Who Can Like That

3.

Who can like that?

I must admit I dislike
seeing human life

compared to something smaller than itself

making love
compared to a comma

death to periods.*

*Ted Berrigan


Albert Mobilio, writing in the Voice Literary Supplement, observed: “Creeley has shaped his own audience. The much...diluted minimalism, the compression of emotion into verse in which scarcely a syllable is wasted, has decisively marked a generation of poets.”


Birth
Awareness
,
Descent
.

Dear Joan

I remember leaving Chicago

After not not sleeping
tossing random items into the Altima
escaping not moving

books and treasures
in the curbed dumpster
hated neighbors
scavenging within

dumpster-diving for computers
I took one from the hands of a father
and smashed it onto the street
with blue eyes vacant
and dead calm

Toys were another matter
I put them all on the red front porch
and the Spanish kids
swarmed onto them
asking “how much” their eyes wide
and hopeful

Its all free . I said
I was in La Raza
Lord of the Flies

So dangerous with generosity
strapped with a 9
and speaking
in tongues...

Lethal drugs
boiled like human soup
in the crooked spoon

A perfect rose
bloomed in the dropper.

Churched

I prayed in a church today
The poem by Jesus
Our Father who art in heaven

This couple was pleasant
greeted me and listened
to my triangular thinking
and Played and sang
Amazing Grace.

I was barefoot and strapped
left my beer on the Missouri gravel

It was comfortable inside
Newly paved Christians
on a one note
two hour crusade

I’m never going back

And A Father Man

(for Michelle)

“Curtain falls on the psycho play”
the audience leaves
hurriedly

mumbling obscenities.

Nick 
9/3/2015