Jacqui, A Portrait

Faces

Lincoln was called a tyrant,

Man of liberty.

That's how misconstrued

A human brain can be.

Never a Camelot.

In don't think JFK

Fell asleep in tears

Listening to the play.

The cops and Daniel White

And others of their ilk

Made the golden city

Inferior to Milk.

Throughout the universe,

Generous or meek,

Fools look at a gentle man

Mistakenly as weak.

11-14-13

 

TA Residue

Fourteen months of therapy,

A semester more in school -

Transactional Analysis -

The rules without a rule.

Somehow can I salvage

Something from the games

That summarize behaviors

And have peculiar names?

To solve your daily problems

Sensibly and well,

Then go a little crazy.

There never was a spell.

11-14-13

 

Grief

The feelings that you lacerate,

The tipsy boat you sink,

When you bruise religion

By saying what you think.

Not everyone's a tyrant

Or homophobe. A clown

Is harmless. Some are needy.

Splash them and they drown.

11-14-13

Family Life

Only your mother's allowed to attack.

And all of her neighbors say “yes”.

Seven's the hour for hitting the sack,

And asking the angels to bless.

God made your daddy sardonic as hell,

Flatulent, pompous, supreme.

When you are grown up, get out of the spell.

But things aren't a bit as they seem.

11-14-13

Talk

Writers unlike Rupert Brooke

Just have a need to talk.

It's not enough to write a book.

But in a world of chalk

Conversation with the free,

Interspersed with rock,

Tattoos, rap and vanity,

Is superficial schlock.

To quote the wit of Wilde at play,

Tell anecdotes of Hart

And Hesse, til you're rolled away

In a wooden cart.

11-14-13

 

The Geyser

I wrote a lot of songs this afternoon.

I won't write another one tonight.

Both of them insist I should keep writing,

Success will come, and one that it is here.

To drill for water, then to tap a vein

And see the geyser burst into the air!

Crystal water, clear and fresh and clean!

To bathe in it like rain, or like the sea.

11-15-13

 

Remembering

I don't recall their names or faces,

Only what they said,

Significant or clever sayings.

When all of us are dead

And there is no one to remember,

And the air is clear,

Other ones will populate

The place and call it dear.

11-15-13

Jacqui, A Portrait

Tricky Jacqui. Wasn't she?

The mistress of the games.

For someone so loquacious

Who never said a thing

That anyone with common sense

Could hope to understand,

Everything was underhanded,

All deals from the bottom,

Unless you interrupted her.

Then she was explicit.

And Jesus! How I hated her,

Tangled in the yarn

Of her psychotherapy.

Beaten. Left for dead.

Getting well

Meant getting rid of Jacqui.

11-15-13