Off the train I hit the streets
and start laughing. This is ridiculous,
incomprehensible. How can innumerable bipeds
have individual inner lives. Why are they doing
what they’re doing? I have no answer
New York City but to also go about my business
in this case prepare for surgery, survival.

But why survive with so many exact replicas
to replace me? A swarm of ants or hive of bees,
social organisms they’re called, climbing
over each other, avoiding bumping and amazingly
making way, anticipating the sudden turns
and straight paths of others, strangers but brothers,
sisters incubating, the cells of a small
*****, nodes of a single semi-conscious organism.

The concept of a higher power that cares
for me is also risible yet how else
can I explain the surgeon and his team,
robots and magnetic resonance imaging machines,
all primed and trained to save my life.
They are not particularly interested in what
I do with my time. I am immediately
in love with the Irish brogue of the head nurse,

the Indian skin of the physician’s assistant.
The long extraordinarily thin
fingers of the famous surgeon. All
mine to savor (and the other cancer patients).
Back on the streets, rush to the train.
So many women to choose from! One
in fishnet stockings stands out, tall
calm, still, graceful. No cell, no hair, no hurry.

Yesterday’s suicidal thoughts: the mind
is a clever servant, insufferable master. Therefore,
meditate on this: absolute need, dependence on the Other.
I still like Hombre, The Shootist and Ulzana’s Raid
but realize those dead heroes
were subordinate to society: the gun manufacturers who armed them.
Thus, I go for cancer tests, accepting, not predicting results.
Hero accepting help.

A torrential rain following five days of flooding,
tornadoes out west busting up wooden towns
all because too many of us are hoarding plastic, herding electrons.
None of us know how it will end, what the outcome will be
(of our surgery). The best that can be said
is Don’t forget to breathe. And you might
as well believe in that higher power.

1THE DOWN drop of the blackbird,
The wing catch of arrested flight,
The stop midway and then off: off for triangles, circles, loops of new hieroglyphs-
This is April's way: a woman:
"O yes, I'm here again and your heart
  knows I was coming."
  
2White pigeons rush at the sun,
A marathon of wing feats is on:
"Who most loves danger? Who most loves wings? Who somersaults for God's sake in the name of wing power in the sun and blue on an April Thursday."
So ten winged heads, ten winged feet, race their white forms over Elmhurst.
They go fast: once the ten together were a feather of foam bubble, a chrysanthemum whirl speaking to silver and azure.
  
3The child is on my shoulders.
In the prairie moonlight the child's legs hang over my shoulders.
She sits on my neck and I hear her calling me a good horse.
She slides down-and into the moon silver of a prairie stream
She throws a stone and laughs at the clug-clug.

Hard light bathed them-a whole nation of eyeless men,
Dark bipeds not aware how they were maimed. A long
Process, clearly, a slow curse,
Drained through centuries, left them thus.

At some transitional stage, then, a luckless few,
No doubt, must have had eyes after the up-to-date,
Normal type had achieved snug
Darkness, safe from the guns of heavn;

Whose blind mouths would abuse words that belonged to their
Great-grandsires, unabashed, talking of light in some
******'d, etiolated,
Fungoid sense, as a symbol of

Abstract thoughts. If a man, one that had eyes, a poor
Misfit, spoke of the grey dawn or the stars or green-
Sloped sea waves, or admired how
Warm tints change in a lady's cheek,

None complained he had used words from an alien tongue,
None question'd. It was worse. All would agree 'Of course,'
Came their answer. "We've all felt
Just like that." They were wrong. And he

Knew too much to be clear, could not explain. The words --
Sold, ***** flung to the dogs -- now could avail no more;
Hence silence. But the mouldwarps,
With glib confidence, easily

Showed how tricks of the phrase, sheer metaphors could set
Fools concocting a myth, taking the worlds for things.
Do you think this a far-fetched
Picture? Go then about among

Men now famous; attempt speech on the truths that once,
Opaque, carved in divine forms, irremovable,
Dear but dear as a mountain-
Mass, stood plain to the inward eye.

a perfect, newly unveiled horizon line
ancient and promising
yet reborn as a newborn
to my industrialized eyes.

I haven’t heard sirens in days.

still, there is the hustle and bustle
of movement everywhere,
but not by people
nor Porsches and Escalades
and their infiltrating thick smog.
no inane chatter
and fake oohing and aahing
over Louis’ and who saw who.

no
here the possessions move
the so-called inorganic
the buildings, doors, and gates
yearning to be free
swaying, creaking
their tiny reins of confinement
too much to bear
for their free spirits.
taking their cue
from trees, plants, vines, leaves
which are overgrowing fences
and clambering over walls
a massive riotous uprising at a glacier-pace
to triumph over the bipeds
imagine the horror of the flora
at a sudden interment to La-La-Land
the hopelessness and oppression
at being trimmed twice a week
mutilated and then slaughtered.

no
they are the secret underground rulers
stubbornly proud but humble tyrants
mercifully loving their lowly subjects
feeling sorry for us
we who have been forced into
this unnatural industrial order
not their beautiful chaos.

and yet...
they lie in wait
patiently, silently
anticipating the day
when we throw up our arms in exasperation and relief
and acquiesce to their dominion
a return to times before times.

Grim grey day
starts in the dark,
grumbles, glowers
shoulders hunched
Everyone in bitter agreement -
"Miserable!"
Rain driven against windows,
streaming pavements,
shoe-squelched curses
cast at baleful sky.

Travelling home at last,
raincoat defeated
tricklebacked discomfort,
Windscreen wipers ten to the dozen
under sopping sorrowful trees,
headlights strobing relentless rain

And -

Those aren't leaves.
What are they?
Tumbling across the road,
crisscrossing parabolas
of peculiar joy

Frogs!

I stop:
I have to.
The night is alive
with manic delight
as secret creatures fling caution to the wind
and bound into sight,
into frantic celebration,
unphased by cars, by foolish bipeds
who thought this planet was theirs -

Open mouthed and uninvited
I gaze, displaced and foolish
for not knowing
It is,
it is the most beautiful night
that could possibly be imagined.

One should never regret coming away
From any crowd, and certainly not now:
Their loving voices are raised in chants of hate
And their funny hats aren’t funny at all

Their ultimate freedom is the freedom to
Obey with love the loudest loving leader
Who twists their supplicant hands to fists of love
For beating harmony into us all

One will never regret coming away
From any crowd, and certainly not today

And I answered:
To see and touch all that I forgot,
To remember the delta where
Immense waters rushed to
My memory's melodic forms.
     To remember that ***** that
     Broke my heart,
     How I loved her,
     Look at all the poems
     I wrote for her!
To feel the livid wounds
Of everyone fester about
Like domesticated bipeds,
Watch them grow entangled
Beneath a shivering sun.
        To read the crazy beautiful
        Of other people's thoughts
        And get in their heads without
        Psychological babblings
        And manipulation.
To watch the shadowless sun
Create a phantom city
In the concrete swarms,
To stretch every sense
Into the living moment.
      To catch myself from splitting,
      Or perhaps to split from myself
      And call me crazy,
      Laugh it off and cry
      When I read it again.
To embody what I miss
With these fucken cell phones
And internet opinions
With elongated voices
Lonely, their kind of
Misery loves company after all.

      Why the poem?
      Ask yourself,
      What else is there??

I'm waiting with certain trepidation
Assured my reality
Is in for something big.

The eleventh dimension
Can't assuage my dread.
There's something happening,
As big as Dead.

The cellphone's our new Nativity,
Destroying my old myths;
Where's the white salamander hurrying,
Spirits hoovering, aliens lurking,
Hairy bipeds in the forests,
Yetis in the snow.
Nothing soon forthcoming.
It all looks like Alberta.

I can't snap inside the sun,
Nor freeze-frame a revolution;
Or the moment one feels love;
But truth is self-evident.
And the facts are yet to come.

All the best stories,
My life-changing beliefs,
Need one still, a black and white will do;
Til then,
I'll suspend
Disbelief,
And sustain credence,
Close to the dark room.

Then we'll be the Magi,
Bowing, grovelling,
Awed and surprised.

There it was just sitting
in the middle of the street
all black and white
waiting
for traveling feet

Herds of milling bipeds
traversed across it
as it stretched across
a sweltering pit of tar

While masses of
Auto.. mo.. biles
broke it’s back
wait
I think...
they call them...
Cars?

I just stood back

Watching

Waiting

Wondering

just contemplating

But still…
I was at a complete loss

I keep a vigil at the curb
waiting
for the zebra to come
and wondering…

*how do they know where to cross?

I saw five blackbirds perched on a telephone wire at six am
They were black as the blackest of nights and as big as Caterpillars
They were looking down on cars taped over with blowing plastic bags
Floating in the hot pink wind like tornadoes made from lipstick
Their talons were long daggers looking to pierce the deepest part of my heart
To open my eyes with their meandering meaningful meaningless
They had shipwrecks adorning each obsidian feather and crooked teeth
Capped the nightmares that lurked behind the glare of their eyes
They watched solemnly at the scene below of closing doors
Of rustling papers and stained tears tarring the summer ground
They had secrets cawed in a language of screeched whispers
Warning and educating ears that were too deaf or too self involved to listen
We’ve got no chance to escape this drudgery of modernity
We’re stuck in this self-built prison of black and white prisms
Of three dimensional reasoning and the attitude that follows
Never meant to be but it’s what it is when we think we’re free
How can the one blind bird perceive things differently
If our shortsighted near-death experiences have left us numb
Numbing us to the presence of the stars in the morning sky
Or the Sun exploding torrents of fire during the night
Wrapping us in a chilly warmth like blankets soaked with gasoline
We've left ourselves to wander the desolate land thinking of the obscene


I saw five blackbirds blacking out the sun as they took to the sky
Laughing their murderous laugh at the awkward bipeds down below

We watch from space
Safe in our spaceship
As a small rock planet,
That has orbited it’s star
Over seven and a half billion times –
All those billions of its years –
Is peeled away
And eaten
By that very sun
That gave it birth.

Two and a half billion years before,
This star ran dry of hydrogen
And grew
From yellow dwarf to red giant.

Now, nothing is left of three of its worlds,
All engulfed by flame
As the sun grew
Into a giant ball of death.
All history is gone.
Nothing to show
For countless civilisations
That adorned the third planet.

But oh what’s this?
We spot a tiny spacecraft!
Must reel it in.
Examine it.

It has a name:
“Voyager 1”
Inside: a Golden Disc!
A Golden Record.
We can play it.
Images of hairless bipeds.
Ancestors from that third planet.
Sounds of animals and someone laughing.
Images of bipeds taking sustenance.
And best of all
More sounds
Of something called “Rock Music”:
A being called “Chuck Berry”
“Singing a song” called “Johnny B. Goode”.
For we have feet too
And it makes them tap.

Paul Butters

© PB 12\12\2019.

because it  burns  you
you don't like the sun
and the shadow doesn't buy a story,
It knows its edges and the milky ways,
attached to a leaf tail
chlorophyll counts its rays,
***** energy from its light,
- we grow elephant ears,
our heads have shrunk like the peak of a needle
bifurcated,
time does not lie
instead of being permanently bent
head
now it is one meter above the ground
hands / feet / thighs
we do everything we want in upright bipeds
yes,
to get out of africa
we walked thousands of years until we  picked up "the first thumb up"
then again we walked thousands of years,
we raised the thumb up again
thousands of years ... thumb (up) drive one gigabyte,

time does not lie

- i saw you at the țoțora in the polk of medhorotsky,
with the toma from brăila digging  ditches to keep your feet lower,
at a french carnival, you loved a girl and called her by the name
consuelo, mon amour, consuelo, - you wielded swords,
used feathers to write (with the blood) on a soap bubble
you were looking for

the time that does not lie

did you say:

- the night is just beginning to taste like molasses
- from afar, you see love like a bloated balloon lost in the distance
- to recognize the shape of the earth, i have to feel the stars beneath my feet,
to see the one above my head
- people are programmed to see faces even in sandwiches,
to believe strange things, that they can walk on the water or
like in little prince  to believe a talking fox: “though the eyes are eyes, they cannot see,
only the heart can,
tame a flower, and you”ll see that time does not lie ... ”
then what can you expect from the sun
when it burns like a madman in the wilderness and dances like a *****,

hallucinate

they say we are 13.7 billion light-years from the edge,
how  the sun not to like you when it heard you singing a song without a sound,
so simple and clear,
and now every morning it brings you a basket of jackfruit at the gate,

be ”the edge” truth or assumption,
”the foam that forms us and breaks into a vast cloud of styrofoam bbs” (Ken”s words)
who knows, otherwise
it seems that we are close to knowing the real shape of the earth:
jump up, fall on it, is  not  moving,
standstill and solid,
it doesn't matter which way you want to go
you can go in any direction
go far enough
go as far as you can
you will always reach the ocean

did you say:
- we live on an island

There is a bay on the Oregon coast,
Shaped like a scallop shell
And ringed by rounded stones.
And from the darkening sky
Droop billows of blue and gray
Hanging and lit like Chinese lanterns.
Humans in the damp Northwest
Appear to drip from the clouds
In rain-washed colors
Of blue and violet,
Whose tattered clothes
Are softened and soaked
From ragged wool into rich satin.
Still others bask on shores
Of pebbles rolled by the sea,
Bone white and cloud-gray.
Down and up, down again
The light rays vault,
Painting bipeds into the land.
There are no reflections
But rather water in the air,
Looking like rain
Even on cloudless days.
Their world is saturated
Like the scarlet gowns
Of Waterhouse’s Ariadne
And the ponds of Monet,
Green as the British Isles,
Blue as the Aegean
And white as the Pantheon ruins .
Much like an ancient tomb,
The majesty of mortal lives
Commemorated in stone
Is here splashed in the air
And in every forest or cliff.
Hushing people into silence,
So they conduct the most
Serious customs in whispers,
Knowing how voices echo along
Water droplets
And mountain shadows.

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com  
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                            Mysteriou­s Jellyfish Gathering

                        “Honey, did you pack the seascreen?”

That jellyfish gathering is no mystery
Like everyone they want to go to the beach
To play in the water, soak up some rays
Picnic, show off, buy some souvenir mugs

They caution each other about the humans
How bipeds are toxic to the slightest touch
They gaze deeply at the sand beyond the surf
And talk about the mysteries of the air

They brush the sand out of the children’s tentacles
At sunset, before packing up and going home

Mysterious jellyfish gathering grows in Rhode Island ponds | Centre Daily Times

Its not my short legs,
Nor in my overgrown beard,
It's not the big nose
Or small pockets women fear.
It is the corny poem
For which I stand,
The kind of hopeful
Romanticism the women
Can't stand.
If is not in my furry kisses
Nor my nonsense of style,
It is the dork in my walk
That keeps them a mile,
I am a dude,
Unphenomenally,
Unphenomenal dude,
That's me.

I do not have the body
The women might want,
The kind where my bipeds
I'd flaunt,
I haven't the coin
To release the swag,
Hell I'm still playing
Nintendo 64, not much to brag!
My T.V. is till a big box,
I have no women,
I got loneliness on lock.
I'm just a dude,
Unphenomenally,
Unphenomenally dude,
That's me.

I'll finish this poem
With my last pathetic rhyme,
Maybe a chick will like it,
Like me this time!
I'll get a haircut to match
The style of now,
I'll become phenomenal,
I'll get there somehow,
But for now.....
Im just a dude,
Unphenomenally,
Unphenomenal dude...
That's me!

When the landscape turned blurry
And the screaming eyes wanted help
Blinding wind raged across the streets
Famished bipeds drifting off course
Maimed souls searching for cover
Darkness became safe haven
Drained from the arduous trek for long
Attempt to speak the truth, gagged
Fools have created a web lies
Like unaware insects, caught unaware
Detained in the middle of huge mountains
Every will to escape is vanquished
The juices of willpower being ****** away
Hearts have turned to stone
Moulds have made their home
With glib talk everyone has been cheated
Away from the sunshine and hope
To the land of desolation and misery
In the land of apathy, they thrived

Don't speak the truth―
loudly. Bipeds
are listening.

I will not blame
any one ever,
for my poems.

I must invoke
Buddha, if he
was an avatar.

Rage again for
the dying sun. Night
was very cruel.

Do you know why I pulled you over?
No.
Are you wearing *******?
Yes, but I don't see what that has to do with it.

Do you know why I pulled you over?
Is it because I'm wearing *******?

Flowers bloom next to rusting Pepsi cans,
Watered by the spit of ******* dealers,
And the ***** and vaginal fluid,
Of hot lovers groping under blankets,
Under stars dimly blinking through thick smog.

Nightly haven for muggers, rapists, fiends,
Whose every breath profanes the species they,
So poorly represent, turning Plato’s,
Featherless bipeds, to dead plucked chickens,
Soul-less, pointless wastes of protoplasm.

Abomination-- not in itself but,
For the use it’s put to: a bone for dogs,
Who’ve never tasted steak, and are gleeful,
To feast upon the scraps of fetid meat,
Clinging to well-gnawed bones that they are fed.

Central Park, the bone we are to chew while,
Smiling complacently at skyscrapers,
Daily rising where wild flowers might have grown,
Our humanity proportionally,
Shrinking inversely to their daily rise.

If I seem narrow minded and unkind,
Or blind to the beauty of Central Park,
It is because I’ve stood on ****** ground,
In summer, fall, winter and early spring,
And cannot bring myself to love a *****.

I stood upon the horizon
As the sun crowned the day,
The people became beautiful,
Each in their own momentary truth:

The sun star rose
And the light mounted the sea,
The livid wound that is man and woman
Became a broken statue in stone
Flawed by time and suffering;
Death in a time of life!

     In the city an ebony man
     Holds the pyramid at the bottom
     Of the scheme, he is unearthed
     By a bullet not colorblind,
     The song of a lost boy from
     The wonderful ghetto explodes
     And a stone is thrown.

The ripples are;
Eyes see, man feels
His heart yearns for better or
Something more, all he can turn
To is less, shadows of history link
Themselves in a chain and drag
Man into himself, there a giant
Mirror hovers over his sky.

    New York, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh.
    Shadow cover the heart and man
    Becomes a feverish animal
    That swarms himself,
    Proud and lonesome I see below
    His heart  and money uprooted his
    His natural flow
    (Domesticated bipeds acting out like
    Four legged beasts, though sadly
    Man knows it and does what?)

And yet there birthed within himself
Was given a gift so lovely as the forms
That man throbs with hope;
Stretching the heart into the living
hour man can see the light,
Truth comes into being
And fills himself with an ironic
Harmony. Here, now, we will
Never be this beautiful again,
The beauty is heavy with minutes
As each fade into eternity's
Shimmering river.

    Man's thoughts are split,
    They meander, think something
    Wondrous and split again
    Becoming entangled in a
    Delta of endless rivers flowing
    With the actions of ignorance.
    Must the rush of life be lived
    So rushed?

Day after day,
His mind cannot embody the forms,
The hostility grinding at each other,
The mirror inside liquefied
Into hopelessness and the body
Of his body becomes a tree
Of actions, risen out history's
Roots, roots which lay seeds,
Seeds which become his actions.

Bird and Whale love song's
masters of air and water;
(while bipeds listen in,
and wonder transports).

Squirrel sits on the edge of the forest,
conflicted where the trees have gone.
Unknowing that the world is culling.

Somewhere often it knows the forest grows,
and sometimes, teetering the edge of the village it goes.

The light balance of the shrubs all around
does not correspond to his homeward ground.


Squirrel wanders a vacant field,
listening for the bird's songs.

He does not hear, or look, or react,
he walks until he stops to relax.

Then in the light of the field he sees
something that he can't believe.

A great and roaring star, falling from the heavens
to the world underneath him that cries and writhes.

He wonders what the light means, as it disperses across
the field, hearing the screech and the tumbling on the asphalt.

The ground collapses in several places as it flips into the field.

He walks over to the metal body in the dirt, stretching his
legs along the way to be ready to run.

But there is no danger, just suspicious little bumps of dirt,
and big metal pieces he doesn't understand.

His eyes carry on, peaceful and serene; examining everything.
Just trying to make sense of the wonder before him.

Community gone- to the life after, it
crinkles all the flowers in the darkness.

The bright red and orange lights flicker down the street.
The bipeds hustle to the husk before the heat consumes it.

Flipped on an axis, as squirrel looks on
a loud piercing call comes from the ground,
so away the squirrel rolls into the brush in fear.