2 New Poems, New Themes, New Styles: "Childhood Calling" & "Bitter Rivers"

Childhood Calling
***
your childhood is calling
collect, because
you left it stranded on the
inflammation super-
highway to hell.
no pocket change, and no
pockets in footie pajamas for that
matter. you
amputated it like an appendix when
they told you
GROW UP
like it was anything to aspire to,
when things like belief and wonder and
imagination
were too immature for a
comp'ny man.
your childhood is calling
long distance, because
wolfchild howling epiphanies don't reach your
ears, years
down the line when the bottom
dropped out of your bottom
line, like roadkill behnd the limo
double-parked when you had to
drive yourself or just
walk from point A to point B,
discovering a secret alphabet of
outcast letters between the two that
resonated with the ones carved in your
bones, the things that should be
engraved on your tombstone, just another
dead kid dressed in old man's
clothes.
your childhood is calling
you names, playground
vernacular, street urchin gospel,
words you thought you outgrew by
degrees: BS or BA, MSW, PhD, MD,
A through Z when
A is for Another Aspirin and
Z is for Zoloft, anything pharma-
copious and
alphapolitically correct to
disconnect your train of thought and
leave your childhood behind, a
useless caboose, and when,
and when you need,
and when you NEED it
most, no
ghost of a map shows you the
tracks of your tears to reconnect,
recollect, because
your childhood has hung up the
phone, and now, something
worse is calling your name . . . .

------------------------------------------------

Bitter Rivers
***
bitter rivers
shiver your reflection
into shards of imperfection, seven
centuries of bad luck every time
you cry, and whales and coyotes are
symphonies for
"goodbye." croon, tune,
misfortune, all to soon, and other things that
rhyme with rune, scrawled
on the wall
above your
hollow ckull
mouldering like a jack-o-lantern
mourning its candle of thought in
November;
nine hundred ninety nine points of
light, outposts blown out
in a countdown,
empty integers all adding up to
zero. ignorance
is bliss because it's
blind to all you've left behind,
and only lasts until, at last,
history
catches up with you.