Mars and Venus Meet on Earth TV
The weatherman on the nightly news
said get out and enjoy the weather,
a rare magnificent late autumn day.
Go fishing, he said. Play golf.
The newswoman, in response, said
it sounds like a perfect day
to wash the windows.
Jane Goodall
Grand Marshall 2013 Rose Parade
From the back seat of a convertible,
a little ol’ lady in Pasadena
for New Years’,
studies the hairless primates
lining the street.
She hopes, in time,
to communicate with this species.
she waves,
they wave back.
The Lights Go Out During the Super Bowl
The announcers prattle on and on
about the lights dimming during the Super Bowl.
I think, why am I watching this crap?
and finding no reason but that the TV is on,
I pull a book from the bookcase,
open it randomly to a poem by Gary Snyder,
a poem about girls finding bear scat on a mountain trail,
not metaphorical scat, real bear shit on a real trail
and all that implies in the real world of women and men,
bears and berries, birth and death.
If you know Gary Snyder’s poetry,
you know a poem about bear shit is not bullshit.
If Gary Snyder was here,
Thanks, Gary.
I don’t give a shit if the lights ever come back on.
Nobody Told Us About the Blues
You think your blues might be first generation,
brand new blues, if you grew up in the Cleaver’s house
or the Nelson’s or with the Partridge family.
Ward and June never taught their boys what to do with the blues,
never let on that white people get sick with the blues, too.
Ozzie Nelson never said a thing to his sons
about what hard times are like
and how they can hit you out of nowhere.
Mrs. Partridge never talked about Blacks or Hispanics
or how to relate to a Vietnamese immigrant
when your son didn’t come home from the war.
Ozzie never mentioned cocaine to Ricky
so he found the white lady on his own.
They were never wrinkled, always permed, vacuumed in high heels;
you never heard them talk about what boys were after
or what makes little girls moan.
The Partridges never sang sad songs, much less the blues
and little Ricky was just a good-time rock ’n’ roller.
They never sang about the life that stays on when the TV’s turned off,
the stuff people gotta learn and learn good,
so that when the blue spotlight comes on,
shines on your sweating face,
and the band begins to cookin’ on high heat, you can sing,
you have to sing, cause that’s all you can do with the blues.