Locked from the top
is a Tuesday night rockstar
cut on the weeds and steam
off of cars speeding by. Tearing off the graceful bonds
called bone sweet
carving flesh pulp
strange and the blood
candy cane ruby red
to the grass bedding below.

Fast lane puppets
caught at lights six miles later. Five year old wails
about God pimping coke addicts with
gloves on,
gloves off,
pounding on asphalt doors
hiding ******* shots--it's raining inside. Her pants are down
in the gutter--scene on TV, reality on fire.

Living in tail lights
till the red blushes
at the cute landlord watching the gore
past the building dishes and shot glass

eyes burned out of lost friends
from staring at blown bulbs.
Mumbling nirvana crawling like beetles
from tripping lungs

taking the same bible spine
away from yesterday. The junk that tickles,
makes the moon spin,
mad women dance
in the bankrupt birth
of  humid H-bombs.

Shovels scoop up gravy
for wood chippers, the springs of History
foaming at the mouth,
shredded to delicate words such as 'fault'
'blame', 'regret'.
The stoop kids play card games as the sirens wail
and another turn passes.

Being a poet, a heavy handed right-hand writer, is to me, being a sociopathic killer of language. Hands that worship sometimes the least popular fruit, the myrrh or the mana, the young woman or the homeless man-animal, prostitutes and the dregs of civilization.

Here I am, shuffling through my cabinets, searching out that precise instrument, for this precise moment. My repertoire of blades, bludgeoning objects, handyman's tools: the hammer, axe, screwdriver, sieve, staple gun, nail gun, jigsaw, bandsaw, handsaw, and wrench, also too there are wood chippers, snippers, clippers, scissors, tapes, shanks, cords, ropes, and wires. I do not prefer the six or twelve shooter, the Smith & Wesson semi-automatic pistol, the M-14 rifle or the M1 Garand. Too many are there to name the incredibly effective pharmaceuticals, including the human tranquilizers, animal poisons, toxic chemicals, and household cleaning products. I do want for these, though many of the myriad instruments I've listed work with great efficacy, eliciting the desired pleasure or response from he or she who wields them. I instead choose the the pen. Any pen will do, though I prefer the Uniball .7mm with black ink, as blue to me does not possess the intensity and seriousness that must be conveyed or omitted. The pen can chisel away the unwanted or offer the necessary temperament and intensity, which might be required. For each killing is unique unto itself. No ****** is quite like the other, though there are similarities between them on some occasions.

It must be I that wields the pen and not the other way around. This relationship is one-sided, and must be orchestrated by me and only me, lest I should sacrifice the personal nature of this hauntingly ferocious arrangement between ink and instrument, instrument and I. A gravely serious one-way, unreciprocated, and unbalanced, nearly schizophrenic performance of language that is never heard nor displays no sound, which instead draws heavy sanguinated strokes, marks, scribbles, and inscriptions amidst other fanatical displays of power and allegiance, ego and lust, eloquent rage and fetishized insanity. Each movement of the hand readies this god-sized control to the pen, exercising its tumultuous rein of might, choosing to exact its motive on this word, while ignoring and sometimes even skipping over whole sets of words, sentences in some instances, while in others it chooses to exhaust itself in wholly unbelievable performances of carnage, destroying speech, and slaying, splicing, and splitting-up complete sections of the English language.

In some cases neglecting those words that might seem noisome or rank to some folks, only to select and offer penalty to others, it chooses on occasion to ostracize other more sweetly and eloquent pieces of speech, it chooses which parts of our alphabet to select and which words or letters it ought to omit.

****** after ******, the writer counts each ****, committing every instance to memory, and on some accounts he or she might even bring home a treasure or trinket, something small though, not bigger than that of a pomegranate though often not smaller than the wick of a candle. The writer takes this together with any artifacts or materials that could tie his or her method to his or her execution. Until, at last amid the company of themselves, they can revel in their vain glory and perfervid excite for the acts they've chosen to commit and the acts they've chosen to omit.

It's in these brief moments, when the speaking ceases, and the company is called to rest, there can be found an easing and peaceful contentment. Each room slowly ushers out any of the unwanted sounds of the day. Finally, he or she may sit or stand, lay or play, undisturbed by agonizing wants or needs, and happily, having chosen to keep many cupfuls of pens, not only on their work-bench and writing desk, but in the kitchen, in the living room, and in every room.

In recent years, I've begun to notice that nearly every home and establishment, business, and institution keeps at least one pen on hand. If only for those special moments of social awkwardness when at last the spoken language holds no greater power than can be wielded under the grand spells and vespers, free-verse, stream-of-consciousness, or prose that quickly by taking up the pen can offer to its bearer in short time steadfast relief or certain resolve. For the heart certainly pumps more ink than it does blood.

when the cold comes
when blinking hurts
when the wind chisels
through storm windows
and cleaves the rafters
when your breath cracks
when the ground is too
hard to dig another grave

it’s time

to grab your bag of tools
picks and saws and chippers

it’s time

to find yourself
a canyon of ice

to carve yourself
a bitter monument

The poem requires a mind
that finds meaning, even divination,
in language. Non-fiction,
up to academic standards, demands
evidence. Nothing less will do.
Most of us read fiction and this
needs a taste for action, motivation.

Lately, as have you, I have
thought about our war and its purpose,
motivation. But I have also closely
listened to the wood thrush, analyzed
its song like a tune by T.S. Monk
or J.S. Bach concerto. One belongs
to the loved ones who ostracize us, too.

A robin looks, hops, pecks, is never calm.
It is the flute-like tones, yes, but mostly
the patient, meditative clarity
of the thrush that enchants. One wants
to be that bird. How will we attain
calm clarity for the species **** sapiens?
Through the discipline of asking questions.

Mimics, woodpeckers, sing-songers, hawks,
chippers and trillers, whistlers, name-sayers,
loons, owls and a dove, high pitchers,
wood warblers and a word-warbling wren.
Unusual vocalizations.
What did the wood thrush sing
teaching its young thrush meanings?

Too much commotion is the commonest of mortals’ sins.
Peace has many faces,
the wood thrush in the canopy is one.
A word of praise here, an encouraging word there.
A wraith, a ghost against an impatient man,
verbose, unsure of the path, always longing.
Nothing satisfies like the thrush's song.

An AI fear ifier, launched on Joe Rogan,

ALARM WOLVES LOOSE EATER ROBOTS ON FLOCK ALARM,

naw, out here, on the border, well,

watch fargo, joe, we have chippers, big chippers and

plenty of retards to run them. We use AI to foment joy juice.

Don't play been there done that with me.

Money, these guys believe, as takers have told them,

no givers have shown them grace
for grace,
you want it, get it, that's the secret,
slow and steady wins the race, to get old
you gotta live this long

that's a song,
you can humm along,
any good deed is tainted by money love lessons
learned under weight of student loans

guaranteed, student for ever  or

if high school was your limit, we got sports, you can watch

and feel a weness in the strength of Sunday Gladiators,

but war is unthinkable here,
on this level of reality, mere words may **** a will,
but not an actual made way,

as in made man in the mafia movies, a way, once made

remains. Siempre phibeta or worse. Life won, that's how this was done.

I feel like an incomplete puzzle,
Clumsy waltzing in a field of wood chippers.
I don't just fall to pieces, I shred.
I tear and bleed, most importantly I hurt.

****. I hurt.

I've never been full,
I've never seen the bigger picture.
Always out of reach, lacking perspective.

As my own world is ripped apart,
I further delve into gnashing teeth of hell.

But it's not just mine, this shared damnation,
Leaves us all to rot.

I've no clever line to sum it all up,
I've lost the words which sing of hope.

this won't be re-written,
though it'll be felt fair enough.

it'll hardly last at all,
with luck, it'll go down rough.

the paint, I'll waste on chippers,
the words, I'll waste on time.
the love, I'll serve with clippers,
my whiskey will serve your wine.

I'll knot my hands with good-ends,

"dream fingers, of skin, and spine"

My thoughts are running, on an unstationed path.
My mouth is cunning, , im coughing tar, terribly rough black.
I smell like a bag of ******* chippers,

Little bird chippers,
In the warmth of your sanctuary.
Feathers, blue and purple,
Her home your sanctuary.

The bulb on your desk,
Her, sun and the moon.
Hill, she would love to conquer,
The bed in your room.

Your house,
The galaxy.
The streets,
Her universe.
Little bird chippers,
For the food and the shelter.

The rails, her window,
Cold steel,
The warm bed.
Fedders,
A field of beetles,
water,
you forgot to fill today.

Little bird chippers,
In the warmth of your sanctuary,
Feathers, black and grey.
Her heaven your sanctuary.

you and i've been through a lot in such a little time
but if there's one thing you and i know, that's how it goes in life
we've seen things no one should see, been places no one should go
that's how i know we're strong enough to crawl out of this hole
we've been put through wood chippers, we can handle busted knees
i'll hold onto you if you'll hold onto me

“There’s nothing you wish for that won’t be yours
        if you stay alive.”  --Beowulf

Winter has arrived and the wind cuts through
the parking lot under the el in the Bronx,
streets stretch out in their directions, events
in their mere chronology have no relation.
Old friends face certain dissolution
with perplexity, comity and humor,
look with gay eyes on their future
in a forest or a city, someplace.
Snow outside, despair inside. Homelessness.
Raccoon tracks cross the soul. Prostatectomy.
Winter mix. Don’t relax. The difficult
dangerous season when weak creatures die
and the strong barely survive. Leave me alone
with autumn, an autumn like last autumn.
Don’t stand around my bed, I won’t be in it.

Jack’s in jail. His panic attacks are like
an AI on automatic pilot
who wants to live, just like the rest of us
under the eye of eternity or
running in new snow, loving that feeling.
Some people go dancing in fishnet stockings.
Effortless mastery, success without practice.
Fractals without chemistry. Do the small
things first, clean the house and bless the guests.
Sick of Krshna, sick of salad, sick of self.
Sick of meditation. As I lay dying
the full moon’s rising. My existence
is indivisible from the wry Creator’s.
I like the old Rhymer, his smile resplendent.
It’s Death, not the Jewish king, in your rose garden.

I ply my arts all day alone. All I have
is all I do not know. The past isn’t dead
it never even happened. Learn the changes
then forget them. Keep on learning and re-
learning them. Down the steep and icy trail
through hail and storm. Take into eternity
my hail and farewell. We’re living in the
Anthropocene. Indestructible garbage.
Bulldozed landscape. Big Brother, dead father.
***** of the tiger.  Getting thought to twitch
the prosthetic. Mischievous, malevolent,
militant thistles. Or just plain polite
Americans, afraid to get shot.
Bump bump bump down the igneous rocks of life,
take the boulders two at a time down.

Old-timers bagging groceries, low social
security for the security guard.
Situps, pushups, fix yr brakes, fix yr leaks.
I know what’s gonna happen before it happens.
Polar bear mugs wino exhausted by that earlier,
irritating, constant need to survive.
Surrounded by history, neither seen nor heard
from again. And a deaf mute in a pear tree.
If it’s human, nothing’s wasted. Pasted
into a big wet kiss or posted
on the internet. Stolen from the pockets
of the dead, burgled from living memory.
Most art is dispensable, ***** and *****,
vaginal lubrication, prostate enlargement,
the unknown, anonymous man named me.

I’ve been wrong before and I may be wrong now.
Things fall apart. Or maybe not. Maybe
it’ll all hold together 10,000 years more
after all we’ve observed a galaxy born
13 billion years ago, a faint red blur,
and microbe partnerships on the ocean floor.
The good life’s all around us smiling
girls on bicycles, dogs on leashes,
equality is mandatory.
Sweet solitude and privacy, quiet
sitting spot, write a little, read a lot.
Tip generously, gratuitously,
like good luck. Haircut, cabride, dinnerout,
to eat a continent is not so strange.
Does Jack even exist? I doubt it but

the class of transformations that could happen
spontaneously in the absence of knowledge
is negligibly small compared with the class
that could be effected artificially by
intelligent beings, aliens in the bleachers.
Japanese knotweed also known as kudzu.
The Chinese navy also known as t’ai chi.
Water shortages. War and wildfire.
What you’re scared of and what you love. Contracts
and deliverables. Hate speech, fate.
Humor or ardor, I can’t decide.
Dad’s steel-toed boots. Leaves, flowers, fruits.
Things are said, mistakes are made. I’m driving
pontificating on geopolitics
when an archangel flies into the windshield!

Lost my timepiece, lost my metronome.
Well, music is a manufactured crisis.
Caloric restrictions, control your addictions,
desire to be famous, propensity for violence.
The profusion of species contents me.
Wilderness comes back strong as cactuses,
chestnuts, coral. No more missile crises.
Eat less, an empty belly’s holy.
Horselum, bridelum, ridelum,
into the fray! World order—not my problem.
Only meditation can save your soul,
should there be such a thing. There are actual people
half woman half man running past me
and dream people in movies half language
half light. Or they lie under polished stones
embossed with actual photos of themselves.

Learning who you actually are is difficult
as sitting still 10 minutes w/o a thought or want.
To get lucky you gotta be careful first.
Knowledge of death without dying =
early retirement. Counting your blessings,
a healthy activity. No solution
to death’s finality, and such a blessing
awaits me, too. If you’re suicidal
they call the cops. The audience is full of glee.
Watres pypyng hoot. Chinese characters. Quantum guesses.
Most failures, and most successes, are in our future.
I embrace wild roots and run through streets
with arm around my girl. Inmate #427443.
Poetry and surgery—they go together
like a horse and buggy. Cheerful as a flock
of chickadees. Looking for a lost horse,
I hear Appalachian Spring!

Look one way, from another come the heart’s
missed beats. Much better to look slowly,
labor for the success and happiness
of others, even the old and frayed.
Look it up. There is no death, just perfect rest.
Look more closely. It will be gone in a few days!
First entertain, then enlighten if you can.
Is it stress? Yes. Tired of death? It’s what it is.
Let’s play sports, have ***, live a wonderful life,
give generously. If you see a hawk on a bough
at field’s edge beyond the corner you should have
turned, maybe it’s a sign to go on, alone.
No body, no soul. No mirror, no black hole.
No mission, no hero. No applause, no noise.
No experience, no nonsense. If words can
be arranged in any order can they be
of any use in foreign policy?

Disappointed, didn’t get what was wanted.
Forget me not, is that all I want?
A catbird account, a mockingbird account
and an owl account. Then, and only then,
nothing’s missing and nothing’s left over.
Jail or zen mountain monastery
hiphop artist hypnotist bebop trumpeter
unknown soldier black bear bad bladder
ice cold beer poker player wry Creator.
If not one way, then another. Otherwise
give me your 5-10 best hiphop artists. Can
they take the sting out of life like bluegrass, jazz?
Mimics, woodpeckers, sing-songers, hawks,
chippers and trillers, whistlers, name-sayers,
thrushes, owls and a dove, high pitchers,
wood warblers and a word-warbling wren.
Unusual vocalizations.

We have hope that everyone alive is
essential, consequential. The commonplace
and everyday is sanctified. Nothing else
special need be done but stay alive.
Don’t lose passport, don’t be late to airport.
Insects are pollinators, insects are us.
Romance without finance is a nuisance.
November, however, is sweet, sunshine
through bare trees, dry brown leaves companionably
visiting among the dead. When middle school lets out
at the periapsis of Earth’s orbit
that’s the face of joy. Each leaf out and Jack
in his boxers. If you run over a chipmunk,
a groundhog or a skunk, say a short prayer.
One can’t help being here, queynt.

I live in a state so blue there’s nothing I can do
to change man’s trajectory and if I could
what angle of re-entry or ascent
would I choose? Grace is what we get
no matter what. Come the tired end of day
Jack thinks why not waste time watching tv
but the next day he has a hangover
like Ernest Hemingway or **** Jagger.
Your soul is immortal. It exists outside
of time. It has no beginning and no end.
If you cannot accept this, forget it all,
do not even begin. It all goes into
the same church service and comes out babbling
for God to appear. The shorter the service
the better, less passion, more resistance. Joy
may outlast the holocaust. Get it while it lasts.

The material world is reality, my friend.
Reality is not always what we’re after.
I like Jack’s confidence, that working the problem
will result in better outcomes than guessing.
Confidence is the feeling you have
before you understand the situation.
A hawk hunting or just floating waiting
for inspiration, a heron rowing east,
an owl’s quiet hoot even simpler than
the pentatonic bamboo flute.
What’s not to like? Ice cream, yogurt, profit, tofu.
Mosquitoes this summer are relentless,
heat and humidity, merciless.
Ice will ice those little *******.
Killing time before it kills me. Ha ha.

Whatever forever. Poetry is plumbing
your unhappiness habit until you reach joy.
As I think of things to do I do them.
Thing by thing I get things done. I think
that’s how my father and his father did things, too.
“Away up high in the Sierry Petes
where the yeller pines grow tall, Ol’ Sandy Bob
an’ Buster Jig had a rodeer camp last fall.”
It is the older man’s responsibility
to protect, not as a hard-charging archangel,
Jack’s joints couldn’t stand it, or hero
but as a rational participant,
cool, caring and completely zeroed in.
Culture or religion is an answer to
the problem of what to do and why do it
when your cancer makes poetry from
losing the argument with yourself.

To die spiritually in the hot sun
and the body go on climbing, haunted,
hunted, nature’s intelligent partner.
People are the element I live in, or else.
Call for the elevator. Wait for the el.
Snow on the Sonoran, each saguaro
wearing a white yarmulke. Creosote
smell as snow melts, ocotillo buds out.
Man needs help from every creature born.
The blackbird contains death but it’s bigger than death.
It’s more like God but an ironical god.
Smaller and funnier than God, impossible
to regard directly, gotta look sideways,
aim binoculars left, right, up, down—
missing every time. There’s nothing you wish for
that won’t be yours if you stay alive.

The crow, parrot, raven, and parakeet
Meet across the cracked street
Scuttle along the wrecked concrete
Where human feet once walked
Flutter up steep uneven steps
Not missing those tripping fools who
Cracked the earth with metal tools
That split lumber with chainsaws
That destroyed thin and thick limbs
With loud rusted wood chippers
That incinerated hated legal papers
Shredding evidence with precision
These birds do not miss one person
Just go searching the soft grounds
for deliciously slimy worms

The wolf, coyote, and lonely fox
Hop and trot from here to cross
Separate paths to their favorite snacks
Bloated bodies swelled with stinky fat
Exposed corpses sitting back so that
They could watch their favorite clips
Catch invisible monsters on their phones
People who now become kibbles and bits
For two howlers and one quiet hunter

A mouse, possum, and racoon
Hunt under the split moon
Going through the monsoon
Of decaying human garbage
Devouring all the waste they want
Finally, free from the humans
Who used to hunt and **** them
Now they just have to watch out for
Other local predators

But all these animals are so much better
For the lack of such a destructive species

if reasons govern
and rationale is what it is
and common sense gets fair airing
and sophistry is not so addictive to the lame

then in stark reality
the chippers chipping away
would grasp less the blunted knives
that's yet to make a cut after thirty years

look at the planters
toiling night and day sowing
alas all sown are stones in mirages
and all that's grown are the vocabulary of flying monkeys

in truth its all a con
the fools errand of finding
a left handed knife or Striped paint in black/white
the diluted emulsion of rogues that makes the innocent the guilty

one sided stories aired
distortions misinformation unquestioned
malice pollicised, fabrications lauded to the gullible
lies hedged by lies to excuse the unreality of the unreal

So please just do as you're told
for to question chicanery and banality
is not an option readily open to the banal commoners
a time wasting confused and disingenuous ruck helps relieve
the miseries and inadequacies of the mundane lives and mediocrity