Outskirts
 
Always thinking ahead
 
outskirts of a typical city of now
many with crimson tattoos
sown into wrinkled foreheads
 
loosening my belt
finishing my potato chips
and Pepsi chaser
 
heading back to the new wilderness
after voicing my opinions
to those that will listen
 
stirring a gathering crowd
sticks and stones
against my thick scars
 
but something about me
holds them still
perhaps tired of killing others
 
I shrug
squint
hearing angels in my head
 
my fists filled with heaviness
many wondering how
the world came to this
 
several miles out
I’m thinking I’m free
but someone sent the hounds after me
 
I crawl into my cave
temporary home
possibly my final tomb
 
but I believe I’m safe
plenty of dog biscuits
in my backpack
 
always thinking ahead
for a few more minutes to live.

FUNERALS, LOVE AFFAIRS, DEATH

 

I’ve written more poems

about funerals

than I’ve attended

funerals

 

I’ve written more poems

about love affairs

than I’ve had

love affairs

 

I’ve written more poems

about death

than I’ve

ever died

Don’t Know If I Hit That Bugger (A Christmas Poem)

In solitude
realization 
dawns
higher
than suggested
great works
consider
your meditative
mind
playground
for seasonal joy.
Merry Holidays
Happy Christmas
Have a bang-beat, great-go, big-haul, 

rip-roaring, neck-or nothing, every time a bulls-eye,
bell-ringin beatnik Christmas!
And mighty Hanukkah!
groovy Kwanza!
chillin’ Ramadan!
the blackest of Satan fests!
Jains celebrate non-violence to microbes Noel!

Mothers & Tales
here, we are snowballs that drop. 
sometimes, we check up our cheeks to 
see if there are more stones to throw.
—childhood fleets too, we dare know.
mother has confessed of different stories
when she sat us under an Udala tree, where
our ancestry dangles their hatchet in case 
someone tries to ransack 
their remains. Don’t twitch your gazes, 
moimi told me the tale 
& our mothers do not lie, their lips only get 
reddened by the lard of a palm-kernel when they 
speak random truths. So say, you —
I dare say, I loathe halloween. Mother once 
told me there’s a grim reaper that escapes
from its demimonde every season to rip
out the guts of the children who shrug to
their mama’s words. So, I bandage myself
into a wrapper of mom’s every night
& lingo plummets on my tongue till all
I say is I love you, mama. Life is not 
a trinket of rebirth, or the ashes of a 
phoenix. Tomorrow, I might ask God to
make my mind the pigment of my retina.
& bath me in the red sea —till all I
drip is blue hue.
but that’ll be a poem for another day.

Bodhi Tree

Your parents will try to close yr mind.
The kids at school will try to close yr mind.
Most of the teachers, too.
The tv WILL close yr mind.
But you gotta fight back
Write poetry
Watch ballet
Learn how to play guitar
Till you see all the blue-eyed blondes
And all the green-eyed redheads
Riding all the rainbow unicorns
All 27 of them
On the silver mountain with golden apples.

Those Were the Days
A student at Leeds University, at the end of the 50s, 
I found a holiday job at a local factory, making jam.
The first fellow worker I met was Kevin, operating
the snuffing machine, topping and tailing gooseberries.
I was sure Kevin could snuff a lot more than fruit.
He had a wrestler’s build, with trapezius muscles
that sloped like the sides of a mountain to bulging deltoids.
He told me he was a recidivist whose last sentence
was five years in the choky for killing a gay man
who made a pass at him, then illegal. “Only five years! 
Astonishing! I don’t believe it! How come?”
“Because” he said, “I used the Portsmouth Defence.”
I wasn’t versed in legal matters; he enlightened me.
It was also known as the “Guardsman’s Defence”
as well as the “Gay Panic Defence”. It appealed
to the prejudiced jurors of the day. If accepted
in court, the perp could be treated more leniently
and escape the noose. He grinned at me and winked.
A shiver ran down my spine as I hastily assured him
that I had a fiancée and showed him a photo of her.

Anthony and Cleopatra 
 
hey, he said, hey, 
let's stay in bed  
together. outside 
somewhere, the dust  
is settling. people 
selling carpets  
from car boot- 
backs and wine  
off from dusty 
back shelves. 
 
somewhere 
there's a horse 
turned to ribs  
by some cross- 
roads. somewhere 
blood flowing. 
it's 5pm here 
but there is light 
somewhere else, 
coming over  
the horizon like legs  
rising out 
of a bath. 
 
she looked up 
from where she was  
off at the window, 
hair on her shoulders 
black waterfalls 
falling on rocks, 
and she smiled and said 
yes, you want to stay in bed 
every day when I visit 
but me, 
I have things to do, 
Ant. 
 
I have friends 
and work to go to. I like 
going outside 
when the sun is up.  
like coffee on patios 
and music 
in jazz bars 
and sometimes 
outside them 
I talk to people  
I don't know. 
 
that's how we met, 
remember? 
and that's why you like me. 
because sometimes  
I go away. 
 
he rolled on the sheets, 
stiffened his resolve 
and something else,  
yes, that thing 
too. yes he said 
and rolled the duvet over, 
exposing the mattress  
to her side. yes 
that is part of the reason.  



Straight down. 
 
the best ones 
take feeling 
and get their hands in  
at the start –  
pulling it  
straight  
down and over  
the page 
like a windowblind 
hiding distraction 
or a coffin nail pushing 
some meaning 
to place. 
 
the best ones are rivers, 
and like that  
take courses 
going straight 
and invariably  
downward.  
only looking 
to the shallow  
eye like they  
meander.  
 
experiments in form 
are experiments, 
not decisions –  
exercises in not knowing 
which way  
words want  
to go, written by some people  
who do not understand  
where stability comes from 
or where their feet would go 
if they ever decided to stand up, 
pick a course, 
and plant themselves.

Camping for the Night East of Salt Lake City, 1972

  
After three days of driving from New York, 
we stopped at a Utah state park for the night, 
our bodies thrumming from the ancient Valiant.
 
Too wired to sleep, we sat around the campfire, 
and since I’d admitted to a Masters in Lit, 
Dwayne, Eva, and Brendan cajoled me 
into telling a horror or ghost story:
 
“The Cropsey Maniac,” the scary favorite 
at the Catskills camp where I’d been a counselor: 
A burned-down mansion and a madman avenging 
his bride’s death by fire-careless Boy Scouts.
I held the flashlight under my ghoul’s face
while I croaked the fate of the doomed troop.  
 
Had this been a horror movie, 
my tale would’ve conjured Dr. Cropsey 
into stalking us, picking us off one by one.  
Instead, we woke to the sun’s first 
eye-stabbing rays, stretched to unlock 
stiff backs, and sat on logs, drinking hot tea:
 
too many horrors back in New York City 
and Vietnam for us to be bothered 
by a cackling maniac gripping a scalpel. 

Psych
 
We were in Lynch’s dorm room,
fanning away the marijuana fumes
when Randy, the floor counselor,
twisted the knob, pounded on the locked door.
 
“Lynch! You in there? Open up!”
Randy’s inner Gestapo goon took over,
Jekyll-Hyde style; sometimes he was a good old boy, 
just a reasonable classmate.
 
Lynch sprayed Glade Peony and Cherry
from the aerosol can, while the rest of us
hid the roach clips and baggies.
“Just a minute!”
 
I dropped the needle onto the spinning LP,
like a licorice pizza pie on Lynch’s turntable.
Merle Haggard’s hillbilly tenor twanged
“Okie from Muskogee” as Lynch opened the door.
 
We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee
We don’t take our trips on LSD
We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street
We like livin’ right and bein’ free….
 
Randy sniffed the air like a bloodhound,
nose wrinkling, lips curling to a sneer.
The four of us in Lynch’s room snickered
like kids caught swiping cookies.
 
“You think you’re so smart,” Randy smirked.
“You’ll be sorry. Just like that hippie chick
out west who gave birth to a woodchuck
after she took some of that LSD.”
 
When Randy turned on his heel, left the room,
we all shot question marks at one another. 
 Nobody wanted to be caught being gullible,
but … that hadn’t really happened, had it?


Freitod
 
“As beautiful as an electric chair.” Jo Nesbo, Nemesis
 
I’d just pulled off the highway,
ravenous as a wolf after a day
of sales meeting and miles in the car,
greeted by a strip of gas stations,
fast food franchises, making me think
of the midway at a carnival –
games, rides, freakshows announced
by flashing neon, bright primary-colored signs.
 
I pulled in to a Chick-fil-A,
the most convenient drive-in on my right
with a stoplight to make the departure easier.
I knew about Chick-fil-A’s political agenda,
disapproval of same-sex marriage, LGBT rights,
but food is food is expedience.
 
As if in punishment, though,
I ran into Family Night,
a couple of single mothers
and a passel of kids
that made me think of a litter of puppies,
ketchup smeared across their faces,
jamming Chick-n-strips into their mouths
as if they were racing a timer.
 
“Sonny ain’t paid no child support
for three-five months,” the heavy mother complained,
more depleted than angry, her cheeks
sliding down her face like melted plastic.
 
“He ain’t got no job,” the skinny one pointed out,
an African-American girl whose collarbones
stood out like a steering wheel.
“Hey, Lonzo! Quit messin’ around!”
she called at one of the kids.
 
Suddenly I wasn’t hungry,
but I ordered a grilled chicken sandwich to go,
and the traffic light?
Turned green when I drove up to the intersection,
a smooth left putting me back on the highway,
a hundred miles from home.


A Hookah-Smoking Caterpillar
 
Keith lumbered across the darkened campus
like some demented ogre 
slouching across the moor
in a Nineteenth-century English Gothic novel.
 
In memory I hear a distant howl,
as if from an unseen wolf,
see a full moon curtained by fog,
but what I have no doubt happened –
Keith thrusting the peyote pill at me –
a translucent plastic pod filled with brown powder –
the frozen look of cat’s-eye marbles
in his dazed round blue eyes,
before he shuffled off, disappearing
into the dim vapor,
even as I thanked him.
 
I’d ingest that brown capsule
sometime in the next month,
even though I heard – and half-believed –
the rumors about Keith
shoving his hand
down a garbage disposal,
flipping the switch to “on.”