Lounging, today, on Your back porch
I saw America's men
Holding their tiki torches
Toward all they had been
I saw all of America's men
Wade angrily out into the icy upper bay waters
Toward all they had been
Through the tears of their mothers and daughters
Wading out into the icy waters
Holding their tiki torches
Through the tears of their mothers and daughters
Lounging, half-drowned, on Lady Liberty's back porch
Sep 2, 2020
Sep 2, 2020 at 4:32 PM UTC
Underneath a sun baked deck in San Jose
A flower was born.
Sun dappled, it unfurled its small green hands toward the lawn where
Globes of water still sat on the shoulders
Of green grasses to catch a glimpse of the sky,
who's cool breath had so recently whispered them into being.
Every day, as the sun peeked through the
Slats of gray wooden decay, the focus of it's impeccably golden eye would enevitably fall upon the delicate petals of a small blue flower.
Where had it come from, such a flower? Fallen out of its sleeve on the way to the garden? Had it been blown astray in one big gust? Where were the other flowers then?
They are gone. The Partridges disbanded long ago and left in their place a corpse
of tortured cedar, concrete, and angry hot metal. All now home to one small blue flower, who dances whenever given the chance in the spotlight of it all.
I only tell you this because because I watched that flower die this summer. After a gaggle of men pealed back the carcass-home, a flood of light came tumbling down upon all that had unknowingly benefitted from its protection, mostly weeds.
I should say, the lawn was the first to fall, well before the house itself, though it fought valiantly.
Hoisting its mystical morning globes skyward, like an offering. Golden death still spread like a flood across the lawn, catching every unshaded corner until all was bleached and unremarkable to look upon.
I remember how odd it must've looked, one blue flower shooting up from the grey mounds and yellowed grasses. How excited I was to see something so small and beautiful set free. How long I lingered there waiting for it to die.
Aug 20, 2020
Aug 20, 2020 at 8:25 PM UTC
"Metaphors are Dangerous"
is something my mother said
To me recently while hovering breathless above
her calendar; waiting carefully between the spaces of functions, appointments, and birthdays. Blank.
I asked her why she had me.
What became of my first calendar,
my genesis, the foretelling of my arrival?
What was "god's plan" for that lifeless heap of events she threw away in an afternoon, after everything within it either happened or didnt? Was it whisked away to trash island, with the other spent husks that had the audacity of limited use?
Does it still exist?
Stained and useless, wretched paper
sprawled out in the sun. Has it been completely reformed? Sent out as several paper cups, a newspaper, a birthday cap, a kite?
What would god think of "used" calendars? Would he? When he reached our day of being in the cosmos, did he look at us and say "you will be used or you will be nothing" and pin us to the wall? A useful but temporary tool?
Why do we begin something at all? Why must we blow the balloon up just to let it go? Is it still a "balloon" when it's lying limp in a stranger's field a mile away?
In my mother's silence I knew she had no answer for me, except that "metaphors are dangerous" as her hands full of paper-cuts flattened the page.
Jun 22, 2020
Jun 22, 2020 at 4:29 PM UTC
Over the heads of 3am stoplight dancers
through the viney brick pub where Verily
bleaches the bar-tops by beersign fluorescents,
past the last streetlight to blink off where Hope
is marching brisk-ly through the muddy dark,
under the first confused crimson leaf to fall of autumn
with not an eye to see,
upon the sill where Early leans/
checks the time and sighs smoke behind the window,
through the Oaken Chapel doors where young Clöse
writes his first sermon and cries,
out in the alfalfa field where the fireflies whish
and Sol says goodbye to them again
hoping one day they’d take him too.
Beyond the yellow hill
Where the homeless sleep alone,
Illumination strikes the lens white
And they are new.
Sep 9, 2013
Sep 9, 2013 at 6:43 PM UTC
It's a song we sing.
a foot, a car, a bullet
train to becoming-
Aug 20, 2013
Aug 20, 2013 at 3:53 AM UTC
Jan. 1st,
New Years drowns
its yesterdays with alcohol
and needle ships to
summer paradises made of ice
But in the morning,
when the frost retreats
into the suburban sidewalks-
slides its way down
into the drains-
mixes with the wastes and vomited
dredge-water of a year gone whipping by,
I see the children of the defeated
mothers poking ugly toads behind the shed
with cardboard hats fashioned
from discarded Budweiser boxes,
barefooted on dewy grass
with capes of an old bed-sheet
thrown out when daddy found mummy
in the arms of another woman~
I watch the fathers of men
smoking, sunken, and sitting
on the docks
of the world's beach-towns
wondering forlorn how they got there.
Their orange cigarette tips-
dying stars over the water.
The collective orange glow
both artificial and desperate
shines forever outward~
toward the pole
where Johnny always kisses Sally
and they love each other
until they don't.
I stumble home at dawn
on the quietest day of the year with
the undergraduates:
Seekers of love
Seekers of purpose
Seekers of seeking,
Glassy eyed and slurring
Memorized facts about underground reservoirs
And the disappearance of the ********* honey bee,
Falling into ditches
And lying there with the sunrise in our eyes
Drinking and smoking anything
That will help us
forget we're watching the sunrise from a ditch
forget that if we're lucky
we too will be sitting on those docks,
flicking cigarette butts into the water,
and hoping Sally thinks about us sometimes.
Now-
the worried porch lights of Orange County
are turning off-
~And the mothers are curling their blonde hair
hoping someone will secretly fantasize about them
at work
~The fathers are covering up the smell
of cigarettes and alcohol with expensive cologne
and fantasizing about that blonde from work
~And the graduates have invested
in more comfortable ditches
May 13, 2013
May 13, 2013 at 9:51 PM UTC
Waking up there
next to you
is like being born
to a Symphony
of warm water-bells~
Your smiling eyes are light houses
where the ghost-light keepers
ring out their fears with silver bells
a lovely Symphony of bells
calling my ghost ship
of white noise and lonely violins
to the easy morning light
you wear like a crown
of laughing daffodils.
Apr 3, 2013
Apr 3, 2013 at 2:16 PM UTC
News Flash:
Religious Science has created life!
With heat and pressure
and Sounds Sounds Sounds!
Watch their lead-boy
dance and sing
recordings placed in his
chest
by People Who Know.
Listen close
to his strictures about what
is abominable
you can hear their voices
in the crackling gray
noise:
The buzzing of cieling fans
in offices far away, Oz
The humming chatter of
"The maid found a dove
drowned in the pool!"
"Oh, how unsanitary,
truely abominable."
You really should see
him dance
in the Starstudded Ballroom
where the wicked pace
in the side-halls
dreaming of childhood summers
at the lake
and kisses in the morning.
Holy Science has smithed life!
Holy bullets smelted a fine
man.
Wholy Holey Holy Bullets.
Mar 22, 2013
Mar 22, 2013 at 3:46 PM UTC
This is a recurring dream,
it slips into my veins
on the best and worst nights
warm and vibrating
lik blue jazz:
I am sitting in a tunnel, huddled
scared and staring, open--
into the hazel eyes of Sarah
the wandering angel of San Jose,
the cool Sunflower in my brain
as Peter Sarstedt fills
the blue-bricked walls
with, "Where do you go to,
My Lovely?"
Shaking my teeth
and ribs
like old blank dice,
lovely accordion sobs-
What vibrations!
Echoes and blue memories running into the dark.
I hear you Peter, She hears you
I must tell you that--
and when I wake
all that's left are the echoes
of my accordion heart
and the sounds of traffic
over the plucking
of red chords in street.
Mar 21, 2013
Mar 21, 2013 at 10:25 PM UTC
I was wandering
like the others when
Music!
rang out over our heads,
The Fiddler was benched
in the square--
with an instrument
strung: beautiful red
strings.
They were quivering
like tendons,
The Fiddler plucked
music from them,
from us--
Strangers danced about,
silly at first
and then slower
confused and close--
I remember the spinning,
the blind Fiddler grinning,
the red strings singing
their promises to us,
I was dancing
like the others
and in all of our loneliness
we danced our feet raw
to the tune
of The Fiddler's jig:
A Call To Threadbare Hearts
Mar 18, 2013
Mar 18, 2013 at 4:12 PM UTC