a brief overview:

so far, in our voyage
we have stayed home
call it a parallel apocrypha
omitting all and accepting none
I own nothing

pronouns are a formality:

a Roman Catholic, a Greek from Rheims
a girl and a boy
a sister and her friends
a wife and teacher
a nun who’s a mother

chronology of implications:

first day, second month
prudes scare me
how much should a man give up
when his wife leaves him

she’s not really gone
it’s just something to think about
or ignore
or laugh about

you decide

the one person who’s bereavement
you have mulled over and over until one day
you find out the person has been going around saying your name

I call that a preferential loss
I call that, as an if

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!

you looked
i won.


this is a poem

written by me

and sent to who-so-ever-will

open up to love,

lay aside hurt pride,

unfreeze to stay warm and hungry.

what are you thinking
so curious a surrender
without prejudice

next to those mischievous pealing eyes
soft goes the song of love

for you I think of cranberry crumbling cakes and luscious blackberry colored beets

I make for you a crown
of laughing stars, with singing orbs in guileless profusion

but if ever life ends this round - forever desperate sends are bound

for if ever a war was in my heart - it rages over being with you
or being alone,
for my pride gorges on isolation

selfishly feeding - like a dismal mite -
making a mean meal - meticulously picking out flakes

of love.  but there is love - though it seems forever lost

and if ever a semblance of a true and divine love would by chance appear,
save me a place, not waiting to be saved in this world, not wanting the next, but only now
my most dearest and loving v., save me a place, in this moment,
next to you.

Adam!
turn me over and sing me a song of sixpence
hearing voices, not seeing faces ... with the radio on

it's just me myself and I

driving between towns emoting, gushing
hurt me, break me, **** me!
at the top of my lungs

finding bars buried in backyards
on back roads of insincerity

birch bitten and chewed
logs wet and rotten
and still, chords neatly stacked in ordered rows

can you stand me on my feet?

back home
brushing my teeth yellow
biting my nails turgid, hoping she will come with me to a show
my state is of a lower-class shambling

hoping for a renewal
                or rebirth

sweating on the train repeating God's name

gasping for air making people nervous staring
at their phones wondering if I am going to keel over and die

it's just me myself and I

that's right, write it out in long hand first, then go back and edit

(wishing  to write  like  Tarkovsky)

comparing father and son - an unchecked exception
they were buried in separate coffins
                one in France the other, in a timber cask

but won't I be
too?

I wish I could say, "we have a saying in my country" or "scripture says" or

"I'm lost without you"  (I am and now found).

In ruins at the end of a day
building pigeon flap (or come what may)
ascending a scale of notes in a mirror of songs
behold an image
in a scale of descending notes at dawn.

drop a cap
says a lot
   of crap

used words
won't work
or at least
I ain't gonna buy it

what's it worth
if it can't be said?

until it drops
don't try it

used
words
don't
work
for
what
they need to say

to tell the grim and glum and gray

ultra-violent
rightly-fallen
defiantly-silent
irritably-sol­emn

a gap opens

a rat is about to die

muck starts settling

wood ash leaches to lye

crystals start forming
an emerald worth rejoicing.

J'étais fou de toi.  J'ai été

I will never forget
the more I wanted (you)
the less I was.

If a dark night is for dancing -
will you come waltz with me?

from the top of a hill
she never heard
which way to down
and never felt
a connection underneath

a missing note
a deviate step
a vapor mist
our kisses never met

a hollow cavern
a hole forever closed
inside and out

like tar water run-off from a hopeless ash basin
an unending drizzle of forever ending dribble that fizzled ... out

help me dear earth
if you really want to be mine
blacken the soil and ink the green

in deeper ferns we reappear
as lava flows to shore.

there is a list to drum by:

father,
mother,
sister,
brother,

the son who died is he forgiven?
the father who survived is surely not.

sitting quietly in a boat
fishing reluctantly
casting my rod
accidentally
to the bottom
of the lake

our guide
a nations pride
holds his breath
then bursts out laughing

my father rises
spits bits and flicks
his stub

glimmering light
thuds as it laps
against a hollow bow

we are drifting now

american bound.

[they say the meek shall inherit the earth]

those *******
no one tells me anything
so no one owes me nuthin'

when living means dying
when dying means I told you so
when a letter arrives (too late)
when a boy no longer fits in his grave
when someone dies
and still wants love

defending myself
by yawning (as if shouting who me?)

afraid of people
or fighting for myself
or smoking grass

but having hatred
baring teeth
biting my thumb (and looking at the marks after)
striking my brother (with a hockey stick)

running off a neighbor's lawn
its ***** -  too fast down and breaking a collar bone
proof gone.

still biting my thumb (and looking at the marks later)

yelling **** the the rich
and bury them with those who live outside themselves

who wear me out
who wet in commercials
transmitting their cleanliness
into our homes

they can no longer stand their filth

they smile as they **** on us

the little people

turning to face me
he dares me
to make eye contact

clenching his fist
grinding his teeth
he sputters

you middle class smurf
I don't owe you jack!

here come the warm jests
here they come droogie

gently smiling
level headed
laughing loudly
heaven scented

being warm they are gentry
being strung-landed
they are like a bad drug
like a bed bug
they don't even like jests

still, bring 'em on
young and all
like infant children
draining *******
too hard to reach each
too hard to touch much

some of them are us
some of them are
just in the way

leave them then
more for us

that's a good question
do I write it out first?

glasses that are cheap
fold into plastic

by the time it takes -
a train passes

hurried enough to find it
I can't locate my keys

lost in a tunnel to save
Time

I've seen fish swim underwater
and turtle heads peek over
and smelled leaf mildew
under blue tarp's dew.

I've sat watching my mother
knitting-in-the-round
as she watched TV
buxom and warm
(whose warm embraces)
won and lost my father
who accepted having children - not his (or hers)
raised them, fed them, sent them to school
and in the end
left.

I listened to punk
and tried to drum to it
then watched TV
and slept on the couch
and woke in a sweat
and kept my head down
and fell into bed.

just like my dad
who ate with us
then drank enough to fall asleep
sitting in his La-Z-boy
head bent to chin
half smoked cigar, half ash, half a glass  

someone who knows him
can't explain.

I love my wife
and see her
and really see who she is
who when her father died
my friend too
knowing his soul was alive
placed the phone by his side
for me to say goodbye

and that was really the kindest
thing a person could do - has done
it is her love that saves me.

and in the wing
and on the shore
and in the plains
where Indians store
the living pines as tall as mine
lifting birches - children's lashes
lay running away
towards me in the dark.