Pillow Talk

I am but a minstrel, a singer of songs.
A righter of wrongs.
And I sing to make my mistress happy.
And I sing to bring her peace.

When my voice and my lute
do not suffice,
I unsheathe my sword
And I become….

Well, actually, sort of depressed.

Working recently
At being more honest
With myself –
It’s just a plastic sword

From one of the kid’s
Halloween costumes.
And I don’t really have a lute, it
Was more like playing air guitar.

What did she say in therapy last week?
That for once she wanted me to take
The trash out without having to ask?
Just once?

Lord I hope though
She still likes the love poems
I leave on her
Pillow.

Charley’s first half: Minstrel

Blow

drifting into the Vanguard
in ’61, Trane blows a blue-bottle
fly into my silken ear

a nightmare
pursues me
through the streets
allowing a taxi
to precipitate me
home where I have never been

the blue-bottle fly
tips back its longneck vodka
bottle brown

horse fly
trying to find that fine
fine vein
shoot high then squeal
the tires and the reed
bent all the way to Harlem

Jilly’s first half: Trane Blows

“There is a human wildness held beneath the skin that finds all barriers brutishly unbearable”
– Jim Harrison (Day Four – 28 Days of Unreason)

She collects whispers from the menagerie,
Breathes the restless prowling
Back to me.

Who is this silkwife – spinning threads of touch
From the tangled desire
of moths?

My arms swing her up in their trawl –
She knows catch and release,
The leap of endolphins.

Last I saw she was
Dancing naked in earbuds –
Deaf, blind with data

She said I had
Paleo blue eyes –
light, the color of water
from before Fire –

Then dawn over Manhattan
greeting us
like the oldest sunrise
in history,

Where my ribs, ancient,
are stuffed in the mud
of Olduvai Gorge,
aching for excavation,

Day
Ten Million
with ten million
more to go –

One by one
I pull my bones from the bed,
evolve them together yet again.
and go walk the dog.