That's the place
they would wash
their dead
Prepare them
for what comes next
The lands
beyond
I guess
Now we drill for it
bottle it
put wells
in their
cemeteries
Seems we're
thirsty for their
ghost water
Need a taste
of that
poltergeist pool

Humpty Trumpty
sat on his wall
bleating and blathering,
condemning us all.

"I know the way,
I'm better than you,"
Tweeted he every night
over his golf course view.

"I don't care for
Mexicans,
Muslims,
and not so much
Jews...
Well, at least not the Dems and
those on the
'news'.

I prefer instead
those painted orange,
like me,
in fine Italian shoes.

I'm the President now,
I decide
if the sky stays blue...
not the the artists or the scientists...
and certainly not
you.

I'll make this Country great again!
You'll see,
I know what to do!
Put your faith in me,
a 'Billionaire'!
I promise,
I'll tell you true!"

Hollered he up high,
his chubby fingers crossed,
as his great jowels blubbered,
and his voice quaked with frost.

"I wonder," thought I,
reading his alternate 'facts' of the day,

"Maybe he wouldn't be so grumpy
if his daddy had loved him more,
or at all,
or maybe,
just maybe,
if his fat greedy hands
weren't so
*******
small."

Razor tucked in the fixture
base

That and the dull-fluorescent-light
stare me
Dead
in the face

Was it put there
just in case?
How did they know to find me here
in this place?

I guess
it's just another convenience
in another
mini-life-space

Little shampoo for your hair
Little soap for your hands
Little lotion for your skin
Little blade for your sins

and a sink in which to
Erase

All just such
a
convenient
little
Waste

What is it like
The moonlight on her skin
Surely it must dance
Some spectral movement
A longing that only
The forest would know
Deep secrets whispered
Beneath its bows
Ancient recollections of
Sweet footfalls amid the duff and
Arcane choired reverances
Echoing a covens embrace around
Samhain fires
Charming the spirits arise and
Make light the growing darkness
But time is cruel and
She alone now stands
Testament to the cycle
******* in the dew
Singing the old songs
In the old ways
Enticing that old wood wake and
Take heed the coming dawn

Far be it from me
To complexify the issue
By propulgating wrongery
Less I subterfuge
My untentions
Toward wittery
And ashoe
Refudiation

A wise pope once said
a man's ambition
must indeed be small
to write his name
upon a ******* wall

But for want of superstition
and tales told tall
I'll play that ancient game
....right after my last call

Preluding my expiration
just before the fall
I'll seek the Devil's fame
and inscribe that ***** stall

By hook, by crook,
or explosive indigestion
Every nook, every sideways look
shall bear my ugly shame
For what better eulogy book
than that old ******* wall
That great temple of the read

Funny
I thought
McConnell's lips
would have been
orange

Pope John Paul II
maybe
Johnny P the Deuce
(to his friends)
empassions an Easter sermon
years before the Passion
or millennia after
to Jane Fonda
feathered red and nicotine stained
watching the city burn
one
station wagon
at
a
time

Entombed in plastic and million dollar magnets a marvel of medical magic mines my mind for defects little pearlescent pearls of impending numbness and degeneration generated by rogue proteins surging through my spine an overwhelming force indiscriminately seeking targets shooting first and never asking
questions

I send words
like **** pics
both decidedly
wanting
and
unwanted

Except maybe by one

but that was
long ago
and who
really
knows
the truth of it
now

Can't cut through
Lost my even keel
Just blackness below
and sharks at heel
Could tread forward
Rather flip the wheel
Run her aground
Taste the bite of the steel
Let the waves crash over
and the chain unreel
Until the deep takes me whole
and I can no longer feel
The grip of the truth
and the horror of the real
I'd like my mind to fade
maybe
give it some time to heal

Macrame for days
cruising in tubes
and fannypacks
on Caddy couches

Ash in Pepsi cans
dogs n mac
and
floral print velour
meant love

A onetwo on
Soda Popinsky
and locust
husks
on the old
walnut tree
were the
****

New Topps
new Jos
new Raisins
air conditioning
and the smell of the
rain

I could have
but didn't
I don't know why
I certainly should have
but I didn't even try
maybe
someday
I'll get around to that thing
someday
but not today
or tomorrow
perhaps not ever

**** it
I suppose

why not live the lie
and regret it
until the day I die

Shower beer
shower beer
my kingdom for
a shower beer

My kingdom is
a shower and a bed
yup
just a shower and a bed
in this
podunkshitholenowhere
******* town

But I'm suds'n up
while suds'n down
making my frown
turn
up
Up
UP-side down

Nothing better
nothing aside
from her
peachy little mound
nothing better in this
fuckedupdownandoutdingy
******* Desert town

Never astray
have I been steered
nope
not by a shower beer
no indeed
no tears have I shed
no siree
no life have I bled
no not me
no ill will have I ever bred

no
not on account
of
a shower beer

She dances
a demon's tinder
through a voice
not her own
purring Appalachia
as if born to it

But it's not the voice I hear
I hear how it was

Sounds and sights
twenty years gone
on those streets
on that railing
through those halls
in that cold

She's in other halls now
on other tracks
down other roads
warm and shadowed
by a different
firelight

Did she change
certainly
Did I
doubtful

Maybe
I just never
really knew
her
voice

The Reds won by turning capitalism and democracy against us The frenzied shortsighted pursuit of individualism enraptured by its own grandiosity Obese in arrogance and false piety Among our weakest links the myth of liberty in the guise of protection against our own From My Cold Dead Hands they will eulogize the depths of our hypocrisies tucked into the gaping cracks of a marbled column tombstone that reads We the People a hollow echo from a dead philosophers guilded mirror reflecting delusions of equality while his window glimpsed the reality of People bound as chattle An era of monsters championed as heritage by a devolved theater of gross absurdity enraptured by a sycophantic maelstrom swirling a wretched mass of vitriolic grievance creeping its facists tendrils through our halls our homes and our hearts So much bluster about essential freedoms now a **** in the wind from a constituency of the ignorant dead eyed before the altar of Exceptionalism A manifestion of the truly unexceptional by a bizarre cult of personality devoid of that very essence Whiny and bloated convinced its oily opulence is somehow self evident justification for its own cavernous gluttony Heavy the privileged jowels spew hatred and lies slathered in corruption shouted as truth through the arcanity of scripture among those who would not know the forest from the trees from the rot in their minds as long as it says so on the TV vomiting endless propaganda of imagined shadow forces flooding the country with fictionalized caramel colored criminals Willingly blind barrelling into a fog of twisted fantasy failing to realize that the narcos envisioned pale by comparison of heinous intention or deed to the very real NARCs embraced Lockstep and jackboot heel in tow behind a tide of Nationalism that is anything but A contrived patriotism cannibalizing its own mythology whittling the bones of history to alternate facts devoured by fat children as so much sugary cereal bored reading the Constitution from the back of a whitewashed cardboard box ******* about a return to values and integrity they never possessed with their fingers crossed Cowing to the blackened whims of spineless parasitic wraiths picking at the shades of fallen titans Packs of roving dipshits trumpeting ideals their grandfathers died to eradicate Prancing about sporting the finest camo and tac gear in a perverse sashay Their measure of civic duty reduced to how much red white and blue crowds their shitstained boxers dowsed in cheap beer and sad rivulets of encrusted ***** trickled in a shame for which they have yet to fully account or atone Fools leading the foolish to oblivion are we God bless the USA for surely no creature under heaven would

I bought
one of
his first editions

He would
have preferred
that I spent it
at the track

We all disappoint

I hate those Voodoo mornings when I cant dig myself out of my own head a relentless quipping chirping anxiety over woulda coulda shoulda wishing I knew better wondering why I dont silent resolutions that evaporate by days end pondering the infinite insignificance of everything that is nothing paranoid that nothing is in fact everything in the doomed hands of a salvation without mercy heavy hearted in the dark waiting for light to peek through the blinds and tell me that its ok to be awake its a lie but thats ok too I guess **** it might as well make the coffee

BUT

I
love
those
hazy
baked
evenings
where
every
thought
is
clarity
or
at
least
the
perception
of
it
guiding
each
seamlessly
to
the
next
and
still
next
after
until
the
next

I'm not the monkey
that turns her *****

Oh

don't get me wrong
I know how to play
I can make that box sing
But it's not my fingers she wants
on the crank
not my head she wants in
that little red cap
not my lips she wants
puffing the smoke behind the leash
and certainly not my hairy ***
she wants
swaying to the tune

No

only one can
grind those gears
only one can
tinker that barrel
only one can
make her hum
proper and true
But in the end
he's just another one
one of us

     little
          monkey
                      bums