24/52: summer solstice

I am not ready for the days to begin to shorten
the length is just right, now.

to show I am a reasonable man,
I am willing to leave things as they are:

the birds beginning their pre-dawn ballads -
and the sun streams through the coffee's steam;

the light extending past dinner,
and sunset to do dishes by;

the long arc of the day illuminating
all of the things that are still to be done.

I am not ready for the sweltering heat,
even as the time we have begins to roll back

toward the turning of the leaves,
the gathering of fruits.

Too soon the birds will fly
and nests will be empty

and I will be forgotten -
frost on the window,

the light, for the remaining hours
hard and joyless.


audio: https://soundcloud.com/mbonica/summer-solstice

23/52: the ledger

the morning light is a horizontal
coming through the windows -
there is a certain magic to being awake
early on a Saturday.

it's in the dust and pollen
that drift in and out of the beams
as if they come to exist for a moment
and follow a random path
like each of us do in our lives
then fall out of sight and into the darkness again.

I'm counting days like this
on the ledger
of gifts.


audio: https://soundcloud.com/mbonica/the-ledger

22/52: Different Drummer

I didn't think there was something genetic

about being deaf to the drummer of society.

But now that I stand amid generations
I see it, this pattern I've passed on to you

and I wish it were not so.

It is this very trait, this far-hearingness
that has machined me
painfully into this man
who I am.

I would not have wished it upon you
to be lathed by loneliness

to have your spontaneity ground down
by the scrapers and gouges of your peers,

but your inheritance
is the ridicule of not knowing the rules,
the humiliation of inadvertent deviance.

You'll have to listen harder, my child,
you'll have to attend to that faint cadence
no one else can hear.

Your birthright is that distant high hat,
that remote tom,
the far flung djembe
that calls you, and only you.

I am sorry,
and I am sorry I am delighted.



audio: https://soundcloud.com/mbonica/different-drummer

21/52: signaling to the stars

luckily for my wife's sake
we live out in the woods

because tonight
while she was watching TV

I slipped out the back door
barefoot
(but otherwise clothed -
it's not one of those stories)
and standing in that patch of lawn
that we maintain,
beating back the assault
of maple and oak

I began, again, to send hand and arm signals
to the stars.

You know, communications
like the ones you see in the movies
with soldiers directing helicopters
coming in for a landing
over blowing sand or
waist high elephant grass.

I was signaling for them to come down -
any of them,
even one of the small ones -
a red dwarf would do.
To explain, in their heavenly wisdom,
the unfathomable nature of earthly existence.

I raised my hands above my head
to signal that I was ready to guide them in,
and then began to indicate
they were to advance and descend.

If you didn't know what I was doing,
you could easily have mistaken me
for a madman.

They haven't obliged me yet,
those stars,
but they will.
Once they understand.

20/52: too much vernacular

too much of the world's story
is told in the vernacular.

there is something lost
when we use the same language
to talk about grocery shopping,
mopping the floors,
and paying income taxes

And to also exhort the divine
of being alive:
of love's first spark
of the secret three AM fears.

we need a language of magic and sacred
that allows us to
speak the words of the wind,
sing the songs of the waves,
invoke the mystery of the flame,
and sit in the silences of the stones.

the world is less
for the words.

19/52: You are a verse

You are a verse in my poem.

See, that is you up there

all by yourself.

But also intertwined
like a preposition,
or maybe a semi-colon.

Yes, you also seem to be a semi-colon;
after all these years, I still have
no idea how to place you
in my life.

By syllogistic reasoning,
you are a verse about a semi-colon.

Or, whatever.
I know you are a verse.
A verse in my poem.

Audio: https://soundcloud.com/mbonica/you-are-a-verse-1

18/52: a certain tension

There is a certain tension
we live with
that gives our lives color and shape.

In particular the shape
of an inverted parabola -
a black line cutting through
textbook-white space.

When we are lucky, we live at the peak,
forces balanced -
dancing, as the angels once did,
at that dangerous precipice.

We can't choose not to have them,

these pulling forces,

we can only try to cope -
an arm flailing here,
a glass thrown there -

And out of balance means falling
whichever way the tension shifts.



audio: https://soundcloud.com/mbonica/a-certain-tension