Tuesday, March 12, 2024

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.

Monday, March 11, 2024

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.

Saturday, March 9, 2024

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.

Thursday, March 7, 2024

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.

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

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.

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

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.

Sunday, February 11, 2024

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.

Thursday, February 8, 2024

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.

Wednesday, February 7, 2024

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.

Tuesday, February 6, 2024

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.

Sunday, February 4, 2024

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. 

Saturday, February 3, 2024

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.

Tuesday, January 23, 2024

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.

Tuesday, December 5, 2023

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.

Friday, November 17, 2023

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.

Saturday, October 28, 2023

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.

Saturday, August 26, 2023

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.]

Friday, August 18, 2023

Ode to Skip's Garage

A man needs a shed by the edge of the sea,
A shit ton of poly, jig band table saw three
To plane, sand and join like his home-building clan
And squirrel as many dowels as one man can

In library drawers stuffed of clamps to spools
As his voice still resounds "Who stole all my tools?"
For he needed each nail for the love he built in
To the furniture, the frames, the Skip-shaped kitchen.

A man built his house at the edge of the sea
For a loving wife and children three
Who dusty cup lift of old Andre's still stashed
To his dreams each fulfilled, lived largely.

Thursday, August 10, 2023

Moon

Captain Kirk
Has already shown us
The black broken hulk
Of a once-proud starship
Decimated by war
And put in orbit
To save a planet
That looks on it fondly,
Its sick light
Projected like a movie,
As source of all mystery,
All feminine lunacy,
As it makes birth regular
Instead of free,
The Van Allen tidal trance
Demagnetizes women,
Keeps them from control
Of the earth, her body,
Source of everything.

Monday, July 31, 2023

The Zucchini Unraveling

The roots are deep,
       leaves wide,
              flowers
                    edible,
You just want to bring them
       to your mouth
               and taste
Whatever bitterness
       has been distilled
               from feverish sun,

The one we circumscribe
      pulls free 
               from the fungus 
                          bed
Where death is daily turning,
      the crypt like a compost
               cylinder hard to spin
That burns out shoulders
       rocking endless 
                cradles.

There is no hope
      only consequence,
               all actions glide to
                            resistance,
The conflicted pair
      all knotted up
               and intertwined
With all one's nothingness,
      the play of the mind
               on what will happens

As the worms turn 
      the dirt
               and the sun massages
                             strawberries,
Who will one day too
      fall to seed,
               that thing
That our life seems 
      to wait for, rely on,
               the seed.

Sunday, July 2, 2023

Catullus 16


I will prick you, Aurelius,
Tongue and throat your noble boy toy Furius,
Until you say what you think of my poetry,
A little soft, a little sheathed?
For a pious poet ought to be clean, 
There is no need, in fact, for verses
When there's fleur de sel and rabbits on the grass;
Let the lines purr gentle and a little chaste
And if the hairs stiffen for an itch
It's for those whose loins are never moved. 
You, who cover all the bases,
Did you read me wrong?
Do you think I am a male? 
I will prick you, Aurelius.

Tuesday, June 27, 2023

Retro

Lavender farm to the sea
      in Hawaii,
The first one proposed, as the place
      to end all place 
And a few more were offered
      to the agil-e divinities:
      
Queen Charlotte Island accessible
       only by boat,
The Pismo barefoot lifestyle,
       the sofa 
Where the children were read to ...

Until the last one saw her home,
       Walpole, abode
Of the prison, the orangeade farm,
        the one road to the den
Of the lawless champion
        pitching razor blades.

Wednesday, May 31, 2023

Afternoon TV

The common caw
Of get involved with me
Rubs the entanglement ropes
The wrong way
And the puppet strings break
To free-fall flying through
What used to not be illusions
But palpable beads
Of crystal, the world 
Bounced up and down 
With somnolent echo
To efface the frack congress 
Of slack lackey flacks
On your behalf,
The ludicrous madhouse
Of plaints real
And remembered
In your vast entitlement writ
Of complaint
To steal everything outside
Into the hole you had to climb
Into, unrecognizable
To yourself
Just in time for a fade
Into a sunset no one sees
Or doesn't want to,
Your suffering neglected
Because it is taken on
For the collective, so they can
Look away
Or look so closely
They can't see what you 
Don't want them to see,
What you can't,
Librarian caught
In a classification scheme
Fit for priests 
Where emotion was spared,
Now needed 
A river of tears
As the sea recedes 

Thursday, February 16, 2023

Carmel Mission

I break the silence
With these words of love
As I broke the bread
Of silence
So long ago
In these echoing halls

When we were one heart
In all but name,
Touch, kiss,
The sacred word
Flowed between us
Beyond words, beyond God,
The place we knew
But could never land

So we landed here
Our pure white wings
In service to suds
And feathers and lace
And each other,
The look of learning
In each eye,
A key to who we were
And will always be.

Books of symbols compromised
By the lack of proximity
To us,
Lace all that is left
Of our hands
That should have touched,
Our silence that was wasted
On no kiss.

But that is the way
Of the pilgrim,
To find in absence
What would be too much ...
What you are right now
A hundred miles away
In my very core.

So we continue
Where we broke off,
Waves that never stop
Reaching the shore.

Monday, January 30, 2023

Another Carmel Apartment

There's a rainbow on the sea
Where our Penelope
Awaits her invisible,
Her pinned shot fading
In his cell
For posterity,
Still glistening
His might-have-beens
Of dream,
The descriptions of home,
Bedsheets flying
Due to clothespins,
Car returning in grey
To an empty garage
In glory every day.

Does he stand on the gangplank longing?
Or does he know all this
Will end
Only when the knot is tied
To dock
And not a moment before,
No matter how tremulous the waves
Or uncanny the shore.

There are houses, now,
Encased in mist,
Lost in their views
From the hill,
The love inside
Too vulnerable
To be spied even with
The drapes flung wide,
Would-be widows at windows
With eyes that only mirror
What they see,
Eternal grey
To pierce again from sky
Another rainbow.

It only appears
When you least expect it,
Like the ghost horizon ship
That stays away from port
Dredging and dumping
In menial breath
Some black stuff that holds
All its value
In arm hurl and sinew
Tightening
To serve it
At a reach

From where hearts are open
To receive,
By hearths that make quick work
Of it
In the name of things to burn
And share
And never run out
Of the need to share
It all.

The person there
Becomes whole
In the fire
Of give and take, 
Of nothing really,
Just a wish
That they would know,
In this case, the sea,
The impossible road
That lends itself
To nursery rhymes
Where serpents rescue nymphs
But goes silent
At the truth,

That no one rides
Its scales,
The heart is always
Somewhere else,
Frozen like an ice chunk
Under glass
Waiting for its maiden
Who will claim it
When the tide returns
What treasures the sea
Disgorges:
Some rope, some kelp,
A handful of shell,
The things that stay
In sitting rooms
Forever,
Memories of loss
And distance.

Wednesday, January 25, 2023

Trine

Western Union announces the birth of our daughter
29 years too late
But we're ecstatic anyway
Having finally left the sea
For desert shores
Where sun reports the afterbirth
To infinity,
Our carcass heaps
Happy as a dream
And still in a way that can only be
If each lives inside the other
Completely.

It has been a long day
Of striped harlequin watching
And compliment fishing
With the denizens of Purple Town
Who huddle now like we once did at bonfires
And make babies like balloons
To scream into indifferent skies
The glee of their disquiet ...

But that was many years ago.
Our cold hands never really touched,
Our eyes never locked despite
How much our fingers shook
And pushed whatever bilge came up
Back down. 
The sun just glazed the rinse repeating days
With radiance for tears
That never seemed to end 
And never really appeared.

What is left of what never happened 
Is in what did:
A father's love, earth placed here
To contain it,
So he can be the one who climbs the cross
Like crows the sunrise for love.

Saturday, December 17, 2022

Grief Trading Eights

How can the separation bring you closer?
The pain of love
Makes you see love
Is not pain
But a feeling 
That flows beyond all walls,
The very feeling
I came here for

And now I know what it means
To love what you don't get,
What you had.
Unbearable grief is the only way
Sometimes
To feel
The love
We are.

Sunday, December 11, 2022

The Jazz Baby

From Dirt for Sale, written August, 1991

Too many troubadours and no legitimate leader,
But the jazz baby can almost fly on his blue wing.

Every dream is owned by some unholy conglomerate,
But the jazz baby skreeks like the birds.

Rotted tyrants hold the Earth and its entire people hostage,
But the jazz baby will grab at anything he can reach.

The jazz baby hears in church bells things we'll never comprehend.

Every day more furniture is put out on the street,
But the jazz baby has a taste for everything left behind.

Discarded masterpieces float in the sewers,
But the jazz baby looks toward the blue in the skies.

When he looks at you, he smiles right through. 

Friday, December 9, 2022

Elegy for Jesse

What many would consider to be the greatest tragedy, to lose a son, is equally the greatest treasure, to know in my life the true meaning of his life.

The streets are too soft.
Forgiveness comes too easily.
The people of the sun are unredeemed in this world.
We cannot hear their screaming,
As they move past us like shadows,
Who think their pain isn't real.

That's where Jesse chose to be,
Enjoying his stay
In the trestles and the drains, in plain sight
Hiding places, the overpasses,
Squat homes owned by kudzu, 
Alleys colder than the truth 
Spanging coin from the wits of his guitar
And spent his spare, never-wasted time in 
Loaded club rooms where his monk-robed friends 
Gathered as men to watch football and other slow suicides, 
Or in his well-tuned blue Suzuki with his beloved country bride
And adopted feline Weenie of the streets.
He was living his dream
Of complete self-sufficiency,
People were too easy to hurt otherwise
If reliant on their kindness in any way.

He made heroin cool again in Lynn,
Slept on its beach in fisherman's ice,
Carved up his arms for the unbelievable kick of it,
The kick of jumping off the roof
Got him locked inside a fine rubber room and orangeade
Institution of Higher Crazy, where he shared
His joy at Pops the Sailor
And the usual cast of characters he spent his time
Befriending, learning from, but mostly being amused,
Like a moth to the light, forever flying,
Forever learning how to find love, or, rather, apply it
To the unbelievable darkness at hand, inevitably a broken soul,
Someone lonely.

With, just as inevitably, a guitar, 
As in Witch City Salem, where he made his living 
From humility. Or in the City of the Queen, 
In whose service he always wound up, 
Fighting a well-intentioned army 
For the right to be free, to make his living from the street, 
The closest thing to natural we can find. 

And in many rooms he was alone, actually scared,
Tho' you'd never see that behind his Negro-level cool
That always relayed everything was 'ight
No matter how much you'd fret, he made it feel better,
Laughed at it before anyone else got a chance,
Jesse, old goat, wise philosopher,
Master of the bad-ass Geronimo Effect,
Who would rather share himself
Than win another war, the old general who 
Saw, finally saw, the most hardened of souls
And made them all better, for being true,
His impossible glee 
In bleakness unimaginable
For weeks, months, years on end.
He'd shrug and laugh, and, to comfort, say
"Anything is better than that damn shelter, son 
Almost as bad as the Gideons. They're the worst."

He was born high, in fact, at some faster vibration,
Some immediate knowledge of what God wants
His Children to do, full of cartoons, complete designs,
More life than a roomful of people, a Saturn of aliens
With lives like our own, in ice cream frequency detail,
Everything, in fact, included, all plastic toys were filled
With stories and tunes and sound effects, a soundtrack 
Constant as bird song.
And Jesse was a bird, just a little higher from us, 
Looking downward in love and wonder
With his ever-present cry: "Light!"
Which was joy,
Which was life
Well-lived.

He would only consent to work for the birds.
As a boy, with a vision of his dream home
In McAlpine Creek Park, an old tree house 
In the woods, he saw as his key to freedom,
To grow green beans and peas
You can eat off the vines, to turn wood
Left for dead into doghouses for the poor,
And in time he became a scrap metal entrepreneur 
Who took only what was thrown away
In subdivision dumpsters 
And made it his own,
With the freedom from 
That he insisted upon,
To be an orderly with the blessed elderly, EMT, team leader
In the free people's union, and then be mechanic,
Roof mover, tattoo surgeon, 
Flying to and fro so effortlessly, as his heart not the man said
And you know who the man is,
The same one you once were and will be again
But this time, thanks to Jesse,
You will know how it feels 
To give love 
Without condition to his friends,
Everyone. 

He rose to his station to wash the dustiest feet,
Menial to the mendicants as always,
Shaman of the streets, who did not believe
He was any less than anyone, or more ...

                               But his sunny orange turned blue
When he discovered he felt much more than the others,
Expected them to act more like the Children of God, 
Disappointed at himself to be disappointed by them, by us, 
For the humanity he chose
To experience, in the guise of a bird, a spirit of rising
From the mud where he played long after others had found
A warm bed and clean sheets to live their lives asleep.

And as the world prepared their Sunday night faces
For another round of dreams
He went out to demonstrate his love.
As if he knew when he was gone, we'd finally feel it.
His Passion was on Brookshire, a Roman chariot
For a distinctly non-Roman messiah
With a Jesus guitar for a cross
On a roadside Golgotha 
In a chord of God
Our song, not even knowing. 
He insists we must be joyous
At this time, even inside this ribcage prison, 
With a love only violence can show,
Where all I didn't know
Or couldn't understand
Came radiating through 
The angels and their wings
On the darkest of nights,
Like so many he remembers,
So pitch black he could see the birth of light. 

Monday, November 28, 2022

The Only Tears Allowed are Tears of Joy


Jesse McCulloch Sigler, 8/23/91 - 11/27/22

The death of someone close 
Is not always a bed of roses,
Sometimes it's a highway crucifixion
On a Jesus guitar
At a roadside Golgotha 
Whose chord of God
We sound with our song
Not even knowing,
Merely joyous inside the prison,
As he insists, with the love
Only violence can show,
Where all I didn't know
Or couldn't understand,
The love at the center of the gift,
Black chariot and doomed messiah,
Winds back to teach me
What love feels like
As time solidifies.

And a most decidedly non-Roman Christ
Holds me strictly to happiness
In all that is left,
A few scraps of Metallica
From a happy metal scrapper 
Who would only consent
To work for the birds,
Whose dream home was a tree house in the woods ...

Ah but it veers into tears now
For the people he touched
And left no choice
But to accept him as he was
Walking round in circles
Over the mistakes you've made --
That toughest of pills to take
Has been waiting in my cabinet
For a long, long time,
Why he chose to set his joy
In the places people weep of
Trying to forgive, trying to understand
How bleakness unimaginable
Could spring such hope each day,
How those the most heroic
Had the fewest laurels of all...

I rested in his cool,
Though twists and turns unfathomable
Amid his constant laughter
Of compassion there to share
For we always knew, no matter how
Far apart, our hearts
Were one frequency of love
That came from that familiar place
That gets included here now too somehow
However thrown out with old sketches
To the lowest toy chest 
In the earliest room.

And as I understand him less and less
I feel released, to get it at last,
What he did for those he loved,
Which was everyone
Without condition,
His unblinking smile
Into a gaping hole,
A darkness so perpetual
One could witness the birth of light.

Sunday, November 27, 2022

Contrast of Light and Boysenberry Vine

To be a poet
With no time fr'it

In obligation's constant pull,
Something I agreed to

So unable to
Settle

Except for the bend of
Tendons

Angering my way
Through

Morning chores
As bells,

Evening chores
As prayers

And the numb
Unending plea

From every building
Burning

While songs await
Patiently

To share the sentience 
Of birds

Who seemingly belong now
To another world

As I look through glass
With occupied eyes,

Rag in hand,
Daring to clean.

Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Variations at Sunset

The imagined sun is no less real
Than the one we worship
But the hawk that comes close
Is more familiar.

~~
We who make the least etheric goods
Can afford to think our thoughts are less,
A quotient of air, a gradient of nothingness,
For what imprisons us we're proud to possess.

~~
A father dominates his daughter at hoops
But one would never know,
Nor the meaning feet deal to a soccer ball --
How heavy in the material must holiness go.

~~
We savor and wait for the pink
As ideal at the end of the day.
Is it real, we ask, knowing it's physical,
Colors still stable to unbelieving eyes.

~~
How dimly the world of thought
We come from filters in
To the neighborhood of hard-edged forms
And children spiraling with glee.

~~
The blue light dog, with a tennis ball 
In its snout, can only smile
At how we've made things simple,
Impossible to transcend.

Gift of the Balsamic Moon

We are limits, not bodies,
Punctured by edits ...
That's the way it has to be;
The thing's not real
Unless seen
In all its glory
By those eyes on every side
Worrying death to infinity.

What we call the real
Mere movie
To a ghost projector 
Who slips the loops
Through dust-mote light.
The proprietor hums
As the audience turns
Stone and blind.

I have always known this,
But now ... now
Its sound is a purr
That soothes the background clouds
To sleep.
The birds wake up,
Try to sound like it,
That is, like me.

Sunday, November 20, 2022

Old Playbills and User Manuals

Consciousness starts the machine.
Is that really so strange, so new an idea
As we'd dreamed?

When we sleep, the world ceases,
As even the golden books
Of lies attest.

As we rise the next act lifts
Exactly as the program indicates.
We install instantly,

Can look but better not attach
To the backdrop that we're not.
Everything is for our benefit.

How, then, could word not reach 
That we are God?
Pages I look through in vain.

Thursday, November 17, 2022

Chill After the Show

The night has cat eyes,
Thousands pounce the windshield 

As the cars move through space
Under the whole's baton 

That swings in my mind like a lantern,
As if to music already there

And the cars would appear
Without my eye.

The mad clavinet that plays in my head
Overtakes their sound

For the feeling of gold
Beyond the Norm's sign. 

It must be open all night
As they claim,

How else could each booth tell its secret
From a room I have never seen?

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

Confessions of a Short Attention Span

I'm a shapeshifter 
Of 
The frequencies ...

Now I wear 
A mustard 70's 
Velour

And am observed 
By those I've noticed,
Looked at by eyes

I can't see through,
Unlike the moment 
Before ...

But a moment further
I have Billie 
Holiday from the Black Trumpet PA

And I have her 
3 AM voice,
Always someone else ...

And now the Hell's Angels 
Have taken over 
The pool ...

And Aung San 
Has gone
To jail!

Each thought is a leaf 
I pick and exist
Inside of

If I have 
A place
At all -- 

The all must always 
Be nothing, 
Must even close its apertures

To send tiny packets 
Of universe
Kaleidoscopic with light,

A light that imprints its thoughts 
On the sky 
As time lapses,

The shutter closes,
And the bulb of lived experience
Flashes in a wink

That captures
The afterburn 
Of what is natural:

Everything indistinguishable,
Compressed into some middle
Of a love sangwee,

Not the blessed separation,
That thing we asked for,
Freedom.

Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Balance Exercise

When I'm in the other room 
I am not real to her.

I don't live in her attention
So from her field have been removed

Only to return
With an offer of coffee

Fully materialized, 
While the real I 

Pauses briefly from chasing clouds 
In a balloon
 
To ponder on whether she'd need
Some love. 

So I sense in this way who I am,
In absentia.

Monday, November 14, 2022

Alienations of the Free

The art of the adept 
Is the skill with which the truth
Mixes with the lie

For the truth needs companions
— It's lonely in the cold
Without gods, words, tastes shared

And the dual always waits 
With a loaded pistol aimed 
At whatever heart aches

To get through the smoke
Of a morning where nothing
Is left to chance,

Everything's explained, or
Everyone thinks it is at least,
The bare table that's been left for us:

The coffee is bitter,
Berries sour,
Tastes that can be shared ...

How can you survive
When it's sweeter for you
Than for others?

Friday, November 11, 2022

Senator Fetterman*

Senator Fetterman
     doesn't exist.
We created him,
            you and I,
Out of wholecloth
                wishes.

Their latest model
      imposition 
Coincidentally 
             the same
As what we wish
      to experience:

The joy, the anger,
              the pain
And thus remembrance 
      of who we are
And can now peel away
      for a newer one,

A different ring
      of the true tree
Forever growing
      without a single
Idea of separation
      succeeding

To change the future
                  trajectory.
Those limits
     bounding ideas;
From beyond they
    scarcely exist,

Like 
    Senator
            Fetterman,
Who they talk 
            up
Today
    as President

When everybody knows
                there is no
President,
                   for I am
In charge here,
    of everything.

* Refers to John Fetterman, an android replicant of the type immortalized in the "Minions" cartoon series, who cannot form coherent thoughts yet is claimed by mainstream narratives to be Pennsylvania's newest US Senator, having beaten a beloved celebrity heart surgeon in the 2022 midterm elections. 

Wednesday, November 9, 2022

The Taste of Sour Grapes

The black ocean
I never knew I desired 
Comes cajoled from a cloud
Of my thoughts in another room

Forever plotting out
What I will do,
How the needle will move,
Always touching true.

Monday, November 7, 2022

Dinner on the Princess

Was a freak cold in Laredo 
With the ladies in their serapes 
And that beautiful Mexican boy
Who begged to go back with us
But the best we could do 
Was an Encinitas orphanage
Run by our friend Stan Stout
Remember him?
City of Children
I think it was called.
They let us walk right in,
There was a great big bathroom 
And tiny little toilets all lined up.
In those days we went diving
All the time,
Lobster every night
And we found one
On that pink fluffy rug,
The same one where I found
That missing snake,
And no, possums aren't dangerous
But raccoons are. We had a family 
In our yard
Of different colors
But nobody does negatives
Any more, the colors 
Aren't right, I took some old Kodaks 
To a specialist
And they couldn't get it back.
But all the heads turned
For the coyote coat
We bought at auction
At the Bear Valley Country Club.
I remember
Hilda asked Johanna
What are you doing,
And she said she was looking for Lars
Somewhere in the crowd
Isn't that sad?
Poor woman.
Not like MiMa 
Churning up the gravel 
In front of the cabin
After Pookie married a black man.
Now all those rednecks
Became BLM
That crazy summer
And gave out our number
"We're gonna kill your kids"
They said, little did they know
We had a pickaninny too. 

Friday, November 4, 2022

Elon as the Good Reptillian

This green room is a hologram,
I sway around in space
And conjure with my thoughts 
What I thought I heard him say:

We live inside a game
Of our own design
(Though we still blame that pesky AI).
One of a million universes

We must choose
With our thoughts
And our actions
As the frequency rises

To shinier lakes,
More iridescent cactus,
Source for the shamans
When they manifest jaguars

Because the Amazon's so vast
The old computer can't keep up,
So it lets 5D 
Sift in with the wind ...

Settle down pilgrim,
The thought in books
Will one day wish
To be experienced.

Tuesday, November 1, 2022

The Apartment in Carmel

The apartment in Carmel,
     I remembered it

I even remembered the names
     of her parents
Who were still there
    and still, however vaguely 
Remembered me
    when I tracked them down
Through identical floorplans,
    unmemorable numbers.

It was the location
    I recalled
Across from what is
    no more.

They let me look in
    on her museum,
All the broken pieces
    of youthful expression
The perfect coda
    to their disappointment,
The unredeemable pain 
    fathers feel.

I missed the flight
    from Indianapolis
To be silent in the kitchen
    with its ticking clock.

There was no need to assist her
    or apologize
When she inexplicably appeared
    and we hugged
In the death grip of nothing
    between us anymore --
There never was a chance
    to even save her

And the fact all this was never real
    immaterial.

Saturday, October 29, 2022

Another One for Sylvia

The druids are still skin-walking,
       birds still aligned in flight,
She was as they are except
       we weren't her,
Could never understand
       the basics of her plight,
Still it went
                    heralded
       just like she wanted,
                          with all her
Careful what you wish for
                    heart.

She went famous in excess
      of all that we keep bottled 
                    up
Like a humming refrigerator 
      in our morning prayers
               of domestic bliss,
Everything clean, everything loved
               and pulled into perfect
                            volupté         
      as if
               that's the way it always
                        should be
In the dusty fields of harmony light
      where our being resides.

Any move below
                             a choice of
Unfathomable love. 

Wednesday, October 26, 2022

Song of the Orange Pepper Farmer

The first few cautious steps
Into 5th density,
Where the mind of the pepper
Reveals who it is,

There’s exchange of ideas
Instantly, without a wall,
The will bequeathed
Whatever it wants

Your brain is an earth 
Of mighty rivers
Beyond your vapor form,
All-embracing consciousness flows 

As thought that continually unspools 
The toroid to its unified thread
Always from a central point,
The point where you are exactly

In this moment of blue 
Spilling out all
The secrets you thought you knew
But never once came close

Like the comments section
For the press conference 
Announcement read
In the wake of what later occurred

Not one of the posters
With their well-thought-worn theories
Able to call correctly
What the future holds.

Sunday, October 23, 2022

The Daily Commute

The guard at the door
     between sleep and waking
Will acknowledge you, if you'll 
     notice
(Though even Google won't 
     give his name),

But it's a hard lock
     at the gate,
Top secret what goes 
     on there,
Save some fragment
     remainders,

Teaching Assignments 
     to chew on
In the waking hours,
     in those moments
When the veil's still
     full of holes.

The moment you pass sleep's
     threshold
What went on there
     is over,
Whatever cities 
    you've toured,

Whatever heights 
    you've scaled,
Whatever plans
    made for you
In waking hours
    to execute

Go through without the glitch
    of your knowing,
They are like sand 
    collapsing instantly 
Except as anamnestic
    toy.

There are no rules up there 
    as rule us here
(The part where I ink
    what disappears).
Too much impossible 
    for the veil 

Not to be kept taut
    by this slave
Who kindly waits
    for my word
To go back to what I know,
   who I am.

Friday, October 21, 2022

Still Life with Surfer

For the Taygetans

Reality creates itself on a wave
Thundering to shore,
Belief so strong
It is so.

The tongues encircle as they tumble
In a roar, to overwhelm 
The others
With their love

As a final giving gesture,
With no last word.
They grind to answers,
The destitute truths,

For there is no other
To share,
The wings reach up the beach
In flippers of foam,

Gather light as tumblers turn
From the effect of
Every perspective
Elbowing in

For the sake of each passion,
As extension to their care
-- The others are jolted,
Driven away

In an almost-white pillowed buoy
That floats away to sea
For the archives to reclaim
As the distance

Between yourself
And what you see
Lengthens instead of being
Redeemed

For the mirrored dimensions
To become one frequency,
One shared sovereignty
Of being,

You, me, or both, together,
The lens of everything peers in there
Like the sun through
Magnifying glass 

That spills out over the water
As light just beyond the truth,
The purity of your frequency,
Its utmost confidence –

You must know it
Before you attempt
To harmonize
With everything else.

Otherwise your answers
Are found in other’s notes,
And we don’t know
What to do with them

So we fight,
We take stands
In order to divide
With sordid fisticuffs

That won’t cease their cruel
Unforgiving blossoms
For the sake of a truth
That can't bring us together

But can be hurled away
With an instant of inattention,
A lack of the slightest notation
Of how the tyrant stays.

There are plenty of waves
In the sea,
The ones you ride with,
The ones you know

Arc higher, more
Fibonacci in their curl
Of a natural order
Humans always get wrong.

The surfer surrenders
To another day,
Taking the last wave in
Like a golden ray

In this moment
That shows how there is
No time,
As suddenly

The water is still
And electric blue
As it apparently always has been
And forever will be.

Thursday, October 20, 2022

The Anachronism of Place Names

The rats are on the beach,
Mayonnaise in the bottle,
The hills of San Berdu
Another Golgotha

For Christs to pop like mushrooms
And pimple the rolling lavender
Where sacrifice is sold
For the sake of the Romans

Where all roads end,
At the Vatican Library specifically,
Where the books of truth are held
Against their will,

Sequestered from the world,
The copies destroyed, fake records left
In their wake like mosquito dander
After the blood is taken

To seal a precious few
Of the too, too many holes
In non-existent history,
Where themes would otherwise skirt away

From the story made for applause
Not accuracy,
To cordon off, in this case, the heady days
Of rebellion into surrender

Evangelicized as the good news
Of military conquest, as when Titus had
The zealots his followers killed fished out
Of the Galilee, for example.

The salt of lizards we long for so much
Turns out worthless, a pestilence,
A yeasty scent, though nothing else
Can compensate the victims, us.

Monday, October 17, 2022

Mantis 1

Why are cars insects?
      No one has said.
Our frame of reference
      So limited

We look at wings
      On the windshield 
Grooving to an Allman guitar
      As some mechanical

Construction, something children
      Could find a pattern for,
Instead of what it is,
      What exists outside our world

In the cozy dirt
       Where the impossible,
Because invisible,
       Seems easy.

We suck all their sugar away
       But they love
Like we would
       So it's OK,

No one is here anyway,
       The mirror is only a light
And we live like them
       In the shadow

Jumping from reed to reed 
       Through unpredictable breeze
By way of foraging
       As they, they

Watch from above
       And below
On their idols
       Because innocent.

They hover over.
       That's how they fly,
Aware of all life
       As we see nothing.

Their subtle hum is all 
      The subtle hums,
Transparent wings and the palms
      Are one loving murmur.

They are the Gods because 
      The humans won't be.
They control the world, you know,
      Those buzzing invisibles.