The money dries up coming in the door.
The bills it pays at nibble on our hands
and stop them playing music anymore.
The angel dust that gathers in the sands
outside our door brings strength I can’t resist.
My strength is like an angel’s or ten men
each time I hit on uppers. Don’t insist
that there’s nothing left of courage in that tin
I bought at midnight walking in the park.
The stalking time that tourists fear with cause
is all I have. Behind my eyes it’s dark
although my pupils flame like Santa Claus
on steroids whipping on his wayward elves.
Our money’s gone. We are feeding on ourselves.

Date this sonnet written unknown. Revised 05/06/2006, 03/02/2016 (and changed themes from ‘Psychosophy’ (because it’s not at all about me) and from ‘Mortal Health’, to ‘Drink and Drugs’ and ‘Crime’), 06/09/2016

Aware of what words say, not what they mean,
I am dumfounded in this living world.
With knitted brow, I oink each time I’m pearled.
I am stitched with drops — wisteria and woad —
that others cast before me. Life is fine.

‘Why,’ I ask, ‘wisteria?’ I am owed
a pittance of the earnings I must pay
in principle, if I want to persist
in living lightly on the edge of life.

I know that woad commemorates my blues
which I express more avidly than I feel,
but why wisteria? Magnolia, and pine,
and — when I’m at my best — the mighty oak
are me, or were my provenance. And weeds
are what I wear when my large debtors die,
and what I hide in when my creditors approach.

I think I’ve reasons for words I define
instead of living them. Word definition
substituted well most all the lengthy years
I was lucid, and went on a while beyond.

Like shade expanding from the church that makes it,
gloom takes in cemetery, road, and me.
The clouds of what seemed reason to Descartes
boil Bolshevik depression from the beach
and leave me panting, horse before the cart.
I shed shade, restoring tan that pale thoughts bleach.
I find respite in thoughtlessness. I doze.

The next table cheers a festive lunch’s arrival
for German damsels. They are noisy en masse.
They, in their last-ditch forties, celebrate.
I relish hot-dog tactics but desist
from sentencing them with verbs to help them end
their sentences. I’ve other Fisch to fry.

One word, an icon for all other words
that I hover by, define, misunderstand,
demands — this is unusual — a meaning.
Not what, this time, ‘wisteria’, but why?

‘Where is the universe?’
Her answering ‘When?’
seems normal in the circumstances and
we look for it together in the thin
impossibilities where chances fan
false hopes till they extinguish something grand.

As raffles raise more hopes than they subdue,
so does the fact this mystery is true:
Although we know not why we are in love,
nor know if it will last, the skies are blue
and heaven is where we are, not above.

from Sometimes in Balance, 2007, isbn 987-9-0811-5821-3