Winter Morning

 

On this cold winter morning, I
Am awakened from the misery, alone

What a good thing sleep can be
Bringing us out of hibernation

Making sense finally only for me
Who was never a figment of your imagination

©Dean Baker

Fool’s Cap

Yes, I shall wear the fool’s cap
for you, my love;

in the spirit of the night,
where my concussion
finally takes its rightful place:

no longer to intrude,
with feeling both numb and rude

©Dean Baker

Each Lover In Turn Contrite

You’re quite content to forgive,
and forget; to trade on your sensitivity
for my prolonged contortions of regret.
You can sleep, as you never did,
when there was no threat of marriage:
thinking perhaps of habit as a carriage.

You have no desire to listen, or please
in any way; excepting a whisper
of the perfect world you need, but
Needing sleep more you do not change,
altering the metaphysical into a snore: without
the sense that your indulgence does not fit.

©Dean Baker

Fat Albert’s Outpatient Folk Clinic 1

The Initiates

Boris wandered lost in the crowd, stifling yet another
belch; knuckles sliding along the ground, a ham-fisted
grab-bag of Coca Cola, chips, and a stale cigar clenched
in the other hand. While Corncob was mounting the stage,
the first and last object he’d even come close to mounting
in the last decade.
These were among the real Bloor St. underground
denizens, cave-dwellers, morons, and the intellectually
quadriplegic. And each of these unmentionables has
participated in a simultaneous and mutual evacuation that
had completely polluted several layers of whatever
atmosphere existed only moments ago.
I sit back here, scribbling these words; praying that
nobody will notice me or call attention to the fact that I
am being what they please themselves to call
cynical. Though I believe it is simply relief that someone
else has taken on the task  of description they would not be
able to contain once begun.
I guess it doesn’t help that our peerless leaders are
themselves in dire need of such therapy as this cast of
village idiots provides.
Both were kings of long sustained bursts of silent thought.

©Dean Baker

The Stupids

My mind’s a thread unwinding; I
pluck at darkness, which falls.
It won’t let the stupids out; it
suffers them to bray and shout,
these Attic businessmen and women:
busy, they are knitting spirit doilies.

Must I endure like a disease the bad
and bright side of the living’s enemies?
But who am I asking? We are so
few than farther between might be.

You cannot hear me; you are denying everything,
soiled by the crossways unclean:
strapped in a cocoon of the secondary.

©Dean Baker

The Uselessness Of Want

You seem eager
to be gone, my dear
mother; shrunk
upon the pillow, your

anemic swirl of hair
twists to a dying curl,
curiously mouthing
each inarticulate word

the sentence done:
as if you were an acquaintance
hurt into further distance,
your soul pointedly surprised.

©Dean Baker

 first published in Jewish Dialog

The Traitor Within

The ordinary human event,
passing probably unnoticed.
went with intervals of laughter:
one more suicide since

Strip the grafts of skin,
pick flesh bare to the bones;
leave the eyes staring inward,
wave that shaft of stone

Damaged beyond repair,
everything done is failed, or fair;
unwrapping the gift again:
the dark heart a plum you pluck at will

©Dean Baker

I Don’t Know How

I don’t know how to escape
The cage of slums,
In which I live; wanted
By none, desired by many

For my ills, there’s no sum
Equal to the cure;
Nor any analgesic to mitigate
The spasms of joy

You can see how my face
Is contorted with one now: your
Silence more mysterious to me
Than what I have to say of love

©Dean Baker

Lonely Company

©Dean Baker

Magazine Minds, Confectionary Lives and Cold Souls in Café Society

These are the days of holy rage; the nights, of broken thunder. The numberless
specific insanities that pull your mind right under. Total potentiality.

You know, don’t you? Who can’t gain weight, ain’t got no appetite. Vanishing
invisibly yet I can’t sleep at night and before evening’s day I am all awake. Where
drunks stumble and lurch; slur my daylight mind in ancient doorways, forever
with us. Of course, it’s everyone except you. Fear being another tightrope.

So I shall disappear. The jewels of truth light my way through empty towns, streets.

There are no deals. I left everything behind that would not touch my sunken eyes. In this I am blind, the wounded thief.

Who would be the orphan and limping stepchild, ascribed with insulting logic? Hadn’t I assumed the debt that was once always my badge and refuge? I did not want these signs of genius undermined and botched due to lost affection: or losing what you never had, a haunting.

Another apocalyptic howling at the moon, screaming at the living. Who
never laments or complains.

Unborn flesh torn by desire and the desireless. Physical distances I contemplate as loosely as lost spirit encounters where self-consciousness bows to tie the ribbons of my shoes.

Vision, life.
Above all else, passion. But how can I ask do you care: how many dollars
for how much, objects of impersonal lust. And me with my eye trouble, my insomnia, depression. Mere symptoms.

Poetry the next disavowal by sodden lugs and lumps abandoned in coffeehouse condominiums,
esthete shelterbombs. Who are not satisfied with a life of anonymity.
Who require new distraction, always. A pleasant death for T.V. minds.

The rest: morbidly dull, virtuously sadistic, and wholly masochistic as a result of not cornering the market on sensitivity.

Lot ’s wives. You have had my company for so long you even believe we have not been fucking in mid-air.

Dreamers of an everywhere downtown, the neon nightmare: dummies, doppelgangers, jerks, stooges, nerds, zipperheads… plus a few second banana intellectual epileptics, emotional fascists, and spiritual tyrants.

Though none try to borrow a cup of sugar, I can’t really be sure of the neighbores.

©Dean Baker