April 2020- and eventually she will show up with a new dress on and tell you a joke you can dance to again – New work pending-for terrible now take my advice –

Advice for Aspiring Alcoholics

  

Listen

if after beer number three

you don’t feel

at least mildly optimistic ?

And after number dozen

you’re sobbing in your pillow-

Quit.

Collected circa 2014

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Why is April the Cruelest Month ?

 

Hard to put a handle

on this label.

So I asked my students

who originally wrote

this line.

 

They “peered” up at me

with such a deep bewilderment.

 

All except for that one girl who sits off on the left hand side of the room

who rolled her eyes and let out a sigh while huffing indignantly ,

“I don’t even see what that’s even supposed to mean.”

 

I guess now wasn’t the time to introduce the line,

 

“I see myself dead in the rain”

 

Maybe it was the bookend of chilled dawn memory

sandwiched between the evening dusk desire frost.

Sniffing the smell of the shit hitting fan

tends to make you a “little thirsty”

by the end of the day.

 

OK.

How about

“a lot….. of  “little thirsty”

 

Perhaps it is the terrible now taking hold

like one real “stick it to um” bastard of planet

The distance of the years gone by realized numb

is a growing, gnawing squeezing in your chest.

 

But really it’s that stranger’s hand in your pocket

You know that one you discover

upon putting your own in there

to fish something out.

 

And it looks like somebody already beat you too it

In some other April

where somebody else’s memory

picked that pocket clean

of all you ever desired.                                                     Collected     4/2004

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One for ears from Mr. Cedric- Stop him if you’ve heard this one

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