I CAN STOP ANYTIME

I CAN STOP ANYTIME

Listen here you, I can stop anytime,
Writing my life in couplets and rhyme,

You in my face, waving your fist,
I am always quite ready to cease and desist.

And while I am at it in a fit of rage,
I can kindly dismantle my Facebook page.

I can bury my head like an ostrich in the sand,
Can discard my dreams and my best laid plans,
Can cut the computer cord and blindly set sail,
To the brave old world of yesteryear,
No I-Phone and no email.

Like the Unibomber’s cousin but without all the drama,
More like a monk or the Dalai Lama,
I can stop anytime and set myself free,
From the troublesome bondage of technology.

Without a 12 step program or an exercise bike,
I can stop, I can stop anytime that I like.
But I’d soon have no friends, for they’d all be online,
Chasing down cat videos, saving their time.
Finding a mate or at least a state of grace,
In the hallowed world of Apple,
In the confines of cyberspace.

Listen here you, I can bear it no more,
When was the last time your face graced my door?
I have to wager with a heave and a sigh,
It’s because in this house, there is no free WiFi.
That’s why we meet at this little coffee dive,
On the far edge of town, on the pish-posh east side.
No one else in the world around,
Just you and me with our noses down.
Lost in the Internet gossip and the wallet draining brew,
I can stop anytime, I’m not sure about you.

I can tear down this blog with its readership of two,
I can stop anytime, but then what would I do?
On damp rainy Sundays when the boyfriend’s away,
How would I manage without Castleville to play?

Listen here you, I could go on a rampage,
Fueled by my boredom, egged on by my rage,
And meanwhile my exploits you could read about and boast,
Send me emails in prison from the Huffington Post.
Its big and bold headlines thrill and delight,
And maybe if my rampage is sufficiently vile,
Arianna herself will cover my trial.

But don’t get your freakin’ nose out of joint,
I think I’ve very wisely and succinctly made my point.
In big bold letters in Times New Roman font,
I can stop, I can stop anytime that I want.

-Bruce Potts
Copyright 2012
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Note: I am a big fan of social media and modern technology, (including
Facebook), but am not above spoofing them from time to time.
As long as they don’t totally replace in person human interaction,
all the cyber antics in the world are fine by me!

IN POPPY FIELDS WHERE SUNLIGHT BEAMS

IN POPPY FIELDS WHERE SUNLIGHT BEAMS

My eyes are blurry, glassy even,
Starry-eyed with the vaunted promise of hope.

For nightmares melt to happy dreams,
In poppy fields where sunlight beams,
My life seen through the microscope.

The scope it catches everything, the fearless highs,
The loathsome ugly lows.
Each fiber and each tissue.
The epithelial, the adipose.

The worm of hate and jealousy,
It focuses its beam on those
And then just lets them go.
Into a land of hazy silence,
Of dearly remembered peace and quiet,
Far from the streets of violence,
My inner child takes his kite and flies it.

And maybe it indeed is God I see,
While levitating quietly.
It could be heaven’s nectar that I sip.
Perhaps it’s just the morphine drip.

But I am flying past the judges in their solemn black robes,
Swirling in a land past judgment, past politics and prose.
I am lost to happy, soon to be realized schemes,
And not my usual bucket list of strange and impossible dreams.
Lost in this lovely forest, where the woodsman hums
And his companion bluebird sings.
A psychedelic land of strange, shifting sands,
Where the hot and hazy sunlight beams.

Someone whose face I cannot see, throws his or her arms around me.
Perhaps my father, perhaps my mother, perhaps the Holy Trinity.
Yet everyone is kind to me, no one’s behind me honking at a red light,
Everything’s serenely green and uniformly bright.

My eyes are blurry, glassy even,
Yet I have to trust what they are telling me.
I cannot pretend to have witnessed heaven.
Or to have walked on the water of the stormy seas.

But something lives and must remain,
Once we slip this earthly frame.
I am telling you I know it’s peaceful,
I have held it in the corner of my mind’s eye.
I’m not afraid to slip away into that feathery, velvety sky.

And nightmares turn to happy dreams,
Starry-eyed with the promise of hope,
In poppy fields where sunlight beams.
My life seen through the microscope.

-Bruce Potts
Copyright 2012
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

IMPONDERABLE

IMPONDERABLE

Sometimes life is imponderable,
Skirting the edges of righteous rage.
Sometimes we wait in the afternoon shadows,
Pens without ink on a blank, empty page.

Sometimes our lives are slippery slopes,
Built on false, inflated hopes.
We ski before we take the course,
We take a tumble from the horse.

We rise to ride the rodeo,
Unprepared for the errant bow,
That flies from the quiver of reckless men,
We rise up just to fall again.

We do our best to pay our debts,
The doctors eat our souls alive,
We play the game and hedge our bets,
While their bill collectors thrive.

Imponderable is the oath they take,
First do no harm, the hypocrites.
Then bleed their sucker patients dry,
The cost is less if you quickly die.
But then they throw a holy fit,
Who‘s going to pay for all of this?

Sometimes life is imponderable,
With water rising every day.
And sometimes in our haste to try.
To rise above and touch the sky,
We drown alone in the rushing bay.
Covered with the stench of existent debris,
Flowing from the rebel factories.
And washing up on the distant shore,
Or killing fish on the ocean floor.

Sometimes life is imponderable,
No one cracks its ancient code,
There’s no safe harbor from the storm,
No harmless, warm abode.

Sometimes life is a renegade biker,
Shooting through the stop signs.
While those content to play by the rules,
Get lost or left behind.

Sometimes life is a prep school prick.
Posting Internet close ups of his dick.
A wild, malevolent Halloween trick.
A bully with a big iron fist,
A candle burning to the wick.

Sometimes life is imponderable.
The weight of the years unimaginable.
We are left feeling worried, lonesome, and scared,
Our tempers lost, our nostrils flared,
Flirting with the notion of righteous rage.
Pens without ink on a blank and empty page.

-Bruce Potts
Copyright 2012
All RIGHTS RESERVED

BE STILL AND LISTEN

BE STILL AND LISTEN

Be still and listen, a word to the wise,
You are nearer than you think to the pull of the prize,
The pot of gold where the rainbow sings,
The grand hallelujahs, the bells that softly ring.

Nearer each day, to laying down this tired sack of clay,
Nearer to the land where harps of angels play.
Nearer to the final intoxicating wine,
The final bacchanalia, the land of endless time.

The end game where there is mercy and nothing left to judge,
Goodbye to the bitterness, farewell to the grudge.
Nearer to a life well lived that parades before my eyes,
Eternity or nothingness, the final surprise.

Nearer to my dear mother who loved me evermore,
Nearer to the mysteries of what this life was for.
Nearer to redemption, sweet as the scent of the rose,
Be still and listen, where holy water flows,

Be still and listen to a night and day both filled with love,
A pillow as soft as a snow white dove,
A place to lay my head and dream sweet dreams forevermore,
Free from the spell of earthly hell,
And the agony of keeping score.

Nearer to the sound of the melodious horn,
Another day nearer for the lost and forlorn.
To lay their sharp and jagged burdens,
Down by the riverside.
To pick up their bed and to know for certain
The healing there in the Savior’s eyes.

Be still and listen to the penny tossed in the wishing well,
A miracle in the making, a truth yet to tell,
When the flag is unfurled to the end of the world,
The end of the lure of the mighty spell.

Be still and listen, for Arab and Muslim and Christian and Jew,
Are forgiven the hatred and violence they do.
Be still and listen, one to the other,
Formerly the enemy, now the cherished brother.

Be still and listen, for the glow of health glistens,
No more Parkinson’s, no more MS, no more the scourge of cancer,
There are no souls with bullet holes, there is peace and a final Answer.
Be still and listen, restored to the vigor of health,
Where rich and poor, they are no more, and at long last share the wealth.

Be still and listen, a word to the wise,
Be still and gravitate to the pull of the prize,
The rainbow of heaven where the pot of gold sings,
The grand hallelujahs where angels earn their wings.

-Bruce Potts
Copyright 2012
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

EQUAL TIME FOR HAPPINESS

EQUAL TIME FOR HAPPINESS

Sometimes I am a gloomy guss, my eyes have seen the glory,
Of many a tear-stained afternoon, and many a downcast story.
And I long to see the other side, the apex of the rainbow,
The mint where coins of joy are spent, the flip side of my sorrow.

Whatever happened to the wondrous days of the two-sided radio hit?
The record companies thought it was just one song,
The listeners thought the better of it.
The radio played both sides of the wondrous forty-five,
Don McLean had Vincent with his Castles in the Air,
For Carole King it was too late, and she felt the whole earth move and shake,
Equal time for both sides, life was just a tad more fair.
There was violence in the ‘60s, but we wore flowers in our hair.

All I am saying is give a smile a chance,
To blossom in the evening sun with its kissing cousin romance.
Equal time for happiness, equal time for joy,
The poor unhappy drudge of a scholar,
But also the wide-eyed jubilant boy.
The wild crescendo of a laugh that spirals through the afternoon,
The heartbreak of a life so stranded and marooned.
For though we ache with the pain of age and the certainty of death,
There is too the hope of rescue, and another day of precious breath.

Just like Gilligan and the Skipper, the professor and Mary Ann,
Our hopes rise and fall as only hopes can.
And even if we never see the cusp or the comfort of dry land,
Equal time to savor the favor of our fellow man.
Equal time for mercy, for the benefit of the doubt,
Equal time for a respite, before all hope runs out.

Sometimes I am a tireless drudge, in a Shirley Jackson tome,
And yet I have a fairy tale lover and a castle for my home,
And sometimes I turn a blind eye to my fortune and my friends,
And a deaf ear to the happy music that God the DJ spins.
Sometimes I forget the joy, this welcome sixth sense,
I’ve done my share of kissing frogs, but I also found my prince.

And when I die, it will be my time, but for now until I go,
I’ll sit back and close my eyes and revel in the show.
For after all, we can choose our mood most days more or less,
Equal time for the muse of the blues, but equal time for happiness.

-Bruce Potts
Copyright 2012
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

DISCOVERY

DISCOVERY

Discovery is illusive, like a phantom in the night,
Invisible ink on an empty page,
Nothing there when held to the light.
Oblivious to the challenge of youth and age,
Hiding somewhere in the shadows out of sight.

How I long to be discovered, like an actress in a smoky room,
Marilyn or some other starlet, long since gone and in the tomb.
But discovery is random, fickle and unkind,
And a run down poet with Parkinson’s
Is surely not what he had in mind.

I just want to know that in some cosmic sense,
There’s a rhyme and reason to this life,
That it’s just not all coincidence.
That at least a single soul finds comfort in my words.
That there’s something magical about only me
That sets me apart from the stampeding herd.

That there’s a meaning in my being here,
That I’m not just stealing space,
I want to be discovered,
By some victory of grace.

I have lived and loved, and written well,
I tell myself that that’s enough.
And it’s plain to see I write for me,
Forget the esoteric stuff.
The stuff of which my dreams are made,
It lies abandoned in the shade,
Gone but not forgotten,
Like a heart’s crumpled shards,
The dreams I had are crumbling,
To the finish line are stumbling,
But my hopes are stubborn and my dreams die hard.

Discovery is illusive, like a school child longs for snow days.
And my best snow days they are gone,
Like a fool I venture out, like an idiot I travel forth,
Work to be done I tell myself, a hunter with his bow,
I skate against august advice, cracking through the ancient ice,
Bargaining with the future, and tempting tomorrow.

And I long to be discovered, like Columbus did America,
Like Ponce de Leon did the Fountain of Youth,
Like da Vinci he found beauty and Michelangelo his truth.
But discovery is a blind man who turns his eyes from me,
And I am lost to the waves that toss and will be for eternity.

-Bruce Potts
Copyright 2012
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

FOR MY PART

FOR MY PART

(FOR KYLE, FOR VALENTINE’S)

For my part I can only say,
My love for you is constant,
Like a lighthouse on the bay.

For my part I can only sigh,
When I see you standing there,
Kind and oh so patient in my mind’s eye.

I was never much the looker,
The player or the king,
I should not have been the one you chose,
But you chose me for your everything.

You are the ace of spades,
My shining diamond, king of hearts,
What you saw in me I could never see,
But I saw your beauty from the start.
Like the shade of a sheltering tree.
And I still see it even now,
Sometimes hard to articulate,
A handsome man in handsome clothes,
The too cool captain of my fate.

Standing there, naïve and fair,
Not dreaming what was in the air,
The Parkinson’s, the impotence,
The muted echoes of despair.
The poverty, the aborted trips,
The sleepless nights, the sinking ships.
The financial burdens and the woes,
You’ve loved me true through all of those.

You bravely took the drop with me,
Into these frigid lonesome seas,
Never a prophet or a seer,
Or a fortune teller could you be.

But magically you have stayed the course,
Like some jouster perched high upon his horse,
And oh how you’ve parried and sallied forth for me,
Doing mortal combat with this crippling disease.

And after all is said and done,
It is you who should stand proud,
For you were faithful to the end and I sing your praises loud.

And I gave nothing in return
But lasting love that brightly burns
I hope to heaven that that was enough,
The poetry and the flowers, the paltry pretty stuff.
In the end I gave you all I owned,
My tired and desperate bleeding heart.
It was all I had to offer you, for my part.

-Bruce Potts
Copyright 2012
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED