SCREENING MY CALLS
If you’re sending love my way
and I’m not receiving love today
It’s just because I’m standing behind
a round-holed screen within my mind
Bullets and BB’s will fit through fine
so take your best shot and I’ll take mine
Call tomorrow when the holes are square
and you’ll find a friendlier person there
All insults and snides the screen will deflect
and whatever you say will have a healing effect
A PANTOUM TO CHASE AWAY GLOOM
Austin is as open as its mics
anthologies at midnight bloom
music and rhyme will fill your nights
good and bad there’s always room
Anthologies at midnight bloom
from budding poets far and near
good and bad there’s always room
and sometime others come to hear
From budding poets far and near
there is support for kith and kin
and sometimes others come to hear
and warmly they are welcomed in
So if you should happen on this town
music and rhyme will fill your nights
you’ll give up what’s got you down
Austin is as open as its mics
COYOTE EYES
It is Austin
so a poet is running for mayor
We stop by a back yard party
in our neighborhood to meet
greet and hopefully support her
It is Austin
so there is an eight piece band
The Bob Katz and they’re very good
A dog with coyote eyes
comes up and wants to be my friend
so I make up
a Coyote Eyes, Coyote Eyes song
and sing it to her while the band
lights up Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire
and she looks up at me with those coyote eyes
and we are very much in love
but I am late for a poetry reading
at the English Café and have to leave
so she goes and sits by another man
She is looking up at him with those coyote eyes
I think she is trying to tell him
about the song
FAVORITE FURNISHINGS
My favourite antiques are old poets
Many I love are old and dead
but better old and alive instead
The better and the worse for wear
I prefer them here much more than there
Old roll top desks not near so dear
as the dear that are still here
A patina you could not only touch but hear
THIS IS JUST TO SAY
(after William Carlos Williams)
This is just to say
that poets can be
a pain in the butt
Who else would
eat all
of the cold sweet
plums
you were
saving for breakfast
put a poem
on your plate instead
and expect not only
forgiveness
but gratitude as well
ALAS POOR…
And we in this new old land turning up
with our plow
hammer heads, and arrowheads, and sometimes
a bone or two
and if one would be an uncrushed skull it would
be no Yorick that we knew
This noun, once verb, would mock us
in its grinning
all those with whom we might converse
are laid neath Hamlet’s soil
His redder kin scattered
like his bones
ROSES IN MY REAR VIEW MIRROR
(and a few Bluebonnets too)
There’s a family always laughing
There are girls, and they’re all smiling
There’s a collie dog a roaming
chasing gophers down their holes
There’s a ranch with grass all greening
fifteen minutes after rain
Maybe you can go home again
IT WAS A DARK AND BOVINE NIGHT
Perhaps finding it warmer than the grass
a big black cow has settled down
to sleep in a rut on a gravel road
My right wheel meets her ass
at sixty miles an hour
I’m not sure who is most surprised
Wrestling the injured truck
I avoid the almost inevitable roll
and my name in the obits
She takes a few steps into the ditch
and dies
If there’s a destiny that shapes our ends
mine was shaped by a guardian angel
hers by a Firestone tire
ALL THEY SURVEY
My father
would stand for hours
just looking at his cows
Like God leaning
on a rail fence in heaven
pleased with his creation
CIRCLING BACK
All those
long days of youth
before I was a poet
lived but not noted
I go back now
guided by bent grass
and broken branches
Attaching
toe tags of meaning
to departed days and friends