I can't tell if any fleas
Have smaller fleas upon them;
But I can feel that on these fleas
Are giant jaws; and toothsome.

These fleas are opportunists, sure,
They hop from leg, to arm, to floor;
Each leaves behind a bit of gore:
There's nothing smaller I abhor.

They're nearly invisible and yet
Upon me I can feel them set;
And tear out great big chunks of- Nyet!
A bigger fiend, I've never met.

I was gagging on poetry
And nothing could help:

I was gagging on poetry
So they let me lay my head
On Emily's desk
And her inkwell spilled.

I was gagging on poetry
And they covered me up
With Whitman's army blanket
On which I promptly threw up.

I was gagging on poetry
And the Poet Laureate
Sent me a get well bouquet
Of forget me knots.

I was gagging on poetry
And all my poems
Kept getting rejected
For Selective Service.

I was gagging on poetry
And they performed
The Heimlich maneuver

And up came
Twelve autobiographical
Sketches of poets

Thirteen anthologies

Three missing manuscripts

Two thesaurus books

One rhyming dictionary

And my good luck eraser.

Come to the Psychopath's Junction
For a time you may never forget;
We've got mystery and ****** and mayhem,
For some hours that you'll never regret.

Come to the Psychopath's Junction
We have tours and stories to chill;
And we'll push you down steps to the basement,
And there we'll forcefeed you some swill.

Come to the Psychopath's Junction
Where we have all new torture devices,
And we'll tie you up, and then use them on you;
And won't have to think about it twice.

Come to the Psychopath's Junction
Where we'll do terrible things just to you;
And if you survive and miraculously escape-
You can invite your friends to come too!

They don't want to hear it
These minutes of a life; this synopsis
That could only make sense to you
Even if it doesn't.
It's your baby, your Alcatraz, your Auschwitz;
Don't expect any sympathy
And then they won't bare their own scars
Of things you haven't even dreamed of.

Dig a hole and bury that pain in secret,
Like a cat buries its dung,
In the dead of night.
Paste on a fake, plastic smile
In a bright color, early next morning.
Life is shallow, because we are selfish
In our weakness-
How about pink?

I think that I shall never see
A thing as odd as eight baby
Eight baby from a single mother
Makes me roll my eyes- oh brother
Oh sister oh brother oh sister oh yeah
Mother looked like a Guernsey cow
Is there milk enough- I don't see how?

Eight colic'd infants wailing in the night-
Draw back, draw back- go fly a kite
Eight fitful babies screaming in duress-
Moved far away left no forwarding address
Eight poopy babies dragging two pound diapers
Went to the car wash and used the windshield wipers
Eight teething babies wrangling on the bed-
Picked up a gun and blew off her head.

When you first wake up after sleeping
If you will hold very still,
You will realize that you are holding in your mouth
An exquisite glass form of a dream
Which you have been blowing all night,
With every exhalation forced out

And it is like nobody else's
And has never before been seen;
For each of us is like a kaleidoscope
And we include different layers in our glass,
Taking it all from within ourselves;
The exact parts needed for the form we are making,

Taking the pieces from other dimensions;
Things which might seem untrue in this one,
But are real as we can make them
When our dreaming eyes and fingers
Lift them from our waiting wholeness,
In the night time of our stillness

When we finally become one patent vehicle,
And the dream begins to grow then, like the smallest bubble;
A stained glass fetus of our blooming individuality
Made only for, only by us;
As fragile as any snowflake,
As ephemeral as any memory.

To another shirking duty do I die
Swarmed by specious crowding thoughts that sped  
We wed in black, so dreaded black to tie  
The altars bones of white that lined our bed  
And followed constellations in our heads.  

My addled weight of whetstone you've become  
With tons of stones in wooden bladed sling  
Past summers clouded face hung heaven's sun  
On bark you tried to dry the deadest things  
And on my strumming soul threadbare you'd sing.  

The nightmares ran past colored vats of dye  
As shifting shapes geometrized the rune  
What dyed the pigment in your furthest eye  
Was joined with the paler canvas tones
And cracked the varnished face our pebbled moon.

Looking into the large bathroom mirror
Before the bath
I catch a glimpse, a flash of something
A darkened area of discoloration
Almost as if some future dead thing now inhabits me:
A too old cut of meat turned a familiar greenish hue
Dead corpse waiting to sprout
A glaze eyed figure in the haunted house.
The spot may reveal itself on the face,
Or along a shoulder or arm. Just for a second.
Looking again, it was only my imagination.
The infamous man who dug up graves
To take parts of the bodies, spoke of a woman's body,
That it flushed red where he began to take off
A part of it, by cutting it.
Even that dead for a week body knew
Something violent was being done to it
And stories abound of the still-growing hair, fingernails..
Not just haunted tales to scare children
It seems a little bit of death resides in the living
And a touch of aliveness remains even in death:
The boundaries of when we are transformed
Into house of wax characters
Are never as clear as medical textbooks imply.

What must inspire the vagaries of the wind;
Such a variable vocal cord must it wear-
To mimic the voices of so many beings,
And still beneath doors, around corners it bends:
But seems less like a fast flowing column of air,
So that each second, we expect to be seeing
The creature that to anguish it’s voice has lent.
As if the hearts grief has been at once laid bare,
And all the pent- up melancholy given wing.
Ceaseless lamentations rise up and are sent
To the same lone spot where flings curse or prayer.
After hours spent howling, it may begin to sing-
Who can say sorry when at last it has went.
Peace reigns when it abides in its lair.
A stirred- up breeze few good things brings-
And what makes moan when there is no pain?

The cruciferous prophet sticks in my teeth-
I think I'd rather have a tidbit, of thief;
All covered, of course, in a vinegar sauce
With just a light dusting, of the true cross.

Some rarefied spleen, set sideboard,
With red vintage wine; A.D. thirty-four
Frankincense and Myrrh, baked in aspic;
And saved for last, Shroud Flambe: digestif.

They said he was known, to talk to his axe
As if it were the best comrade of his,
Amid the rumors about, he had a rich father
Must have fueled his rancor; the life he had missed.

So local horse slaughterer, became his career,
Ready day and night, with axe in his bag;
Sick and old cows, horses and mules,
Made short work with his axe, of the ailing Nag.

It was his work and he was quite good,
Most skillful with axe; and strong and fast.
With his constant friend, in it's home, the bag,
There's many an animal, breathed it's last.

His work left a smell, upon his person;
Some sick horses had the smell within,
And a small girl at play outside, could not miss
The man going by, with strange smell on him.

Under the radar, he plied his trade,
Coming and going, near invisibly;
Never suspected, if he was the one
Gave fatal blows their timely delivery.

Like a bad choice come back, from the past
To haunt the rich miser, in his worldly domain
Of such stern stuff, there's no doubt he'd refuse
To his fatal undoing, and terminal pain.

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...

Lonely, deep, swift moments I commune with you,
Looking through my open window into blue,
Uncharted, star-filled, never-ending space
That holds the cherished image of your face.

Longings I would tell you in sweet, sudden word,
Catching in my throat, are stilled, and never heard;
And lovely, unsaid thoughts surge up anew
To wing across the darkness, seeking you.

Knowing not the time and distance in between,
Silently and eagerly, by eyes unseen;
Across the star-filled, never-ending blue
My heart springs up and runs away to you.

I love you terribly, and because of it
I am become completely impotent.
And I love you impotently,
And that is a terrible thing to behold.
I love you patiently
Because the root of me is a grave impatience,
And I love you impatiently
Lest the present root begin to die in earnest.
My flesh loves the scarlet sin in all of you;
Being that itself is made entirely of ruby-blooded flesh.
And my spirit loves the resounding hollowness
Of your souls thin, empty rails.

My love is an imperturbable being
That is too soon ground beneath your wheel, like an acorn;
And it is an impenetrable wheel
Which pulls me under, on it's return travel around.
This love is a decomposing hand
That's rising up fist-like, out of a newly closed grave
To grab my ankle as I run past, trying to scream out your name,
Through some shadowed cemetery, at some ungodly hour
In a world that looks suspiciously like this one.

And this love is a panting hound,
Trying to rebury its last remaining bone scrap of hope
With two lame legs impeding;
While this love, a one-eyed crow
Sits taciturn in a tree, just above a tiny, dead sparrow-
And fluffs its jet feathers, unconcernedly.

If we set the old Master's paintings ablaze
Just for a minute; a few micro-seconds,
The paint liquifies, sends up it's medicinal scent;
Lazuline blue and lead white,
Coloring the smoke lent to heaven,
Pulling the soul from out the old vellums;
Freeing the subjects from their long, indentured service.
Smoking, it leaves a paint dotted canvas behind,
Like a dot to dot, of some strangely familiar drawing,
The edges curling inward, like a dying flower at dusk.

We had snowflake symphonies,
And foreplay arguments-
So long as we both shall live;
So long as we both shall live.

We had silverware tympanies,
In tiny apartments-
So long as we both shall live;
So long as we both shall live.

We argued every numbered day,
But we could never stay away-
So long as we both shall live;
So long as we both shall live.

We watched as love stretched out his wings,
We listened just to hear him sing-
For love, he's brought us every thing;
So long as we both shall live.

Decidedly blase, as the hours tumble past
If divinatory; as the strains of old fugues
That once roused us to incoherent victories.

Never mind that the **** crowed thrice,
Ere you forgot our names-
And lord, the company you keep

Locked in that old hobnail chest;
How you'd be disdained, were it known
The lampshades here drink old *****

Under a goat-grey sky, at morning
And your key's sloppy turning, meteor-like
On its slow approach, at decoding the lock.

But sleeping fitfully now, on the porch,
Your muddy shoes can tell no tales
Of your evenings holy grails.

Three-two-one, Boom!
Said the guns,
Of Eric and Dylan.


Eric portrayed as mastermind,
Dylan as the follower, the disciple;
Violence: the school of after-hours.


Just say no to sawed-offs,
They proclaimed, laughing;
But by the end they were saying, hell yes.


Eric's nose broken by the kickback,
As he played a game of hide and seek
Under a library table.


But the fun wore off, alas;
The fantasy lived out was not as fulfilling
As all the dreams they'd shared.


So they went on to hell together
To see what trouble they could raise there-
And left us all holding the bag.

Now I'm in the turnips and string beans of poetry:
It's like, you think you'll grow up some day
And live in a two story house with swimming pool,
And a two car garage, with a six pack driveway.
Things turn out differently, though you might think
You'd spend whole days devouring Dickinson, Keats, and Shelley,
Drinking fine wines with tidbits of exotic cheese.

Then you find out you'll live in a one car rented garage apartment,
Over a couple always yelling or making love-
There's no in-between; and you never know which it'll be
And if you're mistaken for the significant other you might get
Bopped with a lady's spiked heel or an army boot.

Then you find out that you're the couple
But you're always too busy to make love;
Love is no longer scheduled like bowling night,
It all depends on uncluttered horizontal surfaces and spare minutes-
And the wine turns into beer, when you can afford it
And the nightly budget pizza is the only dough you'll get
It's constipating; but the words still get squeezed out.

And the poets you're reading now aren't dead:
They're urbanely unkempt, and you know them personally,
All their quirky habits; writing poems at bus stops
In a voluble rush; writing words on cafe napkins,
On discarded want ads and torn paper sacks;
And none of them are well known, and none of them are rich.

But they're poets all the same, they live and breathe
The written word, and you're no different, certainly no better,
All of you shooting up words and slang nightly,
Weighing out the soul of the latest idiom,
Choking on cheap cigar smoke and wishing you'd written that,
And thinking you could have done it worse-
And suddenly some night, you look around you

You realize you're living poetry, and you don't care anymore
About rich and famous- because now it's your addiction;
None of that mattered anyway, for only poetry holds any reality now.
Everything else is imaginary, and all the poets started out this way;
Nobody knew them or gave a rat's ***,
And they went on writing just the same
As if it were the most important job on earth they'd been given.

Woke up, it was Saturday,
Looked out in the driveway:
There was the car,
On it's rubber-tired splendor;
Got behind the wheel, smiling
Drove and drove, for miles away-


Didn't really want to get anywhere;
Just wanted to go driving, drive..


Went to the meeting,
Wearing my best suit:
Took notes, smiled,
While I watched the clock above
Took names and numbers,
Told them we'd be in touch-


Didn't really want to get anywhere;
Just wanted to go driving, drive..


Made an appointment,
With my best lover:
Wined, dined, flowers and all;
Made love all night,
In the smiling moonlight
But I left in the morning-


Didn't really want to get anywhere;
Just wanted to go driving, drive..


Went to the cemetery
To see some old friends there.
Sat on the grass, and with a smile
Told them how it's been;
Nothing's really changed
Since they've been away-


They said they never really wanted to get anywhere
Just wanted to go driving, drive..