Rubble and dust
spinning in swirling disks
around the fire
until one place
of greater attraction
draws debris to itself
and coalesces into an incandescent planet.
Earth and sky begin
full of promise.

Way down yonder in the paw-paw patch
Bang in the first measure
Came the congenital seizure
Skewing the first invention from scratch.
The campfire skied its sparks
Into the ghost-ridden void,
The skittish tchotchkes
Of paradox and entropy
Quirks and tics as dumb as bricks
Until a headstrong mongoloid
Started groping for rhythm
In the quavering spasms.

Oh, but it was a jawdropper
A bang-up tour-de-force
A horrorshow time-warper
Of Luke and Kirk and spice,
The good apple ran the table
Till the old goat hacked the matrix
And the young hawks did their mind-tricks
Of a tessellated cat’s cradle...
And paparazzi made the odyssey
From planets Claire to Z
To dish how cosmic *******
Trysted protomolecule
As the major ghosted ground control...
In all, a very large array
Of bingeworthy groundhog days.
Lukewarm confabulation
Of the smoking embers
From the essential tremor
Ceaseless oscillation
Between good cop and bad copper.

And the girl scouts chorus
With cheeks full of S’mores
“For all of your fables
Of hobbits and hubbles
And sabering at windmills
You will never untie the volition
Riddled into the convulsion,
Nor how the campfire kindles
Nor be one of us.
You will always ***** the pooch
Halfway to the paw-paw patch.”

Nurse Dipso-Etheromaniac
And Dr. Thorazine-Brainiac
Shoved their two-part invention
Cold turkey into the clockworks,
Cleft lip
Fetal eyes
Flipper-fingered
Riddled with the shakes
Cold-shouldered him to another dimension
Where muggles punk ETs,
And their whiskey wizards
Serve up mock elixirs
Not some hair of the dog to undistemper
The secondhand DTs,
His doggo superpower.

Bill Grogan’s goat
(Bam bam bam bam!)
Was feeling frisky
(Bam bam bam BAM!)
Chased three red skirts
Across the galaxy...
“I knew you were one of the ***** boys
But why do your hands shake like that?
They flipper and gibbet all over the keys”
The sour-smelling teacher spat.

And the mean girls echoed
With tongues of acid
“See how they lurch and squirm!
You will never get to the paw-paw patch
You will never find dear little Susie
She will never teach you to hulu
And you will never two-step
With dear old Johnny
With fists of wiggle worms.”

He touched off the fireworks
Torching all your pomp and cirque
In some skullduggery
Of **** and villainy.
I, Dropout
Outcast
Clonetrooper
Mutineer
Hitched a ride north of the watchtower
Where imperial walkers with hooves of ice
Stomped the land flat, and late-blooming
Summer never shakes the phantom menace
Of the winter that is always coming.

Somewhere in the interstellar distances
Of Kantian prairie perturbed by auroras
Like those night-blooming skyflowers
I glimmered back into existence.
I drank with wildings dropped with the dead
And vaped the contrails of the mad rocketeers
(Kid Rambo, Def Louie, Jedi Freddy and Manny
Steampunk Sal and Wig Out Johnny)
But never found sweeter ******
Than the next bridge to burn.
I, callow flamethrower
Of Shiva, the destroyer.

Marshall Gunpowder Jehoshaphat Miller
The bad apple of the force
Hatchet-faced and porkpied
Dead by ****** suicide
Born again old-schooler,
Packing halitosis
From ossified canon
Skywalked me down.
Gospeled me like Luke
And knee-capped me with a curse
Shame; the oldest mind-trick in the book.
I served out my prodigality
In Ludovico therapy
Which for a half-life, somewhat took.

Headlong into retrograde
I crashed the zero-sum arcade
Fed a quarter into the supercollider
And with some crazy tic of the wrist
Spooked the ball’s trajectory
So it champagne supernovaed
And spat out the shabby ghost
Of a birthright lottery.
Thirteen golden statues.
But as the digits flipped
And the mission crept
As it does to one and all
Faster than a cannonball
I flashed back to renegade.

And the made girls chorused,
With cheeks full of Botox,
From their partial-view suites
And partner-track perks
Of bottomless cups
Of shut the **** up,
“You nearly made the grade, you!
But then you had to mouth off job-hop Hulk
Out, which finally betrayed you.
Now Security Guard Miller
Will escort you off the premises
For a reckoning with your nemesis
Regret, the silent killer.”

True, for a season I was a bluepilled moon
Marooned with space junk
And cypherpunk
Doomscrollers
Of deadend might-have beens,
Like the lunar sonata’s
Primal whisper of futility,
Until it tripolars
Into ultraviolent agitato
And hits escape velocity

Now loosed from orbit of the Goldilocks planet
I tumble through space in dumbstruck rapture
Of hurricaned stars and thundercloud nebula
I tremble in the thousand-parsec stare
Of the headless horde of dark riders
That stampede the stony hobbits,
Through the looking-glass of lightyears past
I see monstrous galaxies in ungainly copulation
Blushing Hiroshimas of atrocious release
And multi-sunned planets where misbegotten
Beings shudder into self-consciousness,

While I drift toward the event horizon
To be gobbled into the enigma
With a little gasp of gamma
Hammerstricken wires frisson.
Where the eleventh measure of the first invention
Counterclockwise corkscrews
Way down yonder in the paw-paw patch,
After a very long array of groundhog days
My skeleton crew bunch into alignment
Like that hunch of spooky entanglement
Or just possibly like that eternal dissonance
Quelled by a quanta of true arrogance,

In a clockwork grotto
Grows a chrysalis F-sharp
Where fingers at last Goldilock
Into queasy equilibrium,
To my dumb surprise
The dark sac butterflies
And there is Susie
A little tipsy
On hard compatibilism,
With hips of pulsars
And hands of auroras
She hulus like the time warp
Not spasm without rhythm
But otherworldly vibrato.

To some Holy Land, now, gather ye,
There, to spend the night in Gethsemane.
Entreat with the father or maybe the son,
Perhaps they can tell you when a war is won.

For another parent, another child,
Their once ancestral home defiled.
Did it help, the blood you spilled?
Your mark of Cain; your curse fulfilled?

Run to your God and pretend he hears,
Believe in lies and dark new fears,
Deny to others their right to live…
We saw what you did and will not forgive.

Where two or more are gathered,
The result is anyone’s game.
But make it many thousands,
And often it is just a shame,
How Gods remain suspiciously quiet,
When the killing is in their name.

We assembled a modest telescope,
To find what sights there were  to see.
I stared, transfixed, at the moon and stars,
In the driveway with all of my family.

I know exactly where I stood,
The moment I would find,
The infinite nature of time and space,
And how it all unwinds.

I asked about the size of the moon,
The distance of its arcing track.
I asked about the space beyond,
The nothing in the black.

I asked my family how big it is.
I asked if anyone knows,
The moon, the stars, and all of it.
I asked how far it goes.

“My son, our curious little one…”,
My parents said to me,
“It has no end”, “It just keeps going”,
“Outward, eternally”.

I stared up into a southern sky,
Ominous, dark as the sea.
And I swear, at that moment,
Looking up,
Something departed from me.

            It flew into the dark of space,
And hasn’t slowed in all this time,
       As far and as fast as information can.
                        The speed of light, I hear…
Which is not so much a speed…
          Hitched, perhaps, to the Voyager probe…
   By these new thoughts inside of my head.
                             But I digress.

This thing  began a journey that,
Must bring it face to face,
With everything that ever was,
Every corner of time and space.
Everything that is yet to come,
Everything that has ever been.
Repeating every history,
It’s trek would never end.

That thought has always stayed with me.
It anchors me, somehow.
A line cast from a sailing ship,
Where I stand upon the bow.
In the oblivion of the infinite,
It grounds me to the “now”.

Writing a poem is about locating self.
Every facet within what you’re about to create
blooms from your consciousness, your subconsciousness
your ego, your mind, your heart

But where are those elements planted?
Where are they rooted?

They are rooted within:

your ethnocentric illusions
your lived reality
your privilege, your pleasure, your pain
your abilities, your disabilities
your socioeconomic status: have and/or havenot
your fluency, your empathy, your sense of humour
your vices and your storytelling devices

Now we've got some roots, what are we going to grow?
Let’s begin by observing, using our senses
Maybe, let’s use our eyes
Consider, the reality of how we see and sense the world
Is different for each and every one of us

Everything is tempered by the lens we use
Which is informed through the roots of our synapses
Which empirically flow from the subjective ground
On which we stand

And what does this have to do with poetry?
What you describe in your poem,
Is an interpretation of what you see (and feel)

Interesting poetry comes when
there is exploring to do
It is a poet’s imperative to
Explore the edges
Out past the boundaries of the visual and audible spectrum

If we were fish poet’s
Would we write poetry about water?

I like to toy with my teenagers on occasion
So I asked my son the other day, what his worldview was?
And I have been enjoying the vacuous silence ever since
To be fair, I have been asking myself the same question for many years
And this might have been the inciting incident leading me to storytelling

As we began this journey together, it was stated that
Writing a poem is about locating self.
Can you describe your context?

Let me attempt to describe mine:

Here I am on the stage in this ocean of air
At the Owl Acoustic Lounge
On a Wednesday night in May
Popping air with rhythm, nuance, and a certain je ne ce quoi

Although this poem is not objectively true
Let me attempt to share that
this poem blooms from my developing cosmology
From the overtures of my Overself;
from the undercurrents of the Monomyth,
From my ***** and through my groans of intercession
This poem blooms from oblivion
Threading through philosophy, to worldview, and into a budding cosmology

For myself:
Worldview fell away when I found cosmology while reconnecting with the night sky
That night sky took me places while grounding me concurrently in inner spaces
Where locating self flows into meta-cognitive health,
Well ... that is something to write about

In the beginning the sky was cold butter,
hard and riddled with kernels of corn,
which, as the world heated, popped:
And thus the clouds were born.

Everyone's been talking about how
the universe will either expand
indefinite cold star death
or collapse and then repeat itself

meanwhile i'm a slave proper
in every sense of the word physical
bound to the elements hunger
a criminal for speaking my thoughts aloud

a loud or a soft noise unheard
unseen and unknown and unthinkable
still I would try to define it
humanity, always effing the ineffable

i'm one and apart and the same all the same
the universe cloaked in name after name
every man and woman a star
in their own drama melodrama how dramatic

i am in a word addict
again you might say i'm back at it
rhyming with rhythm but static
sense or nonsense and i've had it