Some Newish Poems

[untitled]

I was crying out “Know me!”

all those years before you died insane,

but I didn't know what I was yelling, exactly,

so I was all mush-mouthed,

crying out even as you sank into dementia

still clinging to the fantasy of who you wanted me to be,

believing at the end a thing that was not.

Old Man Singing

His voice was dry and gritty.

He couldn't go as low as needed,

Nor as high.

He was conflating two early-Beatles.

(One was "With Love from Me to You.")

He'd found one note that fit his voice,

And he kept coming back to that one --

The one within his one-note range --

Giving that one his all,

Jumping ahead, skipping two whole lines

To sing the one extended note

That fit his tired vocal cords.

Thinking he was alone

Out there in his backyard,

Picking fallen leaves

Out of an evergreen bush,

He suspended time to catch some breath,

Then picked right up again,

"Oh yeah I'll tell you something..."

And I listened,

On the other side of the fence,

Thinking maybe he would.

In Poems Spring Can Mean Youth

In poems spring can mean youth

when one fell in love

but it's only metaphor

and now it is winter

really and metaphorically

and though spring is coming

I'll still be in winter

and where will that love be?

That love I remember now

letting loss scarify those old hurts anew

just to feel once more that breeze,

those ancient park trees

and the grass on which we lay

and loved and never thought

the seasons would change on us.