StarPoet Newsletter Vol. X, No. XLIX

Please unfriend me let me go
For I don't want to text you anymore;
Wasting our lives is just so uncool,
Please unfriend me and let me text again.

I have found a new web partner
And I will always keep her near,
A hundred forty characters a message,
Unfriend me and let me twitter again.

I think I heard a silver bird
High up above the fog,
Circling 'round with the morning traffic
Waiting to land at National.

Seatbelts on, their coffee collected,
The passengers feign indifference;
The plane descends, the clouds surround,
Unseen below somewhere the ground.

Last night I saw my CAT Scan,
Layer by layer, slicing through my body,
There my kidneys, there my liver,
There my aorta splitting in two.
All present and accounted for
And wearing the uniform of the day
Without need of any major alterations
Or out of warranty replacement.

The beat goes on
La de da de de,  la de da de da.

Oddly angled airplanes rise above
The sandstone walls of the rebuilt Pentagon;
Friendlies undoubtedly or 100% pacifistic
Pilot the instruments controlling the flight path.

-- No terrorist, no survivalist, no domestic antagonist
Obsessed with federal government,
Not even a well booked religious fanatic
Declaring his hard and fast opposition
To abortion or christianity stands a chance against
The second coming of the Puzzle Upon The Potomac.

I know that Caesar was born
Several thousand years before me,
And Sappho, a half millennia before that;
I know when I entered the world in Sacramento,
After my dead brother, before my younger;
I remember my grandparents' and my parents' deaths,
The three days my children were born,
The puppy loves, the crashing heartbreaks,
Grandma's ravioli and Grandpa's doubts about God;
I remember the moment I first realized
How deeply I was in love with Sharon
And surrendered to the inevitable force of nature;
I know that space-time exists and yet
I would ask for more and time enough to taste it all.

My childhood slipped by quickly,
A rush to get on getting on,
Even though, to me, at five or six,
The last week before Christmas
Felt like a year and a half.

I've been told by neighbors who know me
From the first moment my mother brought me home,
That I was never really ever a child,
My vocabulary was always older than I was,
My questions always probing and to the point
For them to ever think of me as just another child.

Looking back, I wonder how it would have been
To linger in those long, what-do-you-want-to-do summers
And not to be in such a hurry to be free and grown,
To not spend my waking hours reading everything I could find.

But that would not have been me,
I was not just some other kid happy to play away my childhood,
I was not that girl, not that pre-teen adolescent,
Not that college coed filling her weekends with grass and beer
Rather than science fiction, rock 'n' roll, politics and astronomy.

I was never that mythical, true blond surfer girl
Or a cute snowbunny on the the slopes above Lake Tahoe
-- My interests were elsewhere, and my physical youth,
An unwanted obstacle I was trying to overcome.

Now, still struggling to keep the calendar at bay,
I find myself well outside of time
Along a continuum of my own making,
Touching both my past and future
With no great urge to hurry on.

As I watch the movie beside my wife and lover,
At home or stadium seating, popcorn without butter,
I know no other point on the space-time continuum
I would rather be, no moment I would chose other than this,
Relaxing against her body, my hand on her thigh,
The film flicking by as we breathe.

The low November sun
Highlights the west leaning branches
Of the barrier trees behind the yard,
Bright evergreen against cool Christmas shade,
Blue sky crisp deep in shadow; a passing moment
Clearly seen through blind and window
And snapshot into careful poet memory,
Gone in an instant as Thanksgiving
Turns into sun starved December.

Morning

The air is cold,
Above freezing but below my lungs,
My lips and tongue grow numb;
A bright full moon sinks along the horizon,
A yellow white harbinger of meteorlogical winter.
The solstice is but a quick handful of weeks away,
The holidays and the new year; 
The spring flowers, daffodils and tulips,
Seem as distant as my childhood.

Afternoon

Pale full moon above the Capitol,
Dull white dome rising above the cityline;
Airliners hustle in, rush hour at National,
Rumble of engines, buses, cars, and jets,
An afternoon cacophony before the sun sets.

The vastness of the Pentagon is never more apparent
Than when its long corridors and twisting hallways
Echo with the silence of a workforce enroute to a holiday;
Five thousand people in a structure built for thirty
Resembles nothing so much as the Mohave
And the people, bipedal Joshua trees.

Enough remain to answer congress
(If anyone across the river still remains)
And execute an order to let the missles fly
Or purchase an American Flag to drape
Over the coffin of our returning comrade.