*** tiddy um,
    tiddy um,
    tiddy um tum tum.
My knees are loose-like, my feet want to sling their selves.
I feel like tickling you under the chin-honey-and a-asking: Why Does a Chicken Cross the Road?
When the hens are a-laying eggs, and the roosters pluck-pluck-put-akut and you-honey-put new potatoes and gravy on the table, and there ain't too much rain or too little:
        Say, why do I feel so gabby?
        Why do I want to holler all over the place?.    .    .
Do you remember I held empty hands to you
    and I said all is yours
    the handfuls of nothing?.    .    .
I ask you for white blossoms.
I bring a concertina after sunset under the apple trees.
I bring out "The Spanish Cavalier" and "In the Gloaming, O My Darling."

The orchard here is near and home-like.
The oats in the valley run a mile.
Between are the green and marching potato vines.
The lightning bugs go criss-cross carrying a zigzag of fire: the potato bugs are asleep under their stiff and yellow-striped wings: here romance stutters to the western stars, "Excuse ... me...".    .    .
Old foundations of rotten wood.
An old barn done-for and out of the wormholes ten-legged roaches shook up and scared by sunlight.
So a pickax digs a long tooth with a short memory.
Fire can not eat this ******* till it has lain in the sun..    .    .
The story lags.
The story has no connections.
The story is nothing but a lot of banjo plinka planka plunks.

The roan horse is young and will learn: the roan horse buckles into harness and feels the foam on the collar at the end of a haul: the roan horse points four legs to the sky and rolls in the red clover: the roan horse has a rusty jag of hair between the ears hanging to a white star between the eyes..    .    .
In Burlington long ago
And later again in Ashtabula
I said to myself:
  I wonder how far Ophelia went with Hamlet.
What else was there Shakespeare never told?
There must have been something.
If I go bugs I want to do it like Ophelia.
There was class to the way she went out of her head..    .    .
Does a famous poet eat watermelon?
Excuse me, ask me something easy.
I have seen farmhands with their faces in fried catfish on a Monday morning.

And the Japanese, two-legged like us,
The Japanese bring slices of watermelon into pictures.
The black seeds make oval polka dots on the pink meat.

Why do I always think of ******* and buck-and-wing dancing whenever I see watermelon?

Summer mornings on the docks I walk among bushel peach baskets piled ten feet high.
Summer mornings I smell new wood and the river wind along with peaches.
I listen to the steamboat whistle hong-honging, hong-honging across the town.
And once I saw a teameo straddling a street with a hayrack load of melons..    .    .
******* play banjos because they want to.
The explanation is easy.

It is the same as why people pay fifty cents for tickets to a policemen's masquerade ball or a grocers-and-butchers' picnic with a fat man's foot race.
It is the same as why boys buy a nickel's worth of peanuts and eat them and then buy another nickel's worth.
Newsboys shooting craps in a back alley have a fugitive understanding of the scientific principle involved.
The jockey in a yellow satin shirt and scarlet boots, riding a sorrel pony at the county fair, has a grasp of the theory.
It is the same as why boys go running lickety-split
away from a school-room geography lesson
in April when the crawfishes come out
and the young frogs are calling
and the pussywillows and the cat-tails
know something about geography themselves..    .    .
I ask you for white blossoms.
I offer you memories and people.
I offer you a fire zigzag over the green and marching vines.
I bring a concertina after supper under the home-like apple trees.
I make up songs about things to look at:
    potato blossoms in summer night mist filling the garden with white spots;
    a cavalryman's yellow silk handkerchief stuck in a flannel pocket over the left side of the shirt, over the ventricles of blood, over the pumps of the heart.

Bring a concertina after sunset under the apple trees.
Let romance stutter to the western stars, "Excuse ... me..."

I captained logs lovingly across
a musky pond
to hang stars on this date
when so much happened.
Let’s wake in the missed-me morrow
and I’ll try to recapture it.

6am

My aroused heart pounds with the eager
pecks of new world sparrows
feasting on a found pile of saltine *******
crumbs.

With these easier pickings, they can gloss
over hypothetical seeds lost
and the unfortunate insects
still trapped in their tightly wrapped buds
while emitting
a silky trickle of pollen sweetened tears
I might have once confused as joy.

8am

My mouth is a cast iron bell
robbed of its moistness
and the service of a tongue that would rather be
surgically cut without
the requisite anesthesia
than extol with slithering anticipation
the downfall of cold-blooded prey.

A grubby grimace can’t
switch off the cockle-less warmth
gazed by an elegantly impolite swan,
but amazingly cottony soft escapes can
be ginned with the bait of a choirboy’s tender
“Have mercy!”

10am

My nutmeg brown irises are diced
fresh and tossed into a ***
where spiced hot they’re shown
the urgency this yet-to-be plucked rose feels
when the mid-morning light
accumulates with enough heat
to bake the earth chocolate.

The tattered edges of her puckered lips
glow an ardent shade of pink and make
a beacon, signaling kingly butterflies to abdicate
their aimless flutters and jet
directly toward her alluring realm.

Noon

My usually cool tips can’t maintain
their aloof trance and they trip
red with sudden blushes over the damaged
clasp on a school girl’s lunch box
crayoned with lemonade kittens,
their wordless greetings.

It’s unlatched to reveal no magic
pressed in the chunks of pickle loaf,
but the foetid and desperate
fruits of a wish for can’t-stay-at-home mothers
to be released from the wages of others’
drudgery.

A squirrel drags her white bread
and dappled meat onto the play lot
where the child’s storm-cloud stare
breaks with the flash
and low rumble of laughter.

2pm

My soles crave the touch of loose-dirt
roads, but it’s my ankles that meet
brambles and are torn by their tiny kisses
from which a rubbery
beauty of sappy drips trails back
to grow pastel primavera blooms.

Their long, tapered necks
and delicate, glassy horns blow
the modulated notes of an icy hymn.

Its diamante flecks freckle
the hovering blue before falling
to press these young,
painted plants into a frieze
and free them from wilting.

4pm

My nape aches for the subtle
weight on not supple joints
between thick fig branches
powdered with a maquillage of snowy dust.

No one care can snap them
or keep them from sheltering
the grazes of constantly bleating sheep.

Candy floss wool is tinted
jonquil then apricot then cherry
as the distant and fiery ball of a sun
slowly descends to the quenching
splash in its night-deposit bucket.

6pm

My unencumbered back gently rolls with a raft
adrift on ripples raised
when unknown aquatic creatures
stir in a shallowly cupped liquid.

Their pleasant plunks and gleeful gurgles
are carried on the crisply creeping evening
air to wash away
the unsavory wafts of salty rumors.

Here I can’t scent the far-removed
oceans racked by hunger’s
chilling frissons and the pundit’s
raging rants to at all-costs maintain
the elevation of market-priced pap.

And I drifted off...

Miles of indigo ocean floss the urchins from its rocky teeth
cracked, aged, sturdy

like our captain
unwavered by the changing tides
wrinkles deep in his eyes
skin dry from the salt of the blue.

The ship a knotty brown, pointed like a tri-corn hat. Roguishly handsome like it could Woo the sea.

Our captain sang stories
of the ship's past lives before its soul
settled into our vessel.
His adventures hearing mermaids
Lured under to their beauty.
Most men be tranced by their call
lost forever in their seaweed chains,
not this Stone-hearted Charmer.
With swiftness of a thief
his smirk toss the sirens under his thumb.

Johnny Two Leg sticks his knife into the lid of a large barrel
prys it open.

Maggots wriggle under the dark of it's planks.
Rot cotton forming in their crevasses.

"Another day another barrel" Johnny sigh to himself
lid clanking against the deck.

This will be the crew's rations.

Sing songing men with their plenty red wenches toss back tankards on board.
Their song isn't flashy,
not even practiced,
they just want their tales to be heard.
A chorus, or chant repeats between stories.
Some simpler, some scary, some tall.
Each member of crew taking turns with their voice boxes, scratching the black liquor walls.

Johnny Two Leg plunks the barrel center of the crowd
a loud cheering erupts.
The poor boy who was staged on a chair belting limerick of his most recent love affair has his stool politely kicked, knocking him prone,
causing a nearby member
or four to laugh.

"If a man is a song, is he really dead?"
booms our captain through the bustle. touching Johnny Two Legs back,
giving a smile as he walk past.

We form a line as he hand us vials from the barrel

thumb the frosty glass
pop cork unleashing purple mist tendrils that spiral round like a serpent's tail

look to our captain in devotion
who holds his vial out proud.
Johnny Two Leg stands prouder,
glowing for the captain.
The poor boy stand bright eyed, clutching.
Together we swig back the poison

give our souls to the next vessel
be it castle, sword, or ship.
They'll sing about us
of hearts calloused harder than oceans teeth
voices louder than the reddest haired *****
passion hotter than the fires of hell.

When their lungs grow tired of our song, remind them
'fore we faired the sea under their new flag
we breathed oceans of wisdom
devout to this Knotty Tri-corn Rogue.
May his story never die.

Dim, the stagnant *****-air clears;
thick velvety curtain lifts,
reveals
a not-so-grand
piano, scarred and dilapidated
under a single, cutting beam.

On the bench, the wrung-out crust
of a moth-eaten man
slumps habitually, his spine in a “C”
from the shouldered shackles
of negative meaning.  Void.

He weighs the crackled keys
with weathered fingers; arthritically
knobbled notes float into the open air
hung with single malt fumes,
contained in vacuous walls.
Each hobbled finger-stroke and hammer-fall
morphs
melts
molds into agonizing chords, aching arpeggios.
Audible heaviness.

His oddly-angled fingers
abstain from all accountability
for the throb in his injured melody,
punctuated now and again by a dead note
on that neglect-yellow keyboard.  

Longing plunks minored
on a downbeat, a song woven with
losing the blue of cloudless mornings
in her velvet passions.  The her that’s missing,
that’s gone and packed the dog
and any solace against the pervasive storms

graying his vision, his beard, his hand—
mangled with grief and apologies—his hand
ever grasping for that lost shade
and the irony of intonating the only hue
his notes will ever know.
.

Good way off, past blindness
trickling fingertips felt plunks.
Sedimentary stirrings next to
running brooks dipped into
for pleasure of touching
algaecide inside the head.

And memory impresses gunky
regions explored, faculty of
retaining wet sandy banks,
the murk of his adolescence.

How what was told of who to,
or who not to, or what not to,
that, was only left with more
unanswered question. Just
mire. So the feeling out had
little guidance and quicksand
became lesson planner.

Wonted informality, such sinking,
became hook, shot, and sweet tooth.
These habits took his teeth
and no longer could he chew.
Drivel and flattery became much the
same, his purging, alluvium.

Men can only spill out, what fed.
Eventually mountains' rivers carry peaks to valleys.

I have a cat that loves me so,
why it is I do not know.

I am not famous, wealthy, or wise,
but I can see it in her eyes.
She shows her belly for me to pet,
I have never tired of it yet.

Her body's so warm and her fur is so soft,
without her love I would be so lost.
She stretches and yawns, then plunks at my book,
till I lay it down and give her a look.

She turns her back as if to say,
Why do that when we could play.
Sometimes when I feel so low,
here she comes to let me know.

That I am to her, and always will be,
the only person she loves to see.
I have a cat, I love her so,
Why it is, I think I know.

Seething with agony.
Unsinned―
the creatures were asking for
human rights.

Tracing the spiritual odyssey.
You have landed in a
volcano pit, looking for
the first autumn.

Smudgeless you walk in a
coal mine. It plunks. There
were spots in the sun. Bragging
was coming to the fore.

I am closing the book, not
to read again the drooling
script. Ages were harvesting
the tunnels.

He ambles up, plunks
his oxygen on the counter.
I notice his veteran's cap
when my eyes flick up to
greet him. He unfolds his
money with long, careful
fingers. "You like the music?"
He asks me. Pachelbel's
Canon in D plays softly
on the radio. I do, and
I tell him so. "Pachelbel,"
He says, half to himself,
then adds, "Only thing I
don't like about him is
when you've heard the first
few measures, you've
heard it all."

Water and Oil

Kaclunk! The white smoke under the hood stunk; your car is junk. Get everything out of the trunk, pull the defunct plates off the chunk, and hitch a ride with a drunk. He’ll debunk the automakers as punks, as he plunks another glass bottle at a skunk. But the mechanic implied that it must be the lack of oil in the pump. The sump, dried, and your dump died. If you’re mystified, parts collide, and damage is magnified. An engine denied oil is suicide, he described. Carbide if misapplied, can be liquified; this metallic tide causes problems global wide. Simplified, he replied, slide that certified clump aside, that wreck won’t glide. Go drink some purified dihyrdrogen monoxide, or you’ll end up like your ride.

only in the winter
as I’m stripped of my red
cloak? When the yellows have broken
and scrambled like egg yolk? When I can’t blanket
you in shade. And my bark is sharp as blades?

Do you see me
only in early spring
when my buds are tightly closed
like a fist swinging in the air
and breaking someone’s nose?

Do you see me
only in late autumn
when my colors are bleeding out
and fallen to the bottom. And my nut plunks
someone’s head so loud it shakes the dead?

Do you see me
only in the summer
so green and much
younger? A haven for the thunder. When you
laid under me and fell asleep at my feet?

Sundays, after beatings
He ignites the torrid grill
Browns the butter
Smacks and beats the eggs,
Ick! the shrill of boils in the scramble
Spattering at every turn
When he macerates those yolks;
Chunky bangers begin to scorch
And the tawny smoke that rises from the fry
Sheaths his face.
Greasy sweat drops begin to strain from his enlarged
and scowled pores;
A gooey film of grime and slime
Skims down and plunks into his fry,
Froth around the mouth
He slobbers more and primes his grub one final time.
He crams a pile on to his fork
Without inhaling he swallows and
He gobbles
His jowls are brimming
Will he choke?

Talking about the F-Word, let's talk.

Hey, it's a guy: F. Word. F. Word becomes F. Lesh.

F. Word looked at his watch. Saw the Metro-Gnome. Little sucker just keeps walking. F. Word watched his look. Narrow tunnels, deep sink holes, wide open spaces.

Here we go, he thought. Steps into his own pipe. Blackness breakable What's that over there? An old friend calls out to him. Hey, got some new clothes for you. Yeah, you deal in shrouds. So? What's the fear? You're gonna get dressed up in the end anyway. And after you see the light. The light I see now is a fight.

Here we go again, he thought. Steps into his own chasm. Darkness drinkable. After some deep falling he plunks down in an inch of water. What’s that over there? Another old friend calls out to him. Hey, got some new proteins for you. Yeah, the fleas, and who ends up as food? So? What's the fear? You're gonna get eaten anyway. And after there’s the apple tree. I'll be the apple, I'll flee.

Here we go again, he thought. Steps into his own vistas. Brownout boatable. Another old friend calls out to him. Hey, got some new ship for you. Yeah, the one that carries me nowhere. So? What's the fear? You're gonna be shipped off anyway. And your last Port of Call will be the Court of Pall. Must say, you got a way with words. You just gave me the floats.

The friends met in Mr. Koestler's Twilight Bar. How come we hardly ever see you here? they said to F. Word.  Keep getting lost, get into a fight, have to run, end up on my back in the canal. Boy, you still got your looks. How do you keep 'm up? Oh, those looks. I just traded in my Kingdom.