When Mars attacks
I'll be in Oregon
eating saltines
and everything bagels
washed down
with orange Tang
while you're probed
anally with a green stick
the size and shape
of a bottle of Bud
in downtown Tallahassee.

After the attack
I'll go fishing
in Crater Lake
and catch twelve
rainbow trout
or kokanee salmon
and fillet them
one by one
while you limp
and buy chairs
with extra pads
and change the gauze
at the base
of your ****.

His throat opened under stale wind
and screamed sharp sounds like fish fin
pricked and cut soft hand tissue.
The bruise was a pinch because
the eye can only see what was
there before the attack surprise.

He performed dog magic in Prague
under willows but lacked
important mastery techniques.
Turned rock to frog but not back,
simply a half witted magi
ruined like slapped sewn hide leather.

Crisped under hot red sun he
shakes in his boat like maracas
he curves with blue currents to shore.
With a boat in the mud jammed rudder
he stares at clouds hugs himself
and sees a rock kiss a frogs belly.

Walter was history's best fisherman -
history's best minnow fisherman.
He combed and cleaned his net
like a lint trap or a summer screen door
so delicate, seaweed fibers, mussel shells.
He fished more of a dance, a twirl
his arms up and down and around and always
spun in the shallows like a waterspout
he would glide his butterfly net through the lake
and capture little fish he placed
into a sand castle bucket filled halfway with water
he would always pour back into lake.
He was strictly a catch and release fisherman.

All the mothers on the beach would stare
at Walter and his water waltz and at his mother
who stood next to him so he wouldn't fall.
It was hard not to stare at Walter
always alone with his aged mother
and he had to be at least a teen by now.
Perhaps it was hard to tell, autism doesn't age well,
but we had been beach regulars for fifteen years
and Walter and his mother had for ten.

The last time I saw Walter he danced and fished.
I laid on the beach with my cousin and we observed
his patterns and his mother his rock who stood there
for ten years with the minnow fisherman.
The next day my own mother cried
more than when her own mother passed
and she told me, she died
Walter's mother died

Even now I stand in the shower skin deep in water
and think about where Walter is now.
I see him in my mind dancing in some bath tub
with a butterfly net in some foster home
without a mother to break his fall.

In 55 Bukowski wrote of severed *****
while Rosa Parks decided not
to sit in the back.
Not a hacksaw but a rusty tin can.
Can you imagine?

Here's a true story, mind you
I was negative thirty three years young
then when Emmett Till was killed.
"In God We Trust"

Fifty four years later
Iranian protesters shot,
the King of Pop drops dead.
If they knew it then,
Elvis would have had to do more
than just shake his hips

While Eisenhower played pocket pool
in line at McDonald's,
true stories fluttered from feather pens
turning page into prose page.

I want a Clarence and Alabama kind of love.
I want a call girl with hardly enough experience
to fall for me,
not a *****,
there's a difference.
I want a girl who would drop everything and go
with me anywhere
with more ******* than Sigmund Freud could dream of
and believe in everything I did
no matter how purple my car is.
I want a girl who doesn't care
that only fools rush in
and knows there is nothing cooler than Elvis glasses
and triple kung fu features.
I want a girl who tastes like a peach
and knows how to utilize a phone booth
without dialing a number.
I want a girl who would ****
Tony freaking Soprano,
burn his face off like a vampire's in the sun,
just to see me again.
I want a girl to move with me to Mexico
and name our son after the king of rock n roll
who only cares about living fast, dying young,
and leaving a good looking corpse.
I want a girl
to tell me
You're so cool!

****** bone feathers and yellow beak imbedded in brain
exposed an aviary corpse when the burial dust settled
the last Dodo fell with eighty eight avocado trees cut
down that day and they fell like tipped cows slow
slow fast thud dirt sprayed like winter breath
but before trees tumbled and avocados
rolled downhill north sawteeth
scratched bark and cut
at one hundred fifty
degree angles
and wedges
pried tree
trunks
while the last Dodo slept in the last inhabited Dodo nest
like the last of a long genealogy abhorring what was left
of a final family

a weak decrepit Jones or Smith
tumbles down stairs
of a two story home
in Maine.

You act like an orca
tanning on the beach:
ignoring life
for beauty and recognition,
but only in oceanic swells
is the orca beautiful
and recognized
while it lives it's own life
chasing sea lions
and the air above waves.