What We're Told:
     There's 3 blind mice
                        but they're all helping each other to find their way
                                                                ­                   around the place.
What We Pray:
     There's 3 blind mice
                             and maybe there's a distant fourth that can see for
                                                                ­                           them, somewhere.
What it is:
      There's 3 blind mice
                             and one is pretending he has vision.

What’s the connection?—
        a secret kept best between plug and socket.
               Prophet man gone the old electric way,
[and durn’ an election year, no less]. Epigrammatic burps, and
  occasional flatulence, of intellection,      
I can’t help
        but admire my own kindofbouquet, it ain’t easy—
                 when Christ was crucified like gas…

…There’s a million and more clichés I could toss around as mud and dirt;
       Alas!,
                         I’d rather speak in terms of glass, [plateglass, stainedglass etc.,
               germs and love, and guns and lovely lovely ca-sh,

today’s math; burnt and sad, self—Walking [my] small town streets, sure to stray faraway of dense windows,
        and passerby's in ugly masks, with karaoke mouthpieces,
                       Ballads of boredom on precipitate tongues, Shoo!—away
and blow apart minstrel clouds.

        No taxis, [ever]
        just men and women in ordinary cars, pedestrians,
                   in obvious shoes,sporting unconscious denim,northeastern scowls
—fashionable scowls,
         nuanced grays that distract from the spots of ill sun [hostage winter sun;]
                 scowls like Northeastern sky herself.

“I’ve surely lost my perspective”
                 [An empty phrase, really. A neat vaguery, I submit.]
        I had a perspective, I still got it;
        Though not much use it does me being how singular it is,
                                       Optics and all, no shades of reflection,
Dense windows of thought, so dense,
       —it’s now a microscope! Hell, all i can make out is a loose collection of colors,

A broken box of loose wires
          and some kinda bang-up dodgy liberty, those frayed connections, too.
                Nothing as tidy as plug and socket,
        however,enough
                to keep the lights on.

Gentlemen of Courage and Ladies of Excellence,
Toast to stolen prayers with rarer player’s hands;
Soft in defiant laughter,
when drinking their wine from the bowels of brines

Sing along the Ballads of Heritage with Melodies of Exception;
Boast, not a breathe,
though sullen heirs ghost to fairer wearer’s air(s) of land—
A settlement of Rapture and Resurrection, arid, amid dirt and sand

and King and thy Kingdom sprout flowering tomb, and rosebud temple reach to the sky during the showers of spring
Devours the crescent Moon

in big pink petals of bloom;

A garden so fertile
it could look pretty in wartime—
with Gardeners of Courage and Laborers of Excellence;
(Lapse, not into digressions of Being and Essence
but hands in the soil and planting the actions of kingdom come,
       patient building of Spring Reign sure
as the flame, the architect of rising Sun is
(Daughters and Sons of kingdom came,
      the soldier in a land been conquered and named; abandoned
for the greenness of hope.
)May it never come, Be All The Same; (


be gentle, though whispering wind)

Seeds of Nextyear and the spores of Awhile,
carried by the Wasps and the Clouds
To the Gentlemen of Excellence and Ladies of Courage,
illuminated, eyes from the flora of stars faraway forest floor of foreign

      fears,
      as the hungry Owls of Time prepare a final feast—
      Consume the years between Here and Now;
      Watching from blank perch, among
      the Trees of Afterall; a place beyond expectance.
      Sing the branches of experience, to wake
      in Siren’s cipher; inelegant forms
      of waking,

ugly sleep on rocks of seabed; once was aboard a marooned skyline—

Those Who Are Will Be
again, again a serf in a wave of Time’s refraction. Neverending neverbeginning;

                          Those Gentlemen of Courage and Ladies of Excellence,
on the Day That Is, arrays of seers sayers doers displayers
optimists and pessimists, toast to them
        and their rarer player’s hands,
Boast they, not a breathe, though sullen heirs ghost
to fairer wearer’s air and land;
Laugh and howl and dine, they drink their wine
from disemboweled gourds
        of their own divine—
Warped, in jowls of hungry fix,
no feast they fear, for they prey to the Owls of Time.

orange cones
                                               &
       y e l l o w
                                 t
                a  p e—Nothing
                                               to see
                                                          w
    ­                                  here?                          ­                        hear”

       see is
                         what                 i think i
                                                               ­                 thinkyoushould;
       say do             what i
                                              f r e e l y    
                           em

                                                      ­            bedded in I—
      My
                                 herostory; (limits
      endowed the scope—action
                                                       controlled by
                                              knowledge]
     ­   true,
                                   even heroes
        can become jaded to their promises,                   tis noble duty
to their state                             to spoil

inside their o w n Suit of Just
                                                            ­ice)(the state is not me,you,us,them, we’re all a l i e n;]
                                                             ­               cast
                                                                ­                to the fringes
                                                        o­f dissidence,

my sweet
d i s
                  a r r a y; can there be a center to this shrouded mass?

behind face of the clock
                                                           ­     work(the cow
        ard’s mask.


(Mystic Machine, please
                                                          ­                  cloak us
                                          in hour
                                                         uncouth explanation of the our!
un
                         burden our backs
                                                           ­           of those crosse


       d t’s & dotted i’s,
                                                                ­         so we may

                          be  f r e e                          to carry our religion

      sans
                                 the

immobile prescriptions
        of our structures—
                                innumerable volumes of procedural scripture & scroll,
                Mandate and Prophecy.(

                                                   ­               …but OUR brain weighs a ton;
                                     (yes
  but w h o
                                              stored it in the w r o n g vat?
“In fact, we object to the framing of that concept—I


                                         control my mind, to the full
est
                         extent nature a l l o w s

Just
                                     ask the cat
                                                        who assumes itself
       Master of Domain—I lay claim
                                                                ­           as gatekeeper of
            the input, to engineer the flow of my information
                                                     ­   consciously, constantly,
                                                     ­   without a shadow
of intellectual guilt
—This is my herostory; if you
                                               aren’t with me,
                               you are againstme”


Every
                        body got a story
         with a hero, even ideas. but there’s alotta b o d i e s;
This world
                        must be seething with villains too,
the worst clothcut of villain, the most sinuous form of e v i l. that of
            Average Evil—              the
                                       unremarkable,
                                                   ­                                                      tacit kind;
but i               over
                                       stand—it’s philosophically strain

                                             ing                                                              ­
                                                                ­                                 to
        precisely and definitely
                         define players vs. pieces

Wheres the end? slow down
                                                            ­  we don’t even know
where to start?
                                               blistering mound of
                 opinion turn man of reason sheepish to
analyzing, let alone

         cutting the circulation
                                                                ­     to the veins of ideological fires,
                          sure to wait
                                 until the b o d y is scorched
          we may examine
in order and consolidated, complete,
                                            and stored in an urn.

a slave to Time,                         unfit for given task—
                                                    to proof eternal equations,
Mechanical narratives reach unintelligibility
                                               ­           when incorporating those remote
        rules of the game: counterintuitive
                                                ­                                      to our abilities—
                     mysterious areas
                                                          r­ife for exploiting,
                                                                ­with juicy soundbites
rather than laying out full-courses;
How can
                              one                            ­T h i n k and C r e a t e
    when surrounded by
                                                           f o o d...mm
              but can find no nourishment?                                       (then
                                          
                ­                                                 it'd be
                                                              ­                    time to survive, a narrow state of being:
                                                s u r v i v a l—it's either
                         sanity or intellectual
    consistency
                                    ­                                            
                    ­                                                "ya can't c h o o s e both)

On the play for some action
                  but whose knowledge am i acting on?

even as i type this,
                           searching for the path
                                                            ­              to distant answers     but

              whose questions am i posing?

Mad archangel 2020 scam, dead weatherman noos report blam
                                               be live-r to the umbrella storms;
“Stiffen up, you needa chief more
                                                            ­      kid, you’re riffin’ with a
legend— as it is,
         it’s a sewage drain,a bed
                                                             Pan the pipes of dawn’s
crack;at end of the tusk,
                                     the silverback-gorilla camo on the lawn
          kept the rusted metal on a locket-chain
                                                    ­     hanging off his pocket;pocket-watch
                hang from his eye-socket;
.seed sewn,              from the cornrows
                                                                  in his carriage-patch,      3-wheeled rig and [a battery-pack
                                      lithium frame,        told him, ‘slow down black’
         —ain’t no money in that”
                                     magazine gass’ed up -let me hand em the curls;
code to the Source,name
              the names, bigstick for walking a sideways polemic
                                                         ­                   fortyoz forecast for
                  hisshadow stringed-up a harpwing tune
                                               the maddog politick;
Show ‘em on the map
                                                               ­            -where it rain tonight?-
                   (not that alley X the liquor store—sea the eagle
         swim gelatinmass of marvelous cherrylime-green sky;
posse told him to pass
                                               his flying colors, vomitspittle—
                                               Magnesium flare—was all his
                                                             ­     day in the dunya,(we all got’em)
                                                         ­         bent youngblood ear like a
                                                                ­                                     bloodhound:
                                                                ­  What’s the static charge?
Smash!pumpkin brain s-p-l-a-t,  rush to eat the seeds?
   all the sparrows scatter cuz the lights
is red,white&Bluuuue on L juice
          —Ah! Hell’s loose, call me a river and
                                                                ­                                       press
                                                                ­                              snooze.

this always happens:
sitting at tombstone
desk—blood clots from hours in this twobuck
torture-chair;
4AM? can barely read
my own thoughts,
neatly arranged,
painstakingly painted a
cross ether
glare of the computer screen.
Seven stanzas devolved
from the act
ual epiphany
of the p o e m;
chest tight,stomach churning acid from
cheap *** cheap cigarettes and cheap
grass rolled up in
99 cent Dutchmaster cigars—
Forgot to eat, forgot to hydrate, forgot to remember
the truth i was trying to forget
—forgot the point i was struggling to articulate;
Did i have a point?
I’m beginning to note tiny
Beings of Light
out’ve the corner of buzzing eyes,
all too familiar friends
friends of fiends, vampire junkies,
raving mad x-politicians,
and nocturnal suicide poets—
who after failing to get laid
in college bars
and drinking too much, too many boring conversations
with dull goons;
Get home, pour another glass,
cigarette      to dry lip     in perpetuum; beatiful Miles,
Porgy and Bess, sit down to
computer and write p o e t r y
not prose,
not prose—Man’s revelation of
histories to come, histories manifest.
not prose which brings Man’s higher-self
        into the great
        Universe-at-Large
but p o e t r y, pretentious,
narcissistic, self-important,
which alienates man from his tools of realities;
enemy of machine—but Man is machine;
no poetry is Man!
no poetry is animal,
primal, instinctive;

Well, **** me, half
way thru another cigar,
“maybe i’m not learned enough
to write a story, a **** good one at that…a novel
i’d say
-good luck you simple sloth…How
could you? just a regular self-loathing chimp
who writes — p o e t r y.”
really pondering
hard; thinking: i can’t be [that] dumb,
i'll admit what i don’t know,
(but Hell, least i’m smarter than the next guy, the
       next guy, the next guy…til the next guy makes
me a **** fool; time to relocate and read some books.)

return my eyes to the computer screen,
re read what,
an hour ago,
i was, prematurely awarding myself the pulitzer prize for
as i see it now: pure
*******.
Devil’s attorney
slinking on slouched and grim drunken shoulder,
“hmm…and you say this is your forte?…
I wouldn’t kid yourself…kid.”



Warnings
in grave visions
of a desperate worm of a man
hunched at resin-stained desktop, scribbling away
His fancifull abstractions, broken man— Mad
and scared; shriveled,
scarred by regret—
Thought he was a talker;
witty, true like Bukowski,
        or Heron;
Fresh,
inventive as cummings
        or essential as Pound.
Simple
and brilliantly smooth
        as W.C.A  or W.C.W.
elegant, smart
and far-reaching as Eliot,
        or the Old Romantics;
could have sworn his musings
Rapturous! no Thoreau, he,
        nor as damaged as Poe be
under the Impression
He could stitch his Soul
into the seams of American Divine, direct such
spirits into p o e t r y as ***** ol Ginsberg did
so bravely, beautifully
as
Wherefore art
thou loving father? in Heavens is Walt
Whitman—
He
sure was;
He
was sure,
******* sure he
possessed a nugget of gold, mined
          from inside each of these masterful
Mountains. panned entire sunsoaked cordillera;
yet
each night
would ‘finish’ a
p o e m,
clock out, tho
always would feel, incomplete,
nevermind how many p o e m s he wrote
hundreds, maybe thousands of
bottomless wells
        of words;
Great Idea! Necessary Idea,
take action, he, in prose,
a form of action the action of wit,
to give human
body to formless, ex-humed soul—
Give soul to formless body of philosophy by god!

alas,
the schmuck
never
witty never
potent enough to pen a real
mother-****** of a story,
certainly
never could imbue a plot
with significance, endow with subtext
or builda character out of his p o e t r y,
        Then give it the legs to run for two-
         hundred pages—
He had the ****, just
not the ***** of it-all…
toiled, silly
in his nebulous, castrated,
dimlit room—swelling
whiskey or gin
cigarette glued to his dry lips, attempting
to romance the grey gods so
that thay mey spit mustard-seed
onto humbled holy head—
pray that it may grow, Flower
to full Bloom
even without
ever learning
his Biology.
…never
realizing what he had there—right
in front of him. Poor *******.
-Dumb. he was.
Cursed to be a P O E T.
and doomed to fail as one.




I hate the sound of the Sunrise
when i’ve been up, writing all night; it’s
an alarm like bones in a blender
thru an endless
waking dreamscape;
Sitting, thinking loosely,
wildly, loose-
change two-cent thoughts—
This
this is when regulatory bodies
are disabled, de
funded; radioactive runoff (operational hazards)
contaminates
pure streams;
...random billboard pop
t-r-a-s-h drift in
and out of mind(probably from
        the endless drone of those same 3 chords in
any store or restaurant you enter. How about some Classical?
        Math: the food ain’t rot ‘em enough, let’s assault
   their other senses of taste. Quick. while
        we’ve got them swine trapped!)
politcal memes, halftruths and
newsday buzzwords flash, bright and
silly then recede into obscurity;
only to discover, the next morning,
their greasy finger-prints
given gimcrack shine to deeppurple dawn
Gibberish. trife piffle. bunkum and balderdash,
gobbledygook, mumbojumbo jackshit slangspit
hogwash, ** lotta raspyutintutyncomman nonsensses hoosis mut nowago sayawahhesay too dum for dada…
My
yawns
are now childish giggling;
My concentrated writings. none of it makes any sense to me.
Searching for a distraction
To regain my focus, composure…
biting
nails, tapping Art Blakey grooves on tired desk,
inspecting burning cigarette, forensically.
Oh—
look around for my cat, come here, co
me here kitty. (ah yea, comforted
by familiar purring, a hum from under the bed;

-Close my eyes,
to centralize
to meditate
to ***** out
inanimate,moving parts
to put finger
to pulse of programmed nub;
to create value
for a dying currency of language;
to whisper sweet nothings
in the ears of tender muses
and meaty hookers.
-At this juncture:
reconciled
where the finish line is
strung,
how it appears to me…only snag:
by the time i get here—none
of these
nothing have no meaning
writing,this,that? what? be
low my paygrade *******;
Let stew; sleepy,
delirious, suicidal, anxious, sorta
*****, deadly confident;
Let stew...
…then it hit me like a Point of Intoxication!
brilliantly constructed
Words,
words hanging,
hanging
like a,
Renaissance-style portrait
above a fireplace in an enlightened *****-den,
    -for a moment, seen clearly thru parting
    of deadeye yellowsmoke sea.
Maladroit,
hallucinatory, went to type,
thought better,
no doubt would ****** such
sudden genius,
fumbled for recorder, gotcha
click:
closed my eyes oncemore
to review this epiphany, to record it.
relayed, recited
like a prayer;
perfectly—this must be what the body
of Christ feels like…
when done, i, exhausted,
smiled like a son a *****
how fine
that P O E M is gonna look,
when written
down all nice and neatly.
it was close(but i knew i'd pull
something revelatory out’ve
my ***.)
satisfied,
if my pants weren’t dry
i'd swear i came.

...the following afternoon,
Upon waking, coffee, cigarette, news
in the background,
grab the recorder to listen to this opus;
well,



**** ME!
if
i didn’t make sure there was any space left
on the ****** thing!
bye bye my petty kubla khan
Smart Boy.

ah well...
it’s just
P O E T R Y ya know.