A living skin, a skein of green briars
where a half-hinged door is wagged by the wind

Good-natured god, decay’s stigmata-stained spires
nettles paint the stairs splotch patterned, olive skinned

Glass window shards grab a slip of silk curtain
pick-pocket beetles engrave brute luck broadside

Chimney thrushes cabined in ash are certain
cynicism’s growing sums are rectified

Blue jays opine time’s cuckoo clock mocking
worms ply enormous copses, scrawl casts of clay

Autumn gusts and rains whirl detritus stocking
flung colors Pollocked, clutter’s chaos array

Hours dissolve the acorns and soft seeds scatter
as grasses grown tall have turned light yellow

architecture’s flourishes are picked off
crumbled valuables filched and turned to dirt

tumult’s passages dug the driveway’s trough
carrion feeders pull black quills from their shirt

slugs smear a rainbow trail and mice scurry
collapsed walls fall to the slush of leaf slurry

they’re pouring out of the
woodwork
those pretentious machiavellians
in ailing albino frames
eccentric masked figures
milling about the glow light
like night moths
in a london fog

lunatic gazers
with seeping moles
pinned by frogmen and twine
spider climbers
in hell fire
splitting seams
on the fading
and hideous ink

guards of the perch
stand on hades hand
while monsters and demons
with severed limbs
taunt the condemned
and wanting
souls of the ******

cauldron fire
in blood red sky
silent screams
hack and wheeze
gas lines broken
words unspoken
teetering backwards
in the dark shadows
of a phantom abyss

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.

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

She lived along the Atlantic coast
and had a collection of lobster pots
by the porch
and her lawn was trimmed for croquet
smelled of clams at low tide
the house was set near barnacle rocks
just beyond a stand of trees.

I found her by looking in a phonebook
next to her name it said, "Poetry Journals,"
so I called the number, and said I was on my way.
"Is that ok?" I added hesitantly.

“Well, yes,” she laughed, “You can come buy one.”
I passed the sign for fresh eggs
and arrived at a black wrought iron gate that said,
"Poetry Journals - 2 for $5.00."

“You’re the first one
who’s ever made it all the way to the house for a journal…”
“In four dozen years,"
she said.
Then she asked,
“What’s your name?”

“I don’t really have a name," I said.
She nodded and understood.
She'd heard from Byron
that the Banshee drags souls out to sea
but sometimes the nameless
manage to float back looking for poetry
these lost ones are like driftwood
bringing a sense of chilly dusk
a retrospective on the sea
in a seashell
appearing by happenstance
at low tide
"yes, I hear a distant mumble of waves,"
she might have said of me
I was one of the lost
turning her porch into a quay of despair
the first one in almost 50 years
who had made it so far
to latch on
until high tide
when the rush of sea returned
washed me out again clinging for dear life
to a raft of poetry