This serpentine shadow.
A ticker-tape wind.
It's a new constellation.
Planets pulse like an idea.
A gathering squall spells out our fortune.
Everything disappears in a wall of gray.
It's not a new form of suicide;
Its as empty as space
And twice as cold
In a dark with no stars.

Toward morning I draw the first words
From the place I came yet cannot return
As night crawls back to the hills

Pain is a bright room
Lit in florescent
Here the needle is turning

I wish for the waking of other worlds
The stars are all broken
The ghosts of time pass through me

My eyes are waiting for me in the dusk
I feel my way toward them

I'll find my name written in dust,
There again, I will meet it.

Jacob over the bridge town proper,
Gas lit streets, a string of yellow parking lights
In a slow fog turning to threads,
Barely remembering their colour.
Waking to predawn gloom
The town looks small and elderly.
I light a cigarette,
Spy the old Yankee town.
Here, there be Tygers
Night races up the steeple.

Watch the wheels and whirs,
Long welts lines like lupus.
My God Man, I'm responsible for this mess.

I thought I'd vacuum to pass the time.
Must not have heard the phone.
My tried and true,
Welcome to the desert.

Lets get started.

The first thing you'll need
Is a well-honed upper body.
Or a shirt.
Do I **** the ending?

The familiar phrase ran up the jaded alley.
Who do you think settled the valley?
The lazy bees outside the window?

The futile logic of the exercise?

Waiting on the circadian rhythm,
Millions of years in the making.
Old Ted Kennedy died this week,
Made me what to play a dirge
To The Three Kings.

I fear the new ones ain't as friendly.
Brandishing sticks instead of branches.
Blessed be the Peacemakers,
They will be called the Children of God.

I got your back, what'd say?
I brought it chapter and verse.
The peace frog forming in
the midst
This strange August.

Switching the jeans for basic black
How urbane the lesson.
I should have turned on Randolph,
Had to wait for Ohio,
Turning on Rush to the buzzed suit
Crossing against traffic.
Two on the way, one on the way back,
Looking for the self-park.

Splendid Desolation,
Daddy done drug up the rear
Its like this from here on out.
Nothing but green along Michigan,
A right on Congress,
Two on the way,
One for the way back.
See the Glory of The Royal Scam.
                    *
         Sep 03 2009
   (For Walter Becker)

Never mind the silence,
Bring on The *** Pistols
With they're vitriol
And jugular vein jutting
Out when they sing
Probably spitting on the first row.
The chicks dig when the singer's spit on them.
They get quite emotional with fake anger and wild gyrations.
Captivating they're audience.
But I want to know is
When are you finished,
We got a V.A. function going on tomorrow,
And by God I see one of your band members passed out in the front with the paying customers. And your CD not selling at the door and please clean up the puke when you leave.

the last wind of November
lashing the trees,
unseen rain racing the tiles
the wind rises and echoes
the clouds
the old trees and whithered
with dark branches
gnarled, bent over like an old woman
clutching a rosary at evening mass.
the rain whispers to the sodden silence
as clouds race the half-moon
and the sea is unknown.
is rain falling on the last place on Earth?