TOM'S POETRY CHANNEL

I, ROBOT

I sing my body electric

state-of-the-art

luxury sports utilty vehicle

of the species

nothing like me ever was

built like a brick shit house

to last

to take a licking

and keep on ticking

modeled on the redundancy principle

extra brain hemisphere, superfluous

kidney, lung, eye, hand, foot

five senses each with its

software-bundled hardware

connected by spaghetti-tangles of

fiber-optic nerves to the

mother of all boards

and every cell vacuum-packed

with its own copy of the spiro-encrypted

double-helix, micro-schematic

blueprint, and every digit stamped

with its encrypted swirl-pattern

‘scan code’

 

Oh, I’m the quintessential

self-replicating

self-healing

self-cleaning

psycho-medical

chemico-robotic

circuit city wonder—

 

Drop me on an alien planet

and watch:

at one-tenth brain capacity

I’ll invent the wheel

steal fire from the Titans

change water into wine

clone myself, and when there’s

enough of me, enough time

and enough typewriters

we

will compose

Hamlet!

THE RIGHT STUFF

"...it's lonely out in space..."  --Elton John & Bernie Taupin

Fifty years ago, when the

psychological test results

were finally in, the scientific

intelligentsia pontificated:

Man will never—   can never—

travel the measureless emptiness

survive the stark loneliness

of the big-bang to the stars

so hopelessly social  is his nature

so utterly dependent is he

upon human warmth, upon real  contact

with his village... with his tribe...

today, a generation of innerspace-

astronaut sons and daughters and

nieces and nephews with uncanny

hand-eye-mouse coordination

self-strapped into the consoles

of wireless suspended animation

in space-capsule bedrooms

have launched their cargo lives

on  drifting trajectories through

the days, months and years of

cyber-space... utterly alone

and chatting endlessly

in virtual bliss

in virtual chat rooms

resolving virtual conflicts

with virtual combat

developing virtual relationships

leading steamy virtual sex lives

and leaving us, their

baby-boomer elders,

tethered back here

on terra firma by our

virtual umbilicals

WHEN I WENT TO THE MOVIES ALONE

When I went to the movies alone

I could weep in the darkness

when they put Ol’ Yeller down

or when the little blonde kid

wailed Shane! Shane! while Shane

rode off into the credits

     

When I went to the movies alone

it was holy like being in church

worshipping creation on the screen

(the creation of someone accessible)

each film being another chapter

in a Bible even I could read

When I went to the movies alone

it was like being in school

only a real school that only taught Life 101

all the stuff you really wanted to know

but were afraid to ask

the stuff they never had the guts to tell you

     

When I went to the movies alone

I learned how to go out in a blaze of glory

when to ride off into the sunset 

that you put girls on pedestals

and how to get Natalie Wood to fall for me

by the end of the show—

 

Oh sure, I’d sit with my brother when he went…

or Freddie, my cousin… Jerry or Steve…

but it was always so much more

spiritual

when I did that

when I went to the movies alone...

ORIGINAL SIN

When I was ten (back when the

Sunday-school purpose-of-life was

never to tell a lie and to think only

pure thoughts) I could never dig what

Popeye saw in librarian-plain Olive Oyl

What was keeping me up nights was

the little independent theater in my head

starring those jailbait Disney girls of Peter Pan

the mermaids of Marooner's Rock, the real

reason for flying into Neverland for the weekend

Scantily-clad and always

happy to see you, the island girls'

welcoming and entertainment committee

for lost boys looking for

a bit of R-and-R

Sweet petite Tinkerbell,

all pouty and deliciously jealous

in that hot little jungle-green number

and those legs, Mr. Disney—

what were you thinking?

Oh I might not choose

to swing on a star

but hey, carry ‘moonbeams’

home in a jar?

back to my room?

And of course Wendy, my first pin-up

gliding around night and day in little more than

her modest and sexy powder-blue nightgown and slippers

more than willing to play house, darn your socks

or sew your shadow back on

RHYMES WITH 'EUPHORIC'

(a.k.a. Reefer Madness)

once upon a time in the late 40’s

shortly after i began cutting teeth…

the nursery became...

all of a sudden

baby’s first opium den—

mom still marvels how i

stopped crying and

dropped right off to sleep

just like that

after massaging a dollop

of her favorite

over-the-counter opiate

into the tender and swollen

teething sores of my

five-month-old

gummy-gum-gums

PAREGORIC: the mom’s best friend

a product that really worked for once—

and my brain (no dummy, even then)

as eager to learn as any pavlovian dog

coming alive with messages flashing

in and among the synapses:

brain to gums, brain to gums, come in please...

roger, brain, this is gums, go ahead—

10-4 gums, that last dose was a beaut

whatever you do, just keep’em coming— you copy?

roger wilco that, brain— over and out...

yes, message received:

laugh and the world laughs with you

cry and you cry and get stoned

i like to imagine my cunning little self

swaddled in a powder-blue security blanket

jonesing for my next fix—

wonder if i snored like a banshee

as a little babe coked to the gills...

bet i did a lot of gratuitous ‘crying’...

hell… i’d have cut extra teeth if i could’ve

 

(Click image to read the dosages)

GOODBYE YELLOW BRICK ROAD

published in the Bangor Daily News 12/01/2008

you took it for granted...

just assumed memory lane

would forever remain

your yellow brick road

overlooking, way back then,

those sleepy seeds borne on

the winds of time

sowing themselves in between

the cobblestones and then

all those little spearheads

the crabgrass unsheathing itself

up underfoot ... choking the undergrowth

in an overgrowth primeval and

now you’ve gone missing in

the outback of your own

hardening cerebral arteries,

all your hansel and gretel breadcrumbs

disappearing like hourglass-sand

down the little rabbit holes and you,

needing a damn machete

to hack your way in circles through

the foliage of your own

life’s back pages ... unable to find

even the forest hiding behind the trees

 

PIPE DREAMS

Warning! Contact your geriatrician

immediately if you experience

an erection lasting four or more hours

 

accompanied by euphoria, delusions of grandeur,

delirious tremors, the rockin’ pneumonia

and the boogie woogie blues

(followed by an acute craving for nicotine)