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It’s February, 2015, a Saturday and here I ‘yam.
Back in sunny California again:
The sun shining brightly again
On My Old Hemetucky Home,
Another mutant Stephen Foster tune.
Hemet: Riverside County,
Southern California,
The so-called Inland Empire,
According to the hyperbolic parlance,
Of sharkskin-suited land speculators,
Truly, the last of the
Patent medicine, liniments &
Snake oil hucksters.
Hemet: little oversight & lax policing
Yield a thriving, local
Medical-marijuana industry.
You are comfortably tucked . . .  
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(THAT’S RIGHT, *******: A ******* COMMERCIAL RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ******* POEM!  GIUSEPPI MARTINO BUONAIUTO--SURELY NOBODY”S FOOL—FINALLY FIGURING OUT HOW TO MAKE POETRY PAY, THEREFORE AVOIDING THE DIED-IN-THE-GUTTER BIT.)
You are safely tucked behind the impenetrable
(www.tucks.com)
Wackenhut G4S Security-
(www.wackenhut.com)
Policed & Patrolled walls,
Of your typical over-55 gated lunatic asylum.
“For Active Adults,” reads the sign,
Whatever that means.
I’ve been thinking about the adventurous young.
What is it these bright,
Wander-lusting whippersnappers
Fixate and obsess about.
Like dropping out & coasting for a while.
Dropping out & coasting:
Not as easy to pull off for 20-somethings these days,
As it was in the late sixties/early seventies,
Flush times for Guns & Butter.
Where is it cheap to live?
Where on . . .
“This blessed plot, this earth,
This realm, this England . . .”
Where on this ozone-depleted,
Global fondue fungus ***,
Can I go to just sit still?
To think:  to make sense of it all?
It’s leisure, Kemosabe.
Leisure cultivates philosophy.
LEISURE:
The very stuff of curiosity and
REACH—
As in: “One’s grasp should exceed one’s reach”—
Idleness leads us,
Gifts us with understanding &
Self-awareness.
You are 21 again, and restless.
You are unwilling to just settle in.
So, where do you go?
Where can you live on savings?
To not work,
But not go hungry?
To just sit still,
Contemplating the state of the wicket,
Be it wicked or sticky.
Today it’s Prague and Berlin—
Or, for the truly decadent: Bangkok.
For us it was Florence or Paris—
Or, for the truly frugal,
Driving our cars to Mecca: Montreal,
"La Métropole du Québec"
Sanctified are the places we’ve chilled.
Shrines & vortexes; each holy latitude,
As Han Solo drolly reminds us:
“It’s not the years; it’s the miles.”
The amount of ground covered,
A blessing devoutly to be wished in Old Age:
But I digress.
Just the thought of hanging out
Some place really cool,
Yet relatively inexpensive--
In a parlance acquired
Over the years and the miles,
Tactfulness learned,
Manipulating the language
For fun & profit.
Common sense is aged in the barrel
And the bottle, rephrased.
Vernacular Viniculture.
Which proves my point:
If you live long enough &
Read enough of the right stuff,
Eventually you’ll discover
A precise, more exact vocabulary,
Appropriate for Old Age inner monolog.
Would Old Age be tedious?
Boring, for those who
Never went anywhere?
Both physically & spiritually speaking.
Are memories our only revenge on Old Age?
And for those hiding behind the barriers,
Safe. Ignorant. Jolly. Dull.
A fast track toward senility &
Evanescence.
Does Alzheimer’s seek out & destroy the
Most cloistered among us?
While those bold & beautiful,
Experienced, still spinning,
Still weaving a tapestry in 3-D Technicolor.
Remembrances of things past . . .
(Get back in your hole, Marcel . . .)
And as the AARP crowd knows so well:
We Baby Boomers really had it pretty soft.
Boom economics,
Conspicuous consumption,
Coonskin hats, Betsy Wetsies & Hula Hoops!
By and large:
FUN TIMES!
No Great Depression,
No chocolate rationing.
A jungle war pretty much optional,
For most of us of the
American bourgeoisie.
We’ve got a lot to remember.
We’ve much to be grateful for.
Electronic media changed everything for us.
Television and movie theaters gave us
Alternative dimensions,
Parallel lives,
Multiple identities.
Experience so real that
To see it on the screen
Was to live it, oneself.
Perhaps those video downloads
Might prove useful one day.
Comforts out on Golden Pond.
Will you still need me?
Will you still feed me?
When I'm sixty-four?
Grazie, Sir Paulie.
David Nelson Mar 2010
What the Hell was That?

I was walkin home late last nite,
I heard this weird noise,
What the hell was that?

Saw a cat drive by on a large motorcyle,
he honked his horn,
What the hell was that?

Saw I guy on the TeleVision,
talking bout his pants on the ground, whao,
What the hell was that?

Reached inside my bluejean pocket,
pulled out a big alligator,
What the hell was that?

On my head was a coonskin hat,
looked like Davy Crockett,
What the hell was that?

My wife said she was leaving me
for a toothless old man, wow,
What the hell was that?

A gorgeous naked woman came to my door,
said she was my lover,
What the hell was that?

Saw a pig the other day, on an elevator
he winked at me,
What the hell was that?
What the Hell was That?
What the hell was that?

Gomer LePoet...
Mysterious , Tennessee nighttime wind , what fables do you bring on a cool Spring eve .. Tales of Mountain 'lore , of whispering rivers and moonlit hollers , black Bear antics and coonskin chapeaux , pristine valleys and hillside shanties , Memphis Riverboats and Elvis Presley .. Cascading brooks , foggy morning dales and Bluegrass pickers , Dulcimers , twisting highways and Nashville Telecasters* ..
Copyright May 6 , 2016 by Randolph L Wilson * All Rights Reserved
I WAS born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the red of its clover, the eyes of its women, gave me a song and a slogan.

Here the water went down, the icebergs slid with gravel, the gaps and the valleys hissed, and the black loam came, and the yellow sandy loam.
Here between the sheds of the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, here now a morning star fixes a fire sign over the timber claims and cow pastures, the corn belt, the cotton belt, the cattle ranches.
Here the gray geese go five hundred miles and back with a wind under their wings honking the cry for a new home.
Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more sunrise or a sky moon of fire doubled to a river moon of water.

The prairie sings to me in the forenoon and I know in the night I rest easy in the prairie arms, on the prairie heart..    .    .
        After the sunburn of the day
        handling a pitchfork at a hayrack,
        after the eggs and biscuit and coffee,
        the pearl-gray haystacks
        in the gloaming
        are cool prayers
        to the harvest hands.

In the city among the walls the overland passenger train is choked and the pistons hiss and the wheels curse.
On the prairie the overland flits on phantom wheels and the sky and the soil between them muffle the pistons and cheer the wheels..    .    .
I am here when the cities are gone.
I am here before the cities come.
I nourished the lonely men on horses.
I will keep the laughing men who ride iron.
I am dust of men.

The running water babbled to the deer, the cottontail, the gopher.
You came in wagons, making streets and schools,
Kin of the ax and rifle, kin of the plow and horse,
Singing Yankee Doodle, Old Dan Tucker, Turkey in the Straw,
You in the coonskin cap at a log house door hearing a lone wolf howl,
You at a sod house door reading the blizzards and chinooks let loose from Medicine Hat,
I am dust of your dust, as I am brother and mother
To the copper faces, the worker in flint and clay,
The singing women and their sons a thousand years ago
Marching single file the timber and the plain.

I hold the dust of these amid changing stars.
I last while old wars are fought, while peace broods mother-like,
While new wars arise and the fresh killings of young men.
I fed the boys who went to France in great dark days.
Appomattox is a beautiful word to me and so is Valley Forge and the Marne and Verdun,
I who have seen the red births and the red deaths
Of sons and daughters, I take peace or war, I say nothing and wait.

Have you seen a red sunset drip over one of my cornfields, the shore of night stars, the wave lines of dawn up a wheat valley?
Have you heard my threshing crews yelling in the chaff of a strawpile and the running wheat of the wagonboards, my cornhuskers, my harvest hands hauling crops, singing dreams of women, worlds, horizons?.    .    .
        Rivers cut a path on flat lands.
        The mountains stand up.
        The salt oceans press in
        And push on the coast lines.
        The sun, the wind, bring rain
        And I know what the rainbow writes across the east or west in a half-circle:
        A love-letter pledge to come again..    .    .
      Towns on the Soo Line,
      Towns on the Big Muddy,
      Laugh at each other for cubs
      And tease as children.

Omaha and Kansas City, Minneapolis and St. Paul, sisters in a house together, throwing slang, growing up.
Towns in the Ozarks, Dakota wheat towns, Wichita, Peoria, Buffalo, sisters throwing slang, growing up..    .    .
Out of prairie-brown grass crossed with a streamer of wigwam smoke-out of a smoke pillar, a blue promise-out of wild ducks woven in greens and purples-
Here I saw a city rise and say to the peoples round world: Listen, I am strong, I know what I want.
Out of log houses and stumps-canoes stripped from tree-sides-flatboats coaxed with an ax from the timber claims-in the years when the red and the white men met-the houses and streets rose.

A thousand red men cried and went away to new places for corn and women: a million white men came and put up skyscrapers, threw out rails and wires, feelers to the salt sea: now the smokestacks bite the skyline with stub teeth.

In an early year the call of a wild duck woven in greens and purples: now the riveter's chatter, the police patrol, the song-whistle of the steamboat.

To a man across a thousand years I offer a handshake.
I say to him: Brother, make the story short, for the stretch of a thousand years is short..    .    .
What brothers these in the dark?
What eaves of skyscrapers against a smoke moon?
These chimneys shaking on the lumber shanties
When the coal boats plow by on the river-
The hunched shoulders of the grain elevators-
The flame sprockets of the sheet steel mills
And the men in the rolling mills with their shirts off
Playing their flesh arms against the twisting wrists of steel:
        what brothers these
        in the dark
        of a thousand years?.    .    .
A headlight searches a snowstorm.
A funnel of white light shoots from over the pilot of the Pioneer Limited crossing Wisconsin.

In the morning hours, in the dawn,
The sun puts out the stars of the sky
And the headlight of the Limited train.

The fireman waves his hand to a country school teacher on a bobsled.
A boy, yellow hair, red scarf and mittens, on the bobsled, in his lunch box a pork chop sandwich and a V of gooseberry pie.

The horses fathom a snow to their knees.
Snow hats are on the rolling prairie hills.
The Mississippi bluffs wear snow hats..    .    .
Keep your hogs on changing corn and mashes of grain,
    O farmerman.
    Cram their insides till they waddle on short legs
    Under the drums of bellies, hams of fat.
    **** your hogs with a knife slit under the ear.
    Hack them with cleavers.
    Hang them with hooks in the hind legs..    .    .
A wagonload of radishes on a summer morning.
Sprinkles of dew on the crimson-purple *****.
The farmer on the seat dangles the reins on the rumps of dapple-gray horses.
The farmer's daughter with a basket of eggs dreams of a new hat to wear to the county fair..    .    .
On the left-and right-hand side of the road,
        Marching corn-
I saw it knee high weeks ago-now it is head high-tassels of red silk creep at the ends of the ears..    .    .
I am the prairie, mother of men, waiting.
They are mine, the threshing crews eating beefsteak, the farmboys driving steers to the railroad cattle pens.
They are mine, the crowds of people at a Fourth of July basket picnic, listening to a lawyer read the Declaration of Independence, watching the pinwheels and Roman candles at night, the young men and women two by two hunting the bypaths and kissing bridges.
They are mine, the horses looking over a fence in the frost of late October saying good-morning to the horses hauling wagons of rutabaga to market.
They are mine, the old zigzag rail fences, the new barb wire..    .    .
The cornhuskers wear leather on their hands.
There is no let-up to the wind.
Blue bandannas are knotted at the ruddy chins.

Falltime and winter apples take on the smolder of the five-o'clock November sunset: falltime, leaves, bonfires, stubble, the old things go, and the earth is grizzled.
The land and the people hold memories, even among the anthills and the angleworms, among the toads and woodroaches-among gravestone writings rubbed out by the rain-they keep old things that never grow old.

The frost loosens corn husks.
The Sun, the rain, the wind
        loosen corn husks.
The men and women are helpers.
They are all cornhuskers together.
I see them late in the western evening
        in a smoke-red dust..    .    .
The phantom of a yellow rooster flaunting a scarlet comb, on top of a dung pile crying hallelujah to the streaks of daylight,
The phantom of an old hunting dog nosing in the underbrush for muskrats, barking at a **** in a treetop at midnight, chewing a bone, chasing his tail round a corncrib,
The phantom of an old workhorse taking the steel point of a plow across a forty-acre field in spring, hitched to a harrow in summer, hitched to a wagon among cornshocks in fall,
These phantoms come into the talk and wonder of people on the front porch of a farmhouse late summer nights.
"The shapes that are gone are here," said an old man with a cob pipe in his teeth one night in Kansas with a hot wind on the alfalfa..    .    .
Look at six eggs
In a mockingbird's nest.

Listen to six mockingbirds
Flinging follies of O-be-joyful
Over the marshes and uplands.

Look at songs
Hidden in eggs..    .    .
When the morning sun is on the trumpet-vine blossoms, sing at the kitchen pans: Shout All Over God's Heaven.
When the rain slants on the potato hills and the sun plays a silver shaft on the last shower, sing to the bush at the backyard fence: Mighty Lak a Rose.
When the icy sleet pounds on the storm windows and the house lifts to a great breath, sing for the outside hills: The Ole Sheep Done Know the Road, the Young Lambs Must Find the Way..    .    .
Spring slips back with a girl face calling always: "Any new songs for me? Any new songs?"

O prairie girl, be lonely, singing, dreaming, waiting-your lover comes-your child comes-the years creep with toes of April rain on new-turned sod.
O prairie girl, whoever leaves you only crimson poppies to talk with, whoever puts a good-by kiss on your lips and never comes back-
There is a song deep as the falltime redhaws, long as the layer of black loam we go to, the shine of the morning star over the corn belt, the wave line of dawn up a wheat valley..    .    .
O prairie mother, I am one of your boys.
I have loved the prairie as a man with a heart shot full of pain over love.
Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more sunrise or a sky moon of fire doubled to a river moon of water..    .    .
I speak of new cities and new people.
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.
I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down,
  a sun dropped in the west.
I tell you there is nothing in the world
  only an ocean of to-morrows,
  a sky of to-morrows.

I am a brother of the cornhuskers who say
  at sundown:
        To-morrow is a day.
Mitchell Dec 2011
When the pages of life
Get worn, burnt and torn
When your eyes are red
And you can't remember what was said
Call me once or twice baby
I promise to never say maybe

When haste drips like paste
Like paint from a babies fingers
Don't sit down and linger
For the smoke in your mind is for real
Just call on me once or twice baby
And I won't tell you maybe

Make your way to my place
I'll shout out "This is what it's all about!"
And the grey clouds will turn white
No longer having to put up a fight
Call on me once or twice baby
You won't ever be hearing maybe

If you start to believe our worries
And dogs no longer bark but growl
You say hello to strangers
And they won't even hand you a towel
Just call on me once or twice baby,
You won't ever hear a maybe

After the sun has set
And the fishermen have reeled in their nets
Your stomach is done n' empty
And death starts to look temping
Call on me once or twice,
Cause you'll never be hearing maybe

I am back where I started
Like time stopped and im back in it
The lonesome whisper
Those lonesome sisters
They make you cry and they
Make your heart sigh

Pass the sergeant whose *** knee
Is broken and is about to sneeze
All this repetition is bringing to fruition
A new kind of terror that
This mind can't handle and the
Body melts like a candle

The bed is burning as I'm yearning
For another shot of the hard stuff and
A kiss from a lover that seems to hover
Across the floorboards of my flat as she
Wears an old worn coonskin cap

Repeated love affairs that bare
A resemblance to the rear of a steer
Cause' that is the way time works on us
Forcing us to remember though
All we want is to forget an' disregard

And in the heart of the black night
That dances with no shame only ******
Her finger is naked where the gold used to be
Pale in the sunlight that strikes her stony bones
Hearts hear the beating of their own and
Love is alone sitting atop its private throne

Coursing where the blunt fact of our age
Shakes trembles crumbles in the hands
Of the judges whose chocolate smudges
Remind me of their nubile weak baby bodies
Protruding their souls out from their mothers womb
Cracking their lips and knuckles from the
Chill wind now alone with tasks and obligation
Falling to the way side

Former ways of living are now taken aback
They are heated in the sun across the lake of tons
Misunderstood medallions with princes and their wives
Dancing to the music they will hear when they die
No note knows no length or death
For in that final step to rest be not afraid
Friends will guide your hand like the wind
Does the sane

I scratch my eyes as I think of Alice
Alone in the far away from me
Her sight vanishing like our love just the same
The smoke still resting on the waves
The bears still resting inside their caves
Ice on the horizon where inside is the stink
Tell me what I am as my speech turns to a drawl
Out of the states so far away
Inside I know these words will make it all O.K.

But now with the droopy piano man
And whispers that aren't mine but his
I recall a guy I used to stare at and know
He mentioned his name before he had to go
Cause' now I am a new man
With nothing and everything left to give
Attention to the pain of the people around me
Save the love for the one that deserves it
She was the one and I let her slip away
And for that I pay and pay
Every single day

Let me let you in a little secret
Hot like an iron and sweet like a rose
An alley where no one ventures or goes
A tune that is quiet but you try and deny it
Let me let you where I have been
In between living and the fall of the dice
Where time has no face and
The joker's are always present
Where money moves through your sheets
Like your long cheating husband or
The smell of cheap bourbon

In this hour years turn to sand and
The thought of yourself turns blue
Out of breathe the sirens of the sea call
And misery makes its final chess move
They is a maddening presence where
Every pain in the world is true
You cannot escape from the maze like labyrinth
It tells you it loves you so
You have nowhere to go and nothing else
To do

Dream through the mist where clouds are the mountains
And rivers are painted with flecks of metallic gold
Candy cane tongues with a chocolate kiss eyes
Her way was forbidden but never in the sky
A shout from the corridor a murmur from the hall
Tell the tale loudly or the pail of life will seem pale

There is nowhere to go from here
You are here with me
We are here together
And there is no where new to go from here
Do not fret, no
Do not whimper and please
Do not be scared
We are meant to be here together
You are forever here with me
We will learn how to love
How to live and
Learn to see
All over again

And the ways that were have now changed
"Culture will turn into steam"
"Hearts will turn to stone"
"Minds to mush and computers to man"
Forgetting the way the wind blows through the thicket
The moon casting its white hate on the lovely night
Creaking boards as crippling rivers
Collect their wares and head down the road
Strangers to a home they have always known
Gibberish in the eyes of God and his counterparts
Confusion: the only comfort in a world of immediacy
The only sanity in a world of the opposite

There must be a way out of this way
There must be another bay
It is on the horizon or this is a lie
Entranced by the entrance
Not myself, no not this time
A shake and a cry never mentioning the whistling lie
Forbearance here weighs out its own death
Too much here rather too much then there

Poor joe that tells himself he stills sane
That music is the only way out
The only price that one can pay
The crouched hidden gem that litters his ears
Standing on the street corner florescent and majestic
Glitter in his eyes and fire in his soul
Not a thought in his mind only the notes in his hand
Telling the bar man just him and her on the next one
That this is the place where they place his favorite song
And the haste at which his fire was made
God's hands were blistered for he didn't have a plan
Knocking around the **** like he whipped out at the john
And the ball is outta' the park and the girls are all screaming
A leaning beaming loud crack of all reasons
Mentioning professionalism at a bar filled with shining stars
The bathroom is broken so shake on out and grab your sandals
Oh yeh oh yeh oh yeh oh oh yeh
They tell me I belong here but most days I just don't see it

— The End —