autumnal (fragment)
Ellyn picks up a stick
that lays in the road
mustve come from
the white oak over there
when it stormed last night
I woke up at 5 from the thunder
crashing on the predawn
without any sympathy
for the three doubles
in a row
I pulled
me
I don’t know trees
their names or leaves
and I sleep heavy and sound
through precipitation and guilt
caffeine and bad dreams
The Universal Idiocy of the Human Race
Remarque wrote the words
I borrow for the title to this poem
my response is
oh my yes and amen.
I’ll never forget being dumbstruck
learning that the average IQ was 100
and I’d always felt anyone under 120
was moron par excellence.
What, me intelligent?
Maybe not. The crown for idiot king
lies upon the head I call my own
I always thought there was hope for humanity
and still do,
but I read about war
in novels, poetry, history
trying to comprehend the incomprehensible
why humans so willingly kill one another
when the species’ survival is at stake
with or without intelligent leadership,
mostly without.
My Teachers
I remember when I was a kid at school,
I really suffered from the hatreds.
I hated everyone and everything,
But most of all, I hated myself.
My ginger hair, my glasses, my acne,
And most of all, my shyness.
Nothing seemed to ever go my way.
The only things that gave me pleasure
Were records, and more importantly, books.
Jack Kerouac, Richard Brautigan, Henry Miller
These glimpses of life
Helped to save mine.
Now here I am over 30
Years later and still it’s
Books that keep me going,
Dostoyevsky, Bukowski,
Raymond Carver, Knut
Hamsun, Philip Larkin.
Helping to explain this life
That makes no sense at all
To me.
Paris.
Feeling like I’m on the run from
what I don’t even know anymore –
I leave Spain and take the train up to Paris –
watching the land and architecture
slowly change from
yellow to green, white to grey.
In a grubby Parisian hotel room
that’s cost the remainder
of my fruit picking wages,
I check out the view from the window –
outside several prostitutes pace up
and down the sad looking road,
whilst bored looking couples
eat in a McDonald’s.
Elsewhere in the city –
police brutality is up and the word
on the street is that the police blew off
one protestor’s hand earlier.
Romance is dead
even in Paris –
but tonight the poems are flowing
like a deep river
and maybe that’s no coincidence.
mixed intentions
many times the blade
has been held
aimed at different parts
with the intention
of
exploring insides
but it has always been put it down
it was a close call the other night
the boiling static and pressure
needed to be released
i refrained
and placed
my face
against
a cold window
when it started to burn
i went to bed
the next morning
i woke up
feeling
much better
