who wants to know
the exact day one will die?
(not I, not I, says the fly to the spider)  
but she tells me, this crooked old lady
from a dream…

she circles me, prods me
with bony fingers, ogles me
through blue blinking eyes, her mouth
curling in curious, curdled smile  

you will be here a while--you have
until you are seventy-five years plus a day  
how do you know this? mostly in your eyes, she says  
but they are not red, from lack of sleep, I protest, and
my blood numbers are grand, all within those blessed ranges
still red, she says, and being duly desiccated
by wily winds you do not control  

but I still climb mountains, I proclaim
and look for Ponce De Leon’s fountains? she asks  
why do you argue with me, in this liquid world
of sleep, for I am thee, and you
are me    

when I awake,
I know not where she went
or from whence she came, but woefully
I concede, the old lady, and this teller of tales
are one and the same

digits digging divots, gyrating
in the finite field I have left on which to play,
bringing me closer to a goalless line    

mornings I ran the ball,
feeling the turf beneath me, green and flat  
in the afternoon I passed, hoping another would move onward
by eventide I oft punted, conceding my opponent
should be given his run, only to crash into me,
to be shoved into the demanding dirt,
a victim of my will, gravity,
and chiseling chance  

when the ball returned  
to me, as it eternally did,
I called another play, everyman scrambling
for a chance, at more measured madness, more
yardage marked by mocking minutes, that became
miles, hours, days, and more massive, metastatic
months, unstoppable, no matter who had the ball,
or how far their running feet  
would take them

I could
apologize for writing all
these words, ones that I seem
to have picked from piles of trash,
heaps I found while walking this flat earth  
giant stale stacks of others’ discarded stories,
beer bottles, cell phones, and smashed
light bulbs

I could
apologize for boring you
for being a purloining recycler,
of all those fetid finds, of all those relics  
though I am certain I didn’t know what
my larcenies and other crimes were,
until after I committed them

I could
apologize for ALL my sins,  
and beg for absolution, say I am simply sorry  
for being born, for breathing and producing  
carbon dioxide, though plants
have never complained

what
would you say, if
on your very last day  
they got your order wrong, at McDonald’s  
and when you told the pimpled faced nihilist
you asked for no pickles on your Big Mac (!)  
he stared at you through two gray sockets  
that floated on his face, like the eyes
of time    

what
would you think, if
on your very last day        
conjoined twins were born in Siberia  
and one would be deaf , the other left  
to listen for both for eternity, and feel
the black swell of loneliness,
even with blood of a brother
coursing through his veins  

what  
would you do, if  
on your very last day  
you could buy more time  
to create useless rhyme
and it would only cost…
ten cents    

what
would you know, if
during the veil of night, your heart
skipped a few beats, then thumped
a final time, while you were still dreaming
of a dance, under a gleaming sun,
and cherished daylight  
never to come

I don’t know who lived there  
in this stucco house, that appeared  
to be inside out, with fireplace mantels  
under every window, and a setting sun in each pane
walls as smooth as polished stream stones  
power sockets here and there, black cords
plugged into each, all disappearing
into a mist where this abode slept    

I listened for voices
from behind the walls  
though one never hears
in a dream--at least I don’t  
people had to be there…there    
where their shadows danced
behind the fiery orbs on the black glass  
I called to them, but still could not hear
the music that drove their feet  

the suns never moved
on the panes, though the clock
hands spun  inside the house--I was sure of that  
for the shadows faded, the dancing stopped  
and whatever creatures and strangers
lived within, became part
of another’s dream

tonight--my walk
there was fog, a rare vapor
on these prairies

perhaps there  
because I had just read of London,
and German bombs falling through its mythic miasma,
though the only sound that disturbed
this nocturnal glaucomic vision
was a lone siren,
a fire truck, vanished
into the ether,
to save a life

I suppose, since
there was no fire
there was, on the next block
in halogen haze
a fox; I know
you

you ate the
fat black pet hare
the neighbors
mourned  

tonight,
you, and I were on a stroll--I tracked you
just to see your fine tail, hear your soundless
pads on the pavement, knowing the sight and silence of you
were as rare as the misted air

then,
a truck came
its lights making you disappear
and waking me
from this cold
perfect dream

I knew Pearl, comely, calm Pearl
eyes as blue as the skies
that warmed her sands
where we walked and talked
dreamed the days away
her voice so sweet on the Pacific winds
it made me forget about home
I was breaking daily bread
dipping it in the
yellow yolk promise of eggs
when little gunner Joe
said come down below
to see the kitty he found
crouched in the shadowed corner
no bigger than the rivets
get her some milk he said
when we placed the offering in front of her
she roared a lion’s roar…
and the roar kept coming
and the young living
thing
disappeared into the darkness...
the stench of smoke
the screeching screams
the fierce rocking of the hull
and blackness
which came too fast to touch
all spoke with equal madness
telling us doom
can come on a sunny Sunday morn
in Pearl’s land
falling,
is something we all know
in the flat land of dreams
in the lucky light of day, and
on that Sunday morn,
in the boiling bowels of our ship
slowly,
with some giant hand in command
the water, the water,
the water we all had grown to love
now taunting our feet,
then our knees
the pounding began
the eternal pounding
the pounding of the hopeful
in Pearl’s blue skies
and our pounding,
the pounding of the ******,
without any eyes
the water
now at our waists
now at our chests
and then only our frozen faces
against the hard steel that had been our home
had the last few breaths of air to breathe
heard the last few gasps of desperation
and the feeble futile pounding
of those in Pearl’s darkened sun…
now we rest in this sunken tomb
the guests roaming above
with cameras and tearless eyes
for they were not
the ones who heard our cries
those who did, do not return
for Pearl is no longer a sunny beach
and a stroll in a dream
but a place where the pounding started
and never stopped
and where the world changed forever
when the first bomb was dropped

the privilege
to ask these questions, was granted to me
before the long black veil of night
covered my eyes    

could I?
the lieutenant gave the command
and we all fired on them  
a platoon of us, against three pajama clad VC  
skinny as monkeys, minding their own business
walking that trail, a thin rope through the jungle
made by the feet of thousands before them  
safe they thought, so far from
the foreign monsters--US  

would I?
of course, and I did
with 49 other night stalkers
who then crawled with me to find our ****  
100 elbows through the tall grass
100 knees close behind  

should I?  
we found them, each a riddle,  
riddled with a dozen holes apiece
mangled flesh asking the question, was one of those red roses yours?  
did my round take off his ear?  or sever his spine, or did mine
fly somewhere in the dark night, where these
sorrowful souls now dwelt forever      

could I? would I, should I?
I got to ask those questions,
and pulling the trigger,
my fumbling finger answered all 3...
the signal that moved it, the message
that traveled down my spine
from a place darker, deeper
than the night  

the privilege to ask
still there, a lifetime later, in waking dream  
long after the fallen became part of the grass  
we slithered through to see them  
before they could ask,
could I? would I,
should I?

it is proper
for a man to lead in waltz
to begin this slow dance on the killing floor  
‘twas the mother taught me thus, perhaps all mothers  
impart this notion--you lead, 1,2,3,and 4; 1,2,3,and 4  
glide, don’t walk, in this grand circle
make the loop, while looking in her eyes    
you will hear the song only
so long, and the music will drift away,
a friend becoming a stranger
her eyes, once gazing at your face
like it was the first sunrise
witnessed by two footed creatures,
will close, perchance before yours
until then, lead, 1,2,3,and 4
while the melody yet
graces the ground

if I manage to step barefoot
in a large enough pile of dog dung,
I might be able to find a metaphor, either in the tracks
I left or in the cracks between my toes

if I sniff with enough finesse,
a simile may sift its way upward
from the ambitious heap, like grandiose molecules
ascending to heaven,
or at least to my nose

if my ears are keenly tuned,
the squishing sound may be sibilantly sublime,
or be alive with rhyme, or paint pious pictures  
if synesthesia suddenly ensues

what was the question again?
creativity? I yet need a different  pile of dung,
from perhaps another beast, for the canine
is likely tired of my verbose purloining  
from the gift he left eagerly
on the greedy ground

"back in the day" is something
the masses have begun to say--they didn't hear,
five miles to school in the snow, uphill, both ways
nor did I, but I did hide in an arroyo from wicked desert sands,
crouching small with my notebook protecting my acne pocked face
the chosen (with fewer zits) poured from shiny clean station wagons,
their morning mothers’ smiles on their tails, sans the gray grit
from my lonely wilderness journey

still,
we got our first color TV that year,
and I got to see red blood from the first fallen
in that crazy Asian war...I can't remember what color it was
on the black and white, though it dried black on my jungle fatigues,
only five years later, when Sugar Ray from south side Chi-town died
in my arms, one of his skinny legs blown off by a mine
someone decided to put on that trail,
back in the day

Walter Cronkite told us it was all for naught, and we believed him
Johnny Carson still made laughs while anonymous millions made love
(now I hear tell Jay Leno is "back in the day," so who the hell was he?)
gas lines began to form, and Tricky **** tripped on his tongue,
one too many times, and even more chanted the mantra,
"back in the day"

decades passed,
with Iran holding hostages, Ronny Ray-Gun getting shot
and Clinton getting a *******, and the day finally came,
when we were told we were all the same, with some folks
named "Will and Grace" gracing the screen,
now that Walter and Johnny and Superman
retired to a place called obscurity,
or maybe Nebraska

I didn't know what to tell my straight kids, so I didn't
and that was OK, because their "back in the day" was 9/11
and it mattered not who was het or gay, because nobody had black and white anymore,
those tube filled dinosaurs now in some landfill, buried beneath a billion dead cell phones,
a trillion plastic bottles, the cyber art of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates,
and the dung of dogs who could stand the sterile scent
or who did not care

now we still say back in the day,
the view of that backward horizon different for all
I try hard not to wonder, what spell we are no longer under
when we can’t call someone a ***, or hang someone
who simply tries to vote, and of course I must duly note
when my PC is silenced in a newer pile of trash
it will not matter who was gay, or who says,
back in the day

September's sinking sun
summons shorter days, persimmon's pearled berries
have been gobbled up, sultry sunflowers still stand tall,
but court their namesake's light coyly now, perhaps knowing it will starve them out when its arc loses length to the earth's taunting tilt

mercury crawls slowly
down the tube:
100,
90,
80,
70,
like blood returning
to the heart for a fresh start,
until it settles in its own vesicle, patiently waiting for heat's return
to pump it once again through its brittle artery

I have no patience to wait for its return, no long yawn to greet eternal days, for I am cursed to know
September's soft songs give way to October's ambivalent skies,
and to November's naked ****** of all things green and gold
  December then, need not utter a sound to convince me what leaden fate awaits the long forgotten ghosts of summer,
  and the seeds I have yet to sow in futile ground

I murdered you, simply because
of the red fiddle on your back
and because I could, though
we stood under the same blistering sun

had you not made such a tangled web
I would have not known you were there

perhaps then, your sin was the same as mine
weaving words like webs, leaving them there
for all to see, and discover the spindling me
before they decide my fate, like I did yours
with the heel of my shoe

I aspire to be the king
of the noble wolf pack  
the alpha male who makes the first tracks  
in the fresh fallen snow in the high country

the privilege of being  
a quick coyote would be a fine thing as well
filling the desert night with songs, yelps that beguile
the most clever of beasts who hear me  

a shepherd circling the wooly ones
earning a good bone, some meat left on the lamb shank
and the praise and ear rubbing of my master  
this too would be grand  

yes, this canine world
could be rich

mostly, I suppose  
I just want to have four legs
and **** on trees

it may have been
the smallest flying creature
I ever saw; without modernity’s grand prisms
I would have only felt it, a tingle on my ankle, then the itch
I could have crushed it, leaving a minuscule red slash on my skin,
the bloodsucker’s only loathed legacy, but how could I,
a giant glob of cells, master of motion, a driver of cars
one who swipes plastic cards to buy dead, roasted flesh of beings
a billion times the size of my ankle’s tiny guest
how could I be such a monster and blot out its light
with the slap of my paw, especially knowing,
in my wide world, a soft rain was falling?

as dusk rolled into night,
we watched a gray storm pour off the mesas
you spoke of life, death and what lies in between  
I smelled the rain and watched the lightning dance off
every rock, revealing some sacred secret alchemy in their stony souls  
a molten mix from ancient seas which yet today  
makes a bargain with light brighter than our simple, dying sun  
when your words faded into a sleepy slur, I walked
through the torrents of rain, not shivering
from the dreary drenched burden of the flesh
nor from the earthly winds, but from the vision
of my paw prints disappearing
before they were even made

blasphemy,
is no doubt my intention  
for every word I add
will be seen as profligate  
there are no blanks to be filled,  
but I will fill them
with guilt--not remorse  
(or neither, or both)  

for sale,
the dead sign
hanging in the window  
keeping the sun out,
the whispers in  

baby shoes,
ethereally white,
never to be bronzed
or filled with awkward
pink feet, never to be
outgrown or passed down,
with a few sublime scuffs,  
to a brother


never worn,
left sitting on
a sky blue sheet
awaiting the feel of feet
stared upon, with rapt attention
by four faithful, faithless eyes  
that would wait while words
of comfort  fell on deaf ears
but never be filled with tears  
as long as the sign read
for sale  

blasphemy,
I have committed thee  
along with he who convoluted hope, with
six bold words

blood suckers,
engorged with the sanguine sap of Catholic, Jew,
and for good measure a Buddhist or two,

more multitudinous than molecules
in a mastodon’s eye,
these whizzing winged vampires
leave an angst filled itch
in their wicked wake    

they avoid me, though my blood
is there for the siphoning
with  perverse sense of smell
they can somehow tell  
I am one of them,
without the gift of flight  
yet ******* my own crimson cream  
both day and eternal night

billions bubble the carcasses
of hedge fund managers, pigs, poets,
and priests, sublimely engaging in gaseous feasts,
without complaint, or abstemious restraint  

sans their gargantuan gobbling,
our balanced plain would be littered
with mountains of crap

soft winds would still blow,
searing suns would yet set  
but we would grow tired
of shoveling heaved heaps  
into freshly dug dirt,
if the drosophila did not live
so robustly, and die
without dour dirge

some friends, some lovers,
some just…names, none  
dropped from the sky like flies  
they vanished, some before my eyes
mostly, though, my ears heard of their passing  
“so and so…before their time”  
but tabulated ticking is not the province  
of the silenced, now in unseen passage  
it is our ears that hear those clocks  
and decide if they beat long enough  
and by what measure?  
some friends, some lovers,
some names, we heard a time or two  
or saw in print a final time  
before we rolled the paper  
to swat another one or two  
from the buzzing air

the Garden had one, it is said  
to tempt the blissfully naked  

on April’s eve,
one slithered across  
the road, where I had paused to sip
from my canteen, a cool elixir
flowing more slowly down my throat  
when the serpent stopped  
in glistening mid squirm, to tempt me
to follow him

but I did not,  
seeing no tree from which to purloin  
a forbidden delight, knowing full well  
he had others yet to beguile,
and I needed no taste  
of good or evil, to know  
I was ******

trip flare  
and they are in a singing,
soprano sea of light
my heart thumping, baritone,  
my eyes digesting this metastasizing meal  
choking on it, until  
the guy beside me opens fire,  
emptying a magazine before I flip
from safety to rock ’n roll auto  
both of us now filling the killing
fields with tracers,
whizzing shouting shadows
in this sorrowful symphony…  
the light fades
in the newly darkened pit  
the crawling ebony clad shapes
stop,
the conductor, long gone  
to another stinking stage,  
while here, the blood dries black
and I have new mournful memoirs
of  the music of madness

we may have begun
with a glorious big bang  
and some delirious dance of stardust coalesced
into just the right rocks at just the right time  
to give us our trifling flashes and lost shadows  
on this rolling stone,
but what is nobler
than stepping in the doleful dung of cursed carnivores
before it becomes desiccated, before its mushy mass  
turns to invisible gas, and makes hallow our air  
and divine our dust

she would be eighty, or eighty plus one  
her name was Eve, really, she had me
when I was a bucking young mountain man  
only weeks back from that “crazy Asian war”  

now, a prisoner of the prairies,
its harsh daylight dousing my waking dreams of her,
dispersing them downwind, with other melting memories  
I yet hear her English tongue, see her bobbed blonde hair  
against her silk pillow, and feel the warmth of her huge fireplace
and her slender fingers on my shoulders  

twenty four years younger then
than I sit today, what would she say
if I saw her now? would we lie
with each other, or to each other?
what if she has passed, and all that keeps her
here is the faint fire behind me, the embers
speaking in red whispers, of Eve, of yesterday  
and of soft dances in nights
of naked forgetting

what an audacious title!
she squealed, condignly

to speak of the soul, and more,
to enter the holy land
of priests, poets, seers,
and carnies

to discover the synovial moan
between one's craggy crafted countenance
and the invisible breath of god  
to find a place, backwards in time
that may lend itself to rhythm and rhyme
but will never settle silently on the page  

between the soul and the façade,
the mud in which we are stuck,  
a bonded place, in a travesty of space  
where a voice cries for help  
yet is never heard

you did not skitter
onto the asphalt
what kept you at the fence,
what told you to turn around?

you scampered back
to the fallow fields
long before my killing machine rolled by,
but you kept an eye, on me,
ears perked up as well, listening
to the harried hum of my motor,
dulled white noise to me, yet a roaring
coded symphony to you, punctuated by birdsong,
ghostly voices in the gray wind, and perhaps
the languid liquid thump of your own heart    

what kept you from the road
what drove you back to your plaintive plains?  
things I will never see, nor hear  
even as my own heart beats wildly  
at the sacred sight of you

I wish I could run with you
in your silent packs  
I have done my share of howling
a prisoner of this sluggish, two legged species
that cannot chase down prey
or take flight, without the crafted creations
of others,
I can, if I wade warily through
waves of wind, and time,
dance with you,
on moon grazed prairies  
but only until the sun cracks the dawn
and exposes me, for the vain actor I am