Cover your body with white fat 
Grow hair on your neck, the backs of your hands,
ankles, spleen
Smother your skin with the oil of musk,
so effective for reducing unnecessary contact
     with others of your own failing species
Cultivate aging machines
They laugh in the face of long-range forecasts
They spit in the wind of progress
They resist as a point of pride

And turn your old car into a dogsled
drawn by the neighborhood delinquents
who refuse to attend those academies of unpleasant demands
offering the acres of the despondency the elders call ‘facts’

Welcome, deep season! 
Scrub your windy teeth on the tall and prickly points 
of Father Pine, the always acerbic Arborvitae,
and expel your mouth rinse on the gleaming ice follies of yesterday’s
    lacy network of river and streams
converted now into an arterial network of
    just plain freaking cold

Let the ice steam for all comers!
You steam, we all scream
I swallow my fear in huge gulps of repentance
     for all that summer love
Embrace me, icicle mother, and all your greenie beaming children
waving frozen wings of beautiful death
                        

I am the worst driver in town.
In fact I am no longer in town, but lost as usual.
I don’t live here, this undistinguished inner suburb,
but in the city of higher acclamation, in an ancient crumbling walk-up 
     next to the banana warehouse. 
Still, they advertise for drivers,
and though they don’t really pay you
you get a tiny cut of the fare and, they tell you, 
the grinning enticement, 
you may keep the tip as reward for your valuable service –
if you receive one, 
after driving around lost for so long.
And that is all that they tell you. 

You sit in the ranks for hours,
waiting to reach the top,
and ask the canny local, the voice of experience,
‘Does the company exploit the drivers?’
Sure, he replies, the company exploits the drivers, 
and goes back to chewing gum.

And after you get lost one too many times 
and drop a fare off in a perfect Hitchcokian 
     storm of confusion and betrayal, 
you disappear, leaving the key on the driver’s seat 
and never returning to that hated sprawl of tired subdivisions,
chain stores, and traffic signals, all of them misleading. 

Though maybe, you tell yourself, you should go back 
and beg forgiveness from the blind guy
you abandoned on an empty sidewalk
outside a gritty workplace with the wrong address.
It’s the least you can do. 
                        

Just what I need 
Somebody to take control of this mess 
Evil faces at the window,
    morons cutting trees,
ruining the skyline
in the fullness of heaven’s final month 
Traffic everywhere, nowhere to escape

We walk in the last warm day of the season 
The climate crying its eyes out
Sun fading at the middle of the afternoon
Bikers cycling ‘good-bye!’
The moon rising, full as money,
on the path ahead
as the sun sits behind us,
a soft, pink polish 
on the sweet apple of life

as it always can be,  
if we honor it
and understand
that this is the love of our life