feral shout (literary blog)

Here are some poems from the very early eighties, slightly revised:
The children
The garden’s planted.
In the middle of this city we
celebrate one more season of the old ways,
grooming the earth and gathering
bright green food.
May we remember to teach our children
mostly what’s obvious,
the simple relations of hand and soil,
and may they remind us season after season
of the [...]

The mind is a mansion of dark rooms, but there is a courtyard. We’ll find it again.

what I want to say to everyone is:
thank you for being in this beautiful dream

When you’re in good health, dreams are like people who live in the same building but another apartment. You are civil to them, greet them by first name in the hallway or elevator, but you never get too close, never invite them into what you think of as your life.
In sickness, you befriend them. [...]

I’ve begun to accept, in fits and starts, the impermanence of everything, and I have become calmer and happier. It’s the sugar pill hat comes in the second half of life, served up with a staggering variety of pains and losses. I’d like to think it is the inclination toward wisdom if not its acquisition.
I [...]

My old man was an old man. Sixty-four when I was born, facing death when I was a teenager, he served as a monument to his past, a sagging reminder of his moment in history. As he looked back on his life so did I, his trusty sidekick. His dresser drawers, my foraging grounds, were [...]

Thirty-five years ago nobody except a masturbating Ed Koch or Rudy Giulliani could envision the absolute Disnification of midtown Manhattan. Times Square was all glitter and sleeze — rhinestones in a pig trough — and its edges were among the tawdriest edges in New York. Consumerism then wasn’t Starbucks and Lion King souvenirs, it was [...]

Suffering is universal but individual. We each have different attachments and aversions. One man’s amused complaint is another’s suicide note.
And yet despite a huge range of emotional reaction to circumstance, there are clearly some circumstances that increase the probability of individual suffering. First and foremost is poverty, with its henchmen starvation, ill health, and crime. [...]

the storm
(knocks down walls, unhides lives
as they are now, as they’ve always been,
the poor a nation huddled between stores)
reveals our mundane catastrophe

For many years I was a connoisseur of loneliness. There was the loneliness of the broken midnight streets, that was dry white wine. There was the loneliness of bicycling through the empty country, or through sunny towns full of unseeing townspeople, that was bitter coffee. It was all delicious in its strong flavors, in its [...]

The “rock and roll moment” coincided almost exactly with my youth, and so I really have to write one of these songs:
I was born in nineteen fifty-four
when rock and roll came knocking on the white man’s door.
Through the driving New York snow
I heard some noises on the radio.
With a sound that promised to set me [...]

one leaves a daughter
one leaves a son
one leaves a prayer in the muzzle of his gun
one leaves his innocence
one leaves his sin
one leaves his childhood dreams
one just leaves his skin
one leaves his dogtags
one leaves an arm
one leaves the parents who kept him from harm
one leaves the sisters who taught him to be kind
one leaves his [...]