“Are you okay?”,
my wife asks
when I cough.

“No. I’m fine.
Yes. I’m not”,
I respond,

stumping her
in the poetic irony
of words that

encompass the
yes and no
and the in between.

She flips the finger
at me and I return
the bird to the nest.

We go back to our life
and our tablets,
the drip, drip of my chemo
and I wonder about okay.

“No.  You’re fine.
Yes. You’re not.”,
the bag stares in response.

Doldrums, doldrums
eviler than the devil.
-
The Cyclopes’ prism eye  
revolves around me
in a mechanical chatter.
-
It calls out desires at night,
a mermaid cast up on shore
-
that awakens with the caw
of a thousand slaughtered gulls
-
sending me scrambling
back to the darkness,
-
afraid to touch
the brightness of hell.
-
Doom to scrub the deck
till shining like
a ***** whale’s pecker;
-
falling in the whitewash
and awakening to a gull
worming at me boot laces;
-
tugging barrels, lugging barrels,
spit polishing the insides of them.
-
Gulls have the souls of sailors
hidden inside their caw,
-
and when the weathervane
points to the east side wind
-
for seven months the waters
be too great to launch or land
-
and I be ****** near
wedded to this here light.
-
Or she be a figment of my imagination
and I just be gull food
to peck on on these rocks?

“If you do not write or film”,
the director wonders,
”am I alive?”

“What limbo am I in
when the shooting stops?
When my camera no longer
holds the beautiful prism.”

His films stay the same,
only he changes,
exchanging the silver screen
for glistening tin foil
heated under with a match.

When his pain matches
the others, he prays.
When greater, he’s an atheist.

The films are his only company.
He lives with them and for them,
remembering the cinema of his youth
filled with the scents of ****
and jasmine and summer breezes;

remembering the cave
where he learned
to read the light,
understand its alphabet,
and eventually, vocabulary
with each discovered ray.

He smiles as the music track
of little angels being taught
by the local parish priest
to match his voice note
by note flickers in.

Parasites: they insinuate themselves
into your head, your heart, your art

They exist in the schizophrenic zone:
the lower right corner of your painting
looking for patterns that go to childhood,
the well rehearsed gestures that
allow them to take over,
plant the image in your agitated brain
that makes you doubt your love,
sign over your entire identity,
make you think that they can ****
with a scrape of peach fuzz,
until everything smells, feels,
tastes exactly the same-
a collision of **** and water
that knows money and not art
is the iron that smoothes
out all those creases.

The concrete jungle is the exam.
Their goal is to dominate it.

You enter through the black portal
searching for the thing you lost
in the right corner a long time ago-
the thing you call son or daughter-
tapping out SOS with your forehead
on the button on the wall
that connects with the light outside
until it reads SON to that distant brain.

Whether you **** someone or betray
your country doesn’t matter.
It is just the thing you keep
hidden  in the basement
that doesn’t know  
that all it needs to escape
is to walk up the stairs.

Dreaming Graceland or Zombie Land: Double Tap


When you think Elvis was a fraud,
a rip off the black man’s voice;

when you finally meet someone
who smells like candles
instead of gunpowder and whiskey;

who is comfortable with you
driving that pink Cadillac
all the way to Memphis;

who won’t
throw your pink stuff
to the side of the road;

who will kiss you
and hold your hand

until you arrive at Graceland
and try on those blue suede shoes
that actually fit;

let you gyrate your hips,
and for one moment,
feel like the King;

until you open your eyes
and really, really see
that you’re  in Zombieland.

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (A Movie Poem)

The absence of love
makes one a villain
in other’s hearts.

In the proposal
the weeping willow
sheds its leaves
to the sky,

while in the bowels below
the servants of the earth
forge war,

pull iron from earth
as it screams
to be reclaimed.

Above, silk napkins
unfold into laps
with a curt snap of wrists.

Into the depths
the princess falls,
into the opposite of heaven.

She opens her eyes
to the evil above her, around her,
near her, pouring out
like bearings onto sheets of gold.

“Maybe,” she thinks,
“we can exist
without fear of war?
Find a way together?”

This is no fairy tale,
but yet this
is precisely a fairy tale.

She dreams of her wedding
where all are invited
and all are expected.

She can see butterflies
swirl around her wedding gown,
her face reflected in a golden bowl,
the bloom of thousands
of attending fairies.

But yet, she is still falling,
full with the wisdom
that the spindle
curses everything it touches

and that her subjects are locusts
fated to swarm the earth
a thousand years
enduring the evil promised them,

until she burns herself out,
the last blood of the Phoenix,
destined from ashes to be transformed.

She always knew that Oz was a one-time voyage
lasting until the red shoes dancing on and on
cracks the golden road, wears it to dirt dreams,
her tired legs collapsing into poppies fields,
pills, her voice singing on and on in the fall
until hoarse, silent and invisible.
 
She sings because she’s a mom.
She sings because she loves her children.
She sings because she adores the gay affection
of the Tin Pan Alley clubs that pays her
with fifteen tens in a white envelope.
 
Oz, now means living faded dreams in a small car,
fostering your children with your big house ex,
crashing with your ascending star older daughter,
the one with your voice, the great movie star legs
and that spells her name with a bold, wonderful Z—
living enough in her party to feel the gold dust
as you rub elbows with the famous that confuse you/her.
 
You live on your repartee, your “difficultness”,
the hunger in your soul that craves to be fed.
So, across the pond you fly to be fed by those
who know you only as a flicker of revival,
who can accommodate you in studio style,
until the pills, drink, the failures resurface
and they shun you in gentle niceties and quips.
 
Judy you were meant to travel better roads.
The Walk of Fame is not the total of your successes
but the shame of repeating your failures
until you are undone, for every star nova’s as it fades.