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That cat sleeps all day while I'm gone
He sleeps all night in the crook of my knee
In the evening when I read
He settles onto my shoulder
To purr and snore in my ear
In his youth, he was a hunter
Of mythical proportions
Feared by mice and moles
Hoisting rabbits onto the porch
Once he caught a hummingbird in midflight
And swallowed it whole
He howled with the coyotes all night
Kept the cougars and bears away from our
cabin in the north woods
On occasion he attacked me
He still does
Although the squirrels wander
through the yard untouched.

I have much in common with Albert Einstein,
Our names flaunt the "i before e" rule for one thing.
I imagine he too had trouble spelling receive and weird,
Due to overcompensating for his exceptional name
I'm not sure I spelled them right even now.

As long as we're talking about names,
Albert, again like Neil, is one of those handles
Upon which you cannot hang a familiar "y"
Johnny, Bobby, Mikey,
Neil and Albert. The calling of children's names
imbues unasked for personality traits.

Serious and confused, Albert and Neil
Retreated into the inner world of imagination
Resulting in genius revelations,
In his case, relativity, in mine, comic effect
Speed of light versus pacing of punchlines.

It just goes to show you, a smart man
And a funny man are more alike than different
If you ask the funny man.

Coquina sunset
streaked by blackbirds’ swarming flight;
last joy before roost.

Ommegang Belgian
PBR American
Student learning curve

On certain mornings,
when Fate and the
God of Schedules
conspire to wink at me,
after I drag my
ass out of bed
and rinse the sourness
from my mouth
and store the hard plastic
device which,
dentists tell me, protects
my teeth from
night grinding,
and after I
have a good, long,
blessedly relieving
piss, and after I
wash down the
two pills which
middle age and
modern medicine
have decreed that I require,
and the one
vitamin tablet which,
like a lucky rabbit’s foot,
I take on faith,
I crawl back into the
(sometimes still
warm) bed
and sleep