Smoky Hoss

Come and see the old poet
Laying in his bed of ashes and dust,
His love in ruins
His mentality frozen by restless rust,
...

The world seems a strange place tonight.
I feel as an alien
in a foreign land...
I sit, where I oft do, out-of-doors, alone,
...

Don't we all wonder, remotely
- in ways we cannot even fully understand -
'What's this all about? '
Age has invaded our mind
...

When she was young
she loved to lay in wide open spaces,
intently gazing far away into the sky.
With a divinely silent patience
...

Every time, that last year of life,
when I would go visit her in the nursing home
where she spent her days dreaming inside of those
walls that weren't her own,
...

There we sat
Just me and the cat,
Upon a bench overlooking the river Thames,
The cat turned to me
...

The black-eyed Susans
are gone,
the question of fall
has begun.
...

Today on the trail
the temperature high
the humidity heavy
like a beast of burden-
...

'Silence is God's first language.' - John of the Cross

When the sky clears
and radiance out shines the dark
...

- 'There is, after all, something eternal that lies beyond the hand of fate and of all human delusions. And such eternals lie closer to an older person than to a younger one, oscillating between fear and hope.' -Albert Einstein in a letter to the queen of Belgium.

I stand in a receding twilight room
noticing them noticing me.
...

I saw you last night.
It's been nearly three and a half years.
I was worried about you,
perhaps more for myself.
...

When I was barely a teen
I heard a rock-n-roll singer sing,
Something about a sweet and fast little thing -
Said she was the finest thing he'd ever seen
...

fly through the ceiling
play above the rooftop,
saddle a dove with horse feathers
that never drop -
...

Like the earth,
we all carry a scent
deep within us,
awaiting release-
...

Cats and dogs
Chickens and hogs
Lumps in the 'taters
And bumps on a log -
...

- It was November,2020.
I was with my daughter
in southern Utah, deep canyon country,
seeking some temporary solace, far away
...

If I saw a wood boat afloat
Upon the sea,
Would what I see possibly be
The wood I cut from a tree?
...

Where has my little toy train
gone?
The one I got for Christmas long, long
ago.
...

My mind is in the serried, towering clouds
On the long and distant horizon.
Big, beautiful, bouyant, and bright,
full of wild wonder;
...

I stand alone,
feeling the pouring rain,
tilt my old hat
and lean on my crooked cane -
...