PoemS of the Day 12.08.08

Okay, so i guess I'm a John Lennon fan.

hey bulldog

hey bulldog,
it’s freezing like hell
in new york today
and i have a bum
ankle
but you’ve been gone
for twenty-eight years

hey bulldog,
i almost didn’t get around
to this.
i wasn’t sure i wanted
to do the whole
frank o’hara trip
with you this
year.

hey bulldog,
but i loved you more
than any rachmaninoff
piano concerto
with your granny glasses
and your hop nail boots
your put-on cockney accent
and the way
your music
woke up my young world.

hey bulldog,
i’m gushing
twenty-eight years later
and i still get a thrill.
you’re my christmas music
but don’t expect me up at your
tiled monument today.
i don’t do those kind
of tributes
and i have to work.

hey bulldog.
hey bulldog.
the world misses you like
a fine madness.
12.08.08

john lennon

25 years ago i learned about death.
i was groggy
it was morning in a kitchen,
one i barely remember now.
on my mother’s knee
we listened to the broadcast,
moribund jockeys inter-spliced
with your songs & the sad laments
of people from around the world.
folks were already talking about
your legacy, john
& like all good people
they’ve been shitting on it for
a quarter of a century so far.

in kindergarten i had a band
it wasn’t much, but there were 4 of us
sometimes there were 3 because the drummer
needed a nap.
we played all the old beatles songs,
air guitar & lip syncing to my mother’s LPs
on a beat-up fisher price turntable the school owned.
the nun would gather around the girls
& they swooned & i understood the attraction
to all the sound & madness.
but that day we gave no show & the nun
let me keep the radio on to hear more news.
such sadness & loss was so hard to comprehend.
later our band quit playing
ringo slept
george moved away & paul changed schools.
i was you, john
but you were dead
so i choose to be myself & i haven’t looked back
until today.

12.8.05

a day early in the life

every year
i am sad at this time,
thinking about the long past,
that morning
i play like a bad holiday
movie.
the goddamned radio,
and my mother
young
in the kitchen,
trying to turn it all
into sense
for me.
i guess we must all
mourn
a different way.
mine is usually to say
nothing,
to write nothing
on that day,
not even a note
in my journal.
but to get back
to that time,
in my thoughts,
december 8th, 1980,
and christmas splattered
all over
manhattan
like drops of blood
outside a fancy apartment
building.
johnny ace, let them keep
the mosaics,
you and i will open up
a bottle of cheap wine,
drinking it easy
letting the night come
slowly to the world.

12.07.06