My Day

I tumble about every day
You’d think that at my age
there should be more clarity
Days would be unscathed by forlorn
yet as the days experience unfolds
reality sets in with human angst
Ennui is my personal battle
and I try so hard
sometimes with unappreciated pretense
to make someone, during the day, smile or laugh
Amidst this tedium, I welcome the happy wagging
of tails from my two mini-poodles
as they peer up at me with their soulful eyes
awaiting the reciprocity
of my required incessant petting
and sincere love
This makes my day
and now we await
to enter into this moment of joy
my wife, my lover, my friend, their mother

My Theme

It is hard to let go of the things from youth
and when one does due to aging restrictions
the unappreciated moments of the time
the fond memories, linger

My dreams and reveries flow unrestricted of those things
The memories of when I ran faster than I really did
Had Herculean strength beyond my capabilities
Climbed with youthful ease escarpments above my reach

With much pleasure I do remember
when my voice could ring like morning birds who sing
with vocals of angelic themes
inspired from a domicile of surrounding music
sung by Mother’s early morning waking songs

This exercise of vocals has not waned
In her passing the morning’s waking still remain
I can hear her languish in that Spanish refrain
with the passion of a Latina Mother’s heart
that also taught me how to Love

Ah, ‘si‘, and of that thing called ’love’
She taught me how to share
with my mind, my spirit, my heart
not just with my eyes or hands
those things restricted, she’d say,
the ways and limitations of Man’s

I leave behind those youthful fares
the sometimes unappreciated wares
a history that has made me who I am
retaining the things that do not age
of which I can perpetuate,
the loving and the care

Words; no Apologies

Sometimes I write without editing my words
I gather them unsolicited and spontaneously,
they come together with the whimsy of a child’s
format and expression, simple and not rhyming
neither in meter or timing
but I have found that sometimes the innocence
of this method is purer and truer
My thoughts are expressed
like a daisy or dandelion that has interrupted
one’s manicured and pristine yard
Like a neighbor’s dog that barks late at night
or a tiny twig that finds a home between
the naked toes when wearing sandals in a trail
or a pebble finds its way
as cool sand sifts on naked feet
while strolling in a warm day
on an ocean beach

I wish these words to express with pureness
like when the patter or beat of my heart
first felt an indulging desire for another,
a lust of a young boy becoming a man
when first noticing a woman’s curves
The wondrous flow of her hair
her eyes, her nose upon an effeminate face,
the titillating flair of her luscious lips and smile
down to her soft exposed shoulders that compose
the setting for her lovely bosoms or breasts,
a daunting yet quietus desire of every man

I wish these words to express a spontaneity
without apologies for not abiding
or encumbered by imposing editing
to a set of rules and ‘bylaws’ on writ
an innocent surprise like the expressed widened eyes
of a child’s first vision
to the miracle of a ’Mariposa’

Smell don't Pluck

I walk amidst the dandelions
the lavender the roses and the mint
smelling their wondrous fragrance
observing the pureness of their
purples, reds, whites and yellows
without separating them from their stems

Must one pluck the flower from it’s root
and selfishly not allow others
to also observe its beauty from where it stands
amidst and from Mother Nature’s hands
to be free to grow and play in the breeze
and show of it’s colorful display
upon the back ground of a verdant dress
where upon the bumble bee can nest
and pollinates another batch
for others to walk amidst
and also share its beauty
its arrayed caress

Is not Love much like this botanical display
it can be appreciated as a soulful heart
that pervades through dusks and dawns
enraptured by the gleeful eyes
and also shared through tears forlorn
it cannot be plucked and horded
never depleted or stolen from its nest
it is shared amidst the hearts
there is love enough for all

Slowing Time

How do I slow time down?
I know; minimize looking forward
Appreciate the moment
Try to refrain the time spent
on nostalgia or reminiscing
Memories are enjoyable if they
spontaneously come to mind
but not allowing the past to
swallow you up or wallow in it
Appreciate the friends and family
that surround
Accept that they and everything
are transitory by ‘life’s law’
Be able to release that which is near
Take deep breaths,
Listen to sounds of nature
Enjoy the sights of verdant scopes and blue shores
Azure skies with cumulus figurines
Sounds of children playing
A loved one’s warm hand embrace
Music, music, and more music
Read the writ of others’ sights, sounds and heart
Have the ‘pen’ at ready
capturing the moment

Cyber Humanity

Music of Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, Segovia, all flow through me as I journey in my mind while my body is sedentary. I travel in the space of others as I read their minds and hearts through their pen in the medium that now makes us all accessible and vulnerable.

The cyber ‘blogs’ that provide a conduit to each others personal space that before could not be experienced allow sharing of heart felt thoughts and the simple daily mundane that is our lives. This cyber community provides us an opportunity to share a human condition as never before spending time with each other, strangers otherwise. We can sit in each others home and pet your dog or see how your closet holds the choices of clothes, their colors, their style indigenous in the far away land of where one lives. The setting of your kitchen table, the food you consume, the literature you read, the music that you choose to listen. The faces that share your bed and sit next to you and embrace you warmly when all else exists outside your domicile domain as lights are dimmed and your head rests on your pillow for the nights refrain.

I sit here in comfort and peace in the pleasure of leisure that is made more poignant or significant when viewing the photo shots, stills, that bring into my world a child’s face, unwashed because there is no access to the luxury of a washroom let alone the luxury of clean water. At this moment I sit listening to the timber of guitar strings being precisely trilled and fretted by a genius in his craft. I'm viewing a ‘youtube’ video of the devastation to our gulf and wild life as crude oil spills, the result of an explosion to a man made drill well. Then there’s the video showing a flooded Nashville, Tennessee that has left many families homeless and the loss of life. Most personal to me are the video’s and stories I’m seeing and reading concerning the inhumane treatment of Mexican people in the state of Arizona by a stoke of a pen. Whether walking or riding in a car, one is stopped and asked for ‘papers’. Anecdotally, imagine a mother, who has her papers, is walking or driving her kids to get ice-cream, taking them to school or the grocery store, she forgets to bring her papers and is stopped by police. She is hand cuffed in front of her children and taken to a holding station, jail or otherwise. She must convince her incarcerators who are of the mindset that all who look like her, dark skin latina, are without rights and are held for hours until they can retain an attorney or get a relative or friend to go to their home and get their papers. The community she now resides in has been inculcated with the ‘mass hysteria’ that anyone with black hair and tan dark skin is the focus of blame identifying that all ‘crimes’ being committed against the ’white skin’ people who also believe that the land in which they reside is theirs by right of their own legislated and implemented laws. The brown skin people who had resided there many years prior to the ’white skin’ people forcing them out of this land is now an environment where ‘the Mexicans’ are ‘illegal’ in their own land. It saddens me because underlying and surreptitious in this mindset is the nefarious and insidious bellowing of prejudice and bigotry.

The irony of this access is that although we are now in each others lives, a distance is created in a vicarious existence from actual human contact and all the nuances of real human empathy.

Rain

It falls from way up high
If you look straight up while it’s falling
it looks like translucent streaks of meteorites
angrily attacking the earth of where you stand
When it hits your face
it refreshingly stings but only for a micro second
then it splatters into a wet cool
It runs down your cheek and neck
Your ears fill with small puddles
Your hair flattens but glistens in a sheen
You can feel trickles run down your bare arms
Your t-shirt becomes heavy wet
Then your pants are weighted
and you can feel your socks and shoes
fill with a 'squishy' feel
This is a welcome rain

At times when you see it coming
you run from it as if the drops are
slings of demon arrows
If you don’t hide from them or
take shelter from their pummel
they will destroy the vanity
that you’ve cosmetically created
and this persona will be destroyed
Like the mythical figure that turned around
to look and consequently turned into salt
This rain becomes an unwelcome nemesis

Gray days sometimes last forever
The constant little pings that strike
the window panes as your saddened eyes
stare out and although those drops that fall from above
never touch your face they magically appear
Trickling down your cheeks
They seem to escape in a ductile purge
that evokes a sniffling response
and a deep pensiveness emoting
a nostalgia with a focus upon grief
from loves lost and loves unrequited
This is a rain both unwelcome and yet welcome

Birthday Dance

Today, April 25, I choose to dance
my hips may no longer move freely
as my real ones once could
but my heart, my spirit still wish to dance

There’s music all around
if not, then why do birds sing
with the soft and rhythmic chords
played by the breeze and wind

The trees they also sway
the flowers and wild growth play
and if I look upon the seas
they ripple and they wrinkle
bringing upon the shore
a crescendo bass, a roar

If my legs hold out
I will once again dance
upon the trails that beckon my approach
with every step I take
upon pines and maple leaves
fallen from the forest trees

The sounds of broken twigs
are followed by scurrying sounds
and the rustling abounds
of tiny ground forest dwellers,
and their friends perched on limbs
the kindred songs of pine warblers

These dance steps that I now partake
come from my heart, my soul
in celebration along with a birthday cake
With love of life on this day
my Mother gave me birth,
Ironically, on this same day of the year
three years ago, it seems so near,
she left onto that other journey,
one we must all travel through ’happenstance’,
reminding me, that whilst I’m here,
and while I can, yes, I must dance!

Morning

My feathery friends in the morning wake
Share playful songs of praise
attesting to the suns brilliant rays
Arising to await the joy
Of another day

When I walk into your space
that gentle look upon your face
your soft blue eyes stare into mine
And with a warm caress
our arms gather each other close
In a love filled embrace
Causing our two hearts
in synchrony, to race

This gives worth
To my day

Filling the Void

Alone; I used to be saddened by the concept.
I used to see it in my mother’s eyes,
in her tears when she wouldn’t know I’d see her crying.
I would think about her life and how our father left her
abandoned us, me, never to see him or hear his voice.
Mother gave us a picture of him one Christmas
when I was already thirty three.
She tried to share her life with other men
but we were of a different culture and too many of us.
I don’t think they truly cared for her or us
so they, too, abandoned us and I ‘felt’ her being alone.
When I could not have new shirts, pants
or shoes but only ‘used‘ and ‘hand-me-downs
I wouldn’t talk in school and walk home alone.
Later, too soon, I realized an emptiness filled our home
when once we had shared space, laughing and fighting,
singing and crying, now all have gone their own way.
Life has elucidated so, that ‘friends‘ are like leaves in trees,
they come and they go. Should I take this personally?
My lovely wife sometimes loves me, I know my ‘kids’,
Jules and Jaz, our two miniature poodles, do.
I now read prolifically, quite often living vicariously
in the written words of others.
Traveling the world, it would be fun, not just to visit
but to live as ‘Romans do“ and somewhere doing something
selflessly. A replacement to an emptiness, to the feeling of being alone.
Alone, we are all alone, it is ’the reality’!
I am no longer saddened by it,
but accept and understand how to fill the void.

Possum

It seemed to be hobbling slowly, as if inebriated, across my neighbors front lawn. Not knowing what type of wild life it was, I carefully walked toward it as it persist to stumble, aimlessly, without fear of my approach. Then it gingerly sat its haunch on the ground starring at me with its narrow snout, Grayish was its hair with a long leathery tail and leathery looking black ears. Sitting there it just stared at me as I approached closer. A blank stare almost of wonderment as it, with a preceding head wobble, fell side ways onto the grass. Laying there, all of a sudden it raised its upper torso and turned its head once more to look at me. It was a look of bewilderment staring at me almost in a query asking ‘why?’. It then slowly rested its head onto the grass and somehow I knew it was its last life effort. When it looked at me I felt sad and at the same time guilty that I couldn’t do anything to help not knowing what its situation was and also being inexperienced at rescuing this type of wild life. As it lay their for a moment, I now approached closer to see if there were chest or stomach movement, indications of breathing. I notice the belly moving about and at first I thought it was still breathing. At closer observation, I noticed a tiny little clawed foot and a tiny long prehensile looking tail, pink color like a new born baby’s skin, attempting to shimmy out of its pouch. This is when I deduced it was a possum marsupial. A mom that had just taken its last breath because it just lay there without chest breathing movement and now its eyes were wide open and glassed over.

Earlier, I had called animal control when first I saw it gingerly ambling across the front lawn of my next door neighbors house. They had not arrived yet and I felt helpless and surprisingly saddened to where I felt a tear trickling from my eyes and tickling down my cheek. It was that last struggling look toward me that had been impressed upon my human empathetic memory. When, finally, the wild life officer pulled up and observed the now stiff body laying down I pointed out the movement in mamas pouch and explained to him the movement of her stumbling about that I had observed prior to her expiring. He said it sounded like it had been poisoned. As he picked her up from the tail, a now stiff body, he proceeded to say, seeming sympathetic, that some wild life whose carcasses had been found recently showed indications of poisoning with anti-freeze. He stated that if this was one of those indications, even though they would try to keep it alive, the little one in the pouch would probably not survive.

As he pulled away I recalled that wide eyed life ending stare from ‘mom’, taking her last breath, was more a look at me as a human species rather than as an individuals inability to help another living being. I, unabashedly, sat down in my front lawn and soulfully cried. This, a dark cloud on an otherwise beautiful sunny warm Spring day.

Spring Dance

Warm, your breadth arrives
of lavender lilac and white wisteria
it awakens all from a wintry sleep
Your welcoming presence evokes
a dress of colorful freshness

sounds of feathered flocks
cast shadows in the sky
and terrestrials rustle and scamper about
filling the air with the sounds of flirtatious whistles
and teasing chirps and caws

The mirrored ponds long hard and still,
now wave and dance in step
with the gentle swirling breeze
causing its inhabitants
to peek out above and observe
the dance of Spring

'just think'n'

On this canvas where I am but a small spatter
where a paint brush is spontaneously flung and
I hang on with dear life onto the fibers till I dry in time
and that brush then paints with different strokes and colors
around me and I become integral to the scene
captured by the creators eye and in his
imaginative vision I exist

Simple

Simple is the man who sits outside to sell his wares.
Throughout the day he sits in rain and cold
with a back that aches, legs and fingers cramp,
complaints are few for his eyes have seen what wars can do
and this, simply, he does in order to eat and share
with those for whom he cares.

His wife who bears their children
and makes the wares he sells,
cooks the food they buy
and warms the home they all sleep in,
she truly is the ‘telltale heart’.

The arduous daily tasks are made simple
with smiles and embraces attempting to hide
the struggle and strife of Life’s woes
and man’s soulful lamentations
with its constant struggle of understanding
the creation of our Universe whether of chaos and spontaneity
or intervention from Divinity
and Man’s proclivity of a destructive affinity.

Simplicity is that the sky hovers high,
the wind blows and moves the trees, the flowers and the seas,
birds ride the waves of the wind
and sea ferrying creatures ride the ocean tides,
the stars poke the night with tiny beacons of light
until the moon harkens upon the darken sky.

As time travels and it gathers with delight
all that has been sleeping in the night,
the Sun raises it’s head
and its magnificent arms of light stretch out,
it awakens the simple man.

Life, So

Fleeting is Life, so

Memories grow

Friends have become careless shadows

Taste buds taste less without salt and jalapenos

Folds on skin show greater prominence
Like the wrinkles of the sea have splashed upon my face

My eyes gather fog but not of Nature's natural veil
can barely see that light house standing all alone on a promontory
of broken rocks into the sea

Pace of step has slowed with aches and pain
like that aged cherry crab tree that sits alone
in the middle of my front yard with baron limbs
from it’s wintry sleep
stretching out contorted.

Desire for youthful things that I must let go, grow

Lament ascends, tears no longer flow but are captured by my swollen lids underneath my eyes

Pleasures are smaller, understanding more often,
sympathy and empathy runs rampant and free
replacing disdain and judgment
Hope and wish usurp angst

Minutes last significantly longer
Days and weeks become extraordinarily shorter
Awakening to morning sunrises are astoundingly more breathtaking,
refreshing, heaven sent, thankfully

frequency of conversations with God have spawned spontaneously
replacing the once rationalized, seeds of doubt

Blood 'Bro'

It has been said that when the mouth speaks
the ears are at rest and cannot listen
but in the same, silence is deafening
when there are words that should be spoken

Silence sometimes is a defense
when emotions have been assailed
by the sometimes daggers of words
that may have been carelessly thrust
into the shelter of a heart

This will always be the case
when hearts have shared a common place
when they have seen and toiled
through Life’s disdainful mire

But in the same, when they have shared
both tears of sad and joy
have unselfishly shared a piece of bread
and when a needed warmth of hand
in times of destitute and fear,
without hesitation, given of one’s time selflessly

This, all, should be lifelong
even when outside distractions pose challenges
in attempts to interfere with Love of family
and the bonds of kinship, of blood

‘Do not disdain portrayals of love nor feign affection
but receive with open arms and heart
Life’s every emanation
For loves they falter and tend to fade away
and hearts they get scorned and cry from day to day
Do not fold within like a flower at the end of it’s season
but always leave a little room to start again.’

Pedals in the Snow

Pedals of a flower nearing the end of its season
are released and drop as offerings
no longer needed for their aesthetics
though not left unnoticed,
for the soil is thankful
the earth shall give birth anew.

This is not unlike the sacrifice
when youth is no longer the face,
the color of thy hair shall shade of gray
and strength of legs now give way,
they no longer run like wind and jump so high
these youthful things are given up as offerings
and in their place is left a space
for gentle memories of seasons past

Change of seasons come and pass
as sun to rain, the night to day
like colors of the fall and Winters snow
one departs when the other calls
for the other to come forth and play

At Days End

When my day has come to its nocturnal transition,
I am reflective upon time spent
as to whether my presence has influenced
thought or laughter, compassion or empathy at minimum.

Did I assuage a down swirl of sadness
or mitigate for someone the slight of loneliness?

Did my words or deeds somehow illumine
what might have otherwise remained in the darkness
ill fated intentions and has otherwise caused into action
a worthy selfless deed?

Soon my words will be followed by action
when my pain has waned and once again
I can amble about as if my prosthetic hips were my own.
It must follow quickly, though, for I fear
My eyes are witnessing spotted shadows
that may soon fully block the light of day
and my sight must come from my ears
and gentle touch of hands.

I have not much to give in Material things
but will share with whomever wishes to accept
an open hand of care, coming from a never ending
storage of Love, my Heart.

Sunny Shadow

Gray is the day, once again,
ironically my thoughts are clearer,
my understanding more lucid.

My eyes capture the brightness,
the light that hides behind
that veil with the aid
of the reflections arising
from the tiny mirrors
of the mornings dew

After all, gray is the color of the shadows
that help us appreciate the sun.
I am grateful for
this shadowed day.

Wish and Envy

My night time reveries called dreams are cut short.
My eyes open wide abruptly escaping the pleasantries
of my thoughts and memories
for I wish these, again, to be realities.

Like the first time I walked amidst the trails
between those alpine covered mountains
that pierce through the hanging curtains of the skies
and that feeling comes o’er me of gasping air,
with pleased and tear filled, grateful eyes.

Like music when it filled our youthful ears
and all of life before us,
of friends together as we played
in muddy fields or in dance halls
when we would jump about in fearless fray
then hug each other, all, at the end of the day.

Like quiet walks when first we met,
holding hands feeling each others wet perspiration
that comes from the warmth of our desires.
Like all lovers must feel on their initial strolls
down pathways by the rivers bend,
we stop and face each other, place hands on each others waist,
staring in each others eyes without words being spoken,
our expressive swollen lips gently touch
and tongues searching like keys inserted into doors
awaiting entryways, openings, into lust filled spaces.

These moments now just memories
filling my dreams and daytime reveries
with envy and desires that they would be realities
once again and that my eyes would remain closed
enjoying the comfort of this restful sleep
that usurps the pangs of loneliness.