I remember a childhood warning
that cautioned against "impure thoughts"
as though the mind were a tidy bowl
and it could be cleansed with a johnny mop!

Old men tell stories to recruit the young                                                            ­  
and they listen
'round
that dancing fire,
tales of heroes
that do god's bidding
with swords and holy shield words,
smiting infidels that would, if not stopped,
they're told, "violate our women",
but these very women know all too well
that the morrow will be a land of sorrow,
mounded high with soulless bodies too numerous to tally.

I find
you
once again
sleeping on my bed,
you slinky black self satisfied *****.

Am I the guy you want to hang love on, Darlin'
Am I the guy you want for your last name?

Am I the belt loops for you, Darlin'
Am I the boots you'll be shinning?

Am I the rut you want your wheels in, Darlin'
Am I the Harley you want to be riding?

Am I the guy you want to hang your love on, Darlin'
Am I the guy you want for your last name?

Am I the mountain you want climbing,
Am I the trail you want to be hiking

Am I the guy you want to hang love on, Darlin'
Am I the guy you want for your last name?

Am I the belt loops for you, Darlin'
Am I the buckle you'll be shinning?

Am I the boots you'll be pull'in
Am I the song you'll be sing'in

Am I the guy you want to hang love on, Darlin'
Am I the guy you will take your name?

I know that I'm the guy that needs your love'in
Will you take my name?
Darlin', will you take my name?

====
* I ain't no song writer, so have at it.  
Don't be bashful, you got any advice
on improving this ballad plez post,
including take that dang ditty out and bury the **** thang.

Married at fourteen,
A whisper in a ram's horn,
From ****** bliss
To spit up and ****
In less than a year.
Add ten more years,
Seven babies,
And fifty tons of laundry.
"Ma,
"Da says the taters gone bad."
Could death be more happy?

The improbability of you,
Shooting star,
Birthed in the caldera
Of a winged widget
Ejecting celestial dust,
Now your dance floor
Is the Universe.
And you dance and dance
to the delight of your seasons,
Inspiring your myriad friends.

were we to meet,
nose to nose,
fingers handily laced,
thigh to thigh,
knee to knee,
toe to toe,
lips to lips,
what passed between,
a sigh,
i hope,
that would cancel any speech.

Vespers,
Tidal time pours homeward,
Criers cry,
Lamplighters light,
Cats seek mice or mates,
Prey pray
For one more daybreak.

It doesn't matter how many times I face,
a blank page,
its the yet unfilled rind
that sours my stomach.
Some of these poems write themselves.
I can never tell how long they've been molding,
no doubt some for decades,
ruminating, aging like fine cellar cheese,
while other poems are curdles of the moment,
milked from the air.

"Morning light, dear one."
'You were great last night', "I was?!"
'Again', your rejoinder.

Tenacious ice spike,
A Sun lit jewel at noon,
drip, drip, drip, drip, pool.

You,
with your pyrite tooth
and zirconia lobes,
those decades of *******
native vitality
for made in asia
Trinketronics!

I know this clearing
where the berries burgeon,
but blind to covetous birds,
though one still hears their sweet rill.
They, the berries, are ripe with sun kiss.
We'll make a day of it.
I'll bring a wine basket, a blanket -
You say,  "I'll find the pails?"
If all goes well,
we'll have little time for them.
Let's be off, my dear.

From the 8th floor
I can hear an ambulance siren
wailing the boxed night,
who is inside is out of sight,
a heart attack, a street fight?
Somewhere in that labyrinth down there
is a masked doctor,
a pair of surgical gloves,
and a sharp knife.

mind is mirror,
god of the puppet show,
string dancers prance
to their reflections
within this bony theater,
kissed at birth
by the lips of Venus,
and eternally embraced
by the arms of Elysia.

Would that I were the first
to use the phrase "private dancer."
In my thoughts you are arabesque,
a gracefully spinning shadow projected upon my naked walls,
your slender arms and hands, and fingers extended tall
en pointe in the center of my cupped palms
and in my heart, in unison, we are pas de deux.

Of all the body's
in and outie places
the daffiest part
has got to be
the umbilicus,
how sillycus
to have the mother straw
embedded so very far
from the face's ******* lippicus.

I think of you
at the oddest times,
and the strangest places,
as if I were an air show pilot
with the stick pulled back
and the rudders set in place,
and within that ******, roar, and airframe shake
I notice that in my chest there beats a heart that aches.

Your scent lingers,
the shape of your body lingers
upon the linen
where we bed.
Wrinkles in time
will smooth the sheets
but I believe
we have created
a lasting perturbation
within the continuum of time 'n space.

In the constellation of probabilities
there's but one
where we would find each other,
meet and fall in love.
Let us pray our union thrives
beween this band of narrow odds.

Time and distance has conspired
to make our love brave concertina wire,
while this may be an over statement of our case,
nonetheless, you and I have the wounds to prove it.

Too
Soon
Luxuries
Become
Necessities
Binding
Us
To
Yet
Another
Crippling
Wrap
Until
Stand­ing
On
One's
Own
Feet
Too
Is
Nigh
Impossible.

Your forty winks
was an evening of my despair,
barely a word from you.
I'll send you tooth picks,
one for each eyelid,
only because I care ;-)

My grandparents once owned the Lincoln Inn,
in a junction called Essex,
A big old Vermont village house,
that's as much as I can remember,
but on a shelf
in my house
next to where the morning sun glints in
are a few cranberry tumblers
from that hotel
that catch the morning light
and burst out in a flash of red.

I've enjoyed our  bacchanal,
thus far verbal,
in the same way let's take a walk,
you pick the route,
down along the river
where we can compete skipping rocks,
or through a sylvan path
where I could show you that I'm gallant,
perhaps saving you from a low hanging branch,
then there's that orchard where I've heard your kiss 'n tell.
You pick the route so we can hold hands and talk.

Oh to live in a golden age
when a bard's quilled words
would feather a goose down bed
or get thyself royally laid.

Soon spring will grass,
high snow melt,
creeks and brooks begin to swell,
birds not seen in months
will find the fittest mates,
what then --
will our feet be treading mud,
or be toe to toe beneath the sheets?

The person that invented the zippered fly
probably doesn't use one,
for any guy will tell you why
especially if he's mis-zipped Wun!

The surface level of a liquid,
In a tube or water glass,
Has an illusory crescent zone
Known as the meniscus,
Where light is scattered
In such a way
That it throws the eye off
Just a little,
The way a good poem
Can throw off the coherent mind,
While revealing a deeper truth.

Silent assumptions,
have sunk more boats,
than all the guided ordinance,
ever manufactured.

The improbability of you,
Shooting star,
Birthed in the caldera
Of a winged widget
Ejecting celestial dust,
Now your dance floor
Is the Universe.
And you dance and dance
to the delight of your seasons,
Inspiring your myriad friends.

Step off the bank
into the oxygenated flow
of silver flashes
leaping upon,
in flaring rise toward
interior spawn basins,
catch one in the maw 'n claw
before it breeds a million cloned others,
only then to die a quick and fitting death.

Her brain,
miswired
in the way a microphone
feeds it's amp's audio gain,
infinitely looping
loopiness,
with ever madding annoyance
until madness has only itself
to entertain.

There has to be a reason
that movies still script
actors lighting cigarettes.
Could it be that tobacco companies
payola directors?
Most likely not.
I think it's a bit like poetry,
where compression can **** a lot
into a little plot.
There's one thing I personally know,
that every time the handsome guy fires up ,
I recollect the Lucky Strikes, the Camels, the Gauloises
and the woman that inspired me to smoke.

The next best thing to having no god,
Is having too many.
An infinite pantheon,
divides each demigod
so thin that 1x10^23 angels
can dance on their belly
without a god damning chagrin.

In a manner of speaking,
we all live behind walls, me lady,
but your walls skirt fecund beds
which I've come to cultivate.

In a clearing,
amongst the scran 'n frame
of winter's naked trees
that bow this way 'n that
to the capricious wind,
sits the screen house
all closed in with its seasonal wrap,
plastic sheeting translucent like an iced lake,
but vertical and wavy
when the breeze blows through here,
but inside the sun gathers
to collect itself in its own pleasure
and asks the question,
"Why is it so cold out there?"

===
* My best friend from Maine emailed me
a photo of his screen house in winter that
he built on his fifty acre property with a view
of the coast 8 miles away.

My dear,
A little matter I've failed to mention,
I'm the deposed Ruritratinate of Ruritania.
A sad story, really,
My uncle deposed me for the declaring the empire a poetic state.
I was taken to the boarder,
made to swim one of the glacial rivers isolating my country.
I live an ex-patriot's life,
each morning writing a poem,
and sending it to my loyal subjects attached to the next wind.

Morning sounds remix

cat eating dry food,
refrigerator whir,
large jet five miles out,
cat licking water,
hot coffee sipped,
laptop fan drawing air,
cat brushing pant leg,
dry skin -- lacing fingers,
barely audible -- keyboard keys --

sounds I will funnel
          into a tin,
          place a lid,

rhythmically spice shake the tumult with one hand while
clank, clank  - syncopate - clank  syncopate -- clank, clank with a stick.

"The wind has stopped"
Has there ever been a sillier phrase?
What gust has ever been
                            un-been?

updated prayer wheel
recursively twitters
Om mani padme hum.

The sea to me,
Or the gulls above,
Appeared equidistant.
Decision,
Zeit, or flight,
off the cliffs at Mohr?
                                          Oh
                                                   so nevermore!

My lips, your hair,
sweet nothings aired.
My hand in yours,
affirmly held.
Who would break this lovely spell?

A light rendered note
on vellum
only you and I can see
upon which
I tender thoughts
that gently thread
you to me.

Zero Butkus:
  0 × n = 0
  n / 0 = 0
  0 / 0 not defined
  0 + 0 = 0
But
   (1 + 1)^ 0 = 1

Valentine thank you
for your exponential hugs
making us one.

It's 9:30 p.m.
and the CSX train Jericho blows
its Doppler horn
across the black flow
of the Cumberland River
skimming  the rafts of rippling light
lapping the west bank of early revelers
gathering  in the streets and bars and ***** tonks,
spun together by an invisible attractor they're calling
"Happy New Year."

that unhealed you
has run off again
to that valley of private hurt,
that old playground of embarrassments,
those back streets of behind your back slurs,
drained by that river of endless whispers,
so **** thick that hide boat,
that saved you and your sister,
that only patient love will dissolve the skin.

Christmas morning,
I went down eight flights
to check on the weather.
From the sidewalk,
courthouse square
was a snow cookie
sandwiched between
gray skys and bleak streets,
with no one around
to electrify the public's mangerless tree!

Dear Lord,
Wherever you reside,
I pray this night
that you will assist
in the creation of a new religion.
The existing ones no longer fit.

I pray for your assistance
for a new tentless religion,
that retains all the old choir music,
but goes real light on all the past *******.

A yet known lottery buyer
has a ticket
in his possession
that entitles him or her
to $336 million dollars.
I wish this person well,
that the money itself
will be the source of extinguishing
all future thoughts of money.
That this new found wealth
will be a sustained source
of personal growth and fulfillment.
To accomplish this laudable goal
will require a carefully laid out plan.
Should you not have the requisite skill set,
Then let me be the first of many
To offer you my professional services.