Your Porch
I recall an evening, one Fall,
on the way back to my metal box,
I spotted the opossum and stopped,
didn’t even have a chance to think of a
proper Baby Book name from
nineteen eighty five to christen it with,
due to stage fright.
God, how I miss those nights
on my best friend’s porch,
sweating beer bottles
created new rings on cement surfaces.
Only it is October now.
And a few years and
some odd number of days later.
You have another coast
to call home,
and costumed ambulances which
shrill in your ears
and stare you down
in the rear-view mirror, don’t they?
Am I wrong?
The Day You Had Outpatient
I don’t know why I made the title
sound like a drink or the name of
a snow cone you had.
I’d imagine a dentist-like office
playing dentist office music.
Such as Still Haven’t Found….
or a nineties rock song you can
bop your head to but never seen to
remember the artist’s name.
The doctors had you guffawing
like a drunk husband during
a community picnic
at the pool where screaming kids
dropped their jaws and stared
as cartoon characters.
This was two years ago,
well, when you were still living
and on the cusp of
having so much more energy
and blood boiling versus now your
ashes sit on a hillside
in a different zip code, somewhere.
I learned to heal.
And they put the filter in and took it out
with no blood, at all.
So there is that,
maybe not now, but then;
when we were younger and
less half asleep and
more willing to lose nothing and
gain whatever it is
God has in store for us.
And we live on.
And we will.
And I carry your watch daily.
With your voice and your
heartbeat in my head.
Thursday Morning
I’m currently watching
television laundry cycles
and listening to the
dated arcade games while
I’m in this makeshift lawn chair
after chugging a beer
over good conversation yesterday evening.
A poet’s vacation is:
dying to get out of the normal routine of
driving from point A to point B
during nine to fives
and calculated moments.
Academy of the Heart And Mind 