Making the Bed

Making the bed shouldn’t be hard,
Unless, like me you’re a mechanical retard.
How many directions can a cover sheet go?
If I study the problem, and go real slow
I’m bound to find the answer, I know.

Still it defeats me finding bottom or top,
I begin to anger, I probably should stop,
But admitting defeat at the hands of a sheet,
Speaks of a spirit far from complete
Not ready for challenges, unable to compete.

Aha! I think I’ve got it right.
Top and bottom, fit real tight.
Oh NO! It’s time to curse and shout
The f#@&ing thing is inside out.

That does it! Oh yes I see
This miserable sheet laughing at me.
It goes too far, I wont take any more.
Its fate is sealed, I’ll even the score.

I could cut it to shreds, hack it in pieces
Or foul it with my puppy’s feces.
No, that’s too easy a fate.
How would Satan retaliate?

Make it into hand-towels for a colony of lepers?
Use it to portage chinese mustard and red hot peppers?
I could of course burn it in hell.
Covered with skunk spray, not a heavenly smell.

But I go to far, I lose my direction
There’s a better way, a different selection
To get the sheet to cover the bed.
I’ll have my wife do it, instead.

Alone

It was over.
So many dreams fell into the pit that had been my center,
Confirming again, and yet again, that if hope is essential,
Life will have its tragedies.

I had come to revive the spirits of a diminishing congregation.
My wife and I, heavily invested in the church teachings,
Believed we had something worth sharing and a marriage worth saving.

8 months later I sit, alone, in this mockingly happy hotel room
Bright, newly repainted, pinkish walls, earth tone furnishings,
Wondering about the business career I’d abandoned
To bring others A measure of enlightenment.
The arrogance!

I am old enough to know that eventually the pain will pass,
Young enough to know that with the passing will come new
Dreams that will lift my spirit,
And self absorbed enough to recognize times passage will not help today.

I will call a friend, my friend, who might listen
And offer something that questions my uselessness.

Allow me, with an embarrassment of tenses, to tell you what my friend said,
“I will come and get you”.

Morphine Moment

I disappeared inside myself
And emerged bodiless in a space
Outside the moment and the pain.
Time had ceased and I understood everything.
No sensory communication,
Rather, free of form, there was awareness,
Unhurried, all encompassing.
Memory reduced to an unimportant possibility,
Amusing in its past seriousness.

Mark

Believing, as he does, in a libertarian ethic,
Judging his teenage stepsons as "unwilling" to straighten their lives,
Mark looks at 2 more years of conflict under his roof.
 
He flagellates himself over decisions made
Without enough forethought.
Jason, the older child, is less of a problem now
That he is serving a 6 month sentence.
Bryan, starting his junior year in a high school Mark seldom visits,
Is proving unreachable.
 
Where do you go, if not forward?
What does "forward" mean if all signposts point down?
I think Mark will assign most of his guilt elsewhere.
Who among us does not?
 
I knew one woman who saw her marriage
To a fellow senior, who turned out to be very ill,
As a correctable failure.
After seeing him through a third hospitalization,
She walked away.
 
It seems Mark will do that too, but with conviction.