Well, let's just get on with it.
----------------------------------------
This is the way I was taught to sing.
Way down low, in the valley below,
Where the crooked brook flows.
This is the way I was taught to dance.
Words into words, in a little trance,
A lyric prance, on a bending branch.
This is the way I was taught to live.
Meek feet beating hasty retreats
In the wet streets.
This is the way I was taught to grow.
So now you know.
So now you know.
---------------------
---------
No one,
And nothing,
Really,
Can compare to the squish
Of your red wrists
And their dead kiss.
Your warm heart
Is a lark
Into which I,
This lonely guy,
Lurk,
and park,
and then play.
When you plea with me
I hear beetles changing speed,
Bees changing tune,
And the moon,
Silvery and swollen,
Between me and you,
Swoons until
Soon...
Doom.
And when your fiction grows old
And you grow cold
And my brain grows mold,
We'll still remember our wish,
And our meals
And our dish
And that'll be enough, I think,
To pine away
In mellow drink.
-------------------
---------------------------
When they finally come
To take me away
I will not pray
I cannot pray
I will not be-
And cannot see
(The better part of me)-
Blissfully wiped away.
No, no, sirs,
I will say,
You cannot take me away today.
------------------------------------
----------------------------
I am breaking away now.
So long, to all the rest of you.
I will miss your prayers.
I cannot stay, for I must go.
(Wouldn't you know?)
As the river shows,
(In its tinkling stream)
The sky snows
(A thrust of cold white downward steam!)
Incidental bright specks…
The frozen tears,
Mourning my moving on,
Wafting wan through the glow
Of my brakelights.
A rosy, red woe.
I am breaking away from this language.
I cannot play its rotten games.
My brothers and sisters before me,
Knowing not your names,
Nor the place of your face
(I assume in the best of rest),
To you
I salute
And shoot this quick number.
I'm off now, for sooth,
With drink and with tumbler.
In a twisted, wicked way
I make my way
Day by day
Through the gray
And the grey.
I've learned to say
(in my own way)
"Hello" and "Hey"
and "How are you today?"
Without incident.
I was initially a bit troubled
By the "waxwing slain" doubled-
Over, retching a long, languid liquid bubble
Gleaming pink, then orange, then blue, as it trembled,
But now I am not.
For I am a sot.
Gone gurgle, glub, gurgle.
A poet in a king's chair
("No king is he!
He has no hair!")
Ah, but I am king of everywhere.
With bottle, with pipe,
I see beauty in darkest night
I feel beauty in my own plight
(Through mental battles I bite, I fight).
And with a wide bow I go now,
Your king, your fling, your
Doubleteam dream,
Stepping out of the ring
And into the crowd-
To the sound of a loud WOW.
"There he goes," they all say,
"He'll be back another day."
And sadly they all turn away,
Hoping I'll return again some day.
But I am here now.
I think I'll have a look around.
----------------------------------
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To urinate down one's leg is above all things French.
To wake, perspire, wonder and wander,
Fiddle along at great length,
Tell war stories and make them up at the same time you're telling them,
Make up histories,
Recall non-sequitors
With no reality at all,
That is above all things American.
When, in youth, a tongue slips around the corners of a mouth,
Or the red edifice of a scraped wrist,
Or the pale bandage of a cut finger…
It is salt,
And a fault.
To not remember where one came from,
Nor what he's doing,
Where he's going,
Just what is going on
Is above all things
Human.
(There is nothing to this skill but the hyperactivity of a brain gone bust.
This, this is poetry;
And that is lust.)
-------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
I spent seven days floating on flotsam through a tinkling river
And let my fingers dangle in the ebbing rush.
What warnings, wisdom and liturgy I came to deliver
In the vapid plush of the liquid hush
A madman's madness is his friendship
An eagle's eyes its core
And yellow is a fragrant tulip
Ground into the rocking shore
A week upon a creaking board
From a mountain lake down to the sea
Where patience is its own reward
When waiting down the eternal Me
From the banks, between the reeds
A fat old woman did look my way
And delivered from the shiver of her knobby knees,
I heard her voice distinctly say:
"Intransigent fool! Your foolish smoke
Reflected in the stringy stream…
The Devil's Breath on which you'll choke,
And never wake from this endless dream."
I spent seven days floating on flotsam through a tinkling river
And let my fingers dangle in the ebbing rush.
What warnings, wisdom and liturgy I came to deliver
In the vapid plush of the liquid hush…
------------------------------------------
---
1.
Lyrically lilting over a broken old branch
in the soft underbelly of a quiet forest --
The canopy shade is broken intermittently
Creating little pools of sunlight of my feet.
Long bands of dusty rays streaming through gaps
in the leaves, gaps in the trees,
and here, under this brown bridge
I'm rudely brooding,
Making a muss of all this nice stuff.
2.
Everything was better six months ago,
So much more simple,
The music was moving,
And we all got the afternoon off from work.
Our teeth all chattered in the cold.
We all got drunk and groped each other.
Now we're all six months older,
And nothing seems to fit the same,
and we have to work overtime,
And I hate my past happiness.
3.
Let me show you something.
You see this? It is a poem, and it was written
Under the influence of a strange teenage fantasy.
And like most strange teenage fantasies,
It ends with a
BANG!
4.
She was short and stupid and boring
And ugly and hairy and rude and
Unpleasant and ungrateful, but
We loved her anyway, because what
Else could we do?
5.
When I first came across Beauty,
I was asleep and she was dancing.
Her image took my hand, and
The two of us went for a walk
Across a brown bridge,
Where we met our home,
Ascended the stairs and found there was nothing there.
Our furniture had been piled on the steps
Behind us. Seeing this, Beauty giggled, left my hand
and leapt to the bottom and glided
To the kitchen in the diminishing light.
--------------------------------------------
------------------
A soft footprint
Filling with snow
And off we go
----------------
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An Unconscionable Conversation Between Western Buddhists In Jail
- Did you know in another life I was a Jewish golf club?
- Is that so?
-Yes. So very strange. Some human snapped my spine at Augusta, threw me in a lake where I drowned. The Jewish golf club community was all in a tizzy. That man turned out to have the same soul as the man who convinced everyone he was God's son, strangely enough.
- In another life I was the poison that killed Romeo. What a rush as I surged through his iambically star-crossed body and destroyed the lyric force that allowed his character to exist as a waking being at the end of the play.
- In another life I was but a pubic hair coiled in Helen of Troy's
guilty undergarments.
- I was the virus that claimed sweet Jim Henson.
- I was the furthermost tip of the iceberg that first pierced the doomed Titanic.
- I was a squirrel that gnawed its way through an electrical line and with a sweet relief I fizzled and frazzled and become a strange childhood memory in the mind of the man writing this poem.
- Was there pain?
- Relief and belief. Relief in death. Belief in God, my friend. There is no pain.
- An illusion?
- To put it Keenanly.
- Wonderful.
- And what else?
- I was the tumor that grew gray and flicked poor Bill Hicks to the grave. Morbid! Sadness! Morosity!– for I loved the man with his religious passion for the art of comedy and to kill him was but an everlasting agony during which I cried and cried because even tumors love the hilariousitized side of existence.
- I was the stone in Virginia Woolf's jacket as she dashed and drowned in the river Ouse. A carbon monoxide molecule inhaled deep in the profundity of sweet Sylvia's lungs. A light speed sunbeam for eight minutes before I crashed and splashed into melting Ohio snow. A daydream in the mind of God.
- Oh?
- Yes. And you?
- The first spark to ignite kindling when man made flint meet rock. The first organism to make the leap from sea to land. The fulcrum of the first lever. The hemp rope of the first pulley. I was a sound wave screaming out of Jimi Hendrix's amp as he warmed up long before the show began – I believe at that time you, my friend, were one of the snakes jutting from his fingers attacking the strings in his acidic mind. Oh, and in one of my favorite lives I had a peaceful tumbling
descent from the Enola Gay and the, I tell you, brilliant orgasm of leveling Hiroshima.
- The orgasm of death?
- The fright before the light sweet surrender.
- The light and the right endeavor.
- So shall we just ride this one out for now?
- I say we must – to abandon fate is to abandon the Becoming.
- Then here we stay.
- I say Hooray.
- Just one today – replayed over and over.
-----------------------------------------------
------
First:
Endearing sun, cold waves breaking
Earth, grinding it to watery dust;
Warm mouths retching wine into the breakers, and
Speakers blooming in the fog of this blue morning.
It takes:
Attention, affection, rejection --
Repetition, devotion, assimilation --
Acceptance, bitterness and then merciful high mortality.
And leaves:
A poor one, mouth wet with wine retch,
Overfeeding a drug-resistant sobriety,
And auguring into the rocks pounded with surf,
Trembling beneath the force of each successive wave
Of a hand, calling off the ambulance,
Pleading for something stronger. And more and more and
More.
Finally:
The inescapable redness of salty, worn skin,
Beaten down,
Cast out like
Some pathetic, harmless demon.
Then:
Lazy leaves in a hazy breeze, swaying
In a common trance, their backs hot
And their feet tickling the hard bark trees
In Clover Park in late Summer.
The sound of insects scuttling beneath the grass
And in the noble bushes.
The sound of early risers hacking wet phlegm;
The sound of God Almighty's reticence...
Sweeping through the ignoble beard of the poor man's poor brother.
All the way past the crammed families in shoeboxes
Past the grimy streets waxed black with our filth,
Past the broken bottle beaches
And the ever-surging surf,
Over the Deep Waters and
Dissipating finally
Somewhere in the Pacific Desert, where
Not even lost fish can find any sense
In the things that disappear there.
