Listening through the chatter
What‘s mattered now shattered
Cluttered schemes now
Shuttered dreams
Minority priorities
Reassigned—
Misaligned

A whorl is not a swirl
Although it may seem so.
Allusions as illusions.
A reflection deception?
Yes or know?
Can we ever Noh?

The past presents itself in future
The constant is conundrum
The happening has happened
The now, the effortless action
Only eddies of the Dao

Wake up!
I’m awake.
No you’re not!
Slap!

Wake up!
Am I dreaming?
No I’m not.
I’m awake.

My dream:
I’m slapped awake.
By someone not her.
A dream begins:

Coruscating typographic glyphs
Leaves retreating
Roots descending
Tarmac glimpsed

Wake up!
I am/not awake
Wheels down
Then up again

Not awake
No landing
Still ascending
Still plummeting

Wake up!
Which is the dream?
Awake/asleep?
Slap me.

A scratch of me is from him
Carved from current’s flow
Glows in setting sun

Life as summation
Illumination of
Striations cleft

The bereft
Must instruct
The rest

Life is unbelievably beautiful
And remarkably breakable

A rush of joy derailed by
Some news inducing grief

Life seems bipolar because it is;
Crushes of fate between triumphs

What wets our eyes can
Sometimes beget laughter

Choose the latter
You‘ll feel better

semester ends frenzied
with freshmen disheveled
I worry for their worries

I feel their predicaments
but not mine to solve
my words, I hope, are salve

retirement ripe,
I do my best
they must do the rest

I smell cookies baking
There are no cookies baking
What do I smell?

A childhood memory to a
Time and place of comfort?
Wanting the past to last?

Other triggers:
Grilled cheese sandwiches
Campbell’s tomato soup
Breaded fish sticks
Polka-dotted Wonder bread
Liverwurst and catsup
The tasty tang of tang

The nose knows; I’m
Olfactory traveling
Memory meandering

Still, I really smell
Those cookies baking…
I want to go home again

I scratch till blood
An itch that persists
Unresolved issues
Buried below

I try to know;
It whorls, churns
Secrets purple red
Break skin

Red burst bloom
Embarrassing truths
Concealed quickly
Don’t show your cards

Sublime timeline—
Yours or mine?

Which switch?
Which time?

The distinction fine
Defines which which

Relatively selectivity:
Your past or my next?

My now or your then?
Who’s here or there?

Outcomes of which
We must now contend

A pride of lions
A parade of elephants and
A shrewdness of apes

A prickle of porcupines
A crash of rhinoceroses with
A chatter of budgerigars

A gaggle of geese
Gleefully honking
Heads held high

A horde of crows
Cackling and cawing
Wings spread wide

A kerfuffle of Flosses
A gatherings of clans
A thankful flocking

Kerfuffle is commotion
A happy hoopla
Movement together

Noisy, gleeful, cantankerous
Laughing, loving, boisterous
Family to the end

ARMCHAIR

The ugly chair
Is still there
Leave I say
It stays

The ugly chair
Is stubborn
Taciturn
Not feng shui

The ugly chair
Isn’t really
It just sits too near
In the way

(Or, really; cyber-**** me?)

“I know your name
I know your password
I know the **** you rut in
$7000 in bitcoin or else:

I’ll ruin your life!

You will be outed
To friends and family alike
As you view humans
Doing what humans do!

Everyone will know!“

That you are human
That you have base desires
That you pleasure yourself
That you are Everyman

Well, if it’s show and tell time:

Sure, don’t you?
She knows. Not news.
Won’t play this shame game–
Nothing really to lose. Phew!

No longer an extortion ******

(this just happened to me)

Fists up
Square off
Who’s more right
Ends in a fight

You pummel
I parry left, you
Counter right
As you should

Left hook!
Upper cut!
Sucker punch,
Rhetorical quarreling

The ending tie
Is preordained
Win or loss
It’s all a gain

shadows stretch long
across the lawn
autumn sun swings low
singing winter’s song

in a malaise
a general haze
not quite right
these days

the buzz is wrong
a sour note song
but, onward!
shuffle along

show a wan smile
while all the while
walking the maze
feigning strong

It could have been much different
With you and me in love

We should’ve been more careful
With the caring and sharing stuff

If we would’ve been better friends
Through more considerate listening

We‘d have been better lovers—
We promised such in vows

And here we are now:

There is a little, little man
In a big, big house

A louse, a grouse
Smaller than a mouse

He tweets and tweets
Slandering pandering

Mouse squeaking
With all he’s got

A hurricane ****
A sneeze breeze

He’s
******

Confusion allusion
Factual illusion
What’s done undone

Confide beside
Unknown betide
Not lost but won

Decision derision
Conclusion delusion
Condition revision

What fun!

I convert
I come out
I confess

I confound
I confuse but
Don’t conform

I perform
The reform
Rejigger the norm

You and me,
Let’s have tea—
And reach quorum

I want wake up in a better world
Where hate is no longer on the slate

I want to wake up in a better world
Where migrant caravans aren’t criminalized

I want to wake up in a better world
With less human deaths by guns

I want to wake up in a better world
Without blue states or red states

I want to wake up in a better world
Where my vote counted to make a better world

Hey-seus Christo
Eschewed all notoriety
He lived a life of
Quiet peace and piety

Without belief in deity
I follow his philosophy
Being good without god
Is trusting your morality

Travel truth’s compass
Know whom you trespass
Acknowledge the line
You just passed

Accountability is this:
Be true to thee and them
Avoid the dark abyss
Follow your bliss

Page not found
No longer around

Page has moved
You’re still here?

The past disappears
One page then two

Manuscripts decay
The web dissolves

Three decades gone
Legacy now latency
Blink, no longer there

Invest in entropy
A future certainty
Nothing ever lasts

No one needs the past
Nothing to learn there
It’s over; get over it

I can’t what anymore?
I must conform to that, now?

Weren’t you supposed to help;
Not actively slow and hobble?

Not in the job description:m;
Makes my job more difficult.

I’m a Higher-Ed foot soldier,
Not a draconian decree minion.

Google U. or HSU?
College or corporation?

Take me back to the days of
Mimeographs and over-heads.

Work for free?
Not me.

Monarch butterflies
Go back and forth
Mexico to Northeast US

To Alaska
From Baja swim
Great blue whales

Hummers, flycatchers and warblers
Orioles, and swallows seasonally
Fly their North-South routes

So do people
All the world over
Fleeing oppression

How do we treat them?
Less than human?
Better than butterflies?

I’m not so right sometimes
My left turns are often wrong
My pronouncements can be ludicrous
Followed by ?#%£€! fallacies

Being right is illusory
#mybubbleistheonly
I occasionally tell myself
"Shut the ?#%£€ up!”

But I still speak my mind
Come hell or high water
High water is certain
Let’s try to avoid hell

My car has got it’s brain back through
A trick automotive lobotomy hack

It was acting a little manic, the whacked
Human Machine Interface Module part

The screen was seen as a scary
Kerouac consciousness stream

An obscenity screed; a
Muddled fuddled car scene

HMIM installed anew—
Electroshock therapy

Zzzzzzhhhxt-phsssszzxt!
Initiating … initiating … initiating …

“Welcome!
Destination?”

No.
Not without evidence it won’t

No.
Without assurance I won’t

No.
No.

We won’t be fooled again

We burble past
Rocky shoals
Gripping life-lines
Riding rapids

Then stillness offers
Floating freedom
Danger past, we
Row-row, row our boat

Passing the extreme
Merrily, verily, clumsily
Wondering what it means
It’s real; not just a dream

If I had a cape
I’d have escapades

My spiffy metal suit
Would be in pursuit

I’d write wrongs in bulk
With the build of the hulk

I’d echo-locate
Every reprobate

A transgendered Wonder
I’d end their plunder

Return the cash
In a flash

End the pain
We sustain

Save the world
As it whorled

Super-Duper
Super trouper

****-Man!

Ready the ofrenda
Remembrance membrane
Twixt here and there

Loved ones lost
Closer now
Summoned

They come
We pause in
Their presence

A sad laugh as
Wet grief tracks
Down cheeks

We say hello
Then we say
Goodbye; again

Cursed, cursed consciousness
Keeps me up at night; right?
Or I’d dive into deep oblivion
Of blessed, blessed sleep

To dream, it seems needs more than
Shuffling off this thinking coil
I need easy entry to Elysium
Get me to the dream gymnasium

A correlation of crows
Coruscate above
Rippling and shimmering
High in the sky

Potent portents present
As options multiply
Diverge, converge, divide
With diminishing reply

Phosphorescent swirls
In an opalescent sea
Wondrous whirligigs
Of knowing and being

We are all precancerous
Just some degree away

The red spot on your nose
The dubious polyps removed

The tang of iron on your tongue
The itch that can’t be scratched

The trick to being precancerous
Is to be your most precocious

Live large; be positive; do
All you can in time allotted

Scuba dive; skydive
Learn how to tango

Follow your bliss
Treat this as this

I am going to make mistakes
And probably break things

In my attempt to speak the truth
You will like or unlike me

You might even un-Friend me
REPLY: "Oh! No! Dear me! No!”

It won’t stop my postings
In this pre-apocalyptic world

Peeling the opinion onion
Seems the right thing to do

We live in different belief worlds
But thankfully they intersect

Gravity takes us one way but
With thoughts we reconnect

What I mean might seem a
Mean meme, in retrospect

I don’t like who you like;
I mean no disrespect

But his a-hole vitriol makes
Our country wrecked

I’m here because I stink
I’m here because I drink

I **** because I eat
I wizz what that I drank

Stuff in; stuff out
Ergo, I’m alive, I think

Bonobos chimps
Live conflict free
Through mutual ***

Dogs make pacts
Through playing games
With instagram smells

Cats connect
Gland to gland
Cheek to cheek

Worker bees
Leaf-cutter ants
Naked mole rats

Honey hive
Tropical trail
Tunnel twists

We obstruct
We confound
We distract each other

Our entropy portrait shows
The not civilized need
To nurture our nature

Everything I know
I am learning now, the
What why where and how
Subcutaneous instantaneous
Transliteration transcriptions

The you you don’t know undertow
Burbles beneath the underflow
Below Babel is the true power
Speaking truth beyond tower
Is the way to flow

We'd bound around
For golf downtown
Frisbees always in hand

"The students are coming!!”
Was a seasonal refrain
As we’d goofily gallivant

Mother’s Day shows
We‘re free, mother-suckers
For your kids, a show we grant

A CLOWN SHOW!
A DOWNTOWN SHOW!
THERE IS NOTHING WE CAN’T!

Rock their world with juggling
See the Doctor for what ails
Rudi and O in laundromat land

Jeanie, Splash, Allison, Donna,
Silly girls astonishing with
Leaps, jokes and handstands

Chewey, Steamboat and Grog
"Yeah-yeah! Yeah-yeah!”
Silly boys grandstanding

All hail Papa Gale! We
Funned with Cpt. Plunge
Leader of the band!

Sweet Georgia!
**** croquet!
It was grand!



(**** croquet was the official lawn game of the Sweet Georgia Brown Clowns during the summer 198x Trinity Country tour [wherein we masqueraded as a Norwegian Salmon Kissing team at a Moose Lodge Talent Show in Lewiston, CA* {true!}]: “Don’t forget your hat!”)

*(we won)

Dark days just got darker
The future now bleaker
Our rights soon weaker

Temperatures up
Sea levels rise with
Judicial surprises:

Rights curtailed
Guns for sale
Executive privilege
Press repressed
Marches now riots
Meaner tweets
Free speech costs
Groups targeted
Families disbanded
Profiling preferred
Embryos policed

Emigration in order?

What the faugh?
Appoint that braugh?
Barfin’ in the haugh?

“I like beer here;
In the hall—
Keggin’ legend y’all”

Teenage hijinks
Predator some think
From the calumny calendar

“Appoint me;
Don’t disappoint me;
This is my drunken call!”

“No single appointment here
No,  just one issue (snicker)…
Roe? Wade? It’s clear as beer!”

Supporters of this supreme
You really needn’t get this meme;
You want him for one thing

“You don’t like me;
I am a lying pig—
But my r.v.w will stick”

I wear my collar of color but
Lately I’ve been a confessor
They trust me unknowingly
To facilitate their stories

Humbled and awed
I press record
Their lives flow courageously
They want you to know

https://www.dropbox.com/s/n3z0gn6nsogzqei/Marisol.wav?dl=0

Navigating the now how
Leaving but the then when
Not knowing where began

Going to the there then
Hoping to find you, friend
Seeking safer harbor again

I go into the future
To remember who I was

I gravitate to the past
To know who I will be

I recline in the now
Being who I am:

Omni-present
Only me

Rain, righteous rain
Happening right now
Drumming the deck
Feeding the ground

Sun king finally sleeps
After summer dryness and heat
Let’s pre-remember winter
The season we re-enter

I’m being a cat
Not thinking of this or that

Just taking a nap
In my recliner lap

Slipping into sleep
I begin to purr

To sleep, to dream
To imagine what can occur

We do what we can do
With our time allotted

We want everything safe
Done; in the can

We want to rescue
Who we love

As we run to it
As fast as we can

Should’ve, would’ve:
palindromed

Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?

I’m thinking
Thinking so much
I’m thunk.

Resident Trump?
Justice Kavanaugh?
Ending common law?

EPA to EDA
To protect or destruct?
To serve or to swerve?

Department of interior
Declaring mining superior
Thinks he, Zinke

What is the cost
Of Betsy DeVos
School house lost

Eight years denied
Nyet: destroyed
Great again?

I wish I were drinking
Instead of thinking;
Show me America sober again