StarPoet Newsletter Vol. X, No. XXXVII

Sitting up coughing, sneezing, snotting,
Running through Kleenix like a
Border Collie on the hunt; the night is long,
The space between spasms short,
Morning is still hours away
And sleep only a conjecture.

I've had six decades of being sick,
I plan to have at least six more;
It seems a fair exchange for living on
But immortality might be a bit too much.

Who knows what devices the gods would construct,
What devious inflictions they would send me
If I dared to live as long as they must,
Growing wise through my years of eternity.

Would they share their knowledge, their godly toys,
With a woman born humbly human,
Or would they jealously protect, like some spoiled child,
Their privileges and country club membership?

Betelgeuse is nearing the end of its life,
Doomed to soon explode in supernova;
When she goes she is really going to blow
And will be visible on the Earth in daylight,
Outshining every other star in Orion.

Large scale roiling under Betelgeuse's red surface
Is bringing the supergiant to a boil;
Look well upon Betelgeuse,
Your grandchildren may not find her
And will only have our word of a star's former glory
Where a dark dwarf forms in Orion's shoulder.

Gunshots outback again last night,
Ten to the twelve, a block or so away;
A well drunk guy, shooting fireworks off
From Carolina and joining in with his pistola
Until the Polizei showed up to arrest him
For celebrating excessively outside a warzone.

He'll be the last one until the next one forgets
He is inside the wire with houses within earshot
And residents who know the difference
Between a firecracker and a hand gun,
All things considered in the middle of the night
When all is still except the explosions.

On to the Pentagon, I and you,
Aboard the magical metro bus
That transforms us all,
Willing and not,
To desperado warriors
Fighting the budget
In a quest for full funding
That,  like Don Quixote,
Will find no windmills
Permanently conquered
And no horses available
Who willingly go the distance.

Sparrows in the garbage,
Dinosaury scrounging,
Beak not teeth,
Hopping treat to treat.

Pterocrow circling
Floating on the currents,
Feathered raptor waiting
For breakfast to be revealed.

Bipedal well fanged predator
Dominating the streets and biways,
Stalking along the sidewalk
From one cup of coffee to the next.

I have stumbled across
Where America's gone wrong:
Last Saturday morning in the midst of countdowns,
I discovered identical Taylor Swift videos
Playing simultaneously, totally in synch,
On Great American Country and VH1,
Word for word, note for note,
Not a measure's worth of difference
Between the two. 

The Melting Pot has become
An indescript hodgepodge of corporate pop
Whose songs differ from each other primarily
In the souless professionalism of the studio fiddlers
And the nasal tonality of the pitch corrected singers.

I would give anything for a young Keith Richards
Playing guitar for Elvis at Sam's Sun records
While Johnnys Cash and Lennon sing background
behind a single monaural upright microphone.
The world was so very young and we, so naive,
We thought the music would never end,
Presley would not become fat with drugs and money,
And none of us would ever grow old like our parents.

The closeness of the air,
The tightness in my lungs,
The mind games going on
Worrying about the oxygen.

Each breath seems a struggle,
Each cough, a wheezing gasp,
A paroxysm in which my life
Teeters on the precipice.

One day I will lose six decades of balance,
Maintained since my first bout of croup,
One day I will exhale, then draw nothing back in,
My lungs finally tired of all this nonsense.

On Labor Day we all would go
To William Land Park in Sacramento,
Grandma and Grandpa, Mom and Daddy,
My brother, me, my aunts and uncles
And all my cousins, including Frank,
Great Aunt Mary's son, a generation older,
The quiet one and never married.

Daddy would take me and my brother
Over to the Zoo while the picnic
Was being readied by the women;
The chimps and the elephants,
The lions and the tigers, and the dark shiny crow
Who, between ear-piercing wolf whistles,
Would state quite loudly he was hungry;

Ham and potato salad, fried chicken and green olives,
Hard rolls, some salami, cheese and potato chips;
All the family would gather to fill our paper plates,
Grab a paper napkin, our plastic knifes and our forks,
And maneuver for a seat on the bare wooden benches
That lined the weathered picnic tables.

The children watched as all the adults reminisced,
Listening to tales of lives and adventures
We couldn't imagine our parents ever lived,
And stories of distant, ancient relatives long dead
Before any of us were born -- in the war,
In the depression, or vaguely in Chicago,
Or an ocean voyage back in the old country.

That world is gone now, along with almost all
Of my blood related extended family;
The rest of us, we've grown apart,
Separated by both distance and new cities;
We're no longer the multi-cousined family
Who remembers each name and parentage:
I would for another sunny afternoon
Where I would listen around that picnic table.