New Poem: YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN

 you can go home again

 if you tell yourself it’s only temporary 

 see the closed stores and near-empty mall

 drive by the century-old high school 

 be surprised by the changes in old friends

 mourn the friends who decided to leave life entirely 

 buy a Pepsi Zero where the Dairy Queen once stood

 say hello to your family inhabiting the local cemetery 

 refuse to go near the house you grew up in 

 especially refuse to compare your aspirations to your actual life

 

 take your rental car back to the airport 

 all the while noticing big Texas skies

 plus the pastureland where camels once roamed 

New Poem: I CONFESS (52 YEARS LATE)

 wherever you are now

 please accept this belated apology 

 for sending a very 70s greeting card

 with a couple walking along a sunny beach

 containing this inscription:

 someday

 some way

 somehow

 I wasn’t a good listener at 15

 didn’t read unspoken social cues

 until the age of 21

 wherever you are now

 please forgive me

 for being presumptuous 

 and making unintended changes 

 in your later views of me

 

Revised Poem: BEHIND YOUR CURTAIN VERSION 3

Behind your curtain

was a stage flat that looked like a brick wall

I hoped the wall would never change

You used to bless me with teenage smiles

then the smiles stopped justlikethat 

and everything I did got on your nerves

so I closed my curtain 

and never again stepped out for encores

>

Over two decades later,

I visited a restored home 

in West Los Angeles

the owner had a living room curtain 

pulled open to reveal a picture window 

displaying a view of a flower garden,

a swimming pool,

and a charming guest house

>

It’s the kind of sight

you would have loved

in the year

when we were both fifteen 

and wanted to become working actors 

before my parents and yours reprogrammed us

no more live that dream

it became renounce that dream

because it wasn’t….practical 

New Poem: HERE’S TO THE PARENTS

 here’s to the parents

 you know which of them I’m talking about 

 the ones who default to discipline if humiliation doesn’t work 

 who slap and hit well into teenage years

 who throw the approval preserver

 only if the child abandons his/her/their dreams

 taking junior on long summer vacations out of town

 all the better to ward off bad influences 

 but what if the child gets hurt by others saying no

 and the parent or parents choose to end this by saying:

 don’t you know I’d pay her to go out with you

 if I could 

 here’s to the parents

 who create children 

 that become nervous adults 

 and choose not to have children 

 of their own 

New Poem: UP AND DOWN THE HILL

the 15-year-old boy with heightened emotions 

now the 63-year-old man calmly seeing an oncologist 

infused, injected, transplanted, revived

taking medication, getting sleepy, hoping for days outdoors

>

looking back at the girl I thought I loved at 15

lying to myself about how I could have been her ideal

imagining all sorts of happy alternate universes

in this one: didn’t listen, never gained her trust, never was a confidant

>

taught to fear, warned to avoid, harangued to PAY ATTENTION 

in spite of this, eventually thought for myself,

and was blessed/burned by consequences 

at 63, want more years before affairs must become ordered

New Poem: THE OTHER PLACE RAMBLE

It was a two story house close to the railroad tracks and just across from the train station mostly closed since passenger trains stopped coming through in 1967 the house had a brief alternate life as the small town’s teen center The Other Place for about eight months between 1973 and 1974 and it was quintessential small town 70s with jukebox playing China Grove, Smokin’ In The Boys’ Room and Basketball Jones downstairs with occasional dancing (one time I danced alone because I was too shy to approach girls)  and Wednesday night Bible study upstairs where one time things were running late so we watched some of the ABC-TV edit of FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE to kill time and just down the upstairs hall was a pool table where I would watch the people who knew how to play pool really really well and as I said earlier it returned to being a two-story family dwelling sometime in 1974 and from that point onwards I took young people’s theater classes on Saturdays in the city half-an-hour’s drive away which was good until my parents didn’t want me to play Billy Bibbit in a production of ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST scheduled for the summer of 1975 at the theater and I didn’t stand up for myself and rock the boat—instead, all the acting I was allowed to do was One-Act Play competition in the small town (which led to competition in other towns and cities) and the Junior Class Play and that kept me busy for as long as these enterprises lasted

I wish The Other Place could have stayed open at least until my graduation in 1977 so I might have had somewhere to go to practice social skills and, if that had happened, it could have made a certain difference in how the remainder of the 70s and early 80s played out for me