Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
CK Baker Nov 2017
mirrored fly-glass
and polished chrome
are tinted
in the blood orange dawn
running dogs of lummi
hush quiet
on this celestial
summer morn

clubman bars
and tan saddles
strapped to
the lowered hind
skull caps
and fitted chaps
for the open flow
and rich peripheral scene

concessions at the peace arch
(from the blue-coat fuzz)
black *****
and maples
cake the bow hill
and chuckanut

choppers launch
at edison
(with their metal fleck
and tuft)
a half moon rises
on the concho
and interstellar cross

cinnamon gulls
and ravens
scour the netted docks
warlock driftwood
and row homes
spot the winding
coastal roads

rumbling sounds
at the packer slew ~
with the redolence
of briny bay
alive
on the overlook
at fairhaven
Spent a couple days in late September on a motorcycle trip with my brother...weaving through the small towns and villages of the Pacific Northwest.  Magnificent!
Ken Pepiton Nov 2018
How we start is only part of what we eventually do.

Physically that's easy to see. Being human, adamkind,
we see weak starts often in life.
Colts or pups born a week too soon can be loved to lives as pampered pets,
Siring toys for the enjoyment of those who can afford to fuel them,
For generations, with never a single care,
Past that initial trauma and subsequent subjugation to the will of man.

I don't tell horse stories, dog stories or war stories, if I can keep from it.

But when you want to demonstrate the purest of payback,
revenge getting the bad guy in the end,
having a horse be the hero makes behaving like an animal
more noble to the mind of vengeful man.
It's not true, revenge being noble.
That's a very old lie.

Law is to prevent error by disallowing failure. Law.

Relative to the rest of God's creatures, we, adamkind, seem dependent, weak and vulnerable next to bears being weak
a way-less long time
Than we.
We come into this world weak as a baby anything and we stay that way longer
Than any living creature.

I am an American, by birth.
I was not born to a political party or a family with political roots,
"I ain't no Senator's son."
Still,
I was reared drinking mythic cherry wine
sprung from George's failure to lie
Regarding his woodman's knack with a hatchet.

Sitting on the fence rail Abe split,
town fathers where I lived
were said to have decided the most harmonious of towns
have only gainfully employed darker folks,
while white
trash was allowed to loll around because they was
some employer's kin by marriage.

It all seemed pretty normal, as a child.
The loller-arounders let kids listen when they told
Their friends, who could not read, what the newspapers said.

One block from my house there was a vet's and hobo's flop-house clad in corrugated tin, rusted-round the nail-holes all the way to the ground and the rust had spread, so at sunset,...
I only recall the single story shed having one door.
There were always old white men sittin' on the southside of the shed. At sunset, those old men's whispy white hair

appeared as white flowing mare's tale clouds under
a scab-red wall held up by old men with sunset shining faces...

It was a big shed, a low barn, a bunkhouse,
eight or ten 4-foot tin-sheets long on the north and south
Windowless walls.
The one door was on the south side.
Once I saw an old man selling red paper buddy poppies.
He was missing both legs about half-way up his thighs.
The poppy seller rode a square board that had what I think were
Roller-skates, the key-kind, with metal wheels about a 1/2 inch wide.
Nailed to it's bottom. He had handles made from a carpenter's saw
Without it's blade. He pushed himself with those handles.

That looked fun, to a four-year old.
It looks different now-a-days. Knowing
Those red poppies symbolized
The after math automatics of the war to end war.

Who knows the poppy-sellers son? He would be old.
Does he know how his father lost his legs, but lived?
Does he bear the curse of the curse that lost his father's legs?
Does he honor his father's cause or weep at the thought?

Enough is enough.
My family tree branched in America, but only one great grand-parent,
Three generations back from me, was rooted in this land.
My gran'ma's ma, a Choctaw squaw,
That rhymed fine,
But it's not true. My grandma did not know her parents. She was born an orphan,
And her father and mother were likely strangers.

1910 in southwest Arkansas or southeast Oklahoma or northeast Texas or northwest Louisiana
And the color of her skin is all that proved my American heritage.

My grandma was born poor as poor can be,
she never told me how she survived

To survive a 1925 or so car wreck
in eastern Arizona's white mountains.
I never asked what my grandmother knew,
nor how she came to know.

This is my point.
After you and I have gone into forever more,
Our great grand children may wonder
what we did or did not, since we
Are no longer around to give our account.

These days we can leave our story to our great grand children.
Our own children
And our grand children follow us on facebook back to before they were born.
Shall they judge us idlers wielding idle words for laughs,
or  think us knowers of all we found while seeking first the Kingdom of Heaven
In the place Jesus says it is. You know where Jesus said the Kingdom of our kind lies?

The double minded man is unstable in all his ways,
hence Eve and her broader bandwidth corpus colostrum
Come back later, there is a breath system upgrade evolving.

Such changes to the courage of the mind rolls out more slowly
to the root ideas, labouring to find sustenance,
it is a struggle being a radical idea,
we agree, but we have our part,
as do the flowers
and the spore.
Leaven the whole lump, like it or lump it.

The now we live in grew from far deeper roots than
the roots claimed by the
Self-identified nation through it's cartoons/representations of national desires to rally 'round the flag as if it were the fire,
those desires to herd beneath any shelter from the storm,
Your country, your incorporated allegiance
to the inventor and creator and counter of the money under
the protection of the sword and crown representative
of the flame that burns,
The namers of patriot, the rankeers of ideas
who, by their existence,
naturally, over rule you.
Such powers are granted by the individual, not the mob.
You get that?

The desires of the nation over rule the desires of the individuals who
Com-prize the nation.
Whose side are you on, dear reader?

Is the idea we believed believable?
Ex Nihilo, I don't think so because
I can't imagine how now could be
Accidental-ly.

When my hero wore spurs as he went from the jail office to
Miss Kitty's place, (Gunsmoke on A.M. radio)

What did Miss Kitty do?
I had no clue.
In my hero's world people never
Did the wrong thing
While Marshal Dillon was in Dodge.

So did you think Miss Kitty's place was anything other
than a culturally acceptable
reference to professional social ******* workers
under a strong, smart female CEO
with top-level links to the local cops?

All these are rhetorical questions, this being
Rhetorical if you are hearing me say this.
That means, don't nod or raise your hand or shout Amen, kin!

I see your answer my answer and
I know my answer, so you know my answer.

Step-back, 1961, USA Snapshot
Unitas, Benny Kid Perett, Mantlenmarris, the Guns of Navarone.

Why I recall those things, I know not.
Why I did not say I do not know, I do not know.

Though, pausing to think,
knowing contains the doing of it within it, you know.
What's to do?

Outlaws were more my heroes than cowboys, and marshals, and such
Especially the ones that had been forced out by law.

I grew up in a 1950's junkyard with no fence, one mile north of route 66
On the Al-Can highway to Las Vegas, 103 miles away.
My Grandpa was a blacksmith's son,
who rode a horse he broke and his pa had shod
From Texas to Arizona in 1917, at the age of 18.

by the time I knew him,
He was fifty, settled down, nearly, from the war.
Momma had to work, so, daytime, Granddaddy raised me.

Horses weren't, wrecked cars were,
the toys of my childhood.

Grandpa built a junkyard from cars left steam blown
on the old stage road, from before
the railroad.
The Abo Highway hain't been Route 66 for some time yet…
Hoping…


Hoping sometime to polish this bit of this book, I left myself re-minders
Hoping memory of mental realms might rewind or unwind sequentially
When trigger
Neighed.
That worked, Roy Autry and Gene Rogers were names Sue Snow's
Mormon Bishop granddaddy called me,
back when I first recall My Grandpa Caleb,
a baptist by confession,
who was,
as I recall a *****-drinkin' jolly drunk.
While Grandma made beds in some motel,
granddaddy built boats and horse trailers
and hot rod 34 Chevies,
and he fixed this one red Indian, I could read the word on the gas tank, I knew the word Indian
and this motor cycle was proud to wear the name. I was 4.

A stout-strong man, no fat near any working muscle system,
he could and would
repair any broken thing,
for anybody. People called him Pop.
Pop and Mr. Levi-next-door at the Loma Vista Motel, shared a listing in the Green Book,
so broke down ******* knew where help could be found
after dark in that town.
There was a warnin'ag'in
let'n sunset there
on darker than grandma's skin.

My Gran'daddy's shop had two gas pumps
that were reset to begin pumping with the turn of a crank.
As soon as I could turn that crank,
I could pump gas.
I could fill up that red Indian
Motorcycle.
But "m'spokes was too short
to kick the starter."
I told my eleven year old uncle
and he told
how he would always remember learning
that saddles have no linkage
to horse brakes.
"Not knowing what you cain't do
kin *** ye kilt."

He grew up in the junk yard, too.
My first outlaw hero.

Likely, I am alive today, because
On the day I discovered I could pump gas as good as any man,
I also discovered that real motorcycles were not built for little boys.
This is an earlier voice which I wrote a series of thought experiments. The book is finished, most parts, some reader feedback as to interest in more, will be high value gifts from you to me, and counted so.
Ian Beckett Mar 2014
Alta cocina in Cochabamba for eight,
It’s llama for lunch accompanied by
An Andean black rice which I find
Is quinola, which is easy to like if
You are already committed to llama.

This llama for lunch in Paprika, is good
I wonder if gauchos lasso them from two
Meters, at least, to ensure, they don’t spit
This is why Blazing Saddles used cows,
Makes the movie more macho methinks.
Andrew Rueter Oct 2017
I have secret skeletons
That haven't seen the Sun
From things supposedly fun
Now all they do is make me run

Skeletons exit my closet
And enter my jury box
All of whom I've met
Then put behind locks
Now they throw rocks
Or find ways to mock
They are ruthless
Until I'm toothless

I face a skeleton jury
I face the skeletons' fury
They seek vengeance
Or perhaps repentance
I play lawyer in my mind
This job has become full time
And I must laboriously linger
Through skeleton stingers
Until my mind is rattled
By skeleton saddles

They come from my past
To shatter my glass
The skeletons are attacking
My bones are cracking
Under their weight
They are my freight
They judge me
And begrudge me

I made many moronic mistakes
I left laying at the bottom of lakes
Now they are at the surface
Of my fruitless furnace
Skeletons remain
Like a stain
I look across the plain
To see skeletal rain
Precipitated by my dumb decisions
Droplets make numerous incisions
Each one callously cutting me to the bone
Until the skeleton jury is my humble home
After waking at dawn one morning when the wind sang
     low among dry leaves in an elm

Among the red guns,
In the hearts of soldiers
Running free blood
In the long, long campaign:
     Dreams go on.

Among the leather saddles,
In the heads of soldiers
Heavy in the wracks and kills
Of all straight fighting:
     Dreams go on.

Among the hot muzzles,
In the hands of soldiers
Brought from flesh-folds of women--
Soft amid the blood and crying--
In all your hearts and heads
Among the guns and saddles and muzzles:

     Dreams,
Dreams go on,
Out of the dead on their backs,
Broken and no use any more:
Dreams of the way and the end go on.
Nat Lipstadt Oct 2016
crisp atmosphere, special ordered
for perfect pumpkin patching, apple picking,
stout sweaters all, a blueish autumnal sky,
orange 'n red leaves delivered on time

the old uber-man-grand-pa,
hired as a day driver,
saddles them up,
three generations all tucked in a
repeating mise en scène

a replay of some thirty years earlier,
when the now-father
was about the same age,
as his boy, three years aged
and yet so impatient

asking the same question
his father perfected,
in the same sweet voice,
at about the same time,
in the same way,
a little voice from deep in
the cavernous back seat,
sighing, squeaking with an
I've-seen-it-all ennui,
some mere five minutes into
the hour's plus journey
to the 'country' bound

"are we there yet?"

titters 'n snickers from assorted adults,
but grandpa weeps words with composition instant,
so many answers to such an important question,
so serious that an admission, confession
required, due you,
grandpa still asks the same question

every day of his life

it's Sunday and longish poems per Yeoman,
strictly verboten,
God knows there's an essay unwritten
as the answer, a symphonette with
a thousand opus, by-your-command repertoire,
a pumpkin for every patch,
some answers that even may be a
young prince's carriage in hiding

but for now let this suffice,
sometimes yes, sometimes no,
and sometimes, the goal line just goes and moves on ya

so with utmost seriousness
a purposed thoughtfulness proposed,
posing said inquiry knows no age limitation,
if you have not asked of yourself this day,

"are we there yet?”

then the answer is surely,
not yet
10/16/16
Tony Luxton Jun 2015
Gold and silver battle *****
torn from swords saddles and crosses
lying beneath a farmer's field
tributes to kings and bellicose gods.

Fierce birds of prey snakes fish and bears
framed in filigree geometry
guarded warriors' savage souls.
No mercy in Mercia.

Archeologists anthropologists
historians librarians
curators and consertvators
collect confer and classify
while I just try to connect.
Sean Fitzpatrick Dec 2013
The loneliest librarian is in the
heart of darkness
I saw him, old, bearded
on three sides book cases
on the open side, a desk
he faces outward into the darkness
drawing notes at their best.

Look away! in the distance
an army and her generals gather
Up ahead, a conqueror
metal jangles, saddles horse

Cries the pony boy:
I miss my mother
let me go back
what does this all mean?

Studying now, the librarian,
notes in check, own pen
scratching, no metals
only and only
his mind and an ink-filled well

Spearhead, arrowhead formation
a king and his khanate lean forward
into the permafrost, snow lashing
wind blows against but cannot stop
fierce wild will
and only the willows weep

Cries the pony boy:
Radically, may I be afraid
of the dead, arms asunder
so much love! so much love!
what does this all mean?

And far, far ahead of this army
librarian sits, silently
loving nothing, everything beside him
he scribbles notes
A love letter? tiresome if so
upon closer inspection...

At the center of the dark dark forest
where a lonely man rides in his kayak
lantern fixed upon a frame, making his boat top-heavy
he bobs back and forth across his body of water
he is haunted
he is lonely
he is a skeleton

Now grand general crosses the Styx
Ice clumps brushing gently against his ships
cold enough to **** a horse, set blood aglow
with blue, so cold it could not rot.
To valley forge!
to valley forge
to forge a future.

And pony boy cries:
What does it mean?
my father is gone, gone before this war,
he once said, it must be, be,
Did he mean...

Finally, up ahead, the librarian draws
untraceable lines, he knows the army is at his door
lonely, shaking, only the conqueror made it
and he is almost dead too.
Scared, sacredly, he finally hands the librarian his match
and sobs, softly, under breath
"Time, time is, time without,
time too
starts anew."
will finish later
birches and tastsy jerky wood.  resin in the immediate shubbary.... and dust and cobwwebs growing adjacent to the jerky wood.  Myraid of birds, ranging from small birch-types to crows.  A lingering dominant hawk.  A giant possum crossing between borders carrying unborn infants.  Dusty walls with abandonded spiderwebs- insect carcassases dangling, still.  Pool motors revving in every direction lets of a subtle hum that compliments the planes descending and ascending oer-head

the water is grainy yet cool and healing.  the sprinklers function at midnight and sometimes on the weekend.  Maintinance trucks, expensive commuter vehicals, modest vehicls, unmanned vehicles, arrowhead trucks, macdonalds trucks, safeway trucks....

the earth is still wheaty and chalky adjacent the jerky trees, the jerky trees have little hairs and appetizing off red color, the bark saddles off with grace and with a satisfying tare.
Damaré M Aug 2013
I think we're going extinct
I hate to even blink 
...
I remember when we were in sync 
But things changed 
We will act strange over change 
Being caged and attached by chains is voguish 

Are we hopeless? 
Why can we polish our pinky rings 
But leave rust on our linkage chains? 
Our words don't bond anymore 
Our words are shackles 
Our words are like crooked spurs 
And unbalanced saddles 
Yeah It travels 
But lies are to be told 
Only to smear what we really withhold 

I think that we're going extinct 
I hate to blink 
As my eye lids flicker 
More and more existence spills from our mankind 
Man-kind 
We're turning into the kind of men 
Who emotionally melts when we see celebrities 
Where's our rectitude? 

I think we're going extinct 
I hate to blink
Where's my natural woman?
Every time I twitch 
More and more she accepts the word ***** 
And in no time a guy can become exposed to her hips 
Where's our morality? 

Are we going to expire 
All because we create our entire empire with desires? 
Desires and thirst that require us to hurt 
We smile and we smirk 
We loath from good work 
We poke at nerves
We drown our minds to swerve 
We absorb potion 
Only to tranquil our motion 
We indulge in copulation 
With a stranger 
But somehow for consolation 
...
We are endangered 
We are a few more trends away from complete annihilation 
Eradication 
Liquidation 
Obliteration 
Cancellatio­n 
Our tendencies are cancerous and if we keep being patient 
We will need medication 
I don't feel any radiation 
To not become subject to our decimation

I think we're going extinct 
My instincts tell me that
Though we're a percentage and a contributor to this nation 
We are approaching ruination 
My instinct senses that I am one of the few who mentions devastation 
And if I blink one more time 
And if we keep wasting time 
We'll be wastage 
We 
You and I 
We'll be ejected from the race 
And they'll use a prosthetic ethnic affiliation for our replacement 
Can we come together with cooperation 
Resisting this operation 
May we all stand up 
Before they go through with this amputation ! 

Blink
Lets see
Mary Pear Jul 2016
In the dying heat of a Spanish September
Wrought iron gates guard the bar's flagged patio.
Plastic flowers defy the night and sit up stiffly in their baskets on the concrete wall.
No horses tethered here among the motor scooters.

Inside
An imposing counter guards the rooms beyond.
As brightly lit as a dental surgery and amply served by whirling ceiling fans.
The chiselled features of Native American Braves look down from the faded paintings that line magnolia walls,
Their steely gaze perplexed.
No pale faces here among the white man,
Just white hair
Or burnished copper shimmering like the painted desert.
Here the white woman wears the war paint.
Piped music circa 1960 jingles just Out of earshot
And a queue for bingo forms as a quiz is finishing.
Everyone has cheated,
Mouthing answers with a mixture of pride and cameraderie
Not too much of either,
Tepid
Luke warm
Like the night outside.

'Two little Ducks'.
No answering claim
'Old Ireland;17'
'No 3. Gone for a ***.'
'House!'
Then silence.

The plain matron reading out the numbers enunciates carefully into her microphone,
'And the next house is for the jackpot.'
Silence.
The queue slowly forms again. Banal lyrics from the teenage tunes fill in the gaps in stilted conversation
Long dead warriors watch, bewildered
And the night wears on.

— The End —