You pretend to listen, I pretend you care

And time plays with the memory

My heart greases the wheel of despair

So the scenery and years go by

A lab rat in life’s beta ware

Can’t win and has to try

Painting reveals only the blindness

Music conjures deep profound silence

Poetry is just truth that won’t digest

Smoke and mirrors are my science

A festering hope I still confess

For the meaning and substance

I embrace my hunger and thirst

Its colors are subtle but real

A blessing slandered to a curse

Its invitation to gratitude reveals

Of the two which is the worse

Hunger or complacency’s meal

Where are all the great patrons?

Throw me a hook you fishers of men.

That I might be caught and eaten

by the audience beyond the footlights.

That my blood be spilled on pages

and canvas in prescribed portion.

Afford me the flame of arrogance

to believe that my own hand

in the fire of creation touches wonder

and maybe God himself.

From my window in the faces

As my bus drove other places

The graffiti prophet spoke

A gentle sermon in his joke

It’s not the questions, if you cry

It’s all the notions that are why

The passions of the moment pass

And so what’s left is so what lasts

Life flowed past the tinted window

Down a list of city noises groaned

Emptiness was my reflection there

And so to it my questions were

Speak some truth my public fool

Stand and make or break a rule

Share my head some ones and zeros

Show my heart romance and heroes

The river’s not too fast or so it seems

To stop the really mighty dreams

You don’t think the rivers wide

Till you need the other side

History shows in life’s attrition

Reality’s not just strong suspicion

So Plato’s light did come and fall

And throw the shadows on my wall

Rust and rot on gossamer wings

Dwarfs and Elves with magic rings

A smell of life a taste of time

Nine cents missing from my dime

Women bite and whiskey stings

All the bitters sweet can bring

500 channels in the sky

Showing us the vein’s run dry

Saw it through the chain link

Tween the crack and boards

Heard it on the radio

Tween the minor chords

You can see it in a drowned man’s eyes

In the pawn shop window I just passed

Frosty truths that come to the table uninvited

The poet and the truth

Face to face, one whistles, one listens

The napkins fill with cognitive snapshots

The poet drowns in words

Just wanting to say something

Or hear it said at all

The dying words from a poet’s mouth

Blow about in autumn color

Drifts and piles that shape the years of practice

What’s worth saying has to be said by someone

So a poet goes looking and would suppose

That words rubbed together right would produce

Word museum sentences ripe with meaning

Phantasms haunting great books and minds

Torches lighting the way for all

The poet takes aim and fires

At the fog of meaning

He tugs at God’s coat tail

The world peeks at one another

Reaches out or maybe not

To a stranger or a brother

What is get and what is got

In our virtual melting pots

Everything is something like it

In all the places we’ve been

Across the fire we all sit

On the other side of a screen

Where we can’t be seen

Calling soft, cry or shout

There’s darkness out there

While the world is all about

In the cyber night beware

If it’s your soul you share

Once upon a time ago

We called from tenements

To bricks and windows

To ourselves in lost lament

 As early proto blogs went

With a voice in the night

Drawing flies and crowds

The world just out of sight

Gave the night its lowly vows

“Really” laughing out loud

If the truth was pretty

And it smelled just right…

Or it taste like a t-bone

And came in diet light…

If truth was static free

And came in easy stages…

Or in scratch n sniff colors

On large n glossy pages…

If the truth looked good

On my arm uptown…

Or sang like a bird

 In a sequin gown…

But, … the fool is king, his folly law

His head is thick and fingers raw

Justice is blind and wisdom’s a pearl

Luck is a lady and Truth’s a girl

Her sister is good intentions

The procrastinating whore

Who knocks down the walls

And ignores all the doors

From her cuts I have learned

Truth is the flame, not the burn

She won’t change and she won’t bend

Way too uppity for my friends

To some, Truth is getting rich

And finding perfect mates

But Truth is just a lonely girl

 Who never gets a date

Van Gogh’s ear sings tales all night

Soulful moaning over mind’s eye sight

Antagonize the heart and turn the eye

A visitor to the heart or passing by

From this spring that we all drink

What whispers all the thoughts we think

Lunatic genius with eyes turned in

Tell me where my mind has been

A freighting tether is shelter and cage

Where the writer’s pen touches page

Ink’s fossil trail bleeding from my pen

A history of where my heart has been

To go and not say in doing so

Beyond this point no words can go

With feet of clay and hand to chalk

I’ve come to hear Van Gogh’s ear talk

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