Dwight in Des Moines

So what inspired you to travel to Iowa,
In the ice spitting days of early spring,
(Not much of a respite from snowy New Hampshire)
Long before the wheat swirls in the summer heat
And the corn pops upon the stalks?
Is it basketball… or
Wrestling?  The Nationals…?
Old grapplers and coaches
Love their sport…
Stepping down to the arena floor
To wish a buddy good luck, talk shop,
Or just to put your toe once more on the mat.

Or is it some other excuse
To scratch an itch,
A might have been,
That you have had
Since the days on Columbia Rd.
When you and Wayne Kuzman
Walked the back streets of our small town
Discussing the finer points of the single-leg take-down,
While crossing the double tracks that headed west
Out of Ohio,
And wonder silently just where they led?

 

 

 

 

Fortunate Passages

Take a little bit of good fortune and sit with it
When it comes your way,
It’s the best approach to enjoy the ride.
Catch the wave of destiny and
Notice how it buoys you benevolently
Lifting you beyond your strength of will
And cavalier control.

 If luck is yours

You will recognize it as a gift of grace
And feeling emboldened you may try to circle back,
To see if it is still there within your grasp,
This may be so, sometimes…
But as likely as not, it is not.
 
Remember these times, such fortunate passages
Like the pages of an old photo album,
Which may bring a dear smile or two…
And then remember also that
Wisdom wishes us
To say thank you,
And then to let it be.

 

Scars Afterwards

I let go of the wheel for a while

I just had to…
A visitor here I surely had overstayed
My welcome.
And not quite ready to compost into the soil
Like the rusting Pearce-Arrow
Parked deep in Walden Woods,
I let go, dream-like
No brakes, no horn
Downhill and picking up speed.

The crash of course

Was inevitable,
And when I came to
I was living in a yurt
On a stranded mountain side,
In the middle of the unfathomable Pacific.

You don’t get much forgiveness

When you pull up roots and leave,
Not much of a send-off either
I guess that those that had cared
Bought my dog-and-pony show.
Well I sure had.

 But now there is no show,

Just an occasional monologue,
And a lengthy convalescence.

 So the wounds and the scars don’t show-up sometimes

'til much later
When the bruises turn that yellowish-green
And the scabs well up like lava.

A Story That Might Have Happened

It was a god-awful sports coat, a hand-me-down from my cousin Bill. Plaid with hideous bands of colors:  bile yellow intersecting with gall green.

“It looks like Bill puked on it,” chided my brother Mark.  During those days, he often went for the visceral, knowing that it would work on me, the psychological terror rendered on a younger brother.

“No, it’s Madras,” Mom retorted, giving Mark a glare while holding the coat up against my shoulders.  I hoped it would be too large, and it was, Bill being a bit of an Ichabod.  (And I knew it wasn’t Madras; not at least the fabric that was currently in style!)

I think I wore it once, begrudgingly, when my Aunt Dorothy (Bill’s mom) came by.  I modeled it and feigned appreciation.

At the next opportunity, it migrated to the far recesses of my closet, lost and buried among other outgrown, out of dated, and outlandish articles.

Fast forward a couple of years. It was the 60s.  My hair was long, and friends and I were learning to smoke hashish and talk the finer points of revolution.  Clothing had grown funky and hip.  Thrift stores and army surplus were the rage.  Plaid was definitely out!

My friend Dwight called to let me know of an anti-war protest at Coventry on the east side.  Wanna go?  There would be speeches, a march, and a candlelight vigil in the park.  And there would be lots of hippie chicks!  Wear something groovy, he challenged.  But what?

On very short notice, I rummaged my closet, Dwight was already waiting impatiently in the driveway.  Out of desperation, I put on a pair of bellbottom jeans, a work shirt, and I exhumed the puke coat.  Yes, I was far out…

An hour later we fell in line with the marchers and headed down the middle of Coventry St. to the park.  Riot cops were everywhere, and it wasn’t the party we had hoped for.  The police cut off the march, bellowing through a bull horn that there wasn’t a march permit.  Disband or be arrested, they challenged.  

Almost immediately a couple of us were hustled out of the street and up against a police van.

“ID’s please,” a big cop demanded.  ID?!  Where the fuck is my wallet?!  Out of desperation I reached into my pocket, fumbling for a miracle.  My fingers grasped a small card…ID?  The cop grabbed it, opened it and silently read.  Handing it back I saw that it was a “Get out of jail” card from an old monopoly game. Shit!

The cop looked at us, smiled and said, “Go home kid…and for god’s sake lose the jacket!”

We left in a hurry. 

Thanks Cousin Bill.

 

Balancing

I am symmetrical

Born and raised

And so I favor and fall in with things
Like me,
Mirrored and balances.
When I shop it’s a six-pack of beer
And a dozen eggs
(No baker’s dozen for me)
The key is the division by two
That’s where I draw the line.
Oh there is romance to be found
In a single rose
And the solitary house at the end of the beach,
But look closely and I can see
The spiraling galaxies of petals and stars
Shining up and down on me.
Oddly, we symmetricals do not favor the uneven,
And secretly yearn to renew and reconnect
The orphaned sock or single soul.
The dissonant, the discordant
Make me search for higher harmonies.
And even the odd can be rendered even
With a prudent cut
Balancing by perception or by tool.
So if you take your measure of me
You will find a certain duality
That joins us both in heart and mind
A unity that we may find.

Scar Stories

Things best left unsaid:

Stones unturned
Down dark alley ways, dead ends
Such scar stories seared upon
The skin and soul
Old wounds and ways that mend and cloak
Times of raw transgressions
Hiding and healing
Partially
But not fully
These stories that could be told
As fingers trace and beg the memories of shame and pain
That still remain secreted deep
And just below the surface keep
And speak to us in sly voices
Of regrets residing still on that dusty shelf
That might well-forth
And open the wound
And so are best still left unsaid.