Who It Is

the thing about love is
it doesn't really matter
who it is you're making
it together beyond both

Ever Present

dreams disappear before I can remember
where I was what doing no getting back
it's like life though I know the landmarks
and can reconstruct the granular facticity
living it again feeling it again ever present
over done still needing to be clearly seen

Kabul

     It's impossible to think about anything today but the US defeat in Afghanistan, which after 20 miserable years and $2 trillion only took a few days. Intelligence saw it coming but leadership didn't listen, didn't get organized in spite of thousands of professionals paid for exactly this. The vaunted and costly American military proved totally incompetent. We are unable even to make an orderly exit as the Taliban resume control.
      It makes one notice and question the smug subconscious assumption that someone is in charge and in control, that someone knows what's going on, as the plane has a pilot, the orchestra a conductor who knows the score. Despite fire, ice storm, pandemic, and personal shrinkage, we maintain our apparent stability, thinking order is the norm. How else go on? We are not in Afghanistan, which is a special case, as are we in our woebegone disarray, in which I somehow floated into a privileged niche—privileged from birth assumed I'd always be and made it happen. The culture collapsed into screen-gazing. My dual metiers, newspapers and theatre, are both effectively gone, books not far behind. What elite do I represent? Or misrepresent? A tiny percentage of so many people is still a world: mine, which has nothing to do with farming and small-town virtue. What am I doing here? Well, that's the way it fell out, and it works. I'm free.
       So awful as it is, let it keep going. Let us not be fleeing for our lives, or told how to live. Let us be ourselves as naturally and purely as we can, and kind to one another. Let us hope our leaders will be more realitic and not let it all come crashing down.
 

Familiar Pleasure

laying out the cards
at the end of a solitary evening
I felt the familiar pleasure
thought relax be happy
and that was all it took 

Dead Again

 dead friends visit me in dreams
and leave me doubly sad
dead again

even in life I wanted more than I
could take even offered
I declined

writing it down won't help much
but it's the only thing
I can do

I still desire their entire attention
no longer theirs to give
mine to lose

What Else

 what else might there be
after everything is done
except tiresome chores
smile for the camera or
look serious and serene
this is the face I put on
without real intention
masking a self within
aching for recognition

Still Water

hiss of rain falling on still water
remembered from boyhood on the lake
in Minnesota everything has changed
all are gone the sound remains

Old Clothes

feeling my age I dissolve
into furniture air
blows through me freely
only my heart beats

sitting up to write down
words imagined flat
I regret nothing recorded
against the future present

I won't be there to see it
barely now resolve
detail mix up numbers
for two-step verification

take my word for being me
between raindrops
changing the same old clothes
for another opening

Personal Calm

 too many people after one or none
each manifesting rampant person
too loud or deliberately hushed I
can't take it all in don't want to
keep up or compete to impose
my own taste for coming forward
on the stage and personal calm
until I lose myself in Suzan-Lori
Parks' rich brew of civil sympathy
everybody acting better than real

Equal Sitting

 the suffocating materiality of the present
emerges from among words about music
as if harmonies could replace philosophy
reading equal sitting at an actual concert

would I bother to go if I could I doubt it
although glad I did while I still wanted to
my appetite for new experience has waned
the moment expanding into immateriality