My Age

All people my age want to do

is have sex

go to parties

look at their cell phones

plan to get rich

and complain about school.

Not one person understands

the splendor of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The Downfall of Me

I am awfully afraid of dying,

and of any sort of weird noise.

I fail to find comfort in the small things

and in the large things.

If I haven’t given up totally it is because

I’d still appreciate that apology.

At times a hot sword of yearning

strikes me through.

Yes, I’d like to see Japan!

Catalina

I take a beautiful vacation

from my beautiful life.

It’s too much — a hat on a hat.

The frictionless ocean.

A moon that rises irrelevantly.

My ferry lists towards port of call

drawing dolphins in its wake.

I want to ask the natural question:

to whom might I seem

even a little familiar?

Regular Guy

I am good

but I am not better than the dog

just because of my massive size.

Smart

If someone tells you you are smart

just because you know the word “impenetrable”

they are wrong. You might be medium-smart.

But plenty of stupid people

know the word “impenetrable.”

LA driving verse

my love to the wife

my cabriolet to the spa

my palm to the hole

my palm to the spa

my cabriolet to the wife

my love to the hole

my love to the spa

my palm to the wife

my cabriolet to the hole

a let palm

a wet spa

my hole life:

cabriolet

Catalina pt. 2

The air is full of me.

The beach is pale of me.

I bring tidings.

The observable world

in a bloom of palm light:

merely a belly-up clam.

A shell in the surf.

Upper Middle Class

I’m rich enough to not have to do anything

but not rich to actually do anything.

If I were rich-rich I’d invent a drill so long

it could reach the center of the earth

and if I were any poorer

I’d have to get out of this bathtub.

A poem I wrote in a dream and woke up and put in my phone notes:

Your father fell in love with your mother,

the prettiest woman on long island

because he thought himself to be the fattest man.

I don't know why I like this.

I think because I assumed love

would only be about the mystery between two people,

rather than the mystery of the whole world.

My Lance of Truth

I am not a rock nor an animal. 

I make judgements: 

To abjure the city 

with its limited horizon, 

to sink like the sun and stay under,

dragging my chain and 

raising loose curtains of ocean floor

until I dredge up a new town.

I call it something from the Greek

and tell a story about how we were once

an isle for shitting birds only, 

merely a knob in a vast water 

built clod by clod. 

I never mention the cities of men

who made me so sad. 

Instead, I lay with my dead brother

watching gray hulls of seals.

We attempt a do-over, 

a new family from first principles like

tundra, prairie, mouth of river. 

We uncomplicate it so we 

can complicate it again

with no shame.

MORE GOOD POEMS:

Eileen’s Book of Jokes

AND A COMIC: