Thursday, July 31, 2008

THE SUM OF DIM

Some days poems dim,
right brain gated shut,
thoughts limp proper
and prim,
the mind slows down
stands so still,
like birds on a last
fatigued leg
of long migration.

Some days and nights
dreams are vague,
if at all they are,
and waking is silent
and gray
like stepping out
of a rental car,
Ford or Toyota,
(does it really matter?)
in Denny’s
parking lot
in Alaska or Nebraska
on Tuesday
torrid with swelter,
sweat and mindless
chatter
of late August
regret, yes
even trees are sadder.

Yes, some days
are breathed
and sensed
(if at all)
in a daze
of blue smoke
and red haze
where fat greasy
men abide
and speak
of nothing
but markets
and gain,
AGAIN
AND
AGAIN,
interminably
inane.

'The Can't of Three'

A trinity of catalclysms
(albeit unpredicted)
cannot truncate,
delimit
nor create trite
our time true together,
quite tasty and bright,
and admittedly I'll state,
so completely right!

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

‘Ah, a Wish….Perchance to Doze’

I wish, I thought
to myself quite awake,
unrequited in rest
as a raucous rooster
or long distance
driver of trucks,
on the cliff edge
of an early clear morn,
that I could slumber
and linger in bed
like someone else I do know
(and love I’ll add for truth’s sake).

She, the heretofore unnamed,
lazes and wiles away these seconds,
a tender sweet dumpling a’doze
within cirrus clouds
of soft cozy sheets,
while I instead sip
strong coffee with cream,
sit straight on the couch
and write of calm’s
deep sea
which eludes me,
this precious sweet sleep
I long for so much,
and in this yearning,
do seek.

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Bowl of Kindness

Kindness is a bowl
of cherries a’glisten,
short quick brown fingers
pluck round rubies,
kids on a mission.

Kindness is a bowl
whose contours include
war torn Iraq,
an Indian from Peru
who grins at a gringo
in shorts,
her teeth few, far between.

Kindness is a bowl
where burnt morning oatmeal
reminds an absorbed poet on the porch,
multi-tasking ain’t his forte`.

Kindness is a bowl
resplendent and shining,
room enough for sorrow
and splash sounds
of laughter lilting,
where in a smooth pool
clean and cool
at waterfall’s bottom,
schools of bright fish plunge,
leap and soak,
wile away the day,
in love with these curves
and dreams of fine friendship.

Kindness is a bowl
in which weighty fatigue
is gently massaged
by the tired man himself.

Kindness is a bowl
under our earth—
a surround sound of ‘OM’
emanates from depths
offering all birth.

Kindness is a bowl
brimming with poems
underneath ancient maps
pointing us home.

Saturday, July 26, 2008

PRISON BREAK

(“Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.” Wallace Stevens)



Three round cartons,
a holy triumvirate
of the richest creamiest dessert
sat tempting taste buds
and silver spoons to riot
tonight at your long table.

When the burly surly guard
took his brief break,
I squeezed between the bars
of the cell which confined me
and with a grin
of newfound freedom
hovering above my chin
ladled three flavors of ice cream
lustily,
repeatedly
onto tipped tongue,
waiting like a glistening dolphin
for nourishment
near shore.

Life’s sweet promise
puddled and saturated
the receptor cells
of lips and lingua
with an almost spiritual purity,
golden childhood glee leapt
and turned like a dervish in trance,
my mouth happy and young,
one with it all.

The man in the stiff
starched tan uniform returns
to the scene,
his sour sad face
and holstered pistol
dominate the moment.
Smiling with sticky chin,
I offer a full fat spoon
of soft vanilla
melting the bad dream.
He doffs his high hat,
loosens a wide black belt
and thankfully
reaches for lost
boyhood again.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

No Poem, Poor Coffee

The day before lacked new verse,
for this deficit I’m regretful
of course,
and what is worse,
this morning’s coffee fell short
on a core component,
half-and-half.

Sure, I’ll substitute the powdered stuff,
but the brew’s full flavor
is absent thus, and to some degree
(you ask why this fuss?),
morning is difficult to savor.

Saturday, July 19, 2008

BODY OF SPIRIT

I stumble sleepily into wholeheartedness
while jasmine wafts its sultry perfume
on wings of delicate sparrows
and garbage trucks smash their wantonness
through back alleys of the snoozing city
at six am like buffalo on a rampage
or adolescent grizzlies foraging the local dump
for discarded food, or better yet, tourist flesh—
the final photo on the Kodak roll a white
man’s severed hand protruding from the greedy bear’s
oral cavity, crimson fluid drips like melted candle wax
across dense coarse fur of chin and chest.

Oh body, old paint, my amigo my dear dear sojourner
on this gypsy path, can we caravan tonight under a black moon’s
tent with smiling friends and waves of soft music
to lift and tremble us whole again?

Raucous productive truck, fragrant penetrating flower, base
grizzly hunger, wild buffalo power, communal gypsy quest,
the seeds under the flower beds and weeds
under the words---
these comprise a world of continents afloat in sweet sea water
linked by tectonic plates of language patter
and earth’s sinuous curves, hallucinating,
insinuating us towards our Ithacas,
our dimly remembered islands of courage.


Something shifts in my cool bed,
a ship entering shallow harbor,
perhaps?
Feet step gratefully, one by one,
onto attained shore.
Night air now truly tasted,
spinning wind simply savored,
intertwined elements of sky of clan of ground
of true home welcomed and loved
in the chested silent center
of my being.
Transcendence incarnate
again.

Friday, July 18, 2008

Below the arc of shared language
reclines a goddess of languor.
She breathes a shine of gold light,
knows the night like no other.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Fruitful Feasting

Apple, I want to rip into you
with my teeth like knives,
lips curled fangs bared.
I want your juices now
dripping up
my grizzled chin,
murder for hire,
in African rain
sky perspires.


Animals linger and stand
at edges of pond water,
dust everywhere.
I chew you,
each bite crushed
on purpose, tasting
savoring sugary
goodness —
it goes down,
all the way drizzling
down.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Meditation on Mother Death

The morning after the day
my mother died
I awoke in the dark
and stood outside our bedroom
at three o’clock sobbing,
‘She’s not on earth
anymore!’.

No spiritual kool-aid,
no shrunken paradigms
of pie-in-sky
could quench that lostness then,
that squelched thirst deep
in the throat’s torn cave.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

GLAD SONG

Glad song rings strong
inside our souls,
greening and burnishing
from edges inward
towards places we’ve
not been,
yet knowing these unseen
presences are great as mountains
and simple as dirt
or a sudden laugh
shoots wet yearnings’
sweet spray
rising,
a shower ever rising
to the stars,
beyond the circling
elliptical planets
of our first giggles,
those early delights
mapping us for good
for life’s travels
and travails
written large
on ancient rolled papyrus
and mother’s imperfect love,
grateful for cartographers
and those far vistas calling,
listening with each sense,
we enter transformed
into great silence!

Saturday, July 12, 2008

day we met

Karmic stuff got kicked up
the day we met
inside sheets
of summer rain.
We may have met
for the first time
and yet,
we may have
just met again.

It can’t be solely ascribed
to boy meets girl
as simply straightforward
as that,
when lightning strikes twice
in bright gold swaths,
burnished earth rising
across the sylvan plain.

Keeping the Multi-Purpose Powder Dry

When my good bud Doug
sprinkled Desenex
like an Okie dust storm
under Southwestern
bible belt you straight to hell
if’n you ain’t born again
cloud canopy
and into the blue bowl
full of Aunt Claire’s
seven minute creamy frosting,
I knew the cat was a keeper
not just some slumbering
Rip Van Winkled
lazy ass sleeper.

Juxtaposing confectionery sugar
with athlete’s foot powder,
creative prowess
stirred and mixed with
financial consciousness,
a combination sublime,
finished product
delectable nectar
feeding the gods’
incessant cravings,
fungal remover for the toes,
throat and pink soles,
taste buds made whole,
bake and shake
angel food cake,
sing along strong,
Oh, My My
JELLYROLL!

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

It Takes Two

The trouble for me
(perhaps you too as well)
with relationships intimate
in scope,
is that future cost can
exceed by factors of four
or more
any profit potential,
which is clearly preferred
by both romantics
and accountants,
of course.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

VISITATION

The sky fills with seahorses.
Fathers who mother unborn
to life
float across
our field of vision.

They bring bright joy,
surprise us completely.
I awaken,
happiness
the only word
I know
or can say.

Monday, July 7, 2008

'Not Never on Sundae'

Another Sunday evening,
I’m not yet ready
for bed.
I sit down in a dull brown chair
from my parents’ home,
in the corner of this
small living room.

A caramel sundae dessert,
warm sauce in a bronze puddle
melts three scoops of ice cream.
Afterglow lingers sticky and sweet
on my tongue and my lips
as I think wistfully
of you.

I’m alone in my place,
somewhat content,
when the woman next door
for the first time in years
starts a slow moving moan
then rhythmically erupts
in a juicy wet she-devil roar.

An involuntary voyeur,
I lick sugared lips
and quietly cheer
(in spite of some envy)
‘yes, yes hooray’,
I’m happy for her!

Santa Ana Weather,Torrey Pines Beach

Sun scatters sea-spray.
Salt air sparkles and shines,
flies skyward.
A scintilla
of fine
spindrift
effervesces,
escapes in space.

This luminous day
opens
like glad song
or good food
freely given
to all
who ask.

Sunday, July 6, 2008

‘A Mother’s Virtue in an Altared State’

Fatigue, where in hell do you hail from? You pelt and ice down the day, in slow motion uplift, outreach delayed. Were too many hail mary’s pushed down by authority figure others to be parsed then muttered from pure throats tight in former life behind borders of countries not my true home?
Have Catholic guilt and penance unstrung like rosary beads spilled on Titanic’s tipped deck morphed into bulky burlap sacks of sharp rocks bending my back, sapping my verve, draining reserves?

Didn’t I pedal in night’s grim middle, ride fast to the nuns, my red Sears and Roebuck bike down steep Regents Drive? That gray stucco convent scared and stifled me so. Thick cotton wads of contrition, joy’s contaminant, wrapped the boy’s heart on cold dark mornings painted fogbound.
A mass eked out in small muffled space, breath held within, assisting the black sisters apace and the sacrificial priest, regal, nearly aloof from all life.

Pleasing my mom, a convert herself, was not my main aim. She pushed hard like Hera above for her first born son to be an altar boy, to redeem the family with no color in its name. I hopped on the bike against my own will, stung between my pink thighs by the icecicled crossbar. Stood at Portland’s wintry threshold, soul shivering/half-crushed, shrinking into myself with no person there to crawl beseechingly towards.

Nobody saw me so small and afraid, no mirror reflected me altared back to myself, no one dared look except ragged fatigue behind metal bars, ready to suck boy life out through my pores, to feed its desire, to leave me to worry, become undrunk dry, a husk of conformity, a so-called “good” Catholic boy, ordained to never fly too high.

THE CALL

Ithaca beckons me via dream’s call ~
summer’s returning inside green woods,
to her long-fingered lake
and her Buttermilk Falls.
A large white man standing up tall
knows in his bones
and sure strong heart as well,
tells me true words clearly aloud,
Ithaca is where
he can be
at his best.

My ex-wife and I speak of this place
and our time here together
drinking her beauty.
Those decades ago we can still embrace,
tho’ now with separate homes
we’ve travelled far differently.

The fresh sweet spray of Buttermilk Falls
and the hike upstream slipping in water
which coats and flows over smooth glacial rock,
enliven my body, my silver spirit in gladness
as homeward I point towards
dear Ithaca!

Entrance to Their Quandary

let’s close bright eyes
lightly,
invite warm welcome,
remember ourselves
at true best.

walk consciously
down eroded
sandstone hewn steps
into these
canyon/koan
sheerest of cliffs,
they shine red
in the blazing
orange sun,
soft blue
in the quiet
half moon,
and shall never
by us be ig\
norantly missed
nor blindly eclipsed
again.

led by the wind, a river
of air flows above
pungent mesquite
and stony silence of rocks,
perplexed and stymied,
we allow time present
to be what it may,
to hear what it talks.

like entering a trance of bronze
at the door of a monastery
high on a gold hill,
not knowing where or how
we may go next until….
but in the wild English garden
and spiraling labyrinth outside,
the two of us breathing
standing so open and still,
waiting for knowledge of which
grist is best ground
by which of ancient mills.

The question offered
by an old monk
dead for ten years,
“If I stay buried
in this canyon
for ten more,
what shall you each
choose to do with yours’?”

Saturday, July 5, 2008

Migratory Animals

From the Irish pub to her bed
we took a quantum leap
quite unled,
while all along the watchtower
astonished poets scouted
unmapped lands fertile and teem\
ing with layers of meaning,
unlike the unsaid words stuck
in my head
writ with invisible ink
by a metaphorical pen.

Amphibian transformation
takes a bold jump
through fear’s fires
and the loss of sweet clarity
for innovation’s bloody birth
on the mattress of relinquishment.

Levels of being, distinct domains
multiple and murky,
are slowly integrated
as one webbed foot
soggy with seawater senses the other
coated with earth’s sacred dirt
like cinnamon sprinkled
on a warm snickerdoodle.

Wondering aloud from watchtower’s heights,
can true leaping transpire
and historic dusty structures
(some perhaps outmoded)
gently exhale, expire
before steps strong can be taken
by complex creatures so shaken
to be reborn recreated
ablazing earthward and higher
in life’s amazing orange fire?

Thursday, July 3, 2008

Poets and Crooks

Bi-coastal Kerouac flaked out fast.
Thick wads of greenbacks
changed hands in a flash,
like always some poor freak
paid straight through the nose.

The jewelry joint heist worked like a charm!
I’m sitting in warm sand
one quite content crook,
cool daiquiri in hand
thinking of Jack
and his black rusted out
Pontiac.

The Catholic sacraments bloom
beauty and magic
while the big bad church
has been damn tragic.
Poets and priests,
thieves and healers
which life will you work--
con artist of dark muck
or shining lover-feeler?

from the field

I felt him here today.
Today, this morning actually,
early in bed awake
he arriving home
in the center of my flesh.

Slowly-- paying subtle
particular attention, like now here as well,
what was empty except for dread
became alive with specific form.

Geometry birthing in my belly
a trapezoid persisting,
energy pulsing,
moving from the middle
of the body’s bright field.
A young boy’s life unburied
opening into presence
out of soil’s fertile darkness,
perhaps unearthing now
in morning’s golden song.

The End of Obduracy in the Torrid Quiet

Today, this morning actually, the soaring seahorse
feels more like a fallen rhinoceros.
The savannah in summer is harsh,
heatwaves rise from cracked earth
in hypnotic columns, waves of rigor
and dessication abandon earth’s hold.
Parasitic flocks of onyx colored birds
circle my fat leathery flesh, today.

Those ancient pains from decades hidden
in rock caves and submerged under shallow
pools of oily stagnant water
roam my tired defenseless body
like pygmy warriors on the hunt.
Drumsounds incessantly pound my passive form,
speartips threaten this sinister stillness.

And the sun, oh the African sun!
It, no longer golden, blinds
my slitted opaque eyes
and sears my skin raw and pink.
I cannot live here now,
this I know for sure.

THIS IS KNOWN FOR SURE.

Let me stumble down to the ground
on one wrinkled creaky knee
and slowly breathe my last
into the calming brown dust.

And now, in the time
of true descent,
dozens of purplish hummingbirds
baptize this sad crumpled bulk
with tiny encircling blessings,
incantations of fleeting beauty
vibrate within
the morning’s
torrid quiet.

FLUENT, OBDURATE

Watch the river: it’s a torrent downstream.
A fluency of tongues
penetrates and liquifies
this liminal umbral.
She expands and swells
like a wild pregnant animal
and climbs steep embankments
towards the city above.
Sparrows and herons fly
through the light mist
with wind blue on the wing
they drift up, move away.

In the humid night air
your voice meanders
around
then right through me,
although the day we met
may yet disappear.
Oleander washes the evening
softly awake and fragrant
while distinct, floating voices
distract our six senses.


Crowds of rocks settled
down on the bottom
don’t move easy
under acres of water.
If a flood comes strong and fast
stones may tumble and roll,
our time together
solid but weightless
as a cloud of green feathers
or grain of fools’s gold.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

SEAHORSE~ PICNIC

I sit on top of a wooden picnic table
feeling dazzled by blue cerulean sky,
next to this woman, my friend,
who’s a masseuse and a colleague.

Both of our mothers will die from cancer,
hers’ before mine by a couple of years.
Mine with red hair who loved people
and picnics on the banks of Lake Murray,
baskets of apple and blueberry pie,
German potato salad tasting
of vinegar, crisp bacon
and hard boiled egg.

Acres of green lawn spread out before us,
vivid with color and so alive,
the sky and the grass create magic and joy
as seahorses playful
astonish,
swim clear through the air.

This day, this moment
emanate love
as full presence surprises
and nourishes well,
all life’s elements
familiar being
happily here,
becoming themselves
in their particular place.