About Some Nights

What tedious road
will I blunder down tonight?
Will it take me only partway to
the kindergarten room I can't find, to make up
the classes I missed but can't now understand?
I suspect it may peter out
in a corner of the city unknown to me,
but it could also sweep me away in a sudden car
past all the right exits to a highway with no more.
Please don't let it bring me to the house with the basement,
or put me finally by the elevator banks where none will stop
at the floor I need. And by all means,
don't strand me where I will need the telephones
with their tiny keys.
That is the curse of roads: they take you
where you don't intend to go
and then run out,
and at some point you always find yourself on foot,
in a mall whose stores are never the ones you want.

February 23 2016

Sailor's Tale

Shore down in the Ditchy Roads
when the first of the peals came over.
You'd have thought the master of ships would have said
it was a chancey lie,
but as it was, we were pressed to the back,
and keeling till to the boards, with none left over.
Well and well, it was a hard claw, no denying,
but we after took and belled the horn
with all sails flying ribbons to the sky.
Who'd ever take that course again,
you must heed this warning, truly given:
Take no loft to the peal, for God's eye is in it,
and you'll likely be sent all a-bearing to hell,
for a man is a man,
and a woman a woman,
and only the children may sail.

February 3 2016