1. NOT ALONE

BUT IN THAT I GUESS I'M NOT ALONE

There are and always have been things I won't talk about -
but in that I guess I'm not alone :
the manner in which possessions pile up
the way they all get dusty
the mess I left behind
the disarray I live amidst
the way I race through time
the manner I try to cover-up my flaws
the regret I always face
the million little times I looked at myself in disgust
the thousand things I didn't do
the hundred times I could have :
there's no sense going on -
the gargoyle on the corner still laughs at my regrets
the featureless blanks of the chimney pipes run
rainwater down on my head and the guttersnipes
of the curbway near me throw back
their ridicule into my face.
There's NOTHING I can do nor should anyway
for I have certainly not yet died
nor found hunger as companion
nor withered from disease
nor staggered home with blood dripping
from some open wound.

NO NO I am sound and of good mind
with just too many things to do (it seems)
and not enough whatever it is to do them
- or at least to do them well -
and I tell myself I will.
I tell myself I will a hundred times a day
and try to guide my landings through the
marshgrass of mistake and trepidation
though it doesn't always work

(I have landed on my ass I have landed on my head
those times my feet were absent where they should have been instead).

I've taken chalkboard to my knee and tried to write it sensibly:
the everything of everything
the why I've mastered nothing
the things I've missed and what I've grabbed
the means I've been sent packing.
I've no fame nor manner.
I've in fact got nothing of renown or worth -
only sensible moments of insensitive time
and things so little missed I don't remember
'til I find what it was I forgot I'd lost.

It's all so simple really - THINGS ARE RUNNING DOWN

and so am I.

But I LOOK at the morning sky and still find hope (though little)
still watch the rising sun come o'er the open sky
and brighten something like a day until it fades away
- alas no moment such as this is ever right
but yet recurs three hundred times and more a year
to no avail or some I suppose
: memento mori memento omnia memento Maury
- whoever he may have been.

I shake a whorlstick at Father Time
as he races down a hill -
(that old fart will stumble before long - oh I know he will).
I challenge the matter of death and potential
and any future skirmish with meaning and free-will;
FOR YOU HAVE MADE ME NOTHING Lord
or whatever I'm supposed to call you now -
YOU have made me as invisible as gas
and as sick in the gut as a dead man can be
JUST RIGHT before he goes -
that's all that matters and that's all that shows:
BUT I GUESS I'M NOT ALONE.