Good mothers make their children
fold and put away all clothes,
even hers after death.

Bad mothers make sure
they always wear them
for the rest of their lives.

In the rear view mirror
he can see the specters..
  
her upside down reflection
scatter when a foot
hits the puddle…

hear the notes
of a trumpet solo
popping thru the
open red door
of a jazz club…

remembers when they
whacked his partner…

and left their
footprints on his ribs..  

left his mouth
out of joint…

wounded,
in love with that
woman in the blue dress
holding him in her arms…

asking her if there
is anything else
he should know..

because she is
a major part
of the mystery…

If lucky I will die in a room
of non-hospital green, on plump pillows,
good linens, with good family and good friends,
the ghosts of loves, the odorama
of nitrate seas, forests or mountains on
walls.
Room where well-cast dreams lived and died.

Will my death be the end of a long love,
mystery, tragedy or comedy,
flashback to life or final nightmare?

Will your face be the  last frame or just
the quieter, dustier bed
out there in the sun— the rain?

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.

The rose has thorns because
it cares not to be touched.
Its color is a warning
for animals to stay away.
Its scent is a scream and
not a delight for us to own.
It exists in ****** stillness
bending only for the sun.
The scientist knows this
having heard its sub audible
howl with delicate machines
that probe its roots.
The poet plucks the bloom
unaware of the pain that
created that beauty,
the aroma that shouts
its death to its vegetable kind.

We carry our fathers on our backs,
honey boys to their joys and violence,
absorbing their frustrations in memory
or dispersing their cries into indifferent winds.

Our hearts listen for the end of the cycle
powerless to the mind beating the rhythm anew
and the soul’s prayers for forgiveness
bounded in an eternal history of all tears.

Even Jesus felt betrayed by the father
and knew that peace only comes
with the last soft shuffle of dirt
and the new born son’s first scream.

If you wish to know who
really owns the land
look at the faces the wind
has carved into the mountains.

Those  who tread the thin blue line
knows it  follows through their lineage.

Strong boys become men,
then become cops.
The rest become robbers,
the devil that stares them
in the eye for the rest of their life.

If they  are good they’ll get
their shoot out
in the slaughterhouse.

The cairns are mothered
by murders of crows—

four stones as black as raven eggs,
others sky blue with specks of black,

pointing this way to heaven,
pointing this way to hell,

or is it to Tecumseh’s grave,
the bones of all buffaloes?

But then crows are great tricksters,
erecting spoof vortexes, medicine wheels.

They see everything at ground level,
the new landscape under their feet,
the old air lifting their wings.

They revel in the unbalancing
of everyday things

the sun, the moon,
the earth, the sky.

They will flip flop when all are asleep
and flop right back in the waking dream.  

Crows know the cairn formed
where Cain and David’s stone’s fell,
where Jesus dare not cast the first one.

They know what happened to those
who stole the middle stone
causing the soldier to come,

the ones who rose when
their gravestones were removed,

the ones that mark where
the things of life are buried,

even the feather cairns that line
to the final game jump.

I am a Vitruvian Man
marked out like an anatomy lesson
in black and green dye,
something to align against the mean,
a mold made of sheets and plastic
to aim the mechanical eye
to revolve its rays around.

I can’t move because the machine
requires mathematical silence
to perform its cure, so the nurse
must tug me into place.

I get lost in the hum of the circle,
lonely bagpipes playing a dirge,
maybe Amazing Grace,
maybe Scotland the Brave,
maybe the last graceful notes
of my own dying world,
maybe it’s just noise.

Somewhere there
is a small echo of God
that almost gets lost in the creation
of algorithm and code,
smothered in my general deafness,
the unbelief that He would touch me
at my weakest point
like a biblical character.

The scan stops.
The mold is done.
The nurse lifts me gently up
making sure my feet touch the floor
before letting go.
She smiles and reminds me
that the end is just 25 treatments away.

Let the black dogs run wild,
sharpen the knives for
some real back stabbing,
roundup the usual suspects,
the mystery is about to begin.

The cardigan teen with
his nose buried in his iPhone-
he’s a suspect- murderous thoughts
sprouting his blood-brain barrier.

The neglected son tethered
to a high ranking, paying
position in the family business
with nothing burdens-
he’s a suspect too.

Eight others are robbing
Peter to pay Paul
to pay Mary to pay Martha
to pay the extorting genomes,
on the verge of being exposed,
all dangling near disinheritance.

The old codger with the money
whose always leaving clean knives out,
knowing they will forever thirst
for meat and blood, the ******
that will do the work for him,
the job his lawyers failed to do

until the whole ***** gang
finds him splayed on the calico rug,
a Chuka Bocho clever in his stomach,
a Wusthof stuck in a vertebrae-
well, he was a prime suspect,
but now, obviously he is not.

Patricide is not always a family crime.
Point the finger at the mother,
daughter, sister, son, brother
but also the heart, soul, brain
of all others inflicted with hate
that makes everyone suspects too.

Stella remembers when  
the Zeros flew thru her backyard
and she saw Pearl Harbor in flames,
blue bodies bouncing on the waves.

Afterward, welders melted
the steel of capsized destroyers
hoping to rescue any
upside down survivors.

Her Billy drafted six months before
would fly Wildcats in the Marshall Islands
and in the Coral Seas never losing a gunner.

At Midway he launched from the Enterprise,
into a fury of collapsing sea foam and mist
part of the 233 fighter planes of
the sleeping giant squadron
filed with a terrible resolve.

The Zero bullets ricocheted
around the open back cabin
and Billy heard the loud groan
and Mike fall asleep as he
flew  on through the fog
of exploding red mushrooms.

He returned safely home to Stella
wrapped in metals and the flag.
She knew from that day that
Zeros would darken her every sky.

I plea for my mother’s spirit
to wait for me before the ascension
because I want to know more
beyond her sun, moon and stars;
for her to show me
the other colors
hidden inside her;
shades my crafted words
can only reflect in broken shards.

She draws me a symbol
for a word only
known to her and God,
a word so complex
I can never remember
how to draw it,
never define it fully
and can only stutter-
a seed stuck
in my throat-
whenever I try
to release its
sounds to the world.

It’s hard to tell the lies of impression,  
little bits of puffery that
makes one  look good in the eyes
of a would be admirer.

One may say their name
with a French flair.
Betty becomes Bette.
Roy becomes Roy-al
with the long affected A
stretched out to tomorrow.

One may even tell the story  
about that old trick knee,
the birthmark turned war wound.

When they burn books,
in the end,
they also burn people.

The Little Bessy  molts its white chipped,
dull letters out to waves it cannot use.

Capsized on the rocky Maine beach, where  
it once fished for lobster in richer anchors,
the peapod displays its tattered nets on its hull
while the Man O War, filled with a haul of tourists,
bruises the gentle waves of Penobscot Bay.

Its oars are mounted on the lobster shack wall,
its sails framed in the nautical museum.
Abandoned are the days it was pulled
from its moorings on the wharf and sailed
through Penobscot air or spilled weighted circles,

days that were longer than any of its old parts,
times when old hands  hoped for better ways
never knowing they’ve come and gone.

Its broken, rusty anchor once met the spent waves,
the hands holding and releasing it down
to mate firmly with the mount, the moment
when the old lobsterer father firmly grounds
The Little Bessy’s wanton desire to push out to sea.  

Betrayed and exposed every day, run by no one,
Bessy drifts into beauty she never desired:
the pretty postcard in the wharf gift shop,
photos  taken by others rushing by in other boats.
when she was always meant to be the secret  
memory of the lobsterer hauling up his lonely pots.

The rain chuckles on the rooftop
and the sound carry’s down the house.

The oaks in their amber raincoats
hiss in the water’s tickle.

Their sinuses suckle the drops to veins
then shiver off the excess.

The wild summer streams are
beginning their running joke.

The drought retreats with a frown
to the applause of the scorch grass.

The old man and his grandson watch
the slapstick of nature from the doorway.

They wave to their bemused neighbors
in their rockers watching the show.

The old man hands the child an umbrella
and watches him join the laughter all around.

The child delights in the rain drumming
smiles on the harlequin cloth.

The virus news carries me from room to room.
A Verdi aria breaks the solemn
chant of the rising death tolls in my brain
as Italians sing to the sick below,
voice to voice forming a single line of hope,
that filters down to the lonely windows,
my electric screen, all the world’s tablets.  
The music spreads over the mournful lulls,
penetrates through the hemagglutinin,
nucleoproteins singed by joyous noise.
The alarms of Corollas join the chorus,
even the rain ululates with applause.
The gift of every note dotes on the glass.
The ventilated sick duet with their eyes,
pale hands conducting the voices above.
The voices background the daily briefing,
the drone of Trump, and the doctors after him.
I switch to another song, more mellow-
Sitting on the Dock of the Bay, something
in the same tempo, in unison, that allows
my small cautious soul to match their big notes.

How can I call myself a Boricua when I
barely know the Spanish for earth and sky,    
have no roots in the soil of Moroves,
no sense of San Juan’s flavors,
the warm Atlantic blowing Arecibo  beach,    
Ponce dancing in the Caribbean’s laughter—  
all memories stolen from postcards hastily
bought at the airport along with a  
tin of Florecitas by my mother returning home.

Those little flowers exploded suns on my tongue
and created colors, formed postcard dreams  
of forts, conquistadors, Taino villages burning
in flames rather than submitting to Spain’s sway.
I craved to be an archeologist reverently
dusting off the bones of my ancestors.
I wanted to be an artist, like my uncle Bob,
splashing faceless heads among yellow flares
devoid of black, red, no tint of sad back story.
I settled for being a poet, a painter of words,
a discoverer of the history of hopes.

There is a memory of the Rambler hitting a cow
on the dirt mountain road leading to Moroves.
The bovine sliding down the embankment,
nonchalantly getting up and going his way.
The Rambler’s front end forever stuck with the
impression of an angry bull welded in the grill.
Another of a drive to a carnival, sitting
in the cab of another station wagon,
stargazing the white half moons rising
from under the red halter of my cousin Anna.
A final one of my grandmother praying
the rosary while I stumbled to the outhouse,
spending the night on the swing under the porch
because I didn’t want to break her silence.

Cows, moons, prayers are my Boricua heritage.
I can’t translate the decimas of a jibaro song,
nor dance a merengue, a bomba,  plena.
I have no desire to eat sugarcane from the  stalk,
nor split the soursop for it sweetness.
I am lost in the winds every Boricua knows.
My memories are blown away in the hurricane.
I seek the solace of the first flight out
after the storm, sad knowing  that
I was not born, like every Boricua,  
from the roots up, to study the light of stars.

When the color goes away for the day
the night beach revels in the shadows play.

1
After Adam died Eve
designed a house of wooden ribs.
2
She created it to never burn down.
3
It was full of happy walls and
bright colors that never faded.
(The next owner painted them gray.)
4
The rainbow colors would daub off
on every guest’s fingerprint,
an intended souvenir.
5
Nautilus shells placed near all windows
breathed the gentlest light everywhere
6
A stone pyramid staircase
snaked up to the second floor.
7
Doves could be heard cooing
peacefully from above.
8
There was a room with a writing desk that
everyone thought was a guest bedroom
but was really her office.
9
Abel’s name was carved
into all the door mantles.
10
On Sundays, after church, she invited
the children to slide through all the
crannies they could find
11
Outside, oaks and weeping willows
formed the boundary line.
12
When she died
they grew closer
to the house,
their limbs outstretched
as if in mourning.
13
When the government cataloged the house,
forgetting that she was a businesswoman,
they noted it officially as Adam’s property.
14
The next homeowner remodeled it poorly and
it burned down two days after they moved in.

Put two copper artifacts
next to each other,
and in time,
they will turn green
from the attraction.

Bronze Disease is what
the conservators call it.
For them,
corrosion is the enemy.

But that is not true,
as poets and most others know:

Corrosion is life,
Rust is love.

It has been five years
since I visited you
my old  Sea Grape friend,
standing proud and
wizened in the front yard,
unbothered by all
the construction behind.  

Everything is smaller
and crowded than
I once lived it,
except for you—  
still the right size
for a wild girl to climb,
providing enough shade
for a shy and pensive boy
to shelter under and  
think lyric thoughts
or listen to the Dolphins
playing their first football
on a scratchy transistor radio.

I was always the net
under your boughs
lest that restive girl  
should fall after proudly
reaching your canopy,
seeing the open sky
the soft sunlight
kissing her face forever
urging a higher climb.  

She never did stumble,
not even once, just
shaking green hard grapes
loose onto my head
like Newton’s apples,
creating ideas for
stories to explore and write.  

She is still a Sea Grape climber
and I a shade tree dweller,
she ever conquering canopies
and I seeking safe shadows
to read under, plot and scribble.

Your life has spanned
close to a century,
although I have known
you near sixty of those.

Your history, I imagine
had you a transplanted twig
torn from Crandon shores
to become, after the road,
the first magnificent presence
in the middle of East Shore Drive,
the pride of the community
that built a wall to contain,
protect you from Atlantic winds.

You are the survivor
having seen the coco tree
just across the sidewalk
break in a hurricane,
and the banana plant,
which never fruited,
behind the barrier wall,
under the corner eaves,
(where beneath its fronds,
I watched my first desire
shivering cross armed
in a blue maid’s dress, seeking
shelter from the pelting rain)
the succumbing victim
of gnats, flies, mosquitos
and persistent tropical rot.

I saved my first kiss so it
reside under your  embrace,
an awkward peck that
braced her to your trunk,
unleashing an army
of carpenter ants that
trooped through her hair,
the cleft in your middle
a way station for home invasion.

I knew then that you were
a jealous protector of
all the things that loved you,
at least the human ones,
for I never witnessed
gray squirrels scurry
up your speckled trunk,
nor mockingbird nests
resting in tan scar branches,
nor a single heart leaf,
fall sadly to the ground.

The old house behind you,
has kept true to your colors,
beginning green as the sea
and the initial touch of hand to leaf;
five years after college,
a new owner turning it tan
as your weathered bark;
ten years yon, after mom’s funeral,
it like the twilight glow dusting
your every branch and limb;
till thirty years later, I stand here
feeling the squishy snap of your
purple mature fruit under my feet,
the destruction echoed in the  
dusty patina walls looking
like a Pompeian relic.

Now everything is a remodel,
peafowls, peahens, peachicks
with their rainbow eye tails,
iguanas strutting everywhere,
roosting for competing limbs
in mangroves and cypress,
though respecting your old dame
privacy and royal privilege,
while the din of new spaces
being built on still good wood
vibrates out to you my friend.

I scoop some of your purple pulp
into a zip lock plastic bag,
I keep in the car for road trip
vegetable treasures, enough
for a proper souvenir, the rest
reserved for my wife to make
a sweet, tangy Sea Grape jelly,
knowing that this will be
the last time I spend with you
in your earthly eternity.

Strange fruit lives in the
bones of black mothers,

the blood of their sons,
marrow of their daughters.

Blue winds drift by
full of poplar scents,

aromas that never leave
the maternal soul.

They exhort their sons
to be careful,

be safe,  
make it back home.
  
They know they can die
for the smallest things,
for absolutely nothing.

Yet, they also know the American Dream
through the body of their sons
they hold closely in their arms.

They watch them leave,
hoping they experience

just ordinary prejudice and
not a blue knee on their neck,

that sculpts
them both
into a black pieta

Note:  

Strange Fruit refers to the song about lynching made popular by both Nina Simone and Billie Holiday.  Here are the lyrics:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swingin' in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulgin' eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burnin' flesh
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather
For the wind to ****
For the sun to rot
For the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop

This soul is not a drip-dry thing.
It’s needs constant washing and wringing
to function cleanly.
It needs to tumble on high heat
to wear just right.
Hand wash it and it will shrink in protest.
Line dry it and you might think
it will smell of heaven but
it is the rancid smell of tussle and
toil that will stink the neighborhood.
And, oh, by the way you should never
bleach a thing that is already bleached.
Don’t use stain remover for that’s its job.
No starch, please.  Stiffness is not needed.
The same goes for heavy or light ironing.
Follow these directions and
the soul will last your lifetime.
It will protect you from
all the stains of the world.

In the stillness of a teacup morning
in Amsterdam a crowd with yellow stars
query each other, a collapse of
suitcases and stuffed pillow cases
huddled under a gas lamp at a corner square,
while those in the stories above slowly turn away.

A few days before the yellow stars were
twenty-one children with backpacks
dreaming of a long field trip to Deventer.
The school picture they posed for would
be discovered fifty-four years later
under the frame of an oil painting
of the freedom monument in Dam Square.

Sieg, wandering in the fog of Bergen-Belsen
his classmates part of the mound
of George Rodgers well published frieze,
the only one of them not camera shy,
made it back to his mother and sister,
forever now a New York Jew.

Before them the square hosted
the frail bones of yellow star seniors,
their children depositing them
silently and hurriedly under
the hiss of the lamp shutting
off from the night watch.

Daan sewed the photo
of his yellow star grootmoeder
on a wooden chair staring into the sun
into  the lining of his jacket
and felt its pressure on the day
when the train arrived for him too.

The freight train to the Westbrook stockyard
the stench of manure, ****, fetid hay,
the old scent of cattle mingling with man,
fear embedded in every board,
was, as always, on time.

We turned around and she was there
stranded between shore and sea,
beach filled with the oily smell of  whale,
her dark tonnage serenading the waves
for the comforting echoes of others,
her great fins offering sand flowers
to the Great Ocean God for her salvation.

We mistook her motion for the final dance,
the soprano voice for a lamentation,
the agitation of her great tail for death gasps
for in our experience we are slippery skin
creatures destined to loneliness,
defined to be Ahabs to her kind.

The incoming tide heard her prayer and
navigated the sand to slowly release her to
re-float with the high tide, the deeper water
where she be well with herself.

And we sat on the beach and watched
her swim out knowing that
the sea can easily swallow a whale.

Catacombs are full of bones
snuggling in the disgrace of others.
Hipbones piled on top of skulls,
the absence of lower jaws
denying the departed a smile,
the eternal existential joke
of insulting the living
with the knowledge
of their ultimate end.

Femur, skull, femur skull
is the monotonous pattern
of the Paris catacombs.
Two hundred six reduced
to two, an afterthought,
ossein denied an ossuary,
even the unity of skeleton.

The Capuchin Crypts at least
grant a molecular dignity.  
The entrance mummies
are part of a gruesome holy décor
draped in the faux pas of passé styles,
yielding room after nauseating room
to the essential two of Paris,
femurs/skulls clustered
in paisley amoeba patterns
projecting snaking vertebrae
of dendrites, of life replicated
with the cross on the wall as
the ultimate center and end.

Did their former owners
know that death would
be the end of ****** control?
That for a ghastly and sacred art
they could be united forever
in indiscriminate unity
with their enemy or lover?
Would they have opted
for the grave knowing
that their ashes could
easily be blown into
the breeze that survives them?

The clean church Christ
hangs on rusty nails,
dozen-fold years
denied a resurrection,
tied to everlasting
pain and death,
heaven denied,
mortal redemption denied
because the flesh,
existing between hope and despair,
refuses the soul’s release.

The congregation
is dead to peace,
only knowing the scrapping
of their knuckles on the smooth stone-
dead to the light,
seeing only the night,
dead to divine comprehension,
dead to the angels hiding
in their coarse crosses
of common wood.

Outside the lamb
bleats in the snow
wandering unheard
in the wilderness,
fearing slaughter
more than charity,
wandering far from
their muffled mouths,
wandering far from
their questioning,
wandering far from
their sense of things.

When I die fill
                       my memory jug with things my mother loved.
Leave out her tears, the shivering in the rain.
                            That heart on the silver cross,
keep it,
the scrap she wrote my future name on,
                                     the ink footprints on my
baptismal certificate. But not the bandage
                     from my first stand and step and fall,
her blowing whispers in my ear to see if I
                                     can hear after the fever,
for those are tears  
and this jug has no room for
                                    oceans of such sadnesses
and grief.  
Make room for the things I’ve seen
                                                 clearly in the dark:
a frame of Mifune with sword,
                          E.T. phoning home with a gold
finger
and a happy heart light that beats right here,
                                           Dances With Wolves,
Gone
in 60 Seconds,
    tickets to hand shadow play and future love.
Line the jug with lead to keep
                                    X-rays revealing  true dark. Stash an LSD tattoo
                                            lest I desire a bad trip
far far away from heaven.
                                                 Place the draft card
torn up
on a broken hearing aid.
Put no cancer recovery card, test strips inside.
                                    I am not just my diseases
and will not cling to their memories.
                                              Be glad I am gone
if that is how you’re  bent.
               Remove that one small thing you think
I stole,
replace with a pinch of dirt or ash
   from the graves or urns of those I loved dear,
a wax
seal for this little jug for you of me
                                                            pr­oclaiming a
Thank You
                 God, Mother, Father for creating me.

Passion’s Cursive Highway

P
It starts with the line, an upwards curlicue,
the noose flapping rightwards in the wind,
at the top of the curl, an afterthought,
because every line needs a curve and a loop
to follow the road set to the next ones beginning,
less it turn in on itself, circle about,
or start and end nowhere.
a
The next road is not a road,
but an interchange, connected
curve flowing at the bottom,
arching outward to the top,
to half the height, straining
to touch the loop behind
and just above, falling
in an outward curve
that delivers the scribbled
start that is the highway
of their journey.
ss
Their highway starts in swagger,
they thinking it’s straight
but it really swerves and swerves,
she existing in the sedan
of soul and soothing blissful union,
he riding in the open convertible
the slapping wind of ***, sin
and self his indulgent mantra,
the rolling curves of the highway
unfolding, a striking rattlesnake
pushing them together in
a union of fear and death
stuck half in trust and mistrust.
i
They exit the highway their auto
in the fleeting traffic streaming by
an unnoticed sensible sedan, SUV,
minivan amidst the flashier styles
until a passing train forces a stop
at the gate till the arms clear
and the red lights stop flashing
and they can continue the little ways
to the incline street that halts
period, at the dead end that is their
garage and two story home.
o
Everyday they drive in and out
of the interchange that is
their two kids, two cars,
back and forth from shopping,
home, work, garage to garage,
other stories and two story house,
she practicing, and refining the
upward curve outward *****
that is her harmonious devotion
to perfecting the craft of family life,
he to the obsessive dedication of
work, promotion, goals, achievement.
n
At the up stroke, halfway to the end,
he crashed and she was there
to pick up the pieces and give him
her half of the inward flexing n,
loosening the noose to fly in the wind,
finally uniting their divided passions
into not a marriage but a union
that respected the middle ground
they had created with each other
and the true real love that was there.

Blow the dust of history off our bones.
In the excavated ribs of ancient sailing ships
find the burial chambers of kings.

Blow the dust of history off our bones.
In the dig just below them,  but just over
the rubble of the blitz are the
cracks in the golden cathedral’s dome.

Blow the dust of history off our bones.
Hear the cough of the newborn that
ends unknown years later to the last ahem.

Blow the dust off history off our bones.
In the oil that bubbles up see the
trilobites, dinosaurs layered in the sludge.

Blow the dust of history of our bones.
Place the femur of all  misery neatly
on the museum shelf for all to see.

The earth is black
on both sides.
The yellow bus
taking the living away
passes pile after pile
of rubble, of signs that
were once there:
the Harley Davidson store,
The Rogue Action Center-
a nonprofit climate change group,
the community bank -
it’s vault the only thing standing.
Indistinguishable from the ash
is the mobile home park,
which once housed the migrants
that harvested the town’s fabled pears.
Only their metal survived the wildfires:
aluminum lawn chairs, a barbecue pit,
hubcaps of cars long since evacuated.
Among the stranded survivors
is the aged widower searching
impossibly for his wife’s ashes.
He had escaped and settled
here after the Paradise fires took
his previous home two years back.
Crows on charred oaks branches
watched and mock his effort.
He looked all around him
and wondered to God
if he had paid
enough grief dues.
When the bus stopped for him
he did not get on.

Time flies by in the animated flashes between
the silver frames of the train’s windows,
moving as fast as each perceived thought,
a time machine rattling between future-past:
egg sandwiches downed with blue electrolytes,
rustling newsprint coexisting with touch phones,  
the woman in black journeying to a funeral
across from the discretely breast feeding mom,
a heart broken teen laughing at her exes
first TikTok dance she liked and saved.

A track repair forced a two hour timeout
for the executive in the gray suit
to the Natural History Museum, forcing
admiration of things greater than himself-
pterodactyls swinging on steel wires,
T-Rexes corseted in titanium tendons all
coexisting  with their extinction meteorite-
a flying blue whale finishing the diorama
of him ignoring his ancestors in ancient skins
around a dwindling fire pit as he exits.

The train rattles on slightly lurching
back and forth in a stasis of motion
that passes the upturned prairie grass
that transitions towards the end stop
and its final suburban destination.
The executive doodles a Buffalo
on his phone app, one that is obscured
by the barely drawn coal stoking locomotive
belching smoke like a cellophane flame
far from the small screen frame.

The smoke unravels to a vets wife
wearing a Navajo smock,
pearling and unpearling
the mistakes in the weave
of powder blue baby socks.
In the upheld light of her vision
the quartz bison teams the bluing
vista caught in the indigenous hunt,
red faces obscured in the herky-jerky
of horsed riders and hurling arrows.

She imagines her bright face boy
staring unblinkingly at the sky,
free of the stuttering window’s glare,
reveling in the glint of hooves and dust,
unaware of the rain and flies to come.

The eagle
brushstroked black
talons to beak
broke red blue  
in the white sky
tiny scarlet prey
fought and died
in once soft grasp
matron touch
a child freely
loved plumped fed and feathered
in aerie
tall safe high from
screech and whoop
the drop to the
loops of barbed wire below

Orphaned from the girl who bought and loved them
the dolls were packed tightly into a suitcase
and floated gently down the canals of Xochimico
to the Isla de Munecas and into the waiting embrace of
Don Julian Santana Barrera.

In the unpacking, a girl doll, a life-size two-year-old,
with a dress, hand-work all over, silk socks and slippers
caught Don Julian’s stare.

Frozen in a bald passion, an absent gaze
just like his own, eyes white with fever,
so tired, almost asleep, Don Julian imagined
her dreaming of awakening in her new country.  

She smelled of antiseptic and the other dolls
had matted hair, small melts in their plastic body,
as if they had been boiled in a huge ***.

Except for her, all were bent into incredible postures,
a tortured series of poses no human could maintain.
The last two removed were eyeless, armless stone dolls
too heavy for a child’s play, the kind placed in a
Royal Princess’ Egyptian Tomb as a curse hedge.

The island air smelled stiffly of
***** linen, mold, and soiled dreams.

All around where the tangled limbs of
Banyan trees reaching out to everything,
forming a grove of madness. They blocked
the afternoon sun and hovered over
Don Julian, a curious little girl
above a new sister.
 
Hanging down from them on vines,
strips of linen, gentle silk threads,
old and brittle fishing lines,
the coils out of broken watches,
the flotsam of whatever washed ashore,
where the decapitated play things that
composed Isla de Munecas population.

Wedged in the exposed roots of the Banyans
plastic heads stared out to Don Julian.
From the gypsy ground more stiff child faces
half-buried in the subsoil looked up at him.

Limbs that had fallen off were replaced
with Banyan twigs poking through.
The few plush ones were decaying,
changing back to string and dust
that danced dream-puffs as they
floated down to Don Julian’s boots.
The older, still intact figures, have long
been colonized by the Island’s
ever present wasp swarms.

At night, their phosphorescent mold
turned everything into a green candle

Don Julian kissed the cheeks
and gently caressed the back
of the perfect little porcelain skin
child in his fatherly embrace.
He wondered why such a
sweet wonderful unbroken thing
had been placed in his trust
and marooned to this broken place.

A delicate wind breathed among the Banyans
and the munecas swayed into each other 
face to face, ear to ear,
almost kissing, almost whispering,
one to the other, producing the dull thudding
wind chime noise, the  island’s only music,
that Don Julian now customarily ignored.  

He maneuvered with the doll
in his outstretched arms
through the small foot trail
to his thatched hut
the grove reluctantly
permitted through the years.

The hut was plebeian—
only a straw mattress ,
well worn wooden table,
a small clay oven,
and its sole extravagance,
an authentic king’s chair
carved in the conquistador style.

Don Julian posed her in the chair
upright, regal, straight,
the way he remembered
seeing Queen Isabella in the pages
of La Historia de Espana.

Outside, the wind became defiant, angry.
In its abuse the dolls got louder
with each penetrating gust
until their memory name,
branded, stenciled, tattooed
on their back and now scarred over
was exposed in shameful revelation:

María del ojo ensangrentado,
Juana del brazo y las piernas rotas, 
Alma del alma perdida,
Frida la escaldada,
Lupe la hambrienta,
Anna de las calles sin hogar,
Pilar la asesinada…
until every death was revealed.

The wind pulled open the door
and Don Julian felt his arms stiffen,
the rest of his body harden
his five senses abandon him,
his lungs no longer exhale,
his heart no longer beat,
until he was just porcelain and plastic.

The doll felt flesh being formed,
the inhalation-exhalation of new lungs,
the beating of a ****** heart,
a world proclaiming her queen.


Translation of the Spanish names:
(Maria of the  ****** eye)
(Juana of the broken arm and legs)
(Alma of the lost soul)
(Frida the scald)
(Lupe the starved)
(Anna of the homeless streets)
(Pilar the murdered)

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.

The lavender skin river
whispered with a maiden’s call.

Bonnet curls kissed her banks
in a flush of forgiving tears
for the trawlers bruising
her mercy and calm,
each departing an oily scar
that dispersed in the flow,

for the water is never mean
this cold season
to those that whip her  
yet never scuttle in her embrace,
for she is an orphan
seeking the lost ocean’s reunion.

She wonders on rivery things,
the searching and sloshing swirl,
the geraniums, irises, lobelias
breaking off in purple sacrifice
to soothe her aching waters.

knowing that endless
Sunday baptisms have made her
sacred to those who
know only the dawn and twilight
of the sun above her
and the watery blessings
below that feed them.

The river flowers tickled her and
the laughter spread on her stream
and she knew what she meant
and what she meant to them.
She moved closely away
to the tiny hands in the grass
waving her goodbye
and the longer, bigger ones
welcoming the trawlers home.

The piano player
has already been shot.
He is no longer a musician,
less one that sold-out halls.

Once he turned the river’s chant
into a jazz so fine that fish weeped.

Now, he plays only
right-handed counterpoint.
His left is still paralyzed,
even after a year of PT.

He only knows Bach,
the old bebop has faded.

His laugh,
a faint rhythmic sigh
is the only time
he knows how to keep.

He grows frustrated
when a two-handed Schubert
plays on the classic radio station.

He was acclaimed
for the way his music
triumphed over time and adversity:
the weakness of an inferior piano,
his own chronic fatigue, his very pain.

He would admonish those
who broke his concentration
with chronic picture taking
and excessive coughing.

He grunted whenever
he heard his imitators
in the elegies of Muzak
floating from the big mall speakers.

Now, his drummer and bassist
have died. He is alone.
His past brilliance is a cosmic taunt.

He realizes that he never
could have done any of this
without them
by his side,
keeping his time

The small, sleeping audience
of the nursing home
of which he is a resident
is not convinced of his genius.
He is no longer convinced of it.

He plays jazz in his dreams.
It’s as messed up as his left hand,
messed up as his waking life.

When her maman died
Marie flew ten hours to
the ancient French village
where the houses
steepled the church,
their mansard roofs
brown from neglect.  
The Weeping Willow
in front of maman’s
weathered hovel
did not match
Marie’s feelings.  
It never did.

Inside the furniture
had aged into antiques.
The handmade chaises
with ladder backs and
unadorned ticking,
French oak dinning table,
the vaisellier darker from
decades of hearth ash.

The rose print wallpaper had
faded to shadow bands,
the town print on the mantle
now almost sepia,
her first crib picture a fading
black and  white dream.

Maman’s single bed existed
pushed into the corner
of a windowless chambre,
almost a frenzied fever
blue room delusion of
Van Gogh’s last dying days.

Hanging alone in the closet was
maman’s noir widow’s dress,
the one Marie imagined maman
would be buried in.  That was
until Claire, the old neighbor next
door, gave Marie maman’s ashes
in a simple wooden box
with a gold filigreed clasp.
Pinned to the dress was Maman’s
will written in her eloquent hand
on unlined French folio.

These cinders, this shuddering land,
this dress with all its memories,
and grief would be her inheritance.  

Marie held the dress to her as
she returned to the archway
of the still open door.
The lace sleeves were  shorter
than she remembered,
but it would fit her very well.
Just beyond her, the country road
with its oaks grasping for union
stubbornly remained a horse trail.

We birth a thousand
destined broken things:

chair legs detach from their seats under  
the weighted repetition of sitting cloth

itself threadbare from
the rubbing of muscle.

We glue together the
blue China fallen in grief.

The silver nails of the crib are
reserved for our rusty coffins.

We mend the holes
of our tattered souls.

We reattach old soap specks to new
and shape them into a bath ark.

The fallen pecans and apples are
hoarded for the sweetest pies to be.

The broken necks of pollards
make our most savory stock.

The new rug turned ***** is beaten
until dust flies like stars.

We shut the curtains in the
afternoon to cool the room.

Mothers iron, singing in their reverie,
folding neatly, stacking all on the chair.

They listen for the passing mail car
so they can mark the new catalogs

with the dreams of their families
cruising to a distant, distant  land.

Everything under our houses is just
the dust of every housecleaning before,

the joy of  parents knowing their children
will move out and be blessed

to reach their Jesus year and know
the sanctity of resurrected dust.

1.   Greensboro boys at a counter
watch dead astronauts rain on Texas,
2. hear the scream of eight states  
being ripped from Hidalgo’s belly,
3. imagine themselves the first black hand
to cast a ballot in front of snarling mastiffs-
4.  Cochise chanting a war chant
in front of white captors-
5. A free Mexican crossing the Rio Grande-
6. the black Babe Ruth circling the bases-
7. a dark Sinclair Lewis accepting the Noble-
8. an Eagle Scout-
9. their fathers fighting in Guadalcanal,
10. receiving the Medal of Honor from FDR,
succeeding him as President,
11.  even Nelson Mandela blinking in the bright light,
12.  grateful no Lincolns need ever be born.

13. They paint American Gothics,
14. write Valentines to their sweets,
15. take the A-train,
16. score 30k dunks like Wilt the Stilt,
17. toil for minimum wage,
18. are jailed and freed a la the Chicago Seven,
19. speeding free in a T-bird singing Smokey Robinson,
20. imagining they’re Batman and Robin,
21. knowing their bodies will wash ashore on Zawiya,
22. no WEB Dubois,
23. just American casualties of Desert Storm,
24. wishing upon a star,
25. the nightmare that has Liston beat Clay,
26. nobodies never seeing the Grand Canyon,
27. never playing Ebony and Ivory on a Baby Grand,
28. everyone saying “Goodbye, farewell and amen”,
as the last episode of MAS*H fades off

29. as they die on the bonus day in February
no one wishes to be born on.
The day Gone With the Wind wins it all.


This is not only a February poem but also a black history month one as well.  Note the numbers 1-29 denote events that happened on that particular day in. February history.

The moon was neither
voiced into creation
nor was it defined.

It was just parted
from the dark ink
of God’s voice.

Alphabets don’t
exist on dark vellum
just illuminated papyrus.

God doesn’t have the power
to banish those things
that have always existed.

He can’t create the perfect night
just pull crows out of it,
really, the simplest of magic tricks.

The small orifice below the cheekbones
exists to project the whiteboard
scribblings of the human mind.

Man is sad because he knows
that his words and thoughts
fall short of God’s magnificent language.

The moon witnesses what
is below and above its light
and keeps both their secrets.

I am Jonah in the belly of Leviathan
living only when the beast surfaces,
exchanging liquid grief, heavy air
for the unwanted gasps of new life.

I pray out of this belly for gills
and only the ocean hears my voice,  
It deepens and encompasses me,
its  waves billowing me in absolution.

The beast vomits me out to her caress,
a body of weeds penetrating to my soul.
I dream of sinking, my thoughts fainting,
lungs releasing their corruption.

I relax and the waters reject me.
It refuses me gills knowing
that land creatures were meant
to see only mountains and sky.

Each launch begins with a prayer
until I have a puncture, a rip, a tear.
Mayday!  Mayday!  Mayday!

I am always falling
either to the earth or to the stars,
falling forward to God the Father
or father to son.
  
To survive I move in the vacuum
between calm heartbeat
and silent in-breath,

hurling to my final mission
to repair a disconnection
of a mind that can
***** life with a thought
or by sniffling
a remembered tear,

knowing not whether to
****** the monstrous soul
or to hug the last, lost dead part.

I swim through
the waterfalls of mars
knowing I never really knew you
nor am I you.

“Stay where you are.
Do not proceed any further,”
you hiss in loving defiance.

In the space in between
I see that madness is
never once thinking of home,
being free of all moral doubt.

Tethered to the umbilical
I cut the insanity to the vacuum,
suffocate the space between
with love,

until I can no longer see
what is not there,
until I miss what
is right in front of me.

In the after-burn from Saturn
I am looking forward
to the day of my self return.

I will rely on what is closest to me.
I will live and love.

Every Angel Second Class jumps into the river of
George Bailey’s despair, and after being rescued
shows everything that never should have existed, everything that was, everything that could be
contained in the Odbody of his inner existence,
the baptism, the worth and joy of all his toil.

No man gets into heaven by slaying demons,
and when Gabriel falls he follows Lucifer’s path,
never knowing that God tempered his Constantine’s
with hell on earth and the fires of suffering
that forge just a half repentant soul.

Angels are born to hover above,
have no weight but eternity,
bound to heaven yet yearning
to feel the delight of a lithe dancer,
see color, eat, drink, feel, suffer
in their own crown of thorns.

When the Angel of Death becomes Joe Black
and falls in love with George Bailey’s daughter,
asks him to be his guide to this wonderful life,
even Death will heed Jesus, make the sacrifice
and not take her to heaven’s embrace,
content forever to watch her
from first step to last.

I did want to do it with dead flowers
the pressings of leaving here—
flowers made of truths held openly in front
from a  fallow field  left to nettles,
the broken pebbles hammered by a vengeful sun.
I plucked it up, plucked the good root
of all our great hopes and best dreams  
and watched my life parch, shrivel and die in my hands
and heard her cry out
as if this left her incomplete,
clutching nightmares in her small arms.

the
   devil
         put the
              warmth
                          down south
                                             so man
                can call it
Paradise.

The weavers of the plains are tireless workers
poor but honest, always trusting the generosity
of an unlocked door to let in a husband working
nights at the print and design shop, finishing that
last small sign full of eclairs glazed with the most deliciously  appealing serif  font for the new
French bakery off of main and twenty-third

or the plumber who heard about that
slow running toilet on the second floor
who leaves the bill neatly near the vanity
knowing the check will come with
the Wednesday amble and update chat

or the mechanic who can be trusted with the
keys and a blank check  on the front seat
of that old blue Ford that is leaking green.

The weaver mother with seven children,
threads pieces for their school newspaper,
spins fine clear aqua yarn showing other kids
how to swim, substitute teaches so that she
can bind their minds into a chalkboard panel
of good knowledge, even drives the school bus
if that is what the thread requires to be strong.

The weaver farmer sees the Nebraska soil
is thready, dry, hard to till,   harder
to water, that crops can’t be harvested
without the abundant help of others.

In it they see a tapestry,
the people it’s colors
everything needing a tight loom
for it to work, survive and thrive  
and bind forever together.


So, they are intentionally local knowing
machine yarn eventually unravels,
that good thread can’t be found online,
and that the best panels in the tapestry
are the ones that come from common life.

The port rests on my high right chest, a pink crater,
a  cleanly folded linen shroud kissed with tears
wheeled from operating room to recovery  
by melting folds of scrub blues with iodoform scents.

The fragrance of me is creased into a tucked blanket,
monitors on my legs and arm caressing rhythmic,
sounds dissolving into the hum left in a plastic wind-
wafting hints of my odorless crenulated alchemical cure.

My wife holds the origami of my old self in a
blue zip lock hospital bag that opens with a
singe of nitrate, the final aroma of good cooked food
settling on a rack then vanishing into a memory portal.

I smell no future,  just the staleness of hope and fear
as I uncrease myself into my clothes and stand unfolded
at the exit, in the threshold of a shadowless sunlight
whose sleeves I sniff for the blossoming plum tree.