There was a walrus
used to hang with whales.
His bonding efforts
all were epic fails.
He had no blubber
nor blow hole.
He didn’t have
a whaling soul.
His tusks, they said,
were too damned long.
He couldn’t sing
the whaling song.
His body couldn’t glide
throughout the water.
They shunned him
and he said, Okay,
go on about
your humpback way.
I’ll miss your krill,
but I won’t miss
your slaughter.
I think I hear daylight coming.
Its trashing cans crash,
motors rev and voices sprinkle.
Sometimes I try to lock it out
with blankets, shades and pills,
but not today.
Today I am eager for reflection.
Another twelve-hour fire
has been lit and I am ready
to be consumed.
Soon enough the darkness
will reclaim me.
I throw this blazing day
into its way.
Silent summer white lines in the sky
always made me think that soon we’d die;
more so coinciding with the noontime air raid test,
neck craning to spot the fatal mushroom cloud out west.
Hunkered under desks in red brick schools:
looking back it seems that we were fools.
No one even talks of nukes or world war any more.
Now it’s just unending conflict as the news keeps score.
The true man needs
an armored vessel,
heavy woolen gloves
and many pelts;
guns and knives,
blunt tools and bullets,
held in place by holsters
clipped on belts.
I admit to only one such need,
racing storm-soaked streets
at breakneck speed.
If you look outside
and see it’s raining,
know I’m on the road,
out hydroplaning.
Belle, my beauty, out of time,
magnificent, eternal,
stop this hand from writing
these strange entries in your journal.
Make the flowers grow somewhere
just out of sight of man.
Make the aged father leak
so weakly in a pan.
Shine the moon upon the sun,
reverse despotic oceans.
Make us get a healthy tan.
Provide the proper lotions.
And on your last sweet smell of breath,
blow smoke to heal the nation.
Create for us better roads
and faster transportation.