The rain makes even concrete beautiful:
A drop, then two, and then a singing shower
Baptizing the pavement with little pools
That catch the lights and bounce them all about:

Street lights all golden, rippling up and down
And automobile lights slipping across
The other lights, interrupted by feet
Splashing and slipping all the wet way home

And you, dancing about in the puddles -
The rain makes even love more beautiful



(A brief look through the InterGossip does not show that “Rain Makes Even Concrete Beautiful” has been used as the title for a song or poem or other “spot of art” (as Bertie Wooster would say). If it has, please advise me so I can change it.)

I visited a high school the other day
Walking past the police car at the door
Into a vestibule cold-camera-watched
Presenting identification at a window

Efficiently buzzed through into a hall
Which stank of aggressive disinfectant
Among the shoalings a poor unhappy girl
Angrily picked her nose and glared at me

And hissed behind my back as I went my way
(It’s all the fault of the teachers, they say)

A grown man in knee-pants and a cartoon tee
Flip-flopping along in his shower shoes
His hands up in surrender as he runs
A MePhone in his left, water bottle in his right

Nasaling “OmyGod! OmyGod! OmyGod!”
It’s his all-purpose whining upspeak chant
Wailed out for any grade less than an A
Or for a kitty-cute MeTube video

And now for a campus shooting: “Why me!?”
I just didn’t think it would happen here!”


(cf. Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther)

Wait! I thought I saw
A trompe l’oeil trompe-ing along -
I could have been wrong

As one of the blue-jacketed workers
As a defiant student
As a child of poverty
Who never had a bicycle to ride to the Sorbonne

I repudiate your vivid red flags
And your graduate-school keyboard revolution
And your catalogue of cliches’ and cant
And your crawling housefly symbolism

As one of the blue-jacketet workers
As a defiant student
After an all-night shift in the plastics factory
I like my cuppa Earl Grey tea in my bleeding hands

Someday I’ll have a bourgeois balcony
And from it look down on your stereotypes

So many movies on the streaming service
Advert themselves as about forbidden love
Until one wonders if there is any love
Which is not forbidden
                                                 your credit card welcome

An Extraordinary Ordinary Life

            For Mrs. Tinney Davidson, The Waving Grandma
                               Comox, British Columbia

She lived in an ordinary house in an ordinary street
And every day she waved to children passing by
And every day the waved-at children waved back
Because a wave is a good beginning to the day

In the morning she waved the children along to school
And in the evening waved them back again home
And every day the waved-at children waved back
Just like the waves that hug a beach, with love

And then one day she went away, and waved -
And the waved-at children will wave back forever

Extraordinary!

(cf. Here and Now, CBC St. John’s, 26 April 2019)

The manic pixie dream girl of my youth
Curving and tight, scampering along the beach
Her wild black hair flying about as she danced
Teasing all the boys with her sunlit joys

I read to her Rod McKuen by candlelight
While Joni Mitchell on the turntable mused
We played and smoked, and drank good screwcap wine
And played some more, and then she went away

And now - an old lady in a funeral home pew
And I’m not so sure of myself anymore


(“Manic pixie dream girl” is a neologism attributed to film critic Nathan Rubin)

Happy Easter / Pascha to a Russian Orthodox Friend

What sort of man sits in the silent dark
And waits for a small candle to be lit
When he could reach over and flip a switch
For the miracle of electricity

Bravely to course through the building’s wired veins
The march of progress with a touch controlled
By the hand of humanity triumphant
Over Byzantine superstition. Tell us:

What hopeful sort of man waits for the dawn,
For Light to appear from a cold, sealed tomb?

I am a clerisy of one
I argue with myself a lot
And as I speak I know I’ve won
I’m all about me, and you are not

Maybe the Prisoner was Already Dead

     “...he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.”

                               -George Orwell, “A Hanging”

Evening. Maybe he was already dead
Dead long before the State boys strapped him down
And a functionary started an I.V. drip
Left arm? Or right? In a cinder-block room

Fluorescent lights

With windowed faces posted on both sides
Testaments to the protocols of death
The liturgy of falling away because
He and the lads murdered a helpless man

Fluorescent lights

He breathed. And then he didn’t. His bowels let go
And did they put a Band-Aid on the wound?

Fluorescent lights

But now

Let’s go outside and feel the wind

                                                           ­      We live

Our straw boss, now, she hyphenates her name
And there is something frightening about
Those faux dashes stapled between the nouns
Her proper nouns, as if they might slip loose

And fall onto the pages of Debrett’s
As isolated bits of DNA
Dropping their aitches and their gees, oh, please!
So tack that Burberry hyphen back again

Let no proletarian taint be seen -
Made in China becomes Fabrique en Chine

-President Macron

Your privacy is guaranteed
There’s nothing to see here, nothing
He died while trying to escape
Now, then, this might sting a little

Winning the hearts and minds of the people
A light at the end of the tunnel
Lose weight without diet or exercise
We will never sell your information

Uploaded unintentionally
Oh, sure, I’ll pay you back next week

The birds might say, “Oh, look at the pretty humans!
They have waited all winter for us to return!”
And so we have, like seasonal hoteliers
Inviting our guests back for their holiday

The seed-buffets on little metal trays
And little plastic houses in the trees
Bespeak our thoughtful hospitality
For little friends who live upon their wings

Now summering in nest and eave and steeple
The birds must laugh, “Oh look at the people!”

Ubi Petrus

                                          For Inky and Jason


                                      “Ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia”

                                        - St. Ambrose of Milan


Where Peter was, there also was the Tomb --
Blood-sodden dreams cold-rotting in old sin,
The Chalice left unwashed, the Upper Room
A three-days’ grave for hope-forsaken men.

Where Peter is, there also should we be,
Poor pilgrims, his, a-kneel before the Throne
Of Eosian Christendom, and none but he
Is called to lead the Church to eternal Dawn.

Where Peter then will be, there is the Faith,
Transubstantiation, whipped blood, ripped flesh
A solid reality, not a wraith
Of shop-soiled heresies labeled as fresh.

Where Peter is, O Lord, there let us pray,
Poor battered wanderers along Your way.

All Souls’ and All Saints’ were made to disappear
Easter is bad enough with rabbit eggs
And Christmas was appropriated by The People
As a tribute to (belch) Glorious Excess

But no one has taken Good Friday away
With gifts and treats and two-for-one specials
Down at Chez Bubba’s Discount Liquor and Smokes,
And Colonial Auto Parts stays open - why not?

But while the world spins along on its way
A few eccentrics remember Him this day

She will make it a perfect holiday

(“Don’t touch those cookies! They’re for later!”)

Just like the ones on H & G TV

(“Don’t touch Santa! I’ve got him where I want him!”)

With the perfect table and decorations

(“Who moved the Easter bunny, --- --- it!?”)

Exactly like the ones in the magazines

(“Just leave the tree alone; I’LL decorate it!”)

And smiling faces all around the house

(“I expect a little cooperation around here!”)

Perfectly wrapped presents with perfect bows

(“Turn the tree…not that way…LISTEN TO ME!”

Cute Easter baskets for each little child

(“Leave those chocolates alone! You’ll ruin your lunch!”)

Marshaled prettily for a photograph

(“Oh, ----! There’s a grass stain on your church dress!”

Meemaw and Pawpaw will be proud of them

(“---- it! I told you not to play outside in your church dress!”)

The children’s table is just like a picture

(“Not yet!  We haven’t even said the  ----ed grace!”)

A perfect holiday, or she’ll just die -
No matter how many children are made to cry

One hears of a load of codswallop
But no one knows what a codswallop is
And only by the load, or can you buy a dollop?
And just who is in the codswallop biz?

Rebound!

I don’t understand basketball at all
Women and men run around in funny clothes
Yelling a lot while keeping a basketball
From each other in a shoe-slapping gym

Rebound!

And they yell “REBOUND!” more than anything else
And I hear each “REBOUND!” echoing about
And shoes slide-squeaking on the wooden floor
And I have no idea what any of it means

Rebound!

I only know that roundballers are tall

Beyond that

I don’t understand basketball at all

Rebound!

Nothing is more pragmatic than a votive light
A candlelight
A little light
A prayer light

Notre Dame is much more than a place of worship
iconic Notre Dame is much more than
a church icon Notre Dame is much more
than a place of Worship icon Notre Dame

is much more than a church iconic
Notre Dame is much more than a place of worship
iconic Notre Dame is much more than
a church icon Notre Dame is much more

than a place of Worship icon Notre Dame
is much more than a church iconic

She giggles, soft-hidden behind the green
And summer-teases, a shimmer in the air
She peeks at him and laughs, this fairy queen
With mischief in her eyes and flowers in her hair  

While through the forest glades our young, fresh knight
Must keep his path as duty to his King
She dances by him, laughing, lithe, and light
What will he have - chapel, or fairy-ring?

And while he makes his vows, she all unseen -
She giggles, soft-hidden behind the green

A mist, but not of memories or ghosts,
And not a silent mist - a noisy one
Drifts darkly over this altar to the past
The docent pauses for each motor home

Gear-growling up the unexpected *****
Along the road from that point to this one
Well-paved and posted: fifteen miles per hour

For cell-‘phone shots where each historic death
Is marked with stones among the sunlit grass
The docent speaks of her peoples: Cheyenne,
Arapaho, Sioux, and soldier boys blue

With frequent and reflective pauses as
A Winnebago circles Last Stand Hill

For Riley and His Friend Bailey


In the beginning -
                                     we humans were primitives
Existing as crude hunter-gatherers
Quite unaware of any higher thought
And curiously unaware of love

But then we were discovered by The Dog

Who taught us the glorious mystery of play
And how to laze throughout sweet summer days
To contemplate, to cuddle, and to care -
To care about beings beyond ourselves

Because we were accepted by The Dog

Through God’s intended, love-barked dialogue
We pray we may be worthy of The Dog

It’s not enough that words are taken wrong
Misused and misplaced where they should not be
Cut up and pasted down as thought-traps set
To stop poor pilgrims on their search for truth

But even worse: we push ourselves aside
To follow ephemeral bellowings
In passive obedience to the noises
Of settled senescence posing as youth

It’s not enough that words are taken wrong
But even worse: we push ourselves aside

If you annoy a Sicilian woman
She will fling herself at you shrieking,
Her hair and eyes wild with rage; she’ll plunge a dagger
Into your heart three times before you fall

And then she’ll spit on your corpse and curse your memory

If you annoy a French woman
She will fling at you a stiletto heel
Or a saucepan (with sauce veloute’, oui!)
Either one will take you down, mon ami

And then she’ll dial a friend for company

If you annoy a Russian woman
She will make a discreet telephone call
And when in spring the ice of the Neva thaws
Your frozen body will at last pop up

And then she’ll write a poem in your memory

If you annoy an English woman
She will smile sweetly, and poison your tea
And as you collapse, gasping desperately for breath
She will smile again, and ask if anything’s wrong

And then she’ll ring for Jeeves to tidy up

Finally:

A Canadian woman  (I’m telling no tales) -
You mess with her, and you’re bait for the whales!

                               -fin- (so to speak)

One reads that the dear departed was very
Holy; indeed, he was God’s emissary
Instant sainthood in the mortuary
(One longs to read an honest obituary)

One should never regret coming away
From any crowd, and certainly not now:
Their loving voices are raised in chants of hate
And their funny hats aren’t funny at all

Their ultimate freedom is the freedom to
Obey with love the loudest loving leader
Who twists their supplicant hands to fists of love
For beating harmony into us all

One will never regret coming away
From any crowd, and certainly not today

When streaming rain obscures your window pane
You want to be alone, among your thoughts
And no one knows exactly why that’s so
But yes, you are at peace this afternoon

They say the falling barometric pressure
Makes you sleepy, but the rain knows better
The drowsing rain, it wants to sing to you
And tuck you softly into a dream of love

So close your eyes, and as the little book slips
Onto your lap, the rain sighs with your lips

-attributed to Stalin
           in a note forbidding the arrest of Boris Pasternak

Stalin and Caesar had no use for dreamers
Stern men of destiny prefer strong tools
To execute their leader’s will, and yet
They cry and beg when they are eventually shot

Cloud-dwellers camouflage themselves with words
And shift their sails but not their souls, and keep
Their little ships on course straight to the stars
Straight on until the dawn they help to light

Courage is in your dreams and words and works
May it please God that Stalin has no use

For you

Ive been to the dentist

She gave ma a happy pill ME a happy pill, not Ma a happy pill

Tree frogs are my favotire amphibians there so cute ya wanna buy them an ice cream but there aint no bug ice scream

Yes I’m fine than k you

Gosh this is still fun

And they gave me a new toothbrush although I use the super-golly-gee-****-quadro-toothbrush-thing-that-lights-up-and-s­tuff

Yes the pill is wearing off sure
wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Why do they all put their hands in my mouth at the same time

Lets see thats four hands

And then they yell at me to relax

But yeah I got a pill qnd I am sooooooooooooooooooo relaxed

My teeth are fine

My teeth are green no wait my teeth or clean because if they were green they wouldn’t be clean

Dr. Joyce is the best

There’s still something to be said for tree frogs

Yes I can walk to the car whoops

Yes I can opine the passenger door

Yes I can belt my seat fashion

Or somethingthis has been fun

Thank you yes six monyhsts…

Upon Reading a Patronizing Review of Ferlinghetti’s Delightful and Revelatory Entertainment, Little Boy



The only problem with the Proletariat
Is obeying the pretentious ***** that
Insist on calling us the Proletariat -

Resist their Insist!

For I will not be labeled by some artsy-crat

I was just passing through
You didn’t know me; I didn’t know you
But I should have known you’d steal from me
When you told me to Have a Blessed Day

You never came back with the change
And that is sad. We have come to accept the lies
Of praychurs, presidents, and prime ministers
But one expects better of Sonic waitresses

And  you told me to Have a Blessed Day

So you’re 40 cents to the bad, that’s true
But I’ve got the dollar I was going to tip you

And, hey, y’all have a blessed day, y’hear?


(May God bless her for really-real; generational poverty sees things differently, and, anyway, she may have learned it from the 501C3 preacher-man.)

A Secretary-Receptionist Faces the Future - “I Know Where the Door Is, You Little Police Academy Dropout.”

The name on the building changed again today
I must apply for my own job, they say
A smarmer wants more work for much less pay
It’s time to reconstruct my resume’

I once was great with videotape and film
And could type fifty-five words a minute
On an IBM Selectric; my skills are dim
The boy-boss taps on a plastic box - what’s in it?

For forty years I ruled the company’s ground floor -
Security, with a sneer, shows me the door

Whisper Your Area 51

                  “Russian Aircraft Flies Over Area 51…”

                        -U.K. Daily Mail, 31 March 2019

Each of us is an Area 51
In hiding from a psychic bombing run
Behind the barbed-wire fences of our senses
Beneath the radar of our consequences

Our secrets are so secret that even we
Don’t know what they might be, could be, will be
Because the slide-rule calculating hearts
Can only slip between odd-numbered parts

Each of us is an Area 51
Playing hide-and-go-seek
                                                   but not for fun

Of course one asks what was the library doing
With a pipe wrench.

                                 -The End-

Before the Mass I went to light for you
A Penny Candle (it’s a ****** now)
And with it send a prayer up through the air
Throughout the liturgy, throughout the night

But, oh, how sad that it could not be so
For all the little paper matches were damp
And all I have to offer you today
Are heaps of cardboard strips in a little tray

But even so: within my heart, you know
There is for you forever a votive glow



(****** - a Canadian dollar, but of course one needn’t put in a coin at all)

A Temporary, Part-Time, Adjunct Faculty Instructor of No  
    Significance Whatsoever at a Little Cinder-Block Community
      College Unknown to Anyone Beyond the Interstate Bypass
     Asks the Most Important Question About Admissions Bribery


Oh, please forgive this seeming diatribe
But I am one of the scrivening tribe
A poor Chaucerian scholar, a scribe

Who asks

Why doesn’t anyone offer me a bribe?

“Men Ditch Suits, and Retailers Struggle to Adapt”

                      -Wall Street Journal, 25 March 2019

We all must be good comrades now
We all must wear good comradewear
As if we worked with wrench and plough
Instead of cruising an office chair

We all must be good comrades, da!
And from one’s well-lit office space
Sneer at “the suits” - so long, Grandpa!
And so decolonise this place

We all must be good comrades now -
But have you ever milked a cow?

A line cook at Denny’s (must have own pans)
Is an artist, accomplished in assemblage
Compositions of eggs (rather like Cezanne’s)
Toast, bacon, waffles for his decoupage

His gesso is the window layered in steam
Built of reflections and condensation
Hinting at the flowing Interstate stream
Beyond the No Smoking pumping station

The line cook has indeed his pans and plans -
Art, as the muse of cookery commands

Some have said that the bravest thing we do
Is to get up each morning and face the dawn
It may be so. The light is grey and cold
There seem to be no reasons to go on

And yet - the morning sun begins to kiss
The sensitive, delicate springtime leaves
Turning their own hopes to the morning sun
Stretching their chloroplasts awake to life

So even as sunlight embraces the tree
So maybe there will be kisses - we’ll see!

A Hasty Partisan Response to the Mueller Report

                      “And art made tongue-tied by authority”

                         -Sonnet 66, often quoted by Pasternak

The Russian reports on my desk include:

Selected Poems, Yevtushenko
The Possessed, Dostoyevsky
The Zhivago Affair, Finn and Couvee
The Complete Poems of Anna Ahkmatova
August 1914, Solzhenitsyn

And some of them unread, some of them read
And better read than red, so someone said
Some of them shelved (We and The House of the Dead)
But now I’m going to work the flower bed

And what century is it outside?  1


1 Pasternak

“He is a dreamer; let us leave him – pass.” Julius Caesar I.ii.24

Strident philosophers at Hyde Park Corner
Poor buskers at Queen Victoria’s feet
Chalk artists remaking the pavement as Rome
A Seventh Sister with her folk guitar

These are not dreamers passive in their beds
Or supplicants awaiting permission:
They are the worker bees; they know of pain
And sweat, and sunstroke in the fields - and truth

When a sidewalk artist notes that the Ides
Have come, Caesar indeed should turn to hear

Whether I am on the right side of history
Is a fantasy and an irrelevancy -
History had better be on the right side of me

Hart-Bevil Cemetery, Tyler County, Texas



From service as Companions of the Conqueror
To the democracy of death and dust


This was family land in the long ago
Now alienated from the living
Accessible through permissions and locks
But we and the ghosts are okay with that

They say that only four of them were hanged
The dealer in false deeds died of old age
Some possibly were saints; hard to believe
For after all, we are de Beauville’s kin

From Normandy, and then green Chesterton
And then dispersed to the colonies
At the convenience of His Majesty
De Beauvilles and Bevilles and then Bevils

And some are buried on this lonely knoll
Dim mossy bones and stones among the pines
Across the fence a little heap of glass
Broken flower vases from the dime store


Now the democracy of dust and death
But once
                    Companions of the Conqueror

We have no fine old paneling of oak
No ancient silver on a sideboard new
When Charles the First still wore his handsome head
We have no Latin, we may not smoke, but still -

Between the cinder blocks and coffee urn
Dining upon the finest plastic foam
We laugh at yarns that Saint Augustine thought
Well out of date when Africa lost Rome

We have no fine old paneling of oak
But every day we share a fine old joke

The spring morning was chill when from its nest
A young wasp fell, helpless and young
Upon the ground, needing the warmth of the sun
To spread its tiny dragon’s wings into new life

A creature of God, needing only an hour
To gain its strength, and so to live the life
Destined for it, its appointed mission
In the unknowable Plan of Creation

It seemed to beg for mercy with each desperate breath
And so with great care I crushed it to death

Saint Joseph in a dreary winter night
Took to himself a newborn not his own,
Who yet is always his, the Child of Light
Whose crib Saint Joseph knew to be a throne

Saint Joseph shows men truth: each child is ours,
Adopted by each good man upon birth;
True fatherhood ordained in starlit hours
And ratified in Heaven and on earth.

Saint Joseph is the man who looked into
The eyes of Mary in her happy youth;
This strong man looked into her eyes and knew
She bore within her all eternal Truth.

Our witness is Saint Joseph, ever just:
God calls each man to take each child in trust.

Your grandmother and I are the only ones
Who listen still to Rod McKuen, and dream
Of Mission Beach ‘way back in ‘68
Or maybe not so far back after all

The sands still sing of sea and salt and seals
There are no watchful clocks to time our hopes
No calendars to tell us we are old
As we slow dance to a tiny transistor

But not with each other, not any more
For I had my orders, and she had hers

Sweet music on the Mustang’s radio
We’re sitting in her parents’ driveway

And sort of talking about the movie
And sort of talking about poetry and life

Frost is settling on the hood of the car
But all is warm in our bubble of love

Until

Our kiss is interrupted by the flickering
Of the parental, watchful front porch light

We sigh. We kiss. The censorial eye -
It orders me away  - “That’s all! Bye-bye!”

                      (Oh, flick that porch light anyway!)