Under the celestial heavens,
The sceptic, is so small, slight—
In a dull room, filled with gloss, vacant,
Unbelievers, hayseeds, who unbeknownst
To themselves, are all in an incestuous love cult,
A construct so vain, vacuous, of spineless comfort
And smarmy snugness, a tribe of loose, yawning tripe,
A spew of runny phlegms, a scheme of useless blue things,
Festering.  What rational and clear clods, of beheadedness,
Cluelessness, in clefts of lobotomy, plain and clearly sightless,
Without seeing, they proclaim, all that their dull drivels, the dear
Elders had once spoon fed to them, preached, said— now, how,
They are sad, righteous and solemn in their preordained, oldness,
Incongruous, indifferences and prejudices.  To have completely lost
Any warm, decent, actual feelings for emotion is foreign— the stars,
Do not align, the waters will not part, yet they are blind to the lies
In themselves.  To have experienced— any real, beating, ******
Thing is beside the point, is beyond their ken, is not knowable,
Yet, kowtow-able, quantifiable, not actual, but unbelievable
They—the smug, slugs, under rugs, are dead, as dust,
Under celestial skies, deep, darkness inside  .  .  .

there ain't no "Howl" in me.
Just the need of a fix.
       Love of peace and Jazz.
I still roam intrigued
   his passages, and mine here in Daleville,
among the cornstalks, my head can't ever stick out above the yellow
         fringed hayseeds.
I read of angel-headed dark Blake-like tragedy
the again coming wars, and I suspend,
        the beliefs,
that mine could transcend the dark of war,
or make a poem so right.
Or ever make a difference as the head banging
just keeps on.

It has been a year since you visited the city.
walked its streets with its crowds of infinite variety,
an anonymous soul elbow to elbow with strangers,
Faces and fashion and more than that, an energy
so unlike your sanctuary in far away Vermont.

You need this, every so often. It feeds you,
a reminder of the power of mass and masses,
your mind awash with the vast mix of America
all gathered in one place, dreams, and nightmares
and side hustles, a place of promise and fear,
everyone going somewhere, doing, reaching,
faces animated. There is purpose here, urgency,

a reminder

of what you fled, and why you come back,
grateful for your place of peace, but aware
that too much peace and you fall into rot,
that yours is a life barely in balance, a needful life,
needful less of things than places, experiences,
the soul of places and people unlike yourself.
like salt in the stew, it flavors you, always in danger
of too much or too little.

Here is the Hassidic Jew in his worn black coat and hat.
Here is the Puerto Rican girl, bright and loud.
Here are the suits,
the old Italian woman pulling her cart of groceries,
the tourists, the hustlers and homeless,
the old Russian men playing chess in the park,
The Arabs gathered for their thick black coffee,
Here are the hayseeds and vagabonds like me,
passing through, thieves of energy that no one misses.
There is more than enough to go around.

Here are carts of food and Gucci knock offs.
Of diners just outside theatres. Hotels
for the rich and poor sit side by side.
Crowds outside Penn Station, steady streams
rise and fall in and out of subway stations.
Water towers and gardens on the roofs.
Carts of clothes on racks roll by you as you walk.
Here are all the things you are not,
somehow becoming you. You should be lost here
but you never are, It feels like home. Not a place of peace,
but a place of constant becoming.
You smile when you are there, even if you leave exhausted.

It is your pilgrimage, Once, twice a year,
But not this year.
TH=he city has grown dark and dangerous.
Time Square is still full of billboards and video screens
and hardly a soul to see them.
We are warned away in this plague year,
the power of the place gone inside, waiting out death,
and you mourn the lost,
and you wonder,
when you can return, and how, and what will be left
for strangers like me.

If this stein could talk
A bevy of tales t'would ne'er-
balk
Pouring like a cold beer in the dog-days
of August
A hot , black coffee in Novembers frost ...
Gluhwein with a cinnamon stick
Cornbread and milk for a -
hard working hick
Holding Cherokee roses
Green onions tickling our noses
Cool water from an old fashioned well
Remembering March's 'yellow bells' ...

Behold, you tower of imminent collapse
obscure, picturesque obelisk
dishonest monolith, ironic cairn stone
call yourself behemoth, you mammoth
an affront to the primordial gods
who stir this civilized cauldron and lick the soup bone
how you've metastasized, between two lines
so very fine, you walk the edge of Occam's own
what with the sticks and mud and rocks
brass and iron locks airtight, you cut this Pangea into pie
cover the faces of your clocks and walk away upright
with your cute, morbid curios of olde
the missing link- frozen somewhere in the Arctic cold
carnival amusements for your half-pennies, hay-pennies, hayseeds
you pay, a slithering mass observes your compassion on display
tailing the predicted demise of a cosmic appraisal spans Twain the temporary sun
massive panic in the wake of this poisonous gas from fireball's past
that with held breath, eyes do not turn away

The hairless ape is cleansed of knuckle-dragging to the bipedal standpoint by,
baptismal in a pool perfectly still, reflecting back the boundless stars of a frontier sky
as calm beneath the surface as the shuddering, shimmering lake
a soul can search throughout all time in that most restful sleep;
and be unable to keep everything it has learned once it is finally awake.

Heaving lungs, hay feverish watery eyes
As asthmatic curses, reveal the hayseeds rustic charms
Youths in hayfields, under blazing cloudless skies
With itchy, hay-mottled, sun burnt arms
In the evening,the haymaker's drunkedly dance the hay
Remains of the haybox, now eaten away as...
Evening beckons, to make hay of the day.