Counting Flags

In solidarity with Wikipedia

Stars, watching over the worried homes,
A line of long red bloodstripes from an old war
Before the Rothschilds took control.
The people here take pride in the care and folding,
The angle of ascent, the length of the pole,
Ironing it out like something they would wear
While dreaming of grandmothers new to these shores
And the blessings of this vast last chance Texaco
Large enough to take the most insignificant in,
Where there wasn’t something in the way of being human.
The government can now kill every one of us as it pleases
That’s the law, but mostly reserved for those
Who refuse to be implicated in the slaughter of children
For no other reason than it makes some feel stronger.
The flag thumbs its generous nose at such opposition,
That great symbol of dissent now warns against opinion,
Reminds us we have no freedom because we are not responsible.
The few who remember the way things were are sent overseas
To start their own countries (if they’re lucky) somewhere else,
And the brand is refreshed with each gusting of wind
As the buildings around them keep on crumbling.
The morning sun makes these rippling stripes
A memorial to something more than
The people who gave their lives
So that debt would grow,
It’s an undefiled dream
Waving over the projects,
The shuttered factories,
The foreclosed homes,
And everyone in terror

That they might wake up.

A Winter Day

Snow dust at sunrise,
Geese honking, the screeching of crows,
slush cracks, shoes muffle, tires shush, drains splatter

The woods have held on to their browns
and the grasses didn't yield without a fight

The afternoon forgets the thought
that breathed down on the real
as our minds are asked to let our knowledge go

White forms will always dissolve into black pools

Wet night
with its luminous coal and clean concrete,
limbs in tubes of light and diamond straw

Remembering ML King Boulevard

It was so beautiful in Tinytown

When the sunrise hit the formstone, or the

Moonlight caught the scrapyard storage tanks.

We were proud to drink at Butts ‘n’ Betties

Where you fought or lost your girlfriend every time,

Proud to walk the projects every day

And navigate police tape and well-tossed bricks,

Proud of that fat guy at the liquor store

Who sold us our Chesterfields and Smirnoff

When he shot a robber dead from his perch,

Proud we had no furniture and Goodwill clothes,

Proud we smelled the sulfur and epoxy,

Proud we were insane not mediocre,

With our gizzard and horseradish banquets

And violence on the grass each Saturday…

But thoughts become like a virus

And memory a terminal disease

And I wonder why, as I let this go,

I found such solace in their acceptance,

In the magic of a dying old world town

Where there wasn’t ever any room to build

But plenty of incentive to destroy,

Where pain was a badge best left in the attic

And drinking games the only freedom from shame,

The shame of feeling pain

                                            in a harbor

Of tears,

where the priests lacked all compassion,

Where they let you see with a kind of glee

What will become of those souls abandoned

But only if you do not bat an eye;

This town that drinks alone but lets you buy.

Ghosts and homeless people were my only friends

Because they said what others merely know:

How every mental fabricating smelter

Goes belly up in the end, and every grace

Must always be contingent, for no one

Deserves a thing, that is the curse of knowing

That before the Marxist hip-hop poseurs

Stapled their flyers to the plywood walls

That once these storefronts held a golden age.

Escaping from such a place with my life

Was nothing, for it was a place to die,

Tho I cry to have pulled two new foals from its clay.

Brittle Words

Sunday morning
laying in bed
letting all the monumental somethings
float by

Once in a while
when it's perfectly still
the occasional all-encompassing nothing comes
what we, with brittle words, call love

A Fairy Tale for Grimm Times

Once upon a time in a land far away there lived a queen.  

While sewing, she pricks her finger and three drops of blood fall on the snow that swirls continuously around her. As she looks at the blood on the snow, she says to herself, "Oh, how I wish that I had a daughter that had skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony."

A few years later, the queen gives birth to a baby girl who has skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony. They name her Princess Snow White. As soon as the child is born, the queen dies.

In the meantime the king has taken on a new wife, who is beautiful but very vain. The new queen possesses a magical mirror, which answers any question it is polled. The only question that the queen ever wanted to ask, however, was "Mirror, mirror on the wall / Who is the fairest of them all?" to which the mirror always replies "You, my queen, are fairest of all."

But one day Snow White became more beautiful, and the mirror told the queen when she asked: "Queen, you are full fair, 'tis true, but Snow White is fairer than you."

The queen becomes jealous, and orders a huntsman to take Snow White into the woods to be killed.

She demanded that the huntsman, as proof of killing Snow White, return with her lungs and her liver. The huntsman takes Snow White into the forest, but after raising his knife to stab her, he finds himself unable to kill her as he has fallen deeply in love with her. Instead, he lets her go, telling her to flee and hide from the Queen. He then brings the queen the lungs and the liver of a fairy, which is prepared by the cook and eaten by the queen.

In the forest, Snow White discovers a tiny cottage belonging to a group of seven dwarfs, where she rests. There, the dwarfs take pity on her, saying "If you will keep house for us, and cook, make beds, wash, sew, and knit, and keep everything clean and orderly, then you can stay with us, and you shall have everything that you want."

Each of the dwarfs had a name:

Dopey, the youngest, most lovable and most mischievous of the seven…

Grumpy, who found nothing to like in the forest or in the dwarf family…

Doc, the only one of the dwarfs to wear glasses, so presumably an intellectual and in charge…

Happy, the most rotund of the dwarfs, who laughs off all the troubles around him and makes fun of the other dwarfs…

Bashful, who hides his innocent nature behind a classic pose of shyness…

Sneezy, whose words are often hard to distinguish because of his propensity for sneezing all the time…

And Sleepy, who apparently cannot get much work done because of a problem with narcolepsy.

While Snow White travels around with the Seven Dwarfs putting on shows for the forest animals, the Queen asks her mirror once again "Who's the fairest of them all?", and is horrified to learn that Snow White is not only alive and well and living with the dwarves, but is still the fairest of them all.

Outraged, she makes a poisoned apple to kill Snow White, and in the disguise of a farmer’s wife…

offers it to Snow White. When she is hesitant to accept it, the Queen cuts the apple in half, eats the white part and gives the poisoned red part to Snow White, who eats the apple eagerly and immediately falls into a deep stupor. When the dwarfs find her, they cannot revive her, and they place her in a glass vault, assuming that she is dead.

Time passes, and a prince traveling through the land sees Snow White.  

He strides to her vault. The prince is enchanted by her beauty and instantly falls in love with her. He begs the dwarves to let him have the vault. The prince's servants carry the vault away, and the movement causes the piece of poisoned apple to dislodge from Snow White's throat, awakening her. The prince then declares his love for her and soon a wedding is planned.

The vain Queen, still believing that Snow White is dead, once again asks her mirror who is the fairest in the land, and yet again the mirror disappoints her by responding that "You, my queen, are fair; it is true. But the young queen is a thousand times fairer than you."

Not knowing that this new queen was indeed her stepdaughter, she arrives at the wedding, and her heart fills with the deepest of dread when she realizes the truth. As punishment for her wicked ways, a pair of heated iron shoes are brought forth with tongs and placed before the Queen, but before she steps into them, Dopey, who has mistakenly eaten a small bite of the poisoned apple, asks the Queen to marry him. She quickly accepts, and the party continues as before, with everyone living happily ever after.

The Breaking of the Sun

It's the redness of the fallen leaves
the calico blue of the waterway
the pom pom shaking of the winter trees
the revelation of beige in ragged quills

That makes the homes so far away
and the people on the train no more than scenery
and I wonder whether we are seen at all
or whether we are watched like morning birds

As they harmonize their moves from branch to branch
experiencing up and down, together and alone,
one going to the wires, and one into the woods
in some unknown and vast choreography

And I see the people take the form of beasts
outlined out of star shapes and the visions inside dreams
alighting at the terminal, their creatures hid within,
to disperse in complex patterns only galaxies portend.

Poète Maudit

Thinking of Ernest Dowson

Beauty rules her haunted souls,
Her gold transmuting lead,
Her scepter takes allotted tolls
In flames that must be fed

With lives you lived so long ago
Still roasting on her spit,
That feeling you cannot let go,
Like wardrobes that won't fit.

Her perfume phial is empty,
The lipstick faded grey,
The world will never hear your cries
Now that they’ve burned away,

The perfect turns of phrase will bend,
The music will undo;
The kisses will survive them,
The roses will stay true,

The wine will last forever
‘Tho drunkards drain like drops
In death the quenchless river
Where every carriage stops;

The dull words of the girl long gone
Will echo in the caves,
The sound in vain you waited on
Will whisper through the waves

But the sweet silk that you made of it
Has long since now dissolved,
And the dawn you mourned as dimly lit
Will never quite resolve.

The fountain now no longer sings
Its unheard melodies,
But lovers still arrive in spring
With fires to appease,

And only you are absent,
You poet of the clouds,
Who held what was too vibrant,
Too lucent for our shrouds.

The Golden Years

The age that we live in is the past.
There's no need for librarians, everyone's a wiki on something.

The question of the age is: what age do you wish to live in?
Perhaps the absinthe 90's, the 50's baby boom,
Rome when it fiddled, Paris when it sizzled, Britain when heads rolled.

The hotels are roaring twenties affairs, the pharmacies strictly post-war,
The trains were made in 1970, and the stations a hundred years before.
When the buildings aren't greco-roman, they're soviet modern or deco
with arches from Byzantium and frills from gothic France.

Even the factory ruins are preserved as shopping arcades
where orange-yellow miniskirts and bouffants are all the rage
and no one pretends to make jewelry anymore, or watches or gloves
or drapery or shoes or scarves or cedar chests.

One expects wedding dresses and baby clothes to stay the same
but Harleys and Fenders and Airstreams?
There hasn't been a new kind of lamp in 30 years!

Instead there are fractals and video games,
the cartoons that you think are real,
and gadgets that bring the past that much closer to life

so we can chat about Lucy and the Seventies Bands,
relive Antietam, check the Magna Carta's fine print,
draft fantasy players for the USFL, watch handfishing passed down for
centuries,
reminisce about sit-com families before they all become dysfunctional,
see the guitar in Picasso's studio, and the glory of Monty Python's tomb.

Even the currency slowly turns back to gold
along with old books and gas station ornaments.

It's all we can do to hold on to what we are
like a chrysalis flailing through dust
squirming for the light in a cavernous glue
for some long-dreamt beauty of birth.

Evening at the Cyber Café

Chinese warrior monks eat Marco Polo pizza in dishwasher aprons
debating mastadons from Mars to all-night Babylonian oompah music

while off-duty patrolmen nonchalantly play mafia shrooms and shoot-em-up
video games waiting for a slice

and Hieronymous Fresh works on his translation of the lemon jelly donut
into linear b like every archivist from the Pleiades to Alpha Centauri

and a junkyard dog named Iron Fist drinks Mint Romneys with velvet gloves
and a dry cravat remembering how despite it all the Monte Cristos were good.

It was enough to wax nostalgic for getting bushwacked by a tire iron
in the back of a Parisian chop suey joint by men with too much Frenchness.

The clown-nanny wonders why the children are all frightened
and why he can't get service in his hairshirt and order mock turtleneck soup to go,

while the golden thumb piano of justice plays for quarterback Tim Tebow's
elk antlers glimpsed before they retract into His Magnificent Skull.

The organ donor monkey dressed like a Peter Lorre cancer survivor on trial
wants spellcheck now too but not on spellcakes, for his memoirs, that he calls

"Pimping God, the Spanish Johnny Story, or How I Learned the Long Con”
while his pasta grows cold like unrequited love or certain hands in poker.

Tebow Time

"Tebow threw for exactly 316 yards in the 29-23 upset win, presenting an eerie allusion to the Bible’s John 3: 16 passage — whose number Tebow famously wore in the black under his eyes when he led the Florida Gators to victory in the 2009 collegiate national championship game. What’s more, that event took place exactly three years ago on the same day as his latest miracle comeback. And that wasn’t it for the coincidences: Tebow set an NFL playoff record with, you guessed it, 31.6 yards per completion and the TV rating on CBS peaked between 8.00-8.15pm ET with a rating of, say it ain’t so, 31.6." - Glen Levy, Time Magazine online, January 9, 2011

Tim Tebow as John Henry
come to Occupy the Playoffs
sayin' 'tis no game for courtiers and kings
'tis a game for holy children,
no matter all the layers
of anger from abandonment
the giants are as pure
as naked babies underneath.
And while the greatest minds
scheme deep into the night
on how to spring their team
on a blackboard from its prison
he waited late at night
deep inside the locker room
to run to rookie Miller
and tell him of the good news
how Jesus needs this team to win.

He never was supposed to have been born
so physical restrictions don't mean much to him.
He never went to school except to play football
so the thought of himself as an individual makes him grin,
and the game plan always was a form of scripture
with time enough for prayers and gratitude,
the will to win the same as the thirst for heaven.

And when the opening kickoff
bounced right off the goalpost
and landed perfectly still
smack dab on the 20-yard line,
one knew that Jesus was in the building,
that another miracle was needed
in these hard and desperate times,
a miracle that would only happen
when the other team had reached the point
that they could put away the game,
when the last of the non-believers
had given up all hope.

Truth: Pro & Con

One can either move with the stars or against them.
The correctness of the journey is not what is important.

149 Degrees

A Tesla infrared machine
like the desert in a box
releasing copper from my blood
in sadness droplets
pen starts crying
black like the foot bath
my fingerprints toxic
my sadness so small
in the face of the endless
quiet at the bottom of my heart -
no one else is waiting there
just my invincible twin

Epiphany and the Ace of Spades

They talked, at work, of gold this morning,
the difference between base and precious metals,
the former was a bubble, financially speaking,
the latter the last thing of value on earth,
increasing based on its cost in extraction,
the modern variant of the myth in every ancient culture
how the serpents came to our planet for gold
and created us to mine it, and take dominion.
Thank you, Melchior of Babylon
for the gift of empire, in changeless gold,
for the philosopher's stone,
the earth of kings turned virtuous,
the queen that recognizes the divine so gives it birth,
the women of Parthia in the West, in angelic descent
yield their perception to earth, producing form as beauty
the loveliness of all that is endlessly created,
the sculptures, the colors, the bodies
as, from the East, the shamans and brahmins
with sage and papyrus, priests of their captor's religion,
Chaldean necromancers, Egyptian exorcists,
who hold the secrets to conquering earth with their minds
for the betterment of humanity, yield their wisdom
to the earth, producing laws of wisdom
transmitted secretly from races unknown to history,
the 144 magi, 12 messiahs, seven ages.

This afternoon, a different scent in the underground tunnels,
frankincense, strange and familiar, with its opening fragrance
that widens the heart and softens the mind,
the white stone that burns and turns the self violet,
the smoke that is spirit cleansing the air
and calling us inward to God.
Thank you Balthazar of Arabia
for the gift of priesthood, sweet frankincense,
for the fire that burns knowledge into the divine,
that illumines a vision of God the Son,
that we may see through the crystallized sand columns
built from music and plied with cosmic light,
to wear the robes of hierophant as he awaits the Christ
until revealed like an eclipse, out of the infinity of faith,
earth becomes a two-fold star lit by two perfect rays,
the bride and the groom waiting,
the binah and chokmah, the yin and yang
dancing through the skeleton frame
where the constellations, the mighty bull, lion and scorpion
marked in light within the head, high heart and loins
as one aligns with the flowing, the conclusion to the word,
the slow syrup drip of the universe.

This evening, when I came home
my wife put in the diffuser a new essential oil, myrrh,
the most powerful tool of healers, a resin that bleeds red
from the tree, embalmer of mummies
strong enough to resurrect one for the next world,
to if not cure all disease, purify the suffering
in the space between living and immortality.
Thank you Jaspar of Persia
for the gift of prophecy, bitter myrrh,
the divine feminine manifests the divine
virgin Mary in the grotto as the Christ light is born
from the bride and groom of heaven,
the mathematics of love calls down angels
from thrones from dominions from archangels
to densest earth, for heaven to beat in hearts
and vibrate inside skin;
throw the fruitcakes, hunt the wren,
set the Christmas trees on fire, dive into the water
for the cross, let Carnival begin
to celebrate the unification
of what never was divided,
spirit and flesh, earth and heaven.

Father and Daughter Chat

For Veronica

Confusing to know what is right and what's wrong
And everything, all the time, is perfect

The bullies are weak and retreaters are strong
And everything, all the time, is perfect

It's holy to think that the others have won
And everything, all the time, is perfect

It's sacred to feel that that your work is undone
And everything, all the time, is perfect

A comfort to know you have wasted your time
And everything, all the time, is perfect

Losing the time you don't have is no crime
And everything, all the time, is perfect

The greatest of gifts is what hurts you the most
And everything, all the time, is perfect

That thing you're ashamed of is your proudest boast
And everything, all the time, is perfect

The future and past's in this breath that you take
And everything, all the time, is perfect

All that you gather becomes what you make
And everything, all the time, is perfect

You ask how we thrive without a hive mind
And everything, all the time, is perfect

Our strength is in what we can seek and not find
And everything, all the time, is perfect

Outside the Net

When the world was real, I had Biddle Street,
its smell of grime and gravy, its ghosts dressed
like cathedrals, its beggars dressed like ghosts,

the concrete hill that was my life
with the monument on top done up in purple
when the ravens came to town and I had left

to drink lemonade with Sufis and eat oranges with virgins
who wrote ancient Chinese channelings in sand
in yellow houses in the deep evangelical South;

I was simply chasing purple, the shade I finally found
when I saw Jesus tip his titty dancer Mary
in an all-you-can-eat casino in North Las Vegas.

How much easier it was, then, to know what was actual,
for it glinted like a crystal in my hand, reunited with my cells
and now it swims before my eyes whenever I close them.

It's a cry that can't be heard inside this box
that's now the world, that collects all the facts
but not that purple, the bird itself, its arc of flight.

After Falling Off the Wagon to Read a Newspaper

Hobos are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,
Hippies of the drum circle its armies of the night,
the Unemployed turned anarchist the new-school bourgeoisie,
the throng of rude unimpressed Youth the new blue light.

More drop into this sewage from the ordinary every day
as jobs, homes, health care lapses
learning, as they fall, how to live with so much less,
less stuff, fewer lies, not as much irradiated food,
to fill the abyss of self-esteem with something else,
to look with different eyes at the world, to observe
how close the stars are, and how no corner's disconnected
from another, how strong one is for walking on two feet.

Nearby, more people wait to fall off, afraid
of what they'll become when their vestiges of order
crumble, afraid of the smile the free wear,
their shabby clothes. The clock is like a timebomb,
so they hold on to the moments:
the posing models, the decadent gadgets,
the knowing that their paradise must end.

When you've been branded by the hot coals held by Satan
you tend to trust him, you take solace in your pitiful share
of corruption, and overlook the sacrificed souls of children
as it's all a game, until the reaper comes
and reminds you this was your choice all along.

Poet's Block

thermal lint
rusted bulb...

wherever you are
you are inside the poem

it lets you in
its sacred space

to show there is no other you
in all that is

and then it pulls away
like the sun revealing glass

all walls and windows
through which the veils of smoke are clear as crystals

New Year's Day Football

The shock of the clock
turning as I turn
covering as I leap
for what may be my last
hail mary
to haul in the thing
reality contests
its minutes of bliss
too small
for my chasm of heart
beating

My Year in Review

I wash the scent off of 2011,
an Oscar Wilde saint with a past,
the lines, by El Greco, all black.

It's time, to leave behind
some hostages of the mind:
bowling in Manhattan, swimming in the Yucatan,
visiting psych wards and tooth removers,
humid graduations and ice-cold reunions,
afternoon mescal in the West, St. Germaine back East,
the cheers for the Bruins and for De Vere on the silver screen,
the elegies for capitalism and democracy,
well-made socks and the NC double A,
caught in the job creators pepper spray,
praising Aaron Rodgers and Scott Walker,
Stieg Larsson and Julian Assange,
ragtime tornadoes, fracking earthquakes, nuclear tsumanis
a self-immolation before a courthouse in New Hampshire,
the epic fail of sovereigns, the credit event bazookas,
the black swan contagions of a civilization
that can no longer stomach the gentlest of truths.

This was the year we glimpsed the mirror behind the curtain
but only to see if our eyes were open,
for the real work ahead, for all of us now
is go stark raving sane to discover the treasure
of what we have been all this time,
beyond El Greco's tarnished saints
or Caravaggio's lucent sinners,
the thing we are always urging us towards,
forever mistaken but never wrong,
the lurch through the cleansing hurricane
to the nothing inside, all eyes.

The Continuing Adventures of Mr. Bull and Mr. Bear

For one, the sun is always rising.
For the other, the sky is always falling.
Yet they both are always right,
All curvings of the roller coaster ride reveal their foresight.

One is fearless in how much they love us
(Even when they try to kill us),
Sees children as the mother of invention.
The other's always dying to the dream of sleep,
Seeking freedom from the stubborn pull of nothingness.

There's no walk through the fire without being burned
There's only the fire
And not being burned.

Yet one can learn by swaying with the balance
As markets adjust behind secretive weights,
Seek solace in the one and then in the other
Though what is put together one can't calculate.

One must let the rope out in infinite faith
And pull it back in with all of one's strength.
The gift of life is far too prevalent
It must be trimmed back, for growth is
A means to an end.

But what that end is, we still can't predict
Even with minds that encompass all,
Even with all-embracing hearts,

For we wheel in the same old orbit around
The contradictions that are the possibilities
Pretending that it matters to be right or be wrong
When our openness alone propels the journey.

Heroes in a Box

The little people
See the big wide world
In deep and shiny focus;
Every sentient thing
Wears its praise and blame.

The giant people
Have insect-like eyes
Compelled to read patterns
Only they can see;
A thread becomes a world.

The roses the little ones
Throw at their feet
Are shadows of darkness and light,
But the eyes returned in confusion
Bear bright the purest of wisdom.

It's as if they are watching a birth out of nothing,
Some color to light the familiar world,
But the giants vanish when eyes adapt to their light.
The little people fear they're too small
Swallowed in how large they've become.

Near Grafton

Sheets of ice on beveled rock
like frosting over chocolate

Cold Walk in the Middle of the Night

There are few Christmas lights
in the Marblehead Neck mansions,
but in the squid ink sea
green and red lights flash incessantly
from solitary rocks
amid swaying buoys.

Conjunction

Capricorn Connecticut, in a Capricorn sun and new moon...

It's brutal the way
the goat grows out of the spiral,
irascible ego
must learn how to flow
with the consequating whole,
to let the past go
by learning its mistakes.
The integrity of fitting
the narrow straits
requires not molding the truth
to desire
for even an instant,
but accepting the brown hills
of bare woods as beauty
so the path of the birch trees
can be seen.

It's an energy that tells me
with my precious son in a homeless shelter
on Christmas
not to break
or visit.

St. Nicholas the Banker

In honor of U.S. total debt reaching 100% of GDP (officially at least) on the winter solstice.

Hard times for he who thinks of himself as God
And every year pretends he’s not a fraud,
The middleman from a land of endless fleece,
His conspiracy unraveled piece by piece.

He’d told the slaves he’d teach them all a trade
As if it was OK they were not paid.
He called it all a global charity
For the oil-rich, offshore, tax-free territory.

When he asked them to don green felt hats and bells
To endure the sting of sawdust and the turpentine smells
It taught them every year that they were fools;
Their student loans were never paid in full

So they worked to smelt lead, sew shoes, trim elastic
And fill their lungs with fiberglass and plastic
With no health care or dental, for some children overseas
Whose parents paid five times their homes to please.

How money good turned bad he wouldn’t say,
Maybe when he discontinued real gold in his sleigh
Or maybe he created a dependency,
A sense of entitlement to drive his Ponzi scheme,

All we know for sure now is the gold is gone
And shoddy toys each year are left too soon in front of lawns
Yet each of us must fill the stocking yet again for Santa
A starting out down payment of two hundred fifty grand, a

Pittance when compared to what we really owe
To this mysterious Kringle who makes gold out of tinsel
And has nothing left to show for all his usury
Except our souls bound in perpetuity.

For this one Christmas we will owe a thousand
To fortify his compound in the northern wasteland
And so we can believe that he is real,
His bubbles all still made as out of steel.

We’ve given him the mint whose coins are cold, thin air
Leant back to us for payment at three times the share
Yet somehow we believe he can’t exist,
That coincidence could not allow such a perverse plot twist;

It’s so much easier to believe he’s a delusion
Than to know exactly what he does to children.
We lack respect, he says now; this greatest of all men
Has to hide his gifts of course in gilded wrapping.

He offered once a hope to a world torn up by war
That if we were more good each year we would gain a reward,
But these things he leant to us became what we were,
His boxes were empty of what really mattered

And chaos has ensued, the mother of all profit
That spins and spins until there is nothing left of it
And hard times have come now for even Santa Clause,
A time that should give every one of us pause,

A time to look the gift horse in the mouth,
A time for polar north to vibrate south
To rediscover our love inside the light
And bless the final passing of the long, good night.

After "The Long Christmas Dinner"

A miniskirt with sequins, December horn of Orpheus
but no one is adored...

"Titanic's sister ship!," turquoise dress with rabbit fur
but no one is adored...

It's overdrafts, lost credit cards, and pre-processing fees
that warm the people's voices,
the jingling lust of Christmas
that puts the giggle in their stride
but no one is adored...

No birds of prey look longingly
just iron wings with ruby eyes.
Panhandlers cannot even see our souls.
Couples smile arm in arm
so glad to be away from each other just this once
but no one is adored...

Some fair exchange is bartered out
in all the brisk complaining,
some wisdom comes from blackenings of vodka
but no one is adored...

The only one invisible
who floats between the rising plumes of steam,
completely empty of the storefronts in his eyes,
looks up into the fat and glistening sky:
Adoration calm and endless fuels the night.

Words of Wisdom from Bill Hicks

"The world is like a ride at an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it, you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, round and round, it has thrills and chills, it's very brightly colored, it's very loud and it's fun for a while. Some people have been on this ride for a long time and they think to question 'is this real, or is it just a ride?,' and other people have remembered and they come back to us and they say 'hey don't worry, don't be afraid ever because this is just a ride,' and we, we kill these people. We kill all the good guys who try to tell us this and let the demons run amok, but that's OK, it's just a ride." - Bill Hicks (December 16, 1961 – February 26, 1994)

Explaining the Zodiac to a Child

In the circle, like a merry-go-round, you see the same familiar faces
As you go around. Sometimes they smile,
Sometimes they frown, and by the end they’ve disappeared
Although you’re right where you began.

The red horse I am riding needs green dragon by its side,
I need to have the bad guy, to drive these pistons on,
I need to have this mirror in the center, or else I'd turn
To stone, or else I’d be afraid I was invisible,
Unable to see the wound that takes me home.

The shadows rise and fall upon the pole
Still I’m in the same place moving,
The plastic saddle, the permanent smile
Aren’t real, but my stirrups are
As I stroke the purple hair that keeps me dreaming.

And as I pass another turn around the cylinder
That hammers music, another cluster
Of notes like a hand with cubes of sugar
Makes me recognize at last

That every time I pass
It is unique, this stiff contraption
Lets me be the world revolving, for the oneness has the room
For endless ones to spin an endless candy cotton.

The Morning After the Bill of Rights Was Expunged

Geese flying west, honking into the great mystery
But touching somehow, in formation, as if attacking
When they could be picked off so easily.

A sparrow as Cassandra with its discontented plaints
Lives in a harmony of song in the air.

We round them up, and rip down their nests
But still they return, endless
With their incomprehensible squawking
And we too dumb to hear.

Five days of what we do to you,
What we now can do to any U.S. citizen
Who expresses a different opinion,
Makes you a lifelong vegetable.

I wish we could treat humans
As gently as birds.

Happy 220th birthday, and Rest In Peace

Chiron Return

Your parents had a hole
That made them abandon you.

It shines back now
With all of your glory.

What a gift
You once labeled pain.

Your only medal is a scar
As ugly and set apart as you are.

It's made you immortal,
The wound that never heals.

The Second Coming

An alternative version of Yeats’ new-age poem

The hierophant has supper with the fool,
This spade will raise my body up, he chimes,
This chalice holds my blood, that is the rule,
But the fool sees only bread and wine;
A hand turns on the Christ light one more time.

The priestess takes her crystals from her veil,
The magician turns her secrets into fuel
As if it bears on what we do, his grail,
Its vast illusion truth beyond their rule;
A hand turns on the Christ light like a jewel.

The emperor of wands and empress of swords
Fall from the tower under stars and moon
While the hanged man prize lies upside down from cords,
The devil rapt in judgment on the wheel of fortune;
A chariot turns the Christ light on the runes.

These ancient archetypes were made for us
So we could grieve for what we were with wars
And know love as an arc of endless service
With music and mathematics as our lords;
The hand that lit the Christ light brought the words.

And now we see the priests steal children’s souls,
The devil wins whatever king we choose,
The world of form has fallen through the holes,
The truths we sought an analgesic ruse,
The Christ light’s now inside us like a fuse.

Responsibility

"The IMF is the US and so ultimately, these new 'loans' to insolvent sovereigns, are being guaranteed by the US tax payer. We also know that if involved in the financings, the US IMF banks (JP Morgan and others) get preferred status in any sovereign bankruptcy. In light of what transpired during the MF Global bankruptcy, the 'preferred' status given to JP Morgan by the trustee has meant, that segregated client funds that were supposed to stay segregated, by law, have been taken by JP Morgan, an unsecured creditor. That doesn't bode very well for the US tax payers in the case of any future sovereign bankruptcies where investment banks like JP Morgan will have preferred status off the bat. In this situation, the US tax payers will have less 'protection' than the MF Global customers.

"Plus, if the IMF gets involved, countries would lose all of their sovereignty. The IMF would essentially run the country's finances and control all state assets, which basically results in the asset stripping of the said economies in order to continue to repay the new IMF loans that were necessary because the countries' GDP could not sustain the payments of the central banks's loans. Historically, borrowing from the IMF has always been devastating for countries, as after paying the IMF, there is no capital left for growth, all state assets fall into private, usually foreign hands and most wealth extracted from those assets is exported outside of the countries. It's a great deal for the IMF banks, as this means, the taking of real assets, like Italy's gold reserves for example, in exchange for paper, which in light of all the debt, QE and other inflationary policies, has questionable future value.

"Of course this is what will happen, as I am convinced that these people will not stop privatizing profits and socialising losses until they are forced to do so. They will squeeze every last drop from the tax payers of the world until everyone is paving their own roads, picking up their own mail and paying taxes on breathing. They will keep going until they cannot continue.”
-“Swani,” in a comment on Euro Zone: Another Crisis, Another Backdoor Taxpayer Bailout in today’s Zero Hedge.

They paid it forward
Goya and Moliere,
Brecht and Goethe,
Caravaggio and Voltaire,
And if we really care
About their findings,
If they’re aren’t just
Alchemy,
We won't begrudge the copper
Soul-extracted usury.
For they need inspiration too,
The boot of evil rules
To prophesy another way
And distinguish whose from whose.
This bounteous land is there for us
To starve and kill and lose
What other purpose could it serve?
For life is ever complete,
We chomp like horses at a bit
To charge our aching feet.

My Poems

The gathering of poets
share their deepest secrets.

In the library next door
all the books of men are kept.

I had to leave,
through the trapdoor of the evening

to the Burger King,
where all the poems I'll ever need are found.

Post-Face

For Jerome Rothenberg on his 80th Birthday

And why can’t I live
With the cavemen and vagabonds
Sharing wordless screams that they call poems?

Why can’t I look
To the dead and to the darkness
For the words they need to speak to me today?

If you’re patient enough
A poem eventually comes from the iguana’s mouth.

Are we ever large enough
For even the smallest of poems?
You wouldn’t know, weaving all
Into The book, the long-dreamt endless book,
The prayer that never ends, the voice that
Never strays from its beginnings –

One tribe when every person is a wolf
—Who dreams that? That night could unify like that?
Who shows that day can be dismantled
By pulling plugs out of its sockets?

So easy, do you do this,
As if—the way you look at us—we did it all.

Beauty's Dualities

Thanks, MattRusty, for hepping me to Tolstoy’s “What is Art?” as if the 20th century never existed. Here are some ruminations on the subject.

Beauty frees us from our separation, yet isolates us from everyone else.

Beauty’s like a laugh that infects others to laughter, yet no one gets the joke.

Beauty’s nothing but rhythm, logic and form, yet it brings out the deepest, darkest feelings.

Beauty consists of sharp combinations, yet it only exists as a whole.

Beauty is truth and truth beauty, yet beauty's an illusion and truth is ugly.

Beauty is impractical, yet the only thing humanity cares about.

We all by instinct know and savor beauty, yet no one can agree on what is beautiful.

Beauty takes away the sadness from love, and gives compassion to fear.

Beauty magnifies the finite, and sets boundaries to the infinite.

Beauty shows us what we look like using things that aren’t us.

Beauty shows us new ways to think by repeating what we already know.

Beauty is everywhere, in all that humans are and do, yet it is rare in works of art.

Beauty can't be put into words, yet it doesn’t exist without them.

Mirror Image

The squirrel glazed with sap
buries another seed at the depot
deep enough to be hidden
but shallow enough to be found,
the common becomes secret.

A row of his own trees
should have lost their leaves by now
but there's only this veined parking lot.
For as long as he is here
he is free to dream.

After Seeing the "Ancient Aliens" TV Show for the First Time

The world has acquired all my knowledge
just as I start forgetting the facts.
One can claim for the manifest there was no transaction
but this crow knows better,
downloading what's in my brow
with the report of its voice.

Entrance of Frost

A second sun within the glass;
patterns of the nebulae and spider wool;
jewel laminate that shines like stars and capillary streams;
the earth thickened from its dream,
its breath made tangible.

Colors are borrowed away
so the sun can give birth to them again
as it can wipe away the years
from temporarily elderly roofs.

The shallows are solid,
the smoke's stuck to the sky
and desolate fairways glisten grey;
some story begins on a morning like this
though the robins sing elegies to our numb and pulsing ears.

A winter coat of obscurity
lifts the world to solidity,
as something finally real
—with all the pain and ecstasy that that entails—
but the real is just a station,
we continue on our journey
deeper into truth,
forward into fantasy.

Sudden Sparkle

Cold December
and the smell of reddened chocolate,

The browns and the golds are
vying with the greens,

The limbs, unencumbered now with leaves
are lined with lights,

And bells, once stuffed inside
the choruses of morning

Now ring, each one, as I walk by,
to show how something is alive that I can't see.

The birds have lost their camouflage
but still they go on singing.

The sky is now too wide to keep the secret
that everything is white

And shining like a moon
in the blue, transparent morning.

A Cul-de-Sac in Queens

They've very kindly set New York up
like a giant game of chess:
a puzzle here, equation there,
some candy for the mind
that finds its glee in navigating conundrums.
But there are others, for whom
the rules have no real logic,
directions lead in circles,
the languages are of ancient lands.

Why Marketing Executives Should Not Create Children’s Breakfast Cereals

Help Wanted: Cereal chemist who can translate marketing directives into cost-efficient executions for the following series of four seasonal-based sweetened breakfast cereals:

Leef Krunch
Formula: Maple sweetened flakes in the shape of leaves, with cinnamon-flavored twigs mixed in with the leaves. Must be able to claim “Real Maple Inside.”

Mascot: Horatio the Crow, who wears a dream catcher around his neck

Marketing Objective: To replace the concept of fall with “it’s leef krunch time.”

Frost Bitez
Formula: Sweetened coconut macaroon-like puffs with red raspberry filling inside.

Mascot: a Yeti named Balthazar who looks like the Abominable Snowman on Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

Marketing Objective: In addition to its seasonal and holiday usage, to aspire to the coolness of Frost Bitez in the heat of summer.

Paper Faireez
Formula: Paper-thin, almost translucent wafers in the shape of fairies that when exposed to milk expand like a sponge and turn five different shades of vivid pastel floral colors/flavors: daffodil/lemon, pink tulip/cherry, white clover/honey, honeysuckle/generic berry, violets/violets.

Mascot: Five distinct cartoon paper fairies that bring inanimate/dead things to life by sprinkling spring dust on them; each fairy has the name and color of a flower: Daffodil, Tulip, Clover, Honeysuckle and Violet. Further differentiation in characters is anticipated in development with the agency.

Marketing Objective: To transition toddlers to sweetened hallucinogenic breakfast cereals instead of farina, and to provide an appropriate breakfast-cereal addition to Easter-themed confectionery products.

Beech Treets
Formula: “Sand”-like sugar/hazelnut/wheat granules with the consistency of cream-of-wheat (may consult with independent lab technicians to achieve proper consistency), interspersed with chocolate “tokens” like Monopoly board pieces in the shapes of beach objects like balls, soft-serve ice cream cones, umbrellas, life preservers and rafts -- must achieve a coconut suntan lotion fragrance. This cereal will be packaged in a super-size box.

Mascot: None, instead a toy pail holding a prize of a larger, plastic version of a beach token will be in every box (shovel will not be included due to choking concerns). The advertising campaign will feature an ongoing debate between kids who want to eat the cereal whole, and those who want to take out the chocolate tokens first and put them in the pail for later. There will be seven colors of pails, with directions to collect all seven. In every 100th box, there will be a rainbow pail, but there will be no public announcement or acknowledgement of this, the expectation being that kids will think it’s a mistake and start coveting them.

Marketing Objective: To test the outer limit of how much sugar can be put into a children’s breakfast cereal; this product is expected to have high initial sales during its seasonal introduction, but it is anticipated that parental and regulatory pressure may result in its discontinuation. In its place, a sticky tropical fruit themed version will be introduced, with the sand coating the fruit in clusters.

The Humanists

Players Club, Gramercy Park, NYC, 11/24/11

To Jim and Brenda

Emma Ferguson stares from out her cabinet card;
David Garrick greets us at our table
To clarify that it was he who was the first to say
Comedy’s more difficult than dying;
Edwin Booth’s our gracious host
As long as we acknowledge
His Hamlet as the greatest in the sea.
All the Janus-mask personages
Are done up here in oils
More lucent than their most glorious personas
But still they cannot leave the stage…

They have to hear the applause of the forks and knives,
The drinking-game claims of whether Shakespeare
Is only realized in Russian
As Chekhov only speaks in the English tongue.
They take this kind of parlor talk so seriously
As if that’s all that matters of the losses in the world.
I know they want to kidnap me
When I hear of Mark Twain’s pool cue
Just waiting for me to see down in the basement.

Above this Indian burial ground, the owners of the world
Spin the finest dust in endless circles,
While on the boulevard are brand-new couples
Who hold new family’s love in tin-foiled pans, and ask
So lightly and so gay
The most important questions.
I see the shadow now of how tall my tales have become,
That they could be so stirring, though nothing ever moved.
I’m chasing something
Like a dog without thinking would chase a squirrel.

Why Academics Should Not Watch Movies

Scholars in the field have begun to comment on the strange anomaly of why every straight guy in the world thinks he’s the only straight guy in the world who wants to have sex with Katherine Heigl. It is no longer enough to simply respond that Heigl is the antipode of Renee Zellwiger, who apparently has it written into her contract that someone in any movie she’s in must comment on how beautiful she is. Heigl is not simply the beautiful girl unaware of her own beauty, or the pal that no one looks at as beautiful, or other common dramatic disguises designed to project otherworldly beauty into ordinary situations (or vice versa). For Heigl, the analysis must go deeper, into the very fiber of her acting gestalt, for her work to date has veered from the normal puppet/butterfly archetypes of MKULTRA into a deeper level of manipulation that deserves further study, for it may be an indication of future sex idol transmission techniques in an increasingly fragmented media landscape.

Any analysis must begin with her Germanic name. There’s nothing funny about a German joke, as the old saw goes, and her customary bemused opening posture, mouth open as if to say something funny, creates a dissonance when one simultaneously encounters her odd combination of jet black eyes and Nordic blonde hair. Consider the effect if her eyes were green; wouldn’t you just laugh at what she says, having forgotten it immediately? Instead you’re pulled into further confusion, the disturbing mix of her man height, man walk, man hands, man shoulders, and man forehead with her very female take on such irritating qualities as hauteur, mockery, ridicule, impatience, insolence, condescension, fury, indignation, madness, bubble-brainedness and shit-losing, in effortlessly modulating subtle shadings of high bitchiness. This all centers of course on her neck, which you want to strangle, especially when it physically protrudes on the sides, and her adam’s apple wobbles, as she performs one of the above-mentioned irritating qualities. You do not want to strangle Scarlett Johannson or Zoey Deschanel. Add to that the fangs (she’d be great in a Van Helsing squealquel), the eyebrows that can wilt a carrot, and that awkward hairwhip move that only a gangly teenager who’s been mercilessly teased for years can pull off, and it’s almost, almost possible to not realize that she’s got a totally bitching bod. Completing the effect is the most effective eyelid acting of this generation. When James Lipton had her on the Actor’s Studio his first question of course was about the eyelid acting, how he uses her work to train his students but they never get it, what’s her secret, to which she replied, in that unctuous yet silly manner, “I dunno, I guess it just comes nat-rullly”. And that’s the point, isn’t it, the complete innocence of it all, the centuries of forgetting required, you just want to ask her what’s the deal, even though you know this will only result in those lips, those lips moving, squishing around some statement so contrary, so implausible, all you want to do is stick your tongue inside her mouth, even though you know she will suck up your whole psyche and mash it down like another chain-smoked cigarette.

It’s in the bone structure, that pure Aristotelian form more like a philosophy than something physical. Every face you see you’ve seen before, but bone structure, that’s unique, and you have to contend with its uniqueness. And hers is almost perfect, like F. Scott Fitzgerald said Katherine Hepburn’s was, and it frames her shaming smile, lights up her vacant eyes, brings depth to her relentlessly unforgiving brow. She gives you nothing, no hope of any leverage over any aspect of her, no control of anything now in your possession. You are only thankful you are tormented from afar, that you don’t have to hear the laugh if you were to ask her out on a date.

Hesitation

I pray to be a better
portal of the sublime
the little voice big laughs back
the perverse is just as holy

For Some Friends Who Are Experiencing Change

"As with Lester Young’s tenor and Shakespeare’s sonnets, we measure each autumn against an exalted standard acquired early." – Patrick Kurp

Sonny Rollins, Albert Ayler, David Murray, James Carter…
It’s all the same damn tenor, renewed another spring.
Those sonnets they call Shakespeare, ever distant, ever perfect,
Bloom at last as lessons to his son, to whom he is anonymous,
As he is to us, in the meshes of a queen.
Another autumn
Where the past has more of me than it ever has before
And the future is a language I have still to learn.
Does one have more at death or when one’s born?
Or is it all the same, for all the negotiations in between
With a world that changes easier than do we?
Why must we get away from the perfect
After we first catch sight of it: the golden tree,
The flowing reed, the words that fill the emptiest of hearts?
How can we endure the experience again
In a lesser ecstasy? All the autumns I have known
I feel in one lone shudder of the wind—
What magic I’m allowed comes from beyond
What I can see, some receptacle for feeling
Finds its way, through all that’s turned in time
From phantom into stone.
You’re free until you see
The scrapbooks of your parents browned by time
That showed a life that somehow, somewhere else, still is real.

How I wish this thing would rhyme, in pleasant measured meters,
That the afflicted saxophone could make the dry and woody tone
My parents loved, or that the sonnets could remain a mystery for all,
Not mere biography, however stronger they become for being human.
For I remember every face that ever looked right back on me
As I spoke for the first time of a sublime– how much softer
The leaves should be, more knowing of the winter.
Instead
My arms are pulled in marching by the children I’ve looked after,
Smiling that I'm with them in this phalanx of emotion,
Common purpose, the perfection that remains inside ideals.
There’s only the sublime ahead, the hideous in knots
That must be something else, and shall be turned by thought
Into the thing that wraps us up, regardless of whether the mind
Believes it will or not.

The 11:11 Radio Station

I had a lovely conversation with Faith Freed on her radio program that aired live on 11-11-11 at 11:00 Pacific time. We discussed the personal, collective and spiritual meaning of the 11-11-11 "thing" over the course of the one-hour broadcast. Here's an audio replay of the podcast for those who want to listen in:

The Meaning of 11:11:11

Poem for the Changing of the Clocks

Horns and warts in mirrors
So we crave upon the sublime:
The sunsets by Lorrain,
The gold at witching hour in useless deco…
It’s a balance we've escaped,
A peace our love (as movement) leaves behind
To the perfect green eye of the machine…
For consciousness acquires
The weightlessness of truth
But the universal soup puts it to use
In pattern turned to pattern
Successively more distant
‘Til finally it becomes just what we seek
(For we could never see it otherwise):
The workings of the clock that never was…
What seemed to give a measure to our movement...
But the springs must re-elongate into lines,
We always must re-calibrate the gauges,
What we are moves further from the point
At which we began and will end – or so we suppose
With only a face on a clock to remind us,
Its backlit sun, its mechanized moon.

Autumn Song

The colors widen, the air is alive,
Full of dying fire and sweet decay.
The forest opens out to deeper vistas,
Orange distances, death in all its finery.

Firewood dries, as the grasses, scythed, are tied
And rasping seeds that rattle in the gourds
Whisper in between the flickering crickets,
The scraping of the leaves, as silence sounds its chords,

A dissonance like frost, a brittle harvest,
This is all that is, and all that never was
As life receives the endless gift of ending
And death is made forever, all ephemeras

That cling in ragged trees, or is it me
These more-than-human feelings are about?
I quail before the depths that fill with air,
The long horizon and its gentle mists of doubt.


Posted for Gooseberry's Garden, just because...

October Day in Salem

He liked being poor, the dusty cigarettes, the watery eyes, no judgment and no pretense, no achievements to be pulled away, just a spinning wheel of chaos: who would come home with a purple eye today? Whose possessions would be thrown out on the street? Who would suddenly, without warning, leave town, and why? The dinners at the mission are always warm. Most people on the street will give you coins to share some food. It's smoothed of complications here, you're either homeless or an outlaw who steals a wall and ceiling from a kind and hardened sucker who knows just what it feels like, holding out a key with bleeding heart still beating. How many a disability check can feed! All these faces tell such stories, of judgment turned inside until there's nothing that is left but hungry eyes. Satan is called Angel here, 'cos he offers up a homemade cure for shame: a moment of innocent crying.

He was happy to be poor, to poke each others' garbage for the cans turned in to cigarettes, the donuts that can keep the mornings peaceful, staring blankly on a bench. A day does not go by without a few more lives to save, by slapping them to consciousness or pulling off their chains if other resuscitation efforts fail. The workers go inside, to a place no one can get them, while the poor stay unprotected, only able to see themselves in every face that mills around, and so they share the little that they have, as a kind of wordless prayer, that there will be always enough, though they stay forever hungry and holy in the letting go of more. It's easy to be poor, to be one step away from falling through an endless crack. They like it that way, the tightrope that is humming like the voice of some dead god, who hung so many children for the crime of disrespect, who hang here floating still in an endless wind of pagans, with pilgrims just as monochrome, just as quick to condemn.

He finds a rose on a gravestone carved 200 years too late, for one of the unburied girls who lost one of her lives, and he gives it to another girl, who waits for something else, and he moves on like the wind to ask for money from the one protesting Christian, who warns of hell eternal to the goblins and the ghosts. He has too good a heart to tell him that it's all his fault, that he brought these demons here from all the hatred of his kind born of too much love for saviors. Instead, he asks for pennies, a thing that won't be given from a heart of Christian love, but what he later finds like autumn leaves in an alleyway the tourists never see, a present that's the present: a hamburger at Wendy's.

October Surprise

Computers do all the work now
we can spend our time being greedy
eaten away by the voraciousness of money
with the best and the brightest captured by Wall Street
not for our skills but our obedience
to the lie that we'll die if our money stops growing
or if we run out of new things to buy

when it's only the extra that's always extracted
that needs this lifestyle to live,
that needs charcoal fields
where once there were cities,
that needs families
who once had real homes.

Red ivy climbs innocent buildings
where everyone tiptoes, afraid that a child
might blurt out their secret
hidden in plain view
behind a shameful veil.

O how I lack compassion,
how I missed the sheer joy of it all,
the bantering over frivolous things
like deadlines and profits and sales goals and spin
that bloom and wither without consequence
just the feeling we have
glad to be connected to a purpose
for that moment.