The world's abandoned us and left
Us reeling from its own devices,
Separating smaller slices,
Cold servers calculating theft,
Corrupting every sacred craft.
Women punished for their choices.
Hungry children got no voices.
Let's have a war, without the draft.
What worth in words the poet wrote,
Old gods could show us how to live?
Bad questions linger, bodies float.
Who knew the earth could cease to give?
I leave this ragged, tortured note.
And from this pen, I'll forge a shiv.

The fortune teller's twisted heads
See past the time you might have stayed,
And how we might have made our beds.
Did you have need to be betrayed,
Forsake your soul and take your meds?
Confess the way you've been afraid.
Who's with you isn't where you've gone.
He's with you now, you're still alone.

I've no great fleet to sail you home,
Though you are ever beautiful,
As Helen with her careful comb.
Call yesterday your interval,
Give me your scent of summer rain.
We'll face the future, heal the pain.

Smoky used to sell pills and write poems,
Had to make a living somehow, payments
For a disabled mind, combat ruined,
Being less than the cost of rent and food,
So he sold his prescriptions and then some,
A little bit of grass as well, and shrooms
He raised in a little closet, lived with
Two mutts that barked at every driveway tire.

He sold his El Camino, bought it back
Wrecked and hammered out the damage at night
In an old friend's shop on Bondo alley,
Turning down the **** observers offered,
Then lay down in its shallow bed, alone,
In a closed garage, with the motor on.

The rain doesn't know it's falling,
Or that the night is warm enough
For us to sit out on the porch,
Discussing whether I should go,
Or if there's something still to do.

We used to make love in the rain.
We watch it fall like strangers now.

What she doesn't need, not again,
Is to be told by a lover,
Or a husband, where she went wrong
Before they met, or even since,
When apparently she's ******* up
Whatever great plan he had for
His life, which might have been a breeze
Without her siren's screech and moan.

She sits alone, in fading light,
Rejecting pills prescribed to fix
A chemically imbalanced soul,
Neglecting how it got that way,
This  bitter world of reckoning,
At lonely ends of summer nights.

A path established long ago
Invites us boys to follow down,
Set up a new encampment here,
On this brown bank of Caster's creek,
And brown our bodies head to toe,
Pretend to be the other's girls,
In tents we've pitched as evening falls,
And constellations fill the sky.

Two brothers and the rest of us
Find arrowheads and smoke grapevines
The morning after we've entwined,
Throw sticks and rocks like savages--
A Saturday to be alive,
Unlike the sons on Asian hills.

From watered seed, who knows what grows,
In fertile, broken soil.  Your choice--
Who coined that pregnant word, and how?
A woman has decisions, yes,
Confusion and a life to live.
Gone past those gates and flaming sword,
Long legacy of guilt and shame,
For those who keep the world alive.

Your lips impress love's mortal claim--
Wild nights, red wine, fellated mind,
Where I have loved you long and hard.
Cold fingers beckon, crow beaks shine,
Confirm the cropper's shadowing,
Dark cloak that augurs closing time.