There’s always someone better
Who’ll make you feel today
The way that you deserve to feel.
And who says, anyway,
What’s right or wrong within the heart?
You need, you want, you feel,
While promises were idle things
Unthinking and
Unreal
In The Backyard
I lost the man I meant to be
In a windy, wet backyard,
With a book or two aside of me
By a path and a gate unbarred
With my thoughts and my cares on a different plane
Than the grass, or the trodden track:
Yes, I lost it all on a dewy morn,
And I cannot get it
Back
To share is human:
When I Call…
WHEN I call you, I hope you know
That every longed-for Spring
And every treasured Autumn is
In every kind of thing
Between us said or else unsaid --
For this I know, and true:
When I call you, it is because
There's always
Only
You
To share is human:
a smile in the dusk
carefully spoken,
artfully phrased:
the lion awoken
the sage unphased --
as the sun goes down,
comes a smile in the dusk:
as the air turns cool,
and the old thoughts
hush
To share is human:
an old hardware store
neatly arranged but somewhat scuffed
fluorescent lights and metal shelves
not everything but quite enough
for the builder or the fixer
where the ads of yesteryear still hang
in paper yellowing and torn
and a card table sits at the end
of a certain central aisle
where the owner sits with his glasses down
and points me to where i need to go
with a football game now in my ears
from a very archaic radio
that sits beside him with a mug
of coffee cold by now i'm sure,
it's neatly arranged, and very right,
and strange for being both sane
and mature
To share is human:
in other times (5)
she kissed me first, before i knew
she didn't mean much by it:
and "love", it kind of tasted sweet,
and i now hoped to try it
in greater quantities, indeed.
but she would not supply it --
she kissed me first, before i knew,
that soon she would
deny it
To share is human:
we grow from
we grow from
what's above us
what's below us and
what's inside us
To share is human:
a heart let go
she tried to let me down easy, but
there was nothing easy about me then.
she knew i wasn't it for her,
but she seemed all of that for me,
and i wondered where i'd failed, and what
i could have done or said or been
to turn me into what she'd want,
which sadly seemed just "other men",
and truly, not long after, she
began to date the man she wed.
the left behind feel "lesser than"
because we are. it's just a fact.
but being a man, i've found, is mostly
learning to deal with failure.
i failed for years at dating, then
i failed in my first marriage, then
i failed in being a father, then
moved on to my current failures, which
will identify themselves in retrospect.
but all we can do is the best we can,
and let go of the failures and move to the next,
for the dials turn, and the wheels go 'round,
and we cannot know, or perhaps, suspect,
where the next failure may be coming from.
but it all in the end's part of our tale --
for to live is to love,
and to love's, most certainly,
to fail
To share is human:
in other times (4)
i had this strong identity
but then, somehow, misplaced it;
the raven of uncertainty
then swept in, and erased it
and there, within that strange, strange land,
i tried some stock to take --
but all my once reality
seemed far, and faint,
and fake
