Category: Poetry

THE LAST SUPPER

A sickle moon above a street
of doom … cold, tired, drunk,
I sit in the Night Hawk restaurant
where the food tastes like industrial
waste, and yet empty stomachs all
around me, sipping coffee, regard
me with envy, as I frown and chow
down. While toothless men grin,
for no apparent reason, as they
slurp their soup with trembling
hands – maybe in an apologetic
expression because they have a
few bits left from their social
security checks to go out on the
town, as the world tumbles down,
and feast, with abandon, on thin
broth and sodium.
Another night in urban blight, like
a thousand others since the recession
began and the government declared:
“Get by as you can!”

DREAMS OF GLASS

shatter across the shimmering
cities as towers tremble and
fallen angels tumble, like the
ashes from a demon’s inferno.
Cut paper puppets scatter, helter
skelter, amidst the rubble,
like the pieces of an exploding
jigsaw puzzle.
The main streets are backstreets.
The towns, villages, hamlets
eerie: ghost haunts, silent,
shadowy. In my rundown
tenement, where empty pockets
don’t feed the family or pay the
rent, we wait for that miracle
which is heaven sent. (No use
waiting for the government.)
One bad day, we all say.
Every breath makes you pay.
Every face makes you pray,
as lives topple and souls
crumble and dreams fade –
while women wail and sirens
scream and children cry and
hopes fail and men die inside
a little more each day. Life is
hard and unrelenting for some.
Each day is an installment on
an unmarked grave, where names
and dates are erased by fate.
Tomorrow will bring another one.
They go on and on.

Most dreams are out of your reach.
But you dream them anyway, even
though they leave you more lost and
miserable, amidst the rubble of your
troubles, than if you had let them go,
knowing they were a no show.
Life is a stormy road. You head for
a dead end as soon as you begin.
Somewhere in the middle you start to
understand that you are a stranger in
a no man’s land where no one speaks
your language and no one understands.
It is the same for everyone. Yet passion
burns and souls yearn and while dreams
die they live again. There was lots of
whiskey, warm friends, loving women,
starry-eyed children eager to begin.
I’d do it again.

He took the Greyhound to the dying
town and rented a cheap room near the
factories – most of which, he found,
were dead and empty things. He called
the plant he once worked at, long ago
before his stint in the army, before his
discharge sent him back out into the
world, wandering. It had come to that,
even though he knew in life there is no
going back. A long shot at best, he was
hoping he could connect with someone
who remembered him from the past.
Mute point. They weren’t hiring, didn’t
expect to be, might be down sizing, or
closing completely, like every other
place in the vicinity. The same people
walked the streets – hardscrabble
working class families. Only no one
was working and the buildings were
decaying and all you saw on each face
was that look of quiet desperation. You
can’t go home again. You can’t stay
there either. We are all nomads, now, in
a no man’s land; not even looking for,
or expecting to find, our own private
little Garden of Eden, each day a
blessing, in which to live our lives.

Out of the black,
star-domed unknown,
nothingness rushes in with a scream,
a shrieking, circular, no more,
which mangles the jungle night with flames.

Vietnam and napalm,
fear death agony destruction
and all for nothing!

Slanting forward, I slash the canvas
with colliding colors, fractured planes,
splintered perspectives, blood-red rhythms,
writhing soldiers, twisted trees,
(gray hair soaked with sweat,
old clothes splattered with paint)
a crazy conflagration of distorted shapes,
which looks like nothing so much
as a Hieronymus Bosch on hash,
(or maybe some asylum inmate’s “art therapy” piece)
destined, when it’s done, for an exhibit at the
Vietnam Veterans Museum, thinking of Iraq
as I lash away and of the roadside-bombed soldiers,
I read about everyday, reassigned to graves …

“Art tells us the truth about being human.”

I remember reading in one of my art criticism books.

So does a bullet.

HAUNTED

From night to day to night again
the clock’s hands grasp illusions.
Love knows nothing of time.
Love knows passion, fever, reaching
for someone to hold onto forever.
Like a sorceress, or prankster witch,
you left your memory in the dark to
haunt me each night when I turn out
the lights. I sleep with ghosts, dream
of you, wake up with shadows.
What went wrong? Who’s to blame?
Why does love fade away, when hand
in hand through good and bad, side by
side through thick and thin,
sharing laughter, joy and pain, you
wake up from a dream and all you
were died that day?