You feel like you've escaped and then
It's back, that feeling that you've failed
At everything that matters when
The world and you have separate sailed.
Man overboard, call strike the mast.
Unwax your ears and hear the song;
Those sirens that you won't sail past.
Collapse your angel wings, go long.
Reclaim scorched ground in sanity,
Dismiss the cursed curriculum.
Host sacrilegious deity,
Liscentous offerings to come.
Axe whittle down your enemy;
Poseidon take a whiff on me.

What seems important?  Now is not
The time nor here the place of sand--
Annealed, reconstituted thought--
Neck high, yet claiming one free hand,
Spent youth a mandala released
In ardent love songs and defeats,
Old sorrows that have scant decreased,
Poured out in lines with bagua beats.
Your frame and mine, the scarred remains,
Fragmented, somehow holding on,
Against the new, the older pains,
The resevoir turned now to stone.
Shanti, shanti, shanti my love,
Do not look back, don't glare above.

It shouldn't be this difficult
To find a way to love the good,
Pledge loyalty and not insult
Wind water fire and sacred wood.
Did language separate warm blood,
Get bent in efforts to control,
Leave children out to face the flood
Without the carpentry of old
Anticipating what will come,
Despite denier's profit schemes
That leave the offspring running from
The nightmare smacked upon their dreams?
Give love, give faith, give blood and hope,
Throw courage, strength and high test rope.

I've learned this language better now,
Can hear each letter's tone of voice,
Who let me know I've sinned somehow,
Still leaving them without a choice,
Despite their subatomic strength,
That should be paired with more than mine,
And then expounded on at length,
As some apocalyptic sign,
When really I am less impressed,
Would trade them for another slate.
Not saying this tonight in jest,
They're insufficient, as of late.
Yet live with them and give them due--
Some nights they cast a lovely hue.

She hears herself
When no one else is there, rehearsing
What sustains, intransitive
Awareness of an ancient ground, words
Lined and ploughed, bloodwatered,  humble sown
And harvested, now swallowed and recast,
Choked I am (one a.m.) bic pen,
Tam o' Shanter working through the darkness
Still surrounding mother earth.

Of course it's three a.m. again--
Time long encircled in the blues--
And grateful for the company
I pull out old shellacs;
Dinah, Eartha, Big Maybelle,
Then Tina, early blues with Ike
On a long playing record, songs by
Little Walter, Blues Boy King,
Songs Ginny used to sing
At juke joints in northwest Tennessee,
Before she made her way out west,
Vegas and L.A., when cheap scotch at midnight was enough.
And now, somehow, pure grain and Percocet
Have stopped her, some say accidentally.
Man trouble too,
Horn players with habits,
Car dealers and one evangelist,
Backslidden but believing,
Tapped now to speak well,
Ignore vices and regrets.

The American dream had wheels,
Wheelwrights heating rims to fit
Linseeded spokes,
Conestogas, prairie schooners,
Bicycles and trains,
Fords and Maseratis, Harley Earle Impalas,
Coal trucks, semis, interstates
That separate the morning.