Under the Babylonian sea
Lives a place hid from you and me
And in this place, broken in two in the sand,
Known as a fault line cursing the land,
Is the place where we return again.

You and me, citizens of the earth - we’re people from the center of
The earth
And we search out to the stars
To try and find our birth.
All while the truth lies under our feet.
But don’t ask me.
This is the mystery you see.
The mystery of me.

Not to make the story all revolve around me,
But I lived for lifetimes as nature’s pulse,
A most high pixie maintaining the roses,
All the little vines and terraces,
And I was whimsical and wise
And greatly cherished.
I lived to be about a thousand years,
And died of self-sacrifice
In 2005.
As our planet grew more and more technical,
Avoiding the organic, skeptical,
It was for a simple reason:
The present goes in two directions.
The present goes forward and
The present goes backward.
And somewhere in between
We have our fate,
Our choices.
Free will drives this place.
Don’t think too much of gravity
Or relativity.
Free will is the ingredient in this Universe
Holding it all together.

So the extraterrestrials that guard this planet,
They guard like a gourd
Rotting on a hot Saturday.
They guard like a hound
Pitched on a chain
To its little box of a house.
They guard like an abusive stepfather.
Like they are the way.
And I know them.
They killed all the mermaids,
When I reigned as Queen.
That is for another tale,
Or tail?
I forget what sort of humor is
Current at this age,
But puns are a sign of great wit,
So with them, I’ll spit.

I reigned as Queen of the Mermaid people and indeed all of the people. I reigned when there were humanoids
Similar to you, but stouter.
It was before your race mated with
My race.
We raced
Towards death.
You captured my people with the utmost brutality.
I see it done to my cousins,
The porpoises and whales,
And it hurts me
To see it happen again.
You stab these creatures in their blowholes,
Just like you stabbed my sisters
And eventually, me,
In our wombs.
The pregnant ones howled the loudest.
You brutally desecrated my people.
You did it again on the land
To the people we were most connected to,
The original tribes of North America.
And not that it’s you, people of the land.
I am one of you.
That will not change in this lifetime.
As Earth Mother for a thousand years
I obtained the Earthly information,
The muscle memory
Of the plants.

We call it a planet
And terra,
Like Mother Earth is a plant.
We see her as affectionate
And beautiful,
But some has seen her wrath.
She shakes,
She fears the madness
That lives on her skin,
And burrows into her,
Deeper and deeper,
Searching for her heart.
But I, as Queen fairy,
Took the honor
Of self-sacrifice
And took her heart
And hid it
In an average baby girl.
Will she realize her goddess heritage?
Wiped her mind and by-passed the sacred
Earth Mother heart.

Baby girl grows up in Babylon.
The chances of her
Freeing her Beast
Are as low as it goes.
Half of the pixies wept
Half of the pixies cheered.
Then they chose sides
And the positions, they veered.

1.  MISSISSIPPI II
  
Keesler Air Force Base
Sergeant will **** you
Crocodile got to eat
  
2.  SAN FRANCISCO QUAKER
  
Not a bad place un-
til looters step on
the bookshelf that fell on you
  
3.  L.A.
  
The real *****.  Holly-
wood is just the pump
shooting sin into it's vein
  
4.  WYOMING
  
Don't sit on the yell-
ow stone.  That's where the bears
went after picnicking.
  
5.  VERMONT
  
Red necked wooden
Boys always looking for
a fight from a Yankee
  
6.  NEW HAMPSHIRE
  
Charlie and Kathy
are from here.  They're nice to
know if you can find them
  
7.  MASSACHUSETTS
  
The prettiest girls live
in Boston.  They have mouths.
Some worse than truck drivers.
  
8.  RHODE ISLAND
  
Such a little place
to cozy up to the
over crowded rowdies.
  
9.  NEW YORK SHUFFLE ?
  
Buffalo girl moved too
Saratoga Falls.  Hasn't
Had a dance since last fall.
  
10.  HONEYMOONER FELL-ER
  
Took my girl to Niagra
Falls took my ******
Maybe next time
  
11.  DELAWARE
  
Overcrowded racetrack
Casino lots of
swampy grass derelicts.
  
12.  MARYLAND
  
Ain't no place to
Stop off 95
For this' lilly white man
  
13.  VIRGINIA
  
Had them Japanese
people eating fish.
Didn't know it was lunchtime.
  
14.  WASHINGTON STATE
  
All that rain and snow
Can never compete
With it's powerful blowholes
  
15.  OHIO
  
OH HIGH OH
OHIOH
OHIO
  
16.  ILLINOISE
  
Birthplace of Lincoln
and Chicagoland
Nothing much else but farmland
  
17.  ASSISTANCE?
  
I wanted to help
the homeless so I fed
them government nonsense
  
18.  INDIANA
  
Same old flatland lit
up at night Lincoln's
Hiway taking in the sights
  
19.  WINDS OF CHANGE
  
Big bad wolf tried
to knock down my house of hay
today..  I knew he blew.
  
20. COYOTE TRIED
  
Leader scolded me at five
Better off dead
Amen coyote cried

whales rise from the sea like blimps,
soaring,
we see them from rooftops,
plainly distorted,
through unclean high-rise windows,
in cars, gridlocked and craning
our fragile human necks,
inhaling smog,
blowholes struggling,
against the urban skyline—
they pop

there are no more whales anymore,
more and more, we wanted,
until there were no more
oceans, forests,
plains, only rocks, cliffsides and amenities
in which we churn, keeping our
heads down,
chins tucked safely,
never looking up, lest we see
the exploded whales raining down
on us, a final rain
of guilt and consequence

Never summon the evil whales forth
lest they hunger for a salt’s ******
or seek to ravage their ship.

They cry out havoc, scream tempest
to the ocean and sky
so the illhveli hear not their name.

Their harpooned blubber
boils neither to heaven nor hell
but vanishes only inside the soul.

They fear only the steypireydurs
the Great Blue Behemoths,
the protectors of sailors and crafts.

The salts’ wives smell the devil in their remnants
and to keep the fury at bay they call
their men honeyed names clothed in peace.

The mates consign this sweetness
to the void, a sea of faceless women
to be left alone in their slumbers.  

At dawn, they  return
to the great wide green ocean
that hungers for their flesh.

They chum cowshed, yarrows, ash,
throw plowshares, axes and pots creating
a sacred din outside the incarnadine circles.

Cat Whales would come forth
with their devil-angel flukes
half in sun and watery dark.

They mewl alongside,
resting in the craft’s wake,
diving when the waters darkened  

And the roar of Bull Whales spouting loudly  
through their blowholes would scare
the distant  cattle to stampede the waters.

The Ox Whales, swimming
faster than hand and mind,
would devour the calves

Leaving only nibbles
for the belugas that trailed
behind in white silence.  

Bottlenose Dolphins after herding
the Ox Whales beyond the spray
would jump straight high

out of the water
exposing the sun and mountains
appearing underneath them.  

In the rest between breaths
a Taumur awaited beneath their crafts
for the opportunity to break them apart.

On the glint of the horizon a Ling Whale
drifting like a mirage of barnacles
waited to maroon them on her hide.

Today, the Great Blue Behemoth
heard their anguish and would gently
guide them back to their sandy, rocky home.  

In their unsteady slumbers
they would hitch a ride
on the back of a Heatherback

And dive with it
to the ocean’s floor until
their last bubbles floated up.

Around them all the dorsal waves
of the Sword Whale splashed them
while she sliced them in two.

Far away, the Narwhale sniffed
their blood in the water and
waited her turn to eat.

The boy threw up on the way to school,
Regularly,
A matter of course,
Compass-setting.
The stink of decomposing plankton
Would rise into his blowholes,
And make his bright eyes water,
Make the sidewalk swim.
His almost hairless body, half-formed,
Wet cetacean eyes casting about,
Sought protection, not ritual heaves,
Not emesis on neighborhood lawns.

His mother protected him when she could,
Let him swim in her shadow,
Helped him feed, hid him
When she herself was not in danger,
The denouncéd *****, the common ****,
The bright-eyed nurse.

He scraped his way along the sidewalks
Thinking six times nine, four times three,
Thinking bile-tinged thoughts.
He thought of the school cafeteria, steaming,
Waiting, windows fogged,
A place that sometimes had no food for whales.
He thought of home and crashing waves,
The leaping thrashing father,
Up, up into bright air,
Leaping high and falling back into the sea,
Killing what lay below him,
Denouncing the *****.

He wondered how it could be
That at home only she loved him,
Only his mother,
While at school many, many loved him.
Even the ladies in the cafeteria,
Even on the days
When there was no food for whales.

He thought of children, tiered and glowing,
Standing on stair steps reaching
All the way to heaven,
Reaching so high the air was thin and shimmering
Where the oldest stood, singing,
Singing in the school's foyer,
Singing Oh, little town,
Singing with no fear of megaliths
Falling, white-crusted, waves driven asunder,
Gulls sent screaming,
Their wingtips slapping foam.

He thought of his teacher who loved him,
Who loved his gray skin,
His smooth gray skin,
Who gave him stamps and stars.
At night, rising to breathe,
He saw her stars among the stars,
Her stamped cat shapes upon the constellations.
At night, rising to breathe,
He knew he wanted to live in school,
Wanted to breathe the dust of tempera paints
And construction paper forever,
Far from falling fear,
Far from barnacled screams.
He knew he wanted to live, and live, and live,
Without bile, without flukes,
Beyond the horizon, among the stars.