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America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January
        17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go **** yourself with your atom bomb.
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I
        need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not
        the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back
        it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical
        joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday
        somebody goes on trial for ******.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid
        I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses
        in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle
        Max after he came over from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by
        Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner
        candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Business-
        men are serious. Movie producers are serious.
        Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of
        marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable
        private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour
        and twenty-five-thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of
        underprivileged who live in my flowerpots
        under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers
        is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that
        I'm a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly
        mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as
        individual as his automobiles more so they're
        all different sexes.
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500
        down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Com-
        munist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a
        handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
        speeches were free everybody was angelic and
        sentimental about the workers it was all so sin-
        cere you have no idea what a good thing the
        party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand
        old man a real mensch Mother Bloor made me
        cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody
        must have been a spy.
America you don't really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen.
        And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power
        mad. She wants to take our cars from out our
        garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Readers'
        Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia.
        Him big bureaucracy running our fillingsta-
        tions.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read.
        Him need ******* *******. Hah. Her make us
        all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in
        the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes
        in precision parts factories, I'm nearsighted and
        psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

                                Berkeley, January 17, 1956
Third Eye Candy Jan 2013
Flecks of violet, patch-quilt  loofah skin of  sponge-green iris, gold dusted
Emerald  eyes... wet stones in flesh tone, parachute baskets; paratroop lids
Descend... thin paradigms slip ; adrift upon a Seam of Tears. A saline Sea - with
Glass floor; lensing starlight over mint pink trampolines
covered in tiny copper filings,

And two Black Pools that Expand.
Two Sunbathing Night Blossoms -

Dead center. Unmanned...

Her cheekbones encroach upon Cataracts of Vacancy.
Lipid lathes of Lethe ; lips departed... red zeppelins, moist and mute . pontoons
Plump and mindless. Bee stung -
Open.

Soft mimes, glide
Over bleach and stain; over -
bone white; glide
Over Nicotine sigils, hiding -
in off-white
Enamel...

like anonymous petroglyphs for Dentists.
or Rosetta Stones for a lethargic Tongue.



II


Theta-wave turbines, throw rods and spark nods ... as others speak.
She resembles a dream-catcher’s mitt.
Words hiss now, and solid mist, twist the tell o' gram.
Into Fable's Armada !

Fog.... fog rolls in...   She rolls in, Beneath  a New Between. of Chasms
Hazardous grammar spasms, stammering -
Deaf tones of Diction -
All This ....In the Good Ear.
An Ear Of Cornucopias Delete.... The Dry Cob
Of  Annulled
Speech. [ but Morphine ]

Maybe a half-dozen kernels of distinct cream ; velveteen vague...
Or vivid - pleats in pure radiation.
?
Perhaps,  varicose inanities are expiation enough to drown a Kraken ?  Maybe God Happens ?

Let Ampule be the Judge.  Let Pack Mules be Priests.

As Others speak, Our Lily,  decrypts languidly left of linear... dislodged -
from Lexicons ....with long Odds, Against...
She Relents, Relentlessly-  And Utterly

Utterly Regardless...

She aborts pregnant ( .... )
pauses.

All this Fog rolls in... Agnostic.
She Robs
The Cuckoo... She De-bones the Soup
with Disjoint Comments.
And Scuttles
The Broth.

She's all Starlings and Polaroids.... Savage Pinwheels  and Aurora Vandals.

She's  All Plasma...
And Rapture -
with No Handles ...

She's Both Ends ... Burning
NOooo Candle .

A Wee Atlas; Shouldering A Loss
Ever Since Her World  
Was  Dismantled ..  A  Burden ( ... )
Lily
Phantom
Shrugs  

And Random Drugs..Atlantis.
Janette Aug 2012
Touch me...
Beyond the blue silhouette of still shadows,
Press against this body, that shivers
Beneath your journey
To find me...




Shadows sleep beneath dream,
lingering
Where darkness surrenders to wind plows
That pulse and surge, purl-binding; moon gold
Upon midnight's breeze...his name
whispered in silk, hushed;
Hollow and waiting...




See me...




Whispers wrap satin strands across heartbeats
Flowing to islands found within his sepia pools,
Where my soul's veil falls,
And shadows splinter shards of ebony, banking
The creek of my desire;
Breath escapes, a slow push past lips that bite back a whimper;
A voice under my tongue; tastes release...Swallowing his darkness
In liquid heat, taking him deep, body, to body, raw into the recess of moan...




Touch me...



Falling ****** on  goose-bumped flesh;
His deep mocha voice,
Suckles sweet, words flow
And the flesh of his tongue,
Lingers on the breath scent of a rose,
Pulling petals,
Painting my flesh blush-traced...
I breathe ache,  exhale his name, breathe, his taste, as
Pulse quickens tasting the storm of embrace
Beneath fingers, painting subtle brushstrokes
Upon a pool of liquid moonbeams, his tongue,
Hotly insistent, lathes upon waiting skin, where
Veins pulsate isolated desires;
Flesh upon flesh, whisper wetness to oblivion....



Reach for me...


Desire resounds from lips that ache to taste
His love against my heated skin;
My tongue remembers the flavour of his ***,
The familiar of it's heat,
The Smoothness of its slide;
My pout mouth sounds, beg with woman/child sighs,
Laying whispers of my confession, softly
Against his skin, drowning his face where
He is bent to taste;
The glistened spell,
Provoking, unceasingly...lacing through
Soft down to the blossom plundered;
The trickle, of trailing beads devoured, like the restless wind, rendering me breathless without pause,
Stroking tempest against skin, lingering, claiming....



Find me...


The moist of fingertips glide,
The meridian between here and ecstasy,
Lending the pulse of grasp, as I am
Held down hard to
Curve where pearled puddles moan incessantly..
"More! More!" my silent scream;
Melding tight, the succulent berry stirs;
Lifted high above lust, to where the moon sleeps,
And passion's breath dwells,
Lost in a slow dance, surrendered to untamed tides...



Awaken me..


A sharp exhale of breath
Precludes the pleasure-pain
Arcing down swiftly,
My flesh between his lips;
"Oh touch me, kiss me, stroke me,
Keep me here beneath these masterful hands,
While I succumb
To moans within the slide of tongue;
Sipping my mounting desire"...
Arched across the canopy of my offering,
Sighs, etch, beneath the surface of hushed colour
Bleeding need, through cascading hair,
Scarlet passion lit between thighs,
Greeting his touch, lavishing the breath of want....



Spill me...


Oh the heated cry that rushes past these
Trembling lips; the
Tremor trail beneath touches...lingering
For just a moment to capture heart sighs
Awaiting the soft gel of weeping submission,
Brushstrokes, excite, incite, the
Moist rivulets, where musk lies indolent;
Arching beneath sumptuous urgency;
His softly scented slow kiss, wet with my taste....



Bleed me...


I am, outstretched in a questing mark against the moon,
Tumultuous desires
Slaked....oblivious to this milky harvest,
Slipping the crimson unlit depths
Of wet petals;
I embrace and tremble amidst the melt of limbs tossed and spent,
Unveiling whispers and whimpers, as we love in ways that breach the starving soul;

This night is for you..........
Janette Oct 2012
It comes suddenly
a storm that rages to fury
bleeding me between your hands,
your mouth,
to where each syllable lost
between midnight’s satin
crests into a crazed madness


where the soft slide hardens
to gripping intentions as my arousal
tastes in jasmine-licked surrenders
like manna
for your hungered heaven




there, where no scream
goes unanswered but only echoed,
you are with me
primal




seared,
the flesh of you wetly hot
to my thundering pulse,
I am surrender laced
with impetuous desires
woven to linger upon your reddened lips


pressed *******
scrape across your flesh
as you moan in greedy adoration
to my whispered frenzy,
“taste me here,
let me feed you
there”


the suckle of your hot mouth
plastered to my ******* fills me
and I am burgeoning
upon graven yearns






here,
I ache in throbbing flames
as your tongue lathes
love’s lick playing tag
to my purr of silken gasps
and breathy mewling cries
in your ears
stating my submission of this
plunging dominance….
I burn…burn
…to inferno




Smiles wreathe pearl
as you revel in my passionate blossom,
your lick peels me wanton
where we are
pooled
shameless and painted,


my torrents are spilled for you
stained and swallowed
greedily




and I,
quivering in the tsunami
that you bequeath to my racking body,
I arch,
reaching that shattering golden gateway
singing joyous to the columns of fate’s
raging wave




Unleashed,
I am
the tide




Where you are damply hollow
and drowning...
Robert C Howard Mar 2015
Jerry Singing at his Lathe

Slim and mustached
Jerry sang his heart out
in overalls at his lathe –
the Mario Lanza of Kent-Moore Tools.

Curled metal gathered at his feet
as he cut hard steel into usable parts.
He glanced at the prints,
reset the turret to take a second pass
and belted out another chorus.

Jerry retro-dreamed of New York,
of lessons, certificates, Juilliard
and arias finished with outstretched arms –
visions derailed but unforgotten.

Global madness sent him to France.
With a pack and an M1 in place of scores.
Jerry helped set Paris free
yet never left a song on its stages.

Kent-Moore paid him well
and masked by din of colliding metal
Jerry sang and sang and sang all day
for rivet guns and turret lathes.
His voice would melt your heart.

*July, 2006
Included in Unity Tree - Collected poems
pub. CreateSpace - Amazon.com
My room does not
evolve or become;
it morphs instantly and before your eyes.
Things move and fly they burn and cry.  

I watch as a dust devil conquers invades
Two minutes later,
waltzing brooms on parade.

I stuff my room full of
glass metal wood.
Some would say hoarding
I reply misunderstood.

Most of the glass is pretty much broken,
the wood is all scorched, the metal contorted.
All of its stays because my hand has spoken.

My room is a magical place replete with spirits and souls and little doors to inner-space.

It likes to listen to music, the scent of a dog... It begs to get ****** off a good Sensi fog.

My room inspires my hands to create...
Whether with torches or pencil, hammers or lathes.

I often ponder
what will become
of my room when I die?
Perhaps as I come back
to bid farewell....
I'll leave a piece of my soul to guard it at night
Good ol' Colombian magical realism
Mike Essig Jul 2015
America**

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go **** yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
******.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need ******* *******.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
Happy Birthday, America.
betterdays Jun 2014
*******,down, sue
even from the grave,
you suprise....

i open the door to a knock,
two delivery men.
one burly, one stout,
stand on the threshold.
with a letter and a box.

the letter, from your solicitor
said.....
this is your bequest to me....
okay, i got a box of stuff....
nice, but then i read more...

you have bequeathed to me, your office, contents.
entire and intact....
the delivery men ask me where i want it put...

i say in the shed out the back
there....
so now an hour later...

33 boxes , computer, desk office chair, three foot mask
making block, and  various
posters, painting prints and
other items of theatre practitioner's paraphenalia,
sit in piles,
ordered and hapahazard,
in amongst ben's benches, tools and lathes.

and me,
i sit in, the old red leatherete, institutional,
easy chair,
holding the sack of paper and teabag infused garbage,
that came with your office.
entire and intact...

i am both laughing,
at this absurdity
and sobbing at the fact....
that this office,
will evermore,
not have,
the integeral piece,
that makes it whole,
....entire and intact...
for you my friend
....are gone
and not ever....
coming  back.
thier is a largesse in this gift
i cannot explain....but also a wicked sense of humour....
so very much my friend sue..
A pair of hands, smooth as glass
Still now and for always,
burnished and gnarled
skin shiny over ever-bent knuckles.

Held in stark relief on the sheet
that smells faintly of spring,
in this winter room,
my Grandfather's hands stopped moving.

No more to whittle or turn,
the lathes seep their oil
into the sweet, still air
in my Grandfather's shed.

Smoothed wood handles,
worn by love and perfect sense,
songs and whistles linger
sawdust shapes drawn by little fingers.
A wooden fortress to keep marauders out
a stockade made from trunks
barks we give to dogs
logs to keep the fires burning
lathes are turning out
spindles
and all the time
the forest dwindles

eventually
there'll be
one
tree
and someone
will carve a heart
on it.

while I wait for the kettle to boil.
Connor Johnson May 2020
In marlow be he lopped of puneth steff
und marked léath in toper laked breath.
Larned of gyre within underparried smoth,
Through nigh for lone barnit do such men.

One sclarms in great hooroopalées
To know desous that legemont criney laves,
Und staphe und bemolie dank for tiny ravings
lund for farnitulobomy maketh scathing lathes.

With gear und glem Sten over themble tee,
Class teeblon fra noy in silver nins.
For durng broy al mar laked schees
Lar tophe maynansi tipple skins.

Thar léath ti maynansi ouvrer tair
Lop scollomis trayver lorna frayn.
Ab lasci nordich mosa far tibu glar.
Rate olvo vraydon seem us legemont clane.
glass Aug 2019
fresh colors completely distantly constant
brother poet possibly gripping patience
smooth for ever eventually taking existence

a swallowed rolling branch of trouble
the blade expressed by monster eighty
compliantly shady driving a cracked creating whisper
bubbled rubble of weighty concern
does this hurt forget her it's Christmas, web surfer
a bloom adorned in restless praise
for tongues and lathes trail storms ablaze
lingered is west current laid
an unexpected place, for change
07/17/19

— The End —