Two souls once stood against the night,
upon a mountain in a distant valley.
And there in anguished shrieks on loud,
screamed most primitive betrothal vows.

Now many winds have swept the mountain's face
and time has run its endless jagged course,
while the souls like frightened deer have run
to where the frozen brook of fear was sprung.

The great stag drank and was refreshed,
though heart and soul were nearly drown.
The white doe running on to catch a dream,
fearing turbid waters of the foreboding stream.

I cannot save the beauty of a snowflake,
for the warmth of my love will melt it.
And severed will those souls remain,
divorced by nature for its wanton selfish gain.

With snow capped peak bending like a finger,
Gilboa Mountain beckons me to come.
Yet, I fear my hopeless mind must be depraved,
for it offers me a home, I'd sooner call a grave.

The Saturday night crowd, all here to see Dave Van Ronk,
sit huddled in the fashion of Antwerp diamond cutters,
sipping cinnamon/marshmallow coffee at the tables.
Caffe Lena is Saratoga's happening place in the 60's and
we're here to forget the war and civil strife in the ghettos.

Sister Mary Katherine, sans frock, is the warmup act,
but no one really gives her any mind,
as she struggles to seat herself upon the stool
intended for the six-foot plus Van Ronk.
Joan Baez prepare to eat your heart out!

Without so much as introduction, she
breaks into a high soprano Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues.
Heads pivot like synchronized swimmers toward the stage.
Her silken voice emits notes blinking
into reality from quantum fluctuations in space/time.

Every quivering high-C grafts the audience together.
She's spinning veils of sound,
the like of which our ears are unfamiliar.
The quavers in her throat match the tremors in my coffee.
In the back of the cafe a drunken Van Ronk passes out.

In the beginning were the chords
Seven days of rataplan;
The kind of week that John Lee ******
Dreamed in blue and 4/4 time,

Newport on a 60's binge.
Palinodes on saxophone lips
Refusing to look back on Memphis,
Chilling out to Tupelo time.

Spin him a lyric Lady Music,
Camber a tone to smoky heights.
Walk the blues round Jim Beam shores
And drown them in N'awlins nights.

Riff the waves to inner ear
Like satin on the low strings:
From frets on legacies
Feel the descant fade away.

She's manifested today like a ghost
appearing from a haunted house.
Desertion is that inhabited manor
from which the voices in her head
urge her into exile, urge her phantom existence.
Sitting upon the berm overlooking
the beach and lighthouse of Coos Bay,
she wishes she could ride the setting
Pacific sun to New Guinea or beyond.
Below five athletic young women
contest the physics of a soccer ball,
imagining the red-white lighthouse a goal.
In other times she'd ask to join them,
but she must lose her personal history now,
remain hidden in plain sight.
The loneliness of this subsistence
a charnel house blackening her heart.
She's Amelia Earhart about to crash
the Yukon's heartbroken cry.

The artist chose concrete to sculpt The Kiss.
Playfully made the woman taller than the man,
his gaze uplifted, filled with total captivation ---
lemur eyes, mustached smile, desire unmistakable.
Her arm about the nape of neck, hand caressing cheek,
certainly she cherishes him, intentionally stokes his passion.
Concrete the perfect medium for immortality.

This image implanted firmly, as I take my morning walk,
when it hits me, somewhere between Key Bank,
7-11 across the street, and John Deere lawn equipment,
why it is, women place such importance upon relationships,
why they love us, despite flaws numerous as wharf rats.
They have an unremitting need for romance.
That's what the sculptor knew and finally I do too.

Dusk and dust envelop this intriguing Amish couple,
as she watches through the windshield of her parked car.
She's been observing sporadically for well on seven weeks,
as they've taken the old relic of a house
from disrepair to today's refurbished splendor.
It will be their home.

Away in the adjacent field, his straw hat barely visible,
an elder guides a team of Belgians five across
from the furrows of the tract toward the dying sunlight.
She follows them with her eyes, marveling their magnificence
and his unassuming control of their power.
They are the source of the dust.

Outside the house another Amish woman, perhaps
their mother, unhanging clothes, while a baby
plays upon a blanket on the ground. Black bonnet on her head,
flowing soft blue dress, and bib apron, she works
serenely as the sun melts warmly down the western sky,
leaving in its wake the dusk.

Dwindling moments of a day that mark a turning point
for the young couple and their unseen spectator.
For them a place to make a loving home amongst
their brethren and for her a revelation in her life.
She's committed once again to love's entanglements.
Dusk and dust have claimed another.

Lingering above this desert the first rains of winter,
streets greasy with oil/water/rubber cocktail.

Vegas spruces for the tourist onslaught,
bettors eager to lay their Superbowl favorite.

For a weekend the nation marches to a singular drum,
hotels swelling with the faithful to this Neon City.

The Champion stealthily concealed behind the mirror
through which no tout, nor soothsayer may perceive.

The press have lain out every faceted interview,
now only the true believers need worry beads.

This poet shrugs: for him the game has little meaning,
he looks instead to the clouds overhanging the valley.

Bring on the sacks of Sunday, the pass of ******* objects,
there will be snow upon the Redrocks to chill that morn.

To this life,
replete in unconnected fragments,
           you are glue,
                       bonding disjointed existence,
                       exhalting impassioned communication,
                       raising love beyond visible heights.
                                       There are no sounds without receiver;

what good are nimble thoughts,
           without the same --- a lover
             with whom to share?
                       Every separation is a link,
                                making closer the rendezvous.
                       Every revelation a mortar,
                                 cementing admiration in opposites.
                                           I need to know

the unknowable you,
            dissimilar as we are,
            routinely disagreeing,
                        reinforcing our mutuality.
                                             O delicious paradox,

delight me,
           in the not knowing
           in the riddles
                     of relationships.
                                          We both appreciate

Carroll's Rules of Jam ---
         Jam tomorrow or jam yesterday,
                      but never jam today.
                                           My trusted ally,

who but we,
           shall prevail against such logic?
           Let's share
                     *six impossible beliefs
                                         before breakfast.

Epiphany from the Berry Fields

You would not come with me
through constellations of Jack-in-the-Pulpit,
your reasons shrouded in obscurity.
I went there once to pray ---
Did I tell you? ---
I spied a grey squirrel
gnawing a cherished butternut
in a fury of drunken hunger;
forgot at once my prayers.

You went instead, alone,
to the Kingdom of the Mushroom.
I sealed my mouth
afraid to enter there.
You saw violent phosphorous rivers and
vivid galloping colors,
that were of mystical internal origin.

We might have eaten
vine-ripe strawberries and
drunk cold mountain water,
that gushed from the mouth of
the cave under the cliff.

Perhaps, like me you were afraid,
terrified by florid fields and familiar female.
How sad ---
Sometimes I am so dense ---
I should have told you,
I went there in the distance
as a girl.


       *Coincidental Drift

Through the airport window pane,
isolated, I watched the jet
traverse the field in silent shimmering motion.
My vagrant gaze remained
fixed upon the infinite horizon
long after the shadowy
plane had passed from view.
This seemed to me to parallel
my motionless furtive feelings,
as after one I've loved
has migrated in another season.

It was not long after this
that she re-entered the room,
bathed in the murmur of
alluring fragrance which
quickly drew my mind from
the solitude of thought to
a sensual appreciation of her perfume.
How easily she drew my mind astray
from pleasant thought of you and yesterday.
I recalled how earlier this morning,
as she lay neither asleep, nor awake,
but somewhere in between,
I had tried to touch her outstretched hand,
yet, uncannily she had withdrawn it.
The smoke that wafted above our bed then
was the only pervading reality and
not the Mona Lisa smile on her face,
nor the emptiness of my longing hand.

She's said, *She's ready ---
--- that her bags are packed ---
and shouldn't we be going?
Yes, Yes I suppose it's time.
And a wind howling in my brain recalled,
I'd either been here once before or
seen it etched upon an empty sky.

In the harbor of my sixty five years,
The tide is going out beneath the dock.
Ragged barnacles **** up my piers;
Gulls circle my bald pate in a flock.

My first sense of the aversion raised by Frost,
Walls swelled under, yet, I could not exhaust
The barriers confronted on life's twisted path.
Too enervating loosing one's sole ****** wrath,
I pierce the wall that poets have not crossed
And speak to you, my audience, in verse,
Trusting the directed words that I asperse
Will convey the meaning hoped to impart,
Even more, some verbal beauty from my art,
Into which, fair reader, you elatedly immerse.
Gratified, I, the poet, have but you to thank,
The wall of separation loses one more plank,
Between us communication is not lost,
Better that understanding be dispersed.

We speak and therefore are, Descartes,
Worth much more than gold or any cost.

The rotten fruit shall be shaken* --- W. H. Auden

Do they somehow envision sainthood in the homeless
or extol the virtue of the millions toiling for minimum wage;
see themselves as the feudal overlords of trickle-down,
their enormous profits banquet omelets for the common good?

You know the politics whereof I speak,
the Me, Myself and I of anachronistic yesterdays,
the concave years of soup-kitchens supporting high-rise condos
and batshit crazy presidential candidates admiring selfies.  

I wonder if it's all because they can't reach ******;
impotence and pharmaceuticals which fuel our economy?
A nation moans from the exhaustion of despair with
forgotten cityscapes of odorous blacks and blues.

Sisyphus compelled to roll his boulder,
the poet who attempts to reconcile
what he knows with what he feels,
sensing even in compulsion
his stony effort no match for gravity.
Knowledge transmuted into feeling,
feelings obverted to some new knowledge,
a seismic process that rolls in waves,
peaks of insight, troughs of mental block,
all to foist a new perception upon the world,
squeeze perspective from the driest fruits.

What devilish irony to be admired,
for verse most often misunderstood,
philosopher and virtuoso to a tone-deaf audience.
Camus concluded Sisyphus
was happy with his lot in life,
but a poet continues to paint strange landscapes,
never content with color schemes,
ever niggling for that undiscovered pastel.

Celebrate the invisible embrace.
You will be quite alone,
When the altruistic deed is done.

Content your heart in silence.
No choir will raise its voice
To sing your praises.

Consign your life to anonymity.
History no longer needs
Martyrs to fill anthologies.

Comfort your dreams in oleander.
Flowers are an appropriate caress,
For love conferred in obscurity.

Cultivate a flair for solitude.
Isolation is the purifying fire
That steels a damascene soul.

Sadness never signalled us a sign from the cosmos,
left us to decipher the bones of history in quest of omens.
Unheeded, despair overflowed us like a desert sand storm,
buried us in credit ennui and economic laissez-faire.

World leaders formed escalating groups, G-5, G-12, G-20,
still the banks camouflaged in oppressor's language,
invented derivatives against all uncertainty, save their own,
till Wall Street acquired the stench of backed up urinals.

Only when the desperate sallied into the world's streets,
emoting songs that gushered from the wells of outrage,
did rolling blackouts of democracy unearth the buried cities,
freeing a wind that whispers ruin in uncompromising sunlight.

Staring at the contours of the hours,
I watch the minutes and seconds
drift across the dunes of time and
realize my life is blown away.
The tectonic plates of months and years
have slipped across a hot spot of
final days, left only volcanic peaks.

Sorrow picks the lock of my future;
yet, you somehow shimmer,
a mirage on the horizon, an oasis
in the desert of time's geography.
Seeking perspective, I've climbed
the eons' highest mount to view your waters.
I will not thirst, saved by your river
running silently toward the ocean's expanse.

The dealer's upcard is a bust prone six;
The count screams my two tens should be split.
But the pit-boss glares like Charon guarding Styx;
I fear an obolus chip could serve as passage bit.

Surveillance cameras peering from above
have most surely pegged me as a counter.
I want so much to give my chips a shove,
But back-room paranoia renders me a doubter.

I stare into the frenzied dealer's eyes,
Concern says she knows I know she knows.
A prudent man would be saying his good-byes,
taking win or loss as fortune of the cards bestows.

Discretion and all that, I shall be sage;
I scoop my chips heading for the cashier's cage.

I have hidden incognito a decade in this desert,  
enscounced in the Bad Lands of a wasted life,  
evading both politics and the Bureau of Statistics,  
immersed in maths for senseless games of chance.

I forget promises and birthdays with equal disregard,  
attempt mental reconstructions of past events,  
seeking the forgiveness I have no power to grant,  
all my atoms expanding heirlooms of critical mass.

The gravitational attraction of lifelong friendships,  
dithers perception at the horizon of a span of years,  
warping the wormhole space between our arms, our minds.  
I need only for you to ask that I should stay.

" I was not looking for a cage
       In which to mope in my old age." --- W H Auden

Turning sixty-five is not without its pleasures,
though the parameters of youth are rendered void.
You discover illusions are become a virtual reality,
a chimera you never outlived whose core is unmalleable.

So, one finds solace in their granddaughter,
who is unshackled by your paradoxes,
who presupposes only links to the obtainable.
And yet, she loves her "silly grandpa".

Old age is unexpected and doubt arises in the doctrine of wisdom,
a daily glass of prune juice becoming regiment.
Yet, granddaughters can connect the dots,
and, just maybe, afford us that second chance.

It'll all be over in about eight minutes,
Give or take, depending on your side of the Earth,
Plasma therapy for the masses.
Just like that, we're all crispy critters,
Pork rind skins flavored with dehydrated sea-salt.
That beautiful aurora-generating magnetosphere,
Shrinking daily, as the planet's poles reverse,
Will puncture like a too thin prophylactic.
The Christians will have just minutes,
Reminding us that we were prophesized
To all go out in fire and overlooking
That we're actually being ionized with radiation ---
A mere trifle to the True-Believers.
Will the Dow-Jones sell off in those final moments?
Will the Russians attempt to launch a Soyuz?
The Brits will take it all in stride with another pint;
Aussies venture on their final walkabout.
As for me, I'm gonna saddle up a pony
heading straight out to greet the Joshua trees.
I want to meet annihilation on my own terms.

that I ran into my friend Vic was a good thing
because we leaned on the shadowy cars and he gave me
some new words:  Faith,  Reconciliation,  Continuance.
But driving home, they began to fill me up with grief
so I tossed them out the window like a finished cigarette.

And I went down to talk to the creek, who was filled with a grief
of her own, a grief of too much water having fallen
in too few days.  And she had me dash my empty beer bottles
against her tortured stones that night, had me make
the shrill cry of a hawk as I let each one fly.
And with each crash she gave me back my former words,
my old & tarnished words, the fs and ts
honed sharp enough to really hurt somebody bad.   And sharp
enough to hack a trench into my chest, so the water could roll in
like freshened blood, roaring the way it roars against
the creekstones:  girl you're alive, alive, alive . . .

I call the creek a woman because she had a woman's wisdom,
a woman's bitter tears, even had the housewife's old cliché
about how all love ends in either death, or separation
from those we love.  And the creek made me remember
how they want you to believe the only way off the meathook
is by dying first.
She said: *whatever you do, whatever you do
don't let yourself be the one who dies first.

Mr. Ivories

entertains with elan,
daily during cocktails on the mezzanine level.
Jolene always orders a Black Russian,

mine is a Dewar's and water.
We drop a fiver in his basket on the Steinway,
along with a request for "Ebb Tide",

Jolene's personal favorite.
He conjures an image of Fred Astaire at keyboard,
his tails flipped elegantly over the piano bench,

like long black raven's plumes.
Jolene points out two announcers from CNN,
seated opposite. Makes us feel

important by mere association.
Our waitress asks, would we like another round
before the hour's end, as we speculate

about Mr. Ivories' musical propensity.
Time escapes in moonlit harmonic vapors,
leaves us already longing our next soiree.

I peer behind
a tattered paperback
in hopes to glimpse
her satin lingerie,
praying my laundry's
spin cycle runs
on molasses,
rather than quarters.
Phantom of the Laundromat,
got to get a life!

He sits atop the fence,
a transient from the endless circus,
eyeing a prickly pear cactus flower.

Meditating its ephemeral beauty,
he asks the eternal question:
Fleeting flower of yellow and pink,
is the will to charm still there?

My son, how could I not
be charmed by your
exquisite roar, followed by
the delicate blooming of your innocence?

Then remember me that I
may remember our predicament!

There is a balance between science and intuition;
only the myths of priests can disturb that account,
can sadly arrest the bloom of human consciousness.
As we look deeply with telescopes into the cosmos

or inward to the radio-waves of cranial thought,
the No Smoking sign of religion holds humanity back.
There is no Paradise Lost, only that not yet attained.
Silencers muffle, as if the skyes were empty,

the mind subordinate to some Proper Name.
If we are to Live, we must go there.  Out where
the nebulae birth new stars, in there,
where the id recklessly whispers, Good-Bye.

Nowadays, when I see the ocean foam
slick the beach like a colossal latte,
when the autumn forests change
their primary colors playing leaf-frog,
when the jonquils fight up through
springtime snow-melt in defiant coalescence,
I remember that last day I saw you,
your *** swaying in those white shorts,
a mesmerizing metronomic heat in pants.
Ordinarily, I would not speak such things aloud,
but then, regret tends to amplify
walking empty streets at night
with only icy stares from stars to reprove me.
Eventually, I'll slumber beneath my satin comforter,
and dreams will dance like the aurora
at the foot of my half-empty bed.
It's then I'll see those legs again,
emerging from the white cotton shorts,
yet, no cosmic connection will bring
this vision to the woman haunting it.

All elsewheres being equal,
the Monarch Butterfly
prefers to winter
in Michoacan.

You told me once
that even chairs have souls.
Since then I've grieved
for all the dim sum.

Imagination is so ******,
an odd portal
for poetry,
which explains the sweat.

I'd give all
the taxis in Vegas
for a do-over
before I'm obsolete.

So, I'm heading
for Michoacan
to winter
in the sweat.

Time was, when I thought it strong,
to hold back and block all my feelings.
Inestimable the emotional devastation
I doled out on those unfortunates who loved me.
How can you dam it up so?, said the therapist's stare,
still her empathy opened my mind to smiling,
chiseled my heart from the glacier.
And slowly I learned to act out my dreams,
the wounded clown learned to cry.
Pride bled in the thickets of human *******.
Now, when I dream of life, I am perfectly amazed,
my singular life drawn to those who loved me regardless.

The abscission of  inner voice comes,
storm from a vein of clouds,
cut that bleeds a profusion of thoughts.
She trails a finger through confusion,
seeks coagulation, anything that solidifies.

Free but lonely --- an epitaph signed
by empty arms from lip to heart,
extended to a faithless world.
Something more than silence ---
tears form a haptic prayer.

Women who sleep on stones are like
brick houses that squat alone in cornfields.
They look weatherworn, solid, dusty,
torn screens sloughing from the window frames.
But at dusk a second-story light is always burning.

Used to be I liked nothing more
than spreading my blanket on high granite ledges
that collect good water in their hollows.
Stars came close without the trees
staring and rustling like damp underthings.

But doesn't the body foil what it loves best?
Now my hips creak and their blades are tender.
I can't rest on my back for fear of exposing
my gut to night creatures who might come along
and rip it open with a beak or hoof.

And if I sleep on my belly, pinning it down,
my ******* start puling like baby pigs
trapped under their slab of torpid mother.
Dark passes as I shift from side to side
to side, the blood pooling just above the bone.

Women who sleep on stones don't sleep.
They see the stars moving, the sunrise, the gnats
rising like a hairnet lifted from a waitress's head.
The next day they're sore all over and glad
for the ache: that's how stubborn they are.

She came down from Mt. Rainier
wearing khaki park ranger's garb,
a female Moses descending Sinai,
clutching a leather chapbook,
survival notes for a “Dangerous Life”.
Nightingales were songbirds for the grief,
as MS stole in like 'Frisco fog,
unnoticed by a comet-blinded public.
And when the awards came,
strokes of jackpot luck,
acquired enthusiasms soon were
dropped in excruciating back spasms.
She touted poetry as civic-glue,
paste for a populist purpose.
Olympia’s oracle rarely leaves the house,
curtains drawn, newspapers unread,
writing feverishly, as “The Body Mutinies”.

It's a feminine eye that first detects
absurdity as a condition of existence.
In the deepest resources of my unconscious,
in that place where ego slept in the ****,
I knew she saw through me like
Roentgen X-rays of my soul.
Ultimately, it was my pride that
caused us to fly in different ways;
burning love had poured
from the lamps of our bodies,
shrouded in mystery,
like the day of a king or
more adroitly the nights of a queen.
We had found identity, yet
all signs of subtlety,
any shred of relationship,
were forfeit to the pale mackerel sky.

By 1959 the only labels that she wore all said drip dry,
but as I peered through the sliding pocket door
into her master bedroom, there was Mom
holding against her slip a satin blue Coco Chanel.
She smiled in the floor length mirror\ I swear that dress smiled too.

Instinctively, I knew there must have been a time,
when that dress could tell a story that would be sensational.
Then she sighed, re-folded it and replaced it in the cedar chest.
Clothes are always designed for the young, and
unless it's worn, a dress has no life of its own.

"In Modern Drama we turn a critical eye
   into the conditions of real life and morality." --- Arlen Rambush


           Modern Drama 101

Her life had become an Ibsen scenario,
cloaked, as it was, in furtive AOL chat rooms,
seeking the romance no longer orbed in marriage,
rather to be panned from the internet wellspring.

It wasn't so much inconstancy, as it was whimsy;
more a channeling of Deneuve, than profiling Gabler.
And she found they flocked to her,
pigeons to be shooed away, should they get too close.

Soul of the house, everything to husband and family,
yet, it was in cyber tryst where she flourished,
that informed the powerful intellect at intervals
with mother and a carte blanche ingénue.

It's possible she sought to reform them,
tear them down --- or no --- it was conquest.
It was not she that needed men,
it was she that absorbed them in hedonistic pleasure.

One slept soundly in those Adirondack nights,
blanketed in youthful exuberance from
acidic rain pollution heralding the Crack of Doom.

The fish we caught still fit for human consumption,
the marble statues not yet melting in city parks,
nor green pastures distributed with a browning blot.

No, time was far from reconciled with nature,
the child in us still curled up at the center,
our songs still clarion beneath a complicated sky.

You might say our mountains had a low grade fever,
that there were generous shadows sunning across our chest,
but, Midwest chimneys bilged us with their discharge.

I can't go back, reality too painful a guardian,
every mountain bivouac of boyhood long diseased.

In soft darkness my aura of sadness emanates.
O'er cresting notes my lonely whistle treads.
Night birds sing to me their potentate
And lull the drifting images in my head.

All this my emptiness devours,
It feeds upon such times and moods.
My youthful optimism cowers;
Ideals tonight are mere exotic foods.

Do not look for me 'neath street lamps.
I shun the light, as wolves would shun a fire,
Preferring the company of street tramps,
Who seem to understand a man's desires.

So foolish are the rash, deceiving hearts,
Which convince our minds that love is rare,
For not infrequently a couple parts,
Never realizing the secret was to care.

“Beyond the Last Lamp”
                            (Near Tooting Common)


By Thomas Hardy

                                 I

While rain, with eve in partnership,
Descended darkly, drip, drip, drip,
Beyond the last lone lamp I passed
                 Walking slowly, whispering sadly,
                 Two linked loiterers, wan, downcast:
Some heavy thought constrained each face,
And blinded them to time and place.


                                II


The pair seemed lovers, yet absorbed
In mental scenes no longer orbed
By love’s young rays. Each countenance
                 As it slowly, as it sadly
                 Caught the lamplight’s yellow glance,
Held in suspense a misery
At things which had been or might be.


                                III


When I retrod that watery way
Some hours beyond the droop of day,
Still I found pacing there the twain
                 Just as slowly, just as sadly,
                 Heedless of the night and rain.
One could but wonder who they were
And what wild woe detained them there.


                                IV


Though thirty years of blur and blot
Have slid since I beheld that spot,
And saw in curious converse there
                 Moving slowly, moving sadly
                 That mysterious tragic pair,
Its olden look may linger on—
All but the couple; they have gone.


                V


Whither? Who knows, indeed. ... And yet
To me, when nights are weird and wet,
Without those comrades there at tryst
                 Creeping slowly, creeping sadly,
                 That lone lane does not exist.
There they seem brooding on their pain,
And will, while such a lane remain.

We have become a nation of Tennessee fainting goats,
muscles freezing in the panic of social discord,
poised on the cusp of dread, eyeing a mass grave.

In the end no one really dies, the only dilemma being unpardonable
poverty, needless hunger and children born with drug addiction,
pawns in a chess game of life lacking raison d'etre.

And shall I live my span leaving no mark upon history?
What occlusion obstructs human decency in this land of riches,
barricades the impassable gulf, as if echoing a distant waterfall?

I have walked this sidewalk to where it ends and seen the destitute.
How the poet in me shudders and like the fainting goat,
collapses in the sadness of our mutual story, our personal holocaust!

Her chamoisy cape
announced her artistry
fashioning stares
from men
who ought
to have known better.

Her Mona Lisa smile
spoke in tongues
with insouciant disregard
for men
who were
merely amusing playthings.

Her Eva Hathaway affair
plunged her
flailing into arms
of the one man
who pushed
buttons from oblivion.

Brethren skulking from the daylight shadows,
we watched other guys **** up to chicks,
offering to trade their Beatles bubble gum cards;
lying about how much they dug "Love Me Do".
***** Stones fans, we snickered every time
the sycophants lauded Ringo over Pete Best;
stared in disbelief at enraptured female fainting
on Ed Sullivan's really-big Sunday show.

Displaying our leathers, we were anything but Fab;
Brian Epstein would have deemed us scrofulous,
a given that nobody's daughter would marry us.
Back then, chicks were rated by putting-out,
not how many texts backed up on their cell phone.
No one really gave a thought to "the British Invasion",
nor if our lot in life would "Not Fade Away".

Durgan
for J.M.

At Durgan waves are black as cypresses,
clear as the water of a wishing well,
caressing the stones with smooth palms, looking
into the pools as enigmatic eyes
peer into mirrors, or music echoes
out of a wood the waking dreams of day,
blind eyelids lifting to a coloured world.

Now with averted head your living ghost
walks in my mind, your shadow leans
over the half-door of dream; your footprint lies
where gulls alight; shade of a shade, you laugh.
But separate, apart, you are alive:
you have not died, therefore I am alone.

Like birds, cottages white and grey
alert on rocks are gathered, or low
under branches, dark but not desolate;
shells move over sand, or seaweed gleams
with their clear yellow, as tides recede.
Serene in storm or eloquent in sunlight
sombre Durgan where no strangers come
awaits us always, but is always lost:
we are separate, sharing no secrets, each alone;
you will listen no more, now, to the sounding sea.

Time alone is the ultimate conqueror.
It wears down great men and empires alike.
So too it withers the wildflower;
all break before Aggressor-Time.

The hot sun burns into my turned back.
I thought I'd taste the asphalt for a while.
A begging thumb moves faster than a running fool,
but the sun has baked the asphalt to my feet.

Every northern town worn down by Aggressor-Time
awaits the final blown of urban renewal;
and pop-art will decorate the city streets,
where Aggressor-Time has chosen to leave a slum.

Still, the taste of asphalt and the smell of gasoline
carry me beyond these thoughts
and I run from Time, that sadist,
a shimmering mirage just down the highway.

Resting at night, there's always a bar
and a girl upon a stool, who'll listen for a drink.
Kiss her, love her, then run with the dawning sun.
Beware!  For Time creeps up on you at night.

Broad expanses are diminished by the asphalt,
so too your memories lurking in the forests.
But that which you left behind awaits you,
Time, like the rings of Saturn, has no end.

Savor your victory Aggressor-Time!
Your pestle has ground down mind and body,
only calcified bone left in the mortar,
that futilely defied your crushing weight.

So, I got to thinking about solid matter;
all things being held together electromagnetically
by photons of light rallying like tennis *****
between racket atoms of opposite electrical charge.
And I said, "Yup, that's how love works!"

Aren't lovers arrayed in possible simultaneous states
until acted upon by some outside infatuation?
Attraction a moment to moment subatomic entanglement?
There's your spooky action at a distance!
Perhaps, the universe really does play dice with human hearts.

     Random fluctuation palpitations in a quantum space,
     probabilities of possibility tending toward embrace.

Reconnoitering each day from Zuccotti Park toward Wall Street,
they are the ensemble of the jobless, the homeless, the leaderless.
Twisted Brothers singing, "We're Not Gon'na Take It Anymore!",
the Nameless faces of democracy overcoming inertial rest,
demanding that equity of fortune be restored and the unjust be tried,
the living corpus of defiant non-cake eaters,
as naturally disordered as blowing leaves or drifting sands.

From lofts above the privileged sip flutes of champagne and jeer,
mocking the throngs beneath like Roman overlords,
while a daily pall of silence entombs Washington,
as if the watchman of the world has gone on holiday.

Do not shirk in your efforts, Brothers of the Street,
your numbers grow each day nurtured by your poverty.
You have subsumed the high ground and conscience of our nation.

Onyx night drinks up the stars,
swallows the moon alive,
a constrictor engulfs
my eyes as prey.

Ghost roars its displeasure,
lest mortals dare to stare,
past the line of trees,
that burns to galactic core.

My sight averts the horizon,
forcing this universe
to make quantum choices,
who sees what and when.

Heroic in the face of fate,
nooses cinched about the nape,
ransomed at the city's gate,
sackcloth their adorning drape.

Bearing keys to England's King,
the six against a town compared.
Bad omens that their death may bring,
thus the burghers' lives were spared.

Gratitude always falls short of intention,
leaving only a fiction of our meaning,
when silence descends blinking neon emotions
and a void, rather than a hoped for event horizon of joy.

But, it's how you transcend that shimmers humanity,
makes doubt ephemera and avoids conclusion.
No longer a skulker in spiky weeds,
you emerge radiant in a woman's wisdom.

Likely, it comes from a mother's nurture,
but the solitude of silence, these your father's whispers.
So, you've escaped both superficial and awkward,
arisen the womb unscathed --- Proceed to middle age!

Though perception often baffles understanding,
human genomes revel in such challenge.

Since those long ago days in Latin class,
I have endeavored to speak your echo, Crystal.
How I longed to be amongst your trusted inner circle!
Alas, I had no voice then to speak these things to you.

Mrs. Tinkler must have sensed my blocked emotions;
always coupled we two to do textual translations.
I deferred and let you be the intellectual leader
feeling wholly given over to being your infatuated scribe.

It was always your property to be simpatico;
you were the giver of kindness and smiles,
your latent brilliance subsumed by outward caring.
What forlorn chance did my jejune heart have?

And now, at length, I can finally speak these things,
trusting in the smiles that touching substance brings.

Flickering in the wind, like a pale candle
left on the windowsill quite by accident,
she lights our world in words
that stutter and stammer,
but never fail to show her uncertain path.
She thrives in ****** exaggeration,
and yet, through our misunderstanding,
the prescience of her thought becomes clear.
There are many, who need
never answer to the title of poet;
you will not find the name Lane amongst them,
for there is much in her madness to draw us in.

You would not come with me
through constellations of Jack-in-the-Pulpit,
your reasons shrouded in obscurity.
I went there once to pray ---
Did I tell you? ---
I spied a grey squirrel
gnawing a cherished butternut
in a fury of drunken hunger;
forgot at once my prayers.

You went instead, alone
to the Kingdom of the Mushroom.
I sealed my mouth
afraid to enter there.
You saw violent phosphorous rivers and
vivid galloping colors,
that were of mystical internal origin.

We might have eaten
vine-ripe strawberries and
drunk cold mountain water,
that gushed from the mouth of
the cave under the cliff.

Perhaps, like me you were afraid,
terrified by florid fields and familiar female.
How sad ---
Sometimes I am so dense ---
I should have told you,
*I went there in the distance
as a girl.