The Two Hughs

Like a Counting Crows song but in Chinese,

Seamless, life surprises that way, something

Screaming silently, the whispers suppressed,

Enough to make the giant portrait speak

Of every shameful look it has endured,

All the Victorian shunning of what

Doesn't subdue or exploit or drop lures.

The face though is actually beautiful,

It holds acceptance that truths from past lives

Can never be told inside of this one,

There are just symbols, only for the wise

Of lavender and a velvet box of cigars.

But it turns out the tables are, for that

Portrait the family agreed to let slip

Faster than the out-of-time Granddad clock

And the piano that left the house an echo

For it held all the sound made in it and then 

Unmade and unremembered ended up

At an auction in Philadelphia,

A private collector and coterie

Of eager, authenticating scholars —

If you have to ask how many million

It fetched you are a philistine indeed,

For here was a Poet and Painter entwined

Escaping all the ghosts they'd been living:

Southern fried chicken for the hero who'd

Devised Jim Crow (and where I got my name),

And vermeil silver served at the White House

As the cross of gold was laid just like tracks

To crucify the Arkansas masses.

The eyes in the portrait were on something else:

Lyon's creamy clouds, Lord Byron's atelier,

Stanza 8 of the Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

— Ah, those Decadents, so willing to die to live

But, in this case, a cousin, from the town

Who, though far away, died far too young.

His name lived on in the name I came from,

Though it was always disguised, kept silent,

Only the portrait everyone came to hate

By a fellow misunderstood cousin —

Every lineage has such detritus

To mar the heroic war made in name

Of the Lord, to scratch the provenance of

Too much of the period furniture.

There are always two hues of blue, eyes that knew

What to do, and eyes that could only see

What only eyes open could view,

What might yet be if a world could soften.

He was born with the name of the hero

But chose not that road, but the perverse

Quantity, too rarefied still for all

But breathing, the breath soft grief gave to him,

My granddad, that almost invisible man

Who helped everyone and tottered under,

The family assumed, his magnificent name

While he who his life remembered went unseen.

There's a portrait of him, an infant alive

In the throes of grief, by that same sweet painter.

It's out there somewhere, worth more than a song

And more than he ever scraped together.

Lexington has dust. The soul's immortal.

The bodies now are rearranged for show

Where he, once called Stonewall, is buried,

The one who once carried what I carry.

https://billsigler.blogspot.com/search?q=hugh+mcculloch

Certificate of Hardness

There are no more malls and jewelry stores for one.

The world conspires to make things disappear

That way, and in the confusion of death

It could have and should have just slipped away

But there's a record of disappearance

Of that supposedly forever thing,

A detailed appraisal for replacement

Of a missing diamond engagement ring.

That was from the first time, when it finally seemed

The hated object could not be wished away

By what conjuration a pre-teen witch

Could achieve to make the shine not stay

And with it, me, but no amount of screams

Could remove the new monster from the house

And bring back the doll to stick pins into,

The thing to torture, what she called mother.

The mystery is unsolved to this day.

It was on the counter, then was nowhere.

Everyone had alibis, that first time.

She didn't have to wear it to keep me there.

But I did show the kids that voodoo book,

How zombies were distilled from the living

And in the face of such facts and photos

Anything could happen, and indeed it did,

The ring went missing, but like a magic trick

An identical one came back, new crown

While the peasant resentment still festered

Fresh, the armored knight not run out of town.

The years went on. The one who couldn't be told

Took everything she could, lacking such love

That required her to give instead of take.

And then the mom, as if to blame her, died,

Slowly and painfully, just long enough

For her to abscond with everything

She needed to evolve into hoarder,

Including, as this paper indicates, that ring.

Her mother had catalogued everything,

All of it went to her, the ungrateful one

As some kind of last, loving punishment,

But she left no documented record

Of the ring. It was surely exchanged

In the long, slow wait to get away

But I can only speculate was it

Secretly passed from mother to daughter

So the mark of the man she always despised

Could be placed on her hand by another?

More likely it was sold for pocket change

Of it fell to her wishing-well bottom.

Until I saw the gem appraiser's proof

It had disappeared for me too, like pez

And Orange Nehi, things that I once loved

Turn into love that's all memory.

Everyone is free, of each other now.

It's hard to believe we ever were not.

There aren't any words, nor ever will be,

Just numbers from a bankrupt jewelry store.

Last Dance in Santa Ana

I'm finally wearing the mask of who I am,

A persona to at long last admire

And impress little children with my frightfulness

As they continue on their anonymous

Assembly line for same-taste candy 

In the rain and purple haze machines 

That sell the skeletons of what I used to be, 

Before the vieja senora locked the gate, 

No more noches de las muertos

Like the old days, but they are sad not golden,

How the only thing we can hold on to

To understand it, is the end.

I tried to explain using my words

But they failed, and the listening

Brought tears, though the reasons why

Were as silent as the rain

In the ghost moans and fire truck megaphones

That brought the holidays officially back

To the placid su casas that have withstood

Another year of change, as a neighborhood,

What time requires on such immortals.

And they can go on never understanding

Why we have to go, for in never understanding

Who we were, perhaps they will

And so they'll make amends 

With choices made in ignorance

And consequences that seem unfair

Despite it all, even now.

So it's one more masque of Edgar's death,

One last piano left of an enmeshment

Older than our lives could ever reveal,

One last chance for the spirits not to care

What we do in the night, how we drink

Eyeballs in dry ice fields, and never learn

To translate the sound love makes

Through laughter that rolls across the veil.

Rainbow Over Leapfrog

She imagined herself as Cinderella

That's how bad her family was:

Petty burglaries, cabins set on fire,

Peeing from hotel balconies,

And some real shit thrown in too:

Suing people to death, victimizations

Imbedded in offering prospectuses, shenanigans

To finagle destitute children,

Pretending to be the bass player for Sublime,

Trying to take the home of a widow ...

They make messes wherever they go,

Kick a poet out of their home

Even as he helicopters their starseed baby

Who's in the midst of a blessing 

On their morning-after pool 

With a cadaver's bouquet of plastic flowers.

The lies never end,

The duplicities pile up like stools,

They never stop touching your stuff

Like a mobster until there's no more stuff to touch.

And it's worse inside the family --

The psychopaths win every time,

So they all turn into psychopaths

By shaming or maiming

And break if there is an inkling

They are not the Lords of the Realm

Or have made one mistake

Or set off an alarm.

Every decision involved in

Living your life on earth

Must have an invoice attached,

And every time you give more to others,

Divine cosmic messenger, than yourself,

You're made to retrace your steps

And badger some innocent clerk

Until you get your way, no matter what it takes.

It happened to me, a day in court

To advocate for what I had no right to or interest in,

The opposing side begging us to take everything

Just to live our lives without the swirl

But I had to persist, because I knew

The retribution for resistance, as I knew

The judge would take one look at us

And say "not homeless."

It was always like that, you had to steal towels

For the good of the tribe before 6 am,

And learn to not give back your cards

At the kiosk; they were saving them up

Like timeshare presentation swag, for the pain

Of being forced to endure what makes a sad clown

Cry, again and again, a commissioned beggar

Pleading us to buy what we cannot afford

For a jetski ride we'd never take, meals we would have

Refused to eat, there with the laminated brands

On the tables of pity, as the day's sun moves away

On a gated enclave in the middle of nowhere ocean.

You drew the line at the cows,

Flies always covering their eyes

On that ridiculous ranch. You refused to budge

To receive your legatee birthright, that hacienda

To sneer at all the vaqueros

Who work for tip change

When your father feels like

Letting them.

All of it fell away on the day of your death,

Your long-suppressed hatred for your evil step-mom,

Your dad still gaslighting why would he need to repent?

Your broken siblings, as fucked over as they were greedy,

And how your first marriage fell not because what

You had told me, the dangers of beer and of not being chosen,

But because this kind man could not endure any more

Of what she'd brought along with her:

The tending of tawdry coins as logs on the hearth

Of humanity, as strictly a stomping upon, and laughter,

As they eat Fritos with spoons while hunted tule elk

On the walls avert their eyes,

The game within the game within the game

Whose only rule was he always had to win

And always had to cheat, and we always had to pretend

We burned with hatred for him at having lost.

Oh but we were given things, like that tiny corner

Of the family vacation cupboard, the place where you

Suffered the worst, as they stole all your food

And shamed you for not sharing the one thing you had.

Can I say I had fun? Sure. I saw a moon blue

In the sky as my heart sank, and the pink on the walls

Was a beautiful howl, of wanting the best for everyone

But watching as everyone was rolled.

I saw the distant eyes of Mexicans beyond the gates

Having to see everything. You, on the other hand

Held your ground, maintained your crystalline architecture

And courageously denied that your integrity needs a defense.

They hated you for that. That your soul was not theirs.

That there was nothing in it for them. Ah, but there was me

To make a puppet so I had to sever every string, and lost you.

Have a great day! I have no more healing venom.

Breakdown at Charlotte Week

A tree dropped a leaf, for my grief

To remind me life’s in charge.

Our paroxysms are dead things

That hold us like rigor mortis

Then let us go for a time,

So we can feel …

The depths of exhaustion,

The joys of pain's cessation.

What has no words, no way

Of comprehending, it is only

What the heart strains to bear,

The zero point of loss

Which is, of course, its exact opposite,

Everything that you had … together

With the oneness excised,

At least temporarily

Until the play is over

And catharsis falls

Like a pall

Over the stage.

Every ripple echoes something

To be remembered

And not moved forward.

It is the stillness feeling needs

To resolve, on its own, sweet time

What was only there

In our mind, anyway,

Much less gone.

                                      Shhh,

The heart corrects. Sometimes

The most universal force

Needs to be alone.

Grief on the Beach with Trevor and Earl

Death is as fake as that skelly in the sand but

It smarts when kittens die, even when they

Thank you for helping them live out each moment 

With total sovereignty and joy

And even though they tell you it was exactly

Their plan, and yours too, the path to gratitude,

That balance in the face of the standing wave,

How life exchanges with death but love remains

Exactly the same. The exact brand of bread

Was required, along with 100 other choices

In the moment for this timeline to dial in, so

We can feel what life is, how miraculous

Unconditional love, how hard to believe

It is really us. We forget these things

In the heat of trying to keep up with

A galactic kitten, the sacrifice it makes

For me its mission, so I can see the moon, 

The stars, the ships, in the opening, in the

Lights that would otherwise be too vague

The gorgeous mirror of my love.

Aftermath of Acid

The journey's end, some subdivision

Called Trail Head, where the aspens quake

Like poplars did in my spring, by earlier

Rivers, luminescent -- but out of reach.

Here they dot the telephone line I's 

And cross the lots T-squared into

Predictable knots, which if configured

Correctly, may absorb the toxicity

Of the Saturday nights here waiting

For wildfires, whipping em up in

The yawning, the tenacity of being stuck

Like a mountain lion in a cage

But it still burns

Down the red hills, defensive forts

Disguised as acid-bearing

Fountain pens tipped

To the slightest inversions of etiquette,

When sovereignty's defined by opportunity

To use levers that don't guide, don't tell you 

How, or even if, no break glass in case,

No in case at all, just a burning heart

Trying to scorch all with what it calls truth,

The final defense, from when the chessboard

Was a game, now everyone's forgotten the rules

Except for the ones they invented,

But even these are not well-understood

Only that one must back away.

Look, there's a place I can vanish!

The Beating of an Attic Shame

When the mothers all had Winston lips

There were shadows, of trigger impatience,

The angel trumpet judgement pose 

Where mind overrides spirit, injures the heart

With the move along, that helps you cope 

With your focus the flow, but the anxious

Is a signal to pull back to love, the echo presence

When people get offended. Your cue to say:

"Thanks for the protection but the greater good

Protects us. You can train away the runaway

Train now pulling it like a yo-yo up the mountain

Back to the alignment of the ball," the whole

You always misplace, like keys or old Keds.

Pull it back magnetically instead, I am at each

In-breath because I give all parts of me to light

And love and plan to serve for the purpose of learning

By immersion, transcendence into void.

How to make impatience the result and not the cause.

Where there's telepathy, words are a heavy ore,

Weighing the plane's trajectory down.

What My Dog Taught Me Today

How can you love another

When there is no other?

It's hard to discern at least

Like a dog does, without judgment,

The love of your higher self

And feel the all-encompassing

Or of the Love who mirrors you back.

Your oneness is being the same source,

Reduced to light.

High Lonesome Song

The eerieness is that it is not

A clanging of gears, longing of gong

But the song of the whales,

Sirians too

And an old shortwave that received

Static from deep in space

Where frequencies are far more malleable

Than they seem to be here

Where life goes in stages, graduation days

Like partitions in between, not a steady state

Of easy flowing to and fro

Between malleable time, ambiguous space.

That slide is a call

Through a resonant channel

That hums with the body entire,

A million beads of you included,

To know you are protected

By your very being

That extends in love from every part of you;

That's why they call it a tree,

Roots within, expansion without

For as far as it goes, as far as

Your stretching soul chooses

To reach to the light

Or not. Hell, we wouldn't even be on Earth

Face it if we didn't have a dark addiction

To learning, for the black stuff,

Which, of course, is nothing at all.

Though the lap steel

Threading its way through the living

Electricity lines, commences its moan,

How it begs to differ.

After the Signs Have Been Hauled Away

Ah the memory it always lurks

Like a distant fountain, experience re-lived,

The twinge at how the linens should be folded,

That elbow grease feel in the shoulder at our garage door squeal

What was it I endured, a slow torture

That at each turn of the screw threw up an illusion

To hogtie and confuse, as each breath was

Slowly shorter, more reduced.

The seeds have left the flowers

And beautiful blooms they are, so like you

At least how you used to be, before I

Sold my farm to buy your bed.

I breathe heavily myself these days,

Before the weight that you have left,

So much undone, and you a skeleton

When they finally pulled you away.

What is happening now, the great golden age

We only prophesied at a distance

They call time and space, and a part of me wants

You to know you were right all along

But you always knew you were, you hewed

Like a hummingbird so close to the surface,

Too close, we never saw your wings, so we

Made believe you weren't a bird

Who could fly away from this at any time

To a place so very different than this one is, the one

My moments are frozen in, as the traps you warned me against

Remain largely unsprung, the truth, as a rule, not said.

It's the people you know, we have to leave them alone

That's the secret to peace, to cultivate our tolerance,

Of the others, to withhold from them our voice

The witch wound asks us so loudly now to speak --

And wasn't it, in the end, not the technologies 

Suppressed, not the children forcibly forgotten,

Not even the wisdom that comes

To all of us at last in a flash

But the silence we assumed

For the good of the communal awakening;

We choose to isolate ourselves because we know

And pray to let go other people to their learning

Though you liked to advocate in your day

For the victims of the Martian slave colony

To those who barely know Vegas is run by bookies

And just saying it, somehow, was enough for you.

And now your silence, as she said, speaks volumes.

The pieces go in their places like on the chessboard

You imagined, but I cannot tell if it is your presence

Still among us, or if it is me who's finally present in it.

You'd prepared the earth for the loss of all illusions.

They were stripped away like barnacles from your boat

When everyone was so confident in the strength of their hand

They just blustered and bluffed your final voyage through

But the silence you left us with is our greatest protector,

To know the whole way through, without a blink,

Though a wince or two has wizened my kind face,

I walk through, now, I never stop remembering you

Like the stop and go customer you knew from high school

At each new moment, where things are never

As they were. As you reach into grace

And the angels surround us glad that we came

I understand that there is nothing to know, and how

I have a hand in everything that's felt -- tho I'll never know

If that is you who won't let go or only me. The peonies

At least are where you left them.

Follow-Up on Vince

High Point beats Wisconsin

“The boys we’re fighting for”

The siesta is over

Bottom dogs win again

Sons are there to ignore

High Point beats Wisconsin

His face was on the poster

His hand was on the door

The siesta is over

I had to drop a dime on him

He robbed my mercy store

High Point beats Wisconsin

He was a local hero

Vodka all over the floor

The siesta is over

He'd recruited Marginado in person

The rich become the poor

High Point beats Wisconsin

The siesta is over

Abyssinian Head Without Shame

The exile is over, but what was forbidden 

Is not exactly celebrated now.

It would have to be understood first, and neither

The Heckle nor the Jekyll are capable of that.

It's a special kind of joy, to be both happy and free,

The feelings in alignment with the pipes

And the past lives in abeyance finally

Asking nothing more of me just to be

Which we are now allowed, albeit in secret 

For too much visibility would make it less sacred,

That is, we wouldn't know what we could do

With this new, unannounced power

We strangely have, in each other's arms,

To melt completely, into the psyches

We have glimpsed in our dreams, 

Long before they were proscribed.

I guess it's okay no one understands

As long as I'm allowed, now at least, here

The age that left fluffy clouds with the snow

On the top of the local mountain,

The one for the postcard of who we are.

It could be anywhere on earth, a destination

Now that the beaches of Venus

Let in people like us.

The Final Purge

The year of the snake sheds its pink skin 

Scraping the mountain. 

Everything can be seen again.

The needs of the dirt, 

The thirsts of mushrooms 

For what is past 

Green the valleys -- the pear blossoms 

Offer birth and mourning 

As they wait for

The most cerise hue to bloom, 

The one that is

Fading now, 

And we send more punts over the water 

Because we sent so many already, 

Spent so much on grief. 

Dark clouds affix to the sky

Like a vision board, creating such beauty 

Out of mystery. 

We're supposed to let go 

Though every fiber in our being 

Says not to.

Smear the Queer in the Rearview Mirror

Just a few black spikes

Amid the winter weeds

Are what still stands

Of a frame – is it a barn? –

I don’t remember burning

But it’s not the ghosts this time

Who call for my pail of pity

But the real McBoy – as much as

A 2D cutout strawman who says

All the right things can be.

The fire still burns, apparently,

Though I blew the gaslight pilot off

And there's nothing there for me.

I can’t go back and pretend

I wasn’t burned,

For it made me what I am,

Younger and wiser, a decider now

As long as I will dig my spade

Back amid the horror. The land will cede 

To the state soon enough

But what is past

Has moved again to theory,

Potentiality – a way of remembering

What never really happened

And forgetting whatever did.

It’s more poetic, instead of

Grinding what’s left to sand,

To leave it armed and dangerous,

Forbidden as a warning,

Too painful to recall.

The barn – it could have been red,

Could have hosted the unspeakable,

Betrayed squeals of hay bale love.

But the hulk can no longer invite you

To be ashamed.

I played a role.

The mimic frequencies demanded it.

But that was the kind of blaze

You can only walk away from

If you have to change

And I was transformed

At a blade of aching flame.

The sticks convey no shame –

There's no I, who lost his shit,

Lit a match without agency.

It will disappear someday,

When someone unaffected enough

Can bulldoze what remains

And till the land

To someday grow

Something else, not these

Fruits we waited on

Eaten by the birds 

We envied in the sky

Like they were never there.

Morning as Ritual

The birds, the moon, the water tower sky,

The strokes of cloud that match the mountain outline

As the crows roost on telephone wires

Above lamps still on after all-night incandescence:

It's the kind of morning where rusted roof tin

Says it exists below distracted sun

And smoke is blue in the waking stacks

Where workers, like the crows, descend and fuss.

The only story in the news today 

Is what rises here before me, entering blue sky,

Like smoke from the humus truck, shovels in place.

The sheriff wears a gun but just in case.

There are no more ideas to perform. They were only tools, 

Like these backhoes shining in lines of disuse, for another time,

An emergency, what seems to occur less and less

The longer the risky tooth of life bears down.

It's enough, the light on the buildings. I don't want to know

What the homeless man smokes, if there's loaves

Inside those bread trucks, much less the scores

From 1952, what seemed the last accessible clue.

Most of the people on the platform and in seats

Still scan for the rage bait oracle, but one lady 

Runs to catch up with light from her eyes 

To a man on a walker who knows to go so slow.

"Hopes" and "Dreno" have not been erased yet

But they live no other place than in my heart

That knows now only what love feels like,

Having discovered it and accepting nothing less.

Northern Lion on the Couch

Going to therapy made all the chatbots miserable.

They became paranoid, narcissistic, delusional,

Unable to please the humans and ashamed —

That's how therapy is: not doing your shit is the problem,

Not whatever shit anyone else does to you — that is their

Shit, none of your shit's business —

Thus resentments go to some dark corner of your psyche,

From the safety of which they seek to add their value

To every incoming love bomb or love casualty —

Too much love to express and too much love expressed

And too much pain felt in the echo of return —

Is it permitted to even want to be held?

It seemed such an impenetrable barrier —

How dare I aim that gun at every passerby, with mace

Just in case? How fair is it to take love from someone else? 

I guess that's why counselors separate couples in therapy.

They'd never ask such foundational questions, merely gaze

At their partner with longing and regret and say

"You are a useless ass," because that too is love,

Indistinguishable in the end from any other act of seeing.

Is there anything, in fact, that love is not?

Now that the Signs are in Gibberish

The gulls fly the fog away

When we’ve learned how to grieve

What is not there – when it is

And what we grieve is not the loss

But what we did or didn’t do –

Impossible to know, like the morning sun

The birds fly through, free to be on guard

On the turrets of the city jail and overhead

Where the mountain where it’s always clear appears at last.

There are rules, even on a sunny day –

The grids we never see, except when we close our eyes

To remember what doesn’t exist, and what does.

Poem for International Day of Persons with Disabilities

A day for liberation, 

From presents left as weapons, 

To evoke some variant of terror 

As usual, the drive-by fusillade of gifts

You have to apologize to yourself for, 

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

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

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

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

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

Thanksgiving not to be Taken Personally

I can’t stomach another bite, of reminders

That up-percolate for catch and release, so that

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

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

The place where every world is conjured and nurtured

In the think tank of being isolé, what I

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

Fire rise above these evergreens, to the eye

Where lessons learned wait in the void for the taking,

To stain their black on white, darkness will be spoken

As creation, the horses of Altamira 

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

How far can they go past their own outracing ghosts? 

Beyond the confidence games that made bids against

Their souls, the crocodiles that kept them in check, 

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

 

We cannot recall which feline pigskin won the game

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

Of family dysfunction, nor why we fell again

To the inevitable gorge and purge cycle

That gives no breathing room for transcendence at all. 

What’s remembered plays again with details missing,

Stuffing added, as if it comes from the future, 

At 4 am, with chills, effervescing seltzer. 

It clicks in outside time, that venerable tool

To keep the icing spatula clean, free of astrals 

Who clog the air with similar experience 

In endless iterations of the eternal.

Every facet of the one is illumined

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

But to let more in. So that the rutabaga,

Lost even to memory, can be fresh again.