A Ripped And Faded Circular

Welcome to the carnival underneath the ground
Home to moles with painted smiles and earthworm-eating clowns

All ages are admitted with a parent or a gun
Come see our caged ladies where the lions have their fun

Buried on the high wire [unreadable]

Swamp Thing

I was a wonder of biology.
Once my body was full of extra hearts
Calling like a chorus of frogs through the night.
Little by little they splashed into the muck and dove.

Now spring has come around again, and by the river
I heard spring peepers in the trees at midday
Winding up their love songs.

One of my freakish extra hearts
Still surfaces and calls from across the country.
No, no, this is a wonderful and beautiful thing!

My body pumps blood normally, however
With the two strange organs still in my chest.
And yet I feel the hollow place where
No other flesh can take root.

And I tell her, Pollywog,
You still got a room to rent here.
Neither of us is allowed to die first, okay?

Legalese

We sleep in houses like agreements.
The universe never signed it.
Your new device, before welcoming you
Makes you press an acceptance.
There are millions—literally millions—
Of words hammered into blocks of terms
You never read, will never hear
But may allow some monster to eat at its leisure.
No, the universe never wrote it.
I just want to make a damned call, you grumble
And wave away mosquito swarms of law.
You still have to die someday.
Universe wrote that one.
We are trying to bioengineer a good attorney.
We believe the spirit of it falls in our favor.

#25

Six shy,
why try?

Drinking Song

We toast, leaning on rifles,
Eyes over a wall unknown.

Perked ears and slitted eyes
As slim shadows sidle past.

A grenade or a bottle swaps
Grips and our heads tip back

Caught in laughter or less,
Much less, probably only

Scanning the moon with an
Echoless gaze, a smirk, sex.

A red haze unrolls slowly
Down from the aching stars.

The last silhouetted hooker
Unclasps from the party and

Peeling away stands erect
In the street looking up at us,

Two dumb poets taking potshots
At Bombay doors and Mars.

Three Thoughts (And Lo, A Mountain)

If it can't bleed, fuck, or dream
It's not a poet.

Muscle, fire, electricity--
What will the world's next power be?

If ideas could move mass
An Everest would rise in Indiana.

When The Door Clicks Shut

They have been lying.

Nobody knows.
Not a blessed thing.
Not a damned thing.

Instant oblivion.
Beautiful painless nothing.
Forgetful god stuff.
Flipped switch, vanished raster.

Or, worlds exchanged.
Surfacing on alien seas.
Slow dawning on the dim
Morning fringe of the next.

Where the active verb solidifies
Into a permanent adjectival state
Everyone is inventing like mad.

Can I get a witness?

Day Zero

This is day zero.
The revolutions are afizz.
Parades spill out into the street.

Young women are releasing their
bare legs back into the wild.

The trees are spotted with green
after many months without you
the vague promise of seeing
you causes my heart to
burst in an explosion of feathers
and blossoms and songs.

Let us say there are souls.
Let us say all souls long for shelter,
a physical shell, a botanical tent, an edifice.

All rivers always were and
never find completion,
because there is no answer in completion.

There is a universe where there is no matter
only different wavelengths of light.

There is a universe where coins in the pockets
of people chime in time to the heartbeat of a czarina.

When she sleeps we sleep her sleep.
Then such awakening!

Let us say all life wishes to live, as
essentially as the process of osmosis, both fluid
and mechanical, a love that does not require a heart.

Now let me say
she has a face, and
you can call her
by your own name,
and we both can
speak the language,
the tongue of a human mind.

I walk outside sans jacket.
Spring is here.
This is day zero.

[Are you one of the new humans]

Are you one of the new humans
Just discovering my eyes

Are you one of the new humans
Where there is no average size

Are you one of the new humans
Singing ringtones in the crib

Are you one of the new humans
Cloned from Siri’s slender rib

Invader

It has been many, many years
Since I questioned your stony
Easter Island face.

What do you think matters?
Or more importantly
What do you believe
Doesn't matter?

You were always a yardstick of righteousness.
Romantic, realist, asshole--
It never mattered.
You said everything like a goddamn sage.

And how long did it take me
To pull down your statue,
To slip the yoke I had fashioned
From your rhetoric, year after year
In those formative days?

Now, we do not speak.
But once in a while one of your
Black arrows sails through my window
And bleeds a random darling.

so, want

bursting,
unasked heart

sit staring,
searching women
again and again

you’re somebody else
you patiently roar,
something else

girlfriend,
boyfriend,
anybody,
you’re ready

to sleep over,
do it like a rocket

suicide sun inside,
burning itself

doing it
in you

no way,
never



[This is an erasure poem, the source text was Charles Bukowski's "So You Want To Be A Writer?" As is typical of an erasure poem, I did not re-arrange the sequential order of any words, only omitted the intervening words to create new phrases. Thanks SaraEve for the prompt!]

Fronts Moving Through

First thunder.
First heavy sound of rain
Tapping at the house, asking to come inside.
It puts a spell over each thought,
Dresses memory in the garb of dream.
Changes sex.
Makes me believe in a way.
I thought of a leg, shapely and smooth
And the tapping turned to pounding,
Drumming, roaring.
Springtime is outside the window
Holding back its signature color.
The sheets of rain draw across like fingertips
So that tomorrow, I imagine
She must be shaking and green.

Further thunder,
Farther away.
The hands release the roof
Like a tired fish back into the stream.
The spell reaches the low point of its rhythm,
A cycle of waves.
There now, one more errant thunderbolt.
I prepare to undress and rob my dreams
Of the last summer’s memories.

Experiment

Be drawn, and a script would be written.
Let the magnetic fields of her face
Inch you across the tableau
Of mannequins frozen in absent poses.
The story you will write within her
Must not contain any mistakes.
You are indelible, and she cannot erase.
When the stage curtains spread
Both of you are naked in the spot.
Let her hooks into you. The dialogue
Between two poles goes bond, and bond.

A Belated Prayer For Boston

I pop the thin umbrella
Knowing this can only
Stop the drops of rain.
Only the so few things.

A small puddle settles
Under my knelt purview.
In a second my sorrow
Despoils its dim mirror.

In the rhyme of April
The flowers of May
Decorate scenes of loss.
What will ferry us to summer?

In Defense Of Losing

If you tear down all the constructs
We are animals in the woods.
We are animals pausing in the grasslands.
There is blood between this life and the end of it.
A hawk at mid-turn on one wing
And grazing rabbits below.
Most of life is not the hunting, though.
The cruel will convince you otherwise, they will say
You must be a wolf, you must only be a wolf.
But the deer lives a life of beauty as well,
And even the wolf can do no more or less than die.
You say, what does this mean to me?
I have a career, a vehicle I am paying for, a room
Full of products, someone’s first communion, someone
Else’s custody hearing, and they say North Korea
Is moving long-range missles around.
And I say, if you tear down all the constructs
We are animals in the woods.
The only great difference being
We know life will not last forever
And still believe we can waste it.

Heliolatry Revisited

Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy...
Sunshine almost always gets me high.  – John Denver


Millions of miles is a meaningless measure.
And yet we talk about forever
As if you could touch its glassy surface.
Photons?
The average person is riddled with them
And the cumulative effect
Is the hand of a god.
We are terrestrial.
We are the universal constants.
We vibrate with the act of collection.
The trillions of moving parts
Hold us softly like a bed of nails.
Somewhere buried in all of this machinery
My passionate will contorts
And sings with a voice of recombinated phantoms.
There is an I! There is an I! There is an I!
And for me alone you have vastly traveled
Long, long, frigid ways
To strike my eyes with your golden darts
Of pure reverberant joy.

The Mouse

The mouse knows my secrets.
I have no bloody knives,
No discarded syringes.
There is no paper trail
In the shape of a noose.
But the mouse knows my secrets.
The only bones I keep are
Made of stone and could
Never hang in my closet.
Still, the mouse knows my secrets.
My money, when I have some
Is ordinary under blacklight.
If you run my plates you see
Traffic violations, but the
Wheels are within the law.
No hits run from, no saves.
No heat packed. No shells
Except the ones I make when
I squeeze raw clay in my hand.
But the mouse—it knows.
The spyware whispers.
I have no hidden offshore
Accounts, no dealings with
Crossroad devils at dusk.
No dark market business,
No lurking sins of eyes.
No children harmed,
No hack, no foul.
Yet the mouse knows secrets.
It runs journals, walls, and streets.
The mouse knows secrets
My heart would disavow.

Radio Silence

Now

I lay on the wet sand all my day
Watching empty bottles wash in,
Watching the surf take them away.
Waiting, watching the wheeling gulls
Cracking my seeds, spitting the hulls.

I draw your name in the cool, wet sand.
I form the letters with an interested finger,
I wipe it clear with less sensitive hands.
My skin stays away from the seagull shit
And even this beautiful world is full of it.


Later

The sand and my face are lightly mottled.
The sky has been busy blocking the light,
Clouds that ride upright like your bottles.
The gulls, without me, move upcoast.
It's their hungry crying I miss the most.

Halloween Lovers

Bones of sugar
Honey, you lean

On your long spade
Speaking to the moon

My yellow screamer
My howler in the night

Your whip of red
Joke gum bleeding

Teeth falling out
Just for make-up sex

Vampire contemplative
Stakes in the heart

Painterly ghost
Graffiti in skulls

Your mouth,
Wax paper square

Twists at each end,
Opens to my fingers

Ringing bats
In a still-beating heart

What Prey To Call His Own

The housecat

leaves the cult of his home

and freezes up

in the humid storm of the world.

Eyes filled with lightning

he stares six ways at once

hearing his compass
ticking into unbelievable

distance.

The porch concrete a plateau,
the lawn is forest,

the sky endless dream.

Suddenly he is no hunter.
Wider gods have

caught him out.

Fire in his ears,

the fallen angel sees

his once-thundering voice

crushed by its own

lack of echo.

As the door swings true

behind him,

he adopts the habits
of a monk
facing the empty

wind.

First New Heresy

For one poet, it is the dirt-caked steel
Of a shovel's blade
Dragging the rubble away
To expose a still-wriggling heart
To the oxygen and sun.

For this poet is bringing truths
Up from the inner nebulae,
She knows the stars the mole knows.

For another poet--this poet
It is remembering to remember
The vast night-beaded gulfs
Of soul, the hovering truths
That flit and bite and sing
In the ears of one near to sleep.

And I almost forgot, my words
Taken into my eyes, a replacing
Of sound by light, of stillness
By motion, of the tangible craft
With ephemeral arts.

Here, I am returning.
The written word will be the last to die.
Reality is not digital,
An atom is not a pixel.
Meaning's depths cannot be compressed.

The Long Goodbye

I wish
I knew
how to
say goodbye
eloquently.
Something
sweet but
painful is
communicated,
and a smart
man would
leave on
that note.
With me
it’s always
a clumsy exit,
a failure
to break,
a film
whose credits
are repeatedly
interrupted
with just
one more
one-liner,
just one
further
unnecessary
twist of
the epilogue.
I cannot
escape
with grace.
I could kill
five years’
worth of
poetry
with one
of my
ill-formed
goodbyes.

Immutable Rings

I understand trees.
Not like a botanist.
Like a woodland dweller.
A hermit among them.
Humanity is the forest exactly.
I mean just exactly.
Entangled with age,
Individuals with muddled roots.
Some exposed by time,
Some diving narrowly down
To hide in buried dark.
And our fallen ends never recompose.
No upward flurry of gathering,
Autumn in reverse.
I would never go back.
Any root pruned would kill a branch,
Maim the crown.
And errors produce the rarest grain,
Smart carvers hunt them with lust.
I have grown around my pain.
I will never go back.
I will rise a hundred years and
Fall over with the right wind.

16 Syllables

a year's
accumulated light
entering my
eyes on
one leaf

The Hurricane Lamp

A candle’s cage of violet glass
Contains the pain, displays the flame
And how, my love, we know that game—
It’s wildfire in the grass.

Contains the pain, displays the flame
Until the fingers splay to touch
The wildfire in the grass
That ebbs like a receding wave.

Until the fingers splay to touch
The deepening, raw red horizon
That ebbs like a receding wave
Between your parted lips.

That deepening, raw red horizon
Where half-to-half as one we cast
Between your parted lips, my love
A candle’s cage of violet glass.

Does That Make Me Crazy?

If I had the money I owed
I would believe in God.
What other force could be at work
When all of my work is not enough
To close the gaps,
To lift the lead and straw?
When all of my intense creation,
My labors of will and art and love
Are worth next to nothing
From a crowd’s wallets?
I have come to accept my debts
As essential to life,
Like ticking clocks and skin maladies
And scars from a thoughtless pet.
Nobody told the third-grade child
That he would grow up
To earn the hatred, the bitterness,
The spite, the deficits, the hunted
Looks, the haunted hurts,
The pains big and small.
Nor that he would be unable to pay
Despite losing sleep,
Selling memory, and gambling
With futures beyond his own.
If the money suddenly came
To my hand, why wouldn’t I
Scream at the sky again?
If everyone in all the world
Loved me kind and true,
Forgave my faults, allowed
My heart, wanted me
Here to stay, then surely—
Surely—somebody up there laughed.

Life

One slender tendril green
Hangs in the shade of a wood unseen
Reaching relentlessly alone
For simply a branch, a leaf, a stone.

All the meaning I ever need
Floods and flees that spiral green
Bobbing in the forest breeze
Reaching silently alone.

de Lay

You are my tireless creature.
In the light of noon with seconds to go
You place one hand on my chest:
Wait, you say.
We can connect the dots in any order.
Deadlines are dead lines.
I can show you life.
There are a thousand cuts to carry out
Before you carve the eyes and mouth.

And I let you take the hand of my clock
The way a bottle steers a drunk.
Let’s play a game, you say.
Let’s look in another window.
Let’s touch every other base
Before the one that counts.

You flatter me with arrogance
In your négligée of last-second saves
With your panting chest of wins.
I can make the train, you say.
I can pull out of any tailspin.
Tomorrow is a promise
And you will never die.