Celebrity
I had almost fallen asleep when
a name started buzzing around my head.
It was a name I knew, but who was it?
Is he the cop who broke up the gang
of altar boys or is he the one who
was arrested for a Ponzi scheme?
Is he the one who bounced on a pogo
stick for twenty-seven hours?
Or the one who pitched a perfect game?
Perhaps he’s running for Congress?
Or he’s the guy who proposed while
bungee jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge.
Or he’s the author of “Doubling Your IQ
With Blueberries” or maybe it’s the guy
who sells juicers on TV at two in the morning.
There is so much confetti swirling around us,
so many shooting stars in our small heaven
so many celebrity mosquitoes troubling our sleep.
The River of Time
The river of time is a perpetual flood covering all, endlessly flowing
out of yesterday into tomorrow. Nothing is outside of the river of time.
We didn’t invent time, only measuring it. The minutes and hours are ours,
but not the seasons, or the length of a day or a life. People are counters,
once we start, we don’t stop. This is line five, word sixty-six.
What we have that seems uniquely our own is an awareness of time passing.
Within this flow of time is the counter current of memory. Time flows
smoothly day after day, week after week, seamlessly moving like a train
emerging out of one mystery, disappearing into another.
But memory, which is travel in the opposite direction, is a slide show,
the after image of a strobe light. If life is lived on a train, memory
rides
the subway, a glimpse at ten then fourteen, with only darkness in between.
The past is past, the future is future. The time is always now
and now stops for no one. Line fourteen, word one eighty.
Howard J Kogan is a psychotherapist and poet. He and his wife Libby live in the Taconic Mountains in rural upstate New York. His poems have appeared in Still Crazy, Occupoetry, Poetry Ark, Farming Magazine, Pathways, Literary Gazette and an number of other publications including Award Winning Poems from Smith’s Tavern Poet Laureate Contest 2010 and 2011 Editions. His book of poems, Indian Summer, was published in 2011 and is available from Amazon.com.