Mockingbird, mockingbird
Singing all night
How clever
You imitate me.
Your search
For the truth
Of your own song
Seems fruitless
When the phrases of others
Chime loud in your head.

Mockingbird, mockingbird
Silence is loud
And the night
Without music is long.
So we fumble
For voice
In the dark
That surrounds us
Find song of our hearts
In the light of our dreams.

I
Hear the story of our oil –
Hail to oil!
From the glory days of Drake well we recoil,
To see seabirds flap and shudder,
Dolphins, turtles flop and sputter
With collective dying groan.
Hear our population moan
When the gasoline price geysers to the sky.
Still we drive, drive, drive,
To keep consumer binge alive,
Amid a maritime disaster fast evolving from the spoil
Of the oil.
For the oil, oil, oil, oil,
Oil, oil, oil,
For the gushing and the oozing of the oil.

II
Smell the ancient dark crude oil
Stinking oil!
Engulf the products made refining from a boil:
Guzzle gasoline flambé,
Drive-through fast food every day,
Raise our carbonated toast to Arctic roast…
Then drill more oil!
GM corn and corn-fed beef --
Both born of oil,
The shaving cream I slather on my face is made from oil,
Toothpaste, vitamins and lipstick,
Tires, everlasting plastic,
Come from oil;
All American affliction
Petrolopium addiction –
Truth is stranger now than fiction
And it does not set us free;
We are prisoners of oil,
And as slaves to OPEC pricing we all toil,
For the tapping and the lapping
Of the oil.
For the oil, oil, oil, oil,
Oil, oil, oil,
For the drilling and the swilling of the oil.

III
Soak in news of spilling oil –
Offshore oil!
In grim images of damage that the television splays;
First blow-out slimed in sixty-nine at Santa Barbara Bay
Then ten years next blew Ixtoc
In the Gulf of Mexico,
Two-ninety day gush tick tock
Slick slopped thousand miles away
To Texas shores!
In Alaska’s Prince William Sound
Exxon Valdez ran aground in eighty-nine;
Full tanker load erupted,
Left the rocky coast corrupted –
Prudhoe crude!
Seals and otters stuck in goo
Seabirds suffered coatings too,
Cruising tourists supped in view
Of the oil, oil, oil,
Thickened slick encrusted oil
On the shore!
How it clings and clogs and covers;
All aquatic life it smothers
Marsh and beach are left in cataclysmic mire!
Still we “drill baby drill,”
All our gas tanks gotta fill,
We must shop, shop, shop,
Lest our wasteful lifestyle stop,
So we run, run, run,
Take our car vacation fun --
At the beach…
See the sheen -- how it shines!
Pretty rainbow-colored lines
From the oil!
We love our oil, oil, oil, oil,
Oil, oil, oil,
For economy cachinging in the oil!

IV
Hear the praise of offshore oil,
Miles deep oil!
For the goal of independence on our oceans now we toil,
Till ungraceful conflagration
Twenty April rocked the nation
On the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.
Eleven lives were lost in blast
As the deep crude spewed out fast,
Gushing Hell!
Couldn’t stop it with top ****,
Junk shot, golf *****, caps wouldn’t still
Gushing well,
And the spreading, spreading, spreading
In a steady surging crawl,
Gulf coast residents all dreading
That their livelihoods might stall,
Now the fish and shrimp are ill,
Tourist business will be nil,
And still oil spews…
We must thank God that there’s *****,
For there’s nothing but bad news
And the ooze, ooze, ooze
Oily ooze.
Who will pay, who will pay?
Who will make this go away?
Who’s to blame? Who’s to shame?
Many pointy fingers aim –
Lefty points to rich BP,
Righty points to rock Obama,
And there’s six sticks pointing back at you and me!
We will pay, pay, pay,
At the gas pumps we will pay,
So we can drive, drive, drive,
And keep America alive;
Despite the grim disaster that arises from the spill,
The way we live and spend won’t easily end;
So we’ll still say “drill baby drill,”
Each time our gas tanks get a fill,
And we will shop, shop, shop
To do our patriotic duty --
Spend our *****, *****, *****
For the oil.
For the oil, oil, oil, oil,
Oil, oil, oil,
For the gushing and the oozing of the oil!

Drafted 6/8/10, revised 6/14/10

Dark emerald
Twisting lines of my imaginings
Creep upward
O'er the cold hard walls.

Disintegrate the temples
Men wrought of continental stone
Mountain disassembled
And raised here
To form
Buildings
Razed here
By the alchemy
Of green plants
And the elements
Of dark twisting lines
In my imaginings:
Even now
The dust begins to pile upon the ground
And the golden city fades
Beneath the growing green image.

Dark emerald
Twisting lines of my imaginings
Creep upward
O'er the cold hard walls.

Weave vine tendrils
Into the fabric
Of the stone,
Clamber over solemn tombs
What one life raised
Another will surpass,
Must first embrace its artifacts
And then exceed
And render into dust
The particles
Turn roundward.

Dark emerald
Twisting lines of my imaginings
Creep upward
O'er the cold hard walls.
Reintegrate the dust
To continental stone
In dark mantle
Mountain reassembled
And raised here
By alchemy
Of the earth
Turning in another million years
Beneath new life
Raised here.

Dark emerald
Twisting lines of my imaginings
Creep upward
O'er the cold hard walls.

Waggle dance of the honey bee plays in my mind --
Insect intellect tipping and tapping on toes;
Music monomentality swivels the swarm
‘Til the sweet sum of floral fecundity flows.

Wood thrush
Voice rush
Ringing in the wilderness;
Your phrases fill the summer calm
With perfect meter throstle thrummed
In timely repetition.

Wood thrush
Voice rush
Ringing in my ears;
Defy interpretation with your metaphoric strains -
Spell still meaning, clearly,
Mere beauty in the wood.

Wood thrush
Voice rush
Ringing in the air;
I've oft' pursued your fleeting lines
Through mired web of brush and fallen trees
In search of some concluding note
And perhaps vision
Of the higher source of song.

God fire
Melting
Gleam pink milky pall
Across the lake.

Cool hot arc
Sink anchor for my eyes;
Some otherwhere around the globe
Burn blinding bright
And further on
Or back
Orange ember rising
Gild morning star-filled sky.

Source and center –
Orbit of our baking sphere
Gravity suspended spin
Night round
Touch every edge of Earth.

July 21, 2011

Perpetual rhythms
Pleasure, pain
Emotions' tides
Wax, wane.

Anopheles
Syringe aloft
Intone a twining tune to tempting ear.

By day
Mosquito
Hide incognito;
At night take flight,
Seek heat of vein to slake maternal craving.

Femme fatale
Fly ****** dance,
Alight let lance sip sanguine feast:
Soft kiss to ruddy cheek -- know taste of rouge.
Instill perchance live issuance
O harbinger of bad air,
Purveyor of fever,
Anathema of armies,
Ill missile of men made canals,
Evocation to slavery and *Silent Spring.

Subtle touch to pulse of humanity:
Innocent tender to misery --
You mock our pride
In twining tune
Anopheles.

Summer singing madly
Over empty lot

The still grass
Stands near alone
Before the final crew comes
With trucks and blueprints and concrete
To slap together rent fortune
For the white cadillac man.

Summer swinging madly
Over empty lot

The post oaks
Hesitate along lot edge,
Wait to see what happens
To the few brave mesquite:
Better to stand on edges
And wait
Than venture
To vulnerable heart
Of empty lot.

Summer winging madly
Over empty lot

The birds wing madly over
Rarely dropping
To the grass for seeds;
They sit upon the postoaks
At the edge
And keep a watchful eye
Upon the road.
All wing madly to the edge:
Grackles, swifts, and doves,
The mockingbirds, all
Save one persistent meadowlark
Without a mate
That sings each morning
From the wire,
One silly songster
That loneliness has blinded
And brought to chime
Its idyll
Summer song
Over empty lot.

Summer singing madly
Over empty lot.

From foragers swinging in the trees
To hunters striding through the grass
The sun and watery sphere ruled us.

As civilized we learned to farm
To shape and harness beast and grass
Our fathers struggled with the Gods.

Now sins of fire, bow and axe and plow.....
Our **** in orbit, fouling deep in ground
All decay and rain upon our heads.

9/24/2011

Most poetry writing
Is like a nighttime ****,
Standing or sitting in the dark
Aiming as we let it flow.

We judge by the sweet sound
Of the deeper splash
When we’re on the target,
And hope our line stays true.

We squeeze most poems and ****** out
To get relief
From a nagging feeling
Deep inside.

The deviations of our stream
Spilled silent to the side
Oft require
Clean-up.

And the outcome
With that faint stale smell
Is probably better flushed away
Than saved or shared or admired.

Poetry making should not be restrained by words.  
If a poem demands a soundmeaning that our language does not offer,
Creative license allows us to make newwords!    

Methinks this rule should also apply to prosetry.

Broadwing whorl
Rise light through morning mist
Disaggregated flock among the trees;
Lift sun-drawn with the thermal
Plume and talon
To the cloud,
Swarm swirling
Hawks
Together through the shaft.

Fill the airy mortsleam,
Stream southward from the brim,
Pour pinnate spiral spilling 'cross the sky;
Defy dispersing magnet of the earth
Wing skyward down,
Flow river in the sky to nether lands.

Put the point top of paper;
Ride new line down the hill.
Let totality end in a consonancaper --
Result be whatever it will!