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.

A dozen young men clear debris along
The highway, not chained together but not
Free to go, yellow-jacketed, watched by
A supervisor in a uniform
As you and I pass by unrecognized
For our transgressions, not righteous enough
To challenge gravity for redemption,
Just pleading not to fall again tonight.

Rough endings somehow fade, and how
We laughed grows stronger.  Tears you cried
When he was gone reminded my
Rough hands how soft to hold a love
And not insist on anything.

young suicides have spoken out
an echo from the lower rocks
bruised souls uncertain how to shout
or even listen to the clocks
celestial or most terrene
that ridicule the future past
armed crosses planted in between
young werthers with their futures cast
corrupted out of innocence
too soon to have the stoic eyes
unblinking into providence
rejecting even death's disguise
in words like these that slant the truth
poor folks palavering like brutes

instead of any other place
i'll take this one we've stumbled on
through our mistakes and what we've done
this cluttered sacred space
unscared to face the universe
or even time's misgiven hell
as come and go long winters' chill
rehearsal of the obvious
your unrepentant love is all
the paradise i apprehend
though do not say i understand
how spirit cares to make its call
wake up these old but willing bones
i'll sing your praise in quarter tones

There's nothing left to say tonight,
No words that aren't worn out or bruised
Beyond a useful harkening.
Still sirens cast their subtle spells,
Confusing sailors with a song
No more dependent on the verbs
Than parrots or chrysanthemums,
Seducing all that aren't tied fast
To wooden poles or ancient scrolls.
Jack Kennedy, Jack Kerouac,
Where are you when the road goes on?
Our country is no summerland.
Heat bakes dry ground and cuts off breath.
The earth receives its offering.

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.

All that can be said
                             is how unlikely
another word or two could change        
                       places underneath
all that has been said,
not counting evenings when
the same thing said did not
mean what it did
                            the night before.
I could be too certain.
             You could be too certain.
If we wanted the same thing,
                    how would we know?

If we were less impermanent,
We'd forge our nails as hard as god,
Whose only child had kinder skin,
And veins cascading mortal blood.
The straightened line must have an end,
Entropic and irreverent
As any long expected wind,
Ill-suited to the penitent,
And those alike, whose stoic gaze
Accepts the loss of thought and dream--
All aenema a passing phase--
A balanced crossing on a beam.
Forgive me if I say again,
Come touch the wound, come taste the skin.

Allow these lines to draw your heart tonight
Away from where it scatters every day.
Observe each scratched & curious black mark,
A cursive incantation, ancient skry--
Almost as if arranged by me or you.

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.

How can I tell someone like you
That I need you?  You expect me
To lie, to say I'll be all right.
I never could avoid the truth;
You say it's easy, with practice.
Soon enough it's second nature.

I should be kissing your shoulders

The rain cooled things down, what had been
Hot afternoon yielding to birds,
A squirrel on the wood border fence
And us, in still life on the porch.

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.

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.

The shadow of a cross lies flat
Against the ceiling seen above,
As i lie flat upon my back
Beneath the fan that hasn't worked
In centuries. It's five A.M.
I'm trading sleep for poetry.
I've traded it for other things,
So why not scribble? why not sing?

This second stanza needs a push.
I must confess i've used up love,
Though loathe to tell you just how much.
I've let it flow and let it go.
We're running out of time it seems.
Grey doves find branches in the trees.

Could be coffee or
The cat's indigestion again,
Looks like islands
On the vast yellow page,
The lawyer's pad,
Hispaniola with its stark
Divide,
Jamaica, Cuba,
A rhythm section of suppression,
Questioning the rights of man,
Woman, trans, some progress
At a price
Unknown.  Love,
The color of the sun,
Suggests itself in shadows
And reflections.

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.

Two-thirds through the suicidal winter,
It's a full night tonight at the shelter--
Two rooms, two tables, two televisions,
A scattering of chairs, four couches, cots.
This February ice and cold
Has brought in families from their cars,
Tent dwellers from the bridge,
Holdouts from the sidewalk doors.
And somebody says, like it's news,
You hear about Steve and Carrie?
Shot her in the head then hisself.
On the front porch. Found froze solid.
Can't figure why he would do that.
Don't make no sense. They had a house.

What matters now that time has long Resigned itself to peering in
Through black cat glasses that belong
On overwrought librarians
Flipped out on sheets like ridicules
Of mockingbirds as shy kids find
Their *** on shelves at grammar school,
At least the represented kind.
Can someone take these shelves away?
They've given books much too much space,
Quixotically arranged the day
In covers where the lost embrace
Lost lovers from a borrowed song
And lives are lived, however long.

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.

buckled concrete rooted up
by           and
      oaks           elms
impassable in a chair
despite the full battery
she turns
retraces
finds steps this time
so it's into the street
the only way
to reach the square
to protest
the marble statue
now she's passed
by the pickups
with the flags
whose drivers
on their way
to guard the monument
guessing she is not on their side
hurl epithets
call her a lover
of that which they
in their ignorance
despise

This slender evergreen should scratch your name
Against the perfect sky. You're not alone
While someone loves you, if anyone knows
Still what it means to hold a fragile heart
And not be frightened by the memory.

my father was an angry man
who fumed with godlike fury when
someone like me had other plans
that constituted mortal sin
or less than steady revenue,
yet kneeled beside my bed when doubt
had displaced subtly all i knew,
trained substance of the altar vow--
as if this constant crossworld death
could be persuaded to relent,
could be defeated, sparing breath,
or carved out blue as light gets bent--
a son the perfect sacrifice,
as wine is poured and bread is sliced

Still learning what I should have learned
In nursery school,  where hearts get broke
And mended at the first recess,
Where nothing's ever what it seems
And no one thinks the day will end,
Or Christmas will indeed arrive,
With boxes full of promises--
The star stuck on the inside tree.
Consider how long you've been gone--
I can't imagine time that long,
Or where the **** the future fled.
You may return.  We might unite.
The trees are tall in my backyard.
I've watched them grow, not seeing them.

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...

This small town quiet night has left
My mind imagining you free,
The world cracked open at its fault,
Fruit ripe and willing from that tree
That leaves no indication here,
Where traffic is a happenstance
Until you make yourself appear
And I invite your sly advance...
Fresh Eden always ours to test
Against a subtle offering
To be like gods and never rest
And never cease at conjuring.
Come ******* seed in innocence--
Don't look behind for consequence.

so far--
and you may laugh
at the idea,
i wouldn't
blame you--
i've not
found lines
fine enough
said
to bring you
out again
without
one
look back.
forgive me
my
persistence.

I miss the stripteases,
Even the arguments--
Less bitter than the loneliness.
It takes so long to make a friend,
Even longer
To adjust to experience.

You are your mother's eyes,
Her innocence and guile,
Gossip of the single-chair salon.
She say count
Your friends on fingers,
One hand held behind your back.

You were young and casual,
The bed post carved and whittled,
Woodchips on the floor,
Not wanting to be known,
Or even placed in memories.

Forgetting was the great effect
Of the twelve packs
And occasional *******,
Swearing by its value--
While I, some freakish lobe,
Remember every ******* thing.

You never knew how to need love,
With its circumstances,
Gift of the restless father,
A long train ride
Into thin air,
Some years a summer visit.

Rooms with moving pieces--
Morning's unmade beds,
Disenfranchisement of the afternoon,
The self-help hucksters
And baloons--
Children waiting.

Transition of your oldest friend,
Beside you in your husband's arms--
Before they both are gone.

On my good word, this broken line
Began to praise the light at five
And I had much to move and find;
Light lunch and laundry,  heat arrives--
Slow traffic in necessity
Endangered by the solar flare--
This mid-size star has need of me
As god must need the polar bear,
Whose ice is breaking in the sea.
My window frames pedestrians,
Progressing on the concrete walk--
Slow pilgrims mixing prayers and sins,
As I should talk or you should talk
Of anyone misunderstood--
Distorted through the glass & wood.

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.

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.

Suppose he's Buddha, or maybe Jesus
Christ, a mendicant testifying here
With his boots off already and I light
An incense stick, he says they're from the same
Factory as Tony Lamas and the
Only difference is the label and the
Sole and he only needs ten bucks to buy
Some food and I say we don't sell used boots,
Nor any kind actually as we're a pipe
And record store, but he has his pants off,
Jeans better than Levi's and just broke in,
He'll throw them in for a dollar or two.
The store next door takes clothes, but only on
Consignment and he needs to eat tonight
Or maybe a bag though he never says
It, I can tell he's low on something bad
To need, so I pass him the sawbuck and
Tell him to keep his bluejeans and put his
Boots back on as he's likely to need them
Where he's going, mention the soup kitchen
Downtown, though I know he's salivating
For a straw, or else a needle.  Someone
Else comes in, looking for Norwegian Wood.

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.

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.

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.

Your time will be your own again, she said.
That's what I hate the most tonight about
This whole bad deal,  my selfish loneliness.

Regrets--a too long string of cans behind
The GTO, the goat, red Pontiac
Ragtop spewing gravel in the churchyard.

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.

What if she shows
Again, daughter
Of memory,
Willing,
Insistent,
And I am speechless?

What if she wraps
Her legs
Around my face
And my tongue
Gets caught
In my throat?

What if she lies
To me,
Just slightly
Looking
Over my shoulder,
Or below my eyes?

What if she prefers
Sonnets, to a
Questionable sestina,
Or a good liar
To my reckless
Blurtings?

What if I
Can't take
My time,
Or even begin,
Can't say anything
That even I believe?

What would you do,
If I were you
And nothing
Seemed
To come out right,
Or even clever?

How can I
Sleep, while thinking
She may not return?

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.

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.

Meditation, with a black cat
In my lap, **** frost on the lawn,
Lapses into words on a page
While heads on the widescreen chatter--
The new pandemic,
Ways to subvert the vote
In a  contested convention, winter
Weather.  The president praises
Gone With the Wind.  Life is good,
And death I'm watching out for you today,
Pale stallion, afternoon shadow
Of sapien lingo I would not wish
On my companion.

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.

no way to pay the city bills
and not much reason anymore
the turn of the key the lock's click
step back inside her mother's house
who'd tried hard to wait up but slept
instead in the small recliner
the television left on low
with food still warm in the oven
next morning unpacking her truck
she speaks to the neighbors next door
says it just didn't work out well
she saves the long story for me
brings pizza and knows i'll have beer
enough to go back twenty years

Last night I rearranged the world.
You may not have noticed it yet;
It's just a little friendlier.
The sun still shines almost the same.
Ain't nobody changed the darkness.
Increasingly, appetite for
Paradise has worn through black shoes,
And the new road needs a future.

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.

I've never known a poet who didn't
Wish at least most of the time that he could
Be a lineman, say, or else a fireman,
Even better, rescuing animals
And people discovered in a bad way,
Or perhaps a musician, for whom words
Are always buried in a dying song.
But tonight I envy the sweeper, whose
New machine cost eighty grand and flashes
A yellow light at five miles an hour
Up and down Olive Street, where I abide.
I'd wear headphones and smoke a pipe, I would,
And the world would be cleaner when people
Awake. Instead i've lost the urge to sleep
And cannot be persuaded by the pills
Or longing spent earlier in the dark.
I'm settled in, content to mark the time
From sun to sun, while no cars pass this house,
With pent up language of a modest sage,
Renouncing what the night has said, just me
And this steely-eyed old man who's run his
Rig on every street in town, both up at
3 A.M. and he's the one getting paid.

Red sky this morning,
Clear to anyone not sleeping in--
Heat rising off the street,
Songbirds reluctant with their song.
The early lunch crowd eyes the sky.
Don't like the looks of that, one says,
Seeing some suggestion,
Something gathering
In the west.

Come dark it's rained three times and quit,
And then the heavens open up--
Fire dancing through the rain.

Some lives will not be spared tonight--
The weather not the worst of it;
Black powder, steel and lead.

She likes the baseball afternoons,
Better than the Sunday sermons,
Has waited,  sleeplessly, all night,
Now nods along the homilies,
Less certain of the trinity
Than how the 6-4-3 can end
An inning that looked perilous,
Or how the cardinal lately
Spending evenings by the fence row
Might be her husband back at work.

Men ate first at get togethers,
While the women who had laid the
Table waited and I, too young
To yet be called upon for prayers,
Shared a table with my cousins,
Who would later, as the sun set,
Shed their garments in the cow barn,
Just to see their difference from me.