The Biggest Billy Goat Gruff

Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am

Their teasing doesn’t bother me much.
Some people are just assholes.
Why should I let myself be touched?

I see their touch-
ing smiles everywhere I go. They’re trolls!
But their hypocrisy do’n’t hurt me much.

I hit a homerun in the clutch,
defended my goals.—
Why should I let myself be touched

when all they want to do is smutch
their tarry souls on mine, control
my feelings? But they don't annoy me much!

—Trip, trap, trip, trap! said the bridge.
—Who’s that tripping on my bridge? said the troll?
—Why should I let myself be touched?

said the biggest Billy Goat Gruff. A ledge
appeared, and the goat climbed out of the hole,
after putting the troll out of commission, much!
Why should a billy goat let themselves be touched?

More Deck Ditties

Bird feeder swaying. Red-headed finch, flown off. Chipmunk racing across the lawn. He’s the king of the whole yard! Bully Orpington plucks out neck feathers of the poor Barnvelder. Sad! Can I see chickens off my redwood deck? No, but I remember yesterday seeing Jess’s. In a true haiku, there’s not enough voice to ask a question. Cardinal songs nearby,
asking me if I'll ever get right about my life.

redwood deck

chickadee on railing
same moment
alit and flown

chipmunk croak
heart stroke
felt through the feet

garage-door rowan
has its orange
berries again

go poop Charlie
good boy Chuck
good boy

Writing in the Pinch

We have an inkling of what singing is, and Josephine’s art does not really correspond to it. So is it singing at all? Is it not perhaps just a whistling? Franz Kafka, "Josephine the Mouse Singer"

Writing’s an OK thing to do

(others might choose fishing),
but can I count on it to pull me through?

Time I stayed home with the flu
(poor suffering Christian)
writing was OK to do.

I put down my Winnie the Pooh
and took up whistling,
counting on air to blow me through -

calculating the odds I drew,
what I was risking -
a happy-gambit thing to do?

If not for you, I'd have no clue,
I'd spend my life pissing
up the same rope could pull me through -

words not quite ringing true,
puckered lips a-bussing
bubbly, foamy writing-brew
that, in the pinch, may waft me through.

Poetry Porch

Small cedar deck,
now 
redwood-stained.

Everything I see is stuff
I’ve already mentioned 
in poems—

basswood tree, 
bigger
than my house,

stone garden border, 
lacquered
with sooty-mold,

call of a cardinal, 
unmistakable
jackhammer cheeps,

chimney-ed building on the alley, 
more a carriage house
than a garage!

Yard layout same 
as the landscape of my memory—
well puttered-through.

Sunday Morning

Little cedar

deck stained
redwood.

Robin
joins me
on it.

Thirty years ago
we could have saved
the planet.

The End of the Present

Live in the present moment! I’ve decided—

remedy for my anxiety about death.

I won’t dwell in the past, for sure,
when I looked forward to the future and ignored the present.

In the future, I might finally get a job;
then I might even have a home, with a wife and kids.

Well, that future became the past,
and what do I have to look forward to now?

Death, preeminently—but I don’t want to say the D-word;
that’s why I’ve decided to LIVE in the present.

But how DO I live in the present
when I’m always bombarded with memories and plans?

Is the problem that I’m not conscious of the present moment,
that my thoughts are not present with it?

But when I remember the past, I’m not really IN the past,
but in the present in spite of myself.

Still, the present gets boring when I keep
filling it up with the same memories, moment after moment.

As for the future, it’s the same anxious fretting as always, except
that the end of all my trials keeps approaching.

The end of the present. How CAN the present end
if it’s a single moment?