Drop Out

After waking up in a dilapidated fishing shack,
concealed by cattails, teal paint peeling,
he watches white and black buffleheads
waterski in the sodalite sunrise.

Rust-colored ruddy ducks court
in tide pools, dating season at the Jersey shore,
before deciding who to hitch north with
for the upcoming mating season.

He’s thinking of hitching north too
possibly catch some spring trail work
in the White Mountains or do some planting
for an organic farm-to-table in Vermont.

Then maybe he’ll follow a jam band’s summer tour
out west, sling grilled cheese in parking lots.
Meet up with some trimmigrants,
spend the fall clipping marijuana plants.

He doesn’t see any reason to set up camp
on the quicksand of brick-and-mortar poverty
without the excuse of kids
or a sick mother when he could be poor anywhere⁠—

80% of the hippies living in Haiku, Maui
haven’t used currency in years.
He finds the longer he skirts the system
the less he needs it, not waiting to grow wings.

Vespers

 
In your bracing bed
Day’s heat recess
I in my boxer shorts
You a full night dress

A picture of Jesus calm
Hung from a moldy wall
A conversation long
For scholars of St Paul

I did fancy your attire 
Laying on the floor
And atop its lace neckline
A half-eaten apple core 

Aubade


Santiago Hemingway asked
Why old men get up so early
In the morning. Was it to make
The day longer? Perhaps. Or,
To make the night shorter. To be
Awake and navigate the night
By the stars rather than the clock
Adrift in the bladder that keeps
Us afloat in the warm stream
Where dreams flow and every
Man is an island there in the
Delicious dark hours before dawn
When solitude brews slipstream
To pour into the cup of daylight.
__________

Whatchamacallit


Gizmo, thingamabob, thingamajig,
Thingy, not to mention doohickey.
Okay! All these refer to things. But,

I remain clueless. These words are
Meaningless. No nutritional value.
No protein, no carbs. No edification.

They are noise that annoys. Worse,
Using them is demeaning. To hear
Them is maddening. Please stop.
__________

The Burning Bush


The burning bush
Gives light.
The burning bush
Gives heat.
The burning bush
Shows the way
Warms limb and soul.
The burning bush
Can fuel a holocaust .
The burning bush
Can spread wild
A fervor of flame
Without control
Destroy what is built
Consume limb and soul.
Moses walked away
Tablets in hand
Did not look back
The burning bush
Reduced to ash.

When                                                             

If I am not alone
where am I. It rains
the last days of spring. It rains
the beginning of summer.
I kiss the pizza delivery guy on the mouth.     

Candle

 
You know, that way of talking to yourself that can be dangerous. The way a blade is sharp or a pistol’s loaded. Since the last eviction, I don’t own any furniture. I don’t have an address. The newspaper said, Some members of the victims’ families fainted when they heard the jury’s findings. You’re innocent until you’re proven guilty. Close your eyes. Listen. Everyone is their own music. The sun’s fading light, cold as a knife, the end of day, a smothered flame cowering in the candle’s slender throat.

On a Sunny Autumn Day


I passed by a graveyard of veterans
Encircled by American flags
Across the street stands a tree
Most of its leaves red-turning
Only a few remains green
In the warm air I can’t hear soldiers’ wailing
Their names I don’t know
Just as I know not the name of the tree
But I get their anger because
The guilty hands pulling them down
Include those from behind

Symphony

Amidst cherry pines
And dewdrop smiles
I knitted my waded path
Full of allegory
Rich and sumptuous
It rose around the Globewarm sun
The confetti lays bare
The sea grew tired
The blue butterflies wore
A ravenous hue
My aching music and symphony
Of lost leaden islands
The earth's new cicades
The upward sun
The swan's long journey to the West
My blueberry garden
Full of rose thorns
Sublime ecstasy was fought
Around the globe
For it was a merciless plight
Into the endless warmth.

2023.

You were a freshly baked 
blueberry muffin 
dunked 
in a lukewarm coffee, 
desire 
as a beautiful woman, 
whispering be careful 
what you wish for 
ever so delicately in your ear,
as she bites off 
a piece your earlobe,
a rash on an arse cheek,
a tornado tearing through 
a placid cornfield in Kentucky,  
a marathon 
of watching paint dry, 
a grey hair on a baby’s head, 
a treasure trove 
of unexpected pleasures -
bowing out 
just as I’d got to know you, 
leaving the gutters full 
of fallen tinsel and pine needles-
everything already a distant memory, 
like all the years before and after.


Arabian Carpet Shark. 

In Bristol Aquarium, 
I watch you 
move gracefully 
through your tank.

Near harmless 
to humanity 
and far from home, 
I ask you what 
you’re doing here? 

Where from 
your blue cell, 
with a sigh you say -  
I could just as easily, 
ask you all 
the same. 

Poetry, You Could’ve Helped


On the day JFK was assassinated
I was a fourth grader fermenting
at a flip-top desk (adjacent and
acquiescent to my school’s fastest
girl) and cheering for the death
of a Democrat. I had it wrong, I know,
but later, the same with sex (women’s
lib confused this sensitive son of a
robust Republican): that women
really didn’t want to get laid
by me—no chauvinist pig—in fact,
a prig, who never could quite get it
right. Viet Nam came and went, disco,
its chains and hairy chests, drugs
I never did, and Jimi, dead, said, Your
little world won’t let you go. So what
is a petrified guy to do? Poetry, you
could’ve helped, but in “Lit Since
Way Back When,” that meant Milton
and the Three Sonneteers, not Frank,
Adrienne, Allen, Galway, and their
songs of the opened road. I needed
the freedom of the skewed view, a
new scene to drive me deeper than
dead white-guy homiletics. I needed
the New Yorkers’ enumerating their
crazy school of days, San Franciscans’
hard-bopping along the gone boardwalk
that could’ve been the Coney Island
in my mind. Instead, only old J.G.W.’s*
Thanks untraced to lips unknown
Shall greet me like the odors blown
From unseen meadows newly mown.
Yeah, beat poetry, you could’ve helped.

_______________
*from John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl”



Country Crow

 
When cars approach at ten over, ten under,
I think: stay with the carrion at this edible
consistency or do my flap-away-and-wait?

The zoom is monotonous, all buzz and swoosh,
a rhythm I live with, my murder and me.
And I’ve heard we’re confused for starlings,

for grackles, though how? No speckles. No
iridescent heads. We’re bigger, more mythical.
Some say majestic! Maybe. From a distance.

But on the fat branch of this fencerow mulberry
it’s merely watch and wait. Some dull days
I never stretch my wings, just hop from crotch

to pavement and back again, and back again,
a little bluish viscera dangling from my beak.
You’d never know it but the hawk’s no bigger,

though the search light of his shadow casting
wide circles over roadways, over fields means
he’ll soon have live meat. Me, I get what

gets itself hit. Then in between I doze and dream
I’m small enough to ride a bowing cattail,
slurring a scratchy terrr-eee, an oak-a-lee.

Flashing my red and yellow chevrons
luminescent in the summer sun,
I’m catching someone’s eye.

 

 

oh no scorpion

 
i have taught myself hunger, i have taught myself to love twig season.
i dance at dawn and out the kitchen. 

come on denial, convince me not to break like twigs. 

come on, come on denial, wear your open smile tonight.

 
another turn and close my eyes again. 

fifty kilometers northeast, going a hundred million miles.
tonight, tonight i cry, i cry

 
the baseline takes me out, tear open my eyes and see for once more.
me — freezing in that kitchen, melting snow and spinning in wide circles, holding my own hand.
hey, hey dream machine, its time you win.