No text this time July 28, 2024

  

I won't make the same mistake

I made back then

no birthday text just a sonnet

which she may or may not read

though if she does she'll understand

how hard life is

and how we all cling to those things

we think will bring us joy

an illusion maybe

and yet not so farfetched

life being more than

an accumulation of candles on the cake

countdown we take part in each year

 to some conclusion we dread

somewhere in the midst of all this

beyond the count of time

we manage to find our bit of joy

what was, what could have been

we celebrate perhaps our survival

 never assuming we could have

made it this far, and we did

and may yet be privileged

 to make it to the next lighting of candles

as we say secret prayers

appreciating the in between

where love resides

beyond just birthday wishes

 

email to Al Sullivan

Just another trophy Aug. 28, 2014

  

I still recall the moment as if it had happened yesterday, she playing her role as a PR professional at an even designed to create political peace, for the mayor she was loyal to, misplaced in retrospect after what they mayor eventually did, ending her career, yet not yet at that moment, the school renamed, as I humbly watched the circus unfold, the arrival of a freeholder from another town who greeted her as an old friend – a freeholder well-known for his womanizing, even in public spaces, and I wondered, had these two connected as he always does with pretty woman like her. I tried to read the tea leaves from their faces and yet now, all these many months later, still do not know if he had added her to his trophy shelf, and whether or not she would have let him, that brief exchange in that brief moment in that school, how friendly they seemed even though he later claimed he’d not met her for that. Just another trophy?

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When she goes she’s gone Feb 7, 2014

 

she did it again

even when she said

she'd die if she did

somehow still survives

 if not thrives

 moving on as

she has been expecting

 one day she was there

doing what she was hired to do

then taken by angels to a safe place

 she says where she can heal

 it was a year ago or so

 when she left us

feels as wrong now

 as it did then

as if the cosmos press against her

fated to repeat this

at least once more

where did she go

 I asked

they don't know

did she quit or was she fired

they still don't know

all this bubbling for some time

till finally it boiled over

 another shell abandoned

 or evicted from

 leaving behind baggage

she lacks strength to carry

 had she wanted to all

what's Left behind must

stay behind

 part of a life she

no longer wishes to live

 or can't bear to

not saying where she is going to

 only that she is gone

 box full of office possessions

carried out the glass doors

 to the cold street

when she goes she is gone

 

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Blue movies on Times Square Aug. 22, 2015

  

I saw my first blue movie in a sanky theater on 42nd Street in 1968, a Times Square dive full of perverts whacking off to either side of me.

I was scared to touch anything, the backs of the seats sticky, and I dared not look too closely at what else went on in that dark, my gaze firmly fixed on the larger than life people doing all they could do on the screen, not completely sure if all the moans and groans came from there, penetrating me with scary wishes, if only I could have been one of them (On the screen I mean), desperate enough, crazy enough to make those theater seats sticky, trying not to think of myself as 17 as one of the many groan men stoking themselves up in the dark, knowing anyone of them, for a moderate fee, would do the same (or more) for me, or maybe would want me on my knees, we all in need to make this little blue movie of our own, for no one to watch.

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Don’t try to save me feb 26, 2014

 Her absence stuns me,

even when I know she hated me

 when she was here

“I don't hate men only some men,”

she said meaning me

 and yet for all

 the slings and arrows of misfortune

 I miss her now that she is gone

the empty space

that vacancy I can't completely explain

 knowing as I know now

 just how much pain he feels

why she needed to do what she did

go where she went

seek the help of angels

when mere mortals could not do

the world here is different without her

 the way night might be without moon or Stars

 where dark is intensely dark

and we have no lantern

 to illuminate it

 and must tolerate this emptiness

even if we feel now empty inside as well as out

she went where she needs to go

 to find something she could

 never find here

 a search for a lost chord

or  Spirit or savior

when she is the one who needs to save herself

“don't try to save me ,”she once wrote

nobody can

 

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down to earth june 18, 2012

 

we can't defy gravity or time

one always keeps us down to earth

and the other wears us out

the perpetual cycle of rising and falling

we thought of when younger as progress

but we never come back to

the exact same place we started

we just think we do

 it is like a decaying orbit

 in which we fall a few degrees lower

 with a cycle

gravity bringing us lower and lower

 and if we are lucky

 we crash softly

 but as time proves

 we all eventually crash

and if we can we get up

walking where we once flew

down to earth

 

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maybe I can fly out aug 4, 2012

  

I really think she meant well for me

 when she told me not to squirm

a man can't swim in quicksand

no matter how strong he is

she preaching not to the choir

but from it

an elevated a songbird

 who has been here before

looking down at those of us

trapped in the pews below

 it takes more than Faith

to survive all this

 and still more to come to understand

how we got this deep into the thick of it

our knees bruised from prayer instead of pleasure

I really think she meant well

 when telling me not to fight it

not to struggle against something

too far beyond me to win against

you can't swim in quicksand

you just sink faster

 words of wisdom perhaps

 from a songbird who has seen others like me

though she doesn't understand

 I'm neck deep already

and helpless to do anything

but flail my arms and hope

 if I can't swim then maybe

I might fly out of the muck I'm stuck in

 

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