Tuesday, March 31, 2009

JUST PAST ZERO

one stone left alone, unturned in midst of rain
one breath finally released at moment’s instant grasp
one planet circling, a fruited top spins today, what about tomorrow?
one morning a golden thisness whistles and is heard 'round the world
one underbelly glistens in the dusk
one perhaps two or more withstands the unknown morrow
one thistle grazes muscle and wish for something more
one jumper down the hatch leaves us all spilled with sorrow
one eyepatch for a later pirate on the woven sea
one zillion species on a gamble in the darkness of the park
one totebag spills its spuds on the aging sidewalk
one girl skips in sun with grin, shy, her shins limber and long
one mad dog froths and crazy spins, pray he has no twin
one gradeschool embarks on change to love all its kids
one mountain blows its summit, now calls itself a volcano
one ship courses north to ice and wild adventure
one marriage ends in death, another ends in love
one friend washes her hands of him, removes the silken glove
one rock rounds its story as the boy explores his find
one day poetry announced the birth and death of kings
one pill does make you larger although not by much
one hill is too high and hard to barge straight up
one draft dodger did grow fond of Fondu-Lac, called himself Canuck
one Indian saved her country from the beast of obese greed
one German reminds us all of the dirt streaked face smeared in mirror’s sheen
one hill beckons us to stretch those strides beyond
one touch of two friends’ reaching hands grows hope in backyard gardens
one knows itself/herself/himself and thinks to feel then thinks itself again

Sunday, March 29, 2009

THE RETURNING

After the pounding rainstorm and before the street
became unpuddled, the old man sidled up to his sleeping
wife, nuzzled her soft as fog, his unshaven cheek barely
touched her bare smooth shoulder like burnished sheaves
of barley and wheat in the wind.

She dreamt of an antique calliope within a waterfall of sound
where antelope and hummingbirds cavort, refresh
themselves in the cool spray of music’s cacophony
bounding off granite and ferns into the valley verdant
below.

Later, they would sip strong coffee at their scratched
kitchen table and in slow silence watch pools of rain/
water dissolve from the long curving driveway into
the day’s open arms.

Each sweet simple moment shared
as reverent as a death
unto the next
and the next
and the next,
a return of rain
and mystery dream
to its sky source,
infinite pristine.

Friday, March 27, 2009

March Morning

dazzled by sun
like brown honey
sweet and thick
on the tongue
the old gent
bent down,
plucked one
blue tulip
for good luck
from the sacred
ground.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

A Focal Repose

the warrior’s bow is taut
mute fingers know their mark.

eyes pierce the target far
before the arrow flies
across the chasm of lies.

her words pound and bruise his chest
while enemies snake throughout
the mountain,
caves of grief awaken chieftains
for tomorrow’s wave of ocean
sheening.

sleep pulls him towards the light
where day and eve conspire,
twine and melt as burning tree limbs
in passion’s mortal fire.

as he dreams in dozing arms
the curved weapon quiet
at his side,
one image camps for days:

cerulean shoes
her regal
cobalt sway.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

NUTS

Nuts from the get-go
about her
cracked as a filbert
an uncommon almond
shell shocked world rocked
these smoky plains of Mid
America apple pie
Tillamook cheese
from Oregon’s rain
soaked coast
would never taste
the same,
she’s the dish
in which all
loss became
the haste of gain.

No blame
forever untamed
this train
of fools
and its ship
of ghouls
sashays across
trestles down
steel tracks
clickety clack
askew pass/
engers dash
like assaulted
cashews on
the lam.

Perhaps a
weekend pass
from asylum’s
grasp could
purge by dirge
pure hell,
help to mend
this shell?

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

WHAT HAPPENED

Her twisting torso tantalized
tall potted palms while fresh verdant fronds
waved like tortured genius or the mayor
of Abu Ghraib across the silken sprawling pond
towards myriad meandering parades,

These rivers of mystical proportions flowed
stuffed between contorted banks of mud,
“this charade cannot continue past noon”,
comrade Chaplain of Rangoon
boldly did ordain.

He huffed as his filthy silver beard
lollygagged annoyingly
in the dripping rain,

A shower of finesse cloyingly
caressed their furloughed troughs
of blooming lusted love
like precious flaming oils redeemed
as stamps of green
from dearest Persia
(in Allah We Trust)
or the busted hovels
of Bahrain.

Friday, March 20, 2009

The Bang of Bling For Your Buck

persimmons were rimmed with liminal bling
like matrons from France with pears up their ass,
though the ferocity of faux was unprecocious to moi,
the perilous most loquacious folk could
seriously hope was shipwreck at sea,
disastrous as that would certainly be
to the spurious purveyors of gleaming jewelry,

hell, deleterious as well to rapacious capitalists
whose gross bellies swell nauseous in the land of the free,
it’s dangerous out there for those in between.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

FRIENDS TOWARD THE END

Since I’d avoided being dead before today
the mortician’s florid face found me befuddled,
mortified really at his schoolboy
charm, hanging jowls gelatinous flab,
and mama’s boy demeanor as he stood
at the head of what was recently me
laid flat as cold fish on a hard stone slab.

I began to soak in the attention, his detailed ways
as he pumped strange fluids into my inert innards
and licked his chops while my wan complexion
colored up pink and dessicated tissue plumped
quite nicely,

Yes, I do think,
thanks to his two months of instruction
at the Kansas School of Mortuary Science
and the encouragement of blue haired Aunt Peb
who presided over an army of funereal folks raising the dead
day after day in this flattened state where life, death
and the dance of destruction often forgot which was which,
who was who, why all this disruption?

We became fast pals, the mortician and me,
his touch was gentle yet firm and his sen-sen breath
lovely so pleasant, and I must that if I’d known before
how nice a time there were to be had in the lazy land
of Mr. Morpheus….
you get my drift, the haze of death ain’t too bad,
in spite of the corruption of flesh on time’s
tapped out fingertips.

Tomorrow night, he whispered tenderly to me,
is the memorial service for friends and family.
I suppose I’ll be dashing in my red tie blue suit
and only we’ll know I’m barefoot underneath,
we’ll get through the viewing, tearful gazes, elegies,
then he’ll load me in the back of his pitch black van,
hoist sandwiches, dried fruit, a thermos of coffee
ghostly white with cream,

Enough just for two and off to Michoacan
we’ll thankfully flee charting our fresh destiny
as chums on the road like Kerouac and Dean,
without the pot, wild chicks or uplift of speed.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

HER ARAB

her Arab
skin shone
and her eyes
ah her eyes….
dark

signets of thought
and beauty
speaking night
words in couplets
of ancient song
to my worried
meandering
heart.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

flowering sky

ten million geese fill the gray Autumn sky,
their power and beauty – wordless,
tears stream across our faces,

waterfalls of awe,
everything belongs,

everything.

read but untitled

wind rose and fell warm like breath
of a man and woman asleep.

canyons purpled in the day’s wane,
made animals of their wait.

wonder wounded summer’s memory,
oceans soothed and boiled
in the sun of starkest noon.

at the edge of old desire
he risked it all for her hand.

they said “time”
and “chance meeting”,
he told “perhaps”
within “starlight”
after writing
"everything scorches”
eventually.

neither ever listened
to the whole story
of shame and what
still shines after flood
and drought ensue,
pages and pages
unread in fear
of engulfing
conversations.


and the unceasing wind
clothed the sleepers
in flannel,
mopped fretfulness
the mother of endings
from their pensive
and creased brows.

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Shock and Awe Six Years' Later

hunger roams the potholed streets,
lusts for savages smeared red
and green, their rumbling nights
and blazing noons of lukewarm
foods fried in kitchens’ gloom
unfit to eat,
yet that is what children
do when nothing persists
beyond the corner store
ravaged like Baghdad’s core,
eyes opened big as sheep,
they stare and stare
for what was once,
but is now no more….

Friday, March 13, 2009

Oral Hygiene Clinic Hijinks

when the portly doc with booze on his breath
ordered his nurse to call him Oral Roberts,
six or seven old infirm patients stacked
like cordwood in the musty waiting room,
overheard his demand, recalled the mystic
titan for Christ and the many scrimped dollars
they’d sent via U.S. mail to Tulsa,
their own dustbowl Vatican,
with bemused expressions of hope
they tossed prescription bottles unused
into a green wastebasket,
threw down stained Popular Mechanics’ and Vogue
without address labels on the worn faded carpet,
collapsed shiny aluminum walkers like demolished
buildings downtown and stood up straight together
free of disdain, for their moment of truth,
clear and plain as Oklahoma in May,

the gang of Medicare oldsters
like a band of pirates or pilgrims
were made whole and healed in
that dank waiting room while the doc
and his nurse forgetting duty
to patients enjoyed oral relations with
nary a word,
fucked out their brains in Jesus’ name
on a wobbly exam table,
Nurse Ratchet and the doc drove each
other insane, swore Hippocratic oaths
at orgasm’s apex,
the whole damn place
enjoyed what’s called in the trade
a flight into health,
socialized medicine deluxe,
sans insurance forms and co-pays.

and within one week they were fun/
damentally dead,
od’ed in their unprescribed capsule
of godly sweet love.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

unleashed

unleashed but not forgiven
unshaven feeling livid
misty sighted seeing walkers
prancing, out upon the streets
of morning..

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Singular Travel (on the eighteenth anniversary of the death of my mother Grace.)

how many times has she de-planed to no one,
stepped into a city where only others have families?

and it doesn’t ever get easy to travel alone.
simply put, it sucks to be no body’s honey.

a lone egret stands in a white lake of Wisconsin,
waits for her flock looks up to the sky.
it’s beautiful, this rare silence the patience,
five bluish hawks return in circles
of swerve, serrated wingtips
touch, merge on high.

she melts into midnight in a wild tangle of reeds
waits for her friends with eyes wide to the stars.

greeted and taunted at the mouth of the runway
by smiling embraces bold slow
kisses of strangers,
she turns inside peers deeply instead,
seeks holding and warmth
imagines far golden light

an ivory flock of birds soaring

faint shine
of binary stars.

Saturday, March 7, 2009

He Lived For Water

all the world’s water roiled and crashed
over slick black rocks down cliffs of basalt
in map-less countries without borders or budgets,
he could see and taste the flow and spray everywhere
he looked, the utter effervescent fluidity of it on his face
and brown blowing hair, thick and damp like maple leaves
soaked in rain, drops of life fell onto his lapping hungry tongue,
goosebumps the size of tiny sand pebbles on the shore of his neck
and carved biceps and the roar, oh the roar of pure wild/
ness, of caribou stampeding along the angry river
towards their own oblivion

and only the creased scrap of photo an inch square at most
in the parka pocket of the girl he loved in school, her slender body
buried in the arid desert town Barstow, burning waterless Barstow,
where he’d held her pink hand happy, full of grace on hot
and tired streets, swore his undying boy love and escaped
after the funeral and dust coated the whole place
and then the dumbing numbness of duration--
a glacier of NOW unending on grief’s mountain,
only the scent and feel of water could eke out
these small solitary baptisms, these partial resurrections
from the icy cage of frozen feeling,
but liquid moments evaporated fast:

Cool rising mist dissolves in the glare and burn of unrelenting sun.

he learned again and again and again in the ephemeral
refreshing stream, these grateful distractions are forever torn
from time’s capsized dream, chewed, swallowed down
the rock strewn gullet, drunk and eaten
by famished death’s dried gluttonous greed,
he gorged liquid on these long starred nights,
truncated days of untreed drought.

Altruism from on High

The diamond bounced sharp and hard
off a narrow side street into the opalescent
arms of a woman draped haughty in furs
of dead fallen rodents and silken scarves.

She grinned then clicked her red high heels,
without ado handed the scuffed up gem
to a faceless bum crouched and hidden,
tucked small invisibly underneath stairs.

At once his grizzled cheeks grew soft
as value so bequeathed rose like orange
sun at dawn, life had graced him with a rich
rock song worth more than myopic
jewelers or screaming fans may rave.

From atop the mountainous Empire State
Building a thunderous growl so loud
all Manhattan craned necks to gaze
on lusty Fay Wray riding hirsute King Kong
who beat his philanthropic broad
chest with generous animal joy.

Can those in the know
now tell me please,
was it therapy, religion or drugs
which worked this rare charm?

Perhaps there’s hope for unjeweled
scum like Cheney and Perle
and the wide cast world
who would want no more
their diamonds
their pearls
their sweet boys and girls
stolen and hoarded
by effete snorting swine
with snot dripping snouts
buried in truffles,

These corpulent geezers
without riches of war,
they shuffle
they snuffle
their hubris
quite floored.

dawn's breakers

dawn’s ruby red fingers,
splattered digits
of spurting blood burst
from day’s fat throat
onto the concrete street
where skateboarding punks
in abstract style
weave and swerve
loiter in curves
paint the town red
jump gray curbs
with maniac verve
and surgical nerve,


a pack of twirling
dervishes dizzy
and swirling,
these uncelibate
monks who athletically
pray, hope against hope,
tearing and scaring down
the steep speeding slopes
towards a bruised bit
of a sit on the landing
strip sidewalk
and the sweet curling
smoke of rolled
up joints packed
tight as twins
or swarthy
archbishops,

holy commotion!
they suck deep
on their chalice filled
with sacramental chaos
of most potent dope!

Stimulus Package?

short-sleeved
white
shirted
salesmen
smoke
desperate
to close
the deal.

there’s a
recession
on,
don’t they
know?

phones don’t
ring
pens run
out of ink
boisterous talk
falters
becomes
false
and dry.

lunch sparse,
thin cheese
sandwich
and the sports
section.

when and why
did I take
this road?

(asked in
smeared
mirror
of rare
self
reflection)

can Bible
study save
me now,
pay piles
of bills,
make my
silent wife
smile again?

Stimulus Re-Packaged

Six or seven salesmen pulled and dragged
on filtered cigarettes in the drab small office
they called home base. Coffee cups, post-it notes
and the incessant honk and roar of traffic
raked the air they sucked with those smokes.

Conversations with wary customers on cell
phones overlapped, crashed, collided in space,
sweat and dread of unclosed deals ate
their souls, paled their faces, tore their
confidence into shreds,

spoken syllables
of half truths left them
emptied mumbling,
the other half dead.

Every Thursday after/
noon the museum of art
three blocks down
had free admission to its
rooms of beauty.

These men never went,
never left their gunmetal
desks to venture forth
and view Miro
or Matisse,
sat slumped on chairs
until draped in dark,
chain smoked, cajoled,
telephoned and lied,
dialing with art,
did their duty,
day after day
dreaming release,

yet in their mad steamy midst,
a big untouched bowl
of fleshy bright oranges
and soft unsold rain
pounding the street
spoke straight in real language
that mattered
(yet acknowledged by none)

no matter the deal.

The Larceny of Citrus

plundered grapefruits
the size of fresh tits
wrapped their tart skins
onto my fat lips
which startled new neigh/
bors down the dead street
who hopped on second
hand cell phones,
screamed flabbergasted
“police!”, whilst you
read your Bible
from Luke to Matthew,
all those begats and begones,
creek water to fine wine
at weddings in Cana,
surely tweaked
stupefied
poured your
un-becoming,

somber as a be/
wigged barrister
or butt viewed
plumber you
quasi- comatose,
naked as citrus sin,
soaked smothered in
puffed up cloud-suds,
and dear ducky
floated drunk,
crushed on orange gin,
in the claw-foot bathtub
amongst the fruitbowl’s
plump sinned
lemony flesh
confessional
din,

cleaned up
raw scrubbed
we hailed
yellow cab
curbside,
shouting

“long live lime zest!”

hopped in
then onto
the drunken,
perhaps kidnapped,
peripatetic diabetic bride...

tiny girl (bigger/longer)

this tiniest girl, a brownish soft bug
sat like a pinpoint or tuft
of still round hair
reverent on a couch
or was it a chair?,
she’d somehow or other become
my charge at the party.

a friend’s insect daughter
eluded my efforts to touch
or to hold her throughout the event
as a multitude of people
talk ate and drank as they do
at these things.

her mother apparently unawares
didn’t care for her safety or where
she was all night in the noisy
big room until with a thrust
I picked her right up, felt
a protective fatherly surge
for the vulnerable girl.

this diminutive bug held safe
in my hand yet soon escaped
near the kitchen’s flurry and heat,
as my heart fell with a crash,
down on my knees I searched the floor
and knew she’d disappeared amongst
the crowd and the hoopla,
again eluded me well and the desire
to care for her here in the din
amidst dangerous feet stepping
helter skelter to crush creatures
as she.

she was gone from my care
this brave insect girl,
only an orange ladybug left
as I crawled on all fours
here on the floor.

tiny girl

tiny tufted insect girl
you sit soft
and solo
savor the world
from your seat
safe secure
perched upon
the davenport,

I worry yet,
twist
with fret,
if you should
drop off
this couch,
(I’d protest
be bereft)

you’d be
stepped on
smeared,
smashed
to custard
by brutal
feet,

what’s left?
not much,

ouch
ouch
ouch!