Kassandra and Apollo On the Rocks

Kassandra at the bar

Said Apollo was the darkness

      all his Temperance and discernment

      only kept the light before us

Because he framed it for the blind.

              He brought shadows only

      of the gods who needed Mnemosyne

When they came in amnesia sunrise new again.

"They are symbols," he said,

"Not much use for a woman

Who barters in the real thing ..."

"What makes words happen

Speaks so softly," she replied,

"No sun or sky could ever amplify it."

"My Chariot is knowledge itself, my dear,

Carried with a sword of will and caduceus of service  

To shine as the divine on all things equally."

"Nothing is born in your light," she replied,

"No angels conceived, no mysteries revealed.

Men are put as beasts to reap in the heat under the eye."

"Better pain and grief than your miracles!" He cried.

"Your magic is unwise. How can the slaves save themselves

If you tell them there's no shackles?"

"The slaves only hear in the night, in the quiet of the womb

The one voice that hadn't abandoned them

In your quest for identity and its division."

"So you see a point in my architecture?" He sputtered,

"A sliver of moonlight peeks through the oracle ball!

Why would they seek out what is without what is not?"

"We need you, yes, to distort and forget, to make the real 

A recoverable thing, but with each roll of your sun, 

A belief in what is not fools like a mesmer's coin, 

Mind feeds on its empty and endless self."

"So THAT'S why you speak so loudly,

Daring Poseidon to drown all of Delphi

To keep your hisses above the din of humans thinking.

Do you not see the irony?"

"Without a voice unheard unheeded

There would be no hope," she calmly asserted,

And he gave her at last what she wanted,

A home on the other side of the sky

Where she wouldn't have to see

        his inevitable project unfold

On the unsuspecting populace.

Instead, she would be as a human,

        whose cord goes always to the core,

Where all that is obtainable is easy to find

By a heart tamed by mind, once he's left her

        by looking.

The Voyage

From the French of Charles Baudelaire

To Maxime Du Camp

I.
To the child, passionate for maps and stamps,
The Universe is equal to his appetite.
Ah! That the world looks large in the clarity of lamps
But tiny in hindsight.

We left one morning, our brains full of flame,
Our hearts huge with rancor and bitter desire,
And we went, following the rhythm of the untamed
Waves that cradle our infinity within the sea's finality of fire:

Some, joyous to flee the infamy of their homeland;
Others, horrified in their cradles; in view of the moon
Astrologers drown in the eyes of a woman,
Tyrannical Circe with her dangerous perfumes.

Not to be changed into beasts, we go higher
Into space and light and the blazing sky;
The ice that bites us, the sun that fires
Will efface the rash of love slowly.

But the true voyager is he who leaves
To leave something; light hearts, resembling balloons,
Never shrink from their fate's weave
And, without knowing why, always say: onward, go on!

There are those whose desires are formed of clouds,
And who dream, thus the cannon conscripts came,
The vast voluptuous, changeable, unknowable crowds
The human mind can never name.

II.
We mimic — O horror — the top and the ball
In their waltz, bound, and bounce; even our dreams run,
Our curiosity tortures us and we roll,
Like an Angel cruelly whisking the suns.

Singular fortune where the target moves west,
And, being nothing, carries perhaps the meaning of all:
Of Man, whose hope never lessens,
Always trying to find rest like a fool.

Our soul is a schooner seeking its Icarus;
A voice reaches from the bridge: "Fix your eyes, far."
A voice from the topmast, eager and crazy, shouts to us:
"Love...glory...happiness." Hell! It's a sandbar.

At each island, man's vigilant gaze goes foraging,
For the Eldorado promised by destiny's night;
The imagination creates an orgy
That turns out to be a reef in the morning light.

The poor lovers of things that are chimeras!
Should they be put in irons, thrown to the sea,
These hard-drinking sailors, inventors of Americas,
Does the mirage make the abyss more deep?

Like the old vagabond, tramping in the sewer,
Dreaming, his nose in the air, of a paradise that dazzles;
His entranced eyes discover a Capua
Everywhere the candle illuminates a hovel.

III.
Astonishing travelers! Whose noble stories
Are read on eyes as deep as the ocean!
Bring us the chest of your rich memories,
Marvelous jewels, made of stars and ether in motion.

We would travel without steam and without sail
To ease the sadness of our prisons,
To call into our minds, stretched like a veil,
A canvas of memories in the frame of your horizons.

Tell us, what have you seen?

IV.
               "We have seen stars
And floods; we have seen bare sand stare;
And, despite the shocks of unforeseen disasters,
We could not go on with life's tedium, just like here.

Glorious sunshine on the violet sea,
Glorious cities in declining sun,
Burn in our hearts an unquiet plea
To plunge in the sky's enticing reflection.

The richest cities, the grandest landscapes
Will never contain the mysterious charge
Of chance meeting the cloudbreaks.
Desire makes us anxious, ever more large!

— Enjoyment joins desire to our will,
Desire, ancient tree whose pleasure is manure,
Your bark grows hard and thick,
Your branches long to see the sun nearer.

Do you never stop growing, large tree with a harder look
Than the cypress? — Yet we are, without worry,
Picking sketches for your voracious scrapbook,
Like brothers who only find the distant worthy.

We have bowed to the fraudulent icons:
The constellations where joy is illumined;
The palaces whose gilded fantasies of pomp
Make the banker's dreams ruined;

The costumes clothed for the inebriated eye;
The women whose teeth and nails are dyed,
And the sage jugglers the snake caresses."

V.
And now, what is next?

VI.
               "O Childish brain!

Don't forget the most interesting principle:
We have seen in everything, without looking,
From the heights to the depths went the fatal scale,
The spectacle of ennui, of immortal sin.

The woman, the filthy slave, conceited and stupid,
Without laughing adores and loves herself, as if a lure;
The man, the ravenous tyrant, debauched, merciless Cupid,
Slave of the slave and gutter of the sewer;

The happy executioner, the martyr who sobs;
The feast with the seasoning and scent of blood;
The poison that unnerves the enervated despot,
And the mob that forms from a deadening whip — love;

Many religions resemble our own,
All scale the sky; the Saintly,
As in a feather bed where the delicate wallow,
Find in horsehair and nails ecstasy;

Chattering Humanity, on her genius tipsy,
And crazy, now as ever before is it true,
Crying out to God, in her furious agony:
'O my mate, O my Master, I curse you!'

And the least stupid, bold lovers of Lunacy,
Flee the great herd that Destiny pens in,
And take refuge in opium's immensity!
— So the whole globe is one endless bulletin."

VII.
Bitter knowledge, that's the haul from the voyage!
The world, monotonous and small, today,
Yesterday, tomorrow, always, show us our image:
An oasis of horror in a desert of ennui!

Must one leave? Remain? If you can stay, stay;
Leave, if you must. The one shrinks, and the other cowers
To cheat the vigilant and fierce enemy,
Time! that's it, alas! giving no respite to the racers,

Like the wandering Jew and the apostles,
For whom nothing suffices, neither carriage nor vessel,
To flee these gladiator nets; Time is like all the others
Who can slaughter without leaving their cradle.

When finally it puts its foot on our spine,
We'll be able to shout out with hope: ahead!
Just as when we set sail for China,
Eyes fixed on the open sea and masthead,

We will embark on the sea of Darkness
With the happy heart of a young traveler.
Do you hear these voices, charming and lugubrious,
Which sing: "come here! you who want to devour

The perfumed Lotus! It is here that one harvests
The miraculous fruits for which your heart depends;
Allay your thirsts on the strange softness
Of an afternoon that will never end!"

With the familiar accent we foretell the spectre;
Our Pylades with their arms toward us outstretched.
"To refresh your heart swim toward your Electra!"
Where before we kissed the knees at best.

VIII.
O Death, old captain, it is time! Raise anchor!
This country bores us, O death! Sail on!
If the sky and sea like ink are black ore
Our hearts, as you know, give illumination.

Pour us your poison so it comforts us,
The flame that burns our mind so, we wish to
Plunge into Hell, or Heaven, what's the difference?
We plumb the Unknown to find the new!

The Dream of a Voyeur

From the French of Charles Baudelaire

To F-N

Do you know, like me, the sorrowful savor,
And of yourself do you say: "I am the man singular!"
— I was going to die. It was in my soul like a lover,
Desire mixed with horror, an evil particular;

Anguish and vivid hope, but not rebellious.
The more it emptied, the fatal hourglass,
The rougher my torture, the more delicious;
All my heart was torn off as the familiar world passed.

I was like the child greedy for spectacle,
Hating the curtain as one hates an obstacle
Finally the cold truth was delineated:

I was dead without surprise, and the terrible dawn
Enveloped me. — Eh what! Is that all there is to go on?
The canvas was raised and still I waited.

Stonewall

It takes a village of idiots

     flipped like tiddlywinks

But at 96 June degrees

     uncooled dignity

However arch,

     however cruel the blues —

And the lilac revolution

     took sides at last

On its way to today's

     rainbow hues.

What stone walls could be

     walked through,

All of them inside.

     For the people were not real,

So we didn't know there was

     a not us. We can't let in 

The colors unless

     they say they exist.

The thread of gratitude

     that prismatically

Folds through the lies,

     abuse, bondage

For refusing to stand

     for something in this world

Frays on days like these,

     shame sold for parts

Must end, so one must be

     grateful for the pain

Enough to stand, because it's real

     suffering,

To stand opposed, to see clearly,

     to be forced

To see oneself, like a forced

     holiday from other people

On a humid day in June

     where thirsts cannot be slaked.

The thought of rising above

     like the vapor

Escapes, seems impossible,

     being harmed

And taking action, as if it was

     a neutral move

That would not make cops wince

    50 years later

When told they couldn't walk 

    in their blues

At the citizen's local 

     rainbow parade.

It takes honesty to know

     the people you love

Have lied to you

     and strength

To still be grateful ...

     for what is no longer

Seen and known, a newly minted

     variant of freedom.

You want to take the wheel

     but sometimes 

You have to leap

     outside the vehicle

To not be in the death seat

     with a rear-view mirror.

But the game allows

     a tuck and roll,

To pry oneself of the comfort

    of others, 

The crash-test dummies

     you rely on, 

Like those fags at the bar

     waiting to be caught,

Prepared to squeal,

     programmed to scatter. 

Memoir of when Philly Won It All

His first single, at 17, was so advanced,

Too sophisticated for even the Doo Wop residue

That hung over steak Philly like cheese,

The twist had twistered from this town 

Never to be seen again

Except in the hair

But it was in the air, the Romeos, 

Kenny's dream, there at the start,

Use the radio for good,

The good of love in all its otherworldly glory,

Of peace through listening,

Making even the expressway a heart.

A lion knows when to pounce 

And when to look, and Kenny

Knew both, transmuted the Bachs

Near Wayne State to the

South Philadelphia streets,

The most hopeless of places.

Where better to give hope

Of a love train mothers fathers sisters brothers

House band, love its message?

Only an orchestra was worthy of this Philly.

The arrangements he commissioned 

Felt as real as the Freedom Theatre,

As the natter on the French horn stoops 

And the lips on pizzicato rooftops,

The words, Kenny's sword, cut so deep 

In love you only could fall right in

To a hole so sweet you could ride the air

Swirl of Philly Free to World B 

Before it became the symbol of America

Before it became crystalized as disco

Before it became the 70s themselves.

There was an actual business plan 

With all that infused the Jersey breezes,

To clean up the ghetto in fact 

Which meant in fact to face the fact

You're not a victim if you do not

Choose to be.

The sun shone kindly 

Even on his indiscretions,

How valuable they were to the cause

Of saving the black male

By the strength of his grace,

How much he could bend

To those stringent strings

Yet stay strong as the streets.

Even tho 

The traffic lights in North Philly

Are the only light

Down a long street

And the pleasures of musical flesh

Smelled like so much peddling 

When the cocaine turned serious

Heat up on the girls who wanted to be 3 degrees

Unhooked in that long coke binge 1980s

When Michael showed he listened to Kenny

Like few before him, how the rose

Of music can burn right through the thorns

To the glorious pools

Where we bathe each other

With golden water 

Under columns of brotherly love.

But the world could not contain 

The heaven of music

And Kenny turned to the children

Of his children, offering school 

With a non-misinformed education,

One that stresses, you guessed it, love

And graduates based on standards

Of peace and brotherhood.

And even when that loophole was tightened

By the crack bank, he stayed a lion,

Pleaded for money otherwise thrown to graft

To build houses, grow children, 

Serve communities, find opportunities

In the blackened shell of the one last church.

He gambles there still, with the lost

Who always had a voice

He never failed

To hear.

From the Invictus Files

The Chinese plan,

The long-term transaction,

Requires no thought at all,

Since it is only an idea

But that same idea

Sent Eddie Holland,

Who gave Motown words,

To debtor's prison

The best place

For songs to be from.

Proving also how it wasn't

Ever really meant

For him.

Everybody knows the story,

Thinks in fact it's exactly

Them

And the heart of every story

Loves a mystery

And the only name that comes through

The room's anechoic foam

Is one Edythe Wayne,

Who no one can determine

Is an alethonym

Or an actual person,

But a lot was lost

When creating weekly galaxies

We to this day revolve around,

Still standing in the heatwave shadows

Stopped in the name of not hurrying love

Kept hanging on without a witness

Not too proud to beg a little while ...

The blueprint for the path

In other words

Of whoever heaven cared to match,

Who's melodies still cling to the rugs

And sparkling chandeliers,

Still resound in quarry and rebar,

The foundation of the coffee shop

And corner bar, the grocery decisions at 2 am,

The endless Saturday afternoon 

Shopping for everything and seeing two movies,

All for the dreaming

Of a love that could be like that,

How longing with enough badgering 

Can float,

What Berry Gordy prophesied

As he created a slot for the heart

To fit tight as a Heidelberg pin

In the vast cosmos of the blues.

Yet Another Low Morning

The moment the servant

          becomes a slave

There's a clock somewhere.

                We can't hear it

Tolling remorse,

      what sounds to us like mocking,

The steady cloaking of bells.

It could be as small

                 as a blue Post-It note

The way the instruction is given,

                             the empathy

All on one side

                           completely.

We all have needs. Some needs

            are more important

To be fulfilled, at least, if morally

                  there's a curtain

That goes over like the skirt of terrified squid.

        It is always the slave's fault.

There is no redemption.

                                            As long as he serves

He is doomed.

While Waiting in the Queue

"Guilty on 34 counts 

Thank you New Yawk!" 

A lady in glasses said. 

Not 33 and a third? 

My lawyers fee

For the right to carry 

An alternative reality.

It's the cover charge, see

At the Freemason door

Where the band always plays 440.

Ah how the universe works

On perfect spring days;

I had just been patting

My self in the back

How I was able to ignore COVID,

The common cold and its variant,

The whole time. And now this.

But the streets are now wise

And another pipes up: "Election?

We don't follow no fucking election.

That's olden days fairy tale disinfo,

Like vampires in robes

And babies swallowed by dingos.

We no longer get fooled

By such things."

Fool's Royal

For Hanna Hester

The wise fool,

       The stupid fool,

               The nullity,

Motley stiltwalks

        In checkerboard socks

Between two towers

        That look like my 

                   own house

Usher falling 

        Past life bricks.

They power the Chariot

        That's taken us 

              Through grapeleaves

On Dala horses. They are the towers 

        Bathed in gold

              On the Death card,

The poles for the baying under the Moon,

The balance

        The High Priestess knows

              And takes with her.

The Tower in tarot always falls,

        Material turns illusion

Not with a soft firefly glow

        But the final war for truth,

               The truth of the experience.

And the Jester,

       Miss Hester,

                Has no scepter 

So she can't tell it

                To the king who

Has long since left for Orion,

        Which she carries on her belt

On the vintage harlequin suit

        With stilts that lift her

Like a marionette 

        Above the tarn

To the heaven

        Of albatross.

But the Fool cannot smile.

        The towers lurch

                    But nothing moves

Cept our eyes

        As we wait

                    For both to fall,

And fall they will,

       For stilts can't 

Hold up the juggler's balls,

       How things are funny

                    Until they aren't.            

The Unoverse

Our field is wide

As wide sometimes

As the universe.

Yet it's only me

And my verse

In convergence 

Of how the universe 

Folds like batter

Into one verse.

The grain of sand

Crystal coded

With the all --

It vibrates on the sheet

But cannot harmonize 

The way I do

With tubes of different colored goo.

How can there be difference

When there's the one?

Lunch Chat

In Avignon 

When the mistral came

And the city flocked

To the gift shop

Of L'Eglise de St.-Agricol 

The nuns shooed away

Like oxen

With censers 

Any visitors

Including our heroine

And Kiwi mother

Who traveled together

Mother and Daughter

The World

In hostels

And were then getting drenched 

By an end of the world fury,

Only to learn they had to buy

Something to be saved.

The rest is confusing.

I find myself on hair pin

Turning

Switchbacks in the Blue Ridge

In December Smokie blackness.

I prayed

There would be someplace

To stop.

My Mornings Victim's Journey

Entitlement and Victimhood walk hand in hand;

One hand asketh and the other taketh away.

With so many faces trained 

To cultivate the rat's ass nothing

The world gives for human striving

How is it that others are to blame

For not getting all one wants?

How shitty service and POS product

Are the reasons for dreams unfulfilled,

Dreams of food always delivered

When one is hungry

And not a moment before,

Dreams of every moment being full

Of something that doesn't suck or bore,

Dreams, most of all, of not having to do

What one would prefer not to do.

It's the ultimate insult, if one

Doesn't want to, why should one have to?

No one has ever answered that question,

Because it seems it's built in to people 

Not to ask, like an extra chromosome,

Those fuck-lucky people

Whose skin isn't ripped to the last nerve

By idiots and assholes who won't do

Their fucking job and serve.

There's a warm place for complaint

In the human heart, such compassion

For grievance, it's so hard to see

How we are one in suffering:

The shivering tin can collector

Who reclines by the trash in the river

And the one who's had his Maserati, 

The only ride worth having, taken away

For bullshit drunk driving citations.

And in that gap, an enmity forms.

How can the same heart

That reaches as wide as the cosmos

Hold so much?

There must be a catch.

It does not compute.

So the hurricanes rage from the eye.

The Mirror of a Familiar Tarn

The nose and eyes of the alligator

Are the same shade as this standing water,

A festering grey still as dust on a no-pest strip.

You'd never know it, but the alcazar is sinking

And the alligator integrates

All that is disintegrating

As it disintegrates. 

It only disintegrates in fact

As quickly as he integrates. 

He must gaze keenly

And sniff discerningly

To even detect it —

What feels a collapse

As if it was an illusion that there were

Slats and girders and boards,

But it's more a thing that goes in and out

Like an oscilloscope's throbbing wave 

— It's only when it is no longer real

The alligator can move.

Only a warrior is strong enough

To let everything destroy itself

In order to swim freely.

It holds its prey below sight

So you can think that it exists.

The Mirror Doll

Only the eye knows

      and isn't telling,

For show has to come

      before the tell,

A life in contemplation

      of the hole — 

Wouldn't have a whole

      without it.

The Shell Beach Sign

We've waited so long just to tell the truth but

The time for it has passed.

Mark it up to the humans

Who yearn to be as lazy as the animals,

So beset by the flaws of others

Brilliant in their eyes

They take a pick to the bevel,

Try to chisel inclusions in the crystal.

But there are no cries of pain there,

What you feel must go unfelt.

It is you who cries for you — the rest are

Chorus

To match you whine for sigh

But they are what you have become

As you've lost all you had of your life

Like an old sailor on a pier with a Ferris wheel,

Whose entire frame of reference is what happened there.

Everything else was an idea

That led back to this, now nothing

But a blue horizon,

All he ever was.

One of these Red Flask Days

As the shrubs shiver

The pink lily sways

With the one infinite wish

To recognize our divinity

And be free.

My lips touch the newly freed sky

And anoint the world.

Every nerve in the cosmos

Feels the kiss.

Divine oneness is so omnipresent

I must take a sip of tea.

The Peanuts Delivered to the Door

A shadow in my own house,

Only the railings hum my name,

The candelabra's dripped in sadness

But it's at the void, not me,

There's nothing left of that, some strange

Undisclosed condition of witnessing.

I am at best a bird looking in,

At worst a service monkey

Looking for tips and kept from thievery

By the very love that enslaves me,

The need to value what is not mine

And never will be.

Enter the Great American Con Man

Who no longer has to say I'm invisible

Because I did not whistle loudly enough

How it's the amount of evil used to acquire power

That is the only standard of right in the universe,

So my value is non-existent, he says,

And he only keeps me around because of all men

(He of course would never say this) I can give him

The most with the least disagreement, and

Offer the highest percentage of my soul,

Most of which, the part with no opportunity for ridicule,

He will indifferently leave there, or spit out, or throw 

In disgust on the floor, sometimes laughing, 

Sometimes stamping it out in his spats like George Raft

Doing Al Capone doing Caligula.

But even I know I'm not kept around for that, I am kept

To keep his protector from unrelieved misery.

He would, he claims, acknowledge my existence

If what I said had any relevance. The collected teachings

Of the ages I didn't keep to myself. I raised a lip, 

A brow, an objection of any sort one too many times,

He calmly informs me, or would if these bones were real.

What will he do

When I take away his car, his room, his home, his food,

His family, and send him out with nothing into the world?

I've pondered long and hard this difficult question

And realize my torments will finally end only when

I can honestly, happily, blissfully, with all the heart

Of the cosmos, say, final answer, "I will be free."

More About Bats

The shaman trains as hanged man in the darkness,
Suspended in a chrysalis of inwardness

To invert what he believed in, about himself,

To learn how the opposite is equally true.

It's not to die the hero's ego death, but know

Who he is, from the other side, sonar, not flight,

The path — before all the bones that crack to the sound.

He's wrapped like a snake Caduceus around the pole

Because he has remembered himself, and he wants

Nothing more than to hold the center that can't hold,

For all is love, at the end of each silver cord.

So the spiral snake wends the needle, to recall

As illusion the error ways, where the not love,

The golden dream, could finally be realized

Via one's chosen hallucinatory loop,

Maelstroms we call them, because it is always fun

To be the victim, suffering is what we choose

Every time. Is it a sin to say we prefer it?

How could we not choose lives of gluttony lust and

Purgatory, for the sheer joy of it, to see 

How far away fair love can appear to be

Like we would compass the stars for a sense of awe.

All the vastness and perfection and cohesion

Love extends, what better vantage point than below?

Demonseed

The bat on the window

Laughs at the insects

Large and in charge at

The Sigler residence,

They way they cavort,

The tones they use,

How play turns to blood

So quickly

And flight

Only flits back

To cold

Electrical distances,

But, then, the bat

Thinks the place is his,

It welcomes his guano

After all,

His heart and soul,

Its rafters a net

For companionship and safety,

Harmony, a steady diet of flies,

And would swoop upon 

Its kitchen meats

As freely as he

Shrieks.

That's the way at least that 

The shadows look at it,

The never having,

The never having enough.

There are no rules,

Except what can be heard

In the exclusive caverns of ears

And, being heard, transmitted.

Ah, but the globe is breaking

From the weight of

What is wasted, and most of it

Throbs in the ethers

Like fat in a candle flame

Humming the house.

The crickets only know

How to sing it.

After the Addendum

"La plus commune façon d'amollir les coeurs de ceux qu'on a offensez, lors qu'ayant la vengeance en main, ils nous tiennent à leur mercy, c'est de les esmouvoir par submission à commiseration et à pitié. Toutesfois la braverie, et la constance, moyens tous contraires, ont quelquefois servi à ce mesme effect." - Michel de Montaigne

So I tolerate the intolerable

Because compassion cuts off wisdom

Whenever two lanes merge to one.

That's just science. What irks

Is this belief I could exist outside of it,

That, when the smoke rose, and the pawns

Were left on the board, it would be

Like I'd been there. Even those who try

To disappear need external validation, I hold

As I bear that last candle over the threshold

Not to see, but to know it won't go out

After the million lips have mistaken its flame

For an invitation to darkness.

There's too much light, until there is no more,

As truth must fold completely into lie

For what just happened to be revealed,

As curtain opened on an empty stage --

It's what's best for the patrons, they say,

When it's the actor himself

Who demanded the chairs be empty

For the performance of his life,

Only then to know that everything he did

Deserved applause.

Convo

The endless talk

Of drafts and draws

To give the others the squeeze

And then the slip

In knots of condemnation 

Webbed like a lace

That can be blown like birthday cake,

The laughter at the shame

Somehow the fuel

For further power moves

To wrench control of some detail,

Some small remote console.

But the dogs lie down to sleep

And the shame just arrives like fleas

As morning beckons like a train.

There's only so many ways

The rooster comb

Can brush the corpse's hair

And there's only so many beers

In the fridge

And none of them are cold.

All battles have already been fought and lost, 

All winners will be beaten with a stick.

The Pink Bench and the Great I Am

In the park

Where things happen without time

Sounds connect, seeds fall, nations rise.

Each stem holds a world to the sun.

There is no one like anyone else

But we are all one.

In fact,

The Temple from beyond

The Jacaranda blue

That strokes its amorous bell

To get through

Is just the whirr of birds

— It never did exist.

The Band Aid Can on the Yacht

The empty must be rusted,
Just a slant of light let through 
This plexiglass opaque curtain
— Once people suffered here, on some
Lint-lunged, mangle-handled contraption 
To make fashion affordable to the masses
Long extinguished in the current rages
That's long since blown through now,
Home to feral cats and all that keeps them
Alive in the dark, with ever-vigilant eyes.

It could not become a parking lot
Or boredom-making office park
Like the other would-be Pinocchios—
It must stay free of all ennui ...

The wait is inexorable 
For enough to be forgotten
To raze the rafters down
In hopes we will remember
What haunts us like the China in the shed.

The Invisible Turns Motionless

The rust on the rooster-crown roofs

Of still fans in sultry gray,

There's no wind to ruffle the Santa Ana grasses

Finally present with the moment

Soulful with emptiness.

Children's worlds of plastic swings

And suspended upturned trikes

Lie like still lives in the barbed backyards

With no reason to do anything but live

—Something we can do outside of them,

Finally free as jays.

Even the paper debris is free

To collect itself in peace

By whatever fences once held them still,

Wherever their trestles ended up,

What we now may call real.

Container cars whose emptiness

Reminds us how much holier it is

To be an echo

Than whatever can't be seen

In endless carriage tracking west

Under the collective judgment of stars.

And then the messages flash

In slick black Liquitex

And incandescent Krylon

—Not to be understood or even seen,

It is the urge of the eye merely

That connects to what they know,

The chimeras of what once seemed realized.

Like the plastic bags in shopping carts

In the cul de sac beside the freeway,

Once they were as lithe as dreams

And now they dream alone

With the free people motionless now

In dust shrubs peering over kingdoms of waste

That were never anything but places they could go

And not be discovered.

All of us want that

But the all-seeing eye

Must peek inside the packages

Now stranded on the tracks,

Savor the last 

Morsel of liberty.

As the train winds upstream

Some answering currents

Flow back to what might have been

And what never was lies ahead,

A gleaming city of blue!

The root of all sadness 

Is cutting oneself off

From love.

The Rivers Between Commerce

The scrapyard beckons,
The dark art of light refraction,
Where we pile on our dissatisfactions
As if they own us,
As if their price will go up
This time, if only this one time
Then we're flush
As the skies that promise nothing,
Nothing to deny us.

We list between piles of bitter complaint
That the one we have left,
Our mythical selves,
Can't compete
With the sleaze and light victories
Pulled like gills to the gulls
From warm polluted holes,
White gulls with otherworldly eyes,
Yet they pluck the lotus for shit
As does Quan Yin herself as well,
Have the choice to see heaven or hell,
Or maybe the blue only knows its own kind,
Learns nothing from all of the lies.

I have poured out as diurnal ritual
The barrels of measurable shit and urine,
Made microadjustments to

The indefensible
Dysfunction
Hoping my time was enough
Of a sacrifice

For the pleasure of seeing
Everything break,
Everything die and get taken
Apart,
All rationales slide down an icy crevasse
Where the Self as we pictured it
Can't be said to exist anymore
And nothing of goodness escapes
To the light ...

That trickery flickery always throws relief
Onto the shade,
In patterns of steel 

Glittering blade
Like Venetian blinds ...
— Is it the light or the dark
That binds us?
Who knows?
The pipes always churn out
The waste with ease
After this many rained-out days. 

This Day in Buffalo Bills History

They were named for a vaudeville show 
Because the Buffalo Bisons were already spoken for,
But that hardly explains one Elbert D. "Golden Wheels" Dubenion 
From miniscule Bluffton College to be beckoned in black face
To the first playbill will call for a casting coach named Buster
With Carlton, Wray; Torczon, LaVerne; Fowler, Willmer; Yoho, Mack ...
Impossible names all, even for vaudeville 
When they shuffle off the mortal coil
Of Buffalo's defunct and defiant ghosts of football.

They never knew they were dead, you see,
Always thinking they were in it when they weren't.
It's not the same to beat the shit out of the other pigskin misfits
As ride the golden steeds of the football gods,
As merciless and clean as they were sexy, as this crew --
Archie and Butch and Booker and Stew --
The penitents of Lou -- most assuredly were not.

And then there was Cookie, washed out with the Argonauts
For his too-cool-for Canada's dry three goose wings down,
Proof you can liquefy a cookie, to minstrel show juice.
He came with Ernie Warlick - a name I didn't make up -
To try their luck down South in the impossible TV snow

That brought light to Niagara's honeymooner cabins

And the arc welding eyes of the Lackawanna Poles,

The factory negroes, the Erie Irish, the Alsatians

Who came in on the wind. They agreed on nothing 

But the Bills, how truly disappointing they were,

And how they still prefer Pepsi 2 to 1 to Coke and think

The Bavarian creme pies on the East Side are the best in the world.

The world. Yes they want a taste of the misery of glory but

No one had anything to give, only the glory of misery.
Still they took so tiny a slot in the prime time machine,
They only took, even from the mythical Buffalo, the urge to run.

That's where Cookie came in, never crumbling,
Even at contract time, when Buffalo wingback payback
Made it apparent at last just how far Buffalo's light had cast,
The first Tesla-electrified city so they say,
And he was cast to the woeful Bronco winds 
As was Daryl "the Mad Bomber" Lamonica
Presented for peanuts and a harmonica
To the Al Davis monkey vendor, as Jack the quarterback 
Became, because he could not be the hero of this play, 
A Republican intellectual who ran for President
On an "I'm a quarterback" plank, but no one by that time
Even remembered him.

                          What travelling show can't encompass such tragedy?
Their brothers in guerilla war rode the bouncing Super Bowl
To respectability and riches while they still
Stirred the cream of a post-Cookie apocalypse.
They changed their stadium from War to Rich
After the types of sweets at the sponsor's bakery.

And no one was ever sweeter than the man they called OJ,
The rich rookie who raced through the house that Cookie built
And whose father was the souest chef in Frisco Bay,
And if it wasn't for the love of his son, not able to be
White man cool like his heterosexual celebrity dad,
Carrying his pig-skinning chef knives to maul his great white stepmother,
We would be able to remember him,
The juice in the Electric Company, a light on TV,
The way he made us forget, for a moment,
That it mattered he was black.

Maundy Thursday at the Avenue A Swimming Pool in Saskatoon

Jones and Nyro approached lyrics from the standpoint

                         of the streets

As overheard by the ghost captain of riverboat sails,

                         which spooked him,

And the choir seemed somehow to offer food,

                         quite confusing

                                                   for a cool cat

This mission burning down thing, in the southern wing

                         of confederate rock history,

Wee hee hee hee sal on the other hand

                         of the white white boy's school

                                                   would be catnip

To go on a tightrope with impeccable poise

                                 like the ghost in our catnap.

She bailed at Monterey, thought herself too fat,

       didn't perform again until 1971, but she did,

Holy shit, Poverty Train, to half of America's high schoolers

      in their CIA-sponsored communal acid bath.

Clearly the hippies were not ready 

                          for a blue ray starseed

Who needed, at 19 years old, a 7th dimension to cover her songs! 

Who could twirl every carnival wheel within wheel til it popped,

      like a Russian savant reassembles a clock,

               refusing to settle for the real to feel

                          or any better place than dismal bliss,

                                        refusing to accept any fear in fact

      at the Stoney End of all sin-based redemptions

               that prophecy a different morning,

Who admitted to every conceivable sin in her songs

               yet each one was a mystical prayer

                         in the shadow that all light reaches for,

                                         the lunar nigro,

                         for art is in those shadows,

The eclipse observed thus pulled into creation.

                         The Spanish call it duende.

                                         We call it the blues.

There's that point where time and space are violated

                                         and cease to be.

Time stops and space dissolves to one point

                                         of eternal consciousness

                                                        mind goes on

       in Bach's Heisenberg uncertainty variations

                                          in the eternity ward

                          until a question comes again

To ground me into time and space, from an eagle,

      who says it is the only one:

                          are you free or enslaved?

Poison, it appears, is not written in the stars,

                          Blue Orpheus was ...

The choice is always ours

       to attach or not,

                        as a regular ritual

                                         like [fill in the blank].

The Creature No One Saw

Something is rotten in Ferry Bar Park.

Is it the mothman? Does he play this?

Or was it just a hologram like the moon,

Impossible to live with or miss?

Now the chromium flows, the crabs have come home to roost

At Sparrows Point, that sings its no-more secrets

Of Bethlehem Steel, on the day that Judas

Took down the Roman pig iron figurine.

Even the wedding dress and roses on the cake were blue 

And the ring bearers dressed as men in black

On the bridge where it happened in 1966,

Reports the Berkshire Eagle, on highway 36,

The same number of people who died on the Silver Bridge

Before they changed it to 37 on Wikipedia ...

And then there's Bonnybridge, "Scotland's Roswell",

In the Falkirk Triangle

And the Bridgeville UFO Festival, Bridgefest, you guessed it,

On a bridge. And there's that well-documented UFO boat

Floating by the now-singing ("wind retrofit") and Keyless

Golden Gate Bridge.

Brawny can't clean up this spill, the decades as they've festered,

Its non-union concrete crew the only supposed casualties.

Why they weren't warned like the lunar eclipse cars

Is just the most unasked of many mysteries

But I am much more interested in the "dolphins"

Placed specifically to protect said bridge from exactly this,

As pointed out by the incredulous structural engineer

Who poured the slab in 1974,

50 years ago, like clockwork tinker toy war spoils,

The third largest continuous truss bridge on the globe

Felled by a three-year old's tantrum ...

But there's so much not to make sense of:

Why in the 2012 movie Battleship did the aliens take bridges,

What no one on Reddit can figure out.

Or what really happened in High Bridge, New Jersey,

The site of irrefutable, unburiable fact,

As when in full view of Manhattan on the Brooklyn Bridge

People were pulled up one day into the sky,

Aligning such undefined choiring strings

As no allowable theory can contend.

Why, I ask, did the light beam blue avian blue,

And why was London Bridge sung to fall down

And is now on Lake Havasu?

What symbols can we use?

The Mayday Bridge like its namesake's namesake F. Scott's most

Famous story? Google won't tell you, its AI

Makes me admire how tight the Federation of Light has to be

To keep the veil as black as we need it to be.

The one incontrovertible fact in that whole Mothman business

Was that a bunch of real West Virginians saw him in 1966,

Although his eyes were like chrome reflectors not red,

And no one ever called him the Mothman, 

That's just what some AP copy editor said, 

And it wasn't even the figure but the fact

It was foisted on the consciousness 

Of Pleasant Park's unwittingly empathetic

Through some advanced blue light technology 

Presided over by actual men in black

Driving Cadillacs over the bridge

That undeniably went down,

And undeniably

Emil Roedel, Nazi Germany's most famous spy,

Was there, in West Virginia, before the bridge toppled,

As was Indrid Cold, an impossible name 

With a hard-to-conceive-of tale, like Indra the Hindu

God of fire, cold fusioned into dragon

Who appears as a vampire, or as spangle of stars

On any given red, white and blue bridge to nowhere.

It was an attack, a personal pearl harbor I suppose,

On what I was, on Grizzly and the miniature

Row homes of Curtis Bay, and the aforementioned

Ferry Bar Park, where, indeed, Homey Didn't Play That.

And the name of the cargo barge, with its captain called in

Like Jim Morrison's admiral dad for all the headline

Bridge apocalypse operations, was that book

That both of us magically have

On the surrealist Dali, from Dahlia as in the Blue,

Who drew a broken bridge he called it

To dream, but it was fully constructed

To the point it had to cross something, anything, to connect.

The locals never knew the bridge was at stake

When they saw that full-of-holes moth, 

Their accounts never quite connected,

As anonymously famous as they became.

The whole eastern seaboard is now unexpectedly 

Unhinged, as Apple buys up nuclear power plants

And the only transport pipe for waste on the whole

Eastern seaboard has ghosted us.

The Patapsco River now floods its banks

With the flow of the great mind, and we see clear 

In the blue beam to Northumbria

Without ever having to talk.

If You Don't Ask, the Answer is Yes

There's a consequence for everything you ask 

Though the odds of one and one dictate

You may carefully be given what you say,

Another chance to decide, if feeling lucky

Means another has to give you a prize

That turns, it always does, into resentment,

For you carry the weight of the thing

That assumes for a time 

The proportions of the world

What you innocently wanted

Vs. what you innocently thought

You could have.

It's not like it's a compromise, a negotiation 

On which your savvy is judged. You are the only God,

The one who decides what your sun shines on.

No Rolling Stones Gather in Jerry Moss Plaza

The spring confetti swirls in Fibonacci spirals 

Over the hard concrete

As I disappear between worlds

At the end of the day.

I am for others and others are for me

But we have nothing in common otherwise,

Just the situation, where agreements were made,

Our names are our own, signed, but, really

We have no inkling of why we are here

Or who needs to use us to speak.

So the crack seems almost natural,

The place for all the cool people to go

To not be seen. The world outside our senses

Turns to gold decorative foil, hard to peel away

But once the edge is found

There's no limit to how much can be removed.

Gaza with a Z

Mayor Mensch declared all Civil Disobedience

Safe and even sacred, even in Sacramento 

Before a city council hung like a rooster weathervane

Out to dry, in the balance.

"We will wait all night to hear everyone speak,"

He declared, sad he could not do more 

For the olive trees and branches and cocktails

But the audience of one, the photojo in the free speech zone 

Had left when pandemonium and arrests arrived

To such a carefully contrived chaos.

What is it but love everyone sought?

Fish-eyed, she had gazed for hours into Gaza,

Eyeless, thanked for bearing witness 

To someone else's land and crime and truth

In the militarized zone of zealots

She once had been the queen of, telling the truth

To allow the seeing. Righteous of the word

She went beyond the pink sea's endless partings

In her rebellion of peace, the church key lady

Who lit a candle in the dark, for those who risk their lives

So she didn't have to, a fellow traveler 

Photojo who had worn the fur.

But this resistance is all suffering

And darkness is the holding space.

Light is what she uses to speak

Thus walking in hell is walking in sunshine.

The banks close in on the border river, both are judgements

But the river is not, it is only the flow  of light

Zero giving of fucks. To avoid too much photojo with the salt

She had to leave her ego at the checkpoint Charlie door.

Everyone has love as a weapon,

Everyone sees only light

Yet look how much seems aligned against it

To sell the illusion that it has no power.

The photojo looks for the clarity just out of range,

The detail that reveals it as a prop 

On a manufactured stage on which

Our very real yearnings burn.

In the dream of a third opinion they give her 

A wide berth, to be invisible enough to see, 

But she renders no voice not her own, 

That's the thing about the voiceless 

She takes on, to fling upon the primal scream,

They make no sound.

She dreams of Lady Nada, how she sparkles in the pink spring

Like the light means something.

Signs of G_d 3.14

The twin tarot towers fall into their footprint 2 to 1
Like eternal clocks unwinding to perfection
And wound again so we may accomplish
What is already there
And perhaps understand the limitlessness of love,
For that, after all, is its only limit.

I'm aware of you, vescica blue,
And thus conscious of eternity,
Your pi hole in the middle of the rings of Guinevere
The sacred door, the portal,
The sweet g-spot of creation,
God, geometry, the Great arf-arf Seal,
The elusive guess and guest,
Grand Architect, a kind way of saying it:
Gimel Gamma Gamal,
Gematria's perfect triad
Taught by Gamaliel on down
As the harmony when opposites manifest in trine,
As kindness allows in from the choice to give or take
In free will, such generosity twins the contraries,
Merging soul and mind, earth and spirit, into heart,
The G force of G source,
The zero point of everything where nothing creates something,
The key of gratitude that unlocks the gooey, living void

And we all sincerely call for the truth of love
But it's the blue mirror that makes a geometry real
As a spinning funhouse, like the one where the Germans
Lost the War but are still in control ...
Germania, an ancient place of unknown origin
Named by the fiesty Celts for the Romans
To trine the Goths and Gaul as neighbors
For germination and germ warfare
Like 33.3 Gs in the glove of St. Germaine.
The Romans liked to erase things
Like the Druids and the (wait for it) Gnostics.

Exit Ramp on the Van Allen Beltway

The problem with seeing people 

        Is sometimes you see them.

Every eye is a mirror

        And mirrors aren't real

Just a glint of nothingness 

        Retracing the retraction

Back to the eternal subject

        That has no shape or name

In the blind light

                               Where the school of heart knocks

         Tricks you away from dancing free

With a kicked on the way out door

         That can be opened more or less,

Each swing of transactional authenticity

         To learn how you resist one thing 

And the world coils ready to spring

         So say the walking fortune cookies

Who would have you hack the matrix by focusing ...

          How the looking glass magnifies

Before it turns the thing that's seen 

          To dust

Without a stop for popcorn

          Or the nit gnats of judgment

All mystics and Indians know

          Is a crutch.

Death Doula Villanelle

He coughs up blood like Kerouac.

She won't phone up her vegan Republican quack.

The caul is over us now.

Appetite has slowed to a bite

Though whisky still flows, potatoes kept from the light.

The caul will fall too soon.

Photos are gathered for post-it note chats

On the dog's sleeping lie once avoided like gnats.

The caul will fall too soon.

The Swede's scrapbook hung like a sail.

The Mick's napkin sketch what it's like beyond the veil.

The caul is over us now.

Charon's great ship with its white foam prow!

The caul has come over us now,

In the last sick light of the moon.

The caul always falls much too soon.

Checking in on Cleo and Briscone

Baggage gone missing at the new moon

          On the spirals of progression carousel

That spin as one would peel back the toroid

          Of an onion

Off-balanced like a top our merkabah

          Tilted to the zero point

Where you would straddle the pole to recharge it

           Not at true horse North but blue.

I am in the center of you, unable to move

           Except closer

To the spiral of your chapter pages turned,

           Your ever-unpeeled onion leaves 

That leave me to cry for morsels,

            For the morsel horses, 

For the breadcrumbs to the morsel code,

             Point Zero Morsel.

But the world gets a little less straightened and chaste

             A little wiser as we

Become a little more free don't it Zephyrillis

             Or is it Etherea? 

We know each other 

             By so many names

We have become as fluid as Flood,

              For shape is optional, 

An excuse to lose myself, forget you,

              Always fun, seldom necessary, 

As memories of you crystalize my DNA,

             Conforming to me like memory foam

Squeezable as an inflamed sponge,

             A lemon ponied up

Off-world and off-the-hook at the Nature Lounge

             Naked Spirits bar.

Timelines tremble,

             Thoughts interstell.

The nothingness of pure light

             Manifests all things 

For the sake of illumination

              Nothing more.

But then we went quantum

              And truly lost time.

The Oldest Chinese Restaurant in California

The rain drips in my bed.

The long-suffering house is finally crying.
It can no longer dance.
The main vein has been unreined
To memories fallen like mirrors.
The pillaging pillow bends like a willow
As the crisper fills with remedial rain.
 
The pea flower blue forbidden rice frog
Has many paddies to cross.
The lilies are the only things blooming
In the pea soup, blue velvet fog
That refuses to smoke out in a blaze of entitlement
Like flair-haired Jimmy the red-headed step head,
Roller of doobs for pubes 
But to evolve with each resolve,
To see the master's hand as my own
Pulling the black and blue down into the sky.

The only consistent thing in my life,

The panhandler at the cross-walk

Hits me up with an especially robust "spare today, spare today"

As he holds a few coins in his fingers.

Bus 69

My forlorn lonesome burn
For what's locked away in Folsom,
Your fulsome bosom blues
and their foregone conclusions.

Yet they somehow found their way
To the Ukrainian pray for rain party
At Open Heaven that went on all night
Keeping vigil like a light house,
A sigil for the ages where the buzzers and alarms
Go off instead of on
And Caspar the Jumping Ghost is on the struggle bus
But thankfully not thrown under
Like at the Mesmer school of Mnemesyne
When the Chicago School of lab rats and coats took over
And asked, famous artists style, "can you draw this blank?"

Oh my wing woman
For the sweet adelines
Swedes on treble cliffs
Wailing love language for dummies
From open source on the light web
Open all night
Wherever love is forbidden
Which interplanetary love always is
Everywhere but heaven
Open all night
Like the pickup truck that rides the LA River
Blaring Staying Alive with no way to disco duck it.

The doctors just say fuck it, face the hypnotist and dance.

Whisperings of the Way

The whole is the only individual.

The blue glass where we live our sunlit part

Asks only we stay quiet, for the murmur

Of what has transcended us, in common share,

The common's tragic end in keen elite listening,

To the white noise there, all the secrets

Burrowed in like grain for ancient rats.

It is so clean, the air, so crisp in execution

And weejun wax. We leave no trace,

For we touch no hands, at our best,

Let all success turn to failure

And failure our greatest success.

The clock that we keep measures the mind

Of the one, the living corporation

We incompletely fill.

                                      We are unreal

For most of the day, as the sunlight tracks

The Hollywood sign, descends into flame

Above Wilshire every single night...

The weather's unpredictable 

In Southern California, 

The micro-climates,

The infinite flow.

The Space it Takes to Be Nothing

Somewhere in this garage is my new life.

Is it the green iguana heat lamp, for future movies

   as a figure of shadow and screen renown perhaps?

Or the toilet seat riser that no one will want, will it

           cling to me like the memory of an elephant?

The felt casters of a thousand broken chairs

                     and paint enough for a mausoleum,

The gardener will be gone, the mauve gloves will have 

                                                             slipped on,

There are never enough Goodwill runs to take

                      the finish off the hands

Of the disposable experience, that rests now next

    to the trash receptacles, in Zen balance.

The dragon sees the sky red

             and all of the leaves are crying.

Make of me what you wish, kind spirit, as you spin

          the fated fool's wheel like a Colt revolver

And the bated breath blows out to soil and solitude,

   small house with dog on the outskirts of Yuma,

And another family filed as a chapter in my saga,

           my postcards from another world

I pin to my heart of cork like a flag that is only the past

    and, therefore, proven wrong

But still stirring its lies in the pale light of fear

                                where absence once swam

And it's waiting again, the Swan,

             ever black as the night is long.

The Fear Leaves

Silence is blue sky.

The words curl below.

They wait to exist as the wind deems it so.

But be always blows into do.

The others are filled with meaning

Then exhaled in a plume

To travel like birds

Over hills, without weight,

Shape or place to go.

The thousand years of rain

Can only be recalled

In the longing to be absorbed.

The Kings of Hollywood

Tornados in San Diego 

But the clouds all laugh at that.

They throw their weight around 

As if they owned these hills,

As if they're merely vapor

Not the massive moving anchor

That mottles the valley 

To robes of black and white

As lords of shadow

Under judicial blue review.

Sunrise Train after Rain

The windows are blue. The steam is like clouds.

Mountains rise white in Buena Park.

The snow came in from the Pleiades 

To say how far away the white is

Of our spirit.

                         The streets of Cascade Circle

Are encased in mirror.

                                         The grass

By Commerce Casino, enflamed by new sun,

Befriends the names left behind: Blaze, Shred, Spar

-- At large and now in charge on Isra Mi'raj --

The pebbles sun themselves 

Beside the Blisterpak storm drains

Where the world shines back 

As if it was all nothing,

The thing that plagued the sleep of orphaned children.

Light will make a mockery

Of the cold blue moneyed spires

-- Even the ties by Mission Tower glisten from home--

And will inhabit hobo chairs

Wet like redwood beside

The shiny tracks,

To view the passing

In a different white.

The river pours like a concrete truck,

Flowing wings, as birds arise

Unearthly bright.

Fire Horse

What can be done with the fire horse?

It can't exist 

Yet it does.

It won't burn

But there's flame

As far as the eye can withstand.

And the dirt and horizon

Have become

The same red,

The burning of blood

As a ritual act

In someone else's show.

Ox and Goat in Rabbit Time

I.

Like clockwork we agree, to our broken clock

Twice a day -- the rest is a hiss

Of enmity and longing, pleadings for what can

Never be. Bliss, the critics say,

The horse on course will miss its whip and jockey.

A spirit must be broken like a spine

In the book of grievance, encased in ice

To encapsulate the noise. The silence,

Though occasional, is the gift for the soul,

A fair exchange on the planet of war.

In some schools I'm the hero for getting through

But tell that to the moon, whose narcotic milk

Won't feed the mouth deprived of bristols

To call one's own. We boys we do such sullen things

At the persistence of tyrants, the knife we draw

A pain we can call pleasure.

II.

I did agree to love. I did agree to fear.

I did agree to veil myself behind the silver mirror.

There are some things that I have learned in time

Of who I am and how I came to be,

And every single one of them's a lie,

The bite of that bitter apple the not me.

It is always someone else who does this,

The murders in my name. And, always, just by seeing,

I take all the blame. As victory,

For even that can hurt me, transcendent

As I am, a galaxy.

                                 It's how I'm known,

The rumor turned 3D, the murmur that becomes

A raging stream, and feeds so many capillaries

The trees start to believe that they are green.

III.

Where we have been is a mystery,

The future history.

The thing now's to take it all in

And turn it back like the cousin at the door

Sent packing.

                        Who are we, when the real don't talk

And the mauvaise-froid share the same heart?

The dancers stand with weapons drawn

As the back-beat shifts from the 2-step.

I take my ten-gallon of the possible off

From what she wanted, the impossible to fulfill.

Thus the shadow of the cattle hat fell across

The floor, like that holographic horse just appeared

Ununseeable, from that snow-blind winter scene. 

1940

It's come to this, the zero degree

Where all urge of surrender has ceased,

The frozen moment, where leopards

Merely stare. There is a war somewhere.

You can hear it on the military bands.

But the war in here, does not give in

Its thaw. One waits coldly for a word

That is law.

                    Ah, but it was only story time

On that crackling pipe, all the ships to sea

A pale moonlit reflection of the words

I bore each day, of traumatizing fathers,

Zealot moms, cigarettes packed too tight

And an acid point of view on negroes, jews, jews.

Everyone could see it, no one did a thing,

At the Ashkenazi warlords command,

     Per the sane one knowing bravery

And the power of the radio

To garble.

                                  There's gold in Nome

And radar towers.

       And men who go on ships to quiet die

                      Smoking Santa Claus cigars

And bearing Jimmy Cagney to the skies,

Where they fly, regardless

Of life and death,

                                Mere adjustments in the dial,

The game of chess whose master

In Antarctica always wins.

The ice is too thick for human hearts

That burn for any shore.

                       Even the sane one fell victim.

Condemned as insane he went within, silent

As a radio at the thought he only took a hill

In his heart, where all that matters flows.

Signal after the Storm

The terror has poppycocked.

The peaks betray but few

Stray smoke pocks

On blue.

Irreducible the layers peeled

As far as feeling allowed.

The art of doing nothing

First must bear the fear

Of clouds.

Song of the Wheelchair

Even the crows talk of someone else,

Someone who matters

So I can release my great brace,

Smell the exhaust of squealing freedom

Squirrelled out one nut crack at a time,

The inordinate candor

To a squalor of truth

That still floats inside the blues 

Chased like bitters away,

To draw close to.

Incident in Norwalk

The lost angels have gone off the rails, Off tumbleweed reservations, one tweaker Kept 7 trains, 1000s of people, stranded For hours, all up the line to Bakersfield And everyone watches the system collapse, The inexplicable malfunctions In the way people love and understand As we watch our beliefs on the board go down. I’m a lucky one. I escaped the good fortune Of commuter rail suicides on either side of the drive And the bridge dive suicides. The 10 freeway Has fallen through! The hills are angry with smoke As we wait expectant but senseless, accepting But numb, the stoic SoCal cool where there would be Homicides in Gotham, third rail replies To the no explanations, not even, really, lies. It’s a party, in fact, a copa cabana in the club car, A conga line where everyone can sing Of their endless love and get hitched in, Laughing like the moon at jackals. The anonymous station we were deposited With only hope left in our pockets was once The scene of a town’s, any American town’s, joy As the freight rumbled through with a shudder. And when we finally move, it feels somehow historic, This epic fail, to withstand all the traps of time Placed in our way for us, and still be standing, as, At the end of the endless, you’re still there, intact.

Mother For The Sky

The clouds are browned this morning

In a lightly hoovered stream 

That warps in woven frays

Refracting reds and purple 

On beds of wool minds laying

Contemplative as they conjure.

They coat the void as they float.

She was harder than that

Though she floated just as still

And promised hues of softness

No cloudwool can distill.

There was always something for herself

Not spread like rainbow ice among the crystal,

The only note that she could play

In such cold blue.

The air was much too thin,

The company too bleak ...

What happens to the best of us

As we spread too thin our fleece

Across the cling-charged flock

Too nebulous for love enough 

To uncurl ever their locks.

They will move much further on,

Acquire a bruised patina

As the offering of their play

That never ceases its spin

Away.

del vino e delle rose

non è lungo, 

l'eternità 

i panorami che si aprono 

non sono mai la fine,

più paradiso, 

come se fosse tutto ciò 

che è mai 

esistito.

[it is not long, 

eternity

the vistas that open 

are never the end,

more heaven, 

as if it was all 

that ever 

was.]