BEATNIK SILENT BOOMER CAN STILL WRITE 'EM

I caught me one good poem for my book Up Your Ass. So all my creative juices haven't dried up yet. I'm experimenting with this long line form. Sometimes it works. Some of the lines don't break correctly because of the format of the blog. I just corrected them so now they do.

YOU WAKE ONE MORNING

You wake one morning when the alarm sounds in the middle of your life and cancer battle,

and you begin to toddle about the house with an aging mind, trying to formulate a beginning

when you suddenly miss your wife so much that tears rush into your eyes and a hole opens 
in your belly. For a moment you don’t know what it is you have to do to keep yourself alive,

then you imagine yourself as an even much older man, alone and missing a woman’s touch,

and you remember the old man they brought into the nursing home where you were working

in that small town of long ago because you’d just broken up with wife number three. You had

to make a living, the same way you always had to make a living no matter how or where.

You recall they found him in his farmhouse out in the boonies alone in shit stained undies.

He’d lost his wife of 60 years and couldn’t cook for himself and hadn’t cared for himself.

His sons found him that way, more dead than alive among the pines, delusional with grief.

You recall how you saw him as an example of the pampered male, so dependent on a spouse

that he couldn’t live without her and how his dilemma was smugly humorous to you back then

when you were contemptuous of all the members of your own pampered gender, the idiot male.

That was before counseling where you learned to have compassion for the male you were and

where you wondered how you’d come to hate your manhood so much you didn’t want to be one.

Maybe that’s why at puberty a few times you stood before the mirror in your stepmom’s undies

to give yourself a thrill. In counseling Bob asked why you’d stopped doing it, and you told him,

“I don’t know. I just stopped.” That was before counseling with ex-priest Bob who left his order

because his succubus was so beautiful that the sap rose up in him like honey and blinded him,

and you saw how, for guessed at reasons, you’d taken the women’s side in the battle of the sexes

in the turmoil of the 60s that busted up all the John Wayne foundations of American existence, 
and you sank into a quagmire of self loathing, booze and woman needing you called your self,

and you heard Pete Seeger singing, “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,” one morning 
like this morning when the tears wash up out of your silent interior into your eyes, remembering.