All posts by BonWagner

Fading Faces

Free Form, Love, The Future, Youth

How do I tell you this class picture day
Some will not make it through?
How do I encourage you to hold them now
Every last yucky one of them
Carve them deeply into the folds of your mind
Produce high fidelity remembrances of the joy you now share, despite the unsure jabs you throw and absorb, as you stutter-step-stumble to find some sense of place in this wild order of things?
So when that moment comes long from now
Not so long
To crack the covers of the album
Or however one does these things these days
To encounter your hair and missing teeth and sloppy clothes again
You can enjoy those now gone
Again as real as before, or nearly so
Because, my boy, some won’t make it through
More than you’d imagine
In the blink of an eye

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On The Scene in seven haiku

Haiku, Love

Red steak and rare wine
Cold rain screaming its desire
Lust, cafe, winter

Heavy pour of wine
The next dose warms their spotlight
Queer looks, queer glances

Converging pathways
Choices guessed at in a blur
Journeys made of wine

The hand cups the breast
As if caressing fine wine
Preserving bouquet

Soft silk on the skin
Like sand streaming through fingers
Their moans, deep red wine

Night ends like stale wine
Decanting hard memories
Please escape with me

Amble on the road
Don’t let the hitch in your stride
Reveal drunken wine

 

 

 

Two Farmers-Market-Poets’ Hastily Composed Odes To Youth

Dialogue, Family Life, Free Form, Meta, Poetry, The Future

Today, I encountered topacio althaus for the first time. She regularly sets up a small table and typewriter at our local farmers market, with a sign asking for a topic and a price, promising a poem at the end of the transaction. 

topacio althaus at work

My sister-in-law approached ms. althaus with a financial offering and a suggested topic of our young children: brother and sister and cousin, one of them a newborn, one three, one four.  Here now is the poem that resulted:

 

 

 

I too took up the challenge of the topic and created the following on my phone: 

 

Three 
Three wee ones
Some whipping like warm summer wind
Through the forest of ancient wrinkled calves and knees 
Saturday’s lumbering farmers market shoppers
One sleeping, mouth gaping, chirping like a settling bird
Three  
Three!
Weeeeeee!
Bound by blood
Sister brother cousin
Georgia in her mother’s arms, three weeks old
Isaac, three plus one, so four, patiently enduring the face painter and stares from tiny cousin Merryn, three 
She who is eager to run and play more before his batman cheek is done
Three! 
Bound forevermore by this memory
The warm early autumn morn
Among those busy being old, shopping, and nearly born 

 

 

I made no money.

A good day for poetry.

And berries:

 

 

Three!

 

 

old song for the new

Free Form, Poetry, Prayer, The Future

Yes yes and please more yes
Tell me again how old I am
Whisper wrinkle free how irrelevant my culture has become
Yes yes and please more yes
Join me in this haze of conventional whiz dumb
And allow me to wring my worried hands over your imminent decline
Attending the ascendance of your lost generation
Yes yes and more please yes
Throw up any barriers you can young man
My convalescing mates will gladly dance that most removed of dances
And chant that invocation of phantom castes
Yes yes and more please yes

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A Friday Morning And The Rush Begins

Free Form, Poetry, Work Life

If you’re paying attention you will come to realize in fleeting seconds there is this ease to tapping the deep trenches of pain
In such a moment the moods can shift and the cool crisp happiness of a cloudless and hopeful Fall morning will chill further so that the bright disposition is revealed to mask a wet muddy sadness
Maybe not depression but certainly a deflation and a slowing
A drifting into subtle agony begging one to succumb further by the breath

Instinct – if I’m listening well – tells me not to run from this or coat it in a Teflon gloss
Instinct says stay here for a spell, the tilt is trying to tell you something
Well instinct I’m ready to receive whatever it is on this plate before me
But please let’s make it quick
I have a meeting I need to get to and in business there is nothing worse than a gloomy colleague and yes I’m hoping for a raise so I don’t want to be that guy, if you know what I mean, the late guy all depressed and weepy. Ug.
I’m waiting
I’m open
I’m in

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Getting Old Is Always So Depressing

Free Form, Health, Poetry, The Future

How do those words feel falling from your mouth?
These ideas you’ve scoffed so long and now own?
How far removed from the orbit of your soul do you find yourself today?
Has the reality of the failure begun to set in?

Or have you just accepted this dry wrinkle your days have become?
Let the humorless warm bath of rigid frigidity soak in?
And is this all just okay?
You fuck.
You mother fuck.
Feeling good?
Proud of yourself and this language, these narrow thoughts in which you’ve jailed your imagination?
May you always remember the late night you gazed up from the earth and felt profound irrelevance and omnipotence all at once, the understanding you possessed in that instant.
May you never forget how you have forgotten that!

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I see you, second uncle shrunken drunkard

Family Life, Poetry, Prayer

I see you, second uncle
shrunken drunkard
Can you see me
Uncle, uncle
See me uncle, uncle

Is this the way to channel the glories of our day?
Another morning bed of bottles, yet more cramping bowels
A head of rusty nails announcing their decay
Your slick-tongued whispers now rotten breath howls

Again
You did it again
Forsaken the miracle
Again

And goddamnit you’re fifty-farking-four years old!
Get it together, uncle.
I’m not judging but this shit is getting ridiculous.

I see you, second uncle
shrunken drunkard
Can you see me
Uncle uncle
See me, uncle, uncle

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People tell me I’m mixed up but check this out

Family Life, Free Form

Generally speaking, this brownish-red mole right here on my left shoulder, just here on the deltoid, kept me awake last night from 11:50pm to 4:20am with anxiety.
It’s ironic because it’s the very same mole I worried about earlier that day, and you and I both know that.
Needless to say.
Specifically, all the people who participate in the broader medical field and who discuss issues like these and other issues frighten me.
I’m paraphrasing but my doctor said these exact words that I recorded in my iPhone, “Get that mole removed now!”
Fortunately, it’s malignant.
bah