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More of Jim's Poems

THE OLD WOMEN

The old women
sit contented
on the boardwalk,

passing across
the bridges of the brain
back to the old days.

Remembering their children
returning home from school
in the twenties

 or throwing a hook and
line at the ocean's edge
in the thirties.

There is some power at work
soothingthe brittle bones
that settle on the boardwalk,

tending to the old people
who sit at the edge of eternity,
smiling.

THE ALCOHOLIC

I will teach you to treat me like a child,
when I whine and complain you will appease me.
You will be vulnerable and react to my manipulations,
you will worry that you have done something wrong.
You will learn to greet me with suspicious hesitation,
your worst fears will linger in the odor of my breath.
You will learn to negotiate beyond your abilities,
desperate to keep peace in the family,you apologize for me.
Now I will teach you secrecy;
you will respect and protect it.
When I vomit on our doorstep
you will hide me from the neighbors.
When you find me unconscious on the bathroom floor
you will clear my throat, pity me, and put me to bed.
I will use your loyalty until it is exhausted,
until you walk away sick with my disease.
Now that the cement of my efforts have hardened,
you grow terrified as the disease diminishes me.
Suddenly you need me, you are part of the disease,
you are empty without the fear I have accustomed you to.
Though you try to walk away from it, you can not,
you search for some one who carries my disease,
some one you need to take care of.

THE BORDERLINE


Peering out from behind a window the dull silence poisons her;

she paces against its' persistence.

But silence, like time, can not fail

it absorbs and records all;

she resists it as love does death.

So today, like tomorrow, she fashions her betrayals And designs her hostilities;

She holds them like a child in her arms.

Now she considers an audience where she will incite anger,

then collect sympathy,

she grows rich in the chaos she creates.

Soon she will set out again with the rage of an anarchist

to squander the wealth of another's emotions,

to keep the intolerable silence from setting in.



MIGHTY MAUREEN

Big Tom had a way that was tough and was lean

til he ran head first into Mighty Maureen.

As the wedding bells rang in the warm autumn sun

we knew that Big Tom was fundamentally done.

For Mighty Maureen has laid down the course

and Tom must report in his pink boxer shorts.

He tried for awhile to stand on his own

but Peaches just smiled and sent him on home.

Now he stencils and stitches and cleans out the bowl,

and buffs up the house til it glitters like gold.

Once a soldier of sorts who would live for a rush

now he battles soap scum at the end of a brush.

And at the end of the day where Peaches still sits

Big Tom serves her dinner in his plaid oven mitts.

I tell you this tale of the modern day ISIS

Still Tom is our man when it comes to a crisis.



JDD 1997