Sunset Near San Diego

The smell of charred, rancid flesh,
The sound of laughter, blood red glasses rung,

And voices of unthinking cruelty (humor),
One gotcha and we're through.
If you're wounded you will have to play the fool.

The Jacuzzi steam is like a war zone
As the infinity pool dribbles like a machine gun
To water the Mandarin lime trees down
The hillside pomegranate red.

They're stealing the view from the sacred mountain
On the terraced marble of their great mausoleums
That would give the town's homeless a place to live.

All it would take is some real gratitude.

But despite the laughter and the perfect weather
Only sorrow echoes on the cold stone.

At a Winery Wedding

I tried to be mortal, really I did
But "the end" was never a reliable answer to any of my questions.

Love was just too endless, grief too immense.
When we held on to life we were clinging to much more:
A one-minute egg, the smell of fresh timothy,
Old magazines left on streets for the junk dealer,
Compassion for one's lover -- besides, death was always
What happened to others, like a Little League trophy
That changed not a thing but remained in the basement
For owner after owner, 'til when the house was torn down finally
It seemed something timeless, a variant of mercy,
With a persistent and meaningless glow all around it.

Friday Afternoon in the Green Room

The door hit me on the way out
Like cactus at sunset as the sandbox turned to dust
And the puppeteer laughed,
Prickly-pear, once-mighty,
At the thought of another fool
Like yours truly, as disposable as razors
But never nearly as sharp,
To grimace under her fingers
And call it a dance.

While the players writhe in pathos
At my poor, unfathomable fate,
The take back of the golden handshake,
My emotion is not hate, but crazy love,
That she thought enough of me to cut me off
Like an alkey at three lime-green gin philosophies
Before the madness set like concrete,
And she was sweet to kill the light
So I didn't have to see leftover faces nursing miseries
Their soft, unfeeling hands
Rehearsing their own ghost limb shake.

And I wish that she and I could meet
In a nicer place, where time has healed
Enough that together we could laugh
At the gift we concocted in limitless love
Instead of this head let loose from the bag at parting,
This waiting for the black hole our legs will soon fall into
As if we are illusion, not the trap doors each steps through.

Today's Movie Makes Me Want to Buk

I only live for others

When I'm by myself.

When the waltz light comes through
The most despairing yellow sun

Across the Virginia Avenue bungalows

In late lilac afternoon,

Clothes stacked outside,

Chickens eating crabgrass,

My joy seems then so miserable,

As I think of all I'm missing in their smiles

With the gun not pointed to my head
By the strangest hand of all: my own.

For once the horror seems resplendent,

Mendelsohn conducting Santa Ana you bitch to move along.

Tomorrow we go to Santa Anita

To see the dawn before it fades,

Watch horses fresh as dew
With friends made new in hats

And ancient bleachers, holding racing

Sheets, stale donuts and coffee.

We have waited far too long 

For cheap amusement,

Spraying with bullets the possums and raccoons
As if that makes them go away.

Pacific Spray

Yesterday the sea
       was louder than my mind,
Its madness of no words
       in pearl clefts' stillness surging
To land's grey ends, the seeds of sand,
       mounds gathered for veiled burials.
The overwhelming sound, that strips out
       raucous children, the masticating gulls,
A man on fire with summer's rough desire...
       all tossed like shells in madcapped froth
Brought in by the blue stranger, who churns to
       other chimes than these we knock around,
The gourds we have collected, from a giving
       spendthrift tide.
                               
                                   Today
The furnace spits. This thing too small to be,
       the mind, rises like a reddened thumb,
Engorges on our brutal flaws, too much to bless
       when we must do the blessing for ourselves,
The way we are, imbued with all the dust
       of pilgrimage, the waiting water
For our healing too indifferent, too like God,
       for what's left when we clean the grit
And watch it go like hats of defunct sports teams,
       mirrored glasses, lucky stones?

How much that we could lose that isn't there.

At Upper Newport Bay Nature Preserve

No one is as pure as California light
And the cool become old in this wind

That carries the egret like a gaunt moth
On the venting of dry phantom tides.

The red cactus came here a long way to die
Where the half-alive stalks cry in unison

To leave this last russet of earth alone.
But what else can we touch when heaven's this close?

We're squeamish as the estuarine mud,
Silently making each day from clay

Til the pictures are framed and stories playacted
Like a fish that leaps without need of a bug.

Fishing

In a white boat, white people
With white clothes and white hats
Watch a white fish flexed
On a white line
To a white deck

Then a haemorrhage of red 
Is wristed by what seems like holy water
To the ocean below
As if heaven can be fooled
By cleanliness.

Night

The devil is only as evil as we are,
As wounded, as cursed -- his coyote chuckle
Echoes through the night a kind of kindness --
After the blows have landed, on what remains of our flesh,
All pretense of dreaming torn clean, all reasons
Not to love.
                      The clamoring herd moves like clouds past the stage
And an eerie quiet of light resumes
                                                               so meaningful
The candle now
                             still bearing light after war.

Evening

Sunset, and the screaming begins
And there's a short violet light
To determine
If the sound came from outside
Or within.

Morning Arrival

We are our mothers' aphorisms,
Our fathers' pearls of sweat,
But the hens emerge fresh from their hutch
Forgetting their new eggs.
The bunnies every move is unannounced.

A Spot on the Ocean

Beyond Catalina's crowds
A garland of kelp
In a desolate churn
Birds skirt never touching.
I can hear their wings beat.

In Pink Balboa

Boys will smear chocolate on their shirts
Pose like pelicans on storm drains
Walk into the harbor in their clothes

A Skater Rests

In the sun they glide
Still they try to learn to fly,

The present moment flow
Not alone enough for mind

In eccentric orbit glow
Thinking of the Icarus boy

Emblazoned on the sun,
An afterimage mote

That makes the hot earth come alive
In perfect sequence -- as if it is now dead

In vain sense clinging, finding something
Because nothing still is too much to endure.

Yolks Darker Than Tomatoes

Egg laying music
Beautiful if we all join in
Even the dog next door bares his instrument.

Working Lunch

The gray area
Beyond the building
Before the sun divides all into one.

The Hen Will Not Stop Crying

Every moment is a new life
Yet every fragment of the past
Lingers
To be corrected, not destroyed.

Potions

Progress is measured
One disappointment at a time,
In hopes it may be less
Disappointing some day;

To maybe crush the berries
He didn't eat
For the potion he decided
Not in the end to make - 

A little bit less of a mess
To clean, after all.

Cabo Communicado

1.
Mouthwash-blue sea,
Iconic rocks seen from an infinity pool
Warm as the ocean is cool.
I play volleyball with Mexican children
While my love in a bikini water-stomps to country tunes.
There's nothing to prevent heaven,
Not even a cloud beneath the kind sun,
The mission light, the palms saying something
You have to be slow enough to hear --
All you can eat papaya.

 

2.
In sprouting palms a yellow wren
Poses for a snap,
Purple balloons float across the pool
Like there could ever be too much fun.
The cactus shines in the sun.
There is no sense to anything anyone does
But the birds speak the impeccable logic of the palms.

 

3.
Trouble in paradise -- a blue drink --
"What's in it?" -- "It's delicious!" --
The fix was in on the poolside trivia game --
All relaxation stopped and the faces
Became those who can't win.

 

4.
Annabelle sells bracelets by the seashore
In a white robe and straw fedora,
Patiently waiting behind the rope
For tourists to cross, the few
Who are unafraid
To negotiate her down to pennies for her day.
She faces away from the sea,
Toward listless luxury
On a beach that's burning.

 

5.
The joker laughs -- ruido --
The cards always tell a joke --
But the tablecloth is neat
And the breeze from the veranda fans
Will make you forget
Whatever it was you willed yourself
In hopelessness
To remember.

 

6.
The streets of no mind;
Corazon,
Where all is sensation
Regaled
As a king is kissed by a fool.
They wait all night and day
For the birds Americanos
To light again their dream corners
And fall in the sinote
Where they play.

 

7.
At the pink hotel
St. Michael slays a lizard
While the Spanish virgin looks on in wood
And a blind parakeet named Adolpho
Sings at every opened door.

 

8.
Schools of fish spawned from the chum thrown on the bay;
The death boats drop from the landing;
The Mexican Navy plays drum reveille less than crisply;
Dolphins are kept in a concrete house as therapists for children;
You can pose with a marlin as the captor or the captive;
The big fishing boats (owned by Microsoft, Walmart, Exxon Mobil)

Eat the little fishing boats (owned by Juan)

And the tiniest vie for scraps
As grey pelicans wait grimly for food.
The worlds are so far apart they don't even collide,
The well-rounded views of wealth
And the half-completed skeletons
Pass like ghosts exchanging pesos --
All they know of each other is the sea.

 

9.
The rhythm of the waves,
Desert clouds, palm fronds,
The shadows on the rocks --
The only things that stay.

 

10.
The mission garden
Date night
Restaurant,
Hard feelings softened
By the yellow tulip lights
Until a few sobs drop to the tiles
From the skies
To baptize the lovers
Before the monsoon starts
And fills the water glasses,
Clears the tables, sends the still
Smiling hostess on a mission of mercy
To gather all the cushions
Before they float away.
The customers have given up
On Campari umbrellas
And detach to the oak room
And its orange light to sip
Incandescent green drinks
And watch the streets turn to beaches
In sheets of surf-glow black.

At the top of the tower

A blue light beckons

As if what happened before the rains

Was just a pretty picture,

A backdrop to a game with rules more ancient

Than even the masterchef here understands,

At the end of which is ruination,

Mysterious and hopeful and beautiful

But ruination nevertheless.

 

11.

There never was an empire here

But they make it seem so noble

To be so broken and ashamed,

As happy as the dead, to heal

Those orphaned of their Gods

With nothing but hand-painted skulls.

Such visions of what never was

Can take the place of heaven

Everpresent, never ending,

Giggling in the breeze.

 

12.

Trained we are like seals

In ways to see the sky and sea;

Blue means one thing, grey another,

Some valence on our lives gone flickering by,

Sealed as good or bad. But what if

The water, churning in, is as green

As Senor Frog's lime-green philosophy

And as black as Yucatan Chocolate

At the same time? If blue is fractured

By beveled grades of slate?

Heaven is as real as what's let go,

The need for blue, the attitude toward grey,

Letting the green moments stay impossible.

The rocks on the other side are full of spray,

Just now. You may have the food

Here, but that's where the fish are.

 

13.

Angry in paradise

Two black swans,

The people caged outside,

Are overseen by naked Neptune

At the Roman fountain end

Where busts of the Caesars reside.

They pick at their food,

Pick at each other,

Snort and snarl at humans,

These two of a kind

Flown in from Namibia

For reasons the toucans don't understand.

They pace savagely behind their well-appointed wire --

No amount of blue sky and surf frosting

For waverunners, parasails, hangliders will do --

No quantity of happy hour Margarita's and Texas Slammers

In the the deep bass pulse disco light show

On fluourescent Mexican folk art while an 80's cover band

Drives people back like cattle to their youth

To reclaim what they never obtained in the first place

Will keep them from craning their long black necks

Like plumber's snakes looking for a clog

In their sandy demense -- no --

There aren't enough endless pools of bikini'd beauties

And white-washed houses with blue miniarettes

And cliffside drives at night along the Pacific

Past immense haciendas lit with golden light.

No tradewinds breezes will ever soothe the irritations

They feel. Do they know they are black

In this white swan world of beauty?

Is there some onyx and malachite pool somewhere

To call home? Neptune doesn't say, he only

Looks on with the contempt of the ocean,

His curls, trident and impossibly small penis unconcerned

With the problems of two ornery birds.

They are some half-baked symbol, one supposes,

Of nothingness, how black is white and good is bad

And rareness is unexceptional - a gag whose humor

Has long since turned to bile, for no one had the curiosity

To ask for the punch line -- maybe these birds resent that,

How the joke their lives were made into

Was never even laughed at --

Maybe they are laughing

In their squealing swan tongue

To show that they are funny, really,

Despite everything.

New Canaan Morning

The men in blackest suits
Emerge from dim white mansions
To walk the pre-dawn highway
With grim eyes fixed ahead
Suitcases sway in rhythm
To the Talmadge Hill Train Station
Where their crosses await.

Goodbye Mamaroneck

The peacefulness of flowering weeds
        Draped along the waterline
The green that reaches through all grime
        In summertime

I see they're all not there now
        To be seen
They're paintings of the train
        That stays on rails

Its cargo is too fragile
        To look within -
And Willow Auto Sales
        Will do for now

Compendium of One-Line Poems

Too much talking — stream be quiet.

A concrete metaphor: chainsaw days.

In Harlem a rooster sells mulch beneath the train.

Marguerite has holocaust eyes.

Black vanilla from Antananarivo.

A new Hemingway story: Men Agreeing About Women.

So how's the money?

The low road to Fresno.

Rotisserie chicken baseball.

A lurid lack of sleep.

Fashionably Latte.

The suffocating perfume of the rich.

The Aristotelian death cult strikes again.

We disappear in the sun now so they spray on the clouds.

Sadness of the Rebel

Consequence the child must learn
            as if it is a fact,
But the only thing they ever learn
            is love and its lack.

May

These trees move much too quickly
Like thieves in the night
When the leaf vale finally flows

A softness far too perfect
To ever compensate
For the hard-luck lock-down winter
Where all was lost, all forsaken

This new thing at the gate
Has no pain left but the future
It must, like a spring, await

Reality

Like Midas and his gold

     the masks turn into mirrors,

But I see them still as mysteries

     cos’ I can’t see masks I wear.

It’s far too bright, my being’s light,

     to gaze upon directly, so these

Forms that take the fire's place

     are the only thing I know.

To the mind they are false,

     to the heart they are death,

But how could I ever take them off,

     knowing they aren't there to begin with?

Life and Death

Spring sounds so confusing

          to the newest birds.

“This is life? Or death?” they’d say

          if their cries were words.

There are no shoots, no leaves,

          no crocus in the grass,

Tho’ summer cigarettes the sky

          and glows through every glass.

But maybe they know more than we

          how full trees are of sap;

What could we know of life and death

          who eat meat from shrink wrap?

Carnival

There’s always an amusement park

          at the end of the line

Where the sewer of dreams

          has run dry;

Each stop is more hopeless

          as more time passes by,

And the last extras peel

          away from your screen test

Where you would tell the little of the story

          you can handle

(The story we all know so well

          we think we own the rights to the sequel).

You kill yourself thinking

          there’s something you can’t give away,

How if you knew what it was

          It’d be no longer yours

And maybe you’d be lighter

          someday

And could plant your banner

          at the end of the pier

Like some phantasm

          cool, dark and pure,

Lurking, turned heartless

          from heartbroken.

The sound of money and gimcracks

         and junior high proms

Echoes so sadly, like the lights

         that won’t stop

Disappearing, and crying

         through the gear-restless night.

On some moonless Sundays

         you can still hear the ghost

Of the dance hall waltz

         in the arms of the wind

Like the story is writing

         itself.

The Ghost of Henry Dumas

The dispossessed they cry
But it's never quite as real
As those who're crying for them
-- The anger out of line,
The victimhood unseemly --
What has all of that to do with me?
The watcher speaks. We understand.
Yet the specimen parade, in cages
Is the only voice of freedom
We're supposed now to attend --
The loving touch of those outside
Too much like us
To trust.

Negro History Day

"The contradiction between ethics and aesthetics in Western society is symptomatic of a dying culture." - Larry Neal, Director of Education for the Black Panthers and Guggenheim Fellow.

The cool passed all their tales to us
Like a bag of phony dope.
Toasting by the dozens,
The dominant jazz
Oppressed the printed Miltons
In their ghettos.

A child sees only this,
How pale his own skin is,
How ugly.

Aftertaste of Explanations

The machine of mind
          hums brighter now
I cannot hear its
          high-pitched drill.

My prayers are automatic now
          - the clock, the keys, the glass.

Our comfort God asks nothing but
          to serve It like a woman
And drop the petals of my soul
          upon Its black faux-metal
Without a trace of will or
          pause of doubt.

I finger news,
          thumb-wrestle sports,
                    push pictures for the weather -
As if I was betrayed by trees and grass
          for turning yellow.

The older Gods said "shh" inside
          vast honeycombs of texts,
For knowledge was a secret then,
          a sacred thing that blessed.
Now all that humans grasp and know
          is just one more addictive pull
To keep the wolves away
          outside the fire line.

No limit on how
          empty all this
                    striving for the
                                   facts
                                             can be.

The truth
          - the me that I've abandoned
          for fear I'll be abandoned -
is undisturbed.

Another Poem About Chemtrails

The skies are finally thick with a silvering grey, not like every otherwise blue day, when all manner of thin etchings balloon in gassy sick criss-cross in the sky, back and forth, up and down. The skies that would break the silence of God to us forlorn mortals are now sprayed with human waste like some vast and secret dog marking impossible territory. So we evolve, beyond the shapes and thoughts that brought us here - to new visions of what's real and true and right. I begin...with you.

Winter Night Without Stars

The wind must believe I have never existed.
The snow can't accept it won't stay here forever.
Who will correct them?
The trees dare not show any life,
and my heart is far away,
teased and contradicted
by a sweet ocean breeze.

Kafkaesque

The gaslight is not real
-- people say --
but they can't really know
if saying "you've taken my soul"
saves or loses it.

I'd like to think
there was a voice
you stole from me;
your total lack of honesty
let me believe
quite indulgently.

But now I know
there was no you
only me --
even loneliness was feigned,
it took every piece of
the city of lies I built
to fool myself.

Your gift of nothingness
I thought was life itself.

Another Ode to Lethe

The death of literature - ah -
what never was life - oh -
hold the warm beads by the fire -
feed your heart now something more.

All things must live -
passing cannot change that -
the list of things to forget
grows larger every day.

It seems so easy to release one's grip -
until the will fails -
and decay alone opens the hand
to let nothing fly out like a bud.

The councils that watch this - with pillars and eyes -
are no more real than we are,
trying to live in homes we've built
- we pilgrims never lost.

The false hope - becomes real

The false hope - becomes real
With a wave of one handkerchief
- For you remember how you feel
At each turn of love's leaf.

If the thing - underneath
Merely fills the echo of space,
The face of God's the form bequeathed
- Fixing your gold from its base

Like any altared Lord
Can't exist without thankful breath
- Something later nailed to a board
That won't die a real death.

Heaven's in you - now Hell,
As if it's from something you've done.
The pictures you know all too well,
Subtracting one to one.

That thing you remember
Is not your old life, well disguised,
It's barely the flare of an ember
Pops the dense seed - outsized.

Home

Home is full,
Home is endless,
Home takes all you have
And makes you whole,
Each step another lesson,
Each breath a chance to grow.
Such peace when you are sanctified,
Tethered to love's service,
All there ever is.

Home stays still while moving
Mirrored with the sun.
In one home there are many,
Each right in its own way,
Unyielding but still blending
To a purpose singular,
A giving to the future
Without the present moment
Ever jumping off its track,
The memories that have built it
Never needing to go back.

Each day awakes to new disputes,
Problems and resolutions,
Each night is filled with smoky warmth,
The rich bouquet of guidance stilled
In love's unbreakable connection --
We laugh, we cry, we mourn, we play
And home is always with us;
It hears all that we say as prayers,
Forgives us all our freedom.

Home is love, it needs no words,
It gives by its receiving,
Asks only for the best of us,
Never expecting,

Forever hopeful.

The Gun Shoppe

What can we share but objections?
We feel one through what we're excluded from
And build a place away from the people with whom we disagree,
In hopes some nest will feather from our fear,
A bright new bridge to God will build,
Some salvage for our sorrow.

The Inflatable Geodesic Ball

The sound of breathing
Birds through reeds,
The gift of wind calls it song,
This pain of being
Ungrateful for life,
Surviving for oneself alone,
Yet touched by sharing
Breath and sun,
Negotiations
With death,

As if one is unworthy.
The plangent voice
Blots out all I am,
Because it has some being.

And then I see it,
A tiny bird
Perfect, on a branch
Keening, and I watch
As one divine, as it flies
Away, learns to let go.

At Dana Point

A peace sign on the lawn
Of a mansion built on postage stamps,
The conga lines are drawn
In the sand, beneath the man-made clouds.

What world there is has disappeared
In smoke on endless oceans.
All that's left in the mausoleum
Is "Hell is other religions"

And pilgrims who have climbed its cliffs
To touch its form devoid of form
Bring too much life along with breath
To coax the gold to truth.

Feather on the Lawn

No one hears the crow
Assault the shady lanes
And echo all that pain
Across the grass and gravel
-- But he can never cease
His slow harmonica drawl
Until they finally hear,
These people sealing off the air
To tamp his clamor.

Funny Pages, Bag of Crickets, Frog Dirt

Love brings desire
The cry of the hen for my food

Outside the Holy House

I.
All of life
      In goldfish eyes
As we lie
      Inside of time --
               Bubbling --
Letting pass
      Every meaning
                Because we need to
                       Make more

My one job:
      When the kettle boils
                 Turn the stove off

II.
No one knows how bad it is --
       This gift --
Which makes it easier to let go
        The many faces of grief --
So that a greater gift, a more
        Paralyzing grief
                  May arrive,
Like lightning must dissolve
        To illuminate the void

III.
My wife is half a world away
        -- The house next door --
Still her flame burns in my heart
For there is only one
        When all is said and done
Two bodies disappear into the soil

Blues

It's 12 degrees above zero
Honolulu can't unlose
12 iced degrees above zero
And the blues are bound to lose
Motown man can never choose
The only way to walk is in those doomed shoes

Three Poems

High Modernism

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

The word “like” has broken

the blood brain barrier

of an entire generation,

like a gulp of terror:

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

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

of every possible bet, it’s far too dangerous

for any courage of one’s convictions

in even the simplest of declarations.

How smoothly we’ve adopted the fake patois

of the stoner slacker beatnik fraud

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

to have the attention span of insects,

the stuttered speech of dislocated consciousness,

with the only word that matters now

counted like a pulse in the trance of endless sleep,

where generation upon generation of impressionable children watch

Gilligan’s Island episodes hundreds of times apiece

without ever seeing how they’re teeming with sexual

innuendo.

Intelligence is in an offsite computer,

the brain a signal processor, code interpreter

remotely controlled—but at least a machine

trusts in God to work, here everyone is

sticking out their tongues for pharmaceuticals,

and their arms unconditionally on command

for a flu shot that makes them get tattoos

and dance to heart-attack inducing

excuses to rape women, the monkey DNA inside

reducing them like fine China white in a spoon.

Our heroes are just slaves,

Our heroines on heroins,

Our preferences are saved

of kill myself or kill all of them.

The clones called politicians

sprinkle truth like fine white powder

upon the thinnest whole cloth tissues of lies

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

our water catches fire,

as they seed the skies with barium,

have sound waves jar our minds,

have science prove our lying eyes are wrong.

It was a wildly botched

lab experiment

this last century,

a colossal failure at every level

although it produced all kinds

of amazing and unintended results,

like Silly Putty and auto-sushi-mats

and expressions like “kid stays in the picture.”

It’s a history of

the end of history

at its end, our linear braincase

cracked with broken links,

pay-as-you-go fantasy machines,

pornograph placebo

cranking out the junk-sick beats

of needle chic calling sheeple to the steeples

beaming out its microwave short-order circuit

wizardry to bend the shorted minds

on encyclopedias of chaos,

a schizophrenic satire-collage,

solipsistic stream-of-consciousness

caterwaul. The great culling has begun.

Chacun à son propre infini.

Immortality means
all the obligations

of celebrity,

none of the fun.

The purpose of coming to earth again

is to punch it up on the rewrite

for we tell stories first and foremost

when it is said and done.

As the moon waxes and wanes

so does our emptiness hunger

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

Nostalgia-sick I am

for shooting galleries in the grand and central terminals

and agitprop art event announcements

stapled sad to abandoned warehouse plywood doors,

for days of old when boys just laughed

and left the game alone,

before the wind cried Cesar Geronimo

to Bob Gibson’s rising incoherent murderball,

before replacement gods were hatched

just to be retracted back

by the Aristotelian death cults of Venice

who bought and sold the universe

and hurled it as a dismal diurnal

darkened void of stone

with all the immortality of a black hole,

before the word of mouse

and the long strange tip of project artichoke’s

day-glo mustard and Esalen champagne

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

before Eugenics became Genetics

and the subjugation of women through feminism

and op-art hallucination mini-skirts,

before the dormant Queen of Hearts

could terminate by altar command

with playing cards that hide the tarot in plain sight,

ancient divination from the alien

snakes from above and underground

performing a cauliflower lobotomy

with heterocosmic archeobotany,

before the wet jobs and Glimmerglass

and the Knights of the Order of the Garter

created virtual tribes afraid of their own shadows

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

Idealism needs only to be believed to be victorious,

Materialism needs everything but itself to be destroyed.

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

don’t bogart that hat,

it’s gold cinquefoil with tailfins,

the hat of a different color,

heavy is the head that wears that hat,

the hat that got your tongue,

success has gone to your hat,

the moon is a harsh hatcheck girl).

The train is calm as the passengers soak up

damnable lies from dry newsprint

while the skies are criss-crossed by unmarked planes

spraying conductive metal salts to block the sun’s rays

and no one seems to notice or mind.

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

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

control your mind through your smart phone waves

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

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

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

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

what’s been going on all this time.

In old little leagues the whiffletree

still sits crying to be born.

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

in chain-saw weather, remembers all that was

and never has been,

the blues played like a sick kiss

on the Sun god’s muddy mike.

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

Possibilities are the last refuge of the sleeping.

The fish is already covered in fur

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

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

December’s mildewed decadents sigh

on a pharmacologically frozen rose,

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

hyperactive hypodermic solution

that cooks a mean book

of whirled war peas

as seen from the dervish service station

by the dustdevil crossroads truck stop, dog track

and temporary amusement park, but circus people

suffer more than most, usually in silence.

I represent in purple on a divan in full flaneurhood

but true flaneurie is dead, in McCoy truth.

There are yachts to sail and foundations to run.

The British have their causes. We have our deeds.

Rodriguez the Sugar Man

in a red plastic overcoat

felt he owed a little something to the lost;

how long it took him to realize he wasn’t

like them.

Autumn Poem

Gold dies in the green pond’s reflection

                The geese bathe backwards in unison

                And disappear in a sudden splash

Of illusion on cloud-mottled glass.

Chasing hieroglyphs of squirrel tails

                More heard than read, as the forest flails

                Like our life and death – as mystery;

Seeds drop – the secret stays – under leaves.

Birds call to me from whirring trees

                That are the consciousness of the breeze,

                To hear what only hearts can recognize:

How silent this grace that overrides.

A stream clogged with sheets of sky-starched brown;

                The woods are now dropping underground.

                The geese are now floating past my eye.

The cold, inside of me, starts to cry.

At The Bowling Alley

Usually she just sat there

like a mouse without cheese

breathing in seething streams

the hideous tar of her Kent smoke

hoping only that it objectified the loathsomeness

of all she saw, heard, smelled and touched

– even the blue bean-box ashtray full

of her own pink and noxious butts.

The automated pin monkey sent back

the pink marble Brunswick balls

to the sound of dungeons flushing

like a ghost stuck in the machine.

Someone who thought reason alone

could answer might suppose this came

from an indifferent father and overbearing mother,

or some lack of kindness shown by an itinerant tinker

in some jeweled sepia moment in her past.

But all those suppositions would be wrong.

For the plain fact was

she were too inarticulate to even assume

a fixed identity, except in the vengeful

blood entitlement of dreams of annihilation

where everyone grieves the loss of their squalor.

At the Racetrack

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

Current Events, Explained

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

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

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

Autumn Poem

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

Love is perpetually saying goodbye
As it rises to enflame decay

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

This place between
We call it "Time"

Where memory can't free itself
And being is unseen

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

For fear that it will go away
In the night

A leaf floats down so quietly
I almost hear a sound

Monday Morning

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

Alone in the Woods at Sunset

Bountiful day,

Intelligent evening,

The fire-tempered branches lean straight in to me.

The woods have thinned to valleys and rocks,

Brown and orange suffuses the green.

The leaves are all leaving for the light now

And falling back on black mirroring streams

And on meadows clear enough to receive them,

Alive enough for ghosts

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

Nothing here wastes a moment of its life

Or resists death's tender dissolving embrace.

Gold ferns seem older and firmer than I am

Sensing the smoke from my kind.

Aversion to Immortality

Leaves fall on the turds of modern sculptures.

Even the willow here loses what it

Never really had, the year’s well hidden

Appearance of something, so this nothing

Could commune with the nothing over there

And call that living, this thing – resisting –

That never lets us call it by that name.

Children pass like leaves – how crisp they fly by!

Red berry days display the happiness

So carefully not chosen on the way

Within the shelter of my freedom’s cage.

Leaf life floats down, unhurried to its end

Without a sound, except the mourning song

Of birds ever-joyful, ever-bending.

The hill that beckons me to climb—just like

The voice demanding suicide—does not

Allow the mind to ever understand –

The strict demands of contemplation make

The hiss of wind-filled leaves some mystery

That reaches to the center of my being

—That thing that never knows it is a thing.

Sun tears through the canopy as if it

Was a gift to me, the migraine light on

Leaves like grace—but what is can never seem

To be, life’s miracle, mathematically

Reducible to the impossible,

Mere darkness owns these sparks that have no place,

That think that they exist until they don’t

And nothing evermore of what they were

Survives their moment – hope turned meaningless,

The light turned off forever for every

Thing that ever was, so nothing ever

Lived at all in records of eternity.

That’s what they want the falling leaf to say

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

Ery, to disagree – we've fallen here

Ourselves, so out of place, we make our peace

With nothingness so greedily, happy

To have shared our need instead of making

Meek apologies for how outsized is

Our feeling—and how we go beyond our

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

Soft the voice that tells us we are nothing,

How comforting to know we’re lost and cursed,

Bestowed the blessing of impermanence,

Annihilation’s grace, just to forget

We had some existence, we lived here once,

In a world too beautiful, its colors

Final, fearing we were responsible.

Oh horror as the leaf descends – that I,

Born so divine, could squander these precious

Moments of alignment, looking for the

Permanence of graves, the shelter of dead

Walls, the protection of the mind from the

Enormity of consciousness, from bird

Song ever beckoning to understand.

The long and wrenching cry “I am”

That we never can

Believe.

Planting the Feed

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

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