Death says to me: soon enough, he will call collect.
(Only pay phones in hell.) (No burners?)
But the phone companies killed all that years ago –
"Operator? Operator?" A bot buzzes in the receiver
like a dying fly.

My cell phone screen is cracked with jokes
and I don't recognize this grim reaper's smile
staring back at me from the lock widget –
gives new meaning 
to saving face. 

Saved by the bell, or ringtone. Sitting out on the deck –
listening to woodpeckers' hard words with bark beetles.
"I hear you knocking, but you can't come in."
I skipped Morse code in Boy Scouts
along with Lifesaving and Bugling

Which means I can't play taps for you, my friend –
only these fingerprints
on Gorilla glass, tracks in the sand
draining down the silicon hourglass.
If survival is eulogy enough, we are still here.

*”Death Calling Collect” – Don Tracy, 1976 (among other versions/sources)

The Sunday Muse

Now we’re inside the hat trick	What? You say I’m stuck up a magician’s sweaty sleeve, packed with flowers, a bunny, and silk?
I thought a hat trick was in sports.	Performing the nifty magic of being a man — are those roses or a crown of thorns? A fancy red hanky or was I coughing up blood? Is that my lucky rabbit’s foot or road-kill?
Three wickets, three goals, three strikes.	Maybe I’m a fire-eater, but you wanted a mind-reader.
What on earth is a wicket?	If I hold out a rope to the audience, slit its bight, do I slip the noose?
And why are they sticky?	Ouch, I cut to the high card, it’s a suicide king.
This is mixing metaphors.	Magician’s rent their doves. I thought you needed to know that.
I am confused.	Yes, that is the trick.
What is the narrative?	Let’s do the escape thing at the bottom of a tank of water. Or Everclear.
How does this tell us about men?	Dressed in my best flak jacket tuxedo. Either I undo the shackles or drown.

The Sunday Muse

Your head is a flower!	Yes, I am the beautiful “Metamorphosis.” Kafka’s vision abducted at birth, found alive in a crack of pavement outside Prague. Passionate. Unbowed.
	“After a night of uneasy sleep, dreams pressing roots deeper into the soil, fingers aching like thorns, Gregor Samsa awoke to find he was transformed into a wild rose.”
But sadly.	Yes, sadly past peak. Drooping and wilted. What can one do?
How do you see without eyes?	You mean how do I smell when it is I, rose, the center of the world?
	It is for you to pluck and die with not knowing, to find your way to me by scent alone.
You have become one, not many.
You have sacrificed your humanity.	Liar!!! The world pulls through my veins into the very color of my petals.
	What sustains us, the garden of origin and eternity. Let there be light – flowers were first to turn towards god.
	If only you too welcomed bees onto your face, felt their tongues.
	As well the wasps with murder in their eyes and bellies. They, too, dab for nectar.
What? What would I know?
You are just a begonia, high on plant food.
It is really irritating.	My thoughts are a choke of pollen, wind sweeping across the pavement. Wipers pushing to and fro on the windshield of your car.
Please be practical.	My wife no longer needs a vase. She can clear out the cupboard over the stove.
	And you?

The Sunday Muse

Let’s use poems like can openers!	I’m lost in the isles of ACME, nobody knows where the can of worms might be.
	Reader? Can you take a quick whack at it for me on Google or Amazon?
	Sixteen bucks??!?!
	I couldn’t wait, just did it myself. Reader – good help is hard to find. Can you please, please step it up?
Open the SpaghettiOs of personal history.	When worms arrive dead.
	Reader, I agree this is not your fault.
	And I accept your reticence in the matter of the SpaghettiOs.
What other fun can we have with blades and gears?	Oh, yes, beware Tin Man!
	Or Aluminum Man, or whatever.
Cell phone ringing…	It’s you, Reader! What? Yes, I have violated the fourth wall, opened the tiffin of poems, the Tupperware of nightcrawlers.
	A wriggling, moveable feast.
	You prefer SpaghettiOs. Fine.
The container arrived, says “minced bloodworms.”	Blood and dirt a muddy soup.
	Pour, heat, and serve.

The Sunday Muse

A “Slough” is the poetic form of a muddy bog, or shedding dead skin, or stuff I say to my wife as we drive.

Sloo	sluff	sloe
		Small dark globose astringent fruit of the blackthorn
Zoroaster	Can you say “Wickaboxet?”
Come visit the museum of spores
		Mucilage
	The tater-tot world of the arcane
Fetch the fiddle Mary!	Vacant lots: vacant are our lots in life	Madman mud man, grave digger with a trowel for your mouth
	Drear, drear, the sheep do shiver in the rain
Willows weep as weep they must, their draped shrouds prepare for us the way		Yarmouth
Mayfly may be the maybe-fly could would should fly, the can-fly, can’t-fly, will-fly, won’t-fly	Shooby-Do

The Sunday Muse

April, early morning, birds have the microphone –
the squawk box in full dither – I scan up and down 
the sundial sniffing for signal with my beak
as if some frequency of light and shadow on my face
will clear the static.

The Byrds – classic rock, no,
"First known use of 'chugalug' was in 1945" – talk radio, no,
A woodpecker's twhack knocks on my bones:
"Hey old man, I'm tawking to you!"
and each tap bends another creaking nail,

Filches in the bark of my tired muscles for grubs or honey
or whatever leaves me flightless and famished 
in my walk down this dirt road every morning,
octets of birds and peepers a Met Opera 
broadcasting Tosca on public radio,

Those strings of my father's Puccini and Verdi 
lifted from vinyl and woven into nests that spiral outward, 
my mother belting "Praise the lord, and pass the ammunition!"
waking us with her birdshot voice – 
are those notes or holes in the sky?

Sun comes on the loudspeaker, it must be recess.
I hear you say "hey" and finally I'm here, present,
your hand, feathered in mine.
A quiet settles in.
I get the news.

The Sunday Muse

The caller said your father had died.
We were sitting in a booth
at the Greek diner.

Who better than Greeks
to know Tragedy?
Our waiter is from Guatemala.

Maybe who better than 
Guatemalans
to know tragedy.

The restaurant is empty.
Who better than empty
to know loss.

His wife will burn him.
She can send the box 
if anyone wants it.

If anyone wanted forgiveness,
I would tell you
a burnt heart 

closes like a door 
as the last customer
leaves for the night.

We pay the check 
and leave a tip
in the jar.

After we are gone
the waiter will spread our coins
like ashes.

First published Sept 2020 in the I-70 Review

The Sunday Muse

It's time for spring to play grab-ass with sunflowers –
those handsy creeping vines and cheeky yellow buds,
for daffodils to spin and slap winter 
right across the face

The Sunday Muse

let's play footsie with death again one little piggy two little piggy
hickory-dickory TikTok rockets doomsday clocks ten seconds to midnight
ten-nine-eight-seven-six little piggy how many nukes can a nuke-chuck chuck 
little piggy little piggy blow your house down I smell roast pork little piggy

The Sunday Muse

In which the poet is interviewed by the poems. “Tell us about yourself.”

Tell me about your eyes.	I am a periscope squinting above the surface of coffee.
Why is your soul caramelized with soot?	My vacation in Eden was a hot time, but I wandered too long in the garden without sunscreen.
Why did you abandon the piano?	My father re-pointed the bricks of our house with Mozart. It was beautiful, but his fingers tipped the scales.
I heard you can breathe underwater.	Do you want to see my fin collection? Some people have shoes, I have a closet of dorsal Nike’s.
Did you once throw your fate on a wheel?	No, that is a lie spun from mud and clay.
What is it with your hair and the birds?	When taking trash to the dump on Wednesday, first one, then another (!) seagull pooped on my head. True facts!
How did you survive in the desert?	I decapitated myself by rolling up the car window. I was tired of the complaining and that thirsty mouth.
You cried watching “Valley of the Dolls?”	As a boy I was in love with Patty Duke
What do you do when your back is to the wall?	Write a sex poem.
You write of the co-evolution of wolf and shark.	When I stumbled on the carcasses of two frozen deer on the beach, words flooded my lungs with hunger

The Sunday Muse