Poems

He walked into the night all around
New moon darkness too much for
Disappeared shadows waiting for light
To bring them back into the world
In a town too small for illumination

If your strophe and antistrophe
Are no longer synchronized
You may need a new song
To revive your daily dance
A moderate measured melody
For the morning’s first act
Something more rhythmic
For act two’s afternoon
Perhaps some poetry
With a jazzy accompaniment
For end of day’s act three

I grasped for aesthetics
But garnered anesthesia
In lost days and weeks
Going through the motions
Of repetitive incarceration
A not so solitary confinement
In this multistoried mass
Of measured cubicles

He had always hoped something in his life
Would be fulfilled and rounded out
Different than today’s dribs and drabs
Something complete unto itself
Beginning middle and end
Clearly marked out from before
Distinguished from what followed
Anyone seeing it or hearing it
Would see purpose and intention

I was a boy in love with adventure books
Pirates cowboys explorers warriors
Resiliently on disasters’ edge
Sailors forever going down to the sea
In a place with little resemblance
To the New Bedford I knew
But the courage still there
As the fisherman took their boats
Out of the harbor to ride out the hurricane
That took the roof off the church
As I sat in a window across the street
On their return I listened closely
To understand Newfoundland’s cadence
As they sat in Aunt Charlotte’s living room
Above the grocery store she owned
Where the Captain bought supplies
For the next Georgia’s Bank trip
Laughing voices described waves
That could easily have swamped them