You turned me into a paperweight.
Ambling out of your genealogy,
you chiseled me to the marrowbone;
     walk tall with your invisible chains.

You turned me into a paperweight
marooned on polished mahogany –
conquered West-Indian trees;
     walk tall while your mastery wanes.

You turned me into a paperweight.
From your bottomless, two-ton
tongue came my disfigured heart –
     walk tall, you pyrite suzerain.

You turned me into a paperweight,
deserted on paperwork seas,
ball-and-chained to the wooden beach –
     walk tall in your insidious vein.

You turned me into a paperweight.
I fell, clutching the snowflakes,
and held your whole ******* useless life together –
     walk tall, play that catchpenny game.

Were indifference and suffering to go,
Where'd our sad tradition be?
Drugged to sleep in an asylum, or
Muttering mad at a last bit of breakfast.
It was simply illogical to ignore
As a child, the things it seemed grown-ups should know:
Evil-doing is easy
And sorrow's solution isn't vast.

Thinking of our sad tradition is
Like watching a janitor far past
Retiring age struggle to take out
An employer's trash. His
Chest rasps and his bent spine heaves; the boss begins to shout
"You need to hurry, ******! I wanna get drunk before
Too long, and I need to stop by the store."

I
I am in Cardiff
     Where foams pummel the jetty
I am in Cardiff
     Where crab skeletons blanch the beach
I am in Cardiff
     Where the Pilot Star became a conch
I was in the ruse of age
     Where the young kiss
I was in Joshua Tree
     Where the mind is thoughtless
I am a grove's wilting
I will be an unbearable urge
And I am shivering in Santa Ana near Bristol and 1st

II
There is intent when the addict mutters --
Estranged in his unhappy gutters --
"Life is cheap and love is free."
Hopelessness's epitome
Sits naked beyond the wall.

There is derision in the dealer's call --
Osmium-heat in an unimpeded fall --
"You can't change who you are."
Greed could tear down a star
To sculpt into a Cardiff shell.

Warrant breeds within a child's yell.

III**
I am in Cardiff
     Where foams pummel the jetty
I am in Cardiff
     Where crab skeletons blanch the beach
I am in Cardiff
     Where the Pilot Star became a conch
I was in the ruse of age
     Where the young kiss
I was in Joshua Tree
     Where the mind is thoughtless
I am a grove's wilting
I will be an unbearable urge
And I am shivering in Santa Ana near Bristol and 1st

I
I am in Cardiff,
          Where waves pummel the jetty
I am in Cardiff,
          Where crab skeletons blanch the beach
I am nowhere

II
Where the sun severs the street and
Slowly, methodically,
They come, they come.
Electrifyingly stupefied in the dawn,
Tenantry not bound to cause and
Helpless as marred lead in the wind,
Stuck to strata and
Battered under **** pale-green
Thinned on spread fingers.

III
There is intent when the addict mutters ---
Alienated in his nettled gutters ---
"Life is cheap and love is free."
Hopelessness's epitome
Sits naked beyond the wall.

IV**
And I am in Cardiff,
          Where waves pummel the jetty
And I am in Cardiff,
          Where crab skeletons blanch the beach
And I am nowhere

To my left a girl
spoke daftly of Charlotte Bronte,
to my right a boy
butchered cantos out of Dante.

I've offered these kids
pieces written to pass the time;
short, plotless fictions
and epigrams that  rhyme.

"Where's your sense of plot?",
cried a free-verse poet in black.
"Form can be a cage",
advised a boy whose eyes screamed Hack!

"My poems occur
cerebrally, " I explained;
"when reading my shorts
think opposites being strained."

They seemed unable
to deal in abstract thought. It was
incredibly sad.
This is what modernity does.

A patch-work roof burns underneath
the sallow-white chill of a mid-winter moon.
Nearby a lake suffocates in ice;
an astronaut has lost his helmet.
Blood rushes to the eyes and tongue
as a ragged derelict loses his balance.
He topples into a dumpster;
the last pear drifts from the tree.
The firemen are enclosed in smoke.
One froze at the door,
the others melt into the haze;
a hand slips below quicksand.

The moon is doing all it can.
The spaceman is floating away.
The *** is asleep.
The roof is having the time of its life
and the pear grows into another pear-tree.

I miss

all my youthful avarice;
all the hushed proverbial bliss
promised in a lover's kiss;
and this
is the truest exorcist:

Time, undated.