There’s a kind of grief
in a long leaf pine
with a scar cut deep
in its bark from lightning
that shines beneath
a winter’s moonlight
all alone out there
down by the water
like a man in a wheelchair
grieving for a daughter
at the end of the dock
hard and gray
old as the rocks
and cold **** waves
that break in time
along this god forsaken
piece of coastline.

Some in my family say
Uncle Sam was my salvation
when I was a young man
hell, maybe so, I don’t know
but he kept me out of jail
and paid for my education
which is how I found myself
in West Memphis, Arkansas
surveying Indian mounds
that some fool professors thought
were put there by the Choctaw
but I knew they’d got it wrong
all along, it was the Mississippians
which makes perfect sense if you think
on it considering where they put ‘em
but I digress, I must confess it
was my fondness for backroad bars
and blues guitars carved from wood
of crosses burnt by drunks in hoods
and strings plucked by calloused fingers
of old men with shoulders slumped
like sagging barns and Ford pickups
you find out in them parts, singing
songs about long gone women, all
kinds of aching age old pains lingering
enough to make a man’s heart rain
until the US Army Corps of Engineers
blew the levy’s to send those tears
out across cotton fields and mounds
I know the Choctaw didn’t build.

I have this
theory about
irony, tyranny
and irrational
national emergencies
you see, when
the foul wind
blowing south out
of Washington DC
fails the smell test
but compares well
with, say, *******
cat ****, radioactive
batshit contaminants
but, hey, try any
old way, you still can’t
iron any wrinkles out
of the fact that what
lies in the murky bottom
of the Potomac
our leader drinks in
also flow through
the faucets to sink, then
down the *******
of our so-called democracy
and into the lagoon
down on the links
of Mara-a-Lago.

You once said I read too much Le Carré
or maybe Guevara, which could be true
but I’m really just a hillbilly at heart
with dreams of going to Chile with you
on a fast boat running guns, but no más
because you, you can dream forever
without ever remembering who I was
lying in your bed somewhere in Argentina
reading Borges, wearing that black beret
you brought with you from Bolivia, sweet
Olivia, daydreaming of nights with Che.

The old wives
from the mountains
used to tale us  ;)
that if you tell a lie
when it’s lightning
you’ll wake up
at midnight
spitting blood
which makes me
think I must’ve been
talking in my sleep
last night when
the storm blew through
loud enough to
shake the house
and wake the dead
so I woke up to
smoke a cigarette
and let my dog go
outside to take a ****
when I saw a rose
pretty as you please
there on my pillow
I swear, I think I dreamed
that I was the President. ;)

It’s cold outside tonight
but I had to get out of the house
so I went walking about without
any particular thought in mind
as to where I was heading, you see
I was feeling kind of pine-boxed in
and couldn’t sleep, I needed a 2 a.m.
cigarette, so I put on my clothes, my boots
a coat, grabbed my smokes and slipped
on out the sliding glass door, it’s quieter
than the front one that has a bad habit of slamming, not laying blame, but ****
if it wasn’t darker than the inside of my
eyelids, darker than  the catacombs where
dead stars go when they die, and the moon hides away when it’s all out of shine, just
like where my thoughts sometimes seem
to go, you know, when my mind just won’t
put things behind me, and I’m feeling all
kinds of silence, it’s like listening to moss
growing on stones and wondering things
like why bees don’t die in their own honey
and a white stone in a field full of field-
stone is a pretty nice rock, but still, a rock
all the same, so I walk to the dock down
the road in the dark where a man can go to wash his troubles away before day breaks.

I followed a cloud
for five long years
of my life, until I fell
into a pond thinking
it was a beautiful woman
letting  her gown fall down
from around her shoulders,
and the words for her
******* were so strange,
I had to learn to pronounce
them with lips shaped like, oh,
I don’t know, maybe an O,
and teach my tongue new tricks.

When I was younger
I slept in the top bunk
over my older brother

- Pretty soon we’re all going to die -
he was fond of saying
while we listened to Credence
Clearwater Revival on an old turntable
with a penny he taped to the arm
to make it sound like a $100

Pretty soon he got me saying the same
words, like moon, mosquitos and darkness
were in his ear, he’d have dreams of
naked women washing his feet
and sparrows looking out of his eyes

He hollered at old man death
when he was wanting some shuteye

- Nobody on earth is like me -
he’d wake up shouting not meaning
to disturb my sleep

He said - I am the white piano
they threw off the bridge -
- the snake bed and the shade tree -
- I am something, yes-sir-eee -

- I’m something not everybody wants
to believe - he’d say sipping on whiskey
bought from a woman up the holler

He told death to - kiss his white *** -
then holler at me to get out of bed
and go trim the grass around the stone
angels planted up in the high pasture.

I once had a heart
I thought
But I don’t know anymore
It’s feeling kind of dead and rotten
And the smell, well...
It smells a lot like lonesome.

Rolling
over and over
and over again

wrapped tight like
a Birchbark canoe

mute starlight
tapping and scratching
at my window

sleep, that dark
river I seek

night, oh holy
water, sink me

drown me deep
down in the black
mud below you.

Tonight Hunraqan
roams the night
lifting the shroud
of dark clouds
so the moon can peek
down  on my long dreams
of water, and the mystery
of sleep; I am tranquil
one eye open, thankful
for the respite of brief light
while somewhere a plank
floats east to the Atlantic
carrying a forgotten book
of the K'iche' Maya language
with my name inscribed
just inside, I sigh, oh why
heart of my sky, why?

Although I can’t prove it,
I think most poets work
for FEMA, writing good
lines on the side of homes.

This poem is asleep, so
don’t yell at it, waking it up;
leave it alone letting it dream.

Sometimes I come to
while the moon is still up
i have been dreaming
way into the night
of a sad woman
in the corner of my room
sitting at a loom
weeping, and weaving
her own shadow
and my silence feels
like an intruder
to her sorrow
an unnatural light
to the darkness
she will face
for all the rest
of her tomorrows
if I could only dream
a way into her
dark nights.

My tired eyes and red
glow on the tip of my last
cigarette tells me it’s way
past midnight again as I
try roping a star smoking
on my porch by the light
of a big old yellow moon
and I could have sworn I
saw her riding by wearing
black boots, her tight-assed
jeans and a blue bandanna
heading  west to Montana.

Like old friends making up
after too many years
of the fine and high lonesomes
it’s time we get shed of our ways

So take a deep breath
and listen up
all you bad hombres
I **** you not

You may have run off
into the ditch of your past
and let love spin like a wheel
until an old man came by
looking for pop bottles
and bagged it all up

We’ve seen a lifetime of days
sweating blood for nothing
and now this is the night
of nights to do something

Keep your boot on the clutch,
steady, and ready to drive through
the fog of love’s misery or mystery,
the happy, the heartbroken, a sly
smile and a flick of a tongue on red lips,
your truck hitting smooth on all six.

I’m making a boat
nailing driftwood together
maybe I’ll make it across
and maybe I won’t, you know
because nothing floats forever
still, it’s good wood to toss
on a pyre when I’m standing
by a fire over on Odin’s
Valhalla’s Landing.

This bed
is a sad cafe
and morning
a table
I drank from
like a legacy
of one who once
loved
a woman
in a blue dress
draped
on the floor
like a rug
by the door.

Nights like these
when the moon floats
on the creek, all pale
and swollen, I try
to sleep without dreaming
of a small child, still
and not breathing, like
a leaf felled too soon
during the season
of the monsoon rains,
heavy as the pain of a father
looking here and there,
everywhere for a daughter
somewhere in all of this water.

In these parts
sometimes a man
will walk into a bar
and say something
he’s soon ashamed of
then leave with his friends
paying no attention.

O, Orca
Tahlequah —

so much more
than just J35 —

for 17 days
more than
1,000 miles
of heartache
you gave us —

waiting, watching
as you grieved —

carrying the weight
of the world’s eyes —

teaching each
and everyone —

grieving mothers
have their own —

ways and time
to say
goodbye.

Heave away laddies
sail away you ladies
let us lift our glasses
to that one-eyed spy
aloft in the dark nest
looking down to what
we have spelt out in
the fires of driftwood
drinking to the light
filling the silent sea
wooing its bed right
below my window,
and to the memory
of the rusty revolver
held tight in my right
hand I keep beneath
my hard, cold pillow
O, night, you old sailor
your victory, I salute.