The rain creates its own ballet
starting with a lone figure on a bridge
holding an umbrella in the fog
splashing teardrops with his feet,
doing jetes over the larger puddles,
until the wind inverts his shade,
plies turning to pirouettes,
approaches cascading to the portal
and the head of the street,
dancing to a cityscape beyond.

At the last turn they meet cute,
their outward canopies entangling
rib to rib, shadow to shadow,
a plastic bag covering hair and
half her face, soggy groceries
nursed to her chest, an oversized
purse dangling her wrist, pulling
her down, falling, wishing for
something, someone, anything
to stop the descent, the crash.

He catches her in perfect repose,
umbrellas twirling the pavement,
as he slowly lifts her to him just a
breath and heartbeat away,
their hands touching, a thousand
raindrops pulsing on and in them.

Her parasol dances away from her
over the edge into the swirl below,
his caught before flight is vigorously
shaken to form.  He stuffs fallen
apples and pears into the pockets
of his rain jacket.  She discreetly
stashes a box of tampons into
her coat’s hidden lining. The umbrella
is their only shelter as she holds
it over them while he carries her
in his arms to the nearest cover,
a bodega with a green awning.  

At the corner of the drizzling mist
a mother swaddles her boy
in the hems of her rain dress.
Unprotected singles cover
their heads with open hardcovers
or purchases clenched in plastic bags.
Couples step in unison huddled
under their vinyl domes.
It’s all a parade under black and white,
a synchronized rainbow of attitude,
adding  to the grand Romantic ballet
of bending, riding, stretching, gliding,
darting, jumping and turning to and fro.

The finale has the last drop crying
to the pavement, to the street,
washing the asphalt in its clarity,
a lachrymose river flowing down drains,
the mechanical traffic dispersing
the  rest in butterfly waves that
sends the ensemble to the edges,
leaving the coryphees alone, apart,
staring at each other in the evaporation,
waiting forlornly for the first trickle
to return and kiss their skin with joy.

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.

M
My ugly M: two lonely
crescent wings touching the sun,
an  Icarus mounting up,
than melting into the whirl;
the waterfall between mountains;
caterpillars kissing like
moths fluttering to the light.

OY
O- a strawberry, orange
just ripe for a thumb to squish;
a lasso, not a noose;
a good herd dog corralling
Y- to M to A; my tongue;
or the necktie that makes the
suit of my name, my place here.

A
A- the tadpole in the marsh,
the eye searching for the nose,
the hurricane kissing land,
the alpha inside the all,
acknowledging the end
is not the start, nor circle,
but the tail seeking the future.

The pain is gone and
I am ready to write about
everything beyond the fear,

ready to bite into the
muscle and bone
of the world,

to put away the dagger phrase,
all the losses of my life,
ready to live in hope’s recesses.

I am poet enough to
make you taste
this hidden fruit,

see beyond all
the sutured sunsets
of existence.

It will not be all
kisses and music, but  
it will be terribly beautiful!

There will be a time when God leaves you.
Maybe summer. Maybe winter.
The last thing he will say:
Keep searching.  Keep finding.
Seek me in the trash, the womb
lungs and heart.
He will leave you agape and stirring,
just a memory prayer
to say as the sun rises
and you wonder whether
winter or summer
has the holiest months.

Remember the sky even though
it won’t remember you.

Know the constellations tales
even as they know not yours.

Remember the moon’s pull
despite its denying your shadow.

Remember the sun, the dawn even
as its novas your sight,
singes your memories
in forgetfulness, grief and time.

Remember the sunset,
that yields to night
that hardly embraces you.

Remember not your birth,
the maternal pains,
the gasps to your first breath,
the silent cursing of your first form.

Remember not your life’s mistakes,
your mother’s and hers.

Disperse them in the wind,
awaiting angels to hurl
them into the sun.

Remember not
your father’s indifference,
the times he chose
not to be a part of your life.

Remember the earth in all its colors
even as  it entombs everything.
that skins it.

Remember every plant, animal eaten;
the fallen tree that is your house frame
and every book you have read-

for their death and your life
is the child of every poem written
and consumed in the soul.

Remember the howl of the wind
in its indifference,
the universe’s deafness
that seems not to listen
or know you.

Remember that language,
your scream is the retort
to the universe’s grudge.

Shout “I remember”
even as it whispers
“I remember you not.”

I am married to this earth,
this field, this silence,
even as the ocean offers itself.

I walk  it with my dog on his leash
pulling restlessly ahead,
biting at the frenzy scent trail
he knows exists in the air.

The woods beyond are gray.
So is the sky.  

I hear— the echo of
a  trickling brook.  
My dog, inhales—
the last traces of  
dying greens, the odors
of tantalizing blues yielding
to the coming season.

The horizon reels away
until my eyes can no longer
take it in and the sky matches
the coming night—
contains itself in the field,
in every thing.  

Drops of rain splash
and  fall off my nose
onto my tongue.
The taste is bittersweet.
The scent, silences  
my dog’s barking
with the promise of petrichor.

The hidden brook silently turning
breathes in the renourishment—
the earth, the field,
praise the distant blessing
of a dying Hurricane Debby
bequeathing its last bits
for this life.

In my *******,
I feel the grace
of an unseen promise.
In the walk back home,
I am aware that each
foot thud is full of mud—
the marriage of ocean and land.

I watched my house recede to the invisible
as the water rises and the slow flat boat ferries me away.

My only baggage— the wife in her angels nightgown,
my chihuahua, a revolver loaded with dusty bullets—

all collapsing in the flow, dissolving into rot and mold,
a place not all that comfortable for other people,

a belligerent child evaporating into condemnation,
a concrete overhead blocking my view of heaven.

My archive of creeping shame sheds their existence
until it fits into the reality I see, no longer see.

I can only call this invisible place, this marred space
what it originally was before the water and erasure—

I called it love.
I call it love.

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.

What keeps me holding onto my old self,
preventing me from casting it into past swells?

Something detested, adored, hymned too,
haunted, cancer ridden, inflamed, grieving

and torn- yet beloved, pulled forward
into an ocean of tomorrow and tomorrow’s

swimming to hope or drowning in hopelessness,
never knowing where my forgiveness exists

or where my identity will be marooned,
my crueler self will  beach

and be rescued or
die in the unlit sun.

Soldiers patrol Bethlehem now.

The Kaaba hosts no
circumambulating mustati.

The Ganges’ bathes
in its own sin and ash  
releasing no Moksha.

The Vatican quarantines
even  its Cardinals as
The Pope holds mass
to an empty St. Peter’s Square.

In Chicago, a 7-year-old girl named Heaven,
will not die today, not become  
the most expensive candy in the world,
as her mother watches her, the miracle of today,
walk all alone by herself to a closed sweet shop.

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

Rising from the watery mist the
grey sea church blesses the waves
and prays to the sky,
lonely, unadorned,
a silver carven wing,
folded in limbo,
as its sea bells peel out the
redemption of sand and stone.

Its three pillars  
drawn from sea’s breath
are stained aquamarine,
and on its grey stone altar,
embraced with God’s gentle love,
nestle the souls of sea birds
home at last from their long journey
and the hazards of ocean and sky.

I want to greet the new year
with 20/20 eyes,
knowing that cure dances
on the edge of hope’s grave
and that in this biblical year
of flood, cancer and death
that grief is just a
short term companion.

Tomorrow time
will step me away,
leaving only memory
and the long walk
to the horizon.

Her name you may
or may not recall.
It was Chrissie,
the body in the sand dune.

You do remember the shark,
the blood on the water,
death spreading like
a virus in the town of Amity.

You do remember that
the beaches should have been closed
but Amity was a summer town
that lived on summer dollars.

You do remember the shark
doing what it was built to do—
killing Mrs. Kintner’s little boy
on that beautiful July 4th day.

You do remember Mrs. Kintner’s
cold blooded slap
on police chief Brody’s
warm blooded face.

“You knew there was a shark out there.
You knew it was dangerous
but you let people go swimming anyway.
You knew all those things

-BUT STILL MY BOY IS DEAD NOW!”

“She’s wrong,”
the mayor says.
“No, she’s not,”
Chief Brody acknowledges.

Suddenly you remember
reading a news piece
that Mrs. Kintner (Lee Fiero)
was a victim of the pandemic.

You realize there is no
police chief, scientist, grizzled old salt
banding together to do the right thing,
uniting to triumph over disease, death,

Only the orange hair President
standing deep in the drowning tide
smiling and waving and
telling everyone the water is fine.

“We are all Mrs. Kintner  now.”


Note:

The final line is a quote by Mary McNamara,
the obituary writer for the Los Angeles Times.

I don’t know if SEE ROCK CITY is
still stenciled in white on black
on old red barns along dusty Southern highways.  

The old black and white photos weren't arrows, more like anchored arks that floated  menageries of tourists to Lookout Mountain
to see miniature Fairy Tale Caverns,
villages of Mother Goose creatures,  
a Lover’s Leap with a view that overlooked
the borders of seven states on a clear day.

Hidden inside  was a falls that turned red, green, black, orange and holiday colors
on Valentine’s, St. Patrick’s, Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas.    

The last two miles were a treacherous thrill ride
up a snaking two lane mountain highway
filled with all the breathless ascent of a rollercoaster ready to be propelled at its zenith.

The tourist coming down, amped up on
on sugarcoated dreams, soda pop,
rainbow squirts and homemade fudge
dissolving like cotton candy in their mouths,
would dare the descent without a  
tap of the brakes, making it the only place
on earth where heaven could collide with hell.  
  
I’m sure those old barns have rotted down,
filling their fields in creosote abandonment.  
Perhaps the whitewash of time has eroded
ROCK and even CITY leaving the passing soul
wondering what there is left to SEE.

The dream still exists amidst fairy tale caverns and meandering limestone/sandstone trails
on the very top of Lookout Mountain
waiting for a family of woodpeckers
to roost in the metal SEE ROCK CITY
birdhouse hooked to the V of my old oak.

I walk from there to there
to paint myself into black pixels,
my shadow following obediently
part of the hobbled sketch.

I draw myself
as a wobbly line,
ill aligned and always
misplaced near the horizon

Above are scrawled illegible words
written in a shaky handwriting,
below exists the gurgle of my bowels
that my imperfect ears can only hear.

I ponder my broken perfection
and hear Jesus whisper his love,
knowing not the direction
from which he speaks to me.

The sentinels stand silently
guarding the monuments
from rioting against their shadows.
One guard
counts the sunshine,
the other the dark.
The **** and ****,
the broken glass
can never be really
cleaned up.
The stench
just follows the tour
through the
purple velvet queue.
The glass bleeds
the feet of those
who sold their shoes
for nothing.

at what point do shadows become
numbers and numbers become dust

is it when sunlight and moonlight cross
the eye into our anatomical darkness

when the zero circle helixes into short
existence a rose, a cell, a dying memory

when raindrops no longer liquefaction,
leaving umbrellas a meaningless prop

or the grid that passes over unnoticed
during the slow, long ride to the hospital

maybe, the strobe of light that moves
from office cubicle to office cubicle

possibly the shadows that dance while
you clean precisely calibrated glasses

try to focus on those rain smeared
figures now in your field of view

remembering they once were you on
the half lit steps staring into the dark

watching the three triangle flapping
of the crow over the tarmac

She is the way they left her:
silent, shuttered, composed
amidst disarray,
the waiting chair unmoved,
her body draped in final coverings,
spider rays webbing the room,
the overhead light unused,
the bed sagging forever
in the center after this,
the sun fighting
with the weight of shadows
on her bedspread.
The corners of her room are dusty
crying from the lack of human nicety.
A tattered pain lives in the motes
that float to the floor,
bruises
of the past
that cannot heal in the present.
My hands are cut by the sharp edges
of a future I’m blind and deaf too.
I can only grasp futilely as the sun floats
away in the shadow play.
A faint trace of her voice
saying Jon, Jon, Jon
follows me out as I
struggle to lock the door.

My dog finds a conch nestled in the sand-
half dead, half alive- in the foaming tide,
She paws at its exposed pinkness
ignoring the hermit crab seeking shelter.

The conch shrivels beyond its lip
the scent of dead flowers pouring out,
my dog in a frenzy to taste its exotic flesh,
this beautiful creature sheltering in place.

Resisting the urge to pluck it from its shell
I pick it up and toss it beyond her scent,
beyond the fear, disease, the quarantine
I must always return to in silence.

As the shell sinks back to its home,
I now know everything dies in the sand.

I have something I must confess to you
I pick my nose, eat all my buggers too.
This causes distress and disgust I know    
still off the floor I’ve  eaten food that glows.

Science says that it’s all just for the best
for I immunize against just those pests,
my antibodies delight in the twirl
of not taking a break from this ill world.

Be too clean enough, watch your body die,
a clam unable to grow pearls inside.

The history of hay fever  attests
it started an aristocratic pest
until more begats trickled it to the rest.
Years later immunity herd resets
made your older ***** hand many bros
less the cause of your sneezing and your woes.
Now cleaner living, hygienic hands,
less man, swing it back to the wealthy clans.

The fate of humanity all well depends
on the fact antibodies never end.
Evolution favors the hardy bugs
making man one of its many doomed shrugs.
Disease, extinction, not in human plan,
he will fight, fight to be part of this land.

Vaccines have prevented much needless death
giving antibodies a daily test.
We have avoided all that still does ****
yet  allergies still make one run to hills,
allowing even worst auto-inflamed chills.
Giving all your antibodies a rest
is not the answer for ****** distress.

Time to adapt bodies to the new world.
Not **** both good and bad in the big furl.
Let it listen, learn and train friend from foe,
not pay attention to the ad man’s show.

Man has conquered this small space to survive,
he must evolve away to really thrive.
We are unsafer when we **** all risk,
to immunize, immunize is the trick.

So I will pick my nose, eat my buggers,
knowing I am creating new lovers
not afraid at all to hug each other.

If I shut the border,
no one will shut their window,
hide in their closet,
lock their door.

They would shake the blinds of moths,
bring the dog in from the doghouse,
let the cat feast after the mouse hole
has been plugged with a door wedge.

In the distance
the train whistle blows
dispersing mist and rain.
No one steps off nor boards.

The bird nest is not abandoned.
The hollow of the tree stays hollow.
Nothing has shut down at all.

My pen scribbles a poem
only to watch the black words
return to the reservoir.

I open the dictionary to the word “hope”,
but the page refuses to settle
until I put all the words in them
face down on the writing table.

My stoma grumbles louder than my stomach.
I shut my cancer in the mother-of-pearl.
My wife’s cancer is placed in the
small valise of all our memories.

I can’t shut down the museum.
It already is.
I can’t shut down the cinemas.
They already are.
Only the pharmacies are open.

I shut down my mouth
on my broken jaw
with five missing teeth
only to feel the maw of death.

I shut down the ash of my childhood
into a golden urn of my own design.

I shut down America, I shut down God,
putting them both between the now
empty covers of the dictionary missing hope.

I shut down my passions, my emotions
in the moldy basement of my despair.
My shut down love is chained in the dungeon.

Shut up, shut down,  I repeat  to myself,
until those words lose all definition,
until my lips are sealed in pain and
the only thing left is my total shutdown.

In the early morning rise,
my mother and I
take a ride
to the hospital
where I was born
and she has her
dialysis treatments.
Her feet,
wrinkled and bruised,
exhausted
are raised
on a leather pedestal.

They remind me
of Grandma’s
heavy black nylons
that pooled around
her ankles
as she prayed
the rosary at night
in the gentle sway
of her rocking chair,
praying through the days
and all the
joyful,
luminous,
sorrowful,
glorious mysteries,
the standing
required for raising
thirteen children
on platefuls
of morning quesitos,
revoltillos,
bowls of crema
and loaves
of pan de aqua,
three hours
of washing, ironing
and folding their vestidos,
the lunches of
mofongo, and pasteles,
the dinners of
asopao de gandules,
the culling of coins
from a big crystal bowl
to buy dulces
at Carmen’s bodega
just down the block
on Fulton and Seventh.

My mother only had four children,
three boys and a girl,
and just like abuela,
she nourished
them the same way—
standing long and hard
until her feet gave out
and her blood wore down,
in the days before
the seams of myself
unraveled in black threads
and dispersed in tears
to every corner.

In the dreams
for the reality
that never occurred
I would
massage her feet,
put the richest nard
generously on them
like the chastised Mary
did for Jesus,
bandage them in flesh.

The little memories
are unremembered
to the world
except for
the faithful sons
and daughters
who recall only
the clinking of
thirty shiny silver pieces
placed silently
into their open palms,
betraying the reality
with the buffing of memory
into better hopes and dreams,
a poetry
of bruised feet,
blood,
the scent
of good Boricua cuisine,
the silent
watching  
mother
asleep.

Sixty degrees and clear.
She dies -morning hospice shift
while I’m getting ready
to visit her.
Waxen in her white bed,
arms bruised and quiet now,
mouth wide in a gasp
as if in scream, as if saying
ah, no!  Both eyes closed,
turned down for my visit,
denied all further light,
sky or even ceiling.
I touch her hand. It is
cold.  It’s only been
two hours. At the threshold
I see the elevator.
I’m not ready
to drop down that tunnel.
I go back and kiss her forehead.  
Outside, the clear light types her life.

The music is the scent in the air
that changes everything.

“I’ve got no time to lie,
I’ve got no time to play your silly games,”

it croons with a sweet she reggae lilt
pairing off the lovers from the pretenders,

shedding bodies to kiss and writhe
in adjacent rooms or the nearest alley

until only the a cappella
is left in the haze of ****

and turntable revolutions,
the scent of spicy ****
marinated in a calypso afternoon.

There be time for Marley and
his Small Axe vibe after they be gone,

the Rasta boys with their black power
rave, body slamming each other.

It’s all be a silly game, man-
a ***** dream to knowing Jah.

They be warriors until the last spin,
and it be time to turn spear to

that big mama cross they forever carry
and must fold to fit on the bus.

All you wicked men
what is wrong with you?

There is no black Justice
seen on the Sistine Chapel.

Only the stupidities that
can make a stuff bird laugh-

the small axe ready
to cut the big tree down.

https://youtu.be/b0Tk-FoiX_0

Based loosely on theSteve McQueen anthology  of films.  The first in the series is titled Mangrove.  The title is from a Bob Marley song.

Smash the glass if you must, yet
do it gently using soft hammers.
Catch the fury in your breath and
release its image on the pane.

The goal is not destruction but creation,
to leave behind something cracked
yet still whole, hanging precariously together,
a reminder that we are all shards about to fall.

Tap and if it forms a line tap again,
until a lip forms a mouth, maybe yours,
a tear- an eye like your mother’s,
again, your father’s shattered brow.

Leave enough of you behind
for them to complete.
Gentrify the other glasses with
the genealogy of all your pain.

Make everything a museum of
all the world’s shattered glass
that none dare destroy  lest
even they fall apart

At lunchtime pigeons and pinstripes dance with Rockette syncopation in front of Radio City
following the lead of thirty balloons encased
in vinyl tugged down the 50th Street station.

A chauffeured limousine pops out
a freshly groomed and leashed Pomeranian
seeking reunion with her dowager owner
getting purple locks and cuticles nearby.

At the columned entrance of Manhattan Bridge
two lovers kiss at the Canal Street stoplight
while a Vespa owner stops near the pedestrian
walk to hitch the love of his life in full stride.

Black children in bowlers and their Sunday finest
share a car in the Connie Island Cyclone
with Hasidic eyngls from Avenue J
carefully protecting their yarmulkes.

In the South Bronx the children of 136th Street
practice belly flops on an abandoned mattress
before chickening out on the adjacent kiddie pool
decorated with aqua waves, clown fish and mermaids.

The Monday field trip will transport ten
young Harlem poets to the Schomburg Library
to eulogize when Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka
danced a jig on the ashes of Langston Hughes.

One will write a Christmas story about the time
Richard the reindeer took the Roosevelt Island
tram to bring  presents to the orphans
after Santa’s sled had fallen apart.

We exist in
unkeepable bodies

and in the bending over
we decompose

for we are
are but the
memory of grief

that soft bodies
leave when they die.

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.

I asked the haberdasher
to make me a new soul.
something inexpensive
and lighter than 21 grams
with a loose fit.

He made it,
draped me in it
then disappeared.

I went home
and hung it in the closet
.
The next day
I couldn’t figure out
how to put it on.
So, I left it in on its hanger.

Overnight it got darker
and had become a shadow.

In the light it went white.
I draped it over arm
and went for a stroll.

It feel out of my grasp
onto the sidewalk,
picked itself up and
followed perfectly behind me.

By twilight it had become invisible
and was complaining loudly
that it wanted to go home.

I took it back
to the haberdasher
like it asked of me.

The store was closed
and empty of every soul.
His tools had been left out.
Sadly, the master had gone home.

In the Charleston marketplace, a boutique auctions off
detailed limited edition replicas of black history: a slave
who hugs his chains upright over his porcelain hands,
is sold for $1200.00 to a man with a black Amex card,
a horde listening to the Emancipation Proclamation
goes for the same amount, Malcolm X gets $1000.00,
MLK just a little less, the OJ bobble heads sell for $60.00  
in the store’s gift shop while the white Bronco in
slow pursuit complete with flashing police lights
and breathless live commentary garners $2400.00,
Rosa Parks languishes at the rear eventually getting $300.00,
Eric Garner, Treyvon Martin, Rodney King are
part of lot sold for $500.00 clearance and a free
Black Lives Matter T-shirt, George Floyd gasping out
“I can’t breathe,” enshrined in a porcelain halo nabs
the same price, while the last figurine, of his murderer
being embraced by a very happy Donald Trump is
purchased by a man in a MAGA hat for $10,000.00.

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.

“Don’t make me bury you,” the elder
spoke to the younger
over the phone,
knowing that his child
had inherited all his demons.

“I will support you
if you want to do rehab,”
he whispered,
that old Harry Chapin Song,
Cat’s in the Cradle,
about fathers and sons
circling in his head;

his son’s new one,
Harlem River Blues,
kicking it off the loop:

Lord, I'm goin' uptown
to the Harlem River to drown 
***** water gonna cover me over  
And I'm not gonna make a sound …”

“I won’t,”  the son
promised his father.
A click and a dial tone
was the final statement.

That night
Justin Townes,
named after
Townes van Zandt,
the folk oracle
that was his dad’s mentor,
died alone
in a Nashville apartment.
A mixture of  
******* laced with fentanyl
was found in his blood.
He was just 38.

When a child dies
the father no longer a dad,
no longer
the parent of Justin Townes,
or just J.T.,
his first little boy,
adopts his own identity back,
rears it fondly in memory,
burying the child’s legacy
until the erosion of time
files him down
to his birth name,
just plain old Steve-
Stephen Fain Earle
from Fort Monroe, Virginia.

When Townes died
he did a tribute album.
When his old demons returned
he released a tribute album.
When grief surrounded him
and the whiskey bottled beckoned
Steve mined J.T.’s  catalog
for a ten song tribute session
that can be done with that rock sneer
they both shared.  

The only thing that mattered
was that it be released
on the day of what would
have been J.T.’s 39th birthday.

He would concentrate on
the songs whenever he wondered
why he stayed clean and J.T.  couldn’t.
Why did he survive and J. T. succumb?

Steve didn’t hate the fact
that J.T.’s songs
were better than his,
his guitar fingerpicking
was more mind blowing,
that musically J.T. could play
Mance Lipscomb blues
in a way Steve was never  
able to figure out,
not even that J.T.
had a way better voice.

He was always reminding J.T.
how proud he was of him,
how much he loved him.

No, Steve hated that it wasn’t
enough to save him,
that he was the stronger man.
that they both shared the same disease.

Steve sang, his craggy voice
the perfect underscore
for the dark themes
in J.T.’s ballads:
a drowning death
(Tell my mama I love her,
Tell my father I tried.
Give my money
to my baby to spend);
the phantom-limb ache
for a former lover
(Even though I know you’re gone
I don’t have to be alone now.
You’re here with me every night
When I turn out the lights.)

It was therapy not catharsis.
Steve always sang
because he needed to.

J.T. was the opposite—
dressing in retro style,
reveling in the notoriety
of his intimidating talent
that was always trying to
eclipse his more famous parent.

Steve wanted this to be a memorial
between father and son.  
No guest singers, especially
those ******* enablers
that helped **** him
with their nonintervention.

He never included J.T.’s songs
about absent fathers
and single mothers.
He knew only J.T.
could rightfully sing those.

Steve was expecting it to be
a horror show emotionally.
He felt sad, but not disappointed
when it was just business as usual.

When it came time to perform
John Henry Was a Steel Drivin’ Man
he deliberately emulated
J.T.’s fingerpicking.

He felt jealous that his son
was able to write
the John Henry song
he always failed at.

When it came time to record
the album’s last song,
Last Words,
the only song
written by Steve,
and like the
more sentimental
Harry Chapin one,
a heartbreaking synopsis
of a father’s journey,
from cradling his newborn son
to speaking to him for the last time,
the pain returned and
their shared disease
pulled inside him.

By the time it was on tape
he knew it was the only
song he had written in his life
where every single word
in it was true.  

Last thing I said
was ‘I love you.’
Your last words to me
were ‘I love you too.’


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FXgtD3jfikk&feature=youtu.be

It’s in the shading.
It’s the way the light is written.
It’s the way the observer takes it all in.
It’s the way it convinces one that the world will last.
It’s the way it plants a seed in the mind,
the way it touches one inside, lives inside
the streets of memory, inhabits one’s emotional house,
sunsets, harbors, all the great perfect things
that exists in the brief eternity that loop eternally,
that convinces one that the extraordinary
is the purpose of existing in ordinary time,
that every moment lives for the perfect still life.

Super Nova

I destroy the gold house
inside my soul—

the nova of light on
gold archway, gold mantle,
gold walls.  The last bits of

real places that once shined.
l thought, forever

in the aura of sun-
shine on once
gold rooftop, gold windows,

gold doors. Look in,
search and see, find: black gold

steeped in the dark
burned down to ash of
gold wood, gold grass

the once gold streets, gold hills
all around my dead sun.


This dead sun will never rise, rise
and shine its light
to my gold soul.

With the start of NFL football yesterday, I must salute those brave and patriotic players and teams who take a stand against police brutality of black people. I must share this poem and video that my Miami Dolphins shared.  I stand in complete solidarity with the Dolphins on this issue.  

https://twitter.com/i/status/1304186433054420992

It is authentic? That’s the mystery.

Or is it just another symbolic victory?

Now there’s two anthems. Do we kneel do we stand.

If we could just right our wrongs we wouldn’t need two songs.

We don’t need another publicity parade.

So we’ll just stay inside until it’s time to play the game.

Whatever happened to the funds that were promised. All of a sudden we got a collapsed pocket?

The bottom line should not be the net profit. You can’t open your heart when it’s controlled by your wallet.

Decals and patches. Fireworks and trumpets. We’re not puppets. Don’t publicize false budgets.

Ask the pundits and we shouldn’t have a say. If you speak up for change, then I’ll shut up and play.

If we remain silent, that would just be selfish. Since they don’t have a voice, we’re speaking up for the helpless.

It’s not enough to act like you care for the troops. Millions for pregame patriotism. You get paid to salute.

Lift every voice and sing? It’s just a way to save face. Lose the mask and stop hiding the real game face.

So if my dad was a soldier, but the cops killed my brother, do I stand for one anthem, and then kneel for the other?

This attempt to unify only creates more divide. So we’ll skip the song and dance. And as a team we’ll stay inside.

We need changed hearts. Not just a response to pressure. Enough. No more fluff and empty gestures.

We need owners with influence and pockets bigger than ours. To call up officials and flex political power.

When education is not determined by where we reside. And we have the means to purchase what the doctor prescribed.

And you fight for prison reform and innocent lives.

And you repair the communities that were tossed to the side.

And you admit you gain from it, and swallow your pride. And when greed is not the compass, but love is the guide.

And when the courts don’t punish skin color, but punish the crime.

Until then, we’ll just skip the long production and stay inside.

For centuries, we’ve been trying to make you aware.

Either you’re in denial, or just simply don’t really care.

It’s not a black/white thing. Or a left/right thing. Let’s clean the whole bird, and stop arguing about which wing.

Then, Flores faced the camera, and concluded:

Before the media starts wondering and guessing, they just answered all your questions. We’ll just stay inside.

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.

In the shadow of Lincoln
he heard Mahalia shout out
“Tell them about the dream, Martin!
Tell them about the dream.”

He remembered the vision
and the words that came to him
on that long walk to freedom
on that 75 degree June Detroit day.

It was evident as the clear water
of the mall’s reflecting pool,
the Washington monument in front,
the declarations of Jefferson behind him.

He again heard Mahalia’s words sing in him,
the dream of 12 thousand 500 score faces,
wanting to listen, pleading to listen
but only Mahalia’s rising above this soul’s choir.

He pushed the papers to the lectern’s left
and his old preacher voice remembered Detroit,
Montgomery, Albany, Birmingham.
He rose, called to them and the mountains beyond.

Due to the pandemic the children are not coming.  
The adults will set a table for two and wait for the zoom chat after the game with  
the Dallas Cowboys and
the Washington Football Team
formerly known as the Redskins.

They will double their Thanksgiving feast of
Burger’s Hickory Smoked Spiral Sliced City ham,
Betty Crocker’s Cheddar and Bacon Scalloped potatoes,
Bake House Creations Crescent rolls,
oven roasted Brussel sprouts with bacon,
sliced acorn squash with a brown sugar glaze,
and a five cup Ambrosia salad of sour cream,
pineapple tidbits, canned Mandarin oranges in light syrup, organic flake coconut and mini marshmallows
marinated until the marshmallows get gooey
and impart sweetness to the sour cream.

The Trump over Biden over any Democrat arguments
will thankfully not happen this year
and blissfully never again.  For this year,
at least, things will seem to return to normal.
The miracle will go by unrecorded, unnoticed.

They are secretly glad they don’t have to dress up
in the Pilgrim and Indian dress embroidered
with wild turkeys, Indian corn that creased around
to reveal the vast wild fields and forest ready
to be explored and traded for beads and
promises of sharing the American bounty;
the ugly Garfield the Cat sweater over
the crisp white shirt and black slacks
bought at the J.C. Penny liquidation sale.
Today Dad will proudly wear his
aqua Miami Dolphins jersey,  sweat pants,
socks and comfy ‘Phins black briefs
with the not so stretchy waist band.

Go Tua,  memories of the
undefeated Dolphins 1972 season,
the big Thanksgiving brawls of 1977
spurred by Conrad Dobler
***** hits on Bob Griese,
the Dan Marino five Turkey Day
interceptions against the Dallas Cowboys
in 1999 that was the final sunset of
a first ballot Hall of Farmer career
danced in Dad’s head.
Mom just wanted to catch up on
all those Dark Shadows soaps and
Housewives of Whatever she missed.
Dressed in her blue angels nightgown
she rolled her eyes when
first football game of the day switched on.

They vaguely dreamed of the days
when his hair was thick and black
and hers was long, golden and easy;
all the trips they planned
and sometimes took
where they climbed bluffs
and overlooked storybook plains.

Today they would look at each other
with the same everyday stare
and notice their wrinkled hands
and clink together the strong, cheap wine
poured into leftover mason jars.
They toasted each other
and whatever would come next,
the decades of side by side,
their great good luck,
the incoming Zoom
of children and grandchildren.

He could only understand her with his blows,
grabbing her by the throat
strangling the last words out of her,
hitting her on the top of her head
trying to knock any idea
of her making him a better man,
like his father tried 136 times before.

Yes, he remembered every blow he received
just as she took tally of all 67 he delivered.  

The next one will be 68,
halfway to his father’s count.
He will stop, he thought,
consoling himself with the moral insight
that he was only half as bad as his old man.  

Besides 69 was a love number,
a time  for her to show him some appreciation
by getting on top and blowing the **** out of him, while he turn his face away from
the tangle of her brown ***** hair
because the taste of her abuse
wasn’t sweet enough to his tongue.

He dragged her out through the fields
towards the swamp.  The old rage wafted up
and the only thing that mattered was that he **** it, ****** that *****, briefly ashamed by the remembrance of his six year old son calling her that same word in the kitchen with the equal velocity
and rage he felt right now.

He pulled his deer knife out of his pocket,
the small one he used for gutting,
placed it at the tenderest part of her throat,
the spot were frightened blood pounded
and felt the most alive.  He was planning
on burying her underneath the wreckage
of that old sorry ******* Ford,
the one he gave up trying to rehabilitate
because the parts no longer existed.  

He never noticed his boy was following behind.  
He dropped the knife when he heard
the two screams come, one ripped
through the voice box of his wife, the other
off the tongue of the son he hardly noticed.

The 137th blow his father never got to deliver,
the 68th blow of their marriage
was delivered by her, a left handed
backward elbow straight into his Adam’s apple.  

While he strangled
in the recognition of his blood leaving him
and returning,- no, not really, not ever, he thought,-
she delivered the 69th straight into his nuts,
both knowing and relishing the irony.  
It was the last joke they would ever share.

She ran behind and grabbed their child,
then both made a dash for
the two lane black tar road
thirty yards into their future.  
The first light they saw
stopped and took them away.  

The last thing he heard,
as gravity pulled him down
to be buried in the mud of his own shame
was the simultaneous half laugh, half scream
that was the lingering echo of their last caress,
his savage groan and recognition
of their last punchline vomiting out of him
as he collapsed and buried his face in his hands, acknowledgement that he was half the father,
the man, the child everyone thought he was.

The Pandemic has closed
the theaters and cinemas.

On stage a lone actor commits
suicide in the loneliness.

On screen the two lovers run to each
other against the march of soldiers.

The actor’s death is an extravagant fake,
a nod to the art of dying a good stage death.

The lovers perform ****** asphyxiation
until the man seems to fall deeply asleep.  

The actor pulls the dagger from his neck,
red silk flowing freely from his throat.

In the light motes coming from the projector
Sada realizes that Kichizo has died.

The red silk now entombs Sensei Omiya
like a gown as he reaches out to Sada’s cry.

Sada kisses Kichizo for the final time
as she removes Kichizo‘s blade.

Sensei Omiya drowns in a swell of red silk.
“Sada, my child, what shame have you brung?”

Sada cuts Kichizo’s ***** off cleanly carrying
it inside her as she madly wanders Tokyo.

The projector clicks off, the house lights fade.
The transformation is done.  
The performance is over

Notes:
The lovers story is based on the plot of the Japanese film In the Realm of the Senses by Nagisha Oshima.  The theater story is intended to be a subplot of the lovers plot. The theater plot is also intended to invoke images of Japanese Kabuki theater.

I watched in the swirl, the blue fish paddle
steadily away from the boat,
knowing that it had been hooked before,
the wound protruding wormlike from his jaw.

Today would not be his last fight.
He would not be a photo prize.
He wanted not the weight of air,
just the restless, endless flow all around,
the homely tide.

Algae speckled his skin
refracting rainbow fingers
like prayers in the morning
and brown moldy spots on his lateral line
like vespers recited in a dark nave.

Swirls of lilies flowed beneath his belly
revealing his antiquity and mortality.

He danced defiantly along the reef,
shedding embedded sand,
corrupted water weighing him down
the worms wriggling on barbed Js above,
the anemones gesticulating alluringly beneath.

He once was suspended between ocean/heaven
everything green slipping off,
his blue mocked by the lighter sky,
his lungs rejecting its oxygen,
his blood rejecting its gravity
that cut his very being.

He was born with scales,
flexible bones Ill-suited for this rigid world,
born to glisten never knowing.  
more beautiful peony’s,
things more lovely than him
rooted in lands beyond his sight and ken.

His eyes seemed larger than mine
and in a certain graceful way
they had the heavy density of a stain glass panel
trying to contain all beauty in an icon.
They shifted only towards the light.

He stared mouth agape and every scar,
every hook wound fell off, revealed itself,
proof that he will never be any one’s prize.

Like everyone else, he had learned
the wisdom of the wound,
that life was not in victory,
but in surviving, the possibility,
the hope of catch and release.

I started my rusty boat
and in the dart of his rainbow
swimming away, swimming away,
I felt the thanks of his fin and tail,
as I moored in the direction home.c

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.

His arms were too short to box with God,
so God sent him down for more sparring.

He boxed the devil over and over and over,
the Father, Son, Holy Spirit doing the scoring.

When he beat the devil every round,
he tried again to punch the Lord.

His arm were still too short to reach His chin,
though this time he lasted about a round.

God sent him down again to box the sin of man,
Jesus needing a break from all that jive.

When he broke even he died and went to heaven,
spoiling for a rematch with the holy Lord.

At the pearly gates he landed a blow on Jesus’ chin
knocking a tooth out to a thousand clouds.

Jesus picked himself up from the canvas of heaven.
He smiled at him.  “Good fight”, he said.

Shout into the eyes
of sunlight
of the boy who dances in the light.

Every dragon’s death
foretells this child
onto even the smallest realm.

The Phoenix is an ally
to the boy
who forges worlds.

The stars proclaim his shine
this boy who dances in the light.

He is the boy
who flies
into the sun
and does not dissolve.

His chariot with flashing wheels
races with the rainbow.

He is the boy who
sells the golden trinkets
with 1001 truths in the bazaar.

Even the baubles know not all his stories
of pirates, pashas, tigers and kings.

After all has been vended
this boy with the wondrous tongue
will wipe the sweat of his brow
into the most damask bottle
and proclaim it genie’s breath.

In that living moment
the bullet goes right by me—
and in between all my prayers
and my eternal gratitude —
the child behind me dies.  
“Why did it  spare
me and not him?”,
I think over and over again—
counting the lifetime of wishes
that now will never
come true for him.—

It goes right by me—
penetrating present and future—
—dreams and nightmares—
I will sleep an hour more tonight—
—tomorrow, an hour less—
less—less until the end of my lifeline.
Out of all the others who’ve died
I will remember this child— little boy
in the depth of my veins and
the light rain that continuously falls—
even as the bullet goes by and bye.—
pass the fence to his grave.—

The bullet goes by me—
cutting through my words—
my sad attempt of an elegy for him—
all the grief that my soul strives to forget—
It goes right by me—
chance— unsmiling me for a lifetime.—

What does a dog
know of being a wolf,
a wolf know of being a dog?

The wolf howls not
to understand the moon
but to know itself
in the community of nature,

to shout out
its place in the pack
and among the stars.

It knows hunger that
a dog will never know,
the desperation of the hunt,
and not a master’s command.

The wolf tastes the blood
of squirrel and rabbit,
the death of prey and
not the dream of it.

The wolf fears the spark,
the scent of the two foot,
the sound of its silver shout.

The dog knows its leash,
the comfort of the hearth,
the happy dreams that
come with a full stomach,

the fetch of a duck in its mouth
and not its curor,
the squeak of velveteen prey.

Even the dingo of the bush
scavenges for its food and
maybe dreams of human kindness
and living beneath his beams.

The dog shelters with him
and does not swelter
in the fury of the sun.

The dog knows God
through the hand of man.
The wolf knows no God
and scorns its inverted pet.

The wolf needs not good dogs.
It need only to be a good or bad wolf,
to heed the call of the wild.

Abandoned in the middle of the blasted field,
its arms shredded, legs battered,
the chair exists in broken splendor
catching the best of the speckled light
dancing in the quivering shadows.
Lines of the seated father stain the backrest,
motherly molds are left behind in the seat foam,
the relentless kicks, tattoos of children’s feet
bruise the red velvet of the front rail.

At dawn, pulses of light run along its rails
dispersing all shadows to the wet ground.
At the speed of forgetfulness
two robins alight on this storm orphan,
widow, widower, this sole survivor,
with twigs to build a new stick home.