Indigent / outcast
trailer trash
flotsam.
We are products of our surroundings.

Or is it upbringing
Taken / down
Far from home
If it's where the heart is...

"Worthless idiot"
She spits on me
Like her rednecks and *****
Big pimping

Her tricks
Quick to flick
Their Bics and *****
Bringing home the other
Black.

Reynolds wrap and points at the back
Hiding in the thickness
Of weeping veils
Of willows

Outside the picket fences
Just beyond Royale Park mobile
Some kind of
A Community
Missing it's gate
All the times shivoo

Since the South is clammy
Sweat shop swamps
And blistering
Hot like Gold
Coast fires / petrol dragons' breath

(She's a mockery
Of the word -- revelations
Turning
Now napkins and coasters
Tissue for ****** noses.)

Vagrant vespers
In the dark
she lets the men
Inside her double wide

Inebriated bruises
Polka dot excuses

Even in the city
It's funny
How the homeless can hide
Out in the open

Escape.

Indigent / outcast
Trailer trash
Minutiae boy

Barely half / legally life blind
And lucky to be alive
Still in search of
Some kind of

Home.

My regiment?  The New York 156th, B Company.
I’d left the farm in the hands of my wife and her uncle
(Polly and I never had children,
Something I’m grateful for now.)
We’d boarded the train in Kingston,
Figuring we’d have a picnic, see the countryside
Fire a few shots at the Rebels and the odd squirrel
And be home before snowfall.
The picnic was spoiled **** quickly, and not by ants;
We took fire within a half-day of meeting up
With the main body of the corps,
And couldn’t get our heads back up until **** near Appomattox.

Truth told, I don’t remember exactly how many men I killed
(And in some cases, “men” stretches  the truth,
As some of them looked like altar boys from the church,
Same age as the sons I’d never had.)
You find after a while it’s best to lose count,
Do what you can to forget faces
(Now that the beds are soft and the fields are quiet,
The faces come back to disturb my nights then and again.)
Fact is, I’m convinced I survived only because I rode down
What was human about me, or at least the good part;
Best to be like cows or some poor **** stupid ox:
Eat what you can where you can,
Sleep when you might have the option,
And, like the other poor dumb bovine *******
Simply waiting for the cudgel,
Don’t let your thoughts stray elsewhere
Until you’re more kin with the animals than anything else
(I remember Tommy Dunbar from over Esopus way
Brought his dog with him;
It marched with us all the way to Pleasant Hill,
And the only time I cried between enlisting and mustering out
Was when that mongrel snuffed it.)
Anyways, that is all over, and good riddance to it;
I’ve no desire to mount up
With the Grand Army of the Republic types
And go wave the ****** shirt in some convention hall in Albany,
Nor am I inclined to meet up with fellow graybeards
From the other side of the line to sleep in tents
And mock-shoot wooden rifles and imaginary minie *****.
It’s over, and I prefer to keep it that way.
Funny thing, the colonels and chaplains always insisted
That God was on our side, and I suspect their boys did the same.
I suspect (though I’d never tell preacher, of course)
That He left the field quite early in the proceedings.

Ragged clothes on the sidewalk, toddlers murmur and cry
cold morning air where abandoned row houses
smell of whiskey, sage, and molded cotton

diesel exhaust belches into light breezes
forests of burning coffee beans mingle
into their hearth, the children, this is their nostalgia

everywhere leavings of life scatter driven by wind
cover unhoused, distressed, makeshift families
they stand shoeless as fortunate people drive past

Glut of humanity smells of wet newspaper
grey gulls picking at grimy cellophane
cardboard litters muddy sidewalks
above the billboard the wealthy jeer at them

sitting by a liquor store with bars on the windows
shut out of row houses with black wrought iron gates
basement stairwells filled with trash

men in alligator boots ready to lunge
into the lives of slick, bright, vacant women
this is the fate of feminine mother love

Thriving in dead landscapes
growing lost opportunity
under skyscrapers where it is always
almost dusk

The bronze-scorched mud knobbed unhinged sculpture grows
Cinderella down to root knots, ground is grubbed

chapped hats of acorns hit porticoes before snows
honeybees cake their hives closed and wax hubbed

humiliation hardens as color dapples
swelling seed-commas split beneath the frost

piety’s ignored until next year’s apples
night sky is grape-leafed, blackberry sauced

ineffable brutes grow cold to the pinnacle
rhetorical dross groundswells legislations

the long-legged wind tramples our spectacle
rains mock each leaf into pickled munitions

rocks are nothing but hermitages sent by the moon
prescient hardness sets its chin to the ground

hankering for battle, totalitarianism thrives by noon
each soldered twig unloomed, unraveled, uncrowned

we have severed ties to reason’s substantial contents
in the muddle it’s not the empowerment you had

democracy dies bewildered blind with miscontents
unhinged, unconcerned to find the hanging chad

we’re scissored down to our primary chaos all
paralogisms who dwell in a dream that justifies our fall.

Reading John's book
Seal Rock
sitting on a pile of burned driftwood
on the beach
where people are scattering
like jacks
beneath a beach ball
slapped into the air it falls
amongst the group
a few dive for it
someone throws it again

While sanderlings
dance along
the fray of the waves
the sun disappears
in dark clouds

I open Seal Rock put it over my head
as raindrops fall
poetry satisfying so many needs
my wreath, my hat
my shelter
in bustling adversity
I hop over puddles
in sprung rhythm
while gulls
haggle over shells
the words and memories
trickling into my scalp
right off the pages
as we are all climbing
towards the parking lot
stones sliding beneath our feet
a beach ball lodged under a boy’s arm
I keep this slick shingle on top
word pendant
a dream shroud whispering
shedding the storm.