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.

My body is not yours to bruise with your ***** viscous words and hands that carry layers and layers of my dried up blood,
You have no right to touch my sanctuary of a body the way that you do nor do you have any right to penetrate my mind with your poisonous venom that drips from your lips like a torrential rain,
You do not have a say in what I choose to cloth my body of which I perceive with disgust no less, no more,
I shall dress my inane skin in beautiful markings not to appear different to society as you say but to be the alluring being I wish to be,
I wish for a freedom you do not provide me with,
I wish for a day where you do not persecute me for my dark desolate wandering soul for I cannot control who I am meant to be although I have tried to change my self perception for your cold, conceited statue,
Oh you do what you do so well saying what you say so drolly,
I do comprehend my pitiful soul as pitiful of course but with your pesky whispering leaving me whimpering in the dirt and space of empty nothingness,
Oh how I am such an immaculate nothingness,
A swing here, a blow there,
There goes my dented shuffle, my cardinal dropping to the stiff brute ground,
I suppose my fear is amusing to say the least,
You drink it all up as it seeps out of me as if it were my dark red blood,
Oh how you must love its bitter taste for you beg for it every destructing moment you desire with an insatiable fire,
My need for peace is oh so dire, so dire,
I soak in the fear that my death is imminent,
That it is near,
Perhaps waiting just around the corner of the road,
Waiting oh so patiently to pounce out at me,
With such delightful grinning glee,
Maybe I shall meet death in an hour, perhaps our rendezvous will take place on Monday, perhaps it shall be when I am old and creased all over,
Whenever it is I know you shall not feel an inkling of compassion or penance and I think one day I will be alright with that.
An anonymous girl ©

Symptomatic folly,
the tail now wags the dog

Whose bark, it whimper’s drolly,
all teeth removed and gone

Reacting, never acting,
  new victims every day

All courage has retracted,
—the future in harms way

Jailed speech unto the warden,
  whose words may not contend

Our patriotic burden,
  its truth we must defend

With cowards grabbing power,
  a swamp that we must cross

Lies from ivory towers,
—to fell at any cost

(Villanova Pennsylvania: January, 2017)

I need a Bleh Book

Somewhere to dump the random cacaphony of **** ricocheting against
the thinning vault of my skull like a prison yard handball

Nowhere to go but in perpetual motion nonetheless

Drolly counting a cadence without the revelry of enlightenment or the hope of release

What should be pearls of wisdom precipitously condensed by the weight of time within an elegant carapace formed under the irradescent glow of a witches moon are just chili seeds gathering dust
in an old septic tank rusting under a dimming streetlight in an Albuquerque back alley

Hard kernel remnants of rellenos long since evacuated

Maybe this is it
My book

So
Bleh *******

You
are
welcome

The chicks are dancing

around drolly in their shells --


their thick diapers.

Coal dust, pressure-diamond,
Blue men, horse people,
Pretend we’re Cincinnati-an
Some old Baptist steeple
Appalachia,dying slowly
Educashion, all flunk
Accent, speaking drolly
Moonshine whiskey drunk
Class traitor, transgression
Fly-over, fat food
Pensions, Matt Bevin
Impertinent, cancer brood
Capricious, whimsy seasons
Quaint house, rusted down
Leave, many reasons
Stay, familiar town

islands wide the ocean comes to close
mouthing off to nature's maid in wait
deep violet horizons overflow
strike the stars and spill the walls of fate
out in Canterbury, crests of red
cocking o'er the faithful clapping crowd
meat one tired soggy seaborne head
drolly shaking hands and laughing loud
life goes on, one stupid span of time
life persists without reason or rhyme