We’ve All Been Asleep

We've all been asleep for a dozen years,
So, when we wake, vigorously alive,
As the creeping armies of night arrive,
We will wash them out to sea with our tears.
The cannibals will have themselves to eat.
The king and queen will summon a viper
To drive away the song and the piper,
But hear only their own hearts cease to beat.
What we will make of our new universe
Depends (like the fine point of a spindle)
On how much pain or love we will kindle.
Will we invite a new, more evil curse?
Sleep on, nothing will happen while we do.
The prince's kiss has changed into a moue.

Tanka, 10/15/26

The loudest cricket

In my yard never ceases,

Except when I sleep.

He began so late this year,

My October turned August!

Note: Only male crickets chirp.

War

Nations fight War because they have no choice.
Men silence with bomb, rifle, and the sword —
Trying to bury Death's insistent voice
(Though a command is real War's godlike word).
By killing each other men will kill War,
At least that's what they're told by king and czar,
Dictator, minister, and president.

A doctor, my dad had to shoot a man,
A "Jap" who burst into his patients' tent.
War keened, "First, do harm!" — the man's blood ran.
We are all divided into two camps,
Those who fight a war and those who do not.
War offers the latter up to his champs,
Then rallies them all toward riot and rot.

The Four Elements

Eclipse ashes smudge the air

The four no longer breathe.

The earth is a sucking wound.

The earth is bud and bone.

What once was green is red.

What once was dead, aether. 

“Some still say they are four.

I tell you there are but three,”

Says Lady Cobweb twisting —

Ganglions dangling from a slot.

She checks her own pulse — blood

Beats like tines on a crosscut saw,

Always anything but a waltz,

Erratic, and nobody's fault.

Haiku, 10/6/26

I found this in pencil on the inside back cover of my ageless copy of Salinger's Franny and Zooey, which I've had since I was in my teens. There were several drafts. If you've read the book, you'll know there's a lot of Zen in it, which must have spurred me to write this haiku.

A broken pebble —

Sand and mountain together,

Also permanent.

Know One and Two

One

Some think trees know each other

As an unborn child knows its mother —

Receptivities to stasis and change

Continually rearrange

The molecules of a form of mind

As they perpetually unwind.

“Some think” has become all

That’s left of the old universal.

Two

We can’t tell anyone to know,

Don’t even know what knowing is,

Where it comes from, its genesis.

Things we know just come and go.

We can’t force anything to stay,

Especially anything we say.

Everything we know is “as though,”

A nothing become contingent,

Mindlessly intelligent.

There’s no bird smarter than a crow,

Or so it’s said by learned men,

Who can count from one to ten,

But find it hard to explain how

Crows never fly in a straight line.

As if seeking some strict design,

We fly from not wanting to know.

 

Haiku, 10/27/26

Light from a prism

Moves along my bedroom wall —

My sun’s opened eye.

Temptation

Temptation does not walk on legs
As long and thin as giraffe stilts.
It stomps like an elephant on eggs
Until it's churned a mess of guilt.
All the old men are full of denial,
As if that's all it took to be godly.
The Office is an empty trial
And determination works, oddly,
Better than love, if all you want
Is to know physical love, riches,
Hatred — sick powers of the tyrant.
I love how the hair shirt itches.

Six Lake Shore Haiku, September 2026

Haiku, 9/9/26

I think each wave is

New — unlike any other —

But I’m not a wave.

Haiku, 9/10/26

The lake horizon

Is a perfectly straight line —

It closes my eyes.

Haiku, 9/11/26

I watch the lake shore

Through bare trees and square windows —

Water floods the house.

Haiku, 9/12/26

The wind’s strong today —

Gull flotillas ride the waves —

Vanish between them.

Haiku 2, 9/12/26

There’s no more to say

About our time on the beach —

The sand says, “Go home.”

And from September 19, 2022

All gray and white, gulls,

Lake, and clouds. The banished sun

Slashed the horizon.

Rondeau for Ruth, on her birthday, 9/16/26

He knew euphoria the day they met.

He’s often felt so between then and now.

Was it the shy smile or searching brown eyes

Or how her eyelashes would lower and rise,

Like glinting perfection taking a bow?

How could any-day simple chance allow

Strangers meeting to result in a vow

And forty years devoid of pain or lies?

He knew euphoria the day they met.

His eye is protected by her eyebrow.

Their two hearts beat with a whisper and wow,

Not felt, but heard, always in sweet surprise.

No thought between them arrives in disguise.

They will never fail to remember how

They knew euphoria the day they met.

Two Haiku

Haiku, 9/12/26

The wind’s strong today —

Gull flotillas ride the waves —

Vanish between them.

Haiku, 9/11/26

I watch the lake shore

Through bare trees and square windows —

Water floods the house.

Haiku, 9/9/26

I think each wave is

New — unlike any other —

But I’m not a wave.

Haiku, 9/7/26

I sweep spiky beech

Tree shells from the lake house porch —

Shih-te laughs at me.

Note: Shih-te is an eccentric Zen figure always depicted with a broom and laughing, usually with his friend Hanshan.

Two Stump Speeches

“Some chose to run, many to hide

Inside their temples and rooms,

Where every one of them died

In incendiary tombs.

I ignore the mourning fog

Outside and inside my mind,

Hand in hand with Gog in Magog

And all the rest of my kind.

“What are these floods and fires

And stupidity admirers

(Viruses in a cracked petri jar)?

How can I fight the coming war

We’re already losing day by day

As I run, slower and slower, away?”

The Actor Acts Out

As I am “self,” I am more than I am.

I really only speak thus to myself.

My voice is always sweetly orotund,

But what I’m here to say is all mere sham.

I’ve earned a moiety of fame and pelf

And not once have I given a refund.

My fingers flick about like ten small swords,

Not as sharp as the edges of my words.

My visage contortions are a mirror

(That’s where I learned them) of your hapless souls;

Mine is a mimesis of your terror

As you nose up squinting from your mole holes.

Ah, sirrahs, let’s be friends. (I’m just joking!)

My playwright prints my words — gads, she’s smoking!

Note: Sirrah is an archaic term used as a form of address to men, boys, or children, 

often to express anger, impatience, or contempt.

NOW, A Sonnet on My 73rd Birthday

There's nothing there we haven't seen before,

But not so many times we can afford 

To hustle past. Let's promise each other --

Never commit the sin of being bored.

Besides, so much has changed in just a year.

The sun-rustled air seems even clearer.

The pattern of the leaves left in the trees

(Yes, the postcard days ended yesterday),

Suggests paragraphs full of ideas,

Things we think but never think to say.

The colors play the best part of the scene,

And we must grant each leaf its final bow.

If we could stay to watch the last careen

To the ground, we might settle then at Now.

War II, Terzata #46

It’s possible to destroy even hell

And turn evil to dust

With the dropping of shell after shell.

What remains is one man’s lust

Mating with his own cold will,

Giving birth to blood and rust.

Each bullet or bomb’s a pill

That plugs a hole in his brain.

Nothing is as still -- 

As is Ukraine,

Where a young child fell

And didn’t get up again —

Her killer dares her now to tell. 

IF, Sonnet #608

If the end doesn’t end, what then?

This moment is already contingent.

I dare you to count from one to ten,

To ignore a found dime, even a cent.

Each moment seems to come back to us

Like the wind in the tree’s susurrous.

We’ve never been here before to be.

Yesterday and tomorrow are empty.

If I walk around the block every day —

If the houses never look the same —

If flowers grow and trees disappear —

The sidewalk means don’t lose your way.

“If” might not misremember my name,

But won’t guarantee that I am here.

Haiku, 7/30/26

Midnight in July —

A cricket echoes my mind —

One sound from many —

The Master Builder

Lizards stick out forked tongues at each other
In their race to the top of gilded stairs,
Where they'll disappear because nothing's there.
Dogs climb ladders to trumpeters. Mother
Seeks to fill her empty basket with air.
Fireworks state the geometry of the day.
The man near the dry fountain sleeps his life away;
Because he can't understand a thing, he can't care.
Each window, pillar, arch, and capital,
Each wall, riser and tread, each finial,
Was hauled into place by now frozen block
And tackle, which the builders left behind
(Should they someday return). Here there's no clock,
Few shadows, no lights, only double bind
Architecture, mind alleys of the blind.

Warmonger

No bullet can penetrate my new skin,
Sleek and orange and exquisitely thin.
I'm so perfect now, a parade of me
Runs past the black flags of the armory.
I'm joined by a smart, lock-loaded army.
As we march, everyone behind his hood,
Goose-stepping, a phalanx — might over good —
We stare down the innocent and swarthy.

Scylla and Charybdis Have Fun with Odysseus

The most treacherous, the spawn-of-mythos

Murderer — mirage of a whirl pool

Beneath hanging cliffs -- who can’t even hunt,

Must make his fate, deep, and anonymous,

The passing by of the delicious fools —

Some polling pols in their pathetic punt.

Homebound, risking the Straits of Hormuz a

Sailor thought long on vicious Scylla --

Better hands full of mates torn asunder

Than let his rudderless vessel founder.

He straddled the prow with a golden shield

Upraised to fend off raking teeth and claws.

The monsters ignored him and scythed their yield,

Leaving the leader to his insane cause.

Narcissus Looking in the Pool

I should call that man a nattering ass

Who says he created my looking glass

Since I opened his mouth to amuse me

With my own exquisite philosophy.

No one can say I didn’t make the world

That flaps like a flag some soldier unfurled.

I needn’t apologize that I willed

To have that soldier spared, wounded, or killed.

There’s no one to extend my regrets to,

Except my entirely imagined “you.”

I make, making sure I can’t change today.

“Prove it!” you demand, which I made you say.

There’s only my beautiful Narcissus

And can be only him and me, no “us.”

Note: Narcissus looked into a clear, unblemished pool of water to see himself, which in Ovid's account, was a secluded spring that no other animals had ever approached. When he leaned down to quench his thirst, he mistook his own mirror image for a water sprite or another being, and fell deeply in love with it.

The Mocker Mocked

“Upon three lines of argument
I’ll construct an actor’s mask
Not for what is, but what is meant,
Should an impudent audience ask.
First, ‘Witches’ nipples make the thumb
Feel glad about its thumbing task.’
Second, ‘My swift tongue can out-drum
The quarrel fought between your ears.’
Last, ‘The idea of me will come
To satisfy your deepest fears.’
Now, dear friends, with your kind consent,
I’ll put this on. Hm, it appears
You conclude my grin’s indecent.
I’m booed when I expected cheers!”

Not to Trouble God

At the point of the intersection

between the rhetorical line

and point, there’s a dimension,

not of space, nor of time

(those have been imagined

more thoroughly than I’m

imagined by myself), but of sin.

Not the brand to trouble God,

this sin is words that begin

without being misunderstood

(because the speaker winks!)

and conclude that bad is good.

Actor’s Mask

Hiieee! Hiieeea! Hi! Hiiee! Hi! Hi!

Look closely, now. I am cellophane thin,

Imbued by hand with the hues of a lie

And the pentimento of ancient sin.

I hide my eyes with a mendacious squint

And my thoughts with an enigmatic grin.

My hair and skin share a fiery tint.

I am both angelic and indecent.

On stage, politicians deliver speech

After speech and reveal what?, you will ask.

All actors pour out their souls, each to each,

All for naught — only I can mask a mask.

Haiku, 5/16/26

I waken early

To half-darkness half-daylight --

A mourning dove sings.

Pandemonium

Hortus, a suburban devil of Pandemonium,
Is lonely tonight for want of a loyal friend:
Anyone, sick or foul, human or fiend,
Even a specter enriched with plutonium.
The lights glare like angry souls at the palace,
And the burning rivers between here and there
Drown out the sweet, anguished tintamarre
Of endless victims of his own so-called malice.
Cold comfort for Hortus, who once boasted
The brightest shield and the longest spear,
Who stalked the palace halls without fear,
Now to stand out here, alone and untoasted.
"Curse you all!" he cries, "I don't deserve this!"
But knows there's no leaving Satan's service.