New Poem


You make the word “shop” your own
Between the crashing waves of the sshh and the beatnik pop of op

You make the word your own; the secret password thrown

down for others to pick up, given out with subtle glee
like an eager inbiber at a speakeasy

Shop transforms a subterranean space ….. the taxidermied deer looks down stoically from another place

on your broad t-shirt clad shoulders

As your long thin hands swoop down and grip the mike and you jaggedly revolve around the broken music stand like a determined tyke
I keep thinking about
Your shoulders carrying the pain of experience and its weight
Like a strong chugging train carrying hidden freight

You said you were one of the few, the proud and an improbable twice my age
This made me think of my own unexercised body with silent rage
At just 30, my shoulders, though somewhat broad, slope under the weight of uncertainty like a wilted pod

Sometimes all I can do is watch,
Others sing the praises of their lovers crotch

I am an insect trapped in amber
An imposter, a fraud
Trying to papier mache a façade of certainty in front of a life with no god,
paint it with homegrown organic pigments
the black pressed from my graying hair
and the pink mined from putty underneath my white nails’ glare

so that new eyes will send signals upstairs
to the gray mass that report:
“This captain knows where he is sailing, even far away from the port”

The sacrificed venison is still above the altar of words, flanked on either side by two hanging plants like green explosions of thought – shot out of its ears
And they stay in the air forever, like the buck is constantly having a comic book ephinay.
A Roy Lichenstein melodrama for all the Boston scribes to see.

This collection of words is just about done,
The walls of the shop don’t let in the April sun
So put on your night vision goggles and take aim,
Once thrown up in the air, words meaning are never quite the same
this collection will be gut, the white space between the black letters shut with fermaldyhide and stuffed ….

Hang it on the wall, help me detangle this big knot of thought that whirrs to life in the Bishop Allen Drive shop

A sidestep away from the bustle and hustle of lower Mass Ave

To take time to think about words and thought, a luxury to have.