StarPoet Newsletter Vol. X, No. XLIII

Wear your hair, another fashion maxim
That is easier and more applicable
When you are sixteen and not sixty

-- I might have to stop reading
Marie Claire and Vogue
And pretending it's the articles
In Harper's Bazaar
That draw me to the thick pages
Of glossy photographs of women
Whose breasts are even smaller than mine.

-- I've always found it much easier
To be cool after you're dead
When your weight is no longer
A proper subject for discussion.

I sleep with the woman I love,
Make love to her as she makes love to me,
Discuss the world and all its problems,
Exchange sympathies on growing older,
Pass notes from our bones
On the perniciousness of the weather.

I imagine we will be doing this
For several decades yet
Until one of us finds the other
Unwaking in our bed.

My poet eye blurs, salt and tears,
Hoping to spare her that pain.

Seven Sisters in the Pleiades,
A double star in the Dipper,
The nebula in the Hunter's sword,
And a meteor brightly dying:

Not a bad morning,
Nine years into the millennium,
For six decades of gazing
Through glowing city skies.

There is Swine Flu inside the Pentagon,
Incipient panic abrew in its corrdiors,
But nary an alarum nor anti-terrorist magick
Can slow the gathering bodies
Piling up along the Potomac.

Woe to all those who shunned their innoculation,
For they shall be known by their morbid humours.

I am staggering this morning,
My left leg both weaker and shorter
Than when I went to bed last night,
My back dully numb and waiting,
Reminding me that both polio
And a compression fracture
Have ancient claim to my aging body
That I must rebuff with every step.

This hallway seems narrower
Than when I walked through it yesterday,
Its walls seem to conspire to bounce me
Back towards the center walkway;
As much as I try I cannot walk a line,
The muscle is too erratic, my back too ready
To shoot shockwaves down my leg
And send me spindizzy across the planet.

How have I the flu?
Let me count the ways:
The achy body, the hacking cough,
The headaches, the fevers,
The struggling unrestful sleep,
The lack of appetite, the soreness of throat,
The heavy tiredness that drapes my brain
And strips me of my gracile meter.

I do believe
I have counted more than enough
And will not bore you
With the grosser physicalities.

Dark, humid,
Morning closing in,
Each breath weighing down
With warmth and dampness,
Free oxygen seemingly washed
From lungs and atmosphere,
Testing the poet's determination
As she waits at the bus stop,
Her forward momentum stalled
By the moisture soaking her resolve,
Beckoning her back into
The cool dry arms of her bedroom.

Christ on a bicycle,
What have we become?
Ineffectual and undecisive,
Addicted to our own words
As they rattle around reality,
All a-clatter in our cool importance
-- We were frosty before hip was hep,
And now we wonder
Why the world just doesn't understand.

Deliver me my daily pizza,
My General Tsao Chicken,
My Greek salad and beef kabobs,
Including a six pack of diet soda,
Some french fires and sweet desert
And be sure to make it all fat free.

Keep the rapists off my doorstep,
The murderers off my street,
The sound of automatic weapons,
A distant echo in the night;
And if I die before I wake,
Kill the bastards that got me.

I recognize the signs of my own depression,
My frustration at this lingering sickness
That neither kills me nor lets me be
Sufficiently well.

I'm not in my 20s, not even my 40s,
I do not expect to recover as fast
As I did when my body was younger;
But this festering pestilence
That neither leaves nor takes me
Gnaws at my soul a month before
The gray November darkess
Will shroud my breath approaching solstice.

Yet my blood still flows deep red,
My heart still beats, these words still appear:
The world continues and I am upright,
Albeit not yet energetically.