He's had a complex life.
Chance is his name and
his twin sister is Charlie.
They were adopted by a
couple but the husband
left after 6 months and
the mom lost her mind.
The grandparents brought
the chicks into their nest
and are nurturing and
loving and I wish I'd
been raised there by them.

I killed my God by mistake.
I thought He was all powerful.
He made everything I loved
a sin. My sins piled up so fast.
I thought I could confess fast
and keep the curve flat but it
became a huge mountain
and my guilt buried us both.

I was Catholic from birth born with
  original sin and doomed to rosaries and
  Novenas and nuns, priests and confession.
  My guilt would tear God to pieces.
  Heaven would be empty and hell cool ash.
  Atheists would dance if they knew how.
Zealots still speak tongues with poison  snakes.
  Preachers would still make their fortunes.

I'm way too old to just die.
My capacity to accommodate
biological death is diminished.
I'll turn to dust and just blow away
in the morning breeze and wash
into gutters in the next storm.

Voluptuous woman full figure and
tight short jeans bending over your
garden as I walk my dogs by your
yard and I wonder at your wonders.
I imagine you'd be wild in bed.
You might scream and sweat as I
tasted you where it matters.
We'd sleep as spent lovers do.

Steel wheeled chairs we spend our days in
  "marching" in parades on the 4th of July.
  Little flags wave. Fewer each year as the
  memories die like our fallen brothers.

Desire terrifies me.
I have no control.
It's bumber cars
at Coney Island.
Madness gone mad.
Bed bound after drinks.
I ***** for your love.
My clumsy claws miss.
We wake sober awkward.
You're late and run and
I feel a failure again.
Where can I turn? Priest
or Shrink or Doctor or
Madam or Barkeep or noose?

You can't rush a still's chemistry.
Mountain folks know all about
revenuers and they're reaching
for our wallets. Taxes is just a
word for robbery. Leave us to
ourselves. We scratch a living
from the rocky soil and barely
eat from day to day. We dance
to banjos and fiddles and love
in the hayloft to fill our needs.
Our mountains cradle our hearts.
Hardscrabble is our legacy.
We have hearts of coal
and love our mountain!

I work my little *** off filling Santa's shelf.
    We're non union cheap labor and I'm an angry elf.
    I can't feed my family like the fat man eats.
    All we can afford from the company store is beets.
    Communists keep infiltrating our elf bars at night
    buying us beers. They sow unrest. I see the light.
    Marx. Karl not Groucho had the whole game right.
    If you want to grab your share you have to fight!

Men sweat. Woman bleed.
Both are beasts of burden
until their bodies coil as one
ready to strike cruel masters.
They float upon love's breeze
and feel no pain, just healed.

I'm around the bend
and up the creek. My
skin is parchment and
my eyes are cloudy and
ears full of lies.
I'm not fragile.
I don't shrink from
the crisis created by
Goldfinger. I'm
Bond. James Bond.
Follow me to my
happy ending.

She wears her red high heels.
   Dance, your hands love that woman,
   always swaying to her siren song.
   Go home at dawn and climb in bed
   with the owner of your heart and
   hold her flesh and blood to you.

It struck without warning.
   Find a bathroom. Too late.
   My body betrayed me and I
   was horrified as it flooded
   pants and shoes and aisle 8.
   Adult diapers were top shelf.

Ice cubes ring like church bells in my drink.
     I smell incense like the altar boy I was.
     I drink Christ's Chardonnay blood from a chalice.
    
     Celibacy is much easier than sexually complex
     relationships with jealousy and doubt and *******
     measuring the success or failure of a marriage.

She was my bartender and I tipped big.
She is easy on the eyes and full of Marx.
Who would have thought she'd scream
from the Floor House of Representatives.
Her crazy eyes are great in bed but not
so much on the television news.

I'm beginning to think Love needs
to hurt to be itself. It's intense and
everything has a price to pay.
Hookers hurt less but disappear.

I need to be pinned on your cross
like a specimen kept under glass
to bear witness to political victims
like Julian Assange who speak truth
to power and crawl ****** to Golgotha.

politicians recycle their tired clichés
plastic Christs with plastic pulpits
pitch platitudes like mucking stalls
to a million suckers ready for saving.
pockets bulge with lucre. Lambs slaughtered.
the guilty dance on innocents' graves.
Rod was always gentle calm a lovely man,
a friend dead with AIDS before we knew.
Breath rattled inside his chest and skin
hung on bone like tired faded curtains.

We're all being swept to sea in a
riptide of madness in a sinister
world of mad science and trusted
aides with long knives and smiles.

Throw the stone tablets from the
mountain top and break the only
chance to pass on lessons learned,
who we were and disappointing
expectations. I miss my *****
time machine and touching you.

I'm a son of god.
I'm a broken drunk
puking in gutters.
I'm your ex.
I'm your lover
always hungry.
I buy your drugs.
I smell your incense.
I feel your pain.
Be crucified like me.
Escape the tomb then
we'll compare scars.

April 20th is our holiday.
We smoke joints at 4:20 pm.
Flip a finger to the world.
We won't march to your drummer.

I was born in 1949 back before
every child was fragile. We
were just a brood of kids our
parents set loose in the woods.
We broke bones. We kissed girls.
We swung on vines like Tarzan.

Death and taxes.
Love and broken heart.
Right and wrong blur.
We fall into rabbit holes.
We love Alice to death.
I am the Cheshire Cat.

The virus is lust.
It propagates us.
Keep me alive and
feed me love and grace.

I'm so tired tonight.
Maybe I'm drunk.
I follow this madness
in the "news" but don't
have a clue after all.
How can we find the enemy?
When it hides behind the
NY Times and Post we won't.
The betrayal is here and it's
a dagger in our hearts.

I've never known a bad ****.
Some lovers are better dancers.
The ones who think they own
the crown jewels are just *****.
I've found Catholics to be guilty
but earnest participants in the end.
My favorite was a large Jewish girl
who devoured us both in a waterbed.
Patty was ******* centerfold stuff.
She was always in a hurry to finish
and complained of a sore jaw too much.
The first was Westside Story Maria
to my Tony and we dragged our ragged
families to our shotgun wedding and
played at marriage best we could.
It was the 60s and Summer of Love.

We're all conflicted between
   this and that, him and her,
   us and them, live or die,
   soul or soulless, I don't know.

Did you see the soldiers swarm
like bees into our village with
weapons pointed like stingers
for anything that moved?
We were still as death.
They moved on.
We came alive and
got away with it and
lived our simple lives
destroying our enemies.

I don't play along with HP's MO.
I wish I could but the young poets
you choose to feature haven't been
bent and broke as age can broker.
Few shine and I love them but,
they're rare and most are puppy love.
I'll live here quiet in shame
and watch from the distance
and wait for the virus to die.

You almost broke my heart but
    I beat you to it and did it myself.
    I know love is mirage on horizons.
    Feet on the ledge high above deceit.
    Wingless bird I leave your nest and
    fly forever into an endless night.

He mourns all the anonymous souls
   buried randomly in the potters' field.
   How do we become that distant from them?
   He has tears enough for the entire world.
He is us if there's a chance for redemption.

They ask me what I want.
   I won't tell those *******.
   Why would I? I'll tell you.
   We're strangers in a bar.

   I want to move back home.
   I want to move on.
   I want to apologize
   to...everyone.

   I want to watch my wife
   learn to laugh all over, I
   want to make her feel good.
   I want to make her ****** again.

I feel trapped inside my skin.
   I feel trapped inside of time.
   I feel trapped inside of life.
   I have a bottle of escape pills.
   Painless dreams out of prisons
   sing to me from rocky shores.

First lines are always full of lust
  and ******* in secret spots only we know,
  your birthmarks and cute imperfections.
  You're perfect for such a few lines.
  Magic dust blows away in wind of time.
  In sunlight you look too real and scales
  fall from my eyes and you are a corpse.
  These poems always end as eulogies.

It eyes me with suspicion
like I'm a heretic.
Will it burn me at a stake?
Am I Joan of Arc or Jesus Christ?
The congregation can't be satisfied.
Can't be bothered with the ways or whys.

I fought my way through her
****** and saw life pass before me.
Maybe it was my disaster or hers.
I screamed my breaths in anger.
I missed home like Dorothy in Oz.
I never found the yellow brick road.

I walk the steps to my gallows.
I smell anger's blood at the door.
We're fighting. We love and hate
like old enemies, salt and the sea.

She was lovely. She was blond.
  She took me to her bed naked.
  She went quiet guilty nun on me.
  I spent my seed and left her praying
  to whatever deity lived in her head.
  I sat with the living on my bar stool.
I wonder to this day what the proctor
graded me on ******* a lonely corpse.

She makes me feel inadequate.
  I'll never measure up so **** it.
  Just a mother who hates how I
  make my bed and does it over
  every time and I start to see the
  cracks in her shell and the madness
  that finally brings her to her knees.
  She sees a shrink to put her back how
  she used to be but the puzzle is short
  of pieces and nothing ever seems right.

I'm at a carnival midway.
My mouth's agog at the freaks.
Tents for 10 cents to see naked.
Lobster boy displays deformity.
Bearded lady drops her veil.
***** covers the cement floor.
The stench is bathroom overflow.
I try to wake from this nightmare.

I was barely used to living.
The rug was yanked from under me.
I woke into the afterlife.
It's familiar. The people here
died already but I like them.
They get my jokes and drink like me.
We smoke **** and sit on stools
at an endless bar. Everyone has
an endless tab and we all yell
"Drinks are on me"!
Violence erupts. Nobody dies.
Hell's not as bad as I feared.

Life's a tragedy wrapped as presents
    we take for granted like birthday cake.
    Years tick by and we blow out bigger fires.
    We know death happens, just not to us.

Like Vincent my art's invisible
now but maybe future generations
will find fire in the night sky
and read my blood on the page
and know what life was like in
my time spinning on this marble.

The world keeps spinning
   against my will. I stop time
   in my secret world and live
   barefoot in summer grass.
   I build dams in the creek
   and play with crawdads and
   steal change for candy and
   army men from Rathman's.

   Mom never really got me.
   I lived her script when
   I had to. Boy trapped.
   I smell summer's grass.
   I live in a hospice bed  
   and smile big morphine
   grins as my boy trapped
   dies in the summer grass.

Nature's fierce ****** finally spent
  we dare to leave our caves and stare
  at her debris. Neighbors in pieces by
  we don't know what. Picasso painted all
  of it years ago...madness on a canvas
  in our streets among us living dead.
  How can we explain it to the children.
  How can we sleep with the nightmare?

It's not a place you can get to by a boat,
or a train.
It's far, far away. Behind the moon,
beyond the rain. *

I'm homeless in California. Everything's free.
I fly barely over the rainbow every day when
I fill my blood with ****** and die for a day
or so. I rise like Christ and feel the same pain.

We sit in church basements on
folding chairs drinking bad coffee
with shaking bones and shame in our eyes.
I'm Joe and I'm an alcoholic. Hi,Joe!

Christmas eve. Presents wrapped under
the tree. A fire in the hearth. Kids are all
smiles and best behavior. We toast the
scene again and again until it clicks in me.

I'm a ****** up monster full of rage and
I'll never know why. I roar and throw
all the presents in the fire with my life.
I will always be an I. I'll never be an us.

"words so excite me that a pornographic story,
for example, excites me sexually more than a
living person can do." - W.H. Auden

  Her smile slipped a little bit
  and I knew I'd struck a nerve.
  She pretends to love me because
  she has no idea what love is.
  She wants orderly not chaos but
  she has to spread her legs and
  play along and I play my part.
  Here's my seed and piece of me.
  Plant them in your barren ground.
  I might still reach for the sun.

It's ugly.
It's necessary
so we know
beautiful.
The difference
blurs after awhile
it's only skin deep.
Your flaws are what
makes my heart dance.
We'll live forever.