Three Poems

High Modernism

“In the devotion of rhetoric [in French poetry before Verlaine] to either beauty or truth, there is a certain consciousness of an audience, of an external judgment: rhetoric would convince, be admired. It is the very essence of poetry to be unconscious of anything before its own moment of flight and the supreme beauty it will never attain.” – Arthur Symons

The word “like” has broken

the blood brain barrier

of an entire generation,

like a gulp of terror:

don’t kill me, don’t judge me, don’t commit me

– do you, like, like me? The cautious hedging

of every possible bet, it’s far too dangerous

for any courage of one’s convictions

in even the simplest of declarations.

How smoothly we’ve adopted the fake patois

of the stoner slacker beatnik fraud

because it’s, like, cool, as Shaggy said,

to have the attention span of insects,

the stuttered speech of dislocated consciousness,

with the only word that matters now

counted like a pulse in the trance of endless sleep,

where generation upon generation of impressionable children watch

Gilligan’s Island episodes hundreds of times apiece

without ever seeing how they’re teeming with sexual

innuendo.

Intelligence is in an offsite computer,

the brain a signal processor, code interpreter

remotely controlled—but at least a machine

trusts in God to work, here everyone is

sticking out their tongues for pharmaceuticals,

and their arms unconditionally on command

for a flu shot that makes them get tattoos

and dance to heart-attack inducing

excuses to rape women, the monkey DNA inside

reducing them like fine China white in a spoon.

Our heroes are just slaves,

Our heroines on heroins,

Our preferences are saved

of kill myself or kill all of them.

The clones called politicians

sprinkle truth like fine white powder

upon the thinnest whole cloth tissues of lies

they call the issues of the day.
Our food is filled with tumors,

our water catches fire,

as they seed the skies with barium,

have sound waves jar our minds,

have science prove our lying eyes are wrong.

It was a wildly botched

lab experiment

this last century,

a colossal failure at every level

although it produced all kinds

of amazing and unintended results,

like Silly Putty and auto-mats

and expressions like “kid stays in the picture.”

It’s a history of

the end of history

at its end, our linear braincase

cracked with broken links,

pay-as-you-go fantasy machines,

pornograph placebo

cranking out the junk-sick beats

of needle chic calling sheeple to the steeples

beaming out its microwave short-order circuit

wizardry to bend the shorted minds

on encyclopedias of chaos,

a schizophrenic satire-collage,

solipsistic stream-of-consciousness

caterwaul. The great culling has begun.

Chacun à son propre infini.

Immortality means
all the obligations

of celebrity,

none of the fun.

The purpose of coming to earth again

is to punch it up on the rewrite

for we tell stories first and foremost

when it is said and done.

As the moon waxes and wanes

so does our emptiness hunger

but you can’t teach a new moon old fingers.

Nostalgia-sick I am

for shooting galleries in the grand and central terminals

and agitprop art event announcements

stapled sad to abandoned warehouse plywood doors,

for days of old when boys just laughed

and left the game alone,

before the wind cried Cesar Geronimo

to Bob Gibson’s rising incoherent murderball,

before replacement gods were hatched

just to be retracted back

by the Aristotelian death cults of Venice

who bought and sold the universe

and hurled it as a dismal diurnal

darkened void of stone

with all the immortality of a black hole,

before the word of mouse

and the long strange tip of project artichoke’s

day-glo mustard and Esalen champagne

on rock salt ice for later use at the mkultra acid baths,

before Eugenics became Genetics

and the subjugation of women through feminism

and op-art hallucination mini-skirts,

before the dormant Queen of Hearts

could terminate by altar command

with playing cards that hide the tarot in plain sight,

ancient divination from the alien

snakes from above and underground

performing a cauliflower lobotomy

with heterocosmic archeobotany,

before the wet jobs and Glimmerglass

and the Knights of the Order of the Garter

created virtual tribes afraid of their own shadows

reliably liable to crack, like all the stacked debts of Baal.

Idealism needs only to be believed to be victorious,

Materialism needs everything but itself to be destroyed.

(It may be a tin-foil pipe dream hat but

don’t bogart that hat,

it’s gold cinquefoil with tailfins,

the hat of a different color,

heavy is the head that wears that hat,

the hat that got your tongue,

success has gone to your hat,

the moon is a harsh hatcheck girl).

The train is calm as the passengers soak up

damnable lies from dry newsprint

while the skies are criss-crossed by unmarked planes

spraying conductive metal salts to block the sun’s rays

and no one seems to notice or mind.

They can’t kill all the fish in the sea, after all,

or change the color of the sky too much, but they can

control your mind through your smart phone waves

and program you through the smart dust
of this spray line of lithium trails that veils our world.

No, there’s nothing new in any of this,

it’s not even more refined. Take joy when they say

it’s to save the weather, for they finally admit they are doing it,

what’s been going on all this time.

In old little leagues the whiffletree

still sits crying to be born.

October’s octopi in the ghost land of the fens,

in chain-saw weather, remembers all that was

and never has been,

the blues played like a sick kiss

on the Sun god’s muddy mike.

I sink my teeth into some Hollyween irredentistry
but time flies for no dude.

Possibilities are the last refuge of the sleeping.

The fish is already covered in fur

(put that in your this is not a pipe and smoke it!)

On November's Buck Rogers clock
dry snitching for a juice card with the duck
for a stainless steel ride or parole to paradise
on a karmic roulette wheel, they deal me in
with brake fluid, bug juice and wolf tickets to sell
in a ghetto penthouse, picking up road kill in peels
before the ninja turtles insectival with their monkey mouths
go "if you dance upon the blacktop you go dutch."

December’s mildewed decadents sigh

on a pharmacologically frozen rose,

another quid pro snow, a neural zone infraction,
a meta-amphetamine meta-languaging

hyperactive hypodermic solution

that cooks a mean book

of whirled war peas

as seen from the dervish service station

by the dustdevil crossroads truck stop, dog track

and temporary amusement park, but circus people

suffer more than most, usually in silence.

I represent in purple on a divan in full flaneurhood

but true flaneurie is dead, in McCoy truth.

There are yachts to sail and foundations to run.

The British have their causes. We have our deeds.

Rodriguez the Sugar Man

in a red plastic overcoat

felt he owed a little something to the lost;

how long it took him to realize he wasn’t

like them.

Autumn Poem

Gold dies in the green pond’s reflection

                The geese bathe backwards in unison

                And disappear in a sudden splash

Of illusion on cloud-mottled glass.

Chasing hieroglyphs of squirrel tails

                More heard than read, as the forest flails

                Like our life and death – as mystery;

Seeds drop – the secret stays – under leaves.

Birds call to me from whirring trees

                That are the consciousness of the breeze,

                To hear what only hearts can recognize:

How silent this grace that overrides.

A stream clogged with sheets of sky-starched brown;

                The woods are now dropping underground.

                The geese are now floating past my eye.

The cold, inside of me, starts to cry.

At The Bowling Alley

Usually she just sat there

like a mouse without cheese

breathing in seething streams

the hideous tar of her Kent smoke

hoping only that it objectified the loathsomeness

of all she saw, heard, smelled and touched

– even the blue bean-box ashtray full

of her own pink and noxious butts.

The automated pin monkey sent back

the pink marble Brunswick balls

to the sound of dungeons flushing

like a ghost stuck in the machine.

Someone who thought reason alone

could answer might suppose this came

from an indifferent father and overbearing mother,

or some lack of kindness shown by an itinerant tinker

in some jeweled sepia moment in her past.

But all those suppositions would be wrong.

For the plain fact was

she were too inarticulate to even assume

a fixed identity, except in the vengeful

blood entitlement of dreams of annihilation

where everyone grieves the loss of their squalor.

At the Racetrack

This man's ghosts
Galloping gravy
All bets are on
Over toast, baby

Current Events, Explained

Newsprint sky, against the telephone lines
No breaking into sun or tears this time
Just the smudge of heavy camouflage
And the helpless feeling in each one of us
Of what's been left undone
And who's been placed outside
--Our brothers, who we are, the ones alone
With no one to defend us
Or believe us
Or cast a friendly stone

Save the demagogue
With ears to the underground
And eyes on some pharmacological prize
--He unifies what isn't even us to begin with
Behind his stories that are lies
That so much become who we are
The truth lines up on the other side;
It would make us disappear
Were it not for
The incredible rhetoric
So careful to say nothing
But what we feel

For we've long since passed the point
Where any word
Construed for dialog
--As we would construe,
In our loneliness, any word--
Would be too much.
We're just too far away
From us,
We need protection.
We call it justice.

Autumn Poem

The new morning light - so final it seems
Long shadows remembering everything

Love is perpetually saying goodbye
As it rises to enflame decay

The dying leaves become the sun
As if they're being born

This place between
We call it "Time"

Where memory can't free itself
And being is unseen

We hold on to its sunlight
Like the body we so desperately need

For fear that it will go away
In the night

A leaf floats down so quietly
I almost hear a sound

Monday Morning

The traipse - commuter shoes -
burdens hung from shoulders -
a root for breath from underground
- to dirty New York morning.

Alone in the Woods at Sunset

Bountiful day,

Intelligent evening,

The fire-tempered branches lean straight in to me.

The woods have thinned to valleys and rocks,

Brown and orange suffuses the green.

The leaves are all leaving for the light now

And falling back on black mirroring streams

And on meadows clear enough to receive them,

Alive enough for ghosts

And carrying such wisdom the boughs keep their pride as they bow.

Nothing here wastes a moment of its life

Or resists death's tender dissolving embrace.

Gold ferns seem older and firmer than I am

Sensing the smoke from my kind.

Aversion to Immortality

Leaves fall on the turds of modern sculptures.

Even the willow here loses what it

Never really had, the year’s well hidden

Appearance of something, so this nothing

Could commune with the nothing over there

And call that living – this thing – resisting –

That never lets us call it by that name.

Children pass like leaves – how crisp they fly by!

Red berry days display the happiness

So carefully not chosen on the way

Within the shelter of my freedom’s cage.

Leaf life floats down, unhurried to its end

Without a sound, except the mourning song

Of birds ever-joyful, ever-bending.

The hill that beckons me to climb—just like

The voice demanding suicide—does not

Allow the mind to ever understand –

The strict demands of contemplation make

The hiss of wind-filled leaves some mystery

That reaches to the center of my being

—That thing that never knows it is a thing.

Sun tears through the canopy as if it

Was a gift to me, the migraine light on

Leaves like grace—but what is can never seem

To be, life’s miracle, mathematically

Reducible to the impossible,

Mere darkness owns these sparks that have no place,

That think that they exist until they don’t

And nothing evermore of what they were

Survives their moment – hope turned meaningless,

The light turned off forever for every

Thing that ever was, so that it never

Lived at all in records of eternity.

That’s what they want the falling leaf to say

– And who are we, so open to the myst-

Ery, to disagree – we've fallen here

Ourselves, so out of place, we make our peace

With nothingness so greedily, happy

To have shared our need instead of making

Meek apologies for how outsized is

Our feeling—and how we go beyond our

Selves as if it’s laws that we are breaking.

Soft the voice that tells us we are nothing,

How comforting to know we’re lost and cursed,

Bestowed the blessing of impermanence,

Annihilation’s grace, just to forget

We had some existence, we lived here once,

In a world too beautiful, its colors

Final, fearing we were responsible.

Oh horror as the leaf descends – that I,

Born so divine, could squander these precious

Moments of alignment, looking for the

Permanence of graves, the shelter of dead

Walls, the protection of the mind from the

Enormity of consciousness, from bird

Song ever beckoning to understand.

The long and wrenching cry “I am”

That we never can

Believe.

Planting the Feed

"Without form, man is hidden in his own unfathomable secret." - Chuang Tzu

Have pity on the world
For we existed long before it
And will mourn the God we missed
When Her flesh has turned to dust.

Red Matty on Ice

"To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another." - Bruce Lee

The nice blue dice rolls paradise,

Atlantis Braves dispatched

through some trap door to nothingness

with their guilt trip of death as oblivion war paint

like our lives need so much that shocking change,

a road never taken before.

Fibonacci Mordecai unstrands his spiral green absinthe

cotton candy, and banks like a flamingo an impossible shot

on Minnesota Fats’ magic-trick tablecloth royal blue felt.

But the only one who wins at this schtick

walks alone in the clouds

lacking the wisdom

of the lowest, sorest loss:

that we want it this way.

The allure of the losers:

Atlantis in half-light

still rules a toxic stretch of black hole tar

where ruck-sacked hitchers rue their power

in gasp-for-air bar chairs for victims

where the thought of being immortal

is too much to bear.

The ball goes in play—the heart’s leap of faith—

Time falls away, and the game is too long to keep score.

Eyes study moves like they’re holy book clues

to do unto others what you don’t want done to you,

with a full of love handshake and hug afterwards

for all the respect invested in a brother’s defeat.

Loser, that impasto graffiti

sprayed perpetually over vast boundaries

of stone by the young. The death never ends,

expression can never be emptied,

the puzzle is pulled out of chaos again

to dissolve afresh in the spiral

like flesh shells, expended, decay in the soil

that re-uses all to reshape life so malleable

—the spiral moves on, its dense clouds of mind

like seething grey downpours in the distance,

the fields being watered some unknown plane

far enough away the eye can't, mercifully, see

save transcendent sky that smothers with mystery

but never once gives the candy of its secrets out

for the heart must be empty to receive.

Today the rain drips from sundrenched eaves,

pigeons and people collect with each other,

share something in silence that cannot be known,

only work to be done, beyond the East River,

new gods to be tried, combinations applied,

alliances plied and untied

with the ease of the current to a half-imagined sea,

a destination irrelevant because it does not exist,

despite what the flow we surrender to suggests.

The Light at the End of the Book

All the miserable young poets
don't seem to know
love is a weapon
against every ill
that makes the world cry...

The unknown can seem like the known at times.

Mere fear can seem like the truth
                                      disguised.

Nothing is clear
                 no one is heard
                                problems are never resolvable
 but the heart doesn't care about any of that
        for what other truth is out there in fact
                   but love in the universe?

And what doesn't feed on our fear
        but faith
        in whatever it is we
                     believe in?

The dream of a better and larger world
shows the world of death as a dead world
        that has no hold
                on immortal
                        hope
for in our dreams we are Gods
         and it is only in our dramas
                  we are not.

Helen and the Giant

They could not be more perverse,

These readings that she forces

Down all her students’ throats.

When common sense

Forces them to balk

She fails them.

So it is the Great Ones

Stay unknown

Yet remain in the service

Of the hypnosis machine

Where minds are trained

To do anything

For fear of being shamed.

It is not enough

To say that she is wrong.

It is not enough

To say there is a reason

For her always-undersold
Influence.

It is not even enough

To say when humans find

Their natural genius

It’s always snuffed

Like it’s not even immortal

In some diabolical way.

But it is enough

To simply say

That this waste of time

And violence towards the soul

Is there to serve our mastery.

It is the gift waiting

When we wake up,

Like cut flowers in the sunshine

Or brand new words in a book.

The Bristow

The chipmunks cheep in shaggy underbrush

as cricket-throb in auras hugs the grove.

The hissing stream’s the same as leaves above

while crows and wigeons tell the woods to hush.

September’s fresh cathedrals of the sun

glow on goldenrod and ripe crabapples.

The first dead leaves are honey lacquer dappled

and new white flowers run where there were none.

The Bristow's now familiar as a friend,

still alien, but touching who I am.

The water darter skirts across the pond

just like a spider drawing on a hem.

Fuzzed cattails geese still scavenge silhouette

the pastel incandescence - this - sunset.

An Unexpected Moment of Freedom

Fractured by obligation, the diaspora of SUVs
          bears to uncertain destinations
                   to tend unknowable brains
                            while the sun maintains transparence.

 The maddest of poets lives in the squarest of houses,
           presides like some rooftop vagabond
                   as the children squeal "Malatesta"
                              in long shadows of the lawn.

"Summertime" by Abbey Lincoln plays
            at the neighborhood hot dog stand.
                    Birds above the trees are crying.
                               Life is for me, and me alone.

Autumn Drive

The first yellow trees; what do they mean?

It grows more elusive with each passing year.

It has something to do with the past,

how memories must be banished gently,

summer let out of one's system,

letting go of the need to sigh.

The first yellow rivers, when the trees finally cry,

like poets sharing the beautiful with the beautiful.

There is a line of green, crickets sing on one side,

on the other the stillness comes alive. In the last

sunset of September over the Quinnipiac River,

golden mountains answer a golden sky.

The Annual Perambulation Tour (After Chang Chi)

Marblehead, MA

The house of Doliber the Cordwainer on Brimblecomb Hill
         is black now with pewterpurple doors.
The seagulls are white as sailcloth and make sounds
         like the creaking dock.
The smell of blue striper and fried clams is as faint as a memory.
The sun peers down the carved-rock cat walks etched
         through the hills of Old Town.
All of it reminds me of my childhood home at the edge of the sea.

Epiphany at Wolf Harbor

Victory only vindicates,
the sting of defeat
holds its glow—
the dissonant chord
so much richer than
the drop
to resolve.

Addiction

So much that I can control:
the weather, the way that people look at me...
yet I fritter away all my time
because I can't get that bird to fly
in the direction of the sun.

No Trains Today, Buses to White Plains

White apartments for the elderly,

a touch of red in the trees,

their empty chairs arranged around

the rusted cannon mounted in the town square.

It turns out there’s a history here,

you've been inside me all along;

I can see the sleeves of the glee club,

hear the Swedes' long talks in the park.

The people are all on the platform now

impatient to leave this new city,

Reunion Coffee is served on the way out.

Outside

The beauties of Manhattan weave their goddess resemblances

         through the vapor of a still afternoon

while the plaid September suits deal to try to earn their ardor

         with conjured reassurances and smiling words.

It’s the kind of a day a cat stays in the window for,

         where even the men in blue look on benignly, beatifically

as they collect by the thousands at the Waldorf Astoria

         war-zone fortified for the heads of state visiting.

Blondes beam at me behind black sunglasses

         while men try to pin their words to my lapel

but still I don’t exist, amid the chandeliers of crystal and amethyst,

         the river of mirrors, the golden gleam of pretzels in the sun,

the feeling that we’re walking through a painting in a museum as one,

        but then an Asian woman, without speaking, presses a piece of paper

to my hand: “Organ Harvest of the Falun Gong for China’s tourist trade”

         and I realize I have been alive the whole time.

Sappho Fragment

Reconstruction of Lobel-Page 96

O Atthis, she lives in Sardis,

our loved Mnasidica goddess,

but often she sends her thoughts to us,

of the ways we used to love once

when she loved your song the best.

Now she shines among Lydian women

like a rosy-fingered moon among stars

spreading her light over saline seas

and flowering fields equally.

As the dew flows to roses

and clover and sweet honey-locust

her thoughts turn to Atthis,

and tender remembering

burdens her whole heart with yearning.

. . . .

 . . . . ἀπὺ Σαρδίων . . .

  . . . . πόλλακι τυῖδε νῶν ἔχοισα

ὤς ποτ’ ἐζώομεν· . . . .

 σε θέᾳ σ’ ἰκέλαν, Ἀρι-

   γνώτα σᾷ δἐ μάλιστ’ ἔχαιρε μόλπᾳ·

νῦν δἐ Λύδαισιν ἐμπρέπεται γυναί-

 κεσσιν ὤς ποτ’ ἀελίω

  δύντος ἀ βροδοδάκτυλος σελάννα;

πάντα παρρέχοισ’ ἄστρα φάος δ’ ἐπί-

 σχει θάλασσαν ἐπ’ ἀλμύραν

  ἴσως καὶ πολυανθέμοις ἀρούραις·

ἀ δ’ ἐέρσα κάλα κέχυται, τεθά-

 λαισι δὲ βρόδα κἄπαλ’ ἄν-

  θρυσκα καὶ μελίλωτος ἀνθεμώδης·

πόλλα δὲ ζαφοίταισ’ ἀγάνας ἐπι-

 μνάσθεισ’  Ἄθτιδος ἰμέρῳ

  λέπταν ποι φρένα κῆρ δ’ ἄσα βόρηται·

κῆθι δ’ ἔλθην ἄμμ’ . . . .

A Couple in the Woods

It's the trees—not the wind—that's speaking
And what it's saying—is only—what we hear
What I hear—in fantasies of sharing—in dreams of knowing something
                                                             
It might be a reply—a gurgling yes or no
To teach me what I know already—in my confined world...
There's something there—I know there is—although it's not

Yet touched—a voice not heard—still beckons
All my love—although it dies—without a sound                        
I hum its gentle murmur

Feathers

The widow who came in my room

placed such a soft voice on my wounds

I thought it was my own pain that I felt

that wouldn't heal.

The tale seemed so familiar

I never thought it strange

the story-line did not resolve

except as I gave in.

Her webs went so unnoticed

I thought it was my fault

I hadn't brushed them all aside

before, my fuel consumed,

love came to blame’s rescue,

assumed responsibility

for what it couldn't know,

the echo of old auto-plays,

so victims once again could gloat

as if they have no souls.

It was only a ghost who appeared that day

—some memory of compassion—

how real I became in what I gave

to what dared not exist.

Trampoline

Golden late Sunday afternoon light
Gleeful noise of boys on a trampoline
So easy to think that the world is perfect
But it's only a moment

The terror of getting along begins again.

The Chicken at the End of the Street

The chicken at the end of the street
Tries and fails, tries and fails
And cries, taking over the air,
How the good man is never wrong

Outside the Pyramid, Impatient for Forever

1.
LA knows a little about dreams
And how you put yourself aside
To make them real

It takes everything
To be nothing at all

It's rainbows or bust
For those who can trust
Heaven's gold surrounding the dust

2.
The nighttime landscape is alive with light
Except where the Hopi live -
Where she glows in my violet shirt
And pulls me in to the center of the earth

The old man remembers
How I came here alone
And he knows I'm not one
Without her

3.
I greeted the young as my equals
Honored their new words and ways
But my tales of sweet golden autumn
Holding on to the fading of dreams
Made their springtime wine taste bitter

We didn't say goodbye
But they'll remember me

Haitus

Big summer night
No words because the crickets
                          are still alive
New moon, leftover tofu
A month on, my song
                          will be different,
I will be different—
The birth canal says all is forgiven,
Old lessons will all be forgotten

Rain for the Sunday Painter

And if my life to this point falls apart ‘cos it’s not real

I learned from firm sand walls of my creation

how boundaries are all for the lost.

Knee deep in ambrosia I yearned others could believe in

my private miracles, to peer heel-high like a girl for a kiss

at the black-eyed susan glow beyond the bush,

to see the fireflies on the highway tonight, the universe of

unseen raspberries, the clots of pond moss pull away the sluggish

green from the jungle’s weary summer of no sleep.

The bus to Utopia passes Parsons Street at each lapse

of the clock, while couples lope in white cloths and shoulderbags,

rarely talk, sing notes occasionally in Chinese keys

as time goes dripping by, July waiting for some word from the coast,

the barest of frictious breezes, and I eat my sangfroid sanguishes

wrecktified and rectitudinal before the all-seeing blind eye

saying don’t believe the hope, the righteous pettifoggery

all it ever does is kill you the hard, slow, painful way

in pennyante petitbourgeoisie-ary catching on your petticoat wad.

Nobody came when I locked myself in the closet, three years old,

the darkness total, like the shame I felt in liking it, the rent of escape

others' need for me to become them (and, if not, stand in judgment),

and when the neighbor girl let in the light, and I saw my mother’s face

still absorbed in her dried flower reveries, I knew that I’d felt guilty

for nothing, I’d been cheated like some orphan sold the snake oil

of propriety toward the whole, that brand you’ll never understand

but must let control you, your impulses, your instincts, your desires,

the monolithic presence that does not even exist: the world of others.

I watched until I saw, in escalator town, barbarian sophisticates

part like a sea at these red lights, all dead save their overrated heads

with fright wigs de rigeur, and what sleeps on blotter sheets with fishes.

I said I only scrivened the ledgers, I didn’t game the deals,

but an antiquarian of greatness is no less on his own

than one who is without any other.

My blue harmonica home, still the heart stays sick;

I don’t want to be alone

any longer.

The Longest Wait

While they perfect their buddhahood mere towns away
the bananas wait in the freezer,
roses blue in the fridge,
avocados lay next to the stove.

I put away the witch hazel, geranium, eucalyptus
and collect 26 hibiscus flowers.

I have become less than human, and more
than a God, as the veil between imagining
and knowing turns dangerous, any thought
can turn to pure light, my body at any moment
may no longer be my own.

                                              The brand new country
music station accompanies the ticking clock,
reminds me how deeply I need to change.

My Resistance to the Veil

No more crystal
that holds
vibrations' form
in some
blurred keeping.

The heart is endless,
and you are a river
to take me to my own
private shore.

Haunted Anniversary

It took so little:
a cat, a house, some words
that weren't "ours"
to fantasize this atrocity
of doubt

because love was
far too difficult
to believe.

It takes the simplest twist
to throw oneself in a fire
and flames are always calling
for any occasion of desire.

I pick myself up
when I never even fell,
dust off the nothing on me,
walk through the terror
that I haven't changed already

and mourn a past
I can't remember,
some voices in adjacent rooms:
no words, but tones of love.

Loneliness Is Other People

We used to go financing

                nearly every Friday night

and I’d get to hear

                everything about you

and sometimes you would let me

                                touch

But turns out there

                wasn’t ever a you and I

                                only an us

So now I go financing

                every Friday night

                                with us:

                                                me, myself and I

But turns out that

                                there is no I

                except through you:

                                there is an us

                                                in trust

Overgrown Path Through the Forest

New purple in the sun
peels from the primordial skin
the last ash of time and space away
- they're optional now, as faith is
prerequisite. Black streams surrender
to the moment - forget what they know.
Green dragonflies guard the flow.
The pond's solar systems simply show
that somewhere, beyond the living mud,
intelligent toads and tragical wasps,
the Swedish girl waits and you must
treat her like a queen, always.

Fourth of July with the Town Band

This is so amateurish it makes the rest of my stuff look professional, from the microphone next to the bad alto sax player (me, who picked up the sax for the first time in 30 years a month ago) to the camera that had no business trying to take pictures of fireworks. Still, like Free Bird and Skipper Ireson's Ride this captures something of what we call Independence Day, or at least the part of it that allows me the freedom to post such things on my blog.

Cabo Incommunicado

The Continually Embarrassing Thing They Call Reality

All the apple trees come with memories,

They’re storytellers,

Like divers and baristas;

Because there’s so little left of us here

We need the dog from the pound

To be a rescue animal,

The couch on the roadside

To be somebody’s home,

Or a mother, we need her to tell us the plot

Of her infant’s “progressive cry-it-out”

To its “baby-directed parenting” climax,

And how urgently he needs to learn sign language

To express his needs, without sunscreen,

Unboiled water, a ring for teething,

A rubber duckie, spoon feeding

Or purees (except for some heavily gar-

Licked humus to be sucked off a carrot

That only he can be permitted to hold).

- A carrot, which was purple once, til the Dutch

With their gene paints treated it orange

- Storytellers.

A Conversation Between Two Ex-Lovers That Can't Take Place

The way the waitresses’ beehive shines

when she says “hon,”

ambrosia stolen from the bees

hoving to her comb

while she drones like a queen

on her drone phone,

giving you the beeswax

how it’s all so funny now har 

with no cash money in the jar 

and she’s up shirk’s creek

without a dipper

from the land of cigars and honey.

And you want her to say

“Do try these qumquats

they’re quite succulent”

so you can say “I’m not paid

to suck on qumquats,

but then again I don’t imagine

you are, either, are you?”

To which she replies “I’m glad to see you 

back in Pasadena fighting shape,

shaking the talcum powder loose

from the deadweight,

phoning in your bets

on three-year-olds

over a steaming plate

of frosted twinkie sandwees.”

“Trouble is my monkey, Ruby.”

“Your money - if that’s what it is –

has a habit of disappearing

like a rabbit through the hands

of some rather nebulous

and it turns out often very late

fellows, a fact that I could take

or throw to the crows

without so much as a snap

of my bra-strap

but you see our friends in blue

can afford to be parsimonious

about such baubles, er, trifles

as what is true.”

“Some people don’t talk

unless a few teeth are loosened.”

“It’s an ugly city to hear some tell it.”

“Say working here must be very much like running

the alligator island at the San Diego Zoo.”

“Somewhere the dog I lost

when I ate my relatives for breakfast

howls in gratitude at the sad desperation

of your new-found compassion.”

“Hey, I’ve taken my ventriloquist act

on the road, and came in only

so’s my dummy can take a pee

but he gets recruited as a last-minute jockey

to replace one who’s been permanently scratched 

so I have to watch helplessly

the slow Del Mar third descend

on Tiny Dancer in a parade of oaty pathos

running rails around a stretch

that is a stretch

in name only.”

“It’s hard not to be phlegmatic

when expecting to see Noah

float by my window.”

“The influenza rain in my case

has turned to sweet-smelling flowers,

and washed away the old scent

of cowpies and the doomed from the urinals,

and except for some smuggled pianos

I no longer turn so quickly down

the Venetian alley blinds

in the behind-the-barkeep green room

at that certain spot of morning light

to catch a glimpse, done up like diorama,

of the honeycombed piñata tomb

of Generalissimo Santa Ana

skewered like pork swords

by miniature candied unicorns

mocking his legendary defeats

like the boulder mocking Sisyphus,

for in Xanadu a pleasure dome

of Pico de Guaco is decreed.”

“Dat were zen dish iz tao.”

“Yeah, but still my scented nights are secreted

on horse-drawn hearses by old thoughts

of how, while you and Ragtime Annie drank

Orange Cosmopolitans with shots of Grand Guignol

looking for Monsters Diogenes and Imonhotep

at Chez Remonstrance (an elongated community),

he buddah’ed the farm for real, din’ he,

with the burn still on the table, I see,

one Dunlop tire iron poor blood kidney

knocking on a lead pipe lock at dawn

in Erewhon with a cricket alarm.”

“Are you eating crab looey

or is it crab rangoober?”

“I’m having Blackened Mock Sisyphus

and a side of Creamed Cornucopia,

subverted for my protection, of course,

like the ancient gods and last week’s sea bass haul,

for you can see the best cowboys all

have elderly fisherman’s eyes.”

“The windows are open but notfurlong

and are taking bets sticky, prickly and unwise

until the pies underneath the fingerprints

are gone from the Clocker’s Corner Sip n Bet display glass.”

“Mead me in Saint Doobie, Ruby,

that’s about as imaginary

as the legendary cigar smoke

you’re blowing surrepfictitiously up my arse,

or the dreams of those poor mare denizens

fingers charcoaled with moustache-pencil grit

and sunken eyes like stripclub regulars.”

“Those stagehands are a step up from carny folk,

you know, they keep it real with a studied look

of utter alienation, from everything that is socially

acceptable and clean. That’s their charm…

They’re storytellers.”

Some Incidental Dialogue

“My Betty got the skinny from your Wilma”

“Totally”

“Epic meme creation brah”

“So new it’s old”

“Some stellar gnar gnar brosef”

“Three bagger got dursted”

“Whatevs”

“I’m not apple blocking your Betty brah”

“So I barneyed over the foamies brah? “

“Don’t be buggin brohah”

“You duding me?”

“I dude you not.”

“I should be duding you right now.”

“Chillax.”

“Consider yourself properly duded.”

“Dude.”

“Dude.”

Meanwhile in Sports News

The Toronto Raptors are thinking of changing their name. It’s such a bad name nobody ever really could be sure they even existed. Maybe it’s time for the Toronto Sasquatches.  Squatches lock it with seconds on the clock. Squatches called for tripping, kicking the ball, banging their limbs together to rally the team. They say the point guard’s superior eyesight is from a diet of inner city wino livers. No squatchflopping rule in effect. Careful with the Croatian caveman slurs and the Basque Neanderthal slurs. Due to the shockingly high number of opposing player deaths since the Squatchers came into the league, the Commissioner has agreed to consider a Commission to recommend changes (or not). He has to be sensitive to charges of speciesism. Chicken wire across the backboards in all away cities. No more night games. No flash photography. A three-day suspension for dismembering limbs. This isn’t an aquatic exposition, the Commissioner says, to have primordial forest cred you have to break a few dinosaur eggs. While opposing teams quietly arm themselves with guns, Sting wearing a Hornets jacket does an Amazonian rain forest theme song (sponsored by Exxon) as the new anthem of the league. The Primordial Forest Division will be the most exciting development in professional sports since the disco strobe light and florescent puck experiment of the NHL. Cornrows and full body tattoos give way to semi-automatic pistols stitched into foreheads, full-body phosphorescent rug fur rigs, steel-toed sneakers and toad (the wet squatchit) venom dreadlock activators. Skins vs. Furs. Cages will be introduced. Dr. Naismith will spin again like a Smith and Wesson in his peach basket grave. At the end of home games with Toronto protecting a lead fans will chant “squatch it squatch it” in an insistent deafening tribal manner. The Commissioner will be outraged there’s any controversy at all. Marv Alpert will start dating primates again. The Commissioner will finally relent and allow stoppage of play for pooling of blood on the floor, and from that point it’s only a short distance til the whole thing is exposed as too craven and nakedly corrupt for even the NBA and the Toronto franchise will be quietly renamed the Biogeneticists, with no record it ever happened except for Sting’s odious theme song. The Squatches will wind up like the Harlem Globetrotters playing exhibition games at circus venues. Against teams like the Iron City Oafs, Duluth Leprechauns and Casper Friendly Ghosts. And of course the poor hapless Washington Generals. Who will have the world’s last bearded lady as their power forward. At halftime there will be a mock (?) wedding ceremony between her and Nez Piercings, the charismatic two guard of the Squatches at center court. Officiated by Key Rock the Unfrozen Cave Man Lawyer (“…Your modern game frightens and confuses me: I don’t know of any Lakes in Los Angeles, or Jazz in Utah, or Grizzlies in Memphis and believe me I would know, there were no Grizzlies in Memphis long before I froze and your scientists thawed me out. I’m a caveman. I don’t know the difference between charging and traveling violations, I can’t even enter the paint without child supervision, but I do know this, that this manbeast and womanbeast should be legitimately married by the state of reciprocation for as long as the icefloes hold back..."). As the crowd sprinkles them with talcum powder, the groom says “I’m not an anomaly I’m a humanoid being.” Player-coach ape-man Dennis Rodman looks on in his wedding dress, beaming (It’s okay to say that, you know, we’re on the “we hunt, you gather” fur but balanced network so everything’s dank). Hey which way’s the main stem cell? Our chemtrail weatherman Hugh Jennix will tell that story but first cue cavemen with tennis sweaters…

Spontaneous Haiku

A book at the nursing home:

Bob Hope: My Lifelong Love Affair with Golf

Where’s my book? My Lifelong Love Affair

With the Dangerous and Criminal Insanity of Bob Hope

Play the Blues

There are no storytellers

Sadder than Muddy Waters.

It’s so wrong he even has to talk.

There’s no show, just weary disillusionment

That no one understands the blues,

Though everyone can see in him

The world of trouble on his heart.

There’s no formula just the art of falling apart

For it always always must be must be real.

You literally can’t touch him.

He points like a king

And barely dances, barely moves,

Perspires without breaking a sweat,

He can’t sing better than any other licorice twister,

Can’t play guitar like no straight church’s business.

The good man is at the wheel

Soothing and provoking, saying only

That nothing is ever really there, just him

 – And you. You want to make him laugh,

This tragic, mud-bedappled titan,

And he seems almost pleased you would do that for him

But the thought doesn’t last, as the emperor

Of ice cream has to say “turn your lamp down low”

One more time way too many, the cold and bright

Diamond who shows the night’s dark

Without ever getting in the way.

And it’s somehow reassuring that he’s got enough pain

For everyone, he’s got nothing to prove

And nothing to say – he makes it triumphant

And we look at him with awe, at how he turns just so

The joint at the end of each perfectly delivered line,

With no ash, no soggy pants, just the seriousness

That you need to know how it is – on the muddy

Waters of oblivion sinking without jettisoning

His pride to the reverb of the reivers.

Hove on, big river, hove on.

Dual Coast Dawn

Things have changed so quickly
— people waking up to find
the food they eat is poisoned,
the words they use a wounding of themselves,
their life support a glitterbox of lies
containing all the facts they call the world
illusion save the love that two can share
out of its frozen words, infallible measures.

The nixie naiads swim like coy
around the rose-infested cub scout house
as one more Portuguese water dog
with gooey eyes that shine a love
that only can be given out of many lives together
is clipped into her school bus seat again.

The strawberry moon bends
like any curvature of light,
a jewel hanging in the gaudy night;
it is we who do all the moving.

Ennui After a Shift

The rose it opens
the light not seen,
its total bliss
was always waiting there
for the self to dissolve
in the purity of love

but the thread that
carries with it all I feel
catches on the vagaries
of the blues
in pain and yearning
comforted
for what has long denied
my striving kindness

what is there as
mere perfection now
except inside the mind,
the heart locked
on a phantom
larger than itself,
a small thing lost
in an infinite embrace
from which there's
no returning

A Kiss

Inextinguishable light
Meets inextinguishable light
- One light no longer two -
The universal nothingness
Beckons from all sides
And we melt in all our gratitude

On White Oak Street

Four Yorba Linda llamas

                Walk by the avenue

On the way to Poway

                On the way to Poway

Something different’s come to town

                Something different that’s brand new

Hear the tealids ring today

                Hear the tealids ring today

The girl will hit the lower notes

                The boy will want flute played

On the way to Poway

                On the way to Poway

A heart as large now as a house

                At watch from far away

Hear the tealids ring today

                Hear the tealids ring today

Soon the fairy garden

                Will burst out into bloom

On the way to Poway

                On the way to Poway

Soon the violin

                Will sing a happy tune

Hear the tealids ring today

                Hear the tealids ring today

The hens will lay new eggs of love

                The bunnies thump with glee

On the way to Poway

                On the way to Poway

The dolphins will go dancing

                At the entrance to the sea

Hear the tealids ring today

                Hear the tealids ring today

The sun and moon will each take turns

                Shining down with love

On the way to Poway

                On the way to Poway

At laughter never ending

                That warms the sky above

Hear the tealids ring today

                Hear the tealids ring today

Soon the crows will meet again

                When the nectarines turn red

On the way to Poway

                On the way to Poway

Pure heart faith has won its dream

                For the May Faire wove its thread

Hear the tealids ring today

                Hear the tealids ring today

The gnomes can rest their feet at last

                The guardians rejoice

On the way to Poway

                On the way to Poway

The crystals hum in perfect love

                With one earthheaven voice

Hear the tealids ring today

                Hear the tealids ring today

Some Clews at the Dog Fair

I'm nothing but a pretty face, a sense of place,
a taste whose trace can base from wayward glance
a possibility - and then I see a woman
so at one with he - I'll water ski
in South Bay with no other.

Review of Elephant Rocks by Kay Ryan

Some poets give you nothing and it’s everything. Other poets give you everything and it’s nothing. Kay Ryan is one of those latter poets. Zany and nonsensical metaphors build and build in a pleasing but predictable rhythm, cloyingly rhymed and flat as a pancake, until they seem to whip up into something strange, and signify something deep about humanity, the earth, even, gasp, God, but since they risk nothing and aren’t really about anything other than perhaps the metaphors themselves and the way they attack the mind’s pleasure centers, they leave the reader with nothing but the feeling they are safe in whatever illusions they came in with.

This is not to say these miniatures aren’t enjoyable – they are, like easily solved algebra equations, which is something in this day of intentionally disconnected circuitry masquerading as poems because they cannot be called anything else but poems. But it all falls apart in the reader’s hand – oh, I think she was talking about that, but maybe it was this, but anyway, life is strange, people are funny, let me read another one like it is lightly salted popcorn. That’s fine for some people, but I get highly annoyed at such a waste of what appears to be genuine poetic talent. There’s no sense in this entire book that there is actually pain and wisdom in human relationships, or that it’s a struggle to find some temporary respite of truth in the strict school marm of the universe, and no possibility that turning ones perceptions inward will bring one closer to God. At least Mary Oliver gives you that. She is really writing about something besides the act of writing, or more precisely, the act of thinking of something to write about.

Still, the overwhelming sense of vacuous preciousness is not what bothers me, nor is it that insidious manner of how carefully for the eye of the common man she has pilfered the public library for philological and historical arcana to sprinkle carefully on top of the poems like so much vitamin-fortified confectionary sugar. No, her art for me is like that card-shuffling trick before the poker game, a show of virtuositic force that almost distracts you from the all-important fact that the game hasn’t even begun. It’s done before the bets are made that can make or break souls, where nothing is certain, clues can deceive but are your only hope, as you boil the water and roll up your sleeves and turn up the lamp to examine the entrails on the table, and instinct will carry you over the abyss every time. To see Kay Ryan in her Emily Dickinson stripped of the tragic tone of witty wonder bring us her musings on intention, measures, chemistry, connections, age, silence, loss, relief, distance, heat and poetry in translation (to randomly cite various titles/themes in this collection) – it’s so thrilling to think we know such things, how clever that these abstractions can be compared to zoo animals, how sharp that the mind can connect all the dots like a born pattern-maker.

But then the bottom drops out. There's nothing even remotely there because even the smallest break through the illusion is too painful to bear. You were suckered again by the need to not have anything to believe in, to be arch and ironic instead of real, and to not ask too much of your mind when it is barely able to hold it together in a world where nothing is as it was only yesterday.

Ryan’s is a trip through the garden of a neat and orderly Victorian gentlewoman, full of good cheer and good manners, but there are no flowers to take with you on your journey home.

Invitation to a Wedding

We were married on the street by some homeless dude
because he could recruit two sober witnesses
but she wants a legit hippie wedding this time,
so we got a real Man of God to do the hitching
though he does have "fuck the world" tattooed on his arm
and my best man is crazy, always wears a helmet,
thinks the fire chief is giving him orders,
says "moo cow" after everything you say,
but we'll have shrimp'n'grits and lots of moon pies
and hell ya of course you're invited.

The 47 Days in a Mexican Jail Diet Plan

Six days on the road with Russell, Blaine, Jesse and Robert

The cloud chakra on the outskirts
of everywhere
tests how cool you can be
when facing the Antelope Valley
reality:
Diamond Jim’s Casino again,
morning gamblers, no cash
advance ATMs, chewing tobacco
prohibited in the urinals, and a
calming desert pink after you lose all
your Lancaster cash, grass so gray
it’s alien blue.
I don’t even want to step on the cracks
of clay with dirty-ass Jesus feet.
Each shard of trash is perfection.
You can ignore the rickshaws
‘til you get out of town
but the concertina wire
and armed guard towers
seem odd in a casino parking lot.
Officer UPS asks about me and my boy –
“They are strange but harmless.”
“Are you lost?”
Already by this time we’d become a song
played on our car by the unmarked Musical Road:
a clever set of grooves waxed in the warm cement
or part of an elaborating plot to plug us all back in?
It seems there’s only so far we can go into the desert
before we notice something we’re not allowed to see.
The first of the military-alien complex: Edwards Air Force
Base, and the first attempt at a band name:
Savage Messiah.

Then it’s “Welcome to Mohave, Home of Spaceship One,”
which is apparently an Amphicar with a broken window.
We find in Red Rocks Canyon, though, an entrance
to the Portal. How do we break through the holographic
stucco that covers the passage to inner earth?
There’s a temple of stone stacked over the hole,
a carved heart, a smiling face. Rather than run through it
fearless but unprepared, we go up the dripping rocks
in sabertoothed dress shoes instead.
A silence of ears sucking sand. We talk of women
and the rusted soda can we found that had turned
to a friendly face by years-old bullet holes. We break one
Frisbee, and try to follow a crow.

Back on Neuralia Road (“dips next 90 miles”)
the mountains are lighter than clouds
and desert woman suchness emerges like a mirage or an oasis.
Then a bathtub crank town Randsburg comes
“Hopen for Business.” We stop at the General Store
for hand-mixed Sarsaparilla and a picture of Sacajawea.
Burlap was over the window. The proprietress shook her
tresses, holding back more than she revealed, as she gave
as sassafras the secret ingredient, only available (unlike wintergreen)
to pharmacists. As she spoke the sign above her glowed:
“cows may come, cows may go, but the bull in this place goes on forever.”
Outside, the Surcease Mining Company has set up a ghost town toilet,
“hern” and “hisn” (caked with chisom jizm), and for all your tonsorial
needs, a barber shop: “hot baths, fine cigars.” And Slim’s Place,
with its haunted ceiling, antique beer cans, staring dolls,
a Happy Holidays doormat with a gray Santa Claus, a “yes we have
used dentures” sign, and outside a bone-dry wishful thinking well.

It’s creosote weather. We’re growing food in our car as we travel.
There’s a rainbow-colored Petting Zoo by the desolate highway side.
As we pass Shambhalla China White Dry Weapons Lake
there’s an ordinary mining operation running 24/7,
pay no attention to the boarded quonset huts or the swamp gas pipes
from the green trapezoidal building, or the advanced radar tower
turning in a fenced-in field of no cows. By the raspberry road of Trona,
the Pinnacle Inn is at one end of town,the Nadir Inn at the other.
And nothing living is in between, just the sadness of cactus
growing through the cracks of an old high school basketball court
and a football field without grass, and a dude in full zombie makeup
lurching along the side of the road like a method acting class
gone tragically wrong. It’s hot and cold at the same time,
extreme micro-climates that shift in nanoseconds,
lifeless mountains of straw
then a redonkulous oasis with date palms and elephant ears

and birds like warnings crying.

Nearing Death Valley you can smell the geology,

feel the alluvial fans,
remember the aeons locked in rock

when Papa was a Metaphysical Geologist,
sense the quicksand underneath the salt table
and the elusive Chocolate River
Manson attached gas tanks on his car

('cos Charlie don’t stop for gas)
to find. It’s easy to see
why so much weirdness passes this way;

even aliens, who have no problem
converting sunshine to water, have the same

problems we do when it comes to finding

places free of dune buggies and Winnebagos,

they need a vacation without people too.

We can see their landing strips

and runway lights made of unnaturally angled stone,

the cliffside triangles (the alien yield sign).

In the late afternoon sun you live for, it’s movie time.

We got served with raindrops, and the rainy desert smell.

Skulls along the side of the road
remind us we are going to a place beyond death,

beyond love and mercy.
The rain on the plain falls mainly on 2 Skidoo.

At the first official campsite some nervous campers eye us

like mules, some mobile government meth labs
disguised as “Goldtimers” retreat RVs roll by

the last pay phone on earth. The smell of mkultra bath salts.

We freestyle it, decide to go wildcatting,
head down the washboard road that

leads to Heebee Jeebee Crater.
The raindrops are gentler

than the touch of any finger.

No chairs, propane or ladles
for these intrepid squatting fools,

just a panhandling guitar played on the side of the highway,

a 12-string trained at the Waldorf School,

some Apache drums, a Yaqui rattle, a Navajo flute,

and a recorder of course to attract a Sasquatch.

We had to leave the piano at home

- such brutal choices test one's will to survive.

We practiced the art of mishearing:

Savage Massage and Clown Chakras

became poetries bequeathed to the Gods
as we uncorked the resin of our souls
in an air without ghosts

(just the hovering lights of a nearby alien base).

We all felt our fear but we walked in the dark

to a visualization spot we named reality

we tried to claim if ever so briefly.

The desert gave us a fire in the morning,

sprouts grown in a jar, and the rain

as a blessing. No insects

or jackrabbits for hundreds of miles

 - no way to even pay.

In the dim morning grandeur

we decided to head towards

the center of our fears:

the infamous Scottie's Castle.

I could see the blood dripping

down its bell tower spiral staircase.

We couldn't find the underworld slaves

to free them but we could tear it open

by pulling its sick bell cord

 - veritas vos liberabit.

"Let's follow the road to Scotty's grave," someone said.

"We can put the body on top of the car."

We could smell the ghastly horror by now,

nearly hear the agonized howls,

every inquisition, every torture chamber, every dungeon

compressed into this bizarre but innocuous-seeming complex.

The perfect front to process kidnapped children,

turn them into the ruling class as sex slaves. To the side,

past the Spanish gates and Arabian arches,

thousands of thickly stacked railroad ties,

with no train or road in sight, just a locked entrance

at an endless and inexplicable hypermodern security fence,

with a sign on the gate that from afar seems to read "warm slaves."

It's for the crates they ship the children in, we thought,

but the truth is always murky, it's always so much more

hideous in reality than you can possibly believe,

for that's how they get away with something so big,

so diabolical, so obvious, this rule over all we see and hear

through chaos to destroy people's minds and spirits,

through alchemic creation of impossible conflicts,

hopelessness and addiction to methodically infect

the entire population. We saw a strange pile of wood

nearly fossilized in the middle of this, that looks like

the corpses of Auschwitz. The bells went off, in a sick

out-of-tune tone like no religious song I've ever heard.

The sign on the bell tower said "private residence."

We went up the hill to "Scotti's Grave", to see his

warlock statue, his Satanic credo "don't say nothing"

instead of "don't say anything," "don't explain"

and next to his formal memorial, a kindergarten grave

of fossilized turds like unnatural skulls,
and one word, "Windy,"
for all the sacrificed children. 

There's a cross, of course, at the top.
A crow whirred overhead, directly over me,
so I stayed behind when the others escaped
before the winged monkeys were alerted.

She landed on the cross like a guardian of the undead,

then, making sure I'm watching, swooped

magnificently down to the palm grove below

and disappeared, to show me

they are only fooling themselves

more than they are fooling us, that

even in this most damaged and desperate of

places life can hide, it can't be stopped,

love is the only protection.

The bells infected the air again, the last note sounds

long afterwards like a HAARP wave;

even the birds furiously screamed to blot it out,

and so shifted the energy, even here,

from manifesting its total desire.

I returned to the group as they're conferring with

a blind park ranger and a lady from NASA.

"Don't touch the rocks at La Playa," she said,

"there are transponders on them so we can 

catch them moving." Meaning of course

that they were there to catch us.

When we asked if NASA had put them there

the blind ranger gave us the crazy eye,

asked what kind of car we were driving,

and where did we get it, and said we should expect

to lose at least two tires on the way.

The crow returned as we revved up the engine

to remind me of our lifetimes together, and

that she was keeping watch, as I was watching,

her black iridescent on the parking lot.

We left before we got the glitch chip in our brains.

Despite the desert finches, hummingbirds, butterflies,

the mechanical goat on the hillside, it was

Racetrack Playa dust or bust, we had to

get away from the rat race of Stovepipe Wells.

Even one car passing us was like being in Walmart.

"We won't rescue you from La Playa"

echoed in our ears, as we eyed drone seagulls

and heard the alarm go off in the distance

to put air defense on high alert for us

because we weren't driving a Ford Sabotage.

We saw the rock the crescent moon launches from

and bravely strategized

over frosted cheese loaf sandwiches

("leave nothing behind but footprints and teakettles,"

"no placing bets when we get to the Racetrack")

as we bounced to desert mixes the 571 miles

riding dirty on a Big Chief Runningboard keel haul,

staying strong as they turned on the weather machines,

sending a tropical storm through the Joshua Trees

then, getting desperate, turning on the hail.

The place, when we reached it, had an

absurd inexplicable flatness,

a luminous glow from within.

The sun was only over the Playa,

making it superreal, Kubrickian,

so white it was pink, a creme

brulee of salt, with smoke at its frays

from white dust griffins like wild horse vapor trails,

silver rocks the size of mountains at its edges.

In ecstatic tranquility the original island

(what they now call The Grandstand)

lay in the center, with supercharged rocks

and primordial beach. We had entered

the womb, the earth mother's pussy,

it was here in endless linoleum tiles

the akashic records are kept,

and there was no judgment

for all the suffering and loss, so beautifully

felt on the dry slate. Soft rain caused the seeps

to connect, in the brainscape of the cosmos.

The wonder was not the perfect paths of the rocks

as they move just when no one is looking,

the wonder was that in that maelstrom of wind

the rocks didn't move at all. They were

the male, aligning with female energy,

magnetically, in concentric scrapings

against a truth impossible to bear,

the hieroglyphs of life itself

captured in the salt. Some of us slept,

some of us walked, none of us could say

the thing we felt. We were at

the center of the earth, the pure place

even mkultra couldn't touch.

We were sailing on a sea breeze

through the emptiness of everything

and thinking of only one thing.

"Why do five guys go out all this way

for a woman?"

"That's what we do."

And, again, in her soft soft voice

she then said "you must stop this pandering

and do things for yourselves,

for suchness. That's all we ever want."

Crazy Charlie might have had

a Nazi swastika tattooed on his third eye

and all that but he had a good band

and great visions of the Chocolate River

of which there was still no trace

along the Panta-Breath-Mint ridge,

the strawberry hillsides,

confectionary clouds,

the seven-levels frosted bundt cake mountains,

as we drove gaping chasms

in the crevasses of the earth

to try to veer in even closer
to the sweetest desert,

by the 700-foot tall Mammoth Dunes

made of disappearing dust

in the perfect curvature

of a woman's body. Sand

for five guys roughing it,

and hobo shoe print floor-mats

at its base.We went up

the slow dune lava

to the top, our tracks

reshaping what it was

but no longer is (ah, woman is the wind).

We rolled like whirling dervi down,

and ran backwards like a lost Beatles

"run for your life" film, and by the time

we made it back to camp

we looked like Lawrence of Arabia

asking for lemonade as he emerged from the Rub Al Khali.

As we had our tea and breakfast

of Motherground peanut butter

and Bilderberger Berry Jam

from out of nowhere came an F-16

that stood on its side in mid-air less than 10 feet from us

before sweeping away to some hidden base

in a Jack de Ripper yee-haw cowboy hat roar.

"At last I see my tax dollars at work" I said

to this gentle reminder we were not where we were

supposed to be. The park ranger who stopped by

almost immediately was almost apologetic, almost friendly.

And again there was no way to pay.

We'd been living on medicinal chocolate and Death Valley sprouts.

There were diners and hot springs up ahead we knew,

somewhere beyond the Bristlecone Pines,

the mountains glass-stained holy white,

the river that once was a sea where we measured

and recorded a sasquatch poop.

We found a tectonic blue plate special hot food

in the Giggle Springs Mini-Mart,

near the "mule capital of the world."

Sacajawea served us strawberry and rhubarb pie.

I wanted to ask to touch her.

Then the throbbing metropolis of Bishop

with its rodeo stadium, Vagabond Inn,

Choo Choo Swap Meet at the Railroad Museum,

Paiute Palace Gas and Casino,

of dark plush wierdness, real Indian croupiers

and customers counting Indians on the machines.

Blaine whistled "Paint It Black" as high lonesome

theremin dune blues. Robert said "Rare Brare Rarebit"

in Baltimorese on English as second-language headphones.

Russell regaled us with squatching stories

of how they sometimes dive in bear-proofed dumpsters

but they mostly eat deer liver because it's good for the eyes.

Jesse talked about his only pair of socks, one dress

and the other cookie monster - "I even took them to jail."

As for me I just did what I do,

melding my mind with a passing Airstream.

It was clear as we passed Convict Lake Resort

(3 1/2 star facility with turnkey service according to prisoner reviews)

and the Prison Outlet Store

that we'd left Desert Woman

and were nearing Mountain Man.

We found a place we'd need a rental dog for,

with a self-loathing Scandanavian dark sauna,

where we talked about stealing the keys to our wildman cages

when the Mother was so far away,

and played love songs to caterpillar greasewood 

on digiradoo kazoos, manifesting

the Kalamazoo New Kazoo Canoe Revue.

In the Death Valley Daze Ronnie and Snoop had become fast friends

and on the long lonesome road to Rodee-Bodie-O

had disappeared in a blunt skunk haze into Mexico:

"Whell, you talk to Nancy Snoop and say we'll be late for lunch"

"Put yo trippin' bitch in check, niggah."

We contemplated swimming in Battery Acid Lake

where you might lose your leg and all,

but the kids are now cutting off their legs

'cos it's cool to be a hookfoot,

it's like a tattoo as a weapon.

The lake was pewter blue, with a strange crystaline stillness,

calcium spires that grew and breathed and were

for all intents living, even human, and below

an eco-system of incredible importance:

alkaline bacteria eaten by alkaline algae

eaten by alkaline shrimp eaten by alkaline flies

(or as they said in Baltimore, "Al Kaline flies!")

eaten by normal horned larks and sage thrashers

in rust where the flies dance in suchness.

Just then a snooty Prius came along

with picture-taking zombies inside

to condemn Mono Lake as an anamoly

instead of floating in the saline salve of the mother.

Then Dream Mountain Drive, where we felt,

as Nero said "at long last I can live like a human being!"

And Silver Lake beyond the veil, in cold tar mud,

with dreamcatcher visions amid visionboard scenes,

and the name "Cal Ripken" carved on a tree.

And Rainbow Street where the late sun made it clear:

nature offers nothing more, nothing less,

still we judge ourselves for what we have.

And, as if to turn that incandescent afternoon into physical fact

we turn into an obsidian mountain, the black loving mother

from deep in the earth shining like the sun

in smooth compassion, glossy unrelenting love.

And then we went back, just like that

at the Ranch House Cafe in Olancha,

the scene of the water stolen by LA crime,

for Indian fry bread and a sign on the door:

"Wanted: Saw Dust Charlie, the Pockmarked Kid,

the expense of said capture to be borne

by one hundred substantial citizens,"

and the waitress from Texas was told us

as we left: "drive safely and take care

of your women."

Despite roadside dignitaries

like Hot Creek Hatchery and the Lava Girls

the only tree for miles was a rusted fake

by a lone Southern Pacific railroad car

in the sand outside of Inyokern,

where we picked up K-MKUltra's transmission

like a long-extinct star still shining its sun upon us

"coming at all you Death Valley alters

'My Guitar's Gonna Kill Ya Momma'

by Frank Zappa for Mother's Day before we

count ALL the way down to our all-time top-five hits:

'American Pie,' 'All Along the Watchtower,' 'Hotel California,'

'Every Breath You Take,' and, at number one with a Manchurian
bullet, 'Whiter Shade of Pale.'"

Then, like a bomb, Johanesburg,

its "knife shop and casino," "Guns4us", "Jberg Junque,"

dead gas station lots, flashing glass in the sand,

"homes for sale," a blank billboard for rent

(we wanted to put "MORE COWBELL" on it),

a "senior pot luck supper" in a teal Route 66 camper;

everything dissolves here like a boiled peanut

in a bottle of sweet Coca-Cola. Snoop is slumped

way down in the seat, amid imagined billows

of cannibis cloud eating twizzlers.

There's no time-bender button in our Chevy Vortex

just more road by stone-hard sand;

the Black Hole Sun Solar Collector Facility,

the battery for the Matrix, and a "Cactus Shop"

by the transistor circuitry. Then the Joshua Trees

began: the shiva brush trees, ti chi windmill trees,

stretching gymnast trees, pom-pom cheerleader trees,

edward scissorhand trees, universal restroom symbol

trees, Musso and Frank's hatrack trees, Leonardo

di Vinci man on fire trees, praise Jesus trees,

dancing children trees, flying Nike trees, shrieking fencepost

trees, crouching monkey funhouse chickens trees,

laughing squirrel porqupine quill condenser coil trees,

then Adelanto, "the city with unlimited possibilities,"

like, I guess, the Big Rig Tire Shop, the Federal Penitentiary

and Garbage Smelting Center, the look on everyone's face

for an alternative to the governing reality of hopelessness

on this stretch between long kitty litter highways,

but then, on Mother's Day, in the middle of the desert,

we saw a 20-foot statue of our patron saint Quan Yin,

the Goddess of Compassion, "be kind to your women."

Then Victorville, another parking lot, another crow,

as we cleaned out the "all-natural" GMO imitation snacks

only to encounter on the way out a Coyote Dog

that drank goat's blood and licked Jesse's hand,

who saw that was living his dream: a pick-up truck,

coyote dog, and a gun, with the Mexican jumping bikes

derby nearby, every weekend.

Down the bad hills of San Berdu

there was crystaline suchness

but it was 98 degrees in Rivertucky -

we went to Death Valley to get away

from the heat (that's how we roll),

team Savage Messiah, secret

artist heart, learning how

we are the change.