Help

Impatient to move, and
pissed-off by some
dope ahead of me
trying to make a left turn
into on-coming traffic,
I pull out
left lane to right—
without even looking
first—and am hit
broadside by an SUV
THUMP
a jolt
that bounces my compact car
and me
down the street…
Two young girls in the SUV
polite and ingratiatingly understanding
“at least no one was hurt.”
Right.
We stand at the roadside waiting
for a cop.
My fault, my fault
I am cause;
I am not right in the
head, I know it;
I need help…
The cop is no help to me;
he fills out cop-papers
and departs; meanwhile
I have wasted hours of the
girls’ lives, and
am still a danger
to myself and
to others.

Cop

The cop walks up to me
as I sit
in the park:
he wears a bullet-proof vest
and a silver star.
“What is the good word?”
he asks.
I think “go away,” but
that is two words not one.
“Nice day isn’t it?” he says.
“Well—it is not ninety” (like yesterday).
He laughs a cop-laugh;
he is a friendly cop, my new cop-buddy:
“No, it is not!”
His black sunglasses turn away.
His cop-ass moves sideways down the
sidewalk.

Untitled Haiku and Ku

mailman drops new bill
“kerchunk” into
my box

***

gray puff-ball heads of
dandelions like elderly
blacks survived whitey
and gun shots

***

sitting on the crying-bench
listening to the
flags flap

***

read “Welcome” on the
door to
‘Whitcom’s Funeral Parlor’

***

grown from rocky soil
in a world of stone—
kept a rock collection in the cellar

***

I move to Paris
France,
become a Frog—
leap tall buildings

***

no check in the mail:
mailbox empty as
the Grand Canyon

***

April and start of
Spring training—
reading biography of Ty Cobb

***

born in Youngstown
died in Tombstone