The axe is blood red, by the worn churchyard door,
And there's a dark moisture where it's usually dry:
The pigeons are quiet now and no longer cooing;
For the ones who survived must fly higher than high.

So fly away Peter, fly away Paul;
Don't be found hanging round the churchyard no more.

The children are weeping and rubbing their eyes
As the feather's go tumbling, unanchored and free;
****** clumps clinging, to bush and to vine,
And a small pile of birds at the foot of a tree.

So fly away Peter, fly away Paul;
Don't be found hanging round the churchyard no more.

The attacks were unwarranted; murderous rage:
Something gone awry, in the caretaker's mind;
So he pulled out his coat sleeve the long skinny blade,
Putting to rout all the birds and their kind.

So fly away Peter, fly away Paul;
Don't be found hanging round the churchyard no more

Now the children have nightmares, which rouse them from sleep,
But it's too late to save their young eyes from the sight;
And the mute beaks are opening up toward the sky,
While they beat bloodied feathers through long endless nights.

So fly away Peter, fly away Paul;
Don't be found hanging round the churchyard no more.

I always wanted to be that random style of writer
Writing about things which have no connection
In reality but they are connective only by the ingenuity
Of his genuflection; the circumvention of his
Circuitous routing, his plaintive perturbing petulance
Which insists on stacking things of different orders
Flying birds together of different species
If I could write something of the ticking of clocks
Not as though the ticking were of premeditated duration
Embedded in metal tracks around perimeters
Of prevaricated die-cast hours; but as though the ticking
Were only a random fixture of a theoretical day
In which random clocks ticking played a minor role
During the still life of which a poet happened along
And copied it all down dutifully, not caring if
Ticking clocks were related to pitchers of Forsythia
Or falling off of cliffs into the Aegean;
The only task of the poet to capture it all
And let the reader sort it out later
In the random tracks of his circuitous brain:
Whether the pitcher was full of sea
Or the sea was stealing into the pitcher
One blue, serendipitous drop at a time
And where no clocks were keeping time.

If one could make dreams into poems,
I would have such a wealth of material-
Although it might be missing continuity,
And whoever appeared in it might suddenly turn,
With no warning, into someone or something else-
A white rabbit, or an elf, or a Grecian column;
Rooms into swimming pools, and such.
Lucid dreams have signposts to watch for:
Letters and numbers will not behave,
And keep playing musical chairs each time
You look at them, and something about clocks-
Wait am I asleep yet?
More like a lucid dream is poetry dreaming;
We can control everything according
To the strength of our minds attention.
The unconscious is a slippery eel;
But it pops up in poems too sometimes.
In a lucid poem, then, you could still
Pinch yourself? Just to check-
Let me dream about that some more..
I’ll get back to you…

To he whose fingers itch to feel her breath,
Dragging her boldly, through tall fields of grass;
She whose flowering bough is stillborn death,
The graveyard plot's the last place she will pass.

Beauty is the short answer of the muse,
To meet the cymbal crash of longing storm;
It's headlong rush, to light the shortest fuse;
Frightening fury, to douse the trees lantern.

The last hour springs, like whistling in the wind
Pliant captive, makes her way toward him.
His grasp less tender, than were any vise
Broken in his grasp, her bright eyes grown dim.

If even love could be borrowed or stole-
All live in danger of filling that hole.

Flowers in the basket, rotting
Gloves hang by the stairway, dripping
Friends are frantically calling, calling
While my thoughts are slipping, slipping

Roses bloom on faded curtains
Children outside, stairing, stairing
More brilliant dye has stained the cloth
While I sit not caring, caring

Upstairs all is still and silent
Nothing moves inside the gloom
All the voices, never ceasing
Echo in the tomb, the tomb.

The dog at the Saloon door, they saw
Who said in shaking voice, so raw
"I'm looking for the man
Down on the Rio Grande-
I'm looking for the man, that shot my paw."

A mechanic on a days trip from Brazil
Ran down a parrot on the crest of a hill
The beak was asunder, horribly rent
The mechanic swore complete recompense
Fine, said the parrot, I'll send you my bill...