Finding A Lover

"The Buddhists say if you meet somebody and your heart pounds, your hands shake, your knees go weak, that's not the one.
"When you meet your 'soul mate' you'll feel calm - no anxiety, no agitation." - Monica Drake

Graceful

I am normally
too clumsy but when it comes
to you, my love, grace
happens and I can
undo the ribbing around
your heart as though it
was not welded tight
by your own tensioned device,
by how the years fell.

August 9, 2011 3:56 PM

Old Age

There is a typo on this line, so...only now it disappears... If I remove these lines and lead with the poem title the space between "In" and "My" in the poem title disappears. Hmmm...

In My Dotage

Your invitation
as always is a challenge
to be some other
than the sloven soul
I've become, bound in the dross
of my aging life.

I drool from the side
of my mouth and wipe only
half the time these days
but I do clean up
before going out of late.
I wish no offence.

‎August ‎7, ‎2011 9:23 AM

Goat Love

So you decided
to keep goats and let them roam
the cliff back of us
while you hung out on
Facebook with all your cyber
friends and I wandered
off from time to time.

You got four but then one was
stolen - Who would take
a goat anyway?
Two had paired. The white goat left
alone began to
bleat so hauntingly
we tried to comfort her, then
threw her off that cliff
when she died of it.

‎August ‎15, ‎2016 6:51 PM

In case the typo has passed through to your display in the first line... What appears to me as Soyou I wrote so you. I have tried. I have seen that I can do this phrase anywhere in the poem except on that line. I have tried to fix the display many different ways. But this is the poem I want to write with that precise line as the first line. It is the only place that for me So you comes out on the display lacking the space. For that matter, I put twenty spaces there once to see and they all dropped away to soyou. WTF?? This has never happened before and it apparently does not happen on any other line. If I want, I can make it disappear by taking the Title down into the body of the post, which moves the first line off that particular location. It goes fine then but that is not what I want. There must be a reason for this loss of a space that only happens in this phrase. God knows. I don't. But this is the post as I wanted it, so I am explaining... this poem is appearing with the first line as the computer insists it should be while the post's layout is as I insist it should be and that's that. This is the computer's idea of a joke.

Wood Burning

This is what we wanted but it's not what we got.

"I couldn't even
burn the wood", you said to me,
looking that way for
the thousandth damn time,
as if it was my fault again
that the wood was bad
or just whatever
was so wrong with me this time

and I get heavy
with it all, heavy
under your relentless press
on my aging heart.

Written July 29, 2011 12:25 PM
Modified August 12, 2016 6:35 PM

Missing The Point

She's gotten away,
convincing us all Tuesday
to let her go soon,
then giving us hell
before giving us the slip
this last Wednesday.

I do feel foolish
for believing her better
than this, more stable,
more a deep root tree
than the whipping reed cutting
me as she passed through
and gone out the door.

‎July ‎27, ‎2011 7:15 PM
Modified August 11, 2016

At Least The Books

Keeping The Faith
Or At Least The Books
In My Old Age

Most of my toad life
I have slept alone. Sometimes
the bed was king sized,
big enough for two.

Before coming here, I moved
to my living room
and slept propped up on
my couch because that's where my
late night living was.

What happened - Francie
came back from expedition
and shoveled me into
her basement, complete
with a stripped down version of
my remnant household...
barely any sign
of my dead wife or mother
left me any more.

(I had moved into
my mother's house after she
died of her old age.)

We bought me a bed -
a hospital type of bed -
an adjusting wide
single for big guys
like me and sold off or scrapped
all the rest - except
the books - you must keep
the books on threat of losing
your shriven old soul.

‎August ‎1, ‎2016 3:37 AM

Honesty note: This image is not my bookshelving but is a fair estimate of the number of books I still have. I divested of most of the paperback novels as well as most of my household furniture to move to Francesca's basement.