Common Sense. Ted Greenwald
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time turns to practice
The sense of unity
I feel should be somewhere
I guess’ll be there
Long after I’m gone
And someone else
Looks back on all this
And talks to me
Across the ages
With me talking
Through my poems
Up to a certain point
(A hundred, two hundred years)
Language (the ass) carries
The burden of meaning
While after (say
Around five hundred years hence)
A flipflop (oops, a pothole!)
The meaning carries
The language
By then (like me)
Changed beyond recognition
And to think
This doesn’t even require
A grand plan
Although, if I recall correctly,
At one time
I thought it did
And had one
Ready for anything
Nowadays I’m more or less content
To let a lot
Of things take their own courses
Like amiable rivers
Making blue lines
Down the map of history
I’m not saying
That some things
Don’t infuriate me
They certainly do
But I’ve learned
Mostly through stupid repetition
The same patience
I apply to my own works
Moving them out of range of good and evil
Is applicable
(In a romantic way, I guess)
To things (natural and unnatural)
Outside myself
I’m on better terms
(Though still able to bear grudges)
With most things and people
More sociably amiable
(No longer stand
In a corner at parties
Facing into the wall
Smelling the school-like plaster
Getting plastered)
Now I talk it up
And even when down
Never talk down
But remain subdued
Fve learned to like
Winters more
But hate the end of same
Feel relief at spring
Crave sun on body
Enter through the lobby
Of annual depression
Have greater sense of
Personal comfort
Expanding horizons
Ability to survive
(And know how far I’ll go
To do)
In this year of famine
And pestilence
Have learned
To keep my mind and ear
Cocked (like a gun)
For the true poetry
Of the language to go off
And fill
The sky of the mind
With angels conversing
And have
Enough memory left
To remember
And write the angels down
Without pinning
A single body or wing
I have finally
Returned to the cheerfulness
I had when very young
Before the bubbles
In my personal seltzer’d
Gone flat
When the fingers of school
Having opened my thinking cap
Kept the bottle open
Long enough
To let the fun out
Amidst a multitude of others
Asking one way or another
‟Whatever happened to you?
You were such a cheerful kid”
And that I am
AIRY RUSHES PUNCH
Airy rushes punch my shirt
Through a window of sunset dirt
And send me reeling like a lure
Through the water nerves of America
Once on the other side of somewhere
I relax and become someone else
Not that I behave different
Just behave less often
The sky offers me solace and office space
And stars I keep in drawers
Wear nothing
But a little mist and halo
I will imagine myself
A sympathetic headlight
Knocking on the door of the night
To borrow a cup of sugar
From the beautiful neighbor
Who’s moved in
Without even the clothes on her back
‟Would it be possible
To borrow a cup of sugar”
‟Sure Sit down, honey
Make yourself comfortable”
I ease down in the big dipper
BLEEP
Somewhere (where) in between say
Index and middle fingers, to one day
Wake up and find growing a new rather
Radish vestigial finger
Little do you know little do you too know
Questions. Eyes picking off barrages of mirages soberly.
Lone. Drinking on an empty beach. Sauterne
Bottle