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.

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.

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.

It was my best friend who asked me
what I'd choose to be in my next incarnation.
Honestly, she caught me completely off guard,
intellectually dumbfounded by a prospect
I'd never considered, nor felt I deserved.
That night I wracked my brain searching for
a suitable chakra from which to derive an answer.
I know she believes everything is renewed,
so, deferring to her convictions,
I chose a jaguar, as suitable for my solitary way.

She's always had a knack for surprising my existence,
deflecting the metaphysical, steering for spiritual shores.
I recognize this power she exudes, though she dismisses me.
The jaguar I'm evolving divinely subsumes her virtues,
is cognizant of the heroine from Mumbai ashrams.
I'd like to tell you I hear rumblings in the sky,
that there's a certain path beneath my feet,
but my destiny eludes all outward signs,
striving for that inner love that has no name.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It had been one of those enervating days,
when officialdom and red tape paperwork
had ****** the yolk and marrow leaving only
a dullness that yawed the ghost ship of her frame.

She decided not to cook, as much as
payback for her ordeal by proper channels.
And so to the "Toilet Bar", cafe of choice
for malicious villagers, though rarely women.

The men folk hardly stared upon her entrance,
by now they knew those leopard skin boots,
that packed a wallop they grudgingly took
stock of, then returned to their cheese and wine.

This was her quarter of salt cod with cream,
prepared by owner Paula and daughter Carolina,
the only other women tolerated amongst the chairs,
that smelled of tar and testosterone.

Lacking collars three tumbled to the stony street,
drunken mechanic, one armed plumber, peg-legged sailor,
the kerfuffle amusing her, their wicked aunt.
Another Lagoan night that shimmered out to sea.

She caught on to algebraic notation, as if,
she'd been born in the 64 square matrix,
whose precise logic spoke her mother tongue

They discussed, at length, the fianchetto formation ...
... how the defensive fortress of the castled King
was akin to the monarch's personal Masada

... how the power of the doubled Rooks and Queen
in the latent lance of Alekhine's Engine
gored the other position in thermodynamic dissipation

When he pointed out the cloaked irony of
Queen being strongest, but King paramount,
she shrugged, as if it were to be expected

Shaking hands, agreeing to the draw,
she smiled, joy precipitating from her face,
knowing there could be a world without losers

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.

"Boy were we wrong!  We're the oddball.  We're the freaks." --- Dr. Michio Kaku

We looked at trillions of those stars and knew,
that somewhere out there was another Planet Blue.
Those were not canals we saw on Mars;
optical illusions, lensed figment memoirs.

Stare into trillions, space mind overwhelms.
Rimbaud entrapped in countless ethereal realms.
Not the goal of evolution, merely happenstance,
the search for elsewhere leads a merry dance.

Planets a dime a dozen, yet no Goldilocks Zone
produces signals bearing SETI transient tones.
Birds more subtly impact our lives,
than do the aliens our universe provides.

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 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.

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.

Granite plaque in a tulip bed, end to the Oregon Trail.
Teminus for ordeal by ox and prairie schooner,
where slight survivors began rejuvenation,
the wretched fortunate refusing a backward glance,
children with ancient faces set atop skeletal frames
tried desperately to remember what it meant to play.
Manifest Destiny's broken terra incognitae rested.

Swamp Mama Johnson's concert in the park,
a blues-to-the-wall celebration of life and love,
was a saxaphoned shibboleth for offbeat orphans.
Homeless youth played hacky-sack in time;
a baglady danced with the little girl with Downs;
a camera rocked on the shoulders of the PBS man
--- Olympia gave hommage to ghosts in the gazebo.

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.

Between empty junction gullies of the Dogskin mountains,
the BLM has once again released their Judas horses
luring the free ranging mustangs into capture corrals.

Their crime --- thriving in a battle of survival.
I assure you the Comanche do not dance around the fire,
nor does the ghost of Cortez roll in the wildflowers of El Dorado.

Ironically this native species is now considered feral,
introduced in the very habitat which shaped its evolution,
arcanely empowered to exceed enviromental carrying capacity.

The lands of nature are so dear: rejoice their freedom!
The mountains do not judge, they merely shelter.
Let the mustang graze unfettered through winds of dawn.

I am curled upon myself in eleven
hidden dimensions predicted by Superstring Theory,
confident revealing my whereabouts
precludes guessing my velocity.

Paradox of uncertainty handed down by
Heisenberg, mental Mobius of mind,
tethers my strong nuclear force,
I am King of Quantum.

I vibrate in energetic strings
octaves below scale of Stradivarius,
seeking a unified framework
for the duality of space and time.

Like a black-hole event horizon,
where no thought escapes
this gravity of mind,
I ponder blinking out of existence.

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".

I endured spiritual time dilation in life's stasis field,
held to a course you unwittingly set for us 40 years ago.
Back then, I knew instictively you were my beacon,
never doubted I should follow blindly, without question,
even when I lost sight and only drifted the cosmos,
always the gyroscope spinning in my head
whispered, She's still out there, leading.

So, I absorbed whatever light filtered in,
performing some manner of karmic photosynthesis,
noxious vapors escaping, replaced by vital oxygen,
a mere algae amongst humanities' phytoplankton.
And when the time-space coordinates aligned,
you re-materialized, as you'd always been there,
my sister, my spirit-guide, my love.

In parlance of the street he's a dumpster-diver,
scavenger of non-losing wager or proposition tickets.
You'd see his fragile frame each night
walking the isles of the race and sports books,
a condor's aerial eye trained on the floor,
back visible only to casino surveillance cameras.
Seated atop a barstool at the back,
I watch him bend, examine and discard,
through the prism of my scotch glass.
Every food chain has its bottom-feeders,
he brings efficiency to the gambling ecosystem.
Likely not the life that you or I would chose,
but then he has no monthly credit card to pay.
Just now, I saw him straighten and smile,
a parlay ticket will pay for tonight's meal
with just enough left for a brown-bag.
He does not go uninvited to misfortune,
the streets tonight are lined with chance's down.

More a French shave than five o'clock shadow,
the young artist's way of backing off,
announcing danger, an air of the unexpected,
as the King snake has evolved to feign the Coral.

Yet, where camel hair touched canvas calm,
where quintessential light met quotidian ennui,
not the advertised blackened rose or orchid,
rather the sizzle, the honeyed-heat of azalea.

Each stroke portended floral intifada,
pastel yellows and oily greens igniting
upon a fired-umber background,
threatened to melt the easel into tar.

I stood gape-jawed, nodded approval,
eyeing the second creation within a single flower.

pour some words into my ear
make a nice stout aural darjeeling
no need to sweeten
i like mine hot and strong
in turn, i'll steep your cochlea
Senno Rikyu at your service
master of libidinous liquids
ceremonial titillated ears
then we'll make oolong to each other
i'll brew your longing leaves
ferment your black dragon lips
sip the liquor from your *****
write it up for the society page
tea today at four and Thea pours

I am the shy man
you see at 6 AM in Starbucks
umbrella cocked under my left arm like a guidon,
formless and murky as the latte in my cup,
neufchatel slathered on the bageled
cusp of a new day, one bus token removed
from yesterday's office, aspiring
toward tomorrow's and the next day's sunrise,
convinced of nothing printed
in splashy headlines of USA Today.

I am the strong man
who smiles at the concept
of growing *******, watching women
surrender their eggs, take on new testicles.
I would eagerly belly
your child, assume your burden,
let you envelope me with velvet
***, dream submissive destiny
in the absence of Bodhisattva's caress,
if delicious debauchery empowers you.

I am a Boy Toy on the half-shell,
a nascent embryo filled with dread
of wombs which recently had bound me.
You offer deliverance. I am seed
in your fertile loam-brown soil.
I germinate sinking roots in your mind,
fully conscious I will flower,
a stubborn hybrid planted for your pleasure.
I am a pilgrim without a rock,
the twilight sky beneath your periwinkled heavens.

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.

There was much in her madness to draw us in.
Poetry was payback, electroshock for readers,
collusion between self and the culture oppressing women.
Rebelling against the limitations of a woman's sphere,
seeking refuge in career, a feminist before it was chic,
writing poems as a poultice against death
lurking in the shadows of a conflicted mind.

Sylvia, what was the dialogue you had with Death?
He deceived you in the mirror,
made you tremble at the foot of the stairs,
hissed from the potatoes in the kitchen,
till you sought solace in the oven's jets.
You were an artist out of time.
It's safe to come in from the depression now.

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.

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.

Beware the ugly woman who thirsts for admiration;
She's apt to take up the violin with zeal,
Or keep a parrot as a sign of independence.
Her envious heart makes treacherous her words
To pretty women with their petty self-idolatry.

Did Marie Currie suffer meekly the debutante?
Was "Little Women" a Louisa May ambiguity?
The ugly woman burns monopoly on praise,
Like coals shimmering in a furnace,
A night without neon unthinkable.

Standing alone outside the Mirage,
I felt like the only gambler in Las Vegas.
The parlay ticket in my pocket guarded,
like a Top Secret document,
loss would do me
"grave and serious damage".
But don't we all thrive on taking chances?
Some of us simply lack the courage to admit so.

I saw her legs first, emerging
from the limo in nyloned perfection.
Now a valet opening the casino door,
words gathered, a stone in my throat,
"Would the lady care for company?"
I made myself a dog at odds of 8-1,
yet, a crooked finger beckoned me follow.
I felt like the only gambler in Las Vegas.

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.

Did your English toughness lead you to reject
the ancient discontents of history,
to rather seek modern realms of ethical choice, Wystan?
There were no streets named after you,
nor monuments sculpted in the parks,
nothing that would say more than your words.

Words read and pondered in ritual
to better grasp the gruel and poverty of my own.
You talk in my sleep, Professor,
staring back at all that I am not,
teaching that art is born of humiliation.
Did the shaving mirror stare as cruelly?

The task is in the present moment,
Auden's poetry civilly requests a comment.

Your promised proof lacks rigor
and riots down the corridors of logic,
strong women bleeding inside,
all their energy confined in a wind tunnel.

I am not persuaded that my sisters are a dream,
though they die the long death of injustice.
How their voices swarm in my windows,
like maddening windchimes in a storm!

Your promised proof a color on no spectrum.
I set sail with the tide seeking forgiveness,
seeking the Newland where men do not subduct,
where oceans merge with female currents.

The hiker cannot dwell there long,
concealed on a high gull-lined cliff,
overlooking the grey of the Sound.
Framed in a solemn March day,
two curiously juxtaposed species hold her gaze.
Silent as a fawn she watches
a black wolf beneath her arboreal outpost,
hunched in the fashion of Asian street vendors,
observing the other creatures.

Great humpbacks frolic in icy waters ---
spouting volcano plumes of spray
that catch the freshened wind ---
riding white-capped waves,
till entropy dissolves their mist to atomized brine.
Whale-song, too distant for the hiker's gentle ears,
comes rolling in tsunami-like
to the aurally attuned wolf,
which ***** its head and nods
in musical agreement with the odes.

Then little lupine brother
rears back his head and howls,
so sorrowful a moan, as she has ever heard ---
answering his water-brethren,
hunters of krill upon the seas.
Giggling at the incongruity of this lone celebrant
singing pack-songs to leviathans,
she hurries on her way,
lone wolf herself returning to the pack.

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.

Summer struck with the fist of Chicxulub,
incinerated spring in a blinding flash.
Abruptly the pond on Chehalis Trail
was topped with water lilies,
where famished families of water fowl had
festooned the serenity of the surface;
now vanished for cool Canadian climes.
Racoon eyes peered in night shade green,
Foxglove and California Poppy brushed
through blades of overgrown grasses.
Crow song battled with Stellar's Jay,
the morning's true American Idols.
I stirred from slumber to impatient cawing,
chiding --- The best of day's awaiting.

I was off to savor summer's sugar,
lest autumn slip in unannounced
on the coats of Quetzalcoatl.

To ghosts which walk about our imagination,
we have surrendered counsel, yielded consolation.
They are the souls of the might-have-been,
kindred brethren yoked to our liquid center,
who've never endured the pain of intelligence,
never walked the bed-of-coals of perception,
yet, they have wisdom nestled on ethereal neurons.  

To semaphores which count a poet's unused resources,
written in the higher code of life's metaphor,
iteratively substituting words to distill a truth,
a single universal life experience upon which to dwell,
all taken from myriad axioms of cerebral ecstasy.
This is writing, confrere, and you have tasted it, as well.
We are craftsmen in the medium of language,
poets following the involuntary way.

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.

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.

Black lake reflects a trail of ivory plumes,
Cockatiel's alabaster tail of feathers.
Such loveliness can only be the moon's,
Which skinny-dips in lunar altogethers.

Raccoons catch fish along the shore,
Fastidious paws clutching their prizes.
She paddles her canoe with silent oar,
Observing nature's soft nocturne disguises.

Silhouetted loons rock low upon the waves,
Asleep till sunlight sets them to their songs.
Her wake bisects the path the moon engraves,
As wilderness whispers tranquilly she belongs.

She'll stay the night foregoing comfort fire,
Moonlight enough by which to pitch a tent.
And come tomorrow should anyone inquire,
No trace reveals her overnight encampment.

Outside the miner's shack Joshua trees stand silent vigil,
expecting his imminent return, or perhaps his ghost.
Horn silver, weathered by rainwater from volcanic rock,
no longer strews fallow ground to lure the miner back.

In lieu, small succulents feed tortoise and jackrabbit,
replace the metal which only men could value.
Nevada gains a confluence of life in the exchange,
dry-lake flora and fauna bartered for chlorargyrite.

Barren mountains surround this desolation,
where nothing more than fungi lie in vapid dissipation
before the relentless punishment of the sun,
a lattice-work of valleys dissecting their *****.

I ventured here to purge my body of poisons,
exhale the vapors and biles of city living,
to rid the alien presence in my mitochondria,
and let it go the way of Silver State.

As a teenage boy I used to fall asleep at night
listening to the graveled voice of Ernie Harwell
fashion for me word-images of the exploits
by a band of superheroes called the Detroit Tigers.
In those semi-lucid moments before slumber,
I could see the shimmering outline of my destiny:
you see all American boys are meant to be Tigers.
So imagine my confusion, when I fractured
the right talus bone my Junior year of high school,
even putting on weight around the middle,
where no athlete worth his pin stripes would gain.
My karma had begun to take on mass.

I began to acquire knowledge, as the only perceived defense
against some parallel universe impinging upon reality.
Oh, I had everyone convinced, even my keenest teachers
believed I was destined to make my mark in scholarly pursuits.
But no one saw the crying ego of one meant to be a Tiger,
nor how that bottled up the emergence of the Man.
Never reconciled, the Man curled up in fetal dormancy.
Lifespan became synonymous with interstellar drift.
And every encountered star of knowlege was dwarfed,
having long ago collapsed of its own gravity.
Still the heavens of knowledge are auspicious,
so I looked outward, when all the answers lay concealed within.

Only as my life left the outskirts of occluded reality
did I then begin to inherit from my instinctual id,
begin to listen to disconsolate internal voices,
who had known me all along, perhaps better than myself.
The thing is ... the stage has long been set on middle-age,
what props lie about are encrusted with patina,
laden with a dust impossible to gauge or preempt,
made worse by the lack of cast, save one.
Neither Beckett, nor Pinter, could have absurded this.
So, when my acts strike you as quixotic,
when I cut with a penknife through propriety,
it's because I finally remember what it meant to be a Tiger.

This sleepy little galaxy,
lost in the milieu of a billion others,
is filled with song and the finite
thrum of human hearts.

This glow-in-the-dark Milky Way,
whose pinwheel arms
are spun with satin stars,
emits Mozart from its crevices.

This nondescript spiral,
axled upon a super-massive black-hole,
frisbees across the universe,
curving it with the maths of Einstein.

Space travelers are we all,
learning the gravitation-crawl.

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!

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.

her fantasy fulfilled
she guides him by pack-horse
up the craggy mountain trail
restrained by his inexperience
their destination above
her beloved secret valley
river far below, a faded blue memory

spying snow-coned peaks beyond
she fights the urge, for his sake,
to gee her horse the last few feet
almost there, past the jagged rocks
gap's a beckoning finger now
welcoming her home
so many years of separation

the valley bursts upon them
a composite of wondrous sights
compelling her to bring him
quickly through to hallowed ground
how many times she had returned
alone
she turns to him, a stranger here
only he deserves her secret place

watching his face
seeing elation and her radiance
mirrored simultaneously in his eyes
an expanse of horizon
mountain, aspen, florid fields, and water
nature's precious jewels adorn the vista
dressed with utmost care
to steal the unsuspecting heart

she leads him into the meadow
overlooking the turquoise cirque
cool waters in which she bathed
naked and contented
when last she'd journeyed here
meadow flowers cloak
the blanket she spreads for him

her fantasy fulfilled
his body framed against the sky
-limitless as their love- and
boundless beauty in this valley

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.

On chilly, weird wet nights in Seoul
lonely trash cans cuddle up for warmth,
feral alley cats zydeco in the rain,
street folk sip from brown-bags,
that will get them through the night.
Our umbrella slips through fog,
stealthy as a U-boat through depths.

I confess a fetished fondness for the click
of her heels upon the cobblestone walk;
the Angel Falls of raven hair down
the leather shoulder of my trenchcoat.
We will harbor heat within the sultry sheets,
toss carnally upon waves of sensuality,
opposites secluded in the Yin and Yang of night.

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.