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.

What’s What


All I want is what everyone else seems to want, more of everything. There’s no immunity from it and no long-term cure for it. There are just these abrupt yearnings that ache in accordance with the tradition of pointless human suffering. My 6-year-old grandson looks up from hours of playing Minecraft on his iPad, dark circles under his eyes. “What’s s-u-n-n-y spell?” he asks. The principal product of America is an idealized image of America. Only the other day I stepped on the shadow of an old black woman who was creeping along the sidewalk, bent nearly in half over her cane. Police have a suspect in custody.

Reading Bukowski

Reading Bukowski is as addicting 
as looking at dirty pictures
or smoking cigarettes--
can't get enough of the stuff
fast enough.
Guy had his finger on the pulse
of life
that is not life
yet feels, sounds--
could almost be--the
real thing.
Broads, booze, and barrooms:
cartoons, much of it;
the victory of the lumpen
featuring Hank Chinaski, hero
and self-proclaimed shit
who wins by not trying
who does not know loneliness--
a Ubermensch
who rises above it all somehow
like a guy in an air balloon
rising, falling
as he lets the hot air out
or blows some in.

"The Goon of Doom"

He has no brain,
only a teleprompter
mounted on the handlebars
of his motorcycle.

He zips around town,
then off to the nearby city.

He stops at a good spot,
in a vacant lot
beside the busiest street.

Sitting on his old motorcycle,
he whips out his wireless mike
and reads and begins to talk.

Soon there's a crowd,
as he grins with a strained voice.
A few walk away.
Most stay.

"I am the Goon of Doom
before the rise of the Anti-Christ.
Hear my words of the coming
attractions..."

He takes a deep breath,
"You won't be worth
a burger or can of soup.

You'll have a rag for a cork
after you try to poop...

Plastic robots
will seize you
inking you
down.

Becoming one
like me...

A sign
of what
you will become!"

He rips off his shirt
to a flesh torn ribcage
with a limp heart 
hanging inside...

He laughs
then coughs...

The crowd screaming.

Old Houses

 
We old houses store up long memories.
I know the neighbors look at me askance,
call me a heap of ramshackle debris,
an insult to the neighborhood’s good name.

They look upon my once sleek grey timbers,
shivered and weathered, scarcely holding on,
defying gravity as I shudder
and creak when the wind blows. My aroma

has taken a bad turn from the decay
and rot and wafts out into the street.
Dusty maple floorboards no longer grate
Christmas morning under steps of small feet

sneaking down for a peek at the tree.
Behind the baseboards, a cricket concert
supplants a chorus of the children’s glee.
Dull cobwebbed windows don’t let me observe

the foreclosure postings on the garage.
Past due bills for my long-fled family
spew out of the mailbox onto the grass.
My rooms now serve best for transient stays.
Drained by years of neglect, my dear reader
I’ve lost the strength to even stand in place.
I collapse onto the ground like a deer
shot down by hunters. Soon I will be raised

and burned. My ashes will fall and improve
our community garden which will nourish
the lost and forgotten people, for whom
we old houses always keep open doors.

 

I Can't Help But Think

Each night, as I lay here
getting older
Sometimes I can't help
but think of the friends
who have gone before me.

Tonight
I'm thinking of Bertie.
Once upon a time
we were really good mates.

But, as with most of my old
friends.
Drugs got in the way.

When you've all got bad drug
habits,
such fripperies like
friendship dont matter
anymore.

It's dog eat dog.
It's cop, shoot cop.

Anyway, the last time
I saw good, old Bertie
he was really skinny.

He'd always been a
chubby sort of guy.

I was truly shocked.
I asked him what the
Hell was going on.

He told me that he was dying
of cancer.

I believed him, he looked like
he'd just got out of Belsen.
He was shaking, and sweating.

As I said that was the last time
I ever saw him.

A few months later, a mutual friend
told me that he'd died.
I asked, was it cancer ?

Was it fuck
it was crack !

Well, I guess I was a bit naive
back then.

But it's still very strange.

Why not tell me the truth ?

He didn't ask me for money
or anything.

Anyway, these are the ways that I
pass my non-drinking nights.