My Personal World, Part 24: Relativity

Bass banging out a blistering back-beat,

Hoping against hope to hold the high point

Of the dying week,

The ticky-tack ticking-away of time

Siphons, slurps, slips, sags, slides, settles,

Into a slow leak.

Out of the Box and Into the Fire, or A Poet's Worst Emotional Argument for Universal Basic Income

“Just think outside the box,” they say

As 'hind clichés they hide.

A residence outside the box

I wish they would provide.

For though I've searched in foreign lands

Across the sea's dark sheen,

There's few things I have yet to find

Save refuge from routine,

and though I'm mostly stifled,

My moods and muse both wan,

To remain confined by management's

My one preserving plan.

For when I'm working, “different's”

a longer word for “worse.”

I'm quickly made complacent.

It's my temperament and curse,

and outside of a schedule

Upon my face I'd fall.

A refuge in quick failure

Is no refuge at all.

New Years Resolution

Oil and water, mixed poorly from birth,

At peace at the opposite ends of the earth:

The one's hopes map well to the other one's fears,

and though peaceably separate for miles and years,

The one misses the other in spite of the pain

Of deliberate friction with nothing to gain

and the other is creeping toward missing the one,

toward regret for his being an unpleasant son.

It occurs, in this Janus, to this lingering other:

This year's one to make peace between child and mother.

The Old Man and the Seed

Gaze now, callow youth, upon the old man spurned,

His overtures honest, his calls unreturned.

Why should he long, unmet, for this one connection?

To change callow youth from his own sins' direction?

To guide one who holds the same interests as he?

To extend the world's recall of how it used to be?

Or perhaps it's not to teach. Does he aspire, then, to learn?

Gaze now, callow youth, upon the old man spurned.

Life is Loss

Life's no prison, but a holding pen.

So many enter, and pass out again,

and so we struggle to make friends.

On people one cannot truly depend.

I had hoped you'd stay until the end.

Heaven—and life's nature—forfend!

But not everyone holds the pedal down,

Blowing, over the limit, through town,

and so I had hope that I had found

Someone not so elsewhere-bound.

One day, I looked up and you weren't around.

In expecting that you'd wait,

There's a truth that I didn't anticipate,

Learning it only once it was too late:

Some don't just leave; they accelerate.

Decades, it took, to remove the gloss,

To learn that at life's core is loss;

All the world's a ride, and that's the cost.

Why I Write, Part x+265: Director's Commentary for #WeCanLandOnACometButICant

I don't do it often, but when I do, I find

That if I'm writing with an audience in mind

I do it not to move, but rather to impress,

And that I'm rarely if ever at my personal best.

800 Days of Summer

In the last five years of “play ball!”

My Pirates have learned to stand tall.

Though I should be thankful, I'm appalled

To note, as the last of them turns to fall,

That they've yet to win anything Major at all.