Dirt
Road young, 4-minute
Mile

Dirt
Road old, memory
Path

Dead
End Road, new sign
Says

Dirt
Road old, my wise
Friend

My bad:
Two six-packs of Miller after midnight
To celebrate a day’s clarity,
The perfect paganism of Physics
As on July 20, 1969.
And now:
Cursed invariable brain knot
Bed of nails, the collapsed IQ
To 58
With all its ancillary helpless visions, unmediated:
From the Haitian
Social worker handling the welfare intake
And tons of paperwork,
To the Black Muslim psychiatrist
Weighing ECT under
Jewish supervision:
Forgive my Southern roots.

This woods has no intent
But my own
To find in it destiny
To rest in its shade.
Speak to me tree
I’m lonely and lost!
It says to my longing
You get what you Will
If years of bare branches
Have roots in the ground
Limit is only
The Fate of some leaves.

Summer
Came, I opened
Up

Fall
Arrived, the dark slipped
In

Winter
Froze to chilblains
Cave

Spring
Smiled back, took my
Hand

And
Now we marry every
Year

Attended
By the Sun and
Green

The solitude of stars
Is just their distance set
But I’ve seen that distance
In a face and felt it
In my soul, a wonder
Of the faraway beyond
A voice or touch,
In her eyes
The light of love
A trillion miles
Away. 

Darker
By the day the fall we fall
To

Memory
For the light of warmer times
To

Reverse
Regret, the would and could have
Beens

For real
Imagination working at its
Best

A
World unfallen, apples safe to
Eat

My body, your body
Embraced as a passion
Before mind began
To fatten into reason
Aging as we were
With children.
So: for a few years
The sex was good?
Yes, so what?
You never made
Enough money
But enlightened my
Childhood ideals
With only desire, nightly
Calling my bluff
(Ten times with restraints
Bedpost to bedpost)
A woman a hundred times
Better read than you (at least
In Greek myth)
And I will never forgive
You for that: But You!  You!
You forgive me for me!
For projections never
More fearful, never more dire
For a horror, a vengeance
I will miss more than
Earth!     

I sit in my den that needs
Dusting, for four years.
But the dust has become a guest
Or I a guest of the dust,
An accumulated identity
That buries me
With companionship,
That to mop is to murder.

Fall
To frost the grizzly
Land

Pumpkin
Grins a candle
Light

Heat
Survive I beg my
Heart

Crow
Ascends the cold
Moonlight

(Special thanks to PoemShape for haiku prompt)

Sometimes it happens
That way—my friends all
Mad at me.  They don’t
Answer, or if they do
It’s to bait some flaw
Irrevocable I can’t help
Easily the country voice
(“Forrest Gump? Or is this
Karl Childers speaking?”)
Or perhaps it’s a mood
That doesn’t quite match up
To the free help they need
Moving to a bigger house
Or putting together a grill
With a thousand bolts.
Or it might be a milestone
Overlooked—a wedding party,
A godson’s soccer game–
Because I don’t like crowds
And prefer each player
A buddy of mine, that is,
Prefer to hear them talk
Or age for age commune
By common myth, our
Ancestors’ valor at Gettysburg,
Say, or how globalism sucks.
Yes, age for age, some ageless common bond!
A Reich that really lasts a thousand years
And doesn’t invade Russia
Nor blames the Jews en masse
For Jeffrey Epstein
Would be nice.
Or perhaps I should just
Learn more about soccer…