Tuna Melt

This is a POEM about a guy who wants to thank the creator of his favorite food.

Nothing goes better together than
tuna and mayonnaise

rye bread, black pepper, Swiss cheese,

who in the world
comes up with this stuff?

I wanna meet'm

on the terra cotta patio
of his ocean-side restaurant
on the edge of a cliff.

I want the wind to be warm

and I want to tell him
face to face that
if I could
I'd eat his sandwiches everyday.

Posthumous

This is a POEM in which the artist considers what his life's work will amount to after he's dead, comparing it all to a sea shell.

A jack of all trades is what they'll call me.

Those who bother to pick up my remains
will hold in their hands a painting,
colorful and abstract;
a poem of decided obscurity, dismissed too early;

a short, incomplete story.

They'll say "he never amounted to much
in his lifetime.
He worked at a coffee shop and may have
suffered from a mental illness."

I'd really be somebody
if their inquiry went so far
as to report on the life of my parents
or my conception of romance.

I've never been that good at math;
from all the shapes and words and philosophy
I leave behind, this will seem too obvious to mention,
if I were somebody.

But if they look from a distance
at all the trades I fell for
and where I chose to say
what I was incapable, as just a man,
to say out loud in a word,
or single act, or opus,

they might as well have plucked
a shell from the beach,
saw inside a spiral,
perhaps held me to their ear
and listened to my moan
and how I tried like hell
to be the entire ocean.

A Study On The Space Between Actual Facts

This is a POEM that explores the science and mysticism of seemingly unrelated forms of communication.

Absorb me
Through your softest parts
Beg the words of their
Pupils.
And so you let them invert
in the light that blasts onto the big red screens
In the back of your eyes. They soak up
through cords at the speed of light
but slowed down by Ohm’s Law
So that by the time they hit a fold
In your left brain
And spread throughout to
Broca and Wernicke’s
You realize what you’re looking at
has meaning, but you’re not sure what.

So quietly,
someone is actually speaking to you:

Man drew pictures before he could
Breath delicately through his larynx
And imitate the sound of the bird
That was easiest for his son
To catch.

The apple always falls
The shortest route from the tree
To the ground and so, looking at the moon,
Newton wondered, what else is as constant?
After a few calculations the question of
Whether or not there was a relationship
Between the apple and the moon
Was laid to rest.

So does the
father exist in the bird that is caught,
in the boy who spotted it in the air,
Or in the grown boy, a man, who knows the bird by its call
And is so close to sounding it out?
When the father is gone,
is he then the law by which the bird is brought near?
Also, If the boy learns the bird's caw
Will the father ever hear?

If Newton can prove that the moon was as an apple
to his eye for an evening,
Is he really a mathematician?

Rendezvous

This is a POEM about the complexity of a clandestine relationship.

I can bare-
ly remember what we
said between the moment
you pulled off your
shoes at my door

And raced down the stairs
With your hands in the air, screaming
I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care!

Lunch break wasn't long enough
to confirm the truth of the love
you came here to witness and express, manifest, maybe
yes,

to confirm.
But by coming here, to me, so close we were
both exposed
To gestures, mere gestures, confessing our volumes of doubt
Concerning this thing called love.

I think it was doubt that made us sure
Of what we needed to show and how

To stick together

Since we are friends,
romantics at heart, really, whose
hackneyed script is G-rated
for our audience,

and since, for all intents
And purposes
love is like a
good,

I swear
I believe

It would never tear us apart,
don’t
You agree that we can communicate sublime,
Or at least
That sometimes we have
A long and poetic way of saying a simple yes
Or simple no,

of forgetting all our cares for the moment?