NOT MY CIRCUS, NOT MY MONKEYS. Five new poems...

36

Dinosaur Man

Dinosaur Man is dying,

not of disease or hunger,

but of fear of letting go

of his dinosaur body;

and as he gasps for air

he screams in anger and

rallies his strength to

stay alive. But Dinosaur

Man cannot stop the flow

of time, which is a cosmic

function, and as his body

quickens with the higher

frequency of service to life

and not himself he fights

to hold onto his power;

but time speeds on, and

one day, hopefully sooner

than later, Dinosaur Man

will be an artifact.

 37

The Poet’s Mystique

What does the poet know

that the rest of the world

doesn’t?

Why does the world flock

to poets for the right

sentiment?

And why are poets

so difficult to understand

until we probe them?

Not everyone loves poetry,

but those that do cannot

get enough of it, —

Why is that?

 38

Bob and Carol

They made a truce again

to not argue the whole day;

but the more wine they drank,

the more contentious

they became.

My mother made fried patties

with left-over mashed potatoes,

which I loved dearly, and I made

fried patties with left-over rice

and mashed potatoes too.

The evening was getting on,

and the wine was running low,

so Penny went into the house

and got more wine and a plate

of my rice and potato patties.

Bob and Carol are long retired,

and look for things to do;

Carol goes out shopping every day,

and Bob stays home and fiddles

about with little projects.

Couples argue for no apparent reason

other than to be right in their opinion,

and the more Bob and Carol drank

the more contentious they became

over my fried patties.

“They’re made with mashed potatoes,”

contended Bob, who was born to be right;

and to hold onto her precious ground

Carol downed her wine and countered,

“They’re made with cooked rice.”

They broke their truce again that day,

as they fought for their opinion;

and when I told them that my patties

were made with left-over risotto rice

and mashed potatoes, they failed

to see the irony.

39

My Stolen Book

GREAT SHORT STORIES FROM THE WORLD’S

LITERATURE, and stamped inside the front cover

of the book: Property of Nipigon Red Rock District

High School, which I stole five decades ago.

I love books, and I never tire of collecting them,

especially books on great literature, my favorite

passion; but I failed to see why I was so possessive

of the books I gathered like a greedy hoarder.

Penny finished reading the book she had picked up

on her weekend getaway to New York City with

her two sisters, REPORT FROM GROUND ZERO, and

she went through my library and selected the book

I stole in grade twelve for her next read.

“These are the best of the best,” I said to her, with a

strange feeling of nostalgia; but when I went back

to work on my new poem, I felt a storm brewing inside

me. Not knowing what it was, I poured this feeling into

“Bob and Carol” and ensouled my poem with its own

mystery—the gnostic secret of great literature.

Penny read the first two stories this morning, “The

Passover Guest” by Sholom Aleichem, and “A Passion

in the Desert” by Honore De Balzac, and she enjoyed

them as much as she enjoyed Alice Munro that I had

introduced her to when she won the Nobel Prize for

Literature in 2013, and this didn’t surprise me.

But a weird feeling came over me when she showed me

the duct-taped copy of my stolen book this morning, and as

I walked down the stairs for my second cup of coffee it hit

me why it bothered me for her to read GREAT SHORT

STORIES FROM THE WORLD’S LITERATURE.

It wasn’t my stolen book that I fetished, nor the enviable

artistry of the great short stories, but their hidden treasure;

and the idea of her reading my stolen book threatened me,

not for the precious life wisdom of the stories, but for my

fear of her discovering in them my most coveted secret

which I spent a lifetime ferreting out like a blind mole

in the soul of the world’s great literature.

 40

Master of Broken Boundaries

Surfing the channels on TV one night I saw

the title Another Woman, which I had seen

before; but I was so intrigued the first time

that I decided to watch it once more.

I hate Woody Allen, who has mastered the

art of broken boundaries; but he wrote

and directed Another Woman, and I have

nothing but respect for his artistry.

It’s not so much his cloying angst, which grows

more peevish with every new movie that he

makes, that exasperates me; but his seductive

sense of unbounded willful selfishness.

“The heart wants what the heart wants,” Allen

justifies his personal ethics, which he projects

upon the screen of life, and he quotes Nietzsche

and Jean Paul Sartre to support him.

Jena Rowlands is the other woman in the move

Another Woman, reflecting Allen’s recurring theme

of broken boundaries, and the story breaks when

Rowlands sees her stupefying self-deception.

But that’s the secret of Woody Allen’s longevity,

his wanton exploitation of man’s vulnerable nature;

and not until this peevish little man respects moral

boundaries will I ever stop hating him.

NOT MY CIRCUS, NOT MY MONKEYS: Five new poems...

31

Memories of My Mother

Another one of life’s ironic moments—

        my curmudgeon neighbor across the street

with his long-handled dandelion weeder

       hunched over like an ogre on the hunt for

the pesky yellow flower, and me on my front deck

        reading in my Saturday’s Globe & Mail “What

you can do to help bees,” featuring the new attitude

       adopted by Hog Town, Toronto the Good now

dubbed “Bee City,” urging Torontonians to convert

       their lawns into habitats for pollinators, rallying a

cry to all city gardeners to forget the pesticides

       and let the dandelions sprout. I put my paper down

and stared at my snowbird neighbor in his baggy

       shorts and loose-fitting Florida shirt ogre away

on our resplendent spring flower, summoning long

       forgotten memories of my mother hunched over

in our yard and neighbor’s lawn with an old kitchen

       knife and brown paper bag gathering fresh dandelion

leaves which she would rinse and sauté with olive

       oil and garlic for our dinner, but which I liked best

in a thick sandwich with mom’s freshly-baked

       round crusty Calabrese bread.

32

My Journal

Where do you go when you need comfort?

To your partner, mother, father, brother, sister, or good

friend who will listen to your woes and offer you kindness

and understanding; and if you have no-one to turn to,

what do you do?

Life never runs smoothly. We would like it to,

but on the whole life is all about transitions; and when

we’re lulled into believing that life is going smoothly, out

of nowhere we’re hit with a new transition, and we’re

off to the races again.

That’s what happened to me yesterday, picking up branches

and twigs from our yard from our long winter’s passing,

my heart just wasn’t up to the task and I exhausted myself

much more quickly than I expected; so I sat on my deck

to catch my breath, full of apprehension.

I so miss the use of my body, the never-ending stamina

that kept me going from morning till night, and I so miss

my long distance running that turned rotten days into

good ones; it’s just a memory now, but what a glorious

memory, and I thank God for my endeavor.

I’m aware of life’s transitions, and I never fight the march

of time—that’s foolish madness; but all the same, it’s nice

to have someone to talk to when the hammer comes crashing

down; that’s why I turned to my journal this morning

and poured my heart out for a little comfort.

My journal is my best friend, always there to hear what I have

to say; and, at the risk of revealing a secret, my journal always

talks back to me. The voice that speaks is not my own—I know

my own voice, surely; and as I pour my heart out, my journal

always comforts me just by listening.

33

That’s Poetry.

I picked up Keats this morning,

        and then Shelley, but I wasn’t in the mood

for either; and I picked up Immortal Poems

       of the English Language, but I decided to

make coffee instead; and as I waited for

       my coffee I browsed through a word book:

30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary—

        the more words we have, the better we can

express ourselves, indispensable for a poet;

       but my heart wasn’t in it. I poured my coffee

and took a sip and pondered my situation:

       words, words, and more words. Knowledge,

knowledge, and more knowledge, and “to the

       making of many books there is no end and

much study is a weariness of the flesh” said the

       Preacher in Ecclesiastes, and we’re back to

where we started. I opened my book on the

       immortal poems and read Shelly’s Ozymandias

to give clarity to my feelings: it’s not how

       many words we know, it’s how we put

them together. That’s poetry.

 34

The Old Gadfly’s Mission

The Old Gadfly of Athens had an Oracle,

        the sign of a voice that he called divine,

and it came to him when he was a child

        to tell him what not to do. It never told

him what to do, because he had free will;

         his Oracle spoke to him only when he

strayed too far from his mission to free

       soul from its prison. I, too, have an Oracle

that speaks to me; but it never tells me

       what to do or not to do because my Oracle

is my own free will; and the more I exercise

       my free will, the more my Oracle speaks

to me. But when I get myself into a pickle,

       I curse the gods like an errant boy and

get myself on track again to bring more

        clarity to the Old Gadfly’s mission

of freeing soul from its prison.

35

An Old French Proverb

FREQUENCY is the world’s new TEACHING,

And INTUITION our new teacher; no more

willful intention to manifest desire with

the Law of Attraction—yesterday’s guarded

secret; ATTENTION will suffice to materialize

desire into being. And if our world suddenly

falls apart, we can piece it together better

than ever with a higher vibration; but raising

our frequency is the new mystery, and when

everything is said and done the new TEACHING

is no different from the old, the same wine in

a new bottle. As the French are fond of saying,

“Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.”

NOT MY CIRCUS, NOT MY MONKEYS: Five new poems...

26

Poets and Artists

There are no shortcuts to salvation,

because there is nothing to be saved from;

we are born to become what we’re meant

to be, and we will all get there eventually.

It will take more than one lifetime, to be

sure; but what does it matter in the end

if time is never-ending? But we don’t know

that, do we? And we look for shortcuts to

salvation because we can’t wait to get

there. We practice the Five Tibetan Rites

for eternal youth, and meditate for cosmic

awareness, garden until our hearts overflow,

and run marathons until we’re a hundred;

but in the end we’re the same soul as when

we started, only a little wiser, and we wonder

what all the fuss was about. Everything

matters, and nothing matters; it all depends

upon where we stand. But all the same we

have to live, and making choices is our

nature; that’s the game we have to play,

because we don’t know any better. Some

play it fair, and some don’t; but fair or not

it’s still a game, and every winner becomes

a loser and every loser a winner, but we all

become a little wiser. And we play and play

and play, and when we’re wise enough

we come back as poets and artists.

27

A Weird Dream

I had a weird dream last night.

I was happy and resolved, the man

I spent years of conscious labor giving

birth to, exercising my privilege to

become what Mother Nature could

not finish, but the woman I was with

could not fathom the mystery of my

nature and got pregnant by another

man, a handsome and talented hockey

player still in the throes of Mother

Nature (he was an abusive alcoholic);

and then my dream changed, and I

saw three suspicious men planning to

assassinate the President of Mexico

and I had to forewarn him of the plot,

and then I woke up wondering what

C. G. Jung, who analyzed more than

80,000 dreams in his long career and

called dreams “the guiding words of

the soul,” would have made of it.

28

Mothering Instinct

She could not have children

of her own, but her mothering

instinct came out today when she

brought two baby birds fallen from

their nest home to look after, but

one baby bird was badly wounded

and didn’t respond to her loving

care, and the other pined for its

own mother. We put the baby birds

back into the box she had brought

them in and drove back to where

she had found them under the tree

where they had fallen for their

own mother to care of them.

 29

The Old Fox

He was right after all, the Old Fox,

pushing all their buttons to bring out

their chief feature, the darkest secret

of their nature, and they only stayed

with him who rose to the occasion

and put their need for greater meaning

above ephemeral self-interest. No-one

knew where he came from, he kept

that secret to make his teaching more

alluring, and they hung upon his every

word until they could take no more,

and they left more broken than when

they came, writing books and maligning

his intention; but the Old Fox knew

what he was doing, feeding the hungry

and starving the poor, and those that

stayed to hear the worst went away

wiser in the sacred knowledge of their

chief feature that blinded them to

their true nature.

  

30

The Soul of a Liar

It’s not true, what they say about you,

it’s a lie like all the other lies that they say

about everybody they talk about, because

nothing they say can be trusted, —

Why is that?

They mean well, but they continue to lie

despite their good intentions, and they

never stop lying even when they

know they are lying, —

Why is that?

They lie best when they tell the truth,

which is the mystery of the liar’s nature,

and not until they can no longer suffer

who they are will they stop lying, —

Why is that?

NOT MY CIRCUS, NOT MY MONKEYS: Five new poems...

21

I Am Where I Want to Be

No more questing in the dry pages

of lost horizons, or climbing mountains

in the Hindu Kush searching for a fantasy;

and no more meditating in walled Tibetan caves

or collecting wild honey like a mendicant Sufi,

because I am where I want to be.

I could be sunning on a sandy beach in Florida,

cycling in Province, or sipping espresso in Tuscany,

exploring new writers for new thoughts and taking

up hiking or hobbies like Tai Chi and Mediterranean

cooking, but life no longer beckons me because

I am where I want to be.

Not every acorn that falls off the oak will grow

into its own tree, only the seeds that take root will

become what they are encoded to be; so it is with

every soul that takes root in the humble soil of

its own garden, growing where it has been

planted to become what it’s meant to be.

  

22

Self-Murder

The lady was in tears:

she could not negate

the self she had become

trying desperately to undo

millions of years of evolution,

to her Master’s indifference

who responded with a coldness

that made my blood boil.

“Try harder,” said the Master,

but the harder the lady tried

to negate her own identity,

the more her soul resisted;

and in despair, she overdosed

on sleeping pills to become

one with Non-Being just

to please her Master

of Nothingness.

 23

Lunch with a Friend

I stopped in just to say hello to my friend

and neighbor who had come up from Toronto

to his cozy cottage in Georgian Bay that he

had built with his own hands. Born in Calabria

where I came from with my family when I

was five, Tony and I made wine together last

summer and shared it over the winter and

spring, and we’ll be making wine again in

the new season, and when I dropped in from

my bike ride he was roasting some lamb on

his barbeque, along with mushrooms and

red peppers, and he invited me to lunch with

him and Maria whose husband died of cancer

a few years ago. My friend’s wife dropped

dead of a heart attack while building the cottage,

and after five or six years of a bad relationship

with a Sicilian widow who couldn’t control her

drinking, he met Maria at a wedding reception

for a mutual Italian acquaintance, and now

they live together for companionship as many

widows often do, which took their children

time to get used to; and with each passing year

they grow more intimate and respectful of each

other’s quirks and habits and even laugh at

them now in front of me. Lunch was a simple

feast of love of food and sharing, an Italian

custom like no other, and I had to politely stop

Maria four or five times from over-serving me,

reminding her of my mother saying to guests

at our family table, “Manga, manga.” I loved

the freshly-picked asparagus risotto with the

barbequed lamb, large-capped mushrooms,

and long red peppers, and the simple lettuce

salad with salt and pepper and oil and vinegar

dressing, and crusty Calabrese bread just like

my mother used to make every Wednesday

morning to soak up all the juices from my plate,

and a glass of red wine to toast our lunch and

friendship; and, what I really enjoyed because

Penny and I don’t drink it at home, a tiny cup

of espresso coffee with a drop of Anisette and

a tiny spoonful of sugar, and after lunch Tony

and I sat in his garage with the door wide open

soaking up the spring sun and talking, I mostly

listening to his life story, wishing that my father

had been as adaptive and resourceful, and I

couldn’t have asked for a nicer neighbor in

our new home in Georgian Bay.

 24

The Coiled Serpent of My Soul

I didn’t plan it, nor could I have done so:

when the time is right life gives birth to new

meaning in the experience, and writing my last

inspired musing took me by surprise; not that

I wanted it to be my last, they had served the

purpose they were born to serve and the coiled

serpent of my soul sprung with such surprise that

I was awash in a soothing balm of calm—no more

demands to feed the hungry beast that turned its

nose at the banquet table of sacred purpose, no

more waiting for the divine bird to light upon the

branches of my mind; just the resolve that it was

time to move on to another path to serve the soul 

of the great unwashed: poetry, stories, and novels 
to warm the cold beast’s heart, and one wonders 
why the secret is kept secret from the masses 
that want the truth but can’t bear it when
it is served to them on a platter.

  

25

Weasel Words

It’s not the word you have to blame,

by calling it a weasel; the poor creature

did no harm. He sucks the meat out

of the egg to honor its instinct for

survival and is true to its own nature;

but man—o, what a paradox he is! —

who is both what he is and what he is

not, and when he sucks the meat out

of words to have his cake and eat it too,

it’s not the word that is to blame by

calling it a weasel, but the man

for his deception.