Cruel Memory

The past in all its permutations

The loss of word

Friends who should have been kept

Friends who were tossed away

Temporary loves

Long term loves

The never loved and wanted to love

The punches of regret

Things wanted to be forgotten return

Things wanted to be remembered disappear

Ripples of time that change memories

once truth become lies

then lies become truth

Cruel memory is a criminal

that murders what we think

and destroys what we are

from then on

Barry G. Wick

Incomplete

Here is the myth
that doesn't believe in me
There are magic legends
that surround it in amazing colors
It is sometimes a feeble blue
on the edge of purple
I'm not orange enough
for it to accept my myths
that cling to my hands and feet
They clash like demons
at the edge of my driveway
that send a shower of sparks
alternating numbers from one to five
I keep repeating the legends
but never get to see the myth itself
I want it to be red
but that's me
I dance in my breech cloth
that is patterned
in orange and yellow
Jealous natives who dance
in their ghost suits
pat me on the shoulder
in expectation of some new legends
that create a different set of numbers
This is the essence of the myth
It can't accept me yet
This is what shames me

Barry G. Wick

Haiku of Thanks, for all who donate

Two friends gave money
at this time of silent need
Rainbow Washingtons


Barry G. Wick

Mouse Style

There are mice within my walls somewhere
wearing little white underwear
I've seen them scamper across a room
I laugh so hard it breaks the gloom
It is a wonder why they chose
this simple color of underclothes
I know they hear me when I tell
that other colors the stores will sell
When summer comes and heat discomforts
I'm at the pool in my red shorts
Certainly they follow my lead
to cool down quickly when they need
Red is the color I now suppose
mice swim in skimpy Speedos


Barry G. Wick 

Haiku

It snowed Saturday

A bewildered robin sits

where orphan grass slumps

Barry G. Wick

March 2018

Sculptor

In my dreams of starless nights
I leave my vacant studio
through anechoic rock hallways
to walk shadowed incomplete streets
that sift their compressed sand
of my hometown with tool-scarred homes
outside to never enter unfinished doors
chiseled signs of nameless business
then turning roughened corners
onto melt-water sidewalks into unrevealed bars
with tasteless alcohol
No Moses in these stones

No matter how much I wish
that place to go away I'm there
in black-mooned dream
this smoked bacheloric memory
No familiar address no home comfort
no place to reshape my dull tools
There the jagged remains
littering the pyrimidine base
of granite mountains buildings and people
carved by my hand each night as I seek
something familiar friendly or loved
upon this faceless Rushmore world


Barry G. Wick

Foot Voodoo

Herr Doctor
surveys these pink balloons
at the end of my soiled legs
holding oceans
He asks about pills
to make the stream flow
Not from the witch I say
whose hut is
on the same floor
Her magic has not conjured
that option as she dances
around the fire typing
I reveal my failure
since my last visit
to heed his mojo
to couple his ointments
with my lower digits
only twice in seven days
“I'll take it” he grunts
through his oval mask
“Something is better than nothing”
He shakes his rattles
as he clips away the evil
“Four months”
He turns away
in a cloud of sparks and smoke
His footsteps sound strangely
as if the toes of a leper
were falling
into peaceful water


Barry G. Wick

Reading Another Writer's Poem

The words are a jungle to me
To talk to me in my time
leaves and vines must be
hacked away to get to
the writer's hooch
many stanzas from here

There is a thick bark
of experience surrounding
dripping green emotions
Sunlit images rattle around
inside my head
monkeys in the trees

Suddenly the writer appears
ahead on a well-used path
in a golden loincloth
Visible tan lines show
what the sun sees
I am lost in the depth of them

Here I jump from the page
into the clutter of simplicity
Beethoven's page turner
licks fingers for an empty page
I no longer hear the howlers
only Ludwig's memory

I need to read silently
without background radio
This distraction cost me
the possibility of the writer
seeing my arousal then dress me
in his own mystical garment


Barry G. Wick
March 2018

My Sacred Discovery

A small range of hills
runs through the center
of my hometown
the town where I grew
the hill where I played
the hill was my yard
There was no family right next door
they lived down the hill
and I could hit the roof
of Mrs. Bradski's house
with a rock
I just threw rocks
I soon learned
that throwing rocks
can be more physically painful
than throwing words
It was a lesson
I learned from my brother
The scar is beneath
my right eyebrow

The sand rock
at the top of the hill
is named Hangman's Rock
since the hill is Hangman's Hill
next to Dinosaur Hill
where great cement dinosaurs
sit created in the 1930s
From the top
I could see both sides
of my town
and the roads
that ran through the gap
in the hills
between the two halves

Around me sat the ghosts
of so many who came
before me
to the top of this rock
to sit and gain wisdom
from seeing the prairie
to the east
and the Black Hills
to the west
I was not alone
as I felt
or feel even this day

After school
Mother made me practice
the piano
performing her dream
that I did not choose
instead of baseball
or sitting in silence
Jiddu Krishnamurti says thought
creates gODD
and silence of thought
creates the sacred
Very little was sacred in my life

I learned to please others
and never please myself
except with food
or the vacancy of approval

Hangman's Rock
was once the bottom of a sea
or the shore of that sea
a great sand rock outcropping
certainly older than the cement dinosaurs
that pretended to show history

Sitting on the top of Hangman's Rock
was my connection to history
my connection to the sacred
I won't fully understand
until the moment of my death
when I join the small animals
body upon body
that created the compressed sand

Hangman's Rock
is privately owned
a fence now blocking access
just as so many block access
to Krishnamurti's sacred silence

I give every lonely boy
who became a lonely man
the top of Hangman's Rock
in my last will
because it will be mine
sacred
until my last day


Barry G. Wick
February/March 2018

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