Mouse in my Basement

There is a mouse in my basement.
A leftover of putting the cat down,
of the fight my wife and I are having,
of this gnawing feeling that I am broken.

It skitters across the tile floor,
gnaws into the bag of catfood,
leaves droppings that only I can see
even though I shut my eyes.

I would kill it or put it outside,
but the poison tastes terrible, and
my neck is sore from the trap,
and I don't fit inside the cage.

Besides, I'm still hungry and running scared.

Prose poem: The End of Disappointment

My therapist said, "you have to learn to live with disappointment and not feel like the world is coming to an end."  This disappointed me, but I tried to hold it together. We kept talking as the sun went down early and I heard sirens wailing along the street. She was composed, as usual, watching my reactions. I bit my lip, ground my teeth, went through all the clichés. What if it really is the end of the world, I asked. "Brian," she said, "maybe you should just live with this feeling of disappointment instead of blowing it up into something it's not." I tried. I really did. But it was difficult as the locusts rained down, the pavement opened up, and the New Jerusalem rose up above me. Then our time was up.

Thinking Back on Last Night

Last night the leaves all blew down
then the trees, the lamp posts,
the neighbor's houses.

Inside our bedroom, way up
three floors from the street,
we made love while the wind blew.

We lay together, fell asleep,
but I kept waking throughout the night,
listening to the world blow away.

I reached out every so often,
to touch the soft, warm, skin of your leg,
just to be sure we were still there.

Old Men Leaving Parties

with apologies to Mark Strand

It was clear when I left the party
That although I was over eighty I still had
A beautiful body. Following behind me
Another man I recognized, vaguely,
called out my name across the distance
which continued to separate us.
I took off my shirt and dropped it
by the lake shore.
The wind pulled at my hair,
which though it had turned white
was still thick and luxurious,
hair to pull your fingers through,
hair to dream of alone in bed at night.
But it was the muscles of my back,
the raw power of my biceps
which so filled me with contentment
and pushed me onward past the lake,
the city, the burning countryside,
out past the gravestones,
to where my hole was already dug.
I stood beside it, breathing in the night air
looking down into the darkness,
where a party was taking place.
Then from out the hole, climbed
a man, over eighty, leaving the party,
marveling over his beautiful body.
I would have followed him anywhere.

The italicized portion of this is stolen verbatim from Mark Strand's "Old Man Leaves A Party" as was the image of him removing his shirt. So, basically, I'm a thief and a hack. But I can live with that.

Release

Held the basketball tonight,
let it drop and bounce almost back to my hands,
then cradled it in one, balanced it with the other,
looked, breathed, and let it fly.

I knew it would go in,
that it wouldn't even touch the rim,
and I could hear the snap of the net
before it left my fingers.

Such was this day for me,
that chances and uncertainties were within my control
and life was a simple game,
a shot I simply could not miss.

Dropping CNN

I read a fair amount of news on the web. I'm into the political coverage as well as most other things that are happening out there. In the past I have used CNN.com for a lot of that reading because they were quick to get things online, usually accurate, and easy to use. No more. This is a quick post about why I have dropped CNN from daily use and deleted their bookmark in my browser.

CNN has become the tawdry, gossip-mongering, garbage tabloid of the web. When important events are occuring around the world, CNN leads with stories of, at best, local interest, especially sensational stories about abducted children or white women. These are the stuff that, I suppose, have made horrible shows like Nancy Grace popular, but they are not news and not worthy of being read.

Were it a once in a while case of going for the easy, cheesy, classless story, I might let it slide and that's what I tried to do for weeks, months even. But it's too much. The site is a slime hole.

In comparison, the New York Times and National Public Radio sites have remained newsworthy and worth my attention. I use them as my primary sites for news now and won't bother with CNN. I recommend that everyone else do the same. There are important events happening around our world and we should be informed and involved with them. None of them will be on Nancy Grace's show tonight and few if any will be the lead on CNN's web site.

Goodbye CNN. Good riddance.

I Heard Her Ask Me

We were at the Pizza Hut with some of her friends,
this was in college, a long time ago, but I remember.
People were talking and she said something. I disagreed.
I said so. She disagreed right back at me. Without thinking,
without thinking about her, I said, "shut up," and kept going.

She did. She shut up, but I didn't notice that she went quiet.
I went on with my dinner, the conversation, and my years
of self-obsession. I understand only now what she did:
she stopped hearing the conversations, heard only
the two words I said so off-handedly and unaware.

That night she told me how much it had hurt her,
to hear me say that, to speak that way to her in front of friends.
I tried to brush it off, I tried to say it was nothing.
But she said that it was not, she said it was everything,
and she made me hear the words and feel the meanings.

I knew then that she was strong, that I was weaker,
and I knew that I had to listen to her if I wanted to be
the man that I always imagined I could be,
the man I'm still imagining, a shadow who keeps
eluding me, twelve steps ahead, ducking down corners,

when I keep making so many wrong turns
all the while hearing her voice and knowing
that if I just followed, if I could just listen...

Bathroom Graffiti

I'm working against my nature
the habits of my lifetime
to describe without judgment
the men in my imagination
who have sat in the toilet stall
throughout this year.

I've read what the marks left
by them on the stall:
A carved swastika, the word porn,
something about bitches,
an exchange about the sizes
of penises and excrement.

I imagine these men,
they are young enough,
though no longer children,
and their hands are dirty.
Their parents are large,
their homes are cold.

I expect their faces to smirk
as they write these things,
but they are concentrating,
carefully thinking, hoping
that what they write
will be the final words.

And now I smile.
For here we all are,
them with markers
writing on the wall,
me at this keyboard,
all of us hoping

to say the words
that will carry us forward
in the memory of this world
which seems so very large.
We all sit with our pants down
wondering how to be heard.