,
under the cushion.
The tape measure?
Look in the baby’s room.
I got pygmies
to take care of.
Eskimos.
People with
a bone up their nose
who don’t know jack
and people with
a stick up their ass
who think they do.
You want I should
listen to you pray?
Leave me alone.
Look at a zebra.
That’s a masterpiece,
ain’t it?

_____________________

Certain kisses
One under lamplight
One on a boat
One, seemingly,
in a blimp
One when the sun
shone clear through us
One when the wind
held its breath
One on the forehead
it’s still there
One still
on my lips
will be forever
One that left
a mark
One quizzical
like the Sphynx

_____________________

Though

Other stuff is
always always
better than
this stuff
For example
this stuff
just gums up
Other stuff
never gums up
This stuff
smells funny
Other stuff doesn’t
smell funny
Other stuff
I’m sure
wouldn’t be
so runny
This stuff
though
is all we got