To Those Who Are Perishing

A strange figure that has always been there but never seen appears just then, green bottle flies tangled in her long, witchy hair and patches of brown mold staining her forehead and chin. She knows our names, our secrets, knows our thoughts before we even think them. Those she has invisibly visited have perished miserably from Alzheimer’s and tumors and in shopper stampedes. The science of it can be debated later, when cold black stars pinwheel across the sky and the moon flies up like a clown shot out of a cannon. In the meantime, today’s rain falls on yesterday. We grow old surrounded by clocks.

Habitual

 
The hawk of my heart
Is on the hunt—
For hunger is my habit.
And love once sharp
Can soon grow blunt,
You silly, sexy rabbit.

Safe to Reason                                                                             

 

You emerge from a hole,
and your parents’ act of sex
will remain to be forgotten—

or shivered at in shame—
if you should happen
to consider your dark

creation, which is quotidian
for every creature, so shudder
not at previous passion,

in your year zero, of those
precedent genes that, twining,
sent you on your unchosen way

from that moist warm hollow
of meeting that offered egress,
a chance at light air, so accept

the inception while you wander
with their doubly helical strands
aware until you are drawn back

into the recess not for the squeamish.

 

The Beatnik Cowboy

 
vortices of spiraling memories
disperse within the time tunnels
of his mind, echoing back to him
as if his heart were an empty cavern
stretching from hell to eternity
more of his life ahead of him than behind
He goes amongst the throng of humanity
unseen...
his youthful face and age make him invisible
alone and craving the fuel of cognizant exchange
the fire of spirited conversation
alone...
his mind bleeds with the need of the human touch,
youth intoxicatingly dynamic
a parade of thorn-winged emotion
which plagues it's tortured flight
the fusion of inhibitions newly freed
with a stream of loveless anonymity
perpetually hollow within the wanting
ablaze with desires soon flown...
Oh proud display this fallen cause!

Update

Working in the background
like software downloading:
You look like a sack tied in
the middle, she sneers.
Your ass is as big as a barn.
Did her mother speak to her
this way? She seems to think
it’s useful, these relentless
corrections. She seems to
think it’s her duty, in case
you slipped for a minute,
caught someone pretty in
the mirror. She seems to think
it’s funny, because her eyes
twinkle, and she smiles, and
when your face crumples she
chides, I’m just kidding! Gaw!
As if it’s your moral failing that
you can’t take a joke. As if you
don’t understand what it means
to be a good mother, as you make
the mental note to never do this
to yours. She may think it’s ribbing,
but you’ve got the antidote. You won’t be
cribbing from her notes. Cycle broken.


frozen

we were barely in our double digits
that hot summer visiting our cousins
in what my mother derisively called
“the sticks,” everywhere dust and
parched grass, we kids chained
for an icy drink in a perspiring glass,
sweat a rivulet between my newly
mounded breasts, the adults forget
the painful awareness of our teen
bodies (“nothing I haven’t seen”
declares my dad), or they just don’t
care, when they insist we combat
the triple digits in the above-ground
pool, when of course no one has
thought ahead and had us bring
our suits, so topless, and all I see is
baby fat and nippled hills captured
by the callous photographer in stills,
embarrassment a different sort of chill

Journey to the Center of the Earth

She looked
like she
thought this
was her last
journey to
the center of
the earth
That nothing
was going
to move her
once she sat
down not even
a bomb
She hadn't
counted on
the floor
leaping up
to catch her
when she
fell

good things to own

 
a rust bucket flathead Ford and a well-honed block plane
a brass slide trombone in a case that smells like the jazz clubs used to smell

and four or five acres that don’t carry a mortgage
and a “free-to-a-good-home” sway back donkey
and a garage sale Stetson they let go for a dime

sometimes you know when something fits in your life
sometimes you don’t and it slips away before you do
like twenty-two months of sobriety

like the trench art cannon shell your granddad brought home from WWI
or the book of Walt Whitman poems he read and then read again
while the tremors of Parkinson’s ravaged his life

and then there’s the one thing you will never own but you wish you could
the thing Walt Whitman wove into those poems before he sent them into the world
the thing your granddad tried to give you, but you turned your back

Or Gram Parsons


The quickest way to lose me
is to write about
a finch, a wren, or a snowy egret.

I mean, for fuck’s sake.

Don’t write about a sparrow
and expect me to be happy.

If it has to be about a bird,
make it about a penguin
or a chicken
or David Crosby
with his variant spelling.
Vultures are sometimes fine,
but for the love of God,
read the room.

The quickest way to wither
is to write about flowers, any sort.

Clouds,
sunshine,
dewy grass.

Shoot the flowers
out of a cannon, maybe.

Let them knock a bird
right out of the sky.

Let a cat be waiting.

That’s the show.
That’s how it’s done.

Bye bye, birdie.

That’s when I’ll
be back. 

Don’t Fall

 

I tell you, “Don’t fall in love with me.”

 
What I mean is –

 
Don’t build me up on a pedestal

Imagining everything I am

 

Don’t tell me I’m your goddess

Your princess

Your muse

Yet never get to know me

 

Don’t blame me

When the cracks in the pedestal show

And you realize

I haven’t lived up to

The story you wrote

 

If you are going to love me

Love me a little at a time

For who I really am

 

Someone standing too close to the paintings

Because she refuses to wear glasses

 

Someone who gets lost

Coming back from the bathroom

And talks during movies

 

Drinks coffee at 8 P.M.

Only to complain that she can’t sleep

 

Loves the Mets like a religion

Without being able to name a single player

 

Who remembers tiny details about you

And forgets the huge things

 

Don’t fall in love with me

Falling is a quick movement

Out of control

An accident

 

If there ever comes a time

When you love me

Let it be

Slow

Soft

Deliberate

 

Don’t fall head over heals

Don’t fall at all

Just take a step

the joy of cheating death
 
white knuckled down another
back road in the sticks
 
as fast as you can, lights off
only destiny awaits
 
and as many times as i thought
i was going to die
 
there was just as many times
that i felt the joy of cheating
death
 
but youth is wasted on the
young
 
and now my knees won't let
me get into one of those fast
cars anymore
 
my mother doesn't understand
the depression these days
 
i laugh, mention something
about naming me after the two
biggest assholes she's ever known
and then acting surprised at how
it all turned out
 
these are the nights of bent
spoons and dirty needles
 
i want to be one of the lucky
ones and die with the needle
still in my arm
 
maybe melt into my bed and
rest comfortably for the first
time in years
 
the girl i lost my virginity to
killed herself a few years later
 
i don't believe in coincidences