Springtime in Anywhere

Spring is freedom if you hate school. To me, it's being left

Socially and spiritually, intellectually bereft.

Though it's not a social matter, nor the people I miss most.

It's not surrounded (in Church or otherwise) that I've known the Holy Ghost.

I'm simply an animal that requires inspiration –

Intellectual stimulation–to long continue respiration.

At a time when excitement and nostalgia are in order

I come down with a reverse seasonal affective disorder.

If I'm not being creative, or at least academic,

Then I start getting depressive, or even just plain sick.

If I'm not writing or teaching with my life, then what am I doing?

I hate spring.

To an Ingenue with Nowhere to Go

It seems you can't go home again

For the risk of slipping on your solitude

and becoming mired in muddied memories.

It seems you can't go home again

While the sky cackles in triumph at your loss,

Raining in sheets to mock your mere drops,

Saying, “even your tears are nothing

To the rest of the world,” which has it all.

It only seems you can't go home again,

For Zeus profits nothing by your losses;

You were made in God's image, not Jupiter's.

You will breathe and live and love

Long after the thunderhead's cloudy countenance

Is a skull stained by rainbows, bleached white by sun.

God has the rest of the world, and has it all–

Even your back–

So go back.

Home is where the heart was,

and can find its way to be again.

Charlton Heston Would Dig It

Vehicles and Real Estate, ever-practical excess

Are always one missed payment between held and repossessed.

Almost any thing other than those two, things mundane, things celebrated

Aren't beyond the long arm of legal excuses.  They could be confiscated,

To say nothing of legal tender, which by fiat is deployed,

and can by that same fiat be collected, devalued, destroyed.

Most intellectual property is borrowed, as per the terms of use,

and the physical stuff can be stolen, or ruined by malice or abuse.

No, the only thing I've used or spent that was ever truly mine

Was time.

You can have it when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Four Wheels Good, Two Wheels Better

Deciding how to please myself and my earth-mother,

I can't us'lly do both, and pick one or the other.

Always choosing between my wallet and my heart

Which, on sports ticket and employment, are miles apart,

I should unlearn my American training that bigger is better.

I don't want to drive a greenhouse in all this hot weather.

I solved all that with a cut back to two wheels, from four.

I opened the cage, freeing not just a solution, but more.

I don't need to grow wings and a tail, since I've learned

About tucks, wind resistance, and banking my turns.

I've always wanted to, and thought I wouldn't, go through with it,

and now, having started, I don't want to quit.

Why I Write, Part x+258: Anxiety as an Influence

I won't claim I'm the kind on whom people depend.

I'm a man–not of honor, but of flesh and the pen.

Wholly lacking in diligence (Puritan faith),

I leave broken hearts, broken promises strewn in my wake,

Pursuit of goals trumped by pursuit of the mind.

Still, how could I stray so far as to find

Myself afraid to just lounge under trees

For fear of not thinking, and lack of ideas?

Countdown to Sunday/Fuzzy Math/Eight Ways a Week

Half-Satisfied/Half-Displeased

No surprise modern life leaves so many confused.

The world can't even agree on the right attitude

A person should take toward their hobbies or work.

You're either too negative or an arrogant jerk.

If I won't be my own fan, why would anyone else.

If I'm not my own worst critic, aren't I deluding myself?

The so-called healthy attitude is to try

Keeping the world close to half-satisfied

But I hold more closely with those who believe

It's much simpler to fool folks than trying to please.

Deliberate Conformity and Inevitable Nonconformity

Governing two decades of life by two rules:

Better contentment than accomplishment, accomplishment than cool,

and if you can't get better or get even, just get out

Leads to roadbeds of resistance and uncounted gravel doubts.

It's not just road less traveled; it's road not even paved,

But these rules my life both guided and improved, and even saved,

and thought it's prone to washboard and it's potholed with regret,

The former keeps me wide awake; the rest ain't stopped me yet.

Poorly Planned

I'm sure that same gameplan has served you for years,

Getting by on inconsistency, bailed out by tears,

But I've got a defense like you ain't seen before.

It might have worked then, but it won't anymore.

You need to learn when to go for it, when to punt.

You ran a draw on third and twenty.  You ain't getting what you want

For the first time, left tongue-still and mouth-agape.

Good luck next time.  I'm already studying tape.

Eleven Minutes on a New Motorcycle

The first ten minutes are for butterflies and shifting in the seat,

For fluttering thumb-fingered hands and left feet,

For trying to figure out where all the controls are

Without turning all that hardware into modern sculpture,

and after that, it's either transportation, or it's love.

When 20/20 Is Almost Good Enough

I know that I should take this like a man, as if I'm grown.

I know that in the pain of loneliness, I'm nowhere near alone.

I know the other side of being dumped ain't strolling in the park.

I know we're walking separately the same great valley dark.

I know that you are taking this at least as hard as me.

Last time we met, t'was in your face, unhid, quite plain to see.

I know. I get the gist, but I can't even say too bad

Because I'm glad.

When 20/20 Isn't Good Enough

I know this ain't an end that you were charting from the start.

I know you anted up your sweat and tears, your blood, your beating heart.

I know you don't do this to torture me–it's not for me, at all.

I know that learning how to ride is half learning to fall.

I know ten years from now, I will remember this and laugh,

and knowing me, I doubt it will take ten, or even half.

I know these things. I do. I get the gist. I'm well aware,

and I don't care.

An Incomplete List of Things that No Longer Exist

Poets publishing a back-and-forth, which these days only rappers do.

Rebellious children eating paste as they come down off sniffing glue.

Mimeographs, at least in the minds of our youth.

Pathos as merely a dressing for proof.

“That's what she said!” (Replaced by “phrasing.” It's for the best.)

Absolute monarchy, tired long before its rest.

Current jazz, hard rock, and metal (as cultural forces).

Unsupervised bike rides and obstacle courses.

In mainstream science, spontaneous generation.

Mentioning a “superhighway” while seeking information.

The senses of accomplishment at most high school graduations.

Half-decent alternative radio stations.

A heliocentric universe.

An earth where hive living is considered perverse.

My readers' resolve and attention span,

My reserve of ideas, the tip of my pencil, my plan.

Why I No Longer Regard Extra Sleep as a Good Treatment for Illness

It's a torture from Hades, if not from Hell

To close my eyes feeling almost well

and wake feeling like I'd spent the night in bed

With a thirty-pound dumbell lain across my forehead.

These intimate nights with the bowels of the earth

Are, but don't feel like, a good cause for mirth.

-------

Though to write it departs from the rest of the rhyme,

Sleep already makes up most my lost time.

Uncultured, or The Idea of Having No Particular Idea

I'm not countercultural,

Too acultural, too animal,

Trusting in the world I see,

Unconnotating your ideas.

I'm at home in the dirt, too carnal

To even bother being venal,

Content to just be meat

Unless consumed by being me.

The Spiritual Significance of Impatience

I suppose you could say that I've not learned to go

With majestic unchoosing, with the seas' ebb and flow.

I tack and I twist and I roll and I squirm.

One sees sin's silken spiderweb catching a worm.

I pace and I poke and I prod and I ask.

My friends pay the percentage, patience heavily taxed.

Truth be told, I have mastered the thumbnail's dark art

Of scratching and scraping and picking apart.

Campaign-Sign Slalom

Your ambitions, your attempts at getting underway

At getting into power, at getting in the way

Are, in the last matter, already making hay.

You, as your kind is wont to be, are already a pain.

So I cannot help but find the mirth in seeing your campaign

Toppled by ordinary wind and ordinary rain.

So This Is How Liberty Dies?

Liberty dying a death of a thousand papercuts

Makes me want to kick five hundred thirty-five butts.

If Liberty dying is Overpopulation Culture's effect,

I don't know what less I could expect,

But if Liberty dies on the lips of some Hollywood actress,

I'm gonna have to get my seven dollars and fifty cents back.

To an Ingenue, Recent Rediscoverer of Political Incorrectness

You've been bringing hockey gloves to a fistfight.

You've been wearing oven mitts to a microwave.

You've been wearing sunglasses at a quarter 'til midnight.

Is it time to throw the shovel back in your own grave?

You've been tip-toeing around a rock-festival concert.

You've been keeping your punches two feet above the belt.

Maybe it's time to stop worrying if it hurts,

and starting to think about making your presence felt.