Life, said the old poet
is an insistent knocking
on doors that won't open
into houses
...
Fruit-flavored lights!
Shivering, quivering, edible sights!
Spooned up suns of chewable mood-
Plasmic, prismic, rhythmic, food.
...
I have a rendezvous with destiny.
She is the goddess who entices me.
I see her beckoning with open arms.
She promises I will not come to harm.
...
In my cramped world
I only find room
in my sleep.
I’m cornered
...
I returned,
after browsing the Barnes & Noble magazine stand
to buy one more thing
from the same clerk
...
I sit here trying to remember
the dream of America,
the dream of our forefathers,
and all I see is you,
...
I wondered if I could still love you
if I were blind and
could not see your beauty
...
Woke up this morning
realized
I was almost 55.
When Shakespeare was this old he was dead
...
At Shiloh, The Marne, and Waterloo,
Sribinica, Auschwitz, and Dien Bien Phu,
wherever the slaughtered dead soaked the earth
the marriage between man and forest grew.
...
Nice thing about the dinos:
their extinction
not my fault.
A meteor did that.
...
I used to shop there
all the time
and it was always crowded
...
Percy Dovetonsils is the nom de plume of Doug Lane, who laughed himself nearly to death when he first heard/saw Percy Dovetonsils lisping in his cravate on the old Ernie Kovacs Show. Doug Lane is alive and worrying about his credit card balances in Los Angeles, California. He some day hopes to grow himself a mustache as thin as Percy's.)
An Insistent Knocking
Life, said the old poet
is an insistent knocking
on doors that won't open
into houses
that won't be there
by the time
they do.
So relax, stop knocking,
sit on the stoop
in front of the house
that won't be there.
Soon enough
the owner,
the houseless owner,
must exit,
looking for a new house,
a new way through,
and you'll find
he doesn't look any better than,
or different from,
you.