You Will Remember This

You will remember this. Try to forget,
Work on your lucid dreaming for a year,
Maybe a decade, discard senseless fear,
Engage with spirits, haunt yourself and fret,
Consult the stars, pretend we never met,
Nothing will change; that much at least is clear.
You’re hoping, but no light is waiting here
For you or anyone. Not now. Not yet.

As for myself, I never could recall
The past, or any of those memories
You can’t expunge. You know the names of trees;
I barely know my own name. I’m in thrall
To dancing lights, shadows, the panther’s call,
And wakefulness. Night is a time of ease.

Chaff

One day I swallowed ragweed, for a laugh,
A wheeze, a joke, my method of romance,
But lovely Letty led me such a dance
That I gave up. It was a reckless gaffe,
And she warned me my jokes were nonsense — chaff,
An empty bluff on which she looked askance.
I said, “My soul is an open expanse,”
And she replied, “I’ve dumped your photograph.”

She pointed to a thistle and a shrub
Where it had caught, and, muttering my name
Like cursing, to reiterate her claim,
She meanly threatened me with a large club.
She huffed, “Your picture does you justice, Bub.”
I asked, “Did you also throw out the frame?”

Once a Weaver

The poet’s not the world’s only deceiver:
Lies everywhere and always, nowhere, never,
In any helpless moment whatsoever.
Consider monsters like the deep believer,
A butcher who claims he was once a weaver:
“I’m looking for a finger to dissever,”
He says to us, thinking it’s oh so clever,
Flashing above his head a bloody cleaver.

So shrive him in the shrine, where he will shrivel,
Shrink, shrug into his semblance of a shroud.
Once he was shrewd, and shrill; no longer proud,
His will was shredded, so that now he’s civil,
Having given up shrapnel and drivel,
And wears a shrub in his lapel, lewd and loud.

Old Song

So Eddie brought the speed, I brought the weed,
And Schultz the Operator did the rest.
I wasn’t sure that our stuff passed the test
Until the Ranger nodded. He agreed,
And Eddie grabbed the suitcase from the Swede,
Who turned and walked away. At my request
The Ranger shook my hand. “You’re headed west?”
He asked me. “Anything else you guys need?”

Schultz chose dress shoes, bow tie, and cummerbund,
While Eddie hit the track and lost his way.
The Swede is dead now, I heard someone say,
And I said I’d grow old, grey, and rotund:
I put my money in a balanced fund
And went back to the office the next day.