simple tasks

done by millions of workers

will be replaced by robots.


they say workers are worried ... worried they say

how will we live - let alone support ourselves and our family's?

wouldn't it be better to have robots live in misery than us?

better to have them toil?

better to have a machine plead guilty to ******, hauled off to jail, seen for what  it is, in our stead?

let them accomplish this, or invent that,

let them cry over a missing child or wife or lover,

they should suffer, die and be buried

and rise again

Lo,
let thy robots judge the living and the dead!


like a nuke on a mike
the porch we sit on

out of a giant soft shell
plastic brains break open

I'm scared as ****
batteries are recharging
a bullseye of prophecy

I got no strings

to keep me here

though born of earth

of mother brown and father white

bored I listen to music:

"you're so natural - you're so free" "I'm seeing red'

"thats when I reach for my revolver"

it happened in Southampton
("say you don't want it").



Later,

holed up in

brick and stucco prisons that last

a lifetime

there wasn't much to do
when there was time to do it

like a monkey at a temple

I want an immediate response from the world

my brother-in-law fights the same depression

he turned into a Cowboy

I stayed an Indian.

Back in Queens I see a man across the street

he's in an Andy Capp hat and twead coat
he used to hem my pants (he's retired now)

he knows my thoughts but doesn't recognize me unless I say hello first

see that ******* the stoop, the one with her hair veiled over her face, staring at her iphone as to a shrine

I've seen my mother-in-law bow down like that at Meher Baba's Samadhi

I should not have been watching her take darshan

in front of her Lord - in supplication - she folded into herself like a napkin

on the way back, we stayed at the Leela and had a lot to drink before we flew home

I wish she knew how lucky I felt being with her - praying and drinking

but last night she called and couldn't remember a thing

it pains me she is losing her memory

I  had to repeat again and again, 'yes, I have your ticket and passport'

or 'remember we flew in together and now we are going back'.

so naturally our conversations return to her growing up on a farm in Virginia; the second oldest to four brothers, her swimming in a creek and charming all the boys, and leaving home at seventeen to dance with Margaret Craske in New York City (how she loved Miss Craske).  

she married a priest who crusaded for the poor in the Lower East Side;  pregnant with her first daughter (and me, having the saving grace to have married that daughter) she met Meher Baba -  a meeting that changed her course and late in life she became a Psychologist (a PhD at 74!).   

her natural graciousness was born of the wild flowers of Machair (her people are from the Hebrides),
her love of dance, now transposed and expressed in a light and buoyant outlook, made all a fools mimicry disappear like morning vapor on a Maharashtrian plateau ...

my fortune seeing that.

one day she will forget me and the world and not come back

or when she does we will have a certainty of meeting once before.

a river glows

feelings flow

happiness i guess

little is left after dragging myself through the night

keeping apparatuses near enough to not have to reach

she lost to pain

she came for more

she left for good

deepest waters trick swimmers
touching bottom
someday spilling out
or filling in

trickling drops
liquid quibble

how they come and go

i like mixes

and late night kisses

and bumps that go on all night

i have a thing for terribly thin fidgeting things
i wish i could find the cord and plug this in
(so it would work of course)

plebeian hard
raw and numb
i still **** my thumb

too tough to forget the past
holding a beachhead with half an arm ... me - i am the

the guitar that fades
as the drums come in

a short circuit

a brain whiff

my late night knees are bothering me too

three cheesburgers later

a valley of aspiration

o' majestic tumors, o' tedious comforts

the worst of this is true
sounding an escape with tensile strength

spires of desires as ancient as feeling itself

sinew capped mountains of sin
bones buried in landfills
city sewers, plastic bags clogging drains, in trees, suffocating bees
write me please
bite me please
lie with me please

if I were Indian maybe ever

so tall on Sundays
being tall in Bali is
not very tall at all

pause.

o' cinereous city  
give to me your blacktops
where on hard white asphalt
impenetrable, grave and square

we play hardscrabble with toughs
who huddle in groups
hanging keds that swing in the air

a pitch of blank gray
a field of kicked stones
ashen, barren
the end of confusing friends

but still a place to go
and run and run and run
when all at once, filled with children laughing, crying, jumping, stumbling, climbing, bouncing,
announcing life in eternal screams - - let me play!