Not Pain, Its Wisdom

Just because wisdom is silent

Doesn't make is less wise.

This tree, for instance, you would

Never know it was even thinking

If it wasn't for the shivering branches

And occasional bend with the wind,

But it is moving vast tracts of mind

And holding on, for anyone

Who wants to inquire

Through their own inner knowing.

It's like the wood we call forth fire from

And the fire being comes, an elemental,

As our will of two sticks controls the flow

Of thoughts that show themselves to be alive

Communicating the absolute in infinite 

Permutations of the wildness of spirit

Deciding what is from what is not

Or appears not to be, what a cloak it is, 

Invisibility, like that silence thing, for us

To keep poking or to look away, a choice.

That's why you strip down naked,

To find what's hidden.

Giant Underdog on the Roof

The Basenji sent the message in her own Morse code.

It went into the plasma, like a wireless wave

Straight to our ether-tuned antennae, 

Back to our nebulae of dust electric, the universal 

Mind, the one we are thinking.

We run through this groove every year, 

Put blue peacocks on the branches, imagine 

Reverie from memory only. But the do not open

Until the apocalypse box is not even hidden 

Under the tree. We can think differently.

Solar communion is the new black.

The sun will now answer any questions we have

Or, rather, step out of the way, of us already knowing. 

We see that horizon, as it sets in incandescence, 

The universal mind conversing with itself. 

The lid is off the shadows. The Arkestra plays the gospel

Of Saturn, not just to us anymore, but to the stars

As we braid like Celtic knots the vibrational grammar

Of our ascending consciousness. The game is the same

But the bubble popped like soap suds in winter.

Night Train to Oceanside

Mangy-ass Angelinos roll in downhill after dark, to do their own thing while no one’s looking, a rendezvous of the senses to hang no ponga from rafters, wield lost boy skateboards in the shadows, cover up motives with backpacks and vapes, congruent with the incandescents but even more so with the dark, where all falling apart occurs.

No one, when the smoke clears, even remembers them. Invisibility has been a coherent strategy until very recently, and it’s been easy to confuse extreme isolation with deep belonging feelings. But a lot has transpired on the way to the future. The Blue Lounge closed when they shut down the world and has never returned. And in this reflective December in uptown LA, the hill decides who gets sold down the river, and when things go real.

The lights have turned on in every emptied building, a kind of magnificence that can be seen from the stars. The cool people are on the late train, where the flow of graffiti keeps up with the river, and the inner mounting light reveals itself: the scrapyard after dark, the floods on concrete mixers, cars washed with light and lather, a chemical plant cerulean swathed, the warehouse where the tree mushrooms grow have only a loading dock bulb over the door, then a lobby for once full – with light and truckers, every intermodal port occupied, every pot and cup of coffee filled, its lot of semis idling, soft in their red lights –  then the coaster rail rises, over the Slauson salmon lamps not even flinching upstream …

And the train, as if empathically, stops, rolls backward now to Commerce, to pick up perhaps one wayward lunchpail stiff, who would theoretically be grateful for an open door, hence our beacon in reverse through the dark graffiti, the pallets under glass, the weeds under lights more full of life than in the sun, the shipping and receiving under kliegs along with trailer hitch lubrication authorized personnel only. We arrive back-ass-ward to a glow of cell phones on the platform, like candles for choralers exhaling hallelujah – then we’re back Jack on the backtrack rack, past the mausoleums of tool and die, the luminous offices emptied of clerks. The lawyers on the train fall at this time into their historical fiction. The Burlington line still rumbles beside us as it always has, still fucking with everyone’s life.

The pack who walk off at Norwalk hobble swiftly, everyone carrying something, ears occupied with what listening might override in sight of their situation. But they are swimming now in the blue pools nearby, arms throwing spray up like dolphins do when jumping. At every station the loudspeakers are lit up like bows. A single office gleams in the train window glare a patina of pathos: the old computer, that particular calendar, the unmistakable bend to the chair. Then the open lumberyard in Fullerton and its saws officious as morticians, positioned in night-searching florescent for inspection in desolation, Ma’s House Restaurant the only sign of light for a long stretch, then the Satin Topless arrow, the green claw machine in The Paramount Platinum Triangle, then Angel Stadium just waiting with its big A to be filled, a thousand identical dry rigs in the lot for the off-season, while the Modelo flag still waves illuminated, as if it can exist beyond the game. The parking structures are dotted with eyes to see.

Then the Christmas lights begin. The strings between the houses are frayed but they do eventually connect, amid the high palms and the green doors of storage garages, the warehouse with its Christmas tree. We ride above the houses now, above the snowmen. The train speeds up as the decorative flair thickens. But time has become like a rubber band that doesn’t bend anymore. The downtown water tower's on the right, radiant as an alien spacecraft, and the last McDonald's. The cupola over Santa Ana station has left its light on, high above.

Intersection of Grief and Orange Circles

The river is one long reflection this morning

But there was a commotion last night,

A white tree and renaissance trumpets

Brought humanity out of its shell and, later,

Onto the rotary foamy drinks in hand 

As a holographic insert sang from 1947

On an Dyna-Voice microphone.

A year ago, things were very different.

My face was made to appear calm,

For I was not yet allowed to live,

Not able yet to see enough of the illusion

That fueled the room, her enduring,

Holding on in that moment to whatever she could

Until there was no more reason to stay.

My memory of it is frozen, in sepia sun

That was always calm, like the oxygen 

Machine whirring. My beating heart

Reaches now, for what is lost,

Or at least what it appears to be, in

Today's sun, more clear but certainly

No less beautiful.

It's served up like a case in one of those

Ghost antiques stores, a touchstone

For your consideration, to take or leave.

Is it worth the price? Is it worth

Taking home to share your space?

Does it, the moment you set eyes on it,

Possess you? If so, when will it let you go?

It catches your eye, only a thing to look at

That will, like most of the world already has,

Disappear when you have seen it

And you know it finally as mnemosyne,

The hallucination reality saps

That there is a past outside of experience

And a future without a choice.

Halter with Ornaments at Gate 9

It's a new day. Brio is being trained

To be less human, less the clueless,

Catastrophizing Lord of no domain

And more a horse, happy to be

Eating grain, helping us to see

The highlands as if for the first time.

But it's a process. The black gloves

Must be worn. Sister Hollywood

Must be called in to script doctor

Our permissive inclinations, and do

The thing all books advise:

Show him the road to hit, without fuss,

Without the shadow of our soft touch.

No horse therapist, she whispers to us

To trust the boundaries will keep us safe

Oh, and to tell the horse who poop scoops

His breakfast. As she taught the Gypsy 

Vanner who wouldn't pull no cart, who,

As beautiful as a tinsel star, invisible eyes

And hair like nebulae, has been a diva

Since day one, but she is misunderstood,

At least that's what she tries to tell you, 

Or her feathers do, as they hang 

Like white beads over a fille de joie's door.

She lays down now for a 1,000-lb roll

Then looks at me with ever-inquisitive eyes

As horses always do, expecting something.

We disappoint again and again, but they

Find themselves in the paces we push them

Through, as boss who can't be nickled.

There's no logic to taking control. Raw power

Over another is born from the crudest,

Most illegal gestures imaginable

But they always work, and no court in the world

Will hear the complaint, and the horse is compliant,

Running as if he's found his purpose finally,

Under an implied whip. And he nuzzles us

When he's done, the closest thing to an apology

We can muster. Orphaned children typically veer

From feared abuse on others, and never realize 

Attention is all the horse desires, what one 

Never knew one deserved.

 

It's about interrupting his surveils for attention

By ignoring them, the neglected learning

To neglect. The scenario, for both horse and rider

Is to run out of the fear, of being alone, because 

There's nothing left when it's done, but the far view, 

The summit of presence, where the vultures fly over. 

He thinks his ideas matter, but they don't. Most horses, 

Most people, never learn this. They think their opinion 

Is their own, not fear of the grass or the cameras.

They capture it now, for sudden groms who pose

As a newly mellow, flat-affect-faced Brio

Passes by in his Christmas hat.

Shaw's Cove After the Dentist

How could it be no one's noticed before

Each scintillation on the water

Is a being, who communicates joy

In being seen, moving on our keys

In an unmistakable plea to share

The light that would revise our DNA,

Help us see we are really who they are

Shining back, as the sunset glass

In the studio window angles a beam

After we sing our ancient language

To show that we are recognized

If only by ourselves.

Along the Secret Road from Thinks to Feels

Minneapolis is now colder than Mars

But that doesn't mute the mutinous mutables

Who have lost their drones and sinecures

And asked to secure their fat

As part of a holy sacrament of life ongoing

To the vats marked “Tallow”

For a drifter to haul to Grace or P&G, in a process 

Of dissolution that Criscos the chain,

Takes the edge off the lye,

Makes the dog eat razor blades.

Anything can be anything, you see,

A puddle jump becomes 

A hundred dollar hamburger,

A redneck reuben can pair 

With roadkill fries,

So thoughts act out their appetites.

They grow and they die

In the obsolescence of being done, 

Of standing still

In the rhythm that is the divine.

But thoughts are endless

Like the leaves in October, everywhere,

Phosphorescent, in a swirl.

Their purpose is to fall

After all, to free the sky, and for us 

Not to attach

To what can no longer be in heaven,

What we never can hold

Long enough 

To become still.

The solar storms are waking up 

Those who've never felt safe before,

Told they were in charge,

Taken places on their palanquin

In exchange for a peculiar type of attention.

It's a fine line between parent and child, 

Which one's hunger for love will win?

The heart, it needs so much more than is given.

It wants approval from everyone and everything,

As if what never came could return.

But you are every parent dying for love

And every child that cries for it.

You’ve done this for a million years,

On Tiamat, in Babylon, 

On the down to the grotty

Hot spots, which you visit, to use

As reference points, 

Like the homeless spread

Around the town 

To seek distance from their kind.

It is always love that's all you have,

And invitation open to create more

From a world designed for you

And you alone to breathe life into.

It's both perfect and meaningless,

Mirroring in every sunscored glass 

What you project.

That's what it's for, 

The thing you are,

Always withheld.

Baudelaire’s poet plays grief also 

In the clouds, those blue Decembers,

Such a pure duende, where Icarus

Doesn’t fall but remains

Far from earth, but no nearer to heaven

And it makes you long down here 

For the lost, for the trace of the divine

You'd heard of from a lyre you will never believe,

What got garbled in transit, in the translation

From wordless to word one. The thought.

They communicate to you now

From overhead, those cloud forms,

To the ground crew who live heaven

In gaia's compost, and only know 

To feel their way through

As the mask is pulled seductively away

And you are free, and you can see,

Albeit slow to realize

That what you long for

In this case turns out to be you.

Poem for International Day of Persons with Disabilities

A day for liberation, 

From presents left as weapons, 

To evoke some variant of terror 

As usual, the drive-by fusillade of gifts

You have to apologize to yourself for, 

As you try to connect them to anything
In you -- at all.

It stills smarts, that shared 
Birthday party, where I was
The add-on, made to be equal
By methods that made me
Feel small, though there was no
Recompense the giver ever knew 
Anything the whole time why.

It got harder to pretend 
As the functions declined
And the gifts on the other side
Dwindled over time
And so did mine: a party tie,
A maglock clip for my hopefully
Soon-to-be-in-motion money.

They were never of a mind to want them
But I hid my thoughts incessantly 
Looking for the diversions of cake
And Oh My God wine as something 
Else to pretend to like, 
As I pretended I wasn't there
Or at least wouldn't be.

But I'm still locked in the seat, squirming
Secretly, but at least my own plight
Is clearer, in hindsight, admittedly,
Like that day, late to a family vacation
That veteran without arms lent his eye
To my mangled hand, and his entire 
World was now mine.

Versions of Nora Revisited

Such crisp, high-performance

Walking-around knowledge I possess:

There are two Starbucks in Iceland

Frinstance, or that rice 

Was first planted from planes 

In 1932, or that all wars

Are between Rome and the Jews.

My auto assistant has compiled everything 

And is ready to distribute 

The memo with Q&A

In notes that won't waste 

Anybody's time 

Out to the universe, 

Fans and creditors alike

But no one ever sees them.

Everyone has their own feed,

Too self-absorbed to receive.

It's all they can do to survive.

The fact it's been recorded 

Relieves anyone of any obligation 

In fact, to notice.

I am that tree that falls in the forest

That, if it's not seen, does it exist?

Physicists are baffled by such questions 

But the world's existence is objectively 

The one in question, 

With the universe left over,

Still there, in the end. 

And what if the tree never fell?

The note would never be noticed

In the orchestra, 

So unconscious with joy

That's how conscious it is,

Creating non-existence

As a necessary condition of its life.

The red-faced blonde with the beard

Knows this, his weathered face 

Has pondered non-existence frequently,

But he also knows, in order to 

Hold the course,

Best to keep his eyes fixed 

On what the world provides,

The stuff that can be made real.

He's resilient with time, content

To stare the sun 

All the way down the wall.

He only needs to be what he imagines:

Fresh spanging opportunities,

Hundreds of birds crying in the eaves.

Thanksgiving not to be Taken Personally

I can’t stomach another bite, of reminders

That up-percolate for catch and release, so that

The flame of the third eye rises, out of the dense

Family unit, what's been separate, if not equal --

The place where every world is conjured and nurtured

In the think tank of being isolé, what I

Am not now, so never have been. Let the birthing

Fire rise above these evergreens, to the eye

Where lessons learned wait in the void for the taking,

To stain their black on white, darkness will be spoken

As creation, the horses of Altamira 

On the walls, while the free ones refused to be frozen.

How far can they go past their own outracing ghosts? 

Beyond the confidence games that made bids against

Their souls, the crocodiles that kept them in check, 

And the white wolf in line, known by its translucence?

 

We cannot recall which feline pigskin won the game

Or how we ate our feelings from the once-clean plate

Of family dysfunction, nor why we fell again

To the inevitable gorge and purge cycle

That gives no breathing room for transcendence at all. 

What’s remembered plays again with details missing,

Stuffing added, as if it comes from the future, 

At 4 am, with chills, effervescing seltzer. 

It clicks in outside time, that venerable tool

To keep the icing spatula clean, free of astrals 

Who clog the air with similar experience 

In endless iterations of the eternal.

Every facet of the one is illumined

And, once lit, dimmed, but not to conserve energy

But to let more in. So that the rutabaga,

Lost even to memory, can be fresh again.

Trance State Translation

These palominos have the tell-tale eyes,

The softness and sweet folds

Of the bliss state, the twin flames

Say it isn't easy, in adjacent stalls

When the veils of separation have been lifted

And you cannot pretend anymore

Your thoughts are not heard

Or that they are your own

Unless the entire field is you

And all are a part of what extends ...

As far as you wanna go —

It's calmer now to nibble hay, 

Stare wide-eyed at the passing girls

Who have learned so much already

And are almost ready

To feel their love.

Adventures of the Newly Feral

The problem with the mind
It turns life into failure
What you didn't excise.

All the heroes are assholes,
Every gesture offends
Lived life outside the box.

The violence we welcome
Who have no motive to be violent
Would have one hauled to a farm.

Yet it stirs him up, the little man,
This materialization of dream,
From slaves and judicious editing.

The invisible creators know
How fine the line 
Between hero idolizing and killing

So there's no entry possible 
At any time, to where the thing
Actually came from.

All it's good for's to throw away 
The pleasures of the present,
Turned obligation, then neglect

As one follows the drama
From end to end, the spin
Of every fun house gun

For a hoped-for sort of mirror
Instead of how banally evil
Humans can become

How futile is
Their existence.
That's what's redeems

Wasting your life away,
To never quite leap
Into someone else.

They are always too ugly
In the end, too far away,
Too fictional to immortalize 

And one must make peace

With the illusion 
Of their own life.

That's the only kindness
They can give to God,
Walk as God, as inner parent,

Who we flatter until
We are empowered
By hearing "yes"

And nothing outside it.
The only time there is
At this point says to turn

The other cheek, 
Shift your perspective,
Look the other way,

Like Frank Lloyd Wright turned
When Scottsdale became a road
Forever from the southerly direction.

The Trees' Unspeakable Real Names

It was tuba Saturday night in Visalia,

A quinceanera after the pear tree harvest,

Enough for some tuval toning inside the sequoias 

On Sunday, lower than I can go

            because they need me to.

The people have returned, to sing with them

Though no one has to say anything, the sign

"Call before you burn" covers it, for everything

Must go, for this, the grand return of evanescence,

                 icicles gripped by stiff heads of rock hair

Left to drip endless woodland tears, to infinity

And disappear, as we did, the ... seeded.

Once we saw from the promontories of silence,

Before the snows came, and the terrible blaze 

                   that rose straight up the mountain

Where the tallest, widest trees were still waiting

To rest, only the ascension relentlessness could reach

That far, to the pines that would not burn, elemental

Still, their broad red skirts as free and magic-packed

                                          as a younger dryas dryad,

And the same spirits wait, for us, who we tone to,

Until the stinging bees come to remind me of our karma,

Our obligation to community. For eons we let the birds

Of separation rule over us, and families programmed

                          seemingly not to see us

Instead of these, the tribes who need no explanations

Of the golds your tongue has gathered, in the gift light

As the liquid ambers wave it all away one last time.

It's an encouraging sign to see that antiques store

         by Hawk Hollow Drive closed down,

For the false memories to be banished at last,

And the gorge to hold the red we always knew 

Was there, at sunset, when mountains are brothers

And the rocks close up the stacks for the night

                        truth's relentless pictoglyph fractures

Of what really happened, not the mindless game

Of consequence but the river cold, blue sky pure,

Clear as the snow sun true, where there is no end

To celebrate, no birth to ignore, just the endlessness

                     of finding enough silence to hear,

Not to be pulled to the breast of the living earth

But to remember you never left it, except that eye

That assumed a hawk was looking to strike instead

Of teach, you, the only God this is happening to ...

        We've done this a million times before, 

In the same spot, as falling snow, pineal cones, 

The long, slow, burning life of rocks, and here we are, 

Just learning the basics of etiquette: 

What poems to intone, what laurels to store,

                           how presence alone is honor.

The Joys of Retrograde

What is actually at the window has yet to be determined

Though all robed personages already know

What you will do, and love you've made that choice, 

Tho you'd appreciate any guidance, at this point.

Hummingbirds whirr in place at that,

But only because they feel for you, so close 

To the sugar, almost jealous you are only now

Free enough to dance in the darkness.

Some already know the soil they walk is blessed.

God doesn’t need to speak to them, they know the way

And why they should believe their eyes

Not the lies their mothers taught them,

How tunnels end in hell, and every destination

Is a long way off still and almost impassible,

And people are, forget about it, unreachable,

Impossible to trust.

You wait, conversely, for the dispatcher's signal

As safety is now a system-wide issue.

Nothing can move until it stews in the broth

Of what it never understood, at least not enough.

But you feel somehow it's a system that includes you

Though you do not want to know why,

When you hail a ride, it knows where to go

And that you haven’t yet arrived and probably never will.

Oblique Light Thrown to This Side

Golden Gate’s veiled --  half mist, half mast,

The way the living navigate above the dead,

Remembering what we are

As we turn into something else.

The whole too returns to vapor

When each perspective’s been considered

Becoming irreducible again,

Charge nested, invisible

Yet each tunes in

From their own dream,

From the one resonant frequency

That becomes them

Like a fork in the white noise

Humming a hertz beyond

Everything that has ever been

Experienced by anyone.

Morning Puja

There is no God inside this Temple

Despite the mournful incense

And the throes of organ torments

And bent string notes in the light 

Of the divine ...

But there is a priest

Who throws water in the faces,

Places flowers on the idols,

Throws rice to zebra doves -- 

God honoring the Gods.

Letting Go of Cheryl One Last Time

The ashes were in the filing cabinet

With the dated contracts that could get me in trouble.

I've tried not to think about my disappeared life,

To give due cause to the wizard inside 

Who removed everything just so, as if it

Was never really there, for all the void that is

So heavy still. And all the inklings of music 

From every voiced eye tattoo that yearning.

It could be from you, your small still voice

Still imploring with a smile, for the birds to finally

Be understood, a bridge you offer to the other world

I am only recently not a part of.

But Grandmother Mimosa understood 

At the birthing stone for the whole earth

By the lava faces in green Polihale 

How deeply I feel grief's soft offices.

My wand adds by subtraction, then multiplies

By incidents, many of them here, where finally

I floated your bones on a round koa raft

With one freshly fallen plumeria blossom 

Where the water finally flows down from the top

Along the red Waimea clay, though you finally nodded

After letting me, as you always claimed to do, decide,

That you would have preferred -- I almost knew -- Secret Beach

As beautiful as the ending was, the release to end

All releases, what never really was

The way one had remembered, and so

Can't ever be said -- wistfully -- to go away.

The secrets you loved to keep were in the end 

A way of keeping us alive, beyond the best by date,

Of keeping what must be nudged away now,

For what was held led to transcendence,

A job well done, that finally can be laid to rest

As the entire past must also be

Put on oblivion's life raft, as offering to the birth canal;

Aren't I qualified to be born another time?

The Docks of Kap'aa

Not conventional the thought 

Of Kauai as hell on earth, 

But it was my thought, no one else's,

And I can tell you what it's about.

One cane-cutter fell asleep in the fields

And got his arm lopped off. So it was

For the plantation slaves, J-town style,

"Mt. Fuji won't take me," but Waimea will.

It was 12-hour days of grim brake-breaking reaping

And he was not one to overexert

For a foreman's crumb in the Capricorn sun,

Not like those Samarais, 

Always the fucking Samarai's

Who say "I win ... punk" with a smile,

Who sharpened their blades like they were

Honed to go to battle with the golden sheaves

To achieve the quickest, biggest, most immaculate

Death from green-stained scythes,

Men as relentless as the Japanese can be, 

Lords of every painstaked blade of grass

For their fine-toothed frustration, plashing at

The hopelessness of life here, except for

The plantation master's church, the westernest

And he was the kindest one by far, this

Robinson, who gave out guava every Sunday

In his wood community hall, the holy rollers

Among the Japanese as swordy as you can imagine

To get into the good Lord's graces.

No one mentioned his private island, at least to him,

Though he was there, and he did care,

The way a shepherd cares for sheep and goats

Knowing how to fence them, the moment to shear.

He had no use for his mother's zealous

Bloodlet of the local lamb, or for Japan

That stranded him here without escape,

And these islands he wanted consumed in flood.

Yet there were 88 temples on a mountainside shrine

As energized as the Giza Plateau

Where Buddhists climbed, past every variety 

Of self as God as message to believe

In the sacredness of every breath, in the ways

Of enlightenment while keeping one eye open

To the suffering of not being allowed emotion

Visits on the pilgrim.

No pilgrimage for him, and no lava god

Of the Lei wave dancers, as far away

As another constellation they are, who pigs drove

Into a frenzy, who carried spears.

They rode atop the waves that attacked the shores relentlessly,

To remind him he was prisoner, and could never

Set foot even on the Forbidden Isle

In his eyes every resentful sunset.

If this was God's Plantation 

There was more to the plan than God,

But it couldn't be found here, where people

Glowed in simple sun, with false hopes

Of a better life to come, while, for now,

There's crisply woven tailored suits

Like the shells the ancients used to trade

To feel at home with a forever alien place.

There was a library of psalms, agricultural guides,

No Bob Dylan, not even Izzy K

To guide him to the promised land

At the far end of the field

Where he dared not go, the place of floods

And ceremonial suicides, and night walkers

And black mesquite over the plain that was Mana

Where the ones who thought they were free lived.

Polihale has taken them, as the nearby

Radar tower too soon took him, cursing

On his ice-cold straw death bed 

The life he had had to live.

And now, as I point out, the sunsets of Kekaha,

The white ball, source of all information,

And how the trade winds take our minds

With the fronds and grasses to the endlessness of life

And he eventually bent, like a Japanese pine

To let the sun hit his mud-reddened face.

It was all he could do to not go native

And turn his back on the poor human race

And he kinda likes it, with the afternoon raga,

The horses in the fields in 7 ray light

Instead of plodding into town on red, manured roads

Where there was nothing for him at all ...

But now there's papaya smoothies

And the restlessly competitive Japanese have settled

In the same plantation shacks as before,

Which makes him happy,

And he can see the world is really

As he thought it was all along, holding the not-it

Idea in his heart, as I punched his yellow with sweaty

Waiting ticket on the first steamer out of here,

Which turns out to be steerage at 40,000 feet

And passage to Oakland, where they don't scorn the mind,

And all the rules he observed in his youth I will

Also lose, as we part forever friends on different paths.

Temple Blues

Unity only comes through the service entrance
As time's spiral holds only what's made from love.
The rest falls away, still whole
As the king hermit is still
At the top of the tower
Waiting for it to fall.

The seeker must face again the shadow
And surrender another time to the coil of life
In the scholar's studio
Lighting heathen grief,
Preparing the best clouds
For buddha dignitaries.

Interstitially, there are as many teacher demons
As the mandala will hold and have carpets for praying.
They blow their vital breath into a snake
Until the shadow is cast off
Revealed as a human face
And no longer needed in the play.

That was the breath that had brought everyone
From miles away to wave, having become something more
At least while the roads
Are temporarily barricaded 
Zacetecas style, the empanadas
International now after all

Though no one knows that but the afflicted,
On clouds now, inside a moment when history yields
To the way they feel now,
What emerged when it ended.
The feeling lingers in the stragglers here,
Still alive in a new day.

The Polynesian Wing

A 20-foot ancestor spirit from Lemuria

Stopped me at the entrance, "don't go

Into the broken world," where they

Describe what they can't remove,

An orator's stool from Iatmul,

Our Lady of Iguanas headdress taken from use,

Vanuatu totem poles head atop head atop head

With eyes huge, spiralling with Kundalini,

Elongated skulls from Rapa Nui in volcanic stone,

Shell helmet shelters with porcupine quills, shaman's

Bags crowned like vibraphones with black-bone charms,

Tridents of mind with sharktooth obsidian 

And of course the dap dap mortars

To break the betel nut and see God

Cut with lime. Each mortar renders a vision

It inspired: jaguar, blown mind, insect limbs for flying.

Well-documented, too, the Kula exchange of shells

Among 18 island nations, sharing all they had

Every year from ancient wavesplitters

And splashboards dragon-carved.

The Baining Fire Dance on the Gazelle Peninsula

Where young man at age wear giant eyes all night

To see, presumably, the way in the darkness

To the all.

Every mask is built precisely

To reveal. The giant temple drum

Despite its magnificence holds some

Memory of how sound changes things.

The immortals are musical notes, in fact,

And are played like the Chinese emperor ordered

The horses with bulging eyes and flaring nostrils

He prized to be commanded as ideal out of sculpture.

Writing didn't come til after the flood

Yet it flourished wherever seas brought calligraphers 

Who made the word become flesh ...

But there are places where the sacred

Flourished instead, where the birds were

Allowed to keep their notes, the shamans

Their unreality-altering berries, and no one

Lacked wisdom in the absence of words.

It is always an afterthought, these places

That are still too alive for history,

That still resist being catalogued,

The last frontier of our childhood terror.

Terracotta Warriors on Tour

Behold the pale ghost horses, protected only

By a gold brow ornament over their third eye,

There are thousands of them, about the size of dogs

And terrified of Mongols, though a very few 

Are dug out from the sunken pyramid complex 

With its nine gates, where the emperor's, they say, buried.

Each horse is interred with its warrior, and sight lines

To the stable boys, so they know they're still cared for

In the afterlife, and waterfowl are there too

To perform their songs, turns out, for the emperor

And the 6,000 figures in each pit, dressed not

Like warriors but priests, serene, the ones who have seen

Everything, in what seems one flash-frozen instant,

Their life essence to be stored in terracotta.

Their faces are too various and real, detailed

In too many shapes, shades, myriad of moustache

To be the work of unaccounted-for potters

And improbable methods, for some emperor

Because he asked. A dollop of fear holds each face,

Insight runs through every eye. There's something they saw

Not a moment before. They're looking at it now,

The still life forever moment they're brave enough

To endure with whatever story their minds could 

Confiscate as they gaze wide-eyed into the void

Awaiting the mystery with all that they know,

These observers who just observe the observing.

They know they are immortalized in that moment

And are sad for the others who've been left behind

To mundane wars and never knowing who they are.

These faces know, but, even now, aren't telling.

The cinnabar and Chinese purple, malachite, 

Cobalt, ochre — their identifying colors 

Are just glitter on their ash, this "painted army,"

Who've finally been granted their one wish all along,

To be one, and no longer to be separate,

Betrayed again by the paint on their square slip-ons.

Another Poem about Dragons

The souls in dark places are part of us,

Can't wake up with us, without a dragon light

On their cigarette. They've been stuck here

Eons. The migration dark has begun

As now the dragon smoke clears the morning

As reminder that veil is gauze

Transparent to those with eyes to look beyond.

My eyes gaze for unseen crows at the kitchen windows,

The sausages simmer as saucers shimmer

And the glimmer twins winnow

The chaff from my collective ass.

Even they chase what they say is the dragon,

The one at St. Margaret's feet, or at the tip

Of King Henry's sword, the ubiquitous guardian

Of the most well-guarded secrets

In every royal bleed for the elites

In every kingdom 

And every goddess lineage

And all the dragon lines

That hold us to the earth, her heart.

Discovering Suede

Our familiar methods of deception 

Turn on the campfire

As you explode

With burning verbs.

I keep my adjectives covered,

Sip my ginseng tea.

You are always wrong

That's why I love you so

Hoping you'll see fit to be right

Or at least agree.

The fire crackers of tear-scarred cords

Won't give me that 

But the life is magic Mars

Under ballroom maple leaves

To be recoiled so,

Brought to maximum separation 

Like a serpent's trick

To shed its ash, for the mushroom

Mind to shoegaze 

And every crow across infinity to see.

Now we get to learn another way

Under dark and luminous skies.

Our eyes have drawn this map before

Like star gold is prize

And glittering lights guidance

Not the loving void.

It's on us, my dearest one

To reject whole cloth the common

And still spend time in communion

With each other's deepest wounds.

A bird looks down in the darkness 

Wondering what we'll do.

Will we slug back shots of Jack

In lieu of slugging each to other

Or are they, in some way, the same?

We are too, apparently, tho the sis cam

Testifies in open court that can't be true.

We wipe our deepest frowns at any rate

Off our smiles, go on like hearts don't break

And the spirit eaves don't suffer for our racket,

As if we finally agree

To let disagreement be okay

But it never is.

You want your cry to heaven to get past

The neighborhood, I get it

And you want to be heard

By more than numbed skulled me

But there's no trick machinery 

To get those birds back into the trees.

They just go there when you're no longer looking

Many years later, sometimes, it seems,

When you think of it at all it's just how

Stupid you were, but their mouths are full

Of the song of your praise

For all you allowed yourself to feel

Without veering your eye or changing 

Your mind, what the wind does continually

To these would-be obstinate birds

Who wouldn't know what love was at all

Without their nests safecracked for sport.

Museum of Oranges

The veil I reported missing

Has been recovered, in a glass case

As the lace mantilla of one

Dona Ysidera Pico Forster.

It hangs as if the phantoms

That still pull on its threads

Are brand new, with her gloves and fan

Of abalone to circulate the sun.

Her brother owned the land,

What we now call Orange County,

So her hands had to fan as nature,

As the mermaid at times, named California

Though covered in the black lace of grief

The rich must convey, onus hominis albi,

So they won't be seen recognizing

The results of their rapacious play.

Her brother Pio Pico was pleased to unpack her

On the Englishman Forster

As he believed in providential deals, and so few

Like-minded men of substance here to duel.

He had, they said, "a penchant for gambling"

But he also had a private chapel

And a sacrificial rat in applique

On his gold lame chasuble.

There is his snuff-box and manga,

An early photograph of ugly him

And his miserable family

In haunted lace and threadbare bonnets,

The last Governor, resting anxious

On his laurels, premonition in hand

That he was not quite worthy

Of the lordship promised by the land.

His brother-in-law filched the blessed

Blood-stained mission from him at auction

And lived there with his sister

And the ghosts her fan waved off,

Still he trusted him, at blade point, to procure

Grazing grass for his hot-blooded brothers,

Insurgents on the lam, never knowing

He'd already struck a deal with the Americans

To sail poor Pio down the river

To Los Angeles with no title or estate,

Only his knowledge of the wilderness

And where the crossroads meet.

But Forster got his in the end as

They always do, at the sword of one

Don Bernando Yorba, who made his fortune

Trading sea otter pelts as complement to jewels,

And was forced, this Forster, to go to Germany

To petition for emigrants with free cows and parcels

He whose beef fed the California Gold Rush

From his great chain of ill-begotten rancheros.

What was his Dona to do but wave her fan

In her grief mittens and take tea

With the ghosts of the priests

Who took the native hearts and spirits away?

Their hacienda fell into disrepair

As they always do, the fencing

And trespassing broke them. But in truth

Families always take back what was not given.

The whole enchilada went to a guy named O'Brien

Who bought some later farm in a disputed transaction

Lost in turn to an ever-more ruthless

Family machine called Irvine

Who now is barely a sleeve 

In a portfolio that includes the headquarters 

Of the world's largest banks,

For they could be, and so were, pilfered as well.

It's always that way, and it's always these people

Who haunt the displays of whatever ideals

We're supposed to believe, who, yes, subscribed 

With sincerity impeccable to Manifest Destiny

But have very little to show now to precious history

Except how predictable guys can be

When they draw swords for fun at the fair game

Of other people, in this case the Vaqueros,

Who speak with their eyes behind inferior glass

From daguerreotypes of  their enslavement

To a system that defies the wide-open spaces

As they tend their tiny plots with humble serapes.

It's tempting to not look away,

To consider how every road I take today

Was once a river for a land-baron's bluff

To possess paradise because it was still secret

But moonlight-molten oils await me upstairs

As the immigrants came in plein air

To capture what had never before been seen

In post-impressionist strokes of craft

For they believed in artist brushes

To connect the world together,

Whether following the Navajo

Or wandering by chance onto Flores Peak,

Or sharing the iridescence of the seas

With traders as railroad steel rode in

And the rich men drained each other's oil

And the still lifes had oranges to die for

In clear California light, for display

In the most Aesthetic London galleries 

By the McCloskeys, say, partners in illusion,

As if their palettes held a civilized record

Of chrysanthemums and roses, and strange scented

Blossoms that will wilt and die, to those

Who could never know what it's like

Out here, with no obstacles to enlightenment.  

Green of the Tumbleweed

Everything is different. The timeline

Has shifted. It rained. There are roosters.

Nobody really knows what to do,

That is, with the horses.

Yet to pretend one particular

Mud-covered arena is the one,

We all do it, but I, for one, know nothing,

Like that crow of the cock

Not to be eaten by coyotes

For the children who adore

The chickens that help the horses

Somehow with their fly problem

I suppose. It's getting dark,

The purple dapples at grass time,

The buckskin runs in circles.

There are no rules

But everyone observes them,

Even the mules, who disappeared

To an alternate universe for a few days

But have returned, no worse or different at all.

It's for me what to make of it. The lights

Have come on. Brio is rolling. The winter 

Coats make all the horses shine

In water-logged splendor.

They have never been anxious - it was me -

Never wary - me as well - never used

The illusion of love to procure food,

Became lonely after I passed,

That was work I needed to do,

Dredge and observe to let its hold

Go. It took me back to worlds I wanted

To re-do, people I wanted to recognize

When the land itself has been Mandela'ed,

The docks in different spaces of the harbor,

All the buildings moved around. The purple

Lights are not the way they were before,

The car sounds are something other,

A gentle crying from the sea. The horses

Sound like walruses, their clomps

A ticking clock in antiquity

Like that quarterhorse the girl rode

Under the lights in the wet, wet arena

Where they run all odds every second.

It's all been collected,

Culled and scored, and ready now

To be observed and forgotten,

For new music demands the airwaves,

It's as simple as that.

The music creates its ear

And the truth surrounds that solitary note

Like an army to carry infinity 

One funky gallop at a time.

The veil is missing, its black lace

Is only missed by those squirreled

In its attic of memories, as

The moon insists on coloring

Every souvenir in the catalogue,

To render it irrelevant, 

Never really eyed,

What is new in its next disguise.

The perimeter has melted.

I can no longer use the horse's sight.

The hard work of mud leads to shaping

The soft voice of waiting clay.

Cloud Afternoon

Have you noticed how the pillows

Squish the light out

As you're ready to receive it?

Each ray changes the whole history,

For the world is yours, kid, it only

Breathes when you do.

The luminaries are unlimited 

As are the lifetimes you can choose,

What memories you assume.

The bungalows instead of flying off

Hold their own against the sky 

When it grows too overwhelming.

The slightest nudge

Jars meaning 

From the soundest sleep.

A Vision in the Tunnel

The wind

Only reveals

The immateriality, 

My belief

Up next to our agreement 

What will be,

Will my foot fall

Forever or is there

Some floor

For us to dance together

When the music 

Lights the cathedral,

Beckoning us to move

Not like the tide,

A swarm of our own devising,

When we chase down

What the gangsters of song

Echoed the halls with,

The cool of

What their love 

Took prisoner?

It's all for us

To love, isn't it?

The pain, the things without,

How they call us

From the vortex

Like they're not even thoughts.

Parisien Song

Down a low lip of river

Calls a darkness it names lover

And it shimmers on the Seine

Waiting for an eye

To catch her wisp of longing

Her shock of recognizing

As ancient as the Seine

Flowing to the sky

So much her mirror revealed

The more she kept it concealed

Just a face in the Seine

Transfixing eyeless green

She knows the deeper secrets

And keeps them 'til he gets near

They spill along the Seine

She wanted to be seen

The places she could take him

If he only could recall them

The vapor above the Seine

To aetherize the real

He'd chase it all the way

Until the thing she loved was stayed

Unlike the changing Seine

That can't stop how it feels

The cafes fill with candles

Fresh lovers to light up the lamps

That glow across the Seine

And move along always

It was his own illusion

That heave that he was nursing

On his own private Seine —

He could not look away

Lush Life Covers

I have more eternal resting places 

Than I could ever keep track of, but this one

May be my favorite: polished limestone,

The laughter of children as regular

As the irrigation hiss, a weekly mow

As if I am, even now, respectable.

There are others with ocean views, I know,

Some more respectful when my bones need to rest,

But this one suggests almost a person

Behind its dated trappings of renown.

We're so blessed to do things this way, slap a

Marker down so we can forget the great unknown.

The universe did fit into its form

Though that was never what was to be proven

When la Rue de la Fortune blew in like the wind

To infuse every moment, every inch.

It's like the children here came out of its ground

And its words inveigled sermons in the town,

As if something actually happened 

To inspire all the prayers of waste and loss

And our failure to notice obvious things,

Like tomorrow as the same sky, different clouds.

The old songs were always meant to be sung

Again, at other points of attention,

Authentic when separated out again

Presented as evidence, a rested case

That spoke the peace, for the just desserts team

To allay any fears, echo the gift, 

So we face the now danceable music

With what breathes, despite it all has a pulse.

Five Unfinished Meals in Ireland

1.

The diaspora.

It always has to be this way,

To let so much steam of wit escape 

From the stream of the river gods

And follow the quays to Rome

And all its suburbs 

In need of truth, in need of articulation,

Of lies

Told as if if only you could believe them

It would transform your life.

That Kalamata Alfredo

I ralphed up in Dublin

So had to spend the day

In the arms of Temple Bar Morpheus,

The poisoned harp,

Buses moved by mobs at 3 AM.

2.

My brothers haven't spoke in five years.

Because of some sexual insinuation I'm told

By one and then the other.

Towel snapping run amok 

In the wreck of the family dysfunction.

One brother wouldn't go to my son's funeral

Because the other would be there.

It's like that here in shamrocks;

Some tribes have not made peace

For centuries

And doubtless never will.

It's not my problem, even though 

It always has been.

One has to be wrong.

Brothers come pre-armed with fists

To fend off not being the smartest one,

Not so much to impart anything

As to claim as their stock 

Some too-massive rock

Of lichen-stained stone

Upon pain of death at the faintest 

Prick of false masculine pride.

Cuadon, home of Queen Maeve,

Where a plant-based sausage

Made my guts recoil like a rifle

At the colossal insult of Irish cuisine,

As its kindness, a fisticuffs.

3.

The hardness of life must be sent through

To others. That's the only way

To mix the seaweed with the sand

And eventually conjure green

Between the fierce iconoclastic stones

On Inis Mor.

There must be long days howling 

At the howling here,

Nights nursed by fear,

Only the donkeys are ever

Truly sea-legged here

And the goats have disappeared.

On this island the blight never affected

The chips just won't stop coming from the truck,

Hot and magically delicious

In impossible contrast to the rest of Eire,

Where they're rotten, stale and moldy

But served with a straight-up face,

As if food was still allowed

To treat us like this.

They have other ways here,

Where the windows are still tiny today

Facing the vastest sheet of ocean 

You'll ever see

Because the British taxed the sky.

There's nothing for the young here now

Because there isn't a soul who isn't 

A cop, intent to rat you out

As if trawling vermin off the island.

They don't want you carrying on

With leprechauns,

Who are rife in the grasses,

Promising all the joy you can feel.

4.

It's the golden time for Irish youth:

Jobs with Google, smooth white plaster,

Hurling and Camogie every Saturday,

SpongeBob SquarePants in Gaelic.

Barber shops for all the lads

And witchsister covens for the women

Finally taking it on for themselves.

They tattoo away the old ghosts

Still warning this era of peace 

Will bite them in the ass again.

They don't yet know

The truth is a curse

And its telling necessary,

Though they are finally free

Of the landlords and the churches,

The pubs and the bus bombs.

It's all too much in Galway,

The labnah and couscous 

At the incomparable G

Makes me push the plate away.

The town is filled with immigrants,

Those who've fallen under the spell

Of that fabled emerald charm, from Tunisia,

Portugal, Aberdajzan.

It has almost become

That a smile means

You are happy.

5.

I can't finish my porridge

With the quince marmalade

For the second day

And have started to panic.

I have never been known to refuse

An offer of food

And have always devoured

Every crumb off my plate,

Ravenous on command,

Never debating what it was

Or what it tasted like.

In fact I've often surmised

Some past-life starvation 

Made me feisty to win

The one thing offered freely

In the land of milk and honey,

More food.

So it was all the more surprising 

When that karma quietly whispered

Between two limestone walls

On the hazel-gorged burren,

Where a family lived in its one room

And ate potatoes from a central soot.

No one knows why

It had to go down that way:

Five successive failures 

Of the only crop the peasants ate,

A million starved dead, half the country

Forced to flee

To create the great American novel and dream 

From the empty pot at the rainbow's dead-end.

I feel it in the pit of my stomach,

My great-grandfather docking your wage

If you spun out a nail, my uncle's 

Go-to his shotgun draw 

As response to any bickering,

The feeling I seemed to be born with,

Of having to prove I am enough

To pay for a soft touch from God.

But as with all those things

That are ugly but necessary 

To force the uncooperative soul to grow,

There's been no justice, just remembrance

And not much of that, it's such a shabby 

Karma to hold, which falls, as usual,

On those who endured it,

Not the barons who couldn't step outside

Their system of powdered wigs

Or the enlightened priests

Who like black mages spellcast a divine retribution 

To cudgel the restives

For a shelalagh century,

But the stomachs of the blessed,

Who still move from anxiety to gift

As if they are one and the same thing.

It's purging week in Limerick,

The sweepstakes have finally come in.

The 6th Earl of Blarney paid off in the Fifth.

Can we let the horses run?

At the Morgan

Dublin burns the eyes on arrival

It minds

With its own peculiar watchfulness 

That wants to know and not be noticed.

The gentlest of flies watches me too

From the bureau, side table, everywhere I go

More pet than pest,

Like a long-dead poet checking in.

The victims of Industrial Slavery

Are camped out down the street.

Such is the legendary self-loathing of the Irish

They're happy to let me in to their misery circle

But only if I accept the karma

Like I'm a stand-in, all eyes on me

For what's been done to them ...

Even the bath casks say Karmic Ritual

And the rebel music is in English still

Without a need to re-enact the battle

When the Irish tongue has been freed

In the young, and on every street corner.

The fly doesn't want me to venture outside

To be accosted, say, by some card reader

With no boundaries who offers uncomfortable truth 

About my Egyptian past lives.

It only hurts when I laugh, or talk

Or stand blindly receiving the city's energies,

Its ghosts, including it seems blind Joyce himself,

Still prisoner of the Knights Templar Bar.

But the River Gods finally came through the pipes 

To get in the last and only word

In the voice of my late wife

Whose Irish kindness belied her Viking stock.

She seemed surprised to hear

She had ever blamed me, had ever

Thought of me with anything but gratitude.

I am forgiven ... Ah karma, let it go. 

In Search of Permanent Crop Circles

Crows by the river Kennett
That flows to the Thames
That brings all the codes,
Remembering, through London.

It's the Holy Bourne Spring
Across from Silbury Hill
On the chalk plateaus of Wessex
Where silica crystal takes and holds notation.

The water rises when the chalk gives way

And the earth releases the stream
As a living being, responsive
To the plateau's heart frequency.

It's past Merlin's Mound in Marlborough,
Silsbury's twin, due west from the Stonehenge portal
To the underworld, as a conduit, the water.
Magnetized flints fill the croplands like litter.

In West Kennett they used bones as musical instruments 
In healing chambers of sound that housed
The ancestors, who taught them how music
Is the key to eternal life.

The mould-circled stones, once blindingly white,
Are still alive, aligned to all that is
In their respective spots via the dragon lines
To the inner earth and the outer rings of the cosmos.

Every stone has a different personality and shape
Like the purple-bearded wizards here
Who sell sticks, the praying-girl circles
And the dowsing rod picnics with dogs and candles.

They all have such stories not to tell.
The bird light language rustles the black poplars
To ground the fragile codes that hum
Deep within the sarsen stone.

The henge once filled with the underground springs 
To turn the stones into power generation 
To raise vibration, and provide a location
In the orbit around source.

Each stone was meticulously chosen,

Levitated and placed overnight
By sound alone, following older

Instructions from the holy ones.

Ditches and circles like series circuits
Make toroidal vortices go,
Voltage straight to the heart center,
The vibration of an ankh, creation's middle C.

All current can flow through 
If you only let it, in a
Continual conveyance to the stars
Like the river of ether it is,

Each stone is perfectly strange
And perfectly arranged for 
The meridians to align, 
To shake the trees and hillsides.

The crows have followed me all day,
They led me to fields, watched me from trees,
Weaved curiosity from circles overhead,
Ask from the ridge of a thatch roof finally

If I can experience something 
For the first time,
Like watching a wicket keeper lift a shot
Or passing the Basingstoke Crematorium.

On Trying to Rescue William Blake from Westminster Abbey

At Guillaume's White Tower

Through Traitor's Gate

I went straight for the Ravens,

The guardians of all of England,

Who carry the dead to the next world

And break the karmic cycle.

They preserve, at least, in their decorous pomp

By the tribute poppies in the bone grass

Some kind of order

Tho they may, in fact, bite

As the only sign on the premises attests.

Looked after by a raven master,

There's Chaos and Henry,

Harris and Poppy,

Edgar and Poe, who kiss as we pass

Like two twin rays of God.

Georgie and Jubilee grip the pole

By the stone steps where guilt

Or innocence was announced,

To the spacious tower where lions

And discontent to the king was housed.

I asked them if they had anything 

Interesting to report

But they only groomed their wings,

Looked at me wearily.

They only worked here.

But Georgie's wings were gesticulating.

Why are you still here?

Jubilee with vigilant brow affirms.

In fact, they are baby stroller raiders,

Pull up irrigation lines for giggles.

I told them that humans don't like their toys

Toyed with like 'at, and at that

Georgie throws open her beak

But only offers a weak

Confession of an accused elite.

The Ravens remember 

The scaffolds that built 

The scaffolds, on down to

The present day London

Under construction once again.

It's always been that way, for tourists,

Conscription to blood-thirst services,

The staves and armor curiosities 

Of silver sword pomposities,

Horse tails roped into a knot.

They still subdue the modern tourist,

Especially the Tudors who, by the way

Still rule, if hearts and minds still count

Now that the menagerie lions

Have gone the way of property scrolls

And the cast-iron plunders 

Of dragon and lion iconographies

Were melted down in the balance

Of the coin press that oppressed

With oppressiveness on the premises.

There's unicorn memorabilia now,

Knights Templar maces as portable

Obelisks for kings, the crown jewels 

Displayed in felt cases with

All possible implements of torture.

The Ravens stay on the t-shirt.

There's a clock above the vestry

So that every prisoner can see the time

If not the brown Thames one last time

Where white swans still swim.

At All Hallows by the Tower

The church remembers wasted deaths

With our lion and unicorn family crest,

The last of the Saxons

According to the Barking nuns.

The king-sized cross is raised to cover

Whatever devastation occurs, 

As it always does.

A ghost electric light malfunctions.

Rome set up London.

A temple of Mithras was discovered by chance.

The wheel head cross for bending minds

Found underneath 1942's rubble.

One can still feel the energy 

In the Saxon stone

Of the alcove where the confessions were forced

By force words or, if necessary, bars.

The Eucharist is calm, as it always is,

With a pillow to lay to rest any qualms 

About methods, any deeds that need atoning,

For, indeed, there aren't.

The martyrs fell asleep before submitting.

Their blissful face is in stone now

Like the old gold cross.

They rested in peace on their rock pillows.

There's a full stock of wines in a fridge

And cold Camden Beer

By the coat racks, 

In lieu of a gift shop.

At Kensington Gardens

The poets are in the leaves

Not in any abbey.

The city is as mute as a swan

But gardens have a lot to say.

The gulls circle the fountains

In bomber formation

But it's play, a game

Of douse the fluttering angel.

They careen as the wind 

Pulls them up

And disappear

When it dies.

A raven gronks "now"

As birds I've never heard,

A pied wagtail, a little grebe

Break into the beautiful,

Each bird with a different organ,

Like at Speakers Corner

Pontificating important ideas.

Cormorants on poles 

Wave their wings like pianos

And say nothing,

For the local deities

Are in the London Plane.

Return to Salem

If you have a breast

     You have a witches' hat.

It's as simple as that.

     The rope is quick and painless

But the scars acquire permanence 

     Until they are seen.

Stays with you wherever you go,

     The witch wound,

The wearing of the others' hood

     Whenever service is refused;

Unlike the New York Pizzeria

     The witches had no right.

John Conant, first settler of Salem,

     Obvious warlock. First clue.

1688. Quakers and Universalists

     Both vie against the torchfires

Of Episcopalian teeth,

     Congregationalist spite.

1692. The Devil saw to the detail

     Of women's property rights

With horror show girls who had

     Trauma compartments

To rattle with voodoo on command

     In black face

And project their possession

     On the keepers of herbs,

Cultivators of truth running wild

     To appease the goat god,

The only reality stingy Cotton 

      Mather entertained,

When spectral evidence, the craft

      Of second sight

Known only to witches, was finally

      Accepted into Common Law

As one-time precedent

       Against the witches

And Rebekah Nurse was caught in astral

       Presence without a license 

So the witches could be buried in the sky 

       Like all the interesting people

Along with some church-key ladies

       To please the dark Lord,

Who laughs at dice less loaded

       For being pious

And that riotous fun, the cruxifiction 

       Of Pastor John Proctor

For aspiring to play the role

       Of Jesus on the fly.

It was the most fun since the printing press

      Made witches famous

And dropped bibles in every bedroom.

      There was much to confiscate 

Before the witches could be let back

      In the community.

But payback is a witch, when the poisoned

     Pentagram triumphs,

Daemonic energies only draw the covens

     Into tighter weaves, 

Perpetuating the energy 

     When it needs release.

The girls humbled in unmarked dust

     Under the gallows' shadow

Have long since moved along

     From what was not

Particularly memorable

     Until the final act.

As long as we don't have to think about

     What rites exactly were performed

To survive the dark Lord's reign,

     We are allowed to re-enact

All manner of terror and shame

      And grisly sympathy,

A Salem steampunk Halloween

      Where the play's the thing

And everyone stays just a shade

      Inside the darkness,

For they can't yet walk alone

      Into the light.

They need their fellow outcasts

      In costumes

To laugh away their old beliefs,

      For the other world was unfaithful.

The scroll's rewritten one heard word

      At a time

Until there's nothing left of the old ways

      But ghosts,

Some on brooms, some on souvenirs,

      A coffee mug

To plan one's next adventure, to fly

      Directly overhead.

On the Way to Annisquam

These places were just shit holes

Until Hollywood ruined them.

Salem was nothing but tannery wreckage

Until Bewitched came to town

And now it's the spookiest place on earth

When every October comes around.

The Perfect Storm devastated Gloucester 

Where fishermen could once afford to live.

Now everyone comes to take a selfie

With the gale sailor clutching at the wheel.

Rockport, same deal, a lobster insignia

After the B-52s bombed them down down.

Even Manchester-by-the-Sea 

Hosts intervention weekends.

They've been trading in goods

For a long long time here,

And now Siberian crabapples

Hang on Confucius's manbun 

And a nickle harpa plays bourees from Brittany 

In Christmas Major

But at Dogtown Books, with their signed Allen Ginsberg,

They don't know who Charles Olsen is

Though he wrote his Maximus opus

On the same street as the Wicked Peacock.

Such was his dissolute life,

It can't be reduced to fantasy

A seagull seems to scream at me 

Like ghosts of girlfriends past

For the way things used to be

Before civilization ended

And all the efforts to fight churches 

With taverns went largely unrecorded,

Unlike the preachers who perished on the rocks

On the way to save the incorrigible.

They moved the portraits into the homes

To spackle more of history's holes.

Ode to the Flying Warriors of Peace

"Give em Heaven" - Matt 5:16

I'm so concerned to be myself

I can't see myself 

Even though "Literature Only" 

Is the only instruction 

On every cabin seat,

A reminder to cultivate every moment 

As if it was my own,

So that words can be released 

Finally from their bondage,

Words like "Dr. Pepper" and "hologram",

For Dr. Pepper becomes God so readily

We bow to the fizz

As to a translucent sunset.

But on this flight we all have

Separate seats, as if that could keep us away,

Separate thoughts and destinies

In entangled interchange 

Unknown largely

To all of us, who putter as if

Our actions don't matter,

Whether we drink from the sport top bottle

Or try to use the facilities now 

When unclasping conflicts

With the order of oneness

To be belted.

But they inevitably slip off

In a divine timing collective unclasp

Sighing an echo of relief at the opening

So the passengers may know

They are not in it alone.

There are multiple levels,

Of me becoming him,

Her becoming me

But they all rest in equilibrium 

So we may chew our gums in peace

Like cows envision further grass

In the endless alfalfa. It is up to us

To open the Maui Monk

And decline the Oreo

(Vegan tho it is),

When to go to the green light room

To feel Ezra Pounds lighter.

The dragons are with us up here, of course,

To offer their channeling services

To any takers

Of which there is no shortage,

Or would be. The drinks come on 

The magic tray, with smiles,

Deja Blue to make you forget

Every other in-flight service

Though you have anyway, for you have

No real short-term memory of

The name of the person you just met,

Where your car is parked, your past 

Three lives, your existence as eternal source --

So you look at the long haul,

When the stars will be extinguished

And when you will be born,

When everything will be in order

In the chaos that is just the universe

Of sense not fully realized in one's head,

Though all the pieces are laid out

Like Easter colors of jigsaw notches,

The fun is in finding one's way back

To the one,

How it all fits together, 

Though the crumbs are scattered to infinity, 

Which means beyond the reach of 

How we can perceive ourselves, 

At least in this moment

When our teeth break the ice,

Like they've done quadillion times

In as many realms as you'd care to chime

In cymatic temples, to find in one

Frequency a way to hold it all

Without attaching, just being, as you are.

Granted, some of this will occur in the future,

Like the part where we'll laugh

We were ever that young

To take a jet from John Wayne to Nashville 

When, with the right coordinates 

You could go to London 

In a New York second -- we must play 

We haven't figured out these basic

Things out quite yet,

We're still nursing the drink

Of a separate world, untangling 

All its relationships to one,

Each path a rough-hewn endurance course.

It must be, to inhabit the journey 

That always ends in I know

I've met you somewhere before 

And everything you say is so familiar --

It's cloying the lake at the end of the sunset vista,

How much you know something impossibly far away.

Not one person does exactly 

The same thing, although it serves 

The same purpose, to share space

Before dispersing, one of countless

Diasporas every moment 

As the toroid does its figure eight

That is all you need to know

Of the infinite. Some stewards 

Wear diamonds on their noses,

Some look down from Dollar Tree cheaters,

But the rules are the same,

Be yourself

Within the contours of the game,

A delicate and

Most intricate proposition.

But out there in the clouds

That look like mountains hiding UFOs

There is no restriction, who you are is so

Intrinsic to the fabric you can join the cloudwool 

As a spark in its swab of mind.

We look at that from here

With the envy of not remembering;

It's some kindly guide

Of deeper truth and beauty

We catch the briefest frisson from,

Though it is all within our range

If not our reach, the contact

From the tower is available 

Though one may not be said to be

Except as a location, however temporary now,

However unreal when the cosmos is laid out on a map.

For we have our companion, our witness,

Who goes with us to prove that we are real,

That everything we do and say is recorded,

For what good is the sense without the extract condenser?

The apothecary entangles new herbs

To mark the experience as absorbed

And toroided to another void to fill

With future memories that change each moment

Until you realize there is no time

And the sum of who you are

Is reborn as what's not already,

Though everything that ever was

Will not be the same either, when the veils

Between the way we look at things thins

And oneness threatens to implode all that is,

But it never does, there's grace 

In large numbers, we simply have to take it 

On trust, for it's peaceful now

As the gears extend their dependency ever outward

With the whole unconcerned 

Any one sector might go rogue,

For everything can only flow the only way,

Like identical twins must suck their thumbs

As mirrors.

New Poet Tree Sound Files

The surge in views of three very old sound files on my right rail prompted me to make available here recordings of some recent poems. I will continue to post sound files as I record them. Thanks so much for listening! That, after all, is how poems should be "read." 

What We Do With Our Choices

Posted September 11, 2025 

Kirk Reaches for a Note

Posted July 25, 2005 

God as Truth, Key 77

Posted July 7, 2025 

On Horses Running Maskless in the Sun

Posted July 5, 2025 

Only Birds Over Hillhead Road

Posted June 26, 2025 

The Cazimi of Compassion

Posted June 24, 2025 

Machado with Guitar