Poet’s Last Word

Oh, where in the world can your poet run
When the words fall flat, and the rhymes won’t come?
Oh, what hard trials arise to squash younglet poetry,
Like a weeded up, oak-wilt, unlovely and broken tree?
No thesaurus, no dictionary, nor dog-paged Bartlett’s
Can save a poor rhymester when the scansion he forgets.
Arched over his blank page, a pen rusting in his hand,
He remembers clever phrasing that once lofted grand.
But today, too many hours passed, when imagery faded away:
No paragraphs soar to shine, no dark truths for a heart to sway.
Just letters on a keyboard accompany the page gleaming white—
Is it old age, or a brain cancer, or Alzheimer’s that’s blanked his inner sight?
Swirling leaves, the pelting rain; no, just tears to wet another empty page.
Crashing thunder, volcanic explosions; no, just writer’s blocked impotent rage.
Was all this alleged talent just Life’s joke on the unwittingly absurd?
What do you say to the one who cannot find the poet’s last word?

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Hospice Junction

So ready to cry in your arms,
But today’s broken heart is so déclassé.
I hold my iPhone in my clammy hand,
But mustn’t text when you’ve nothing to say.
Broken low down here in Hospice Junction:
I see pretty flowers wreathing the pretty birds.
I hear some pretty lady chaplain
Breathlessly whispering her fine holy words.
Some seventy-two have now come and gone—
The team completing some of their unending chore.
They’ve resurfaced that old tattered roadway, and,
And, another admission: how do they go on any more?
The Sun and Dawn drags up another new day,
Nurses and the all will shoo away the Dark and the Harms.
And they won’t get home until way after dark
O so ready to cry in your arms.

I’m Here

The Sun fell down the usual way:
Gold to pink to black.
The end of another tawny Spring day,
And no, they’re not coming back.

Too many deaths on Hall 5:
Cancer, Dementia, and Heart Attack;
Old and young lives fading away;
Don’t care our hospice census is on track.

The Moon creeped out its old way:
Half to gibbous on passing high;
Poor professionals lacking an out to pray—
Is it really okay for the licensed to cry?

Tomorrow returns the Sun in bust:
Azure to pink to hot white.
Not only families ache when loved ones return to dust.
Come, sit, and let’s talk a mite….

Wannabe Tears

dishes are all done,
plates stacked and dried,
w.annabe poet lifts pen to regale
about one day he cried.
scrubbing for words
to put life into an emotion,
sorta like looking for New Youth
from the latest hand lotion.
top 40 amping at 60,
cds from latter better days;
another February in Austin
as Winter works his hoary ways.
cross-legged in meditation,
another 31 minutes gone,
w. poet nasally focused;
the tear begins its fall all alone.
that jezebel totally shinered
and momma hit the floor.
baby comes March first;
what’s next in store
for all us readers
while the w. poet lumbers lame?
another fish Friday alone;
so what’s up with your game?
no radio for Lent,
and your sacrifice?
oh, we’re no longer catholic—
how awfully nice.
and all the journalists lie,
the job for a politician,
and you ask me,
‘why does a w. poet cry?’

Surely Not

Passed the cutoff for sycamore creek
up round about the CR 245;
down 71, looking for deerpath way—
it wasn’t like I was lucky to be alive.

Blew out the front right firestone
traveling at or around the posted speed;
came to stop beyond cypress creek—
changing the tire wasn’t that much of a deed.

But jacking the 2004 was half a bit harder
as the tears fell out about my taut reserve;
seems the bells had just begun to ring—
what high truth do the chimes preserve?

Back down the road at half passed the rain
needing a bathroom stop something awful,
like I knew might not ever see them again;
exited at a station in a manner not quite lawful.

Email said it simple, nothing quite so very grand:
she was taken at 5:11pm to the seton highland.