Tag: Poetry

Gridiron for Leg Irons

In the winter of
Nineteen hundred and sixty-four
Something was going on,
Called the Vietnam War.

But all we could hear,
At the stadium that night
Was the roar of the crowd,
As we continued our fight.

But older friends
Had joined the fray,
And died in a swamp
Many worlds away.

The play was called.
And I started my run.
As another friend died
Under the gun.

The play I remember
Was Buck- forty-five
As the government kept telling
Us, lie after lie.

Then came the day
They said I must go.
But I stood on the line and shouted
My NO!!

They locked me in chains,
Both hands and
Both feet.
But the mind of the boy
Would not face defeat.

The judge said,
Son, “what will you do?”
I said, “Your honor.
It is all up to you.”

If you think I was wrong, then
To jail, I must go.
If you believe I was right
There’s a great Broadway show.
Perhaps we could go.

And with those words
In the blink of an eye
I traded the gridiron
For leg irons
And two years
At Danbury FCI.

Rating: 1 out of 5.

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The Night

On my wall, the shadows play.
Shifting shapes with every sway.
Through the forest, deep and dark
The wolf’s howl pierces like a spark.
Across the moon, the dove flies high
A fleeting glimpse in night skies.
As I brush tears from my eyes.

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Midnight and Me

A wonderful world happens after Midnight.
Lonely and creative hearts come out to play
No longer hushed by the glare of an unforgiving day.

The graveyard shift,
Or so some call it.
A place where
The dead are laid to rest.
With other undesirables.

In radio
And other lonely places
Time passes slowly.
Midnight creeps to 1, then 2
Then to 6 a.m.
It’s where people drift
When there’s no place left to go.

For me, it was my voice, my opinions,
And my music that was my shovel.
Losing myself in thoughts
Alone in the middle of the night.
Ideas and music flowed like wine.
And I lost all track of time.

Then the phone would ring.
Oh no, not a ring!
You can’t have things ringing
In the On-Air studio.
A red flashing light,
Endlessly flashing, flashing, flashing.
Becoming a silent scream
Refusing to be ignored.
Answer me,
Answer me, answer me.
Phone call,
Phone call.
And many flashes later
I answer.

The voice said
“My name is Midnight.
Would you play a song for me?”

A wonderful world happens after Midnight.
Lonely and creative hearts come out to play
No longer hushed by the glare of an unforgiving day.
So do the strange
and the deranged.
A cross-section of life begins to drift
In and out
On the graveyard shift.

The musicians finishing up their gigs.
Dropping by
Because
Where do you go after 2 a.m.
When there is no place to go but home
And home is no place to go.
We had that in common,
The night people
And I,
As we tried to
Be glad to be alone
When all we wanted was to cry.
Sometimes it worked.

Midnight was neither a lonely heart
Nor a musician.
Just a night soul on a quest for tomorrow’s meaning
And yesterday’s reasons.
A late-night spirit who came to listen
Not just to the show
But to the lonely gravedigger.

And then Midnight would listen more
More from this lonely
Drifting vagabond
Wandering through town.
Both the ringmaster
And the clown.

Through so many passages
In my life, Midnight came to listen
Again, and then again.
Helping me through the
The dark dances of a searching soul
The journey of one growing old.
Dreading the dimming of the light.
Cursing the flickering flame
Fading in the middle of a winter’s night.

And many years later
Midnight came and cared again.
I guess I never really let Midnight know
How much they helped to make my life
A possible dream
Keeping me from going too far adrift
there on the graveyard shift.

It’s time I let you know
You gave my life a special glow
Pushing time along.
Your memory travels where I go.
Thank you for all that could have been.
And for what was.
Lost in the glow of life’s footlight.
Now dimming.

Goodnight, Midnight, goodnight.

Rating: 1 out of 5.

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Titanium Souls

Boston is a city that I love, but I rarely venture into its busy streets. I remember the quiet days of the pandemic when the city seemed to pause and breathe. But I also find inspiration in the crowds of people hunched over their phones, oblivious to their surroundings. They sparked this short poem in me, reflecting the contrast between solitude and connection. I called it “Titanium Souls.”

Titanium souls
In a keyboard world
Lost between now,
And the space bar.

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The Secret of the Cracks

In the light of yesterday’s Nightmare No waking hour And again today No bell To end the night And bring the light To close The pain The night did bring To end this bad dream Tomorrow will come I pray it so But yet it brings Another day on sadness row Against the curse of … Continue reading “The Secret of the Cracks”

In the light of yesterday’s
Nightmare
No waking hour
And again today
No bell
To end the night
And bring the light
To close
The pain
The night did bring
To end this bad dream
Tomorrow will come
I pray it so
But yet it brings
Another day on sadness row
Against the curse of time
No matter the defenses
The consequences
Death is the unavoidable nemesis.

I sat today in a church
Not my church
Staring at the life-size cross
Of wood
With cracks in seams
It seems the cracks are the same
As in my dreams
Sacrifice the blood
Give up the body
Lose life
The heart breaks
Split like the wood
​Yet life goes on
It has no choice
Just as the cross does not fall
It has no choice
It hangs by ropes
Tethered to the ceiling
Away from the floor
But reaching neither
So it hangs instead
As if trapped between heaven and hell
It never fell
Its cracks showing the assault of time
Like the body as it gives in
Too many days too many nights
Too long the fight
Too small the hope
Life cracks and splits like wood
The cracks
Healing not
Left in the heart
Hang on
No place to go
But the journey continues
Left hopeless to begin or end
Only to hold on and await
The waves of time
Until the final lonely moment
Takes me under
Then maybe I too will know
The secret of the cracks.

“The Ballad of the Sandman” by Mike Agranoff, Intro by Dan Sanders

Hi, welcome back, or is it I who has returned? This week I’m doing something very different. For the first time in the roughly ten years or so that I have been blogging and podcasting, I have a guest, sorta. His name is Mike Agranoff. I do not know Mike personally, but he is a musician, folk singer, and poet, and we have been in touch over the years by email. He has a piece of poetry that I have loved for many years called “The Ballad of the Sandman.” The first time I wrote to Mike was about 7 or 8 years ago asking if I could publish his piece on a blog as part of a fundraiser I planned to do for a memorial for my wife who lost her battle with cancer on September 27, 2011. I was going to raise money to place a permanent bench overlooking the harbor and ocean at a place we use to visit to watch the ships go out to sea and come back in again. I never did do that fundraiser, but Mike’s response was instant, saying “Yes, of course, you can do that for your wife.”

“The Ballad of the Sandman” is a piece of writing that anyone who has spent most of their lives behind a microphone will relate to, but I think it’s also a piece that will bring back memories to anyone who grew up listening to “real” disc jockeys, people you got to know and who became your friends through a box that sat on a table and had a dial and needles and sometimes static and woke you in the morning and kept you company in the middle of the night.

As some of you know, I came of age on Staten Island, a reluctant borough of New York City, for years wanting to secede from the city. I never did understand why. In the late ’50s and ’60s it was a good place to be, close enough to the big city and yet isolated and country. In fact, in high school, we would play football teams from the inner city–Bedford Stuyvesant, the Bronx, Queens, and others–and as they would line up against us, the calls of “country bumpkins” and “how do we get off this hillbilly island” would only serve to make us more determined to lay a beating on these city slickers, and most of the time we did.

At night when all the games were done, it was radio time with friends–yes to us they became friends because they would talk to us–Cousin Brucie, “Dan” Daniel, Jonathan Schwartz (a name you will hear in Mike’s reading of “the Sandman”), and of course, Wolfman Jack. Those are only a few of the names that led me into broadcasting.

Mike said I could do the reading of his work and at some point, I will try my interpretation, but I think no one can read something the way the person who wrote it can, although, as Mike pointed out to me, he does not read his work. It is all done from memory, which amazes me because it’s not a short piece. At the end of this blog, I have included a link to the written version of “The Ballad of the Sandman” and a link to Mike’s website, if you want to contact him directly.

CLICK HERE FOR PODCAST

Link to Mike Agranoff  http://www.mikeagranoff.com/

Link to The Ballad of the Sandman http://www.mikeagranoff.com/lyrics/Sandman.htm

I love Old Things, For What They Bring.

I love old things

For what they bring

Memories of those that touched

And loved them

And now are gone.

They loved them long before

My name was known,

Then they touched me

And loved me

But had to leave

The pain wounds the heart

And so, I grieve

But I still love old things

For what they bring.

Memories of those that long ago

Taught my heart to sing.

A lonely Question

Darkness comes too soon
For the lonely.
Midnight last longer
The pain cuts deeper
Nights never end
Day never begins.
The sadness starts
The aching deep within
Then morning comes
The sun is bright
And you try again.
For what else is there?

Once There Was a Time

­­­Last week I shared one of my favorite radio memories in “A Radio Christmas to Remember.” This week I’m returning to another time and place. Just like everyone else, this time of year is my time for remembering, regretting, and rejoicing. Beginning in January 2017, I’ll start writing new blogs and do what I like to do, which is to tell a good story. Until then, I hope you’ll like these blogs from months gone by of memories that seem like lifetimes ago.

Once there was a time. It was a perfect storm of music, issues, and people all coming together at just the right time in just the right way in just the right places. Once there was a time that I think will never be equaled, and sometimes when I feel old—and those times happen more and more to me every day now—I see something or hear some music from the 1960’s and very early 1970’s, and I remember and  I smile. I smile knowing that yes, once there was a time, and I was there.

A very good friend told me the other day that I was his favorite hippie, and I told him it was likely that I am the only hippie he knows given our age difference and that we old hippie radio DJ’s are a dying breed.

I think many younger people today, and even some in my age group who might have somehow escaped the scars of the sixties, don’t realize that their idea of hippie is not what they might think. All hippies were not pot heads dancing naked at Woodstock or jamming to the Dead at the Fillmore. To me and to a lot of others, it was a belief, a lifestyle, and a commitment that while the world was not perfect, we could and would make it better.

I said “scars of the sixties” because of something I call “movement casualties.” We are the survivors who once believed so strongly in–and forgive me for using these terms—peace and love and making changes for the better, and then we watched as all our hopes crumbled. We watched as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King fell to hatred stronger than our love. We watched as Brian Epstein, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan­­­­­­­­, ­­Phil Ochs, and many others left us behind. But we kept on believing, and maybe for many the final blow came when John Lennon was killed.

We old hippies learned that all the things we thought we could do were not strong enough to stop bullets of hate or the despair of a drug overdose or a raging social or political lunatic.

My friend replied to my statement about being a dying breed by telling me it was time to pass the torch and joked that he would start growing out what was left of his hair, growing it long. I said the tie dye was optional, but he would need either a peace earring or a pendant.

Just recently I realized that I was indeed tired. Maybe I had continued the struggle longer than most and got tired of trying. I posted this on Facebook last Wednesday: “I quit. I am tired of jokers and fools and arguments. I am tired of trying to convince anyone that certain things are just plain wrong, so I quit. I tried. Now go on and believe what you want, do what you want, and say what you want because it has become obvious that nothing I can say will make a difference in your way of thinking. So I quit. More on this on Sunday.” Well, here it is Sunday.

Maybe I should go put on some Grateful Dead or John Lennon music and remember and be glad that once there was a time. It was a perfect storm of music, issues, and people all coming together at just the right time in just the right way in just the right places. And I was there.