When you’re eighty-four, and wake up each day
With a creaky hip and a swollen foot,
With a body stiff, pretty much kaput,
You wonder at the lyrics of decay.
Our famous Bard revealed naiveté
With metaphors for age’s attributes—
Bare boughs, dark night, cold ash—the lyric roots,
The tender images for Death’s sure prey.

Of course, he didn’t take ten pills each day,
And “bare boughs” do not convey the sharp pain
Of arthritic stabs or dread entropy—
Neither “night” nor “ashes” image the weight,
The misery, the baleful strain, the drain
Of prepping for a colonoscopy.
(3/21/14)

Find a woman,
Raise kids.
But work, always work,
Which steals your time,
Controls all thought.

Meanwhile
There’s war,
Always war,
Propelled by greed
Or ordered by
The one true god.

Then, way old,
Retired,
Beyond volunteering,
Unencumbered,
You have the space and time
To figure out what life is all about
Just before you,
Like every other living thing
On this pustular planet,
Doomed,
Die.
(2/27/14)

Though shy at first, she loosened up, perceived
Our admiration harbored no vile threats,
And greeted us with smiles, despite regrets
That festered, generating toxic grief.

Her beauty notwithstanding, she, divorced,
Lost custody of her three school-aged kids,
Lost self-esteem, presence, stunned by the din,
The anguish, that grim experience forced
On her. She hugged Ginger, breathed fumes that rid
Her of malignant pain beneath the skin.
(2/16/14}

The weather, unimpressed,
Has been grim gray,
Chilled and rainy
From sunrise on—
Which, of course,
Imposes the usual debit
On these old and weary bones.

Eighty-four is no joke.
Those years a tough,
Silent and unresponsive audience,
While I try,
I really do,
To rejoice
And have some fun,
Exhibit a bit of gratitude
Despite the wind,
And rain,
And the diseased world
All of us
Inhabit.
(2/6/14)

His son is a godhead named Jesus
Appointed by pop to reprieve us.
He loves us we’re told,
A saver of souls,
So why does he fiercely bereave us?

The good stuff, we’re told, comes from god,
And men create woe (that seems odd)—
Now Falwell is dead,
And Robertson’s fled,
Who’ll tell us why this fierce jihad?

Just what was the Philippine’s sin
That justified typhoon Haiyan?
Divine mystery
Festoons history,
And tangles its yang with its yin.

We sinners attract our gods’ wrath,
They punish with holy bloodbaths,
Use foes, floods and plague,
With motives quite vague—
Those sacred divine psychopaths.
(11/16/13)

The stuff we yearn
To hear and taste.

But then
The daily news intrudes.

Over a hundred killed
Stampeding to a Hindu shrine.
A schoolboy shoots a teacher
And himself.
Scores of innocents killed
By careless drone strikes.
Egyptian Islamists
Raid a wedding party
At a Coptic church.
Six bombed to death
On a Russian bus.
Seven bombed to death
On a Pakistani train.
Our largest bank
Offers thirteen billion
To cure its criminality.
Twenty thousand children
Die every day
From malnutrition
And preventable disease.
Twenty thousand, every day.

All this, an iceberg’s
Puny tip.

How?
How can we heed
The happy refrain,
And just, dammit,
Just
Let the sun shine in?
(10/23/13)

We rant about the messy world,
Tell jokes, admire female skin,
Exhibit energy unfurled,
Expressing merriment, chagrin.

Night falls, the energy is spent.
We take to beds and lie awake,
Our aches and pains and old torments,
Plain venomous, entwine like snakes.

The dark is more than literal,
Becomes a metaphor for hope
Drowned in old age, funereal—
Our dreams a blank kaleidoscope.
(9/29/13)

What, one wonders, constitutes a moral
Obscenity? It means, I guess, disgust,
Unwillingness to constrain a quarrel
To bitter foes refusing to adjust.

Their venom spills, consuming innocents,
When battle violence becomes obscene
At Jericho, and concentration camps,
In Syria, when nerve gas kills, unseen.

America, empathic, won’t abide
Obscene, immoral slaughter in the East.
Our hearts, exceptional and dignified,
Forget the giant obscenity unleashed

By us on Hiroshima’s citizens
And Nagasaki’s unwarned innocents.
(8/29/13)

The college girl may groan—that paper’s due.
The Prof may sigh; he has to grade the quiz
By nine o’clock; and businessmen eschew
Their coffee, dreaming bonus-building tricks.

Some wake to days of opportunity
They work and garden, often volunteer—
They revel in each day’s activity;
Spend evenings with hors d’oeuvres and foamy beer.

At eighty-three, back pinched, joints scored with grit,
I wake and moan: “Another day—oh shit!”
(8/5/13)

I’ve never quite understood what “soul” means.
There, tumultuous, underneath the skin,
Empathy and ego ebb, flow, careen
Through consciousness like unleashed yang and yin.

Just where does gratification abide—
In hot sex, wealth, nourishing our egos,
Or in empathic warmth that feeds our pride
When we diminish others’ painful throes?

Remember infantile paralysis?
At eleven, it took Len’s legs away
While in summer camp. Later, on that day,
His mom stared at the iron lung and hissed!

Judge! Which spoke—her ego or empathy,
When she wailed “How could you do this to me”?
(7/27/13)