The shells are singing
holy songs now—oceans whistle through
their concert holes. ‘Holes drilled by predators,’
the seashore sings to me.

And I’m reminded there’s
so much more ancient than man.
So much that can never be written down,
for words are the limitations of our knowledge

—not its end.
And there should be something more
but really, how does one write what happened
with the seashells whistling by the seashore?

Not long ago, if you could call a few years ‘not long’,
when I was still gloomily drawn to that mysterious magnet
known as the mighty Mississippi, I uncovered a nautilus fossil
not far from the Tennessee-Arkansas border, where the land
churns like red butter into the infinity of the Mississippi.
A nautilus hundreds of miles from the closest deep water.
(And only fifteen minutes from Graceland!)
They say most of the Deep South used to belong to the floor
Of some vast Jurassic swamp or sea or river—I forget which…
In the grooves of this shell-rock nature keeps its own history.
No stranger to change as the dust and mud reveal me.

Think how much change
you’ve witnessed in your life already.
Today, tomorrow and yesterday change is a hot-traded commodity, up in the Dow,
down in the Nasdaq, two day super-shipping in the fast lane.
Change customizable, ordered up and hot and ready-to-go,
the hobo on the street asking me for some change;
I told him to change his ways, get a better rate,
exchange those rags for a business suit and some britches.
He just laughed and said: “Huh, are you kiddin me?
In this day and age a man can have twenty lives in a lifetime.
I’m just asking you for a little change…”

It’s been done to death and back a million times this age.
My friends are always telling me I need to change my ways.
That I need to roam and range, that all wise wordsters roam and range.
“Change you can believe in!” But let’s just change the channel.
Onto something else, something new! Everything built for the times,
none of it made to last. See how we age and distance so fast!
Two million years in the making, we’re living proof of the past.
Don’t be a stranger to change; sit back and enjoy it while it lasts.

The boy in the park with pigeon eyes
“What is the rake of human history?” he asks me.
Cruelty and pathetic little bird-like people,
all their seed spent carrying half-ton rocks up
to the tippy-top of the Tower of Babble.
If you possessed a machine of infinite light and speed
would you go back to before change existed?
Could you resist it? Or would the blackness then lead you back to now?
Wondering how—how it all got started.
Change is strange, only the rabbit knows
how deep the rabbit hole will go.

All our lying lives spent flying,
and when we finish no one starts and no one goes.
all of us pondering the unshareable experience.
The world keeps winding on an invisible string
but the weight of the wait in line is unbearable.
A raindrop falls from the sky and hits the shell-rock in my hand
And looking down at the nautilus fossil
I get a chill, for it tells me there are creatures
without words, without hearts, dreams or ears
that have slithered through the dark untouched by change
      for millions and millions of years…

“Lord knows Gods come and go so quick it’s like lightning,
      and lord knows I’ve received my slings and arrows all in silence.
   Don’t quote me about love being nat’ral or rent being heaven-sent;    
they isn’t and looord no I ain’t gonna preach the almighty’s reliance.
     The friendless creep of hours into centuries can be frightening;
  I’m just enlightened enough to know there’s no such thing
                   as enlightenment.”

There’s that smell of smoke again
my neighbor burning leaves across the lot,
     brown leaves worthy of being burned simply because they fell
(and because they’ll rot his idea of a yard).
And it’s brown to black and then gray
     as all things fall.

And there is the sound of smoke, too
wheezing over the t.v. and radio.
Smoke and sirens (both mythical and mechanical)
    as if humanity’s a ribbon caught in a blaze.
Half the globe is burning to be free
        waking to turn the light of the sun into the sugar of their lives.
And the other half is snoring through the haze.
     Generations snoring for generations
fanning the flames
  as they wonder why they burn.

     Looking up I see with a Mover’s clarity
this smoke that blinds the sky
       stings our lives.
  And maybe that’s why they burn,
(this smoke that rises from the hillsides of history)
    to block out the sun,
to make men crazy with a human eclipse
with carbon
   because the fire inside them won’t let those free blue eyes
drift by without this little scarification of smoke.
A gray river flowing toward the sky
              for the live and let die.
  
         This smoke that fills my mouth,
that leaves its bitterness in me,
    does it burn dreams as it burns through flesh?
Will it burn all the way to the seed?
We wonder whether dreams shrivel or if they explode
    like something thawed on its way to the sun.
            Or do they, as the expression goes, simply go up in smoke?
like some slippery eel disappeared in the deep deep dark.
   Do we smoke our dreams from two ends like a hapless fiend
or sip them with precious small breaths to drag out our sunsets?
      When the smoke is all gone
do we see the hoax of hoaxes?
  Or do we choke to death?

Did you hear?
The preacher met the mendicant who’s
proselytizing the end of the world Saturday.
They sat and had it out
on the steps in front of the old
  Baptist church on Main St., each idolizing
their poison with the wild green
all around, the preacher high
   on the holy steps
looking so divine above
the hobo in multicolored rags,
who scams and scams the plentiful
   from a gutter-pipe and who began
the conversation like this:

[snort]: “Go on father! Out with it,
what’d you call me out here for?”

“I hear you’re preaching the end of the world, Charlie—”
     he said putting a stick of gum to his lips,
     suddenly conscious of his stinking breath.
“Well, you’re scaring some of the lambs from my flock, they’re
       frightened beyond their wits—and I’m sorry but this is outrageous
I demand to know why, exactly why!
Because it’s interfering with my plans,
for Saturday I am preaching the End of Times.”

“Well… I believe it for a number of reasons,” said
  the hobo shouldering his heavy sign of doom.
“I mean things just keep getting worse,
no one gives to the needy anymore,
the poor are many, the golden skyscrapers high,
                            those huddling in the streets from gloom
     are praying to die—not to be saved,
   and their numbers just keep growing—
    the most double blessing that a
    man can get used to anything….
So I thought why not take advantage of my situation—
      I gotta make a meal!—
so I blew the crooked horn and said
that all ye minutemen of sin
                   and tradition are just killing
by rules that no one believes in….”
      
        Just then a fat green fly went buzzing by,
reminding Charlie of an old poem
“But tell me father, why do you
      believe in the End of
Times…?”

And the preacher in his dress took a deep sigh
wondering why it was everything had to die by Saturday:
“Well…. there are a number of signs.
         But mostly I think it’s morals—
nobody has any respect
    anymore, they open up
your door for you and say:
‘Excuse you!
        That’ll be five dollars.’
    How freewill
             turns and twists minds.
The youthful
          free, starving wanting-to-be artists—
       they won’t tithe in my church anymore,
they just throw me their books and say
with a blithe look that it’s not about
money anymore…
But what are they saying?
         Meanwhile they put a ****** hex
on all that is holy, have ***
     on all that’s white and pure.
Say that I’m an old man
            in a dress and that we’re all
blessed when really
     none of us are blessed—
say that the light is muddy
and the dark is clear, when really
I’m as clean as I can be, no foul
    smelling intentions in me!
         And that is how the End of Times will be!”

  And before the stench of death
could escape his breath, he put another
stick of gum to his lips.
  
   “Agreed.” said the hobo hastily….
     “But father, it doesn’t seem like
our lambs are really that different,
    it seems more to me that we’ve
been shepherding from the same flock
    and what we ought to do is take advantage
             of this unique situation.
                 Let’s put up a big round shining tent
                       on Main St. for Saturday
   and we’ll hold a dual End of Times—
       our lambs together, don’t you see?
      We’ll draw in twice the crowd
        twice the lot
twice the loud, crying fervor
believing in the burning streets.”
  
“Yes….. yes!” said the preacher with a corvine grin
and a turning coin in his eyes.
      “I get what you’re saying now. Yes, it’s genius—our preaching
together, one way or another, we’ll rake it in—and after the ending,
      when it’s all through….
Uh… [ahem] tell me, just one more thing—you do believe in the End of Times?”

“Sure, brother, sure…
        don’t you?”

War
War
War!
Roar
Roar
  Roar!
No more
No more
  No.
     More.

That soft jingly music
  of snow hitting water—
my birthday

Too Many Smiling People Blues

Before I was a nobody slinking by,
a real skink-body nobody.
Now they give me handfulls
of money and call me a genius.

Thanks, thanks very much, I’ll take this.
I’ll take your money that slithers to no ends
but wait… my friends, where are my precious friends?
There’s nothing but pink smiles all around….

I used to sing songs in the dark.
Now they put a shiny guitar in my hands,
and I make music to shiny coins, crank it out, and when
it’s all over they say, “that’s good, now can you stand

on your hands?” And there’s not even
enough energy to frown. O’ ain’t it a bringdown,
when everybody’s got a piece of you
and there’s nothing but smiles all around.

And it used to be the only one
I could get to listen was you, baby blue…..
You and me alone all those windy, sleepy years,
and when I sang a tune you were the only one that got it.

Now I look through the screaming crowd,
who eat my energy, shouting, “We get it! We get it!”
But your smile is nowhere to be found, and O’
ain’t it a bringdown when everybody’s got a piece of you

and there’s nothing
          but smiles all around….