24837 BIRTHDAY POEM 2o16

Two months working on the BIRTHDAY POEM and still doesn't feel quite right. But it's time to show it. Birthday poems are strange. I never know where they are going to go. Usually they express some event that happened in my youth as well as moments that are more recent. Sometimes the past events are very stylized and not necessarily "exactly" the way things happened in real life. But that's the way of art. It takes on a life of its own. Hope you enjoy this latest BIRTHDAY POEM.

24837

It begins. It ends.

And as it begins it ends
again and then again—

a touch of stretch, a scratch across the sur-face.

The darkness digests me, my shadow struggles
to shape itself, fold itself into something, a something more,
into a some “thing” more comfortable than shadows.
A dream, perhaps, that’s what I’ll be, that is to say,
I mean to say, what’s meant by the phrase “a dream?”
Just one, a single dream, a simple, fluffy dream
that my unconsciousness can crawl inside of.

Chew me up, now.  Swallow me up and down,

and down the narrow nightmare we’ll go.
a slippery, slimy mess we’ve become,
a phlegmy specter, a ghostly snot ball of memory.
But the purpose is clear. Well, as clear
as a shadow can appear while rampaging
through the nothingness drawers.

And behold, beneath that stack of unholey socks

and yellowed t-shirts (that don’t quite fit),
there between my anemic eyes my blind
fingers score a vagrant fantasy wadded up
inside  the pocket of the cutoff jeans
I wore just last spring right before
my legs turned gray and thin
before my hair turned  thin and gray
before reality turned grey and grey . . . er.

A street corner someplace, somewhere,

a Banshee scream in my ear,
a throbbing stab at the back of the skull.
I remember. I think, I remember. My gut
recalls a lightning punch ,and one other
across the temple. And an explosive thud,
bare knuckles smashed against the lower lip.
Teeth splintering, saliva, blood and sweat
coughed up into the gutter. I recall it all
and wonder why I recall it all . . . at all.

Slammed face first onto the ground.

My fear punctuated by a thuggish boot
across the throat, that sudden rip of cartilage.
“That’s all she wrote, my brothers. My nose
won’t recognize my face no more,” that’s
what I’m thinking. I won’t remember a day
when my boyish look lacked scar tissue.

24837 days counted down or up or sideways—

The newscaster pulled me out of a thick sleep:

“On this bright blue sky morning,
a Dove has been murdered by Crows.
On this bright blue sky morning
one pure white cloud wept silently.”
The wind, however, raged and raged
for it is never happy when it rains.

Why would feathered carnivores eagerly destroy

the beautiful song the white Dove sang?
Simplest explanation? Well hell, they’re Crows,
What should we expect from them?

My ears will miss his voice though only for a moment or two.

They’ll forget his sweet sound even before the day is done
because there are more troubling things to wonder about.

The passing of a Dove is a minor sadness compared

to everything else that’s going on, keeps going on,
keeps moving on, a rush down the drainpipe.

But that’s how we survive.

That’s how we continue.
We keep moving.
On and on, keep moving on
until we can’t or will not
move anymore.

Written by Woodie

for his 68th birthday
May 23, 2o16