The Patron Saint of Saturday morning cartoons  and The Patriot have died
They've died from patron-hate
We've come to pay our respects and show our patronage
We give the quarters we hid behind our ears for all these years

People go up to their friend, The Saving Grace
Saying, "I'm sorry for your loss"
And she deadpan replies, "Why? Did you do it?"
She was funny like that

All the people coming out of the woodwork
Who knew it was just a matter of time for these two to finally kick the bucket
No bones about it
It's just the luck of the draw
All the mourners come to talk about the two stiffs in the coffins
"IT WAS MY FAULT I WASN'T THERE!" cried The Merchant
"Don't be so ******* yourself" I said trying to comfort him
But I knew in the back of my mind that this guy was reading off cue cards and had such a hard-on for himself
Matter of fact, this caterwauling fool knocked everything The Patron Saint of Saturday morning cartoons stood for with out even trying to understand

"No taxation with out representation gives one a bad reputation"

The Patriot loved drawing baths, stipple dotting, still lives
Always paid out of pocket for the supplies

The best piece of advice he had given me was
"Cheesy stereotypes are just truths that were left out to age and gain a powerful smell we try to avoid because we can never face it"

The Signer and The Co-Signer went off on a tangent in the middle of the whole thing, I think they were having a war flashback or something

"Metaphorical formalities
Formulaic manic depressive
Compulsive obsessive
Metaphysical
Fairly impressive!"

These two were friends of The Patriot during his times at The O.K. Corral
They we're buried in Potter's field
The only two headstones in the whole place

The Patron Saint's read, "Stick & stones may break my bones but boards don't hit back"
And the Patriot's read, "Write me up, write me off, write this down, right on"

       -Tommy Johnson

From the backbroken fliers over oceans
From between the spiny frills along palm fronds
From Mr. Happy, the chain smoking chaperone of good times
From Mr. Happy’s half-burnt ****, coiled in the ashtray
From the disciples of Theravada and the skinny Buddha’s pupilless eyes scanning jocose scansions of jungle
From the tanned holy heads of students lounging in graveled football fields
From my bowl of rice at breakfast in the shade while considering western cities, you are not here
‘You are not here,’ I’ve written in my letters
‘You are not here,’ I’ve typed into e-mails immense
You are not here, my coke head pals locked in the veins of seedy nightmares
You are not here, my penniless friends who mix music in ascetic dark rooms out in Bushwick
You are not here in no eastern Central Park running naked in the night from horseback cops after hours of merciless balling in the bushes
You are not here you fair-skinned beauties in crowded alpine funiculars bearing your aquiline noses holding your hats over the mountains
You are not here my lonely mother waiting by the phone for a call at midnight
You are not here, you are not in my poems, you are not in the distorted notes harpsichorded across my crass imagination
You are not here, you will not be here, will you read my letters home?

To Garryowen upon an ***** ground
Two girls are jigging.  Riotously they trip,
With eyes aflame, quick bosoms, hand on hip,
As in the tumult of a witches' round.
Youngsters and youngsters round them prance and bound.
Two solemn babes twirl ponderously, and skip.
The artist's teeth gleam from his bearded lip.
High from the kennel howls a tortured hound.
The music reels and hurtles, and the night
Is full of stinks and cries; a naphtha-light
Flares from a barrow; battered and obtused
With vices, wrinkles, life and work and rags,
Each with her inch of clay, two loitering hags
Look on dispassionate--critical--something 'mused.

*

The gods are dead?  Perhaps they are!  Who knows?
Living at least in Lempriere undeleted,
The wise, the fair, the awful, the jocose,
Are one and all, I like to think, retreated
In some still land of lilacs and the rose.

Once high they sat, and high o'er earthly shows
With sacrificial dance and song were greeted.
Once . . . long ago.  But now, the story goes,
The gods are dead.

It must be true.  The world, a world of prose,
Full-crammed with facts, in science swathed and sheeted,
Nods in a stertorous after-dinner doze!
Plangent and sad, in every wind that blows
Who will may hear the sorry words repeated:--
'The Gods are Dead!'

I joust myself into jovial life
Jocose tatterdemalion and stygian salaciousness
Umbrage abrogating merit like swamping locusts
The mammoth chip on shouldered kids starving for life
I'm waiting on purgatory, and I'll wait for you with knives out
Cemetry of the artist stubbed beards and pubescence in the Phoenician Lands
He said she should have left the house
Tomahawks can still cut the vineyard, make my loquacity into beer-tap poetry
Flowery, murmur, kumbaya, kalimba de la soul and all thoughts aside
You're hoping music brings the song to my speechless heart
Your dance sounds light the motionless night, only the tapping of starry footsteps
Hob-nobs, more and more, knobs of heaven's doors open to every hippie with angel hair
Crossing the wires of substrates
Sonatas and partitas can be lugubrious, yet, elegantly examined
Nocturnes, from the centuries

Of ten old centurions
Came down to the Colosseum
Gladiator enthralled the chariots of fire
I was with ten ants, burning under the microscope
Tenants of this Roman Empire

Fighting for your rights
Fighting for the people who cannot fight
For the weak, requires peace and understanding
Shiny, homeless people lost the soul to the drugs and marijuana smoke under streetlamps stretching to infinity
This earth is an orchard of flowers
Slightly plump in the middle, it's mother nature
Not zaftig, it has latitudes and longitudes
Lavish life, garish fiefdom, stretches across the bent imagination of perverse minds
Looking for a kiosk in the peak of red skies that do not know blood and aggravation
New Year's Day, the cyka cry Mother Russia and SOS
Shooting flares into the sky
To reach so low, and to reach so high
Shouting slogans, written by the poets
Passion, prejudice, sensibility, comradery these are metiers of poets
Secrets strewed across the bloodless sky
Wishful thinking tantamount to head in the clouds
The clouds have different shapes and size, the fire of the greater existence lends us words in thoughts

Bili’s one of my two best chums. She's exquisite, cagey and ferociously funny - compared to her I’m tomboyish.

Her hair is a straight corn-silk that shines like black-enamel. When we watch movies, I get to brush it. Her heritage is Japanese, she has perfect, warm-ivory skin, but she’s as American as sarcasm or gun-violence.

When she talks to me, sometimes she’ll be flirtatious or motherly, but always jocose. She bullies me, good-naturedly coaxing and chivvying me onto the trajectory she selects.

I’m jiggered - I enjoy being treated like a pet. I’ve been so harried lately that it’s somehow calming. I think I’m going to spend the rest of the summer, blithely letting her arrange me.

the heron
of your arrival
lands squarely
its talons set
on fields of
awakened grass
as the slender bell
of the morning
shouts into clear void.
its unequivocal voice
shatters the windows
of this home's numb silence
where mouths play back and forth,
the jocose allusion
of a blank audience
where the laughter sledges
an amalgam
of fire ferrying proudly
over a flight of moon-stream
that stretches its white bones
in a quotidian gyration,
fanning out these
  words almost as if infinite.

I do not like Soyinka!
Except because I love him.
I do not like Soyinka!
That in obvious allure octogenarian man.
With whitish locks.
And this is my jocose to him.
That old jolly-jocund who's in a gay.

I do not wish to be garrulous,
Or loquacious.
So I will say
For I am an enfant terrible.
And I will enfeeble him with my euphoric words.
That elderberry with no egregious egotic lines.
I loathe him, yet loathing him.
Bend to him.
That fair dinkum laureate.
I hope this is not a lese majesty?
For I have penned this accord to his standard.

I do not like Soyinka!
Unless because I love him.
My sworn, utter coruscating model.
Is that I do not like him, I love him.

If you had one year of love,
and then you had to say adios,
should you be glad or morose?

Sure, if it ends, it’s not what I’d hoped,
we just weren’t destined to be betrothed.

We had fun, we were close and jocose,
we snogged until we practically choked,
and we did ALL the fun things that were gross,
but our forte was that we felt safe, I suppose.

Now, I’m not saying it’s over, but I tend to diagnose things,
and while I wouldn’t say that we love overdosed,
I would guess that we’ve shared more love than most.

Constancy is no more, it jabs an antonym
Dependability on only what elongates ache
Spasms cordiality that is nearly lost memory
There is a mechanism of biology unforgiving
This black box jocose
Laughing at ruination
Temptation to dive forward into flames
Rather than run
Unfailingness, ends are eventual
Everything is spotted with its departure
When you're seeing your own

The ancillary argument is an asclepion which is anaphoric to anathema, anointing anecdotal evidences as an asymptomatic astonishment, assumptive of an averring the verbiage unwavering used to auxesis an auxiliary found aiding the circular back to an autonomy, assuaged in its entirety, appendant to an irony, giving appurtenance to astronomy yet astringent to all company of asters in the wovenry.

  A sweetened ingredient in life’s vermouth, is a lesser known but still common truth, resounding voice a sound so routh and unforgiving of jockeying jocose uncouth but the greatest parts of life we know are sorely wasted on the youth and so fundamental is this truth or verities vivacious muse that some might say we light a fuse when using such verbose abuse that angry are they who find our use an anathema to amuse?

  To wit so that I must abjure the painful notion there is a cure to a playful mind’s language of slur not meant as such but thus obscured the difficulties so inured on my ment-al-lity of thought a crime, a retching twist of someone’s time thus wasted on a poem blurred, a freedom though has just occurred; my mind a paradise, my thoughts a bird...

You wonder why I wrote this po-em,
Think on your life and about your **-eme,
Look back at youth’s wondrous days,
When life was new and full of plays,
And ask yourself is this a maze?

Lachrymose,
Losing a life I did not fully engross,
Comatose, dying and death seems so close,
But loathe, I live a lie so frankly grandiose,
Verbose and jocose in all manners morose,
Desperation froze,
No one arose to salute my muttered incantations,
To dispute my life through my imagination,
Though through my doting degradation,
I cling on frantically unto unknown exaltation,
Diving into my awaiting expiration,
Regretful inspiration,
Fictitious foundations set in neglect,
Direct forgetting of the very thing once most in need to protect,
Respecting the ideas, with which ones conscious yearns to dissect,
I wept,
Alone except with, or was I within, the dark,
Or was it with the darkness within,
No matter, therein,
It begins, I accepted in that dark,
The dark and the truth of all things,
All something’s whispered so quietly they could well be nothing’s,
Though those nothing’s more oft than not turn into something’s,
Somewhere between the two supposedly lies everything,
Everything lies to make a man,
A man hollow seeming whole,
Holes plugged until they take their toll,
A role in a life you know you stole,
But there is no one,
No one bearing in mind what I have done,
Please, someone to forgive my mistakes that make who I become,
Becoming the shadows reprobate, I cannot anymore outrun,
Become someone, known to no one and now long gone,
Long gone alone, finally where I belong,
Long gone disposed of, to where I feel destined,
Destination twisted as thoughts are infested,
Alone as questions are no longer requested,
Alone but at least not wrong in all my guessing,
Alone in the dark with the truth of all things