Without legitimate occupancy,
Adverse possession is the legal right
Of anyone who moves in and maintains
A property, so here's the deal. We must
Move in to 1600 Penn,
The current tenant having broke the lease.
The caravan from Guatemala first, Hondurans trudging slowly from the depth.
Then the Yemen children not yet murdered,
Those with preexisting conditions next,
And women whose assaults were ridiculed,
Those roughed up by cops and politicians.
Losers in the war on drugs, the big house
Having far exceeded capacity.
The mentally ill, discarded by the
Great communicator after he tore
The Solar panels off the roof.  This is
Anger, not poetic license.  When a
Long train of abuses and usurpations
Evinces a design to reduce them
Under absolute Despotism, it
Is their right, it is their duty to throw
Off such Government, and to provide new
Guards for their future security. Such
Has been the patient sufferance of these
And such is now the necessity which
Constrains them to alter their systems of
Government.  And journalists under  fire,
If there's room still left in the briefing room,
Let facts be submitted to a candid
                          World.

Come see black night.  Black night proposes
                                                      mo­re
Than madness in a prophet's dream, sets free
A lean uncertainty, sweet taste of all
We dare not see.

My sweet Kathryn, you were older than me,
Knew all the black mountains--Olson, Creely, Duncan, Morley, Dorn... While I
                                           was learning
Levertov.  Your dark, unshaven armpits
Drove me wild.  I understood the honor
Of that crazy night--how could feather leave you--
               our dance at the outlaw bar,
Your sapphic gaze bemused by coal miners,
In cowboy boots, as the band played Haggard,
Coe, Willie, Waylon, Johnny Cash, Kristofferson
& Emmy Lou.  I wouldn't trade it for a date
With Miss Brazil, or Russia as it were--
Some people say you made that up,
Changed heritage and grew the hair to seem more European.  I couldn't care
Less. A great dark mystery I loved
Now thirty-seven years ago with me
Just old enough to drink and you come down
From Bingington, I loved the way you said
That frozen town, where your husband lingered,
Teaching English to native speakers.
I know you still loved him. I think you loved
Me, but needed a woman's touch the same
As I.  Strange how a night can be recalled
More than years, one drunken naked sunrise,
Pillow talk instead of class.  I ditched the speech
At PBK, can't remember what they
Fed us, coming for you in a straight shift
Chevy pickup, red as the night was black.

She loves the music more than words,
While I'm caught up in sentences,
The nouns and verbs obliquely heard,
The slanting lines of innocence,
Too often at the end of nerves
To have our tongues make any sense,
With nothing more than broken words.
Mistakes are human, I've been told,
Forgiveness from a greater soul.

She says the songs don't sing her name,
And poetry has scant appeal.
She sings.  I write.  We're not the same.
And yet our kisses make a seal.
With time gone south and winter near,
I  wish your legs, your lips were here.

She checks me out, with smoker's stains
On crooked teeth and looks about
Ten years less old than me, which makes
Her forty-nine.  I thought that old,
When I was seventeen, just been
With two sweet girls, about my age,
Insanely jazzed to learn that thing
Which makes us so ridiculous.

A fool can keep his wits about.
An old one learning not to fret,
Has lost enough to be sincere,
Steps often where he needs to be,
With less reluctant feet. My need
For naked words remains obscene.

and when you lie awake at night,
unsatisfied with what's been said--
what can be said--is any heart
articulate and unafraid
of saying things unhearable?
October is a crucible.

As pictured from behind, she looks
Across the water into trees,
Gripping balcony rail waist high.
She's put down bow and violin,
White table just below the rail.
French doors half open frame her back,
Her braided hair, her ankles crossed.
Her weight has shifted slightly left.

A little drunk, on new year's door,
She calls to say she might come back,
And I, who steeled myself before,
Say sure, and feel a little crack.
A frightened lover's midnight moan
Brings back the flood, the thunderbolt,
The once connected lips and bone,
The song, the night, ecstatic jolt.

I'm done with words that break & fall,
Need legs & feet & dampened hair.
Reluctant ink disdains the ball,
I'd know your motion anywhere,
Who moved my world with mortal sin,
And ushered chthonic rhythms in.

Last year, despite his long gone testicles,
& 91 dog yrs of innocence,
Old Jack got dragged around the whole back yard
By his bone, by a coybitch he lives with.
He's a lucky dog, but he's 98
Now and down in his hips. He cries at night,
Housebound by his infirmities and I
Talk to him, touch his head and give him pills.

I remember my grandmother's voice--
You old dog you; I love you like jackfrost;
Mothers are like that, yes they are. She lived
To 95, forgetting for the last
Four who she was and where she was and why.
Should you or I be 1/2 so fortunate.

An old dog doesn't know he's dying, just knows
It's harder to live. I blow smoke in his ear
And we watch ****** stories, real and imagined.
Forensic files, Hitchcock. He struggles to stand.
I'm slow at doing what I have to do.
This morning, like most, weather permitting,
We're 2 blocks down the street from
Where we live. He struggles to ****--
Cancer blocks his peristalsis, makes it difficult
To squat. And I  stand ready with my Kleenex,
In case he gets it out on neighbor's or
The sheriff's lawn. Go ahead old friend, let it
Go. I'm right behind you.

Where do you go,
When you're back in town?
Do you drive by
The torn down church?
The old graveyard famous
For fornication, or the old-style
Dairy Queen with the good
Milkshakes?
Downtown's too young now--
Let's put it that way--
No one there you'd know.
Try to remember
Where you left your heart,
When you see me
Looking up the road.

i want to make the good things last,
or failing that, good memories,
those moments when the veil is torn,
and sorrow is a secret prayer

Imagine the look
The look on the old man's face
As the shepherd
Said
It's a girl
And the wise men
Handing out perfume
Said
We knew it would be so

They were always coming in late,
Being young.  I used to do it too.
That night I'd fallen asleep,  not
Waiting up just watching reruns
Of a stupid show from nineteen
Sixty-eight & he said downtown
Is burning.  One side of the court
Square, it turned out, which is about
All there is of downtown any
More & she went to bed,
Her mother already sleeping,
Then he and I walked up the street
Three blocks and watched the buildings burn.

Firemen sprayed water & cops watched
And we watched the cops and the fire
And the firemen, and of course they
Had been fighting again, not much
To say about it.  I'd covered
That ground before, enough to know
It was like the fire and wouldn't
Get better, so we didn't talk.
Two in the morning, town mostly
Asleep and this amazing show
Inadvertently in my backyard
And their lives changing, separately.

Sammy can't afford the pills
so he's learned to cook
with just a spoon
& some shaky friends

We must have love suggested now and then,
Believing it exists despite the pain--
A longshot or illusion I suppose,
The fool's lost invocation, Pan's lament,
Come up to something more than harmony
On fractured lines where we invented words,
Then tore them up, a beautiful display
Of broken things like hearts & window panes,
Notes hanging low and bent beneath the sky
We're also told is nothing more than dust.
But I insist it's there, so blue today.

I can leave it half full now, the ice tray,
Can drop socks & underwear anywhere,
Don't need to report my own wherabouts,
Just sometimes, like now, to figure them out.
Are you at home? is a loaded question.
Not exactly is a lonely answer.

Woman dancing in the rain,
I see you have replaced the sun.
The world revolves around you.

The mind is rough, a place
Where time gets lost.
The future wears a sad look in its eye
And I  cannot remember it as well
As it seems I should, for drawing closer
Than the past, so dutifully recalled,
Awake, asleep, ever borrowed and spent--
Overdue bills, coffee-stained reminders
That I'm still alive in someone's judgement,
Represented in a row of crosses.

Erase it all, imagine everything
Untold,
No story spoken, nothing
Overheard,
An unstrung voice--rose petals Dropped
At dawn,
Beneath what tree olives or green
Apples
Issac's lot. The question having not been
Answered. Music, though essential, tells us
Nothing.

Each new crowning, where Peter upside down
Betrayed no longer any human god
Alone somehow connected  until now
The empty skull accepts a tuning held
Across so many faces whose sorrow,
Unbelievable as truth so often
Takes on its characteristic pallor,
Insisting we are none of us forever.

I understand it better now,
The fall, how you missed the first step,
From there tumbling to the stone floor
And lying there till your brother
Came to find you when I had not
Been able to reach you by phone
And you had not shown up to eat
Your mother's Thanksgiving day meal.
No angel there to break your fall,
Past the curved grain scythe you had nailed
To the wall among the other
Antiques and bric-a-brac found here
And there at yard sales and antique
Malls.  You were a scavenger, lost
Among the women and children
Who might have made a family
And yet did not connect somehow.
I recognized your pain, knowing
How you tried the medications,
Manic at times, though never quite
Level and never good enough
To replace the Russian water,
Cigarettes and desperation.
I carried you out, with our friends,
Mummified like a believer.
You've come back in dreams and handed
Me pieces of your muddy flesh
And broken bones and said make words.

sometimes this overwhelming joy
brings earth in sight of paradise,
the anxious mind that would destroy
such ecstasy with ill advice
stilled in its ancient chattering
of good & evil understood,
imposed as bitter reckoning
beneath the stone where moses stood.
at other times the mourner's song
has wormed its way inside my head,
an occupation loud & long,
as if it pushed itself instead
of beauty, love and holiness,
insistent with its emptiness.

Stone shadows fill the seer's eyes,
Soul singers, jacked philosophers,
Cold necromancers' boney dice,
Unearthed beneath a willful curse,
Stale fear of morning's sober skies,
The augury of captive birds,
Whose song goes long unrecognized
In yours or mine or Karun's dirge.

Cold silence makes the day run long,
The night as well.  She misses most
His chin, clean-shaven as a palm,
Her slanting fingers touch a ghost.
He never talked about the war,
Liked culture of the harvest land,
Sometimes an evening at the bar,
Cold mornings waiting in a stand
While  counting antlers,  powder dry,
Field dressing, hauling, freezing meat,
Indulging dogs with half the tripe,
Then sleeping in his favorite seat,
The old recliner, much repaired,
Now empty as the winter air.

How easily affected are the minds,
God's children moving shakily between
The scripts and benedictions. Anon
Caffeine and cigarettes, some chewing gum.
A sketch of what goes on inside the brain.
Confessions, passes, stigma from the nurse
Who holds the pad at management. Pain talks,
At times it shouts, and who are you to judge?

Complete the course, it's all spelled out.  My songs are just excuses for the life I've lived.
Not much of one at that, not ever worth
Enough to pay the bills or right the wrongs
That lately have accumulated here
In my thick head, Golgotha of the soul.

Nothing changes
As the night burns
Into an unholy morning
Of despair,
A scream without translation.
American spring,
Killing season in Kentucky,
Minnesota, Carolina, Georgia,
New York.
Nothing changes but the names,
Mississippi, St. Louis, L.A.
Vigilantes and police,
Incendiary commentary by the chief
Executive
That fans the flames.
Nothing changes but the body counts,
God's sons' and daughters' stolen right
To breathe.
At least a fire gets seen.

Your movement to an upper latitude
Has tilted earth a smidgen.  Gravity,
A badly weakened force, reciprocates,
Just strong enough to hold a world in place
But not to stay your drifting. Mountains green,
So far from Tennessee you're orbiting,
While I in place beside my jar, uncorked
And **** near gone, must ride this wobbled wheel.

Where I'm not thinking
Right tonight could be
That place you left,
Reflecting like a looking glass--flawed,
Picked up cheap
At an antique store.

She found the future
proof
of her illusion;
evidence,
experience,
suggesting
modifications, to wit
striking capitals
and modifiers--
gone,
lacking
color,
shape
and time.

it is enough
to be in your arms
when all the stars are falling
nothing i have found
approaches your
                                   embrace
no words of prophets or messiahs
have your faith
what you so innocently touch

Where this road leads, you might get lost.
When you've traveled it far enough
You recognize the signs, what's left
From target practice and the wind.
I'd give you more to go on if
I hadn't lost the thread and now
It's speculation mostly, though
A little moonlight still endures
And I'll be waiting if you need
A ride, or a place to walk by.

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.

While we're here, come in,
Keep talking.  I can listen,
If nothing else
Explain what you want
I'll keep the music down
If I close my eyes it doesn't mean I'm not
Hearing you
Help yourself to anything--
I'd check the expirations
If you want to slip out during the night
Just pull the door closed
I don't worry that much about it being locked
Anymore, but while you're here
Tell me all about yourself

no need for conversation here
chet baker on the stereo
reminds me of the words we share
when time has no place else to go
immobile as a broken clock
still on the wall a bird inside
long separated from the flock
not knowing where to find a ride.
the need to flip the record soon
Inspires me to lay down my pen
move through the crescent-lighted moon
and drop the needle once again
then listen to the falling man
bend summer into one last stand.

The pleasure of a well turned phrase
Does not approach your touch, your taste,
My tongue's adventure in your lips,
Smooth motion of your pulsing hips.
If words could ply their way inside,
I'd give up my infernal pride
And scream your name--a madman's way--
To ask if you have more to say.

All I want
Is more verses
In this room
That I can read to you

It's paradise that doesn't last, this time
Spent sliding through the grass, composing notes--
Odd things to do, a shuffle or a waltz,
A speeding up and slowing down. So what,
Objectively I've not got much to show--
A cadence well enough begun, but ****
It's hard to keep a good thing going long.
The earth itself turns slower every day.

Dare we regard the lover's moon, quite full
Tonight against the purple sky?  We've set
Our ears for reggae, sure the moon will speak
To anyone who sees it slowly spin,
Slow dancing with the broken hearts that don't
Get over losing Heaven's perfect day.

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.

on that brief afternoon
we saw
across the campus lawn
the rain approach us
as a gift containing more
than we could ever
understand

So let's just say you have the choice
Of Tennessee or some place less
Inflected with your mother's voice,
Could you imagine happiness
Come like the rain that's not been seen
For forty days until tonight--
Or do you not get what it means
To need an everlasting light?
As goddesses have rich pursuits,
Accept this bankrupt blazoning;
A paradise of ripened fruits
Could ne'er compare your opening
My heart were it not sore afraid
That once revealed,  it be mislaid.

The brown leaves holding fast
To the grey branches
Of the post oak tree,
Above the unblemished snow,
Are more beautiful
Than apocryphal angels

Little boy, go tell your mother
That the rains are coming,
And the horrible winds.
But don't scare her.

The truth hangs caught between your teeth
Like some unfortunate rodent
About to give up the struggle,
Fleeing when you tire of the game.
Your lips still tell me everything,
The vowels insisting on a taste
And all about you a halo
Streetlamping this September rain,
The thunderbolt still rattling
Like a Johnson outboard motor
On a runabout,  me tethered
By a fraying rope, doing tricks
On one old narrow, wooden ski--
You glancing back to see me smile.

touch our shared confusion,
once more portrayed
as good intent,
black ink
in darkness so profound
as gravity tilts
what otherwise might stand
as roses
on a twisted stake,
unclear the aspiration
of an intermittent beauty
falling loosely
on an unmade bed

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

All morning & into the night,
Searching the universe for words
That might move you this way again;
Wishing they were available,
Or could be cobbled together.
Suggestions are welcome,  I'll pay
What I can--a nickel a word,
A sawbuck if you keep it short--
Maybe eternal devotion
For the time we got left,  enough
If we stretch it, to storm heaven.

Unlikely color of the fall,
Surviving drought and aphid bite,
Cold nights, strong wind, the harvest blade,
Protected by a wreath of thorns.

An old man bends beside you now,
Pulls close the collar of his coat,
Considering the steps and rail,
The fading light of liberty.

A wolf can hear a cloud pass overhead,
Can smell the men with poison, guns and psalms.
A sacrifice of lamb will save his daughter,
His sons, his wife. A hart will do as well,
Or rodents though it takes a large amount.
The last Connecticut wolf was shot dead
In 1837, the rest forced
West, with other natives.  The Custer wolf,
A renegade, learned the trapper's conjure,
Survived ten years despite the bounty set-
Five hundred dollars, a king's ransom then,
Enough to draw the famous trackers west.
No place for a spirit that howls, or speaks
In tongues, and that is what I do, as well
As I know how, untethered to a school
Of thought, for thinking isn't what it takes
To make the sounds that scare a full grown man.

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.

Up before the birds
Have anything to say, preferring--
Except the owls--
Daylight to this protracted night
And none of them in the odd habit or need
Of recording that which might not otherwise
Be remembered, this linear
Declension of an oral pass along.
The cats are glad for an early meal,
Before returning to their torpor,
And my lover--whom I'm careful
Not to rouse--
Has better sleeping habits than
My own,
And will listen,
Once the birds are singing,
To this redacted song.

We play on themes of an old faith. You know
The story as one who fought it believes
In the war, and then doesn't believe it
Was worth the price she paid for believing.
A quick step through the graveyard gets you past
The carvings, cut flowers wilting on the
Rocks and a line of ancestors beneath
The surface of a small hill here or there.
New Harmony.  Golgotha.  Palestine.
In the light of day the granite glistens,
The weathered old stones lean toward the trees,
Patient with their stories. Come back tonight.

So deep in the blues the devil couldn't
Wake me up, she said Bob you blow my mind
And I said I don't care about any
Of that stuff you got and I don't think you
Ever loved anybody, least likely
Yourself and she cussed a little hearing
It put that way by a fool who hasn't
Lost his innocence and repeats himself
A thousand times in a bad night like now,
When the wind is up and even the birds
And the insects give it a break.  You know
What I mean, better than I can say it,
Which ain't that good lately, deep in the blues.

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.