jonberger

When we said we were driving down to DC together
I understood we would both share the driving responsibilities.
That meant – in my mind –
that after one of us drove
the other of us would.

So imagine my surprise
when after I finished driving
and was ready to take a break around Wilmington,
I found myself driving some more.

Guess we should have been clearer about the ground rules
before starting out, huh?
Guess I should have defined the terms better.

Anyway, on the way back,
we’ll be splitting the driving fifty-fifty,
just so there’s no misunderstanding.
I’ll need some time off the road
on the way back North.
You get it?
You got it?
Good!

Did…
did you just say you don’t know how to drive?

My history with food is such
that too many people will say,
“We have this leftover steak here.
Jon! Come over and eat this leftover steak!”

And I like free food
and I hate things going to waste
and I don’t want to reject somebody who thought of me
for something special
like eating steak
so odds are, I’m going to eat that steak,
even if I’m not very hungry.

If I’m really not hungry,
or the steak is too rare,
maybe I’ll say
“Let me eat this later,”
and then maybe I can pass it off
to some homeless person I meet
or actually eat it later myself
when it’s less likely the steak will make me sick.

The point is,
my reputation leaves me
a prisoner of former food habits
that I sometimes forget to be ashamed of.

I just ate the body of leftover Valentine’s Day chocolate
because it was provided to me
and I couldn’t find a way out of receiving it
and then couldn’t find a way out
of resisting it.

There are certainly healthier ways
of dealing with this.

Perhaps they’ll come to me
later.

Alone I’ve walked this island for many decades now
and in that time a thing or two there is that I know how
to accomplish or to generate, but one I cannot tame.
Perhaps I could have once, but love is a younger man’s game.

Of course I thought of such things back when I was fifty one
and scheming of the youthful dreams of joy and freedom’s fun.
Of course I am much older and my boyhood is no more
now that I’ve achieved the peak of reaching fifty four.

This age that I have reached has left me walking like a gimp
as anyone who sees me recognizes this old limp,
and now I cannot race romance, as one completely lame
so I must admit to all that love is a younger man’s game.

Yes, love is for the younger, and I hunger for it not.
My capacity for love has flown since I have gone to pot.
My interest in romance is near diddley, almost squat.
In fact, I think you’ll find that my love can’t be caught.

My days of affairs are over, if I may be so bold,
due to the simple fact that you’ll find that I’m too old.
It’s a statement that is far too true, that you cannot reframe
and however you try, you cannot deny that love is a younger man’s game.

There have been other stories about this creature
(I just did a web search with conflicting information)
but I deep dived into the subject and found out
that the Truth Fairy comes to you
every time you lose a youthful truth,
like there is no Santa Claus, or Easter Bunny,
or of course, the Tooth Fairy.

There are other youthful truths, of course,
like your parents will live forever
or stay together
or love you unconditionally,
no matter how you turn out to be.

The Truth Fairy arrives
when you realize any of these things you held faith in
are not worthy of your belief.
And what do you get from this beautiful Fairy
when all else is lost?
A kiss from this blissful maiden
before you’re enveloped in an ethereal void?

What do you think you’ll get?

Another attempt at building my future canon
of works before my brain begins to atrophy.
Here’s a poem for 2034, written on spec
today!

When the otters took over, back in the day
we said, “how could you treat us that way?”
But in their animal tongue, they had their say
and dang it to heck, convincingly, they got their way!

Now the otters are in charge of the government
and they tell us how to vote and where to pay our rent
and just who is to blame for society’s descent.
Here’s a hint: it ain’t the otters. On that, there’s no dissent.

Yeah the otters are the bosses, and all others are the drones.
We’re the ones who borrow money; they’re the ones who give out loans.
The otters live Easy, we’re working skeletons to the bones.
Any day now they’ll be busting out all of our tombstones.

The otters became Apex back in Twenty Twenty Five
when they convinced us humans better be slaves and alive
that to die beneath the otter heel and so we took a dive
and accepted fate as conquered creatures who sadly thrive.

And so life goes on on Earth in this ruptured sorry state
with a world turned upside down to the current date.
How awful for a human to live through a creature’s fate
If only we had been warned of this before it was too late!

We’ll just have to see if the otters live up to the promise of the poem.
See you in ten years!

Just in case I find myself
not as creative in five years’ time,
let me try my hand at future poetry,
to help plump my canon.

If I am fully functioning in five years, great!
Disregard.
If not, we’ll just slip this in as an all-new original,
so the fans have something new
(maybe in five years, there’ll be fans!).

Yes, but what of the space cows!
How will they respond to the crises
of milk in freefall?

Lo, there may be no solution
before the hands of hyperspace!
Are we not men?
Bongo Julienne!

This is just a first attempt, of course.
There may be some nuances
to work out
as now gets closer to then.

I’ll provide my notes later.

Reviewing my past writings,
I see that three years ago,
in one of my last spurts
before I stopped writing poetry
prior to the pandemic
I played the prophet,
claiming it would get better
and that creativity would come again
and “eventually
it won’t be as hard as this,
I hope.”

It seems like the future
I predicted has arrived.

I guess the odds were good for it all along.
Each other time I have run dry,
it has gotten better.

Of course, it’s safe to assume
that I’ll run dry again
but it’ll be harder for that to happen
if I continue to exercise the muscles
and stay in fecund arenas.

“Remain among the creators
and you’ll more likely be creative,”
is what past me could say to future me
if I next have trouble.
Of course, past me never said it,
so I suppose future me will have to say it
to future-future me.

That’ll make sense, I’m sure,
at the time.

I just looked over what I was writing five years back
and it appears it circled around thoughts of
distance, degradation and devotion
in equal parts.
It seems there was a certain someone
I was not being direct with
and was expressing myself literarily
rather than interpersonally.

It looks like good art was made
if not good communications
between me and other human beings
but who expects everything from text,
a language form built expressly to communicate
between human beings?

Five years ago,
I was not the man I am now
who would surely still be unable to communicate directly
with any object of desire,
so I can look back with empathy to the me I was back then
and say, “I feel you, brother.”

So if you’ll permit me:
“I feel you, brother.”

All right. Carry on.

I looked back,and ten years ago
I wrote perhaps the thousandth poem
about the narrator’s emotional impenetrability
with the ironic twist suggesting said narrator’s
actual fragility all along.

It was not the last time the subject would be addressed,
not by a long shot.

Some veins are too rich
to not be continuously mined
for new wealth, as yet undiscovered.
Some miners are too poor
to give up on the old when they have
no new resources to call upon.

Even with other tricks in my bag,
I’ll still fall back on that one
with some regularity,
or variations of it.

But it is perhaps not so bad
to admit one’s frailty
nor to admit other weaknesses
nor to admit that one’s been at it
for more than ten fucking years.

On the list of things to do today
(compose three works of genius,
two works of adequosity, one work of dreck,
wash glasses, change socks, eat lunch),
I did not place bird-watching anywhere near the top
or on the list at all.

But on the completed list
there bird-watching sits,
as the Bluebird and the Robin Redbreast
were both competing for resources
at the bird-feeder beyond the window
I peered through this morning.

I assumed they were a Bluebird and a Redbreast,
based on their respective colorations,
and the flyers did nothing to correct me
in my guesses.

The birds were pretty.

This act of bird-watching will not, I think,
become a regular act for me
as this window will not be one I will regularly visit
but as I pass it
I shall venture to view its contents, I suspect,
and welcome the beauty herein.

Why not take advantage of such features
when you come upon them?