The first poem

Did it fly eagerly out of it's cage
Finally set free to sail through the heavens
Or stumble upon us like an old drunk
With incoherent babblings?
Was it graceful, refined, elegant
Or two awkward lines
Bumping into each other in the dark?
Maybe it just ran down the street one day
Completely naked, screaming at the top of its lungs.
It could have slipped in, quietly,
Through the back door while we slept,
Fell to earth in a shooting star
Or sprouted one spring in the garden.
Perhaps it was spoken into existence
On the day after God rested
Or arrived with the first falling snow.
Maybe in the cries of a newborn child
It saw it's first glimpses of our world
As it leaked out through tiny tears
Falling softly onto the hospital floor

Billy Collins is a Thief

First he stole my voice
Then, with the skill of a big city pick pocket
He slipped off with my humor and diction

So it wasn't long before whole poems
Began to disappear before my very eyes
Like bad magic on a television special

It was as if he prowled my streets late at night
In an old conversion van, the kind
With rusted fenders and tinted windows

Sitting alone with some AM talk radio shows
Murmuring in the background
Watching my bedroom windows

Anxiously waiting for the light to go out
So he could sneak through the gate
Into my yard with his big poetry net

The Taste of Regret

Sticks to you
Like the smell of bleach
On your hands

Or trying to get gum
Out of your hair

But it's not gum

It's like getting kicked
In the stomach

Or hitting your thumb
With a hammer

Only forever

Searching for Amelia Earhart
For Justice

I send you outside
To pick up sticks in the yard
But through your young eyes
Things are not always what they seem
There is no yard and there are no sticks
Instead you are smashing tiny villages with your feet
Scaring the fleeing natives with your fierce roars
As you grab fallen trees with your giant fists

You decide to help me
We work on the car a while
But when I turn to you for a wrench
You're a thousand miles away
Looking over your race car's engine
It's gauges and it's tires
Making final preparations
For the Grand Prix

Later that evening
When you should be taking a bath
Washing your hair
Cleaning behind your ears
You're suddenly missing
Flying somewhere over the Pacific
In a small prop plane
Eyes scanning the horizon
Searching for Amelia Earhart

Thursday Night
For Bukowski

Sirens rise up over
The sounds of the streets
In this blood gray city
Then trail off again, slowly
And I wonder if someone
Has had a heart attack
Or worse yet a broken heart

Perhaps some broken woman
Finally had enough
Of the drunken beatings
And put a round in the chest
Of some poor bastard
That probably knew better
But didn't care to stop

A Warm Glass of Water

Often
After being put to bed
At my grandparents house in the city
I would sneak out of my room
Venturing down the stairs
To cautiously ask for a drink of water

My grandmother
Sympathetically stern and matter of fact
Would offer a barrel glass
Of warm tap water

Sometimes
I would try to peek
At what my grandfather was watching on TV
It would always be men talking
About politics and money and laws

He would be grumbling back at them
Sometimes loudly and sometimes I think
Without realizing it

Keep on Looking

As we shuffle through skirts
Finding the right sizes
Then dismissing the obvious fashion misses
It occurs to me that the cashier
And the girls two racks over
And the woman trying to take more
Than three items into the dressing room
All have no idea that you're divorcing me
And as I hold up a sheer, lace hemmed,
Paisley covered, mid-length one
And you squint your face into a decision
With your head half-cocked to the side
It doesn't seem to be on your mind either
And content to never bring it up again
In some false hope that all this will go away
I ask what it would go with, and after
A brief discussion about the tops
Currently in your closet
We decide to put it back
And keep on looking

22 Thoughts from the Top of the Refrigerator
(and other secret places)

1. Poetry comes, but wisdom lingers.

2. From time to time it's good to dance in the rain of inspiration.

3. The heart can devise such wicked schemes yet it sings the song of all love brings.

4. Fame is up to other people.

5. There's no sense in learning a lesson you've already been taught.

6. In these flesh costumes we wear it's easy to forget this isn't a party we're at.

7. A fact is everyone sharing the same opinion.

8. With the annoyance of a fly, time takes itself going by.

9. Sometimes we turn the radio up to drown out our thoughts.

10.Potifer never suspected his wife.

11.Conversation doesn't look good on everyone.

12. Resurrect the lost art of appreciation.

13. Be careful what you see.

14. Aging beauty is all in vain; vanity ages with great pain.

15. Love is where you place it.

16. Life is an unbreakable chain of contradictions.

17. Beware of going down in infamy.

18. Enjoy the things that come easy to you.

19. We each bang out our tortured tune on life’s piano.

20. Sin was first sewn with the seeds of doubt.

21. The past is how you remember it.

22. Raising kids is like painting in the dark.

We think they don't know

But that's only cause it's been so long
Since we were there in their little shoes
Behind closed doors and over the phone
Thinking our words won't fall on innocent ears
But they can see the cracks slowly growing
And hear the fissures forming in our
Crumbling marriage

The Lawyer
For Papa

Inside
The cigar smoke
Sits in thick swirls
While you sit
Cross legged
(like a gentleman of course)
Reading a book
The black leather
High back chair
Frames your thoughts
Before they drift away
With the smoke
And the memories

A Conversation in Dubai

In an airport gift shop
While coming home from Iraq
I watched a French man talk to
The Arabic girl behind the counter

He didn't know any Arabic
And she certainly knew no French
However they both spoke enough English
To just get by

And after hearing them both butcher
My native language in their own way
And still exchange souvenir and money
I wanted to find my old English teacher

And smack her in the face

Like Robots

I'd see them come into the factory

Hunched over and straight faced
They'd walk straight lines

Like the years of industrial work
Had turned them into machines

Like they'd been here so long that
If the plant burned down tonight

They would be here tomorrow
Hunched over among the ashes

Walking straight lines like robots

Looking Back at Sodom

When I have set sail
On death's wooden ship
Heading out into
The oceans of eternity
Will I yearn to touch
The sands of a wasted life
To see what I've left behind
Will I turn to look
At the shores of this life
One last time