I -- A Pleasant Afternoon

                for Michael Brownstein and **** Gallup

One day 3 poets and 60 ears sat under a green-striped Chau-
        tauqua tent in Aurora
listening to Black spirituals, tapping their feet, appreciating
        words singing by in mountain winds
on a pleasant sunny day of rest -- the wild wind blew thru
        blue Heavens
filled with fluffy clouds stretched from Central City to Rocky
        Flats, Plutonium sizzled in its secret bed,
hot dogs sizzled in the Lion's Club lunchwagon microwave
        mouth, orangeade bubbled over in waxen cups
Traffic moved along Colefax, meditators silent in the Diamond
        Castle shrine-room at Boulder followed the breath going
        out of their nostrils,
Nobody could remember anything, spirits flew out of mouths
        & noses, out of the sky, across Colorado plains & the
        tent flapped happily open spacious & didn't fall down.
        

                                                        June 18, 1978

II -- Peace Protest

Cumulus clouds float across blue sky
        over the white-walled Rockwell Corporation factory
                                        -- am I going to stop that?

                                

Rocky Mountains rising behind us
        Denver shining in morning light
-- Led away from the crowd by police and photographers

                                

Middleaged Ginsberg and Ellsberg taken down the road
        to the greyhaired Sheriff's van --
But what about Einstein? What about Einstein? Hey, Einstein
                                Come back!

III -- Golden Courthouse

Waiting for the Judge, breathing silent
        Prisoners, witnesses, Police --
the stenographer yawns into her palms.

                                        August 9, 1978

IV -- Everybody's Fantasy

I walked outside & the bomb'd
        dropped lots of plutonium
        all over the Lower East Side
There weren't any buildings left just
        iron skeletons
groceries burned, potholes open to
        stinking sewer waters

There were people starving and crawling
        across the desert
the Martian UFOs with blue
        Light destroyer rays
passed over and dried up all the
        waters

Charred Amazon palmtrees for
        hundreds of miles on both sides
        of the river

                                August 10, 1978

V -- Waiting Room at the Rocky Flats Plutonium Plant

"Give us the weapons we need to protect ourselves!"
        the bareheaded guard lifts his flyswatter above the desk
                                                -- whap!

                                *

A green-letter'd shield on the pressboard wall!
        "Life is fragile.  Handle with care" --
My Goodness! here's where they make the nuclear bomb
                                  triggers.

                                        August 17, 1978

VI -- Numbers in Red Notebook

2,000,000 killed in Vietnam
13,000,000 refugees in Indochina 1972
200,000,000 years for the Galaxy to revolve on its core
24,000 the Babylonian Great Year
24,000 half life of plutonium
2,000 the most I ever got for a poetry reading
80,000 dolphins killed in the dragnet
4,000,000,000 years earth been born

                                                Summer 1978

Some died in the Spring;
and some by the river, deep
in Winter beneath a bridge.
Some died alone by a tree
behind a repossessed house;
and some with their cats
at home, quiet as a mouse.
Some died reading bills
that come in the mail;
and some reading the part
number, reaching for a fan
belt hanging on a nail.
Some died with a flyswatter
in hand, toilet paper in a screen
door, dead flies on the floor;
and some like heat lightning,
fast as a sick baby’s breath.
Some died without a warm, caring
woman’s hand on a forehead;
and some sharing a last cigarette.
She, my old lover who loved danger,
died on the side of the road
in the arms of a stranger.

the parents
have each
a flyswatter.

they are very worried
about their angel, about their boy
with flu-like symptoms.

in two locations
my son
is unknown
is achieving
a boredom
his disease
can’t reach.

my father is speechless
after
he is left.  I write
about my mother
who is not pain
held
to the candle
of its possibility.  

the timeline is rhetorical, is a deposit
of sleep
disguised as longing
in the heads
of single minded
repeat
abusers.

my son floats for the first time lame,
it is uplifting, a kind of sloganeering
to keep
hate
local.

I want to weigh it, what is used
by the typist
to see
loneliness
from above.

I want it to be the star
your sister needs
when her eyes
claim her hearing
and hear

for example
chicken scratches
medications
disown.

Stingy bug of hate
Have you met my flyswatter?
Death can be sudden

Dear Journal
I am haunted by many things in my life. There are scar that wrap around my body, old broken bones and bruises that never really healed up. There were words of hatred that people spewed at me. Still none of those ghosts compare to the dead that haunt heart an constantly reappear in my dreams.
I remember two little furballs, not far apart in age. My fluffy darlings, both mutt females, from different parents. However, they treated each other like sisters. Playful and protective of each other, but suspicious of strangers. I would walk them both, when I came to visit. Up so early in the morning just to spend time with both of my pups, Laura and Snuggles.  How surprised when I came home to visit one week. I can’t say how long it had been. It seems like years has passed since my last visit. My first instinct was to see my little girl. Even though in dog years they were old ladies.  I made it there ready to play. Only to find an empty doghouse and vacant leash. My poor snuggles lost to the ravages of age. No one had bothered to tell me. Had I been so long gone that they had forgotten or was I to blame? I spent the next few hours with my other pup. Then I disappeared again of into the vapors of my life. I managed to return a few more times to see her, Laura, who had been my very first pet. Still like everything else she passed away. In my absence I was uninformed once again. Once in a while I find myself teared up. When I see a little puppy playing in the field or an old dog sitting lazily in the sun. I feel a tinge of guilt for not being there, when I should.
Many years before that, there was a little blonde haired boy; we were friends off and on. It was during one of those off times, when a bus he was on crashed. He was thrown from his seat, through the glass window. They say his last words where spent in asking if everyone else was okay. He didn’t even make it to his teens. I was lazy and selfish, and chose to not go to his funeral, now I wish I had because every once and while he walks in my dreams.
But the ghost who haunts my dream most frequently is an old man. I knew him all of my life. He payed for my birth. In a house full of women he was a quiet fixture, who would tickle me every time I went for a hug. Looking back I can tell for a fact he was haunted by specters of his own. Still, when I visited there was always a smile for me, and when I needed it there were words of encouragement. He never told me he was disappointed me and seldom raised his voice to me. If I was bad there was a quick swat of a flyswatter, but then it was over. We watched the rain together; we sat and stared at the stars together. We were truly kindred spirits, me and my grandpa. I wish I could say he died swift and in his sleep. But his life was taken away in bits in pieces. First he got diabetes, then he ended up in a home, such a proud animal now locked in a cage but he never complained. Then he had to lose a leg. For eighty years he had been strong and independent man. Now he was reduced to only weekly visits to his own home. Still, he never complained. The last day he was alive I saw him in the hospital the doctor said he was getting better. I kissed him on the forehead and told him I loved him. He said thank you. I felt ashamed. I must have failed him in some way for him to be grateful for that one pronouncement of love. Had I kept my feeling for him to myself or forgotten to remind him enough. I let it pass I was certain I would see him again, then I would tell him again, and each time after I would do the same.
When we left the hospital, my grandma said he would die today. I argued with her. The doctor had told us he was getting better. I failed to convince her. The next day I got the call. I ran a hot shower and sat in the tub and cried. I did not go to see my family. I was selfish.
Now more often then naught I see him again and again. He has both of his legs.

Why don't we worship the amygdala, make it sound exotic, start a fever-fire in the tropics, pour ice over the horizon via helicopter, view the mind's eye like a crystalized Shambala, sell entry to inner-peace to create the illusion and wall the dam, there's no concept of reality without a sham, low as the almighty dollar, processed meat behind bars get your necktie pulled through your collar, I've been all over the world from the edge of my seat, I'm what you could call a stay-at-home road scholar

You braggarts, *******, maggots and fascists
politically correct censorship-sailors and catfishes
you politicians and career-victims, you're all slapstick
you talk too much and don't hold water
you bark at false alarms and pet yourselves because even a broken watchdog is right twice a day
and then ignore every other crisis you called all hands on deck to, raised arms to crush in uproarious righteousness like you were the voiceless minority's own private militant flyswatter
everybody has a voice, we're all screaming or sitting in silence, tired and apathetic
I'm going deaf, I've lost it and I can't keep beating this dead hoarse, the whole world has issues, why are we making such a meal out of ourselves like we were the main course
ever since being put in the spotlight when Columbus sailed up onto the wrong shores
you can recite the diddy of fourteen hundred and ninety two, but you know why Native Americans were called Indians is because he set sail for India initially, don't you?
I have little hope the future will even be able to keep the ocean blue

The only thing I learned in school was psychological warfare, every day since I first set foot on those grounds I've taken live rounds and dealt my hand from the bottom because you can bet on the flop life doesn't turn up fair, it's too much to ask for someone else to care, read from a script for drugs, your alcoholic or *** deviant teachers whisper be-wary of thugs, down sleeping pills, painkillers and my daily dose of brain-fire extinguisher with *** from one of those best dad mugs, it never fails that when you go chucking snails, karma turns around and reminds you why you have to watch out for disgruntled slugs

You might catch one with your name on it
slower than you imagined, this grueling dawn hits
the purple of the sky lines up with the shade of skin under your eye
it's like makeup made to match, a tone only being sleepless for so long
or being on the business end of a fist can really catch, unnatural beauty looks so wrong
it's become normal to manufacture sell and lie, be a product, a marketing scheme
wanting to lean into exposure, explode and fracture and leave behind a profitable footprint to follow at the launch site
it's inhuman, to be switched on for twenty four hours, seven days a week, to be a character, it's obscene
and to defend this are small armies, cute little consumers who don't think beyond the opinion placed before them, placemat bib and all
dissent is negativity, disagreement is not normalcy, it's not okay, you're attacking someone who's so important to me, they literally saved my life
insult and rant, sob and bawl
unless you were personally given chest compressions, or they showed up and held your head so you wouldn't swallow your tongue while you OD'd, and then helped you back from suicidal depression
I don't care if you've shared a stage and danced and sang together, all people are equal
and none of them worth what they think they are, good, moot, or evil
so you can waltz up to a celebrity getting into their car, pop them off and become a shooting star

Sit on the curb and crack a spine, the Catcher Murders loosely spun a web and cast a net all through a grimly imagined fascination of mine, what candid activity to activate a conspiracy for an elected representative on who gets to live, give me the nominee for Manchurian candidacy! Violate the vile walls of a small mind's sanctity, the moral composition of even the purest person is only sound in theory, threaten their family, test their temptations, loyalty and mortality, fill their head with supposition, non-disclosure to time of day, information, no exposure to familiarity, turn what they think is false inside out and convince them what was never real was all along a secret reality, watch them break their neck to stare directly into an eclipse like it was their fealty, to disable themselves in service to pushing out of their skin and beyond their own ability

Mind control is simply too powerful to be stopped at a question of whether or not it's ethical
if I wrote this while someone dictated it, with a gun in one hand while they fed me an acid strip
and I knew they had complete deniable culpability, say for example if they worked for the Central Intelligence Agency
and they were abducting citizens from America and Canada, for one big experimental acid trip
to create Whitey Bulger and Ted Kaczynski
I mean, I know everybody hates to hear other people whine, you fall on your knees in thoughts and prayer for or worship on forums shooters like the murderers at Columbine,
when every day someone provokes a loner, outright pressing them to slip into a violent state
I begrudge myself a few hard feelings against people, but I wouldn't **** time to squash my hate
a child with a gun is an adult making bad decisions, the grey area is a lot harder to see when you're sorting through footage of dead children, bullet-torn classrooms haunting your nightly visions
everything is a joke and everyone laughs in the privacy of their own shadow
when their standards in public are much higher, where there's smoke there's not always a real fire
how can you police yourself, live up to the idea of who you think you are right now,
don't look for an answer, go on and say it, how?