TFTD:

"Robert Frost."

The name almost too perfect for the Great Poet of New Hampshire.
Like "Kris Kringle" or "Thelonious Monk."
His real name should be Clarence Higginbotham, something like that.

I remember him fumbling with his papers at the Kennedy inaugural.
As the patriarch Isaac said to Leonard Cohen,
"I was nine years old."

Modern Love

Meet my artificial friends
(The only ones I have)
They're programmed to intend --
The one, a vicious slap,
The other, tactile comfort taken to new depths.

Measure, I must ask
For measure,
Who will choose Ms. Pain and who default to Mrs. Pleasure?

Buy one
Get one free! 

But wait!
There's more! --

If Captain Crunch indeed
Presents now
As a she,
In that
There's always
Buried treasure.

In Your Hands Helpless

Peel me like an onion love.
Shed my dry and withered outer skin --
A chrysalis in flakes that fall upon your kitchen floor,
In autumn leaves elusive,
When the drafty vents cough up synthetic breaths from time to time
In fits, in starts.

Knead me now!
I'm moist and vital, milky even, pungent.
But I'll leave you only stinging tears,
A buttery hiss perhaps?
But only if you're good.
You knew this going in of course.

Sweeter now upon your tongue,
And soon I'll be embedded in your flesh.
We'll never part --
At least until the final dissolution of this sodden, teeming earth.

I wanted this, you know,
When I was first and last seen by you
Resting, golden,
On your dingy, ashen hearth.

TFTD:

For the best darned sleep in the whole wide world
Visit My Pillow Dot Com.

The bard's "bare, ruined choirs."   Now I get it.

This old house is falling down around my ears.
I'm drowning in the river of my tears.
When all my will is gone you hold me sway.
I need you at the dimming of the day.

You pull me like the moon pulls on the tide.
You know just where I keep my better side.

What days have come to keep us far apart?
A broken promise or a broken heart?
Now all the bonny birds have wheeled away.
I need you at the dimming of the day.

Come the night you're only what I want.
Come the night you could be my confidante ...

I see you on the street in company.
Why don't you come and ease your mind with me?
I'm living for the night we steal away.
I need you at the dimming of the day.
I need you at the dimming of the day.

What Wilderness Is This?

What cackling from the nurses' beverage station,

What cat food consumed alone with freeze-dried coffee,

What obese, imperious State Policemen,

What low politicians preening,

What grey wound that will not heal?

What machetes of the other tribe,
What waste removed at 3AM from New York dumpsters just below?

What shrunken head,

What acid hiss,

What former friends who dash like jackals

In and out of my composure?

What machine to tune the laughter track,
What great loves reduced to rust,

What savage protest,

What remorse when dust is seen as nothing more than dust?