"I guess nobody loves me..."

By A.E. Bayne

Come on! I need your guidance here.
There is this book, this book I’d like to buy,
But it is fifteen dollars too much for this life.
And so my daughter follows willy-nilly, clicking rhythms with her tongue,
Moving pictures ‘round the table while I moan into the phone.
And my baby gurgles softly, soothing with her mood.
Oh baby, oh my baby, if you only understood.
I guess nobody loves me,
No one answers when I call.
Mother, father, sister, brother,
O! My back’s against the wall.
Should I buy this book with my last dime,
Take food straight from their mouths?
Fifteen dollars too much for this life,
And now it’s come to this:
No one loves me;
Nobody loves me.
I’ll just leave it all behind.

This I Wish for You

By A.E. Bayne

Close your window boards and sleep serenely under stars
that twinkle tersely in the moon’s kind charm,
disarming passersby with promises to take names,
leaving them omnipotent.

Tonight, you shine like a mellow dark diamond on black velvet.

The roar of cars on the road beyond is ocean waves
where at night,
long before,
sea stars twisted in the surf under that same glittering sheath.
Masquerading as a hyperborean night sky,
they swam with us in the everything.
Aqueous and indigenous,
the cosmos shared our skins.

Kick, stroke, and pull to the space beyond the horizon.
Will they know our names, those stars, those stars?

Miss America is Back in the Old Dominion

By A.E. Bayne

First, Virginia:
Virginia explained that losing is hard if you become lost in the doing.
Three months she did travel with me,
a glittering grin, shiny red face,
she graduated from far America, Lincoln.
Your questions were jewels as the cheering captured her head,
the mansion queen with her right possibilities.
Your questions were jewels because journeys are best midst life's pageant.
For days we expected to find out that June beats January -
Absolutely, America.

Evolution

By A.E. Bayne

When you were a child
And sleep overtook you in your mother’s ample arms,
Your eyelids fluttered coyly
As you sought a dream.
The rhythmic huffing of your mother’s breast
Rocked you further toward that otherworld.
Your eyes opened, and then closed;
You were gone.

When you were a boy,
The dreams came in sprays of color
Like slick oil from a genie’s bottle
Splashed upon the table.
You hugged your pillow tightly
Riding waves until you touched dawn,
Waking on a foreign shore,
Untried waters toying with your stubbly cheek.

When you were a young man
You did not sleep, but dreamed a waking life.
Audacious in your candor,
Incredulous in your philosophies,
You conquered untold fortunes
And ne’er closed an eye for fear that the world
Would swoop up its cloak tails and dip you head first
Like a fountain pen into the wells of destitution and obscurity.

When you were an aged man you slept often,
Sometimes dreaming fitful plots
That twined through remnants and regrets,
Twisting the truth of tales told twice.
Yours were the dreams of the heart drum and the thread weaver,
Collected stories embellished by wisdom’s pearls.
You balanced each moment with your toes wriggled deeply
Into past and future.

Now you are a child,
And sleep overtakes you in your mother’s swaying womb
As you deliver a dream that says,
I am the new day.
The rhythmic thumping of your mother’s heartbeat
Presses you toward that outer world.
Your eyes are closed, and then opened;
You are here.

The meteor measures our breath in streams of stardust

By A.E. Bayne

The meteor measures our breath in streams of stardust.
O! Conscience in the cold,
How far will you go to find a home with me?
Night's damp chill hangs over us still,
And you, in perpetuity,
Pluck lightly over my heartstrings,
Playing each with the touch of a weaver.
Star shower reigns overhead,
As your fingers twine mine with ease.

Remembrance

By A.E. Bayne

With glazed eyes I peer across the
vast wakelessness of my ocean.
Petrified wood does a dead man's float
as rippling waves incorporate a thousand dreams
into my mind.
Past, present, future
blend like a child's kaleidoscope
as the last embers of the sun's fire
gloriously die and fall
beneath the horizon into oblivion.

(1990)

Slipping Stitches

By A.E. Bayne

Her fingers like bobbins churning
slide yarn from point to point
(slip, wrap, finger, draw through, repeat).
Quicker than the eye her needles clack and scissor, weaving and weaving
(knit purl knit purl drop a stitch and carry to the back).
My hands on her hands, skin like iced tissue paper,
yarn warms them, moves the blood, no idle hands nor lost souls.
Eyes failing now,
she moves my fingers so like hers,
tiny and quick, she moves them with the needles
(nudge the tip through, hold it steady, wrap the yarn around, pull it through the loop).
You’ve moved the world.
Picking up speed, now a purse, some socks, mittens, silky scarves, a tam;
and now booties and a blanket for my boy a jumper for my boy a sweater for my boy.
Oh the patterns! The colors and textures that pass over two slender bodies,
the stitches lost and retrieved, weaving and dropping,
yanked clean out at times, then coming to rest with the others.
And all the while, even after thin fingers grow still,
even after joints grow too stiff to hold the needles,
her hands are my hands and in my hands, her hands, always.

A Kiss and a Shirt

By A.E. Bayne

You were here just a moment ago

or years as it may be

sitting across from me in the club chair staring
while I read the paper in your flannel shirt.

A smile graced your face.
You had to leave for work.

Destroyed by your kisses
my lips stung with salt from the eggs.

Lazily, you lingered at the door;
your shirt I offered teasing later.

Later years, this moment
remains a bright spot -
your lips pressing against my collar bone
and your fingers tangling my hair,
even after returning your shirt
pressed and hung
to your locked front door.

Stream

By A.E. Bayne

Rambling mind roads
lead lower.
Meandering mind,
my heart feeds you.
Roads lead lower to minnows' beds -
rolling matters.
Rolling mind,
my heart eats you in whole pieces.
Roads lead lower to minnows' beds
through tumbling pebble streams minds flow.
My heart needs you in whole pieces. Each
road leads lower to minnows' beds through
tumbling pebble streams minds flow
soft as moss.
Mind free, my heart leaves you in whole pieces
each time.

Stella Nova

By A.E. Bayne

What elegant light
Folding like yellow jacket zippers,
Stella Nova,
Brightest star,
Dead, though far -
Will you reach the new day;
Or will you soon be gone?

Snuffed out and
Smothered in the throws,
Some nights are like your light,
Hour’s contemplation and time’s boon.
Stella Nova
Brightest star
Dead, though far.
Will you reach the new day;
Or will you soon be gone?

On the Night Train to Union Station

By A.E. Bayne

On the night train to Union Station
I dissect your call,
the phone tethered to the wall via a snaking umbilical cord that binds us well.
“He’s dying,” you cried into space.
I responded with my center twisted tight as a giant cat’s thigh before the leap,
wound spring sprung.
Now the damp night oozes into the car
and I have lost reception on this track,
So I wait with nerves cranked ‘round the wheel
watching the rain strike the unnaturally flat plate windows.
We speed onward, racing the chill, killing the cold,
And when we arrive, there you are -
apparition, mostly ghost,
solemn, but casting your arms out to us.
Rushing, we cry, “we’re here,” and “if only for some other reason,”
and “how is he?”
You slay the prowling tiger when you say he died not an hour ago.
Did he know; did he know?

On August...

By A.E. Bayne

It is the season of sticky watermelon juice
on the kitchen floor.
My sandals suck the linoleum on the trek to the sink.
This season is for random thoughts and altered memories,
when we compromise the reality of situations
in its humid physicality.
It is for sunlight pouring through a meandering gloom,
forcing its way toward the seared grass
where only weedy things thrive.
It is the season for losing keys and misplacing identities;
when insect rhythms match stereo sounds tone for tone.
This season unnerves me
with its wasted hours not wasted on chores.
Too much time for thoughts of pulling weeds;
so I turn toward things to come and textures I can grasp.

A rather dramatic thought...

Oh ache, oh hollow ache
When I wish to feel your arms tight around me and all is well.
You are a certain kind of love, a certain kind of special,
a fine tuned instrument that my hands obsessively play.
Your lines are solidity in my relentless life,
And with sincerity that is a sweet addiction for my prismic existence
your mouth is a bow of secret pleasures.

Undecided

By A.E. Bayne

Marriage was not good for me, but it was good
sometimes
a woman has guilty pleasures in a marriage.

I wrapped myself in a shy shadow,
and folded those traits that made me vibrant
neatly into the corners of my heart.

His heart contracted around its own trappings and talents,
so I kept my own neatly packed away,
at times rifling through that treasured chest
to pull one out and dazzle my friends.

They marked me, an acid kiss.

And so I lived with my husband and child
wondering if I really wanted this.
Would I be selfish if I admitted
that being one half of anything was not part of my reality?

And if I decided that I only wanted a child,
who would be the first to condemn me for not
providing an appropriate role model,
providing an appropriate home model,
providing an appropriate name?

(The President of the United States with his agenda; my parents with their concern; my family with their scrutiny; people on the street with disdain; the media with statistics on single parent households; my liberal best friend with a stray, bone-honest comment)

And if I had chosen to have no children would I have heard
for the rest of my reproductive years
about the joy, the elation of having a child,
the fulfillment of bearing from my womb,
the "When are you going to..." or
"So, have you thought about..." or
"Not much time left, you’re not getting any younger, you know..."

And if I had never wanted to marry at all,
decided that having a partner, a family, was not for me,
would I be judged a cold, hard fish of a woman;
an emotional recluse; a wretch?
Would people begin to wonder,
"Who would want her"
and would I care if they did?

Would the shrink question my sanity if I did not
want to share my life, my talents, my Self,
if I wanted only to rip open the corners of my heart
and use that which I was born with in a manner to which I saw fit.

Ah, the Pleasures of Paris

By A.E. Bayne

The French flayed fix
I discovered in the city of sticks,
an artist’s complex science.
Off the street, another well-known venue.
Cafés and brasseries out-lit
their humming and creative aesthetics.
These I discovered in the newest of centers,
Across blackboards and boulevards.
Decent, often, and more than a metropolis,
eventually original, and anciently turned out.

In a home

By A.E. Bayne


There is a Chippendale chair
and a cat
with wily whiskers wavering.

There is an afghan
and a book about the vastness of the sea.

There is rapid rain on the roof, tapping a tinny tempo,
and empty stew pots,
and an empty icebox.

Once there were heavy footsteps climbing the stairs;
now, silence.

In all of these familiar spaces there is absence
that only makes the heart weep and wander,
and days when I sit solemnly
trailing the bending arcs of trees,
lavish limbs leading,
folding and folding.

There is laundry to be sorted and selected,
and shoes rejected by the door where you left them last.

And there is time,
immeasurable time,
interjected.

I am not that poet

By A.E. Bayne

I could die here tonight,
overlooking the brackish back lot behind Riverby Books,
listening to Dylan get stoned on the turntable downstairs,
his vocals popping off the broken boards beneath my boots.
I am a cliché with my tablet full of lines and rhymes,
and yes, I could die here tonight.

I should be the poet to match this scene:
self-important in my cable knit with leather patches;
reclining reticently in a wing-backed chair
with worn padding, brush-stroked
in your grandmother’s favorite shade of mauve;
Eyes distant, ponderous,
and the arm of my glasses crooked casually into the corner
of my pensive pursed lips.

I am not that poet,
but I could die here tonight.

RIP Earl Bayne - March 15, 2000

By A.E. Bayne

Your decisive marks grip me for a glimpse of you.
Finding those things you left at inconsequential moments,
thoughts in mid-sentence.
What were you thinking when you picked up the pen to write that note?
What were you going to buy with that last dollar you carried;
A lifeline to the material, the physical?
What were you dreaming when you were dying?
Sometimes I see you in my words.

The Truth about Snow

By A.E. Bayne

Cooling our fiery tempers,
the snow slows nerves to a dull throb,
forcing us home in retreat from its chill and icy sting
through the slowed cyclical traffic crawling the corridor.
We bundle together; and then
we rush outside,
rubbing our faces in the drifting banks by the juniper bushes,
pinkening our cheeks, jaundiced by fluorescent brightness.
Awed in each other’s eyes and tearing from the white wind, we exclaim, “My God!” tasting the frosty feast.
Tacitly we act together, touching with no burden today,
no choice to be made.
The snow has made it for us:
to stay and act in company,
quietly conspiring.
Asking why we don't do this more often,
we make promises we can’t possibly keep.

And Wonders Will Meet Us

By A.E. Bayne

The journey remains today,
our minds less on goods than
last, last, last.
This nation’s standing unpleasant
time has passed.
We be
the state of the economy.

We are not undiminished standing interests,
or passed off goods;
No work needed,
or last picked decisions.

Everywhere, work will build the new lines;
and we will, we will
meet the new soil;
and we will, we will
state the foundation of
rightful wonders and rightful place.

Narrow again we remake the journey.
Prosperous,
we will restore the digital Earth
all bold and standing,
starting,
needing rightful growth.

Our selves restored,
to begin the work of America.