Injury to insult

The only time i insult someone is when 
I get insulted that's why you should 
Add injury to an insult
You have to stand up for yourself 
When you insult them
Make sure to injure them as well
And don't just minorly injure them
Permanently damage them
So they don't have to come to school 
So that they don't have to all this nasty homework 
I wish I don't have to come to school anyways

I'm not sure about you
But personally i was taught to never take any disrespect from anyone 
Me personally i would have to add injury to insult


School 

I wish that it ended. She keeps talking and talking. I'm not listening, who is? Nobody listening there, all sleeping. School is such a waste.
 
I wish that time stopped. I never thought it was fun. Schools should host more
parties. We stayed there until 9. It ended in a flash.

I wish that he didn't. Throwing that beautiful ramen away. I'm inside the school
starving. While he wastes that ramen. My poor beautiful delicious ramen.

FISH ON A PLANE

 
I am an overweight codfish
struggling with the seatbelt
on this stratocaster airplane.
A parrot sits on a shoulder 
three rows upstream
and that makes no sense to me.
He mocks my fishy words
which sound like gasping to these predators
surrounding me, smelly bipeds,
tricky bait handlers.

This one dangles
a pyramid scheme in my face
like a doomed worm.
He looks me in the eye
where he
can see sharp instinct
ready to bite.
In the other,
a human codling stares wondrously
my colorful scales rendered
dull in the dirty air.

A gold Mercedes
pretty trinket fun
page of wonders
sparkly diamond watch
flashy spinner earrings.
I will not bite.
I will not bite.
I will not bite.
I smile and nod.

"In a year," he says, "you could be
president of the company."
Thank you, but for now
I shall remain
A New England codfish
In the belly of a bird
windows to the world
somewhat unlike a submarine
of the air which, for my own
comfort, I imagine it
to be.




LISTENING TO SPANISH LEARNING TAPES ON THE WAY HOME FROM WORK YESTERDAY MORNING


The morning chilled

misty suds
on slow focus
the sun turned upside
down and flat against the door.

The cost of my constituency
a soft and silent weight
policies and procedures bear down
like bricks on the back
familiar as forefinger to thumb,

the crushing face of a highway sign
the word prohibit shouted
in the face of a shivering doom
structures submerged in a bay of commerce as yet

uncommenced.

There is little substantive difference between renting and owning
a few letters between knowing and owing
there is security in the mortgage
               for 
          the blind man
and his shoes.

These and other thoughts random now
and then in the dusk of dawn
learning a new language is like
driving into a
          fog of culture 
     and slowly
a clearing.




WALKING TO THE DENTIST’S LAST TUESDAY
 

The birds; barren trees like
twisted vines no melons
thoughts out of my head
teeth dropping soft
like pebbles on the cracked
sidewalk, slowly reminding
there is no fulfillment of desire
only loss
and more loss when there is
but lettuce
left to
gain.

Lecture on Apantomancy

Apantomancy: Divination by means of any objects that happen to present themselves. To this class belong omens drawn from chance meetings with a hare or an eagle. -Encyclopedia.com

We know this form of divination is accurate
because we have met poets.

We know that apantomancy is not inference
because divination comes from articles at hand.
What is within reach will only remain relevant
by coincidence. What is obtained is past.
Possessions and juxtapositions do not cause the future.

We know that apantomancy is not resourcefulness,
nor cunning, nor a confidence gained by the self-assured,
because divination comes from things presented by chance.
What crosses our path is on its own path;
was led to ourselves and then, as necessary, leads away again.
What is parallel may rhyme, or convince by analogy;
but parallel paths do not cross nor converge.
Divination being orthogonal to the four dimensions,
apantomancy is something more than making-use.

We know that apantomancy is about ecology
because divination comes from
special significance of chance meeting of animals.
The complexity of sentient minds,
the destiny of that which grows,
a warping of the images of interspecies eye-contact
that reveals a coincidence is no coincidence at all.
Seeking is believing. Concentrate. Find.
To startle is to befall, like fate.

Transformative Dispositions

Splatter platter reigned on radios
in the early 1960s: “Teen Angel”
to “Last Kiss,” “Deadman’s Curve,”
to “Leader of the Pack,” DJs. spun morbid
songs 24/7 as youths romanticizes death
while subconsciously longing for change.

Yes, we abandoned our untucked Madras
shirts, substituted the “lived-in” look
for British styles from tailored Mod
fashions and motor scooters to Rocker
jeans, leathers, and Harley Davidsons.
Timely. Fashionable. Smart.                          

True West Coast surfers had
a head start on the rest of us;
between salt water forays, hot rod ballads, 
and Beach Boys barbecues, their
wavy sun bleached mop tops had been
“getting good in the back” for months.    

Never stooping to wear cheap Beatle wigs
to defy our parents, we grew out locks
hair fell over shirt collars, covered earlobes
established “the look” more fashionable
urgent than buzz cuts or grooming follicles
with Brylcreem, Vitalis, or Dapper Dan’s Pomade.

The British Invasion fed us
rock ‘n roll lace with rhythm &
blues overlooked in the states.
Glam metal gave way to pop rock,
M. Jackson, and Madonna in the ‘80s
rap became disco’s revenge thereafter.


****************************************

The Grand Canyon 

It's a terrarium of secrets, 
holding eons as heirlooms. 
To the high flying condor, 
it is a scar along the earth's crust,
until she tilts her body,
she cuts through the air,
controlling her fall,
aware of her destination. 

Embracing the wound,
she dives closer, past
walls of fossilized shells
to the river below.
Through the ruddy stratum of time
she finds the water and rests 
on the curled arm of a juniper tree.

Leaning against the tree's base,
a man wipes sweat from his brow. 
Holding his camera to the perched bird,
he gifts her immortality—
a snapshot, a photograph—
while feeling proud,
for he has captured something rare. 

A grey mule is waiting.
The man ties his gear onto its saddle, 
and rides back up the trail. 
But he continues to turn, admiring the bird,
until she becomes indistinguishable 
from the constellations of juniper foliage. 

Reaching flat land, he gazes 
over the verge. Southward 
the abyss appears to widen,
as the river stretches like the clear pathway to eternity. 
Thousands of ripples emerge and fall, 
grasping sunlight like children.
Exhaling, he contemplates and releases
the words, “There are stars in this river.” 


Pacific 

Come, lay your bones 
down on the shore.
How many questions don’t matter anymore 
out here within this wild eternal? 

Coastal trees house lost light    
as their leaves rattle like caricatures of angel wings.
We are ancient as their whispers, 
here, away from mundane proportions.

Nobody pities that the Pacific
will never know its name—
it is recognized as a joy 
to avoid self-minimization.

The water stretches effortlessly
as open blue, anticipating 
nothing, comfortable 
with its rhythms 
of ecstasy and solemnity. 

Breaking waves ignite and bow 
like bending, blown glass,
to then collapse at our feet
and retreat into boundlessness. 

in-country

even back in
the world his
thoughts were
rooted in
highway driving
a monsoon of
memories washing
out the road markers,
navigation by sense,
by sight, his Coupe
de Ville, a hearse,
carry-all suit holders,
body bags leaking
cleaning fluids,
acrid as gasoline;
everything they touch
burns, even little
old ladies roadside
holding children
in their arms going
straight to hell in
a hand basket
wherever he passes.

The Terror

I was in absolute terror
When I suddenly realized
That iambic pentameter
Was a real thing and that
There was no way in Britain
To stop it.
"Will!  Put that quill down
You Elizabethan fruitcake!"

McClenney To Beeville

I step outside for the night’s last cigarette.
So quiet I hear paper,
tobacco sizzle the permanent scar
between my first and second fingers.

I think about my old friend Leonard Larson.
Leonard had a broad, angry brow
like his hero Beethoven.
Compared his mastery of harmonica
to Beethoven’s command of piano.
Several years of failing to convince
anyone of this, along with a dual diagnosis,
got him sent away to the horrors of McClenney
for six months of ECT and a lifetime of Thorazine.

I drove a Kenworth for forty years,
then a bottle of Wild Turkey deep into the night.
Ended up in a trailer east of Beeville, Texas.
So quiet I hear paper
burn, flesh sizzle.
Not sure what got me thinking of
Leonard again, but he
would have liked it here.
Maybe it’s the peace and quiet.

To the north, an orange moon
cracks like an egg on the mountain.
It was never quiet in McClenney,
Leonard confessed.

I finish my cigarette,
watch the yolk run down
the other side of the mountain.

Compartmentalization                                                            

 
Of course the door was closed to the room
in which he was snorting crank through

a tightly-rolled twenty-dollar bill, whose eye,
though much wider than a needle’s

would admit only a thin stream, so necessitating
the semi-privacy with like-minded semi-strangers

far and separate from the old-friend crowd
inured to the usual intoxicants distant

from the snowy amphetamine rising to the olfactory
nerve, with which none of said crowd

had experience—or desire to gain
—the new high, another door and hinge beyond the first—

yet stronger than that slab of seasoned oak,
miles thicker too

 

Animals
 
The bear is bare.
Disgusting.
The hare is hairy.
Foul.
The pig is a pig.
Revolting.
The fly flies.
He is truly beauty caught
Between two panes of
Glass as beautiful as
Any star in any sky.