What do you do when you’re stuck in a bed,
And your life wanders through the tape loop in your head
For the ten thousandth time?      

 

 

 

RHYME!

 

But,     
           if you can’t rhyme,
Go get gin and a lime, 
And some ice in a glass,
 Knowing, this too shall pass.

Love me tonight, tell me I’m the one,
And I won’t come undone till the morning when you’re gone
                                                           -Robby Seidman

A Jewish Huguenot from New Rochelle,
Whose tunes and heart and humor we loved well
He came to Cambridge to pluck his guitar
In the Oxford Ale House and the Harvard Yard.

A beautiful sense of the deeply absurd,
He stayed true to his troubadour dream,
Drummed up one Sunday, the Sullivan Show,
February of 1964.

An electric guitar, and an amp, and a band,
And a dance, and some girls, this is fun!
Let’s do this again, I can’t wait! We got paid!
she kissed me She Kissed Me SHE KISSED ME!

He reserved his best songs for his shot at the top,
Releasing them one by one, recordings by
Tom Rush, Lynne Anderson, Roger McGuinne.
Then came double platinum Belinda Carlisle.

Finally someone whose last album was platinum
times two, wants you and your song to record.
Not only that, it will be the next single,
Place hotels on the Monopoly board.

Then something goes terribly, terribly wrong,
The video isn’t played on MTV.
A textbook case how not to market your product,
A new way to make musick history.

He then pitched an idea to someone at Disney,
About the lost continent under the sea,
He came back in two weeks and then the guy told him,
“What a coincidence! I didn’t know,
Someone here’s working on the same idea,
Glad you could come, Oh now I’ve got to go,
Give me a call, I’ll be glad to see ya.”

Then came a phone call with really bad news
Leukemia, possibly fatal.
I saw him one last time when there was still hope,
His spirit resilient, no self -pity.

Choosing the artist’s life seems romantic,
The highs are quite high, but the lows, oh-so low.
When the new stars are almost all infantic,
There’s a place where few with sanity go.

Thus some lovely moths, when summoned by light,
Oft become undone, succumbing in flight.

But soft, what form from yon window is d
                                                                              e
                                                                              s
                                                                              c
                                                                              e
                                                                              n
                                                                              d
                                                                              i
                                                                              n
                                                                              g
                                                                              ?
The neighbor’s dog barks three times. 

As I stand beneath your bedroom window
To cradle your sneakered feet with both my hands,
You steady yourself against the house
                                                 And jump d
                                                                     o
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                                                                     n

We silently walk to the waiting parked car.

In moonlit mid-October Fall,
Tremors form around my heart,
Cleft with the blind bow-boy’s butt shaft.

An elephant steps on my chest as I wrest,
The question relentless and desperate.

You tell the truth,
      Then we both cry,
And I,
Have never been so confused
  Or ever so            deeply 
   In love with you. 

So now a suit I sow. 
In sooth the suit may bring me woe. 
Unless I try I’ll never know.  

Pursuing Sue Purring

Perfection in a suit should be,
well-tailored for a woman. She
Should feel the fit, a second skin,
That she will want to wander in.

Perchance a purchase I’ll pursue,
So soon my suit may suit my Sue.

If indeed I sow a seed,
The seed I sow will need a plow. 
The plow I ply, to play I plead
To sow my seed not with a sow.

So now my suit I set in play,
My one fear is that she will say,
As doctors once said, “Suture self,”
And set my suit back on the shelf. 

Hillsboro Winter
ocean waves swelling shoreward
night, the moon, a kiss