Seventy-five:

75

Everyone comes from Brooklyn eventually

in the still quiet of a new day. Maybe you 

worked there when you first came to this 

country. Maybe your great grandfather 

owned a saloon. Jesus, sang songs with the 

disciples at the last supper. Maybe he sang 

this very song. Maybe he sang it in your great 

grandfather’s saloon. If Jesus walks among us 

this very day, what makes you think he wasn’t 

in Brooklyn the morning your great grandfather 

met your great grandmother when she came 

looking for a job. She was right off the boat 

from Bremen, which came to Brooklyn one day

in the still quiet of a new eventuality. 

Markle~

29April2021

Seventy-four:

74

Many things have been said and done in the 

name of relationship. Good, bad, tired rehashings 

and penitent blendings of thought and speech. 

Air, from another time and place, is just the 

absence of reliable memory taking upon itself 

the head and body of desire. Shame, passed 

along from mother to daughter, father to son, 

somehow always finds its way into the old barn 

of unforgivness and jumps hopefully from the loft, 

landing instead with a thump in a haycock of pain. 

A conical heap of generational ghosted hurt 

with a life of it’s own. An old sayings says: 

...our failures provide the greatest opportunities

to grow towards the unconditional...    Bullshit.

16April2021

Markle~

Seventy-three:

73

My mother used the word gullible

when speaking of me.

My sister did too

when speaking of her husband.

I would take great umbrage

and get blustery when 

my mother referred to me this way.

Well, I may be guilty of wishing

that true love was true...

But was I ever green as the grass?

Wet behind the ears?

Lord knows I wasn’t born yesterday...

I wonder how my brother in-law felt?

Even so, I wonder how Gulliver felt!? 

Markle~

27April2021

Seventy-two:

72

I am in this picture 

with you

yet I have no memory 

of that me.

The who I was 

then

no longer exists.

I am the only one 

left from there. 

I remember you all and so 

I forget me.

How did this happen?

Why did you leave?

I miss you dire. 

Markle~

11April2021

Seventy-one:

71

Jesus went to the olive press, he had been 

there many times. It was his quiet place. 

He left his buddies keeping a lookout. They 

wanted to be good but their flesh was weak

and they kept falling asleep. Jesus kept coming 

and going, back and forth, to and fro. Every 

time he calmed down his buddies failed him 

in their humanness. So Jesus got upset and said 

“Alright, come-on get up! Let’s go!” Just then 

Judah showed up and said: “April fools!”

That’s when Jesus realized how important 

it was to get a good nights rest. And he 

wished he had listened to his mother about 

hanging with that neighbor kid.

Markle~

01April2021

Seventy:

70

I dreamed I was a keeper 

who sang people’s lives into memory.

I held their things in my hands

and their memories became part

of our communal reverie.

So long lives this, 

and this gives life to thee.

Somewhere in the light I awoke 

and spoke this to you

in the morning.

I can still remember you and the we we 

once were. I will always remember the you 

who will live forever in the lines of this poem.

What is remembered lives.

Markle~

01April2021

Sixty-nine:

69

What if one day in a fit of emptiness and metaphor 

Gustave Flaubert gave up writing novels 

and invented the Flowbee instead. What if he wrote 

irregular strophes that seeped sideways 

from his mouth, painting everything in your 

midnight living room with huckster and flimflam?

“The Flaubert Flowbee!” Not sold in stores!

Guaranteed to crack your cauldron 

bang out tunes and make bears dance 

for the exact measure of your deeds!

Without stars! And without pity!

Non refundable! No money back!

Would we be the worse for wear?

Would we have to invent Bovary ourselves?

Markle~

30March2021