Waiting Behind Another Man in a Public Bathroom

If you ever desired the power

to make time pass slowly,

I am exactly that superhero.

Please forget that I’m here though.

Please stop the sideways glances.

I mean you no harm.

Let your mind go to peaceful,

fluid landscapes,

visions of strong flow. 

The story of uncomfortable

meets embarrassed

will soon be over.

Behind You is Another Man Waiting to Use the Urinal

Is this worse than writer’s block?

My plumbing has seized.

Should I just scratch this attempt

and come back later.

I should have taken a stall.

Settle down. You can do this.

There is no issue at stake but time.

Time! Why did you think of time?

How long has it been?

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

Do I address the underwear 

or do I address you, 

now naked pair,

whose underwear disappeared

into that oblivion of bed clothes,

as if to say there is no way

to put that apple back on the tree?

Maybe there is someone approaching,

a child that needs sparing,

or a lover betrayed?

But that, of course,

only makes the underwear hide harder.

Could you close your eyes

you might be able to see yourselves

just five minutes before,

in a tangle of elbows and feet, 

pushing your underclothes 

back in time, almost to the first day.

And now the price of that pleasure 

is an eternity of search.

Nothing free in indulgence

is quite free of consequence.

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

I just gave my dad

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

for the third consecutive Christmas. 

This is enough

to break his waspy resolve. 

He’s called me out in front of the family 

from sheer exasperation. 

I’m shocked.

I can’t tell if it’s worse to be called out the third time 

or not to be called out the second? 

The book is well outside 

his taste: history or spy-fi. 

It was a risk to begin with, 

and I don’t even remember taking it. 

It is the kind of thoughtlessness 

that prevents me from being a good gift-giver, 

or even just average. 

And my father still hasn’t read the book. 

I think if anyone had given me a book three times, 

albeit unknowingly, 

I would have at least cracked the cover. 

Maybe I’m shifting blame here, 

my deficiencies as a gift-giver exposed? 

Maybe I’ll double down next year,

and give it to him a fourth time

starting a game of literary chicken 

that can only end 

in a new pair of running shoes for Murakami.

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

As you drive them to practice,

your son tells his friend

that their tennis coach is 

not the sharpest pencil in the box.

He says this with the same smirking condescension

(and cadence!) that you said it with, 

just two days before.

Moreover, feeling his point might have been 

too subtle he says it again.

At which point you interrupt

to correct your son in front of his friend. 

By which your son understands

you are not correcting his meanness

but his lack of guile.

And you did this all to seem 

nicer than you really are.

In the silent five minutes left 

before you reach the tennis court,

you realize your legacy will be total. 

Your son inherits not just your sense of humor

or your fluid single-handed backhand

but your vanity, pettiness, and spite.

He doesn’t just see you as you present yourself,

or as you conceive of yourself

but as you are. 

And all those not so comic foibles

will become part of him too. 

His words, your words, echo in your thoughts

for five long minutes and then a lifetime more

as you gaze vacantly through the windshield

at all that is before you in time

looking into the future,

the harshest kind of mirror. 

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

My eight year-old son can’t believe his luck.
That there are just 
“all of these coins left in this fountain.”
He easily fishes them out.
He’s recently become curious about money
and where it comes from. 
I’m afraid this is sending him
the wrong message.
I’m also worried about all those wishes.
Will they still come true?
I feel silly for even thinking that.
I would feel really silly 
saying that to my son, 
who might think, as it now stands,
that one obtains money from fountains.

I am desperate for one of those signs
that are on some fountains that say
these coins are collected for charity.
Then I could tell my son to leave the coins
for the kids with glaucoma or something.

My son is really raking it in at this point. 
His wet little hands filled with lucre.
People are starting to look.
Other kids are getting curious.
There might be a run forming on this fountain.
All I can think to tell my son
is that we have to be somewhere.

Later at home we count the money–
“Count de Monet!”
Nothing.
He’s too young for Mel Brooks jokes.
Three dollars in change.
Not bad, my little capitalist.
He is now asking for a water feature 
in front of our house. 
I didn’t expect that.
I try to explain that nobody 
would make wishes in our fountain.
He wants to know why the mall fountain 
is better for wishing 
than a fountain in our yard, 
to which 
I have nothing to say.

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

What do you say? Do you tell her?

I told her.

And now your wife

wants to know why.

So does your therapist.

Maybe it’s because you remember

the day you figured it out

in fifth grade,

a full three years before

it was revealed 

in junior high health class

by a football coach 

that said puberty 

poo-ber-dee.

You were riding your bike

home after school,

puzzling it out.

You knew that somehow

the penis had to 

get into the vagina

for babies to get made.

But it just didn’t seem possible 

that the penis, 

a squishy little piece of flesh,

could be pushed against a vagina, 

and do anything but crumple.

If only it could be made firmer,

if only it had another state.

Wait a minute, 

I stopped the bike for this.

I remembered that the penis 

almost has the desired properties

when you wake up in the morning.

What your mom sometimes calls a flagpole.

Yes, that might just work,

a flagpole penis.

Oh my God, a flagpole penis! 

If you don’t take into account my age

at that moment, 

you might be unimpressed,

but remember this was pre-poo-ber-dee.

An erection was in no way connected

to desire in my mind.

I was like a man who’d never seen water,

trying to figure out how a fish swims.

I was an anatomical engineer 

that deduced the solution from first principles.

It was my on-the-road-to-Damascus moment.

Okay, not everybody gets to be Paul.

But when the great engineer in the sky 

has called your name, 

you go out and you preach the word.

And that is why I told my daughter.

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

Do I address the underwear 

or do I address you, 

now naked pair,

whose underwear disappeared

into that oblivion of bed clothes,

as if to say there is no way

to put that apple back on the tree?

Maybe there is someone approaching,

a child that needs sparing,

or a lover betrayed?

But that, of course,

only makes the underwear hide harder.

Could you close your eyes

you might be able to see yourselves

just five minutes before,

in a tangle of elbows and feet, 

pushing your underclothes 

back in time, almost to the first day.

And now the price of that pleasure 

is an eternity of search.

Nothing free in indulgence

is quite free of consequence.

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

It’s tremendously gratifying. 

You were right.

This band is great.

But the very same moment they legitimize your taste,

they no longer serve as its marker.

You are a bit like a revolutionary

that suddenly finds himself in power.

It’s a little embarrassing.

What do you do now?

Who is left to convert?

There is no argument to make,

amazingly everyone agrees.

The only answer

is to find another backwater band

with which to bother your unlistening friends.

The guerilla needs to go back to the jungle.

If you don’t, you’ll find yourself 

saying silly things like

I liked them before this or that important concert,

waiting for your early adoption 

                              to count for something.

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

These spirits do not mix.

All it took was a 30 minute dose of Nietzsche

on the herd mentality, mobbing, 

and the perversion of the ubermench’s spirit, 

to make George Bailey’s wonderful life a Greek tragedy.

Prior to this encounter, I had seen the movie

over 15 times, usually during holidays,

and it always touched me.

But this was the first time I saw 

George’s family, friends, and townspeople

ply that combination

of guilt, shame, and sex 

(not to mention some angel dust pyrotechnics)

to level George Bailey, man of talent.

And on this viewing, surprise of surprises,

Mr. Potter turns out to be the only man

trying to save poor George,

even if it is

only out of self interest.

And all those gut-wrenching moments 

coming so close to escaping:

the board meeting,

the bank run,

the train station with Harry,

the call from Sam Wainwright,

(if that idiot can make it anyone can).

If only Ernie the cabbie

would just chloroform Georgie-boy.

Just so he could get out of his own way 

for a half an hour. 

The real dagger in the soul is the end

when he’s wet, disheveled 

with tinsel matted on his head, 

looking out as an imbecile on all proceedings,

as he is made

to feel grateful for it all.

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

Occasional Verse is an attempt to reimagine that genre of poetry around smaller events. Events that are still meaningful in a life without being the major threshold events that are the mainstay of occasional verse: birth, marriage, death…

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

You entered the do not enter

and there is no way out but through.

You will learn that the usually effective

embarrassed/apologetic wave has its limits.

Even the church-going mother

in the hatchback

taking her children to school 

can be seen muttering

a few non-biblical epithets

under her breath.

Her stare is enough to wish for the end times.

You have screwed this up for everyone

and will have to keep screwing

because backing up is worse than continuing.

You can only manage your level of wrong here.

Driving the wrong way down a one way street is like

putting a roasted potato in your mouth

at a dinner party that is way too hot

but you can’t spit it out.

So take the honking,

take the shrugs,

take the fingers.

This is an exercise in humility.

It is spiritually cleansing.

Remember Elliot’s words

Nothing dies harder than

the desire to think well of self

and know that today,

if just for a little while,

you killed it.

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse

You are discussing a movie with your wife.

Talk has circled around various interpretations,

and now you find yourself debating, rather vigorously, 

whether you agree with each other. 

You maintain that with minor exceptions you do.

Your wife is quite certain that you don’t.

Don’t be surprised. 

For if there is an acorn through which 

to glimpse the forest of marriage, 

it must be the argument about whether you are arguing.

And so, here we have

in this discourse 

the inability of two to be one,

coupled with the relentless determination

that quite simply two equals one.

It’s a very real physical impossibility, 

a duality of states

as in superposition

not as one, not as two

but, for lack of a better term,

a one / not one.