LAST LESSONS OF THE AFTERNOON

Imaginary Garden With Real Toads

Didn't send anything 
to your journal this time
didn't send anything to
your contest 
(after winning it last year)
give someone else a chance
I said
but the truth is it's just too much
goddamn trouble 
for little reward

Like a lot of things

Like life
mostly

But you're expecting
a poem 
of course you are
that's why you're here...

So let's not disappoint:

Last lessons of the afternoon
your last drive
I said, this misery must end

The rolling English road
bagpipe music
anthem for doomed youth

Buffalo dusk
full moon
what are years?

Look within
the lost man
not waving 
still drowning

I remember the woman
 at the Washington Zoo
wearing flames and dangling wire 
a kiss in space
a taste
tangerine
Xmas trees
the end of love
going
going
gone

All day it rained 

Fuck you 

Imaginary Garden With Real Toads

With Real Toads--d'Verse Poets Pub

rotting fruits and vegetables

atop the compost heap--

breeze wafting my way

spring rain

tires splashing--

you dripping by

sexy dream

suddenly interrupted...

cat's paws

THE WHITE HOTEL

Down in the canyon near the white hotel

there grows a flower whose spirit

belongs more to the sky than to the earth,

and if you listen closely when the wind is right

you can hear it singing "I Get The Blues When It Rains."

Inside the white hotel our eyes met with no formal introduction.

I was a writer who had run out of ink.

You were a fly-by-nighter trying to wangle a drink--

a nun on the run who no longer made a habit

out of seeing the world in black and white.

And me, just out of seminary school,

still wet behind the ears,

but ready to get my feet wet as well.

We were like wind chimes on the verandah--

when the wind sang we all chimed in,

anthem to a blue chrysanthemum

that grows in the winding Canyon Of Love.

When you sang, you thought you were Billie Holiday.

I thought I was Billy The Kid,

so I stuck my gun in your ribs

and said, "Your honey or your life!"

We were busy as bees after that,

holing up in our hive--

room eleven-oh-five--

listening to jive and getting a buzz on.

You moved like music

and you tried every number on me you knew.

All summer I roamed your hills and valleys

where orgasms in dark chasms

brought on the rain.

When the season ended you sent me packing,

lugging your baggage and mine...

you were traveling light.

Making a bee-line for the exit,

you trampled the blossom

that longed only for the same kind of freedom.

Now I'm standing here in these juicy shoes...

JUICY SHOES?

Oh Jesus, I've got to think about that one...

think about why I drank the dank skank of your love,

when all you ever said to me was, "HELLO, ROOM SERVICE?"

Down in the street a forlorn horn

laments what should have been a foregone conclusion

to one so prone to illusion,

as the mist forms upon my window

and I think about a flower

that sang, "I Get The Blues When It Rains."