another bar, another
carousel of faces soon
to become fodder for
unconscious theatre
another set of drinks
which don’t amount to
a single cell of entertainment
another distraction
a thousandth glance
at your phone another(s)
phone goes off
pretend to be
another person
but you don’t like many
other people
you like yourself
don’t you?
where did you go?
another dance to avoid
another song to sing into your drink
another’s eyes within orbit
another chance at looking
into a void, arms down and
fingers rifling
thru pocket frenzied and
pulsing
another cigarette
to light
another cigarette
to light
another cigarette
another night
wasted drunk another drink
and washed-out psyche
slips home
and sad
and brutal
to write
another poem about yourself
but you aren’t that interesting when
you’re just bitter, baby
you know even though you made it with her,
she don’t wanna be more than friends.
Dec 20, 2021
Dec 20, 2021 at 5:26 PM UTC
I
Enough. I am done.
I have no dogs in heaven. Nor one of the Prince’s cockatoos
to leverage favor from. I am the ****** on a cactus.
I have no more
languages to speak truth, but draw blood.
I am a coward,
My tongue not so sharp as a sword.
Remain still. Courage not so stiff as it once was.
II
Everybody inside. On their heels. There is panic
Breaking on the back of soundless numerals. Is it safe
To beg for mercy in the streets?
III
O mercy. The ever-redemptive lack.
And what words at my mercy not co-opted
by avarice, or Sig and his ivy-eyed nephew.
Ah Um.
Too easy to franchise martyrdom these days, minute 2 minute
Things swing as usual ah um
Sssome people get rebellion-medallions; most pawn them
in tomorrow’s liquor stores.
And swing.
O merci, Satyrs of a newly profitable goat-song!
Who can resist them teasing out the milk?
It almost seems fresh, piped thru
loudspeakers in Bentham’s skull
Howling ah, Um, Imagine:
Most deformed Society members . . .
Strapped to their rocketships, mingling w/ stars
in corporate menagerie,
Senators and a gaggle of catamites. . .
On call
Young-things, playthings, old news; money is eternal.
Their’s is a sickness that makes mine worse.
IV
That said. I ain’t got a clue; or a word
to say. Without a code to program the spleen
in my bomb of a heart.
All communication is shrapnel-blasted-out-shrapnel.
Grinning over a screen.
No, Worry, slow down. Spleen, relax.
I’m just a man with a telephone wire
Not the sax-playing Mr. Apollinax
Sure can’t talk politic but ah um I can start a fire.
V
My robe swinging open,
I hang over the balconies of twilight’s regret,
exposed, and unhappy.
I wish nothing more , that the boon of despair
Drop it, an atom bomb and burst the windows. . . .
Everybody inside, solitary: radiated by me.
Maybe we’d all smile at each other
when we finally come out from our houses.
Dec 20, 2021
Dec 20, 2021 at 5:18 PM UTC
A green light shone and like ectoplasm lay over Yesterday’s
intuition of the future. Tomorrow suspended in the wriggling
fate of jelly before colloidal dawn. it transformed
when Tomorrow leaked out and became an animal
of almost ravenous occasion. hungry for blood
certainty. A tooth fanged for the squalor of success
without colon for the enemy of despair. I was there
when Jesus Christ transmuted miracle
into a happening. when Freud proclaimed:
Dreams are the crumpled chickenscratchnotes
in the fist of all beginnings. when Charlie Parker
played Stravinsky to Stravinsky
at Birdland. when Borges transcribed
those notes. and heard Cervantes laugh.
When Woolf confounded Odysseus, and
found Homer, oldcouragebearded, grinning
on the other side of three millennia. Was I there
before the green light. yes,
we were all there.
Dec 20, 2021
Dec 20, 2021 at 4:39 AM UTC
–What do I have to lose if America falls?
my body? my neck? my personality?
. . .
I have not done my research, no
yet I am fat with knowledge,
yet I am drunk on symbols & poetries of excess—
yes, I am an american, what does that mean?
I couldn’t begin to tell you, yet I am
america imagined
in some pawnshop philadelphia
next to the gas station next to the liberty bell
i’ve driven by many times before i’ve seen
the ghost of Ben Franklin, **** out soliciting oral, & heard
********** whispers of, “O, poor Richard…”
I love like movie cowboys & policemen I love
a yankee vampire w/ confederate fangs
a working class hero story told in reverse
I’m beautiful w/o being pretty
I’ve got that trillion dollar smile
my economy IS my business
my mind is outer space pleasure cruise
my politics are bombs & ***
my cultural heritage is hollywood & skyscrapers
ford commercials & Burroughs in a nike ad
my religion is myself, no
that is no wholly american,
no, no holy american, just me
but I am america’s spleen
am its mouth, speak its rhetoric & give its head
am its fingers rubbing on redbutton starspangled fleshspasm
am its brain on drugs
am its soul
on eastern flights
but I don’t take myself so seriously.
Dec 20, 2021
Dec 20, 2021 at 4:29 AM UTC
Rustled from sleep
by the bird’s whistling;
slow and quick, sharp songs
two of them framed
through a trapezoid
of morning sunlight
in the sugar maple
outside my window
so I went back to sleep.
Moved from gray
artifice of work
and workplace concerns,
given dignity
to my passions
before I turned
as gray as the job
is blue as the rest of them
and on Tuesday I said
I’d cover your shift.
Called to love,
like a diplomat—
from my country
of isolation;
given the royal
runaround, and sent
back with eternal kisses
on my neck
and that is
about the time
when I stopped receiving calls.
Dec 20, 2021
Dec 20, 2021 at 4:26 AM UTC
You are separated from Du Fu’s sentimental visits;
His gadding between the mountain’s icy tower-climbs
And the blushing gardens of the temple precinct;
His delighted musings adorn the stone courtyards,—
wind-chimes and long-flourishing chrysanthemums.
You are separated by few, gaseous planets,
Held there by motorized, frozen rings.
Dec 20, 2021
Dec 20, 2021 at 4:23 AM UTC
Oh and the midnight boy teeters
with his yellow crown like a cymbal!
‘round the ennyhoos at the market
hoo-rah or boo-hoo-hooing. . . .
oh boy
beetlebrowing the barelyskirted girls
and gritting teeth, an imaginary rose-stem. . . .
Him, them, no tricks left: a partition ahead
Roped by an archaic madness under gas-lit halo
A ferocity bent like a triangle. Or a tuba.
And looking through to Xanadu
What does he spy? He is the moon’s lonely
lamp above a deserted parking lot
Deserted. . .
Save for the old green wagon
2 bodies inside, radio on.
Dec 20, 2021
Dec 20, 2021 at 4:21 AM UTC
It is 5am. Undressed but for boxers
I join in the unvoiced burden
Of suburban detectives and cul-de-sac mystics,
And whomever else screams into a cloak
Their spells to cure insomnia.
I dream of the city-dwelling
fellow all-nite travelers,
envying their resilient hours’ darkly id,
their alley ways foot traffic car horns…
I can’t explain this impulse.
I know I know ‘The cure is sleep.’
But I think, ‘something more.’
. . .
Hours expand.
My neighbor’s new rooster —-
He does not yield.
And the cockcrow puffs the blinds,
And the cockcrow wigs the veil!
Hours expand
Out of their wrinkle-&-bind;
But I’ve yet to penetrate the cloak,
Or tap into its magnetic-field.
like
so many,
just so happened
so clumsily
to touch,
tugging at its tassels
but failing
to clutch
Before the cockcrow puffs the blinds,
And the blackbird wigs the veil!
Only my eyes
under an apex moon
can hypothesize
in a bulb’s-flash (!)
such extravagant design…
After the boulders roll & crash
The avalanche of balderdash,
etc. etc. etc.
Out of the rubble
the wrinkle and bind:
A head atop some shoulders
with eyes like fingers —-
undercover,
cigarette-stained,
Following his leads, out along the frays
of a magician’s cape, or a death shroud?
Silver-stitched
geodesics,
some twine-gold ciphers,
some…
And the cockcrow puffs the blinds
And the cockcrow wigs the veil!
And as quickly as does the violet
in the clouds above the hothouses,
it dissipates… hidden like an axiom…
The hood is lifted —- once again revealing
The Dawn Sun.
It is in these moments ensuing
That I feel most strongly
Something has been taken from me.
. . .
Postscript
Where are the rats of which I was one?
What are they chewing on, now that day breaks?
All those secrets left out in the dark?
Dec 20, 2021
Dec 20, 2021 at 4:13 AM UTC
As Rockwell shades and the old Japanese masters
Etch the seconds, second by second,
in the clock on my kitchen wall,
There is a Roman calvary thru the door:
Centurions poking at the snack drawers
With their iron swords a-clank. Guests are still asleep.
O and it’s centuries until dawn!
May 5, 2020
May 5, 2020 at 5:25 PM UTC
The grief robin bubbles
from ***** the sun’s blazed emblem—
Morning comes in fits.
Scandent, white-blooming vines
tickle gray’d limestone ribcage—
This old house I’m bird upon.
People go in and out
and the door is always shut.
Who then, am I singing for?
My song is venom
to visitors: Thee beware,
I am a visitor here!
May 5, 2020
May 5, 2020 at 5:15 PM UTC