May, 2025
now browsing by month
09 – Room 814
2024 – Monument Hospital, Rapid City, South Dakota looking out in the Black Hills, surrounded by Indian Reservations, Rosebud, Pine Ridge, Standing Rock. People live here. People die here. I come in peace. Yet somewhere along the road a staphylococcus infection enters my body, attacks my skin, my organs, my life. The people in the blue uniforms attack the bacteria, bombard them with medicines, slice open flesh, drain swamp. Other people in white uniforms bring me food. I am housed, clothed, fed. Bells ring at all hours of the day and night. It is not church. Outside the grassroots wave and hint of wind. Helicopters come and go on emergency missions. It is possible to do yoga on the floor and my practice significantly improves. There are medication‘s for pain, there is meditation for brain. Beyond Room 814 armies clash, humans perish, they attack like bacteria but are crueler and more intentional. I feel safe here, cared for in ways I have never been cared for lo these long 80+ years on the planet. I accept my fate with gratitude. I needed to rest before continuing the journey.
SOUL’S JOURNEY 2023
TRAVEL
The Furry Bug
On a humid, dark, cloudy summer night,
Temperature still in the high seventies,
Streetlights not working,
I step out the door as a huge fluttering bug
Flies smack into my lips.
I do not see it.
I know it is not a moth or mosquito,
More a furry flying beetle of some sort.
And just as I do not see it, I do not hear it.
Rather I feel its flutter and the soft thud
As it crashes straight into the very center of my closed mouth,
Smack in the middle of my pressed lips.
I blow and brush it away quickly,
Feeling its dimensions only slightly.
I respond in surprise and shock,
But without fear or disgust.
I know at once that I have been sweetly touched
Not assaulted or attacked.
And though my rational mind recognizes it as probability expressed,
A happenstance of fate
A random intersection of invertebrate and human,
I am aware instantly of having been kissed by a beautiful stranger,
A princess living in the body of a bug,
The light but explicit tap tap tap of god’s finger
Calling forth my attention.
“Hey you,” the bug commands with her furry kiss,
“Wake up, we’re in this together, man.
Live life fully aware
And appreciative of me,
Fly around in the muggy dark night
Kissing strangers with me,
Let’s be in each other’s company as much as we can bear.”
Later I stand inside the rushing waters
Of a mountain stream
Spray frosting my face
Pulled along by a frightening, exciting, inexorable flow to the sea.
I am the water.
I kiss your lips.
Poetry
Homage to an Unattractive Woman
The most unattractive woman I ever made love with –
I know you think that unkind –
had a seizure disorder and took dilantin,
but had a wonderful mind.
Her teeth were rotted,
she was short and quite plump,
had stubbly hairs on her face,
wore glasses, even in bed …
and bloomers.
Her hair was a mess,
her knees were knobby,
when she opened her mouth
saliva stuck to her upper and lower palate.
She was an English teacher
in love with poetry,
romanticism,
Bharati Mukherjee
and Alan Ginsburg
She even looked like Alan Ginsburg,
laughed like him,
turned in onto herself,
aware of who she was,
and how she appeared,
and the fact that she had you in bed
and was going to enjoy it.
She had slept with my best friend Henry,
who I also adored.
She even loved him,
as did I.
He was so handsome
so beat,
and just the right mixture of
longshoreman and literary intellectual.
I was clearly her second choice,
as well it should be.
Her mind was brilliant
Her hands were a mess
Her clothes were a mess
She was brutally honest
Lovely in her way
Especially naked.
Her courage was more daunting than Henry’s
who is still in hiding,
her thighs softer,
she made nicer noises,
and never belched
or maybe she did.
I don’t remember everyone I ever slept with,
but here’s to a beautiful woman I do remember,
her name, in truth, was Linda.
POETRY
Bharati Mukherjee
Crow Blacker Than Ever – Ted Hughes
When God, disgusted with man,
Turned towards heaven.
And man, disgusted with God,
Turned towards Eve,
Things looked like falling apart.
But Crow . . Crow
Crow nailed them together,
Nailing Heaven and earth together –
So man cried, but with God’s voice.
And God bled, but with man’s blood.
Then heaven and earth creaked at the joint
Which became gangrenous and stank –
A horror beyond redemption.
The agony did not diminish.
Man could not be man nor God God.
The agony
Grew.
Crow
Grinned
Crying: ‘This is my Creation,’
Flying the black flag of himself.
(This poem may seem odd to some. It is one of a few dozen
crow poems in Hughes’ entire book of crow poems, Crow.
Hughes had a very dark side. Just ask Sylvia Plath.)
The Shyness – Sharon Olds
Then, when we were joined, I became
completed, joyful, shyer.
I may have shone more, reflected
more, and from deep inside there rose
some glow passing steadily through me, but I was not
small, in a raftered church, or in
playing, now, I felt like someone
a cathedral, the vaulted spaces of the body
like a sacred woods. I was quiet when my throat was not
making those iron, orbital, earth,
rusted, noises at the hinge of matter and
whatever is not matter. He takes me
into the endings like another world at the
center of this one, and then, if he begins to
end when I am resting and I do not rejoin him yet
then I feel awe, I almost feel
fear, sometimes for a moment I feel
I should not move, or make a sound, as
if he is alone, now,
howling in the wilderness,
and yet I know we are in this place
together. I thought, now is the moment
I could become more loving, and my hands moved shyly
over him, secret as heaven
and my mouth spoke, and in my beloved’s
voice, by the bones of my head, the fields
groaned, and then I joined him again,
not shy, not bold, released, entering
the true home, where the trees bend down along the
ground and yet stand, then we lay together
panting as if saved from some disaster, and for ceaseless
instants, it came to pass what I have
heard about, it came to me
that I did not know I was separate
from this man, I did not know I was lonely.
Growing Old – Emma Rosenberg
Growing Old – Emma Rosenberg, age 13, to me, November, 2002
The clock awakens
Ticking through time
The boy grows older
Abandoning nursery rhymes.
He learns to read,
Write, and talk
Goes through school
Books, tests, and chalk.
To a bright future he heads
Aging too fast
Going through college
Using his skills from the past
The boy, now a man
Becomes a lawyer
Happily marries
Is his own employer
He grows older
Wiser too
Still fresh and hip
As he was at age two
He reaches sixty-two
A perfect age to be
Is wished happy birthday
By his good old friend, me.
