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.

Bare ground gets soft in the cold rain,
Turning ankles and slowing work,
Freezing the overnight tracks
Of possum and raccoon, brushed in frost
For  the morning cattle feeding,
Before the school bus and lessons,
Drilled paddle of the principal,
Confessions of the miscreants.
Nothing more simple than the heart,
Which warms the lungs so breath is seen.
The hens don't peck, prefer bagged grain,
The steady work of laying eggs
That disappear with doorknobs in the nest.
What's the poet getting at?

Such elegance and opulence
Beneath this highway overpass,
Where rocks provide the sustenance,
As winter culls the underclass;
Gimcrackery of transients,
Guitars and spoons and mattresses.
Police come charged with striking tents.
You can't live here, the city says.
One level up, on 2nd Street,
Old cars and vans make living space
For down-and-outs who still compete,
And teach their kids to ask God's grace.
This kingdom come, of what's been done--
Earth daughter, mother, father, son.

Not surprising, really, that she
Never heard from Kevin, though he
Promised if he could he would keep
Calling, after his heart went still,
The inevitable outcome
The cardiologist assured
Them would be soon, maybe three months,
Maybe four.  He lasted seven.
She wore black for the first long year,
And listened close to everywhere
His voice might speak the slightest word,
Watched the fingerlings swim downstream
In the waters he used to fish,
As if one might turn back and look
At her with swift recognition,
Beside her in that icy stream.

What calling beckons long gone memories,
Those scattered prodigals, sad mother's son
And father's daughter, sailing troubled seas,
To fight upstream a washed out riverrun,
Convinced that something  not yet understood
Will recommend this fallen universe
Of wood and nails to shelter brotherhood,
Through mothers' tears and winter's harsh reverse,
Inspire another backwood symphony
Of blue and green?  Come over now and see.

Somehow the words you whispered then
Seemed nothing worth remembering.
Not so the flavor of your skin,
Or how you set the phone to ring
At my house when he called your line
From jail to see if you were home,
While all the time you lay inclined
On feather pillow, mattress foam.
We borrowed time from userers,
Who claim their interest near the heart,
And reappear as raveners,
Insistent while the days grow short.
Would now those words could buy some time,
Spent here in this outdated rhyme.

Unless these clouds move out tonight,
There'll come no moon to wish upon,
No drawing down Diana's light
By bacchanalian devil's spawn--
The only sound  a cat's footsteps,
And our quick breath, almost unseen--
No other watcher here except
The wolf that winters here between
This woods and that one, biding time,
As lovers shiver, called outside,
Through sacred oak and profane pine,
Against the forest's darker side,
Now slanted on a recent fall,
Unfettered as this lupine call.

Wood cut in spring splits clean in December,
And though I've seen three score and should be tired
Of ending years, expiring decades and
Even one century I put to bed,
Should be tired of trees and tinsel,
Tired of tricks played on the children,
Tired most all of new beginnings,
Tired of poems I can't finish,
Long cold winter evenings, sleep
And dreams and anxious afternoons,
The platitudes come late to stay
                   longer
Than invited,
Laughing at us unrepentant
Singers, dancers, lovers, saviours.
            Start.  Live.  Go.  Now.

A sawbuck won't go far these days,
Enough to get your sick off, not
Much more--a Chinese toy, 3 plays
At chances for the biggest ***.
Sometimes I'm happy still, a fool
Soft selling so much misery,
With platitudes of Sunday school
And politician's finery.
There's not enough when no one shares,
When blame is disproportionate,
And hungry voices strike deaf ears
That call the lost unfortunate,
That call compassion socialist,
And gall their name on heaven's list.

Nobody's heard much more than what's
In the paper and that's only
That Hill got killed by an off duty
Officer when somebody called in
Suspicious behavior and he was only
Half  a mile from his house, along
Hill road in the woods
And his sister said sure,
He was gacking,
But he didn't have no gun,
They didn't have to **** him.
I guess they're used to this
In Nashville, St. Louis, Cincinnati,
But here we know each other some,
And his sister says he wanted
To get straight but ****'s
A disease and Hill had it bad,
Had it from high school,
Through two tours in Iraq
And five years now since he came back,
Couldn't seem to hold a steady job
And started dealing it to pay the rent,
Sold grams and eight *****,
Coke or Ice,
Not smack and never packed
More than a knife since his felony,
Because he gave it to me, she says,
I've got his 9 and that's it,
He didn't have no gun.
So I tell her it isn't right
What happened and would like to say
Justice, etc., but
Seeing that's unlikely
And she knows it, I hold her head
On my shoulder
Because last night
They killed her brother.

Unruly truth, your sharp array
Marks tossing lovers--hostages--
Gives aspiration to the clay,
Whose pornographic images
Come through the open basement door.
Fidelity, unreckoned thief
Of all the lies that promised more
Than visitations cloaked with grief,
Defy my moving hand tonight,
That's found the place where life comes in.
Reveal your ugly face and fight.
This thrusting pen comes jammed with sin.
Submersion couldn't call your bluff.
I'm done with this.  I've had enough.

For nights you lie awake in bed,
A thousand miles away from sleep,
Still whispering inside your head
Some promise that you didn't keep,
Or else forgot you ever made,
These words are recommended less
Than paperbacks and lemonade,
Or magazines that dare confess
True stories with a shot or two
Of hookers trying hard to guess
Who's easy money coming through,
Or who needs more than sympathy,
Pays well for late night company.

Chattering squirrel, I beg you hear
This quiet sonnet plead your leave.
Yes, you and I count each sincere,
Refusing, Dylanesque, to grieve.
I offer you the whisky jar,
A hit of **** or mushroom caps.
Cold day is slanting into dark.
If I were younger, there'd be apps.
I couldn't write this, maybe you
Began it and I snagged this line.
What moves will drop, when time is due,
The snow, the leaves, your mind and mine.
No more space left for barking here,
Scorched words an antidote to fear.

What isn't here, not in these lines,
You have the right to see, and more
Than that, discover, touch
As it blooms.
Poem.

Lee's dumbstruck seeing hung
Beneath the light
Her dress, a wig the color
Of her hair, her shoes--
The marionette he wanted.
He'd spent some time on this,
Had set the stage then texted
Please come get your ****,
Garage unlocked.

And  had he thought
Helena, by her now--too late
To shield her eyes--
Would understand such hate
At five years old?
"Is that you, mom?"
"I guess it is.  Your
Daddy's mad."

She held back tears, undressed
The doll except the hair,
Then cut it down while standing on
The set of steps he no doubt used
To raise it there
And dropped it in the trunk
Of her Toyota, unsure
What else to do with it,
Collected all the dross
She carried in for seven years,
Before and while things
Went to hell.

A madam in her house breeds fear,
Long list from halls of government.
Wild music flowers night its ear,
Played rough enough blue words come bent
From queens and jesters, jack and jill,
Buck dancing Appalachian child,
A delta path that winds uphill,
To Corinth, where the rocks lay piled.
Black Jesus clogs at Nellie's house,
Trades in his sandals, blesses feet
That dance in air while lancers joust
On what were never quite white sheets.
Some unwashed sinner sheds her skin,
Makes men of boys and boys of men.

Downhill on a cool morning
With a fresh cut load
Of logs for the mill
The brakes went out
On the old truck
With its nonredundant lines.
No stopping it my father
Double clutched and geared down,
Steered across a road ditch
Deep enough to bounce us
High above the seat,
While I in childish innocence believed
He knew what to do,
And he did, as well as anyone could
Under the circumstances.
The chains and come-a-longs
And standards held, tires didn't
Burst, and we made our way
Slowly to the mill yard, unloaded
On the ground and spent the afternoon
Soldering that breached brake line,
Refilling it with fluid and bleeding it.

She's kept so many keys, cut long
Ago to doors and boxes, locks
On gates and diaries, on wrong
Or bad directions, wind-up clocks
Long stopped and not remembered well,
That maybe should be thrown away,
Though skeletons will sometimes sell
In sidewalk sales on judgement day.
Increasingly, the future's picked
From options found along the road--
Reaffirmation, habits kicked,
A heart that bears a heavy load.
Kind words prove yet her greatest spell,
Her keys cast in the wishing well.

I once knew a girl from Kentucky,
Whose husband would not let her f**k me.
He landed in jail,
And could not make bail.
Now all of my friends call me lucky.

The rain this morning falling strange,
Unheard for weeks while grasses browned,
At first unrecognized then changed
To gratitude that heaven frowned
And cried again on broken land,
Healed cracks and succoured trees and vines.
Would that were true of everyman
And woman born in these hard times,
Observant where the seed will drop,
Terrain that takes good faith to sow,
That generations may not stop,
That rain will come and ice will hold
Our struggling sons and daughters,
Who cleanse the heavens with their tears.

Fall mornings, he believes, will show
The way back, stretched from afternoon
Above midday, an hour now
And then another, three more soon,
Arrested from the night and laid
Upon his plate with nothing more
Than coffee, toast and marmalade.
Resisting what he used to score.
The afternoon could use a source,
Some meditative carousel
To mitigate the old remorse
Of what has not worked out too well,
And what will come, familiar fright,
His long acquaintance with the night.

All colors and their absence mourn--
White page, black pen design the mind.
Bare bodies blow Gabe's copper horn.
They leave a twisted trail behind.
What's left unwrit is lionspeak,
Transcripted worse than poetry
Encaged in shops that smell and creak
From correlated symmetry.
Unbending letters, cold steel rails
Truss up irrelevant decrees,
But broken grammar jams and flails
From supplicants on what were knees
Aa ee ii o u
Come hear what's lost, spit out in blue.

The news is not good news today--
Hide from the wind and run from rain,
A boat on fire, gut sick gun play.
All told, a litany of pain,
And I, perhaps I should feel worse,
Should give anxiety its due,
The medications being cursed.
And yet the sky outside is blue.
I claim no sense of innocence,
While holed up here--a sonneteer,
With lit incense and cupiscence
For that woke fear this craft can't queer,
This horrorshow, this pixeled glow--
Trade winds that blow where words won't go.

Supreme Court ****, supremacy.
Recession.  Constitutional
Embarrassment and lunacy,
A beast whose belly's never full.
Broke minds have given up on love,
Our bodies scarcely understand,
Wish something, somewhere--up above?
Could mastermind a better plan.
This oldschool wordplay broken down
Can't dance in darkness, or hot sun,
While bullets tear through white and brown.
We've overdosed, the children run.
And what can any human do?
Socratic poet asking you...

I think we know the way it goes,
Stray bullets in the moonlit night--
Football East Louis, Illinois--
Take life from good girl only eight.
A pawnshop gun, a deal gone bad,
Unanswered prayers, unfinished life,
Uncertain hopelessness gets fed
To those who somehow just survive.
Which way is this, untouchable?
Defender of the sacrosanct,
Red blood of Jesus, god man child
Spilled out on grass beside white paint.
Our sport is shooting children now.
Swing low, sweet chariot, swing low.

Only we raised crosses,
Gallows poles, ever spiked
The heads of enemies
Along the road to Rome,
Quartered our
Kind--horses being driven
Without understanding--
Ever made slaves a stock-in-trade,
Built cages for refugees
From places worse than here
In class distinction,
Worse leaders--imagine--
Than our own.
Breathe deeply and continue,
While in the place incomprehensible
Another slaughter,
Then another,
And who would give himself that
Name?  Reaper?  Personification
Of the inhumane, political.
A sleepless nation, terrorized
By lies and accusations,
Fear of swarthy siblings,
Ishmael, El Paso.
Pens and pencils, paper, crayons.
New shoes.  Notebooks.  Erasers
Left on the tile battlefield.

To love so well is rarely known--
Incomprehensible but true,
This thing that you and I have grown,
That everyday comes out for view.
Surviving while the others fell,
This linkage has the strength of steel,
And when there's nothing left to tell,
Still how we lived was oddly real--
No grand illusion in the sky,
No better place than by your side,
No understanding by and by,
No chariot or train to ride.
Yes, you comprise my paradise--
Let heaven weigh the sacrifice.

It's academic, as they say,
These evocations lingering,
As I and I remold the clay,
A bold offensive, stolen ring
Of Adam, Eve and human vice,
Exposed in rhythm on the grass.
Cascading willows, wind and spice,
The reaper makes his steady pass.
Cassandra sang, Ophelia too--
Good words are always hard to find,
Yet somewhere must remain a clue,
A still, small voice that says be kind.
Our final words go etched in stone,
And in the end we sing alone.

She stares outside the open gate,
Convinced she can't pass through it still,
And leave the world she's learned to hate.
Perhaps she'll eat another pill.
Scorched character has settled fate,
Has undermined her sovereign will.
The cost of freedom set too high--
She loves her gold too much to try.

The hungry ghost, tight-lipped and sere,
Stores up the treasures that corrupt,
Refuses love and succors fear,
Finds living always too abrupt.
I've said it slanted, but today
The cage is empty anyway.

We've outdone Father Abraham
In sacrificing girls and boys;
Along the border, in the wars
That serve no cause but oligarchs,
Who reassign the deity,
Call Moloch to America,
With powder, pills and poverty,
While celebrating liberty.

Don't fault the peasants, red or blue,
Whose votes have been corrected by
The players in the party rooms.
The unwashed--unbrushed teeth on edge-
Come out of hell for processing,
Discover yet another ring.

A pack of earnest individuals
Turned up at Tom's apartment for the wake;
Concupiscent philosophers intent
On explicating Wittgenstein and Kant,
And English post docs stuck somewhere in Joyce--
The river running through the lion's mouth--
A few of us on LSD, and Ron,
Blonde hair and chiseled, wistful midwest face,
Old granite in his rusted pickup bed,
Palimpsest still just traceable as Hall,
With d. and 18 something underneath,
Processing uphill in the cold dark night
To footsteps of the Hall of Languages,
Long climb of concrete steps, and parked his truck.
We clambered over sides and carried
That rock a little more than halfway up
Those daunting stairs that Delmore climbed in angst,
And Carver, breathing hard, in mourning for
America, romantic Reagan just
Elected president and my black dog,
As snow began to fall, just settling in.

Pompeo says just relocate,
Don't fret about the climate change,
The ice and fires that rearrange--
At any rate it's much too late.

Pompeii saw fire come raining down,
The melted earth run through the streets.
But we have new technologies--
They've parked the rockets outside town.

The darkness in a country spreads,
Collects more space and settles in,
Asphyxiating kith and kin--
Kids slogging through the latest meds.

We deserve some affirmation,
Brighter rhythms, smiling faces,
Love & peace among all races--
Make again a grateful nation.

I've been through Webster's book and none of this
Is good enough to understand your love,
Which held me close against the wide abyss--
Not cast below or rising up above,
Mortality the cost of tasting bliss,
Eternal mourning of a peace-blue dove.
Your touch is more than I and I deserve;
Your soul is where the goddess finds her nerve.

She's got a new coat, rabbit fur,
She found marked down in mid July
In a strip mall consignment store.
She's wearing it at work tonight.
A new layer, first to come off
As she dances in bright, hot lights.
Washingtons, Lincolns and Jackson
Collect on a string drunks tug on.

At home she's got a girl and boy,
Who wait with grandma while she works,
Expecting she'll arrive with toys,
And bar food served with plastic forks.
It's Friday night, no school tomorrow.
She packs them in and starts the car.

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.

She's not available for love,
Can't seem to find the place or time.
Seductions hold a hidden past--
Abandonment, a missing man,
Not interested enough to stay
One year, first year, first word, first step.
She wouldn't like me saying this,
Who came as close as anyone,
And yet remained outside of love,
Uncertain where her heart had gone.

If truth & time be intertwined,
And as we're told by scientists,
It's in our DNA to lie,
Give leeway this forbidden tryst,
Conceived beneath the vernal sky,
In evening glow & morning mist.
Wise men condemn such frolicking,
And yet the fool is April's king.

We've no less right to sacred fruit,
Than Solomon, or Eve, or God.
Lie back, let me take off your boot;
Unzip my jeans, remove the rod.
This greening grass shall be our bed.
We'll move the earth.  We'll wake the dead.

Despite the clutter and decay,
Indicative of my decline,
I'll have you understand I'm not
Unhappy with my lot, and yes,
Do comprehend the odds against
Becoming one with God or you,
And yet I've seen it happen once
Or twice and so, intermittent
Though it's been, I'll keep at it, love
Being one of those things, Hegel's
Greatest contradiction, reason
Being useless in its face, so
I don't mind the pain it harbors,
As much as I would miss its taste.

If I could conjure paradise,
I'd place it here, in this soft light,
With day trips for the groceries,
Occasional short strolls at night,
And visits now and then from friends,
Who'd bring good wine and never fight,
Would love the music that we play,
Transcend some way our mortal plight.

Our maladies would disappear,
Financial worries all dissolve,
Eat every fruit available,
No ****** mysteries to solve.
No hatred, spite or jealousy.
Around your body I'd revolve.

From the garden of Heaven a western breeze
Blows through the leaves of my garden of earth
                                             --Hafiz

Humility comes easier
And easier, accumulates
In the pockets of poverty,
The deep rivers of the heartland,
Where we're told by cashiers to have
A blessed day--sing, count your many--
And it's true as the western breeze,
Where leaves flutter, underrated.

Compassion, in the garden of
Heaven, God's country, flown over
Aside from quick stops to mine votes,
Cannot be regained in this land
By anything less than human,
By any houses not holy.

These pancakes don't taste like they did,
When Mr. Edwards brought her here.
The waitress pours more coffee, says She'll ask the chef but doesn't think
He's changed the recipe in years.
I'll take 'em back, Ms Edwards.  Try
A different breakfast, if you like.
No thanks, she says, don't take 'em back.

Two years now.  Even coffee's not
The same as then, tastes weaker like
It's watered down, no better than
The instant kind she makes at home.
She eyes her phone--no messages--
And nowhere else she wants to go.

She's got a new plan, invented
On a cold morning in April,
A pilgrimage to Tennessee,
Just west of Nashville, where she knows
Some people who are close enough
To take her in, with two kids now,
Long enough to get on her feet,
Find work, apply for benefits.

She tells her daughter to be strong,
To make her little brother think
This move is their great adventure,
Which it is, in its own fashion,
Is freedom, an old idea
She almost forgot.  She's ready.

This late winter snow,
Upon the yellow jonquils,
Forecasts your return.