Layout every human endeavor
In a rational grid,
As one would setting up an experimental ag station,
Keep careful data
on all the plot inputs and outputs
and I believe the data will
Indicate that well prepared soil,
Infused with the required nutrients,
The best pretested seed,
And optimal hydration
Will yield over time
Suboptimal performance.
Too many chiefs and not enough
serendipity.
(Hey, is that PC?)
Can you say that today?.
In an  inevitable changing world
You need to preserve strange outliers.

brighten
warm ghost mouth,
sudden crush,
sleepy ;-)

Summer camp lovers,
Sad, sad your soring high,
Come autumn,
One of you will have moved on
before the other.

The streets today
were widow canyons,
wooed away, the normal traffic,
by something kin to black magic,
and so to supermarkets at five P.M.
emptied by a sorcerer's spell,
but I hear tell, on game days like this,
the tide will turn
as if the moon, by chance, had changed direction.

Another twenty-four hours have passed
which you and I will never reclaim
so much of one's life
is spent oblivious
to the grains
of time
swish
grit
by
g
r
i
t
thru
the hour glass.

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.

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.

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.

Jesus is said to have turned water into wine.
Today my urologist turned my favorite cordial, red wine
into water, and only five eight once glasses at that!
TKed, Syrah, Syrah.
Christ! where's Jesus when you need him?

If you were to script
Your life,
But one time only
Could you now
Tab over
And ...

*  Bullet list
-  Your dawn to dusk
-
-  ...

And when at last
The final Underwood bell dings
Roll the platen wheel up
And with contentment
Proof read the arching sheet
Down to

"- the end -"
        ?

Take these words
and pleasure thyself,
I will be your moan.

Riding a double decker 4B
from Trinity to Terrenure,
one hand clutching
an overhead strap,
St. Stephen's Green
Frames a Celtic redhead,
exciting priestly thoughts.

Time and terrible violence
scripted these four-thousand foot hills,
Every stone under foot has a fantastic tale to tell
and the deep river gorges,
patiently sculpt, sculpt, sculpt.

On our wedding day
my expectations fulfilled,
Our life since has been
flowering revelation

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?

As lovers we've learned
that you are the immovable object,
and I the irrepressible force,
though our ****** subduction truly terrifies the natives,
and has spun much aboriginal lore,
they credit us with Monsooning the weather,
but looking back, my dear, see the adorable mountains we've made.

I'm a poetry critic.
They call me "Homeric Wrecker."

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

The rivers
          that oxbow
             slither
    down the Cumberland drain
        in May
                 SWOLE
M-E-A-N------F-a-t-----P--R--E--G--N--A--N--T,
         hungry pregnant,
walking the floor & opening the fridge pregnant,
drown your own mother for a nosh pregnant,
    cantankerously mad pregnant,
flowing from car to car, truck to truck and house to house,
   through crawl space, doors, and windows,
down halls, laddering stairs, licking banisters, cresting attics,
    feeding, feeding, feeding, feeding
on the stacked labor of years and years,
feeding, feeding, feeding
on unbelieving minds and dumb stares,
feeding, feeding, feeding,
     on "We've lost everything",
"Oh, my God."s
    and tears.

The chief
at the top of the test pattern,
always black 'n white,
facing left to right,
encircled
then squared
and circled again
at each corner quadrant,
with radiating strobe lines
for adjusting
vertical then horizontal,
our fledgling video message
that now nascently probes
the Universe for intelligent life!

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.

That you would dissolve in me,
and I in you,
and like apparitions,
we would inhabit each world.

The alchemy of love
is that two can be one
at a distance.

The all faith popes were flaming atheists,
all two thousand leagues of stacked sea,
sending out their ******* flotillas
on carillon arks stacked ten tiers deep with homing doves,
tithe teething continents of dithering dullards,
the poor mouthed succulent souls
that have so, so
over crowded a once peaceful heaven
to render this one blue ball a hell on earth.

**** the rhyme,
**** the reason,
the oceans swell
from one finite water well,
frozen fjords melt, disrupted weather spells,
One ******* big piece of trouble I'm here to tell.

Oh, to be a tortoise
and never need a house.
No realtors, no mortgage,
never a call for
roofers, plumbers...
or ever to build a shelf!

The city is loud with chimneys,
bristling with dimpled sky dishes,
afloat in a dammed lake of sunset fenestration,
beneath unwitnessed, unappreciated clouds,
its streets a grid of flowless canals,
to the music of "Hey, mister, got any change?"
Oh,
but,
when the lights go down,
and the pretty people come out!
and the beef bouncers sort snort the buzzing sequin queen queues
for the sparkle dance houses,
the city,
the city,
can one ever get enough?

We are all living
with a deadly disease
that will **** each of us.
Some are host to more than one killer,
engaged in a turtle hare coup de grâce race.
For some us the time we have left is too well known,
For most of us the time we have left is left unknown.

You sit indoors,
under man made light,
and you say you've never traveled,
but in truth you raced a great circle
within the last twenty-four hours;
depending where your house, north or south,
a distance between zero and 24,900 miles!
and like most travelers, you're back from whence you started.

Of late,
when I let
my thoughts
free reign to pasture,
they find you
beyond the orchard
where the creek bends,
before it makes a great leap.

In this season
I'm walking the rim,
There is always a rim,
An event horizon,
Demarcating
The past and it's lascivious desire to lunch on the present.

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

Let us hold hands,
experience the connection
between the food
we are about to eat
and all those
that made this meal possible.
The farmer and his work hands,
the lawyers and bankers
that drew up the contracts
and financed the crops,
the truckers, the truck makers,
the road builders, bridge builders,
the buyers, distributors,
the cullers, wrappers,
and food handlers including
a vast myriad of ancillary
support troops engaged
in nearly every occupation imaginable.
We, who are about to eat,
give mindful thanks.

Mornings,
The blessed shroud of sleep lifts,
Ones usesless limbs
Have filled in the nocturn hours with mercury,
Not swift Olympian Mercury,
But the toxic fluid metal
That nearly weighs the same as lead.
A new day,
A new day
Weighs in
Without volitional choice.

from path
to trail
to road
to highway,
the loneliest of all
is the bushwhack.

the moist moments
we've spent together,
are a chaste rivlet

The apartment neighbor
We never see,
Today,
All I saw
From where I stood,
Was a pair of hands
Place
A bonsai tree
Upon a sunny stoop.

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.

Last night
the old cat
out slept my goodnight pill.

The old sod house,
The west wind
chit, chit, chatters the hinges,
The door creaks to 'n fro,
Vermin music to the denizen within.
The old sod house on the hill,
The windows were broken long ago
Like old folks who've lost their 20/20.
And the memories too have leaked
Through that busted fenestration.
Where most the year the wind is weir
And long ago caught the laughter
That onetime surely resided here.
Hard to know who did lived there.
There's only one that surely knows,
I'll ask the wind.

*This poem is a collaboration with joann alabsy who inspired its creation an contributed generously.  Any and all short comings reside at my door.

The propane man came today.
He checked the system for leaks.
Adjusted the pilots
and checked the level of the above ground tank.
Autumn now cheeks winter
as does my life estate.

You play cat and I play mouse,
or I play cat and you play mouse.
The fact is we're both naked on that hot tin roof.
The question is Baby, how do we get off?

There are so many secrets in a village
where everyone knows everyone,
and so many secrets in a family
where everyone is living close,
and so many secrets among siblings,
where each is blood kin to each,
and so many secrets in the heart
where a few       hurt       so much
they are rarely, if ever, given leash.

There are tragedies,
to die alone,
to be unknown to family,
to be unloved,
to be unloved by the very one
that knows you best,
to die loathing self.

There are two sides of town

The straight teeth side,
and the crooked side,

The private summer camp side
and the open hydrant side

The bedtime story side
and "get your ******* *** in bed" side

The balloon birthday side
and the birthday frown side

There are two sides to every town
Sometimes they meet on the same street.

There are words on the range,
and out to pasture,
in the lowlands,
and on the hilltops.
Ole Buckaroo,
what's a poet to do,
if not to ride out,
lasso, brand, and corral a few.

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.

Every Walmart becomes a Woolworth,
Every Everest a **** hill,
Every ocean a vapor trail,
Every love reverts to ground,
And so it goes round and round.

This may not be a poem,
more like a beef,
an irritation,
a shock and awe annoyance,
that too, too, too many poems
by keyed up scribblers,
package their custard mustard innards
with the same skill three year olds
wrap a present for their mothers,
fully expecting the same mom response,
"Honey, this is so lovely."
There is no disgrace
in learning by failing.
Fail, fail, fail,
But do it honestly.
Read five books of poems
before you write
one miserable haiku.

There is no way of knowing
how many poems written go unread.
Surely many deserved an early death,
but what of the brilliant verse?
Sad to think a single one
would die, with its author, uncaressed.