I should remind you over twenty years ago
my old motorcycle flew over a cliff into the Horse Canyon
and you helped me resolve the wreckage then
So tonight I’ve come back again.
For openers, you’ve done enough already
the Kansas farm girl, our two children, our granddaughter,
a lifetime of wisdom from the graphic artist,
my brother, and my brother’s wife,
all those musicians and engineers,
stamina and gasoline, consumed on the endless gravel road.
I know that mechanics don’t top the hierarchy.
But since you are my guy
and the ball has bounced strange and rolled wrong for quite a few
lets send a message to my hairy dog and enormous cat
telling Buddy and Oscar to wait by the swaying bridge.
And if there truly be cosmic writers and referees of universal rules
peaceful love and unified physics toward all of you.
And Dearest Mechanical God Above,
with all the humility of a stainless steel tool I need some help
pouring a fortune into a righteous pile of a poem
that started off sort of true, now rearranged into fiction.
My errors are as countless as the broken souls
crawling from the swamps and borrow pits.
So maybe redemption’s just as easy, or hard,
or as big, as a legendary womanizer saying
“Well we screwed up at the Bay of Pigs, lets go to the moon.”
I’m writing inside a cold austere room
and going into my pocket for a smoke
but a flow of black ink has soaked through my shirt
which means my pen is uncapped
leading me to cap it and cease for now . . .