Farewell to a Friend

You make yourself a new name and you get a nice job.
Doing what you love in a town far away from home.
It's a good life, even if you don't appreciate it.
It's hard to appreciate what you have,
when all you feel is what you're missing.
(Ha, you whiner.)

And yet you end up with a knife in your heart.
A serrated blade found its way in there. Why
did she pull it out?

Philosophy and politics aren't the way for you,
you think you should do what you can't stop doing.
And that's good, it's probably healthy for you.
Let some of that tension out, turn it into heat.
It's starting a fire under someone.
(What are friends for?)

And here you are with a knife in your heart
and your lover's hand on the handle
pulling it out. Why?

I didn't like you, man. You were too proud of
your non-existent failure. You're a sore winner.
And there's nothing worse than those.
Your distorted reality was bound to set you free
(sooner or later).

But I keep thinking of the serrations,
tearing cardiac tissue on the exit,
and I keep thinking why
did she pull it out?

Ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk

It's a one-way ticket and we don't make the same stop twice.
If you're going to get off the train don't expect to get back on.
There are plenty of people here you can meet and greet,
cheat and beat, converse with and curse. Lots of things to do
and see, just ask me. I've seen it all. I've been on this train
for years and years. And nobody sticks around for long enough,
that's the thing. You people get on, get off, get on, get off. You're
railway dilettantes, is all, and it makes me sad to think that nobody-
no, nobody - knows this train as well as I do. It would be a nice
change if a nice young man like you, sir, stuck around - if a beautiful
young lady like yourself, miss, would just watch over these cabins for
a while.

You get it all - blue skies, deep chasms. You get thunderheads,
waterfalls, flash-floods, lakes and streams and rivers. You see the
ocean shore go on and on, north and south and oh does it do a heart
good. You even get used to the musty smell of these cabins, and if
you don't you can always step between the cars. When it snows the
melted runoff drips down the inside of the connector, and you know
it's real weather out there. You can smell it. It's the only way, my
friends, to really see the world as it is, as it was, as it could be again.

In short, I'm tired. And I want to get off.

Portrait

So call me a bon vivant. Sure I enjoy fine things
and base things in equal measure. Sure I stick
it in my lung and in my vein. Sure I spend a lot
of nights forgetting nights previous. But what's
so wrong about that? I mean, who am I hurting?

I have the right, God-given and He won't take it
back from me very easily, no sir, to take what I
can from a world that dearly wants to hurt me.
And I've done nothing to the world, except perhaps
not paying enough attention to the darker parts

for the satisfaction of those self-righteous prats,
the kingpins of moral correctness that will only
award someone the badge of "decent human being"
if he spends every other night slouched on his
face in the direction of the Hague. Not that they

don't make mistakes like the rest of us. The fine
men and women of the Hague, I mean. The moral
censors don't make mistakes. They don't make
anything, certainly nothing resembling progress.
It's all negativity. Why don't they get so exercised

about people who spend their whole lives doing
nothing, very morally of course, sitting in their
armchairs and looking for something else to worry
about, wasting their one and only chance to do
something, good or bad, worth remembering?

Hmm. A difficult question.

After

A girl after my own heart, I thought as we talked about
everything in particular and
nothing in general. Not like kissing a mirror, though -

there were spaces in her heart where mine could fit and
mountains rose above her plain
to fill in my voids. And this girl, after my own heart

had long enjoyed having and holding hers,
gave in, and you know,
eventually, she was, that girl, after my own heart.

Dead, Morose

It isn't like me, is it? To be so dead morose.
Christmastime is coming and I feel
grayer than the clouds and
poorer than the naked trees. I know
I should be laughing, or watching
ice forming in broken sheets over
shipwrecked maple leaves.

But I feel dead morose. Little Soviet
Comrade Claus come down the chimney
with a bag of dry bread and powdered
milk for the children's collective good.
I put paid to that idea, to Father Frost
biting our noses and stealing our sleep.
There's coal in the furnace and blankets on the beds.

Dead, morose. Unenergetic, anhedonic.
Gotta get a gin and tonic. The helium's
spent and the balloon - little Santa crashing
to earth - is sagging on its string.
Not even the road is inviting, and the lake
doesn't know whether to stay liquid or freeze.
Neither do I.

Stillicide

apologies to Ms Christie

Father's having disappeared of his own will and snapshots
when your life's flashing before you I had told her

She took the matter in hand: it's -
and it's not for the base hunger of unqualified
knaves - ridiculous anymore.

Where was everybody when selecting - of course,
those whom he thought would, proud and disdainful,
would say, he can have his eyes on him at once.

'Well?'
he said sharply. O' a gentleman, to haud his tongue. I canna
bide.   

Winter Writer

I tried to be a winter writer but the ink just froze in my pen.
I tried to be a winter lover but the blood just froze in my veins.
I talk to you but all you can do is complain.

I tried to carve my words in the winter scenes.
I tried to kiss the world but my lips got stuck to a tree.
I try to win you but you lose me all the same.

So walk out to the woodpile
Lift the axe on high
Chop that wood to splinters
Spit and walk back in.

I tried to be a winter writer.