Upon Re-hearing Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles

It was 20 years ago today

or more

since I heard

this music

My 66 years old ears

surprised how positive

and hopeful

this sounds.

Sparked by the Viet Nam war years

new recording techniques

a budding culture of self-awareness

wrought by drugs and meditation

Hindu Buddhist Christian

all religions and practices

this diamond joins

Jimi and the Airplane in my heavens

It was a time when youth

sat and listened to music and poetry

instead of dancing

to everything with a good beat

Music was splitting the world

cleaving it into facets

different diamonds for different people

Now,

there seems to be nothing positive

that sounds across the world

as bright as this was then

War and the murder of children

drains art into salt shakers

that season this bitter soup

while we wrinkled magicians

search out old rabbits

to revive our crushed top hats

Our moth-eaten capes

stuffed into the holes

where the tears get in

that keeps our minds wondering

where we are all going

without you

without everyone

the strings cut to our kites

that once anchored us

to the sky

now filled with

too many loose diamonds

a cacophony that strangely

appears in a final chord

that never ends

that never ends

that never ends

Barry G. Wick

Dinner at 80

Barking thunder
from the dogs of heaven.
There is no help
behind the fence.
Don't stop,
it only upsets them.
Don't go in.
Pretend they're nice doggies.

It's the ability
to lie
that makes some
want to go in.

Whispering to the owner
won't help any.
Yelling, too.
The owner has these dogs
for a reason.
Their barking covers up
all the begging and pleading
believers manage to do
since they started walking
by the gate.,
It's the way
the owner wants it.
Glance, but never stare.

There is an invitation
though hard to get
when the owner
steps out to shop
only to run into someone
next to the frozen peas.

True applicants to heaven
have to be clever
about the package
or something they see
gODD is wearing.
If they only get a smile
it's failure.
Next time:
wait near the Jell-o,
gODD always needs Jell-o.
After all,
how many Jell-o salads
does one see at a large gathering
of religious ladies
from the circles?

Better still,
sit near the toys for dogs,
wear an unusual hat,
a cat skin,
and let a parrot
perch on your shoulder.
Let gODD start
the conversation.
It may be as simple as
“What do you think
of spaghetti
with your dog food?

Now we know
why religious Republicans
want the old
to eat what their government
serves them.
If you are old
and smell delicious to a dog,
the old won't get
to the front door
of heaven.


Barry G. Wick

RADIO!!!

Several months of recording

my favorite radio

for the time of no internet.

Poems of life and death?

NO!

Poems of radio!

My friends and companion

with music,

classical and jazz,

as I write or read

to Mozart or Horace Silver.

Their emotions

of time and place

counterpoint to this moment.

Their genius in quavers,

passions in piano and forté.

There may be many

whose ears are stone,

but they weep for me,

who cannot fully see

minute expressions

in a person's face,

who has failed

to find someone closer

than a steel tower,

electrified and pulsating,

the waves undraping themselves

inside magic boxes,

pouring their nakedness

into my life

through boxy mouths:

their magnetic teeth

sculpting Beethoven's brain

beside that of Bill Evans.

From these vibrations

I am pounded

as if I were a piece of hot iron

that began in distant childhood

lying on a sofa

in the dark of night:

a lonely little boy

out of contact

with any babysitter,

with any parent,

neither interested

as I connected

with the Lone Ranger

or Sergeant Preston

and his dog, Yukon King.

I saw them all

in my imagination

that relays

these images to you,

my companions in the radio,

surrounding my body

with their love

no person has duplicated

in my presence.

So now,

you know the truth

why I can't connect

to anyone

why I'm unable to see the nuances

in the crevices of a face

in the creases beside the eyes.

It all passes through

my imagination

created years ago

in the living room

of a new house

in the 1950s

on a light, gray-green sofa,

that imagination of a world

no more real

than the fantasies

I lay before you now,

an emptiness,

a canyon with no walls,

a tundra with no snow,

characters both good and evil,

dog sleds and silver bullets,

word vibrating

through the memory

of a little boy

who never got up from the couch,

who stiffened with every gun shot,

who heard the wind

and the blowing snow,

the barking dogs,

horses hooves on the prairie,

and the crackling of a warm fire

that was never there

except as cellophane

in a sound man's fingers.

Nothing around me seems real;

it's all just radio

that I turn on and off.

Volume up.

Volume down.

Join us again next time

as boots break the ice

or stab a stirrup

and we're sent through

time and space

in waves of energy

pulsing through walls,

through bone,

through the intangible,

the unending

billows of a sofa

Barry G. Wick