A Hard Hope

Bestride your shoulders

he gives a ' come hither' look,

seductive but pacific and mild.

 

-
A New Morning

Still missing and mourning
the shrouded anonymity of night
you witness a new morning with trepidation, 
an old-new colt,

blinking you shrink from the light.
Simple reality pounds you,
but jangled you ask is it day?  Is it night?

Endless dawns and dusks confuse,
but reality coalesces, refuses to be ignored.
Blinded, you submit to the light,
but long for the shroud
of the perpetual night.

Adrift

 

Mired deep in an unknowable thicket

you tire and stumble.

A bumble bee troubles you,

but her sweet melody engages you.

Soul drunk, you succumb.

Deep in a thicket lost, you sweat in dread.

Memories fill you so thick you brush them away.

And you let yourself drop deep,

you hug the earth and say goodbye. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another Day

If I forego liquor, I sustenance 

Will I weaken and starve like the rust in us.

or will I bloom like a secret perfume

or will I die on the vine

like flowers not pruned.

All those questions unanswered

my soul longs to tell 

of a spirit not healthy creativity not quelled

such are the hopes for another day

“One day at a time”, they shout in my ear.. but try as they may 

anxiety and fear 

may fuel me to drink, a shot and a beer .

 

 

 

 

 

 

Antennae

 

Muse and booze seem to jive
when we can't get there without that.
We fling ourselves through the looking glass,
taste the mad-hatters hat.
But we can and will and we must
for have found debris, felt only dust.
We trusted the trust-less
our bones became rust. 

 

 

Asea

 

I am lost   so tossed    airless    I pray for beach
for sweet release
in waters deep
I sleep in the shallows  
weep at the apex 
breathe at the nadir 
grieve each syllable ~ poem and word  

a solemn prayer to yourself
we don't feel the unease 
the floor of the world does not cease  
it moves so seamless,
grooveless, it catches. 

 

 

 

Attorney General Mitchell

 

In a foggy drifting dancing

between consciousness

sub and un your feet are moving

but there's no place to run 

is it morning or not . . 

is it dark or light?

Am I

Barstools and reflecting pools

When I lose my soul and find it lost once again,
I remind myself that I've lost nothing.

It was never mine to lose. I borrowed it,
like an over-due library book.
If I philosophize glass in hand uncertainly,
balance my fat ass upon a wobbly barstool or, askance,
examine my poor lined face
in a reflecting pool
or pane of glass,
I remind myself that what I see is the same skin a snake
sheds, ancient, and unchangeable
as the ebb and flow of life itself.

It's never been me- it has always been we.
I'm a slender blade of grass.. infinite expanse!
It has never been me, it has always been we.
I will die in the tide-pool that hatched me, and live again.

Bestride  (Final Visitor)



I have trod the road less travelled.
                            
Spoiled, you've visited drunk hotels

gone mad and unravelled
                                        
Tumescent and love-dewy

in the moon-gloaming you roll upon my elbow with beauty,
                                      
and you smile, radiant.

Blood-oath


Loss, begins as a lone tide pool.
wearing crazy quilts of guilty sad memory,
It bubbles, reaches the surface,
forms myriad rivulets of fear and doubt.

Ancient accountants enumerate and ledger.
Weights are balanced and measured
they become walls and bridges,
stored in the burned-out library at Alexandria.

A blood sacrifice is required.     
Placed upon Mayan pedestals,
oaths are exchanged, fires lit.
Burning white-hot the mass rises skyward
to meet the wan sun,
vaporizes, form yesterday's tears.
It is the rainy season.

 

      Brave take a Journey

 

Love and life should be seen through a window, not a mirror.
You only find your semblance and resemblance from a glimpse,
peeking the future not the past,
love but outward not inward.
It is better to give  ~ receive.

Better yet, to sacrifice, knead flour and illogically make
a Keirkegaardian leap, a crazy loony jump into an unknown abyss.
The bravest take this journey
There is no safety net.
The cowards refuse and become monuments.
We should be as authentic as rock and sturdy as the ancient
Aegean Way and in our way, . . . pray. pray. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Collecting Petals

Reminiscence, vague memories,
sweet but distant and still, swell up.
Ancient mistakes and longings,
so hard hard to forgive- one and all- there is a death toll!
Lonely so lonely only the lonely whisper it. 

Look away from the mirror! Lock upon your heart.
Let your sails catch the wind. Feel the ancient waters beneath your feet,
speak to ghosts time-immemorial, bathe your body and mind in the cool and sublime
drop sins and regrets like tulip petals. One by one by one one by
one, one by one by one ~  until it's done. 

-------------
Dream

The dream was in black and white, like the newsreels.

A sonorous placid voice was eclipsed by the now familiar shots of the gas chambers and incinerators of the Hitler's Third Reich.

Wertmuller's fantasy Nuremberg danced uneasily with the postwar Nuremberg of the famous trials, as the sullen Nazis mouthed 'not guilty' as unspeakable horrors were trotted out. The defendants sat scowling in the dock.

Usually, you had the faces of fat Goering and sweaty Himmler, but now, to Denis in his nightmare, the faces had changed. The new Nazis were now Trump and Meadows and Miller and Pompeo, sweaty as the earlier models.

Denis nearly tripped over his bedclothes as he sprinted to the sink, pouring water onto the eyes to keep then from seeing.

After he made coffee, strong and true, so black in the morning sunlight.

He drank the coffee and exhaled the smoke and knew what must be done.

-------------

Faked the Funk


In the darkest day in the brightest light,

incandescent light celestial finds you in a lens framed.

It is a mirror and a window, both still life and no life.

You blindfold the truth executing it by firing squad.
      
Facades and blindfolds defunct, you have faked the funk.
        
You faked, now wake!   Feel the dark light.

Fear II


Fear is always sentient,   
and habitually amoral,
it exists merely to haunt
the riptides of the psyche
    
It Rogers you're sphincter     
and cauterizes your colon
gut kicks your gut works
Then it slashes your voice box     
Rendering you silent

As your throat red gurgles,
You find your mind changed
Freeze dried, petrified   fossilized
you are stalked like an African gazelle. 
or Quiltey's guilty Humbert on his way to hell

 

 

The graying Lothario

 

The graying Lothario has an ambitious scenario.
A troubadour blowing his horn,
viagra-dosed, John Barleycorn, 
he whispers sweet nothings to his sod sodden self.
A faux-Casanova he thinks himself a supernova,
a stellar Hugh Hefner view of male.
He fantasizes endless tail.
Feeling newly-born horny-impotent,
Like Scarface he fishes in chlorine pools, and dies insane.
Like a syphilitic chicken, he dies in a hard rain.

Lake of Spirits



On the third anniversary he faltered.
He stuck his toes into the Lake of Spirits
and found the waters familiar-soothing.
The water smells bad-good like an
orchard-morgue filled with decay and birth.

Baptismally afire, perspiring you submerge into the lagoon.
Low but so high, deep and shallow, hollow.
He stirs and swallows so but so full he cramps, hard. 
 
Drowning he finds gills ~ he wills it.
Up up up ahead he can see he celestial light.
Like a dying drowning whale he surfaces,
grateful. Dimly recalling breath, he breathes.

lichens

 

In the uncertainty in the world
in the lack of surety
we whirl

We lock upon dumb blind doubt,
although unsteady and not ready,
we whisper the truth.
We advance slowly, hide and burrow ourselves
between lichens and sand.
Grandly we shiver and shake
until true truth quakes and awake,
we awaken. 

  

 

Like sand

 

Somewhere in that netherland
between sleep and wakeful
lies the answer.
But wisdom like sand falls from upturned hand.
The firmer you hold it, the more you lose.
Luckily the big lake coalesces the heat.
We want answers desperately, and now. 

 

     Meet at the River

 

Our losses accrue with each passing year
the poetic ledger measures smile and tears.
Each death diminishes and finishes us.
Before we are dust, we rust upon a dry vine.
We march to distant drums we inhabit rhyme.
The music we live,
the dance we set our bodies to,
it’s sad and muted.
We must meet at the river,
wash and hope, vainly,
for deliverance. 

Missing them . . .


I miss the dead souls
whose hearts encircled me so
tightly but freely,with love.
Whispering like a prayer
I conjure them; I want them to wake.
          
I have lost you forever I fear, my dears,
I'll never again hear your loving voice,
once so soothing.
Empty of these souls,
deprived of eternal comfort,
I gauze my heart with false buffers,
I suffer silently and await the last supper.

Möbius Strip

In the plastic vinyl dull lining of your narrowing mind
you feel protection.
You bounce about carelessly,
like an unbelted child in a race car.
You crave safety, but this is a death ride.
The dull but persistent jolts concuss.
You reach a sacred dreaded unconsciousness.
Cryogenically tired, humbled and vanquished,
you retire.

A Möbius strip tragically endless,
someone hands you scissors.
You clip the goddamned thing,
and remember how to breathe.
You lose control, uncontrollably roll
the dull, persistent blows percuss.
Then, sacred unconsciousness.

But no dreams inspire,
no light permeates the frozen shell.
You're an endless mobius strip
in a joke version of hell.
Then, in the darkest corner of the dank cellar of wherever,
someone hands you scissors,
and you clip the damned thing.

Miraculously, you remember breathing.

Muffled Terror

The fog rolls in on a whisper. Listen! 

You can hear distant lost rudderless vessels desperately seeking harbor, light.

And the whispered screams the drowning sailors,

muffled beneath the great shroud of sea.

Like those ghosts we can circle endlessly.

I've trod the road less travelled and become unravelled.

You survive like a bat in cheap hotels, and don't give a shit.

I've run out of poetic jizz it went whizz and fizzled out.

The tiny swimmers were perfect, but swam underneath and backwards.

I will dog-paddle, and crawl. 

 

 

My Crucible

 

Eons ago, redolent of dreams and creamy engulfing sex,
when the road to happy seemed solid as Rome's Appian way,
with whispered sunrise promises in my pubescent eyes.
when my young muscular thighs were taut as violin strings,
I rolled a heavy heavy rock upon my confident burgeoning chest,
I sought rest. 

The cure to stop the disease became the disease thwarting the cure.
I, Alice, looking through glass, sat solemn still liquored. 

I pray to stop roll Sisyphus' rock off my now aged shoulders
and giddy with hope, at long last, rest. 

I became Alice through the looking-glass, liquored.
Now aged, I pray my sunken arms can put the genie in the bottle,
and throttle it back. 

 

 

No Harvest

Love deprived, we strive for less.
Lust, a stupid animal living inside us,
knows only need.
The resulting seed needs growth,
but dies upon the prickly vine.
No harvest results from this desolate soil,
which nourishes only heartbreak.
When love is lost
subsequent blind lust costs.

Battling the necessities of life
lacking the bastions of domestic strife
we recede

The glow heightens and intensifies.
Blind, we wander in the ethereal too-bright reality,
smacked, left suspended upon
Queequeg’s sarcophagus, floating but drowned,
a survivor found but, like the narrations of our lives,
ever moving a sea.
We drown or become dolphins.
In the midst of the still din of the night
betwixt the amber glow preceding half- light
we breathe

One


Homo Erectus Sexus Plexus we immortals hope,
bolstered by viagra, porn and dope 
joining the parade, engaging in the
charade.illusions and illusions
and dreams hallucinate
but do not vindicate
or salve the wounded soul.
We are instead lifted, not by our false hopes,
but by the savage winds bound to destroy us.

When those pieces,like soul
refugees, ask to find harbor-
who's home?

One Way Ticket

 

At rest or dreaming?

Is my hairline receding?

Why are my hands pierced and bleeding?

Smoke 'em if ya got 'em.

Ya punched a one- way ticket on the Chicken Bone 

Pristine Vessels

In the vision ~  in the dreams
that fill my dark days and bright nights
I met you eons past.  
We were spanking new vessels
no barnacles on the hulls
no psychic baggage to sandblast away

In the dream we are pristine vessels,
unadorned by the callouses of the heart.
In the graying memory of mourning my vision,
eyes filled with tears and years
we are young horses, gamboling
a stallion and mare caring for one another
with youthful abandon,
loving each galloping loping free endless miles,
the horizon an infinity
no past no future ~  just now.

As I rust gray-hull,
and lovingly recall
to trust the glimmering dreams
and hope again for love and love again.
For love, two young gallopers
covering endless miles,
stop only to nourish each other,
and lovingly raise foals.

 

 

                Saving Face

 

Who can cup the sacred and noble in their hands,
and drink from the font of wisdom and truth?
How do we embrace the shaman in the mirror,
and beg for a truce?
You must go somewhere strange, foreboding and barren.
Let your soul drown in silt and sand.
We hear a bell toll, and we know someone's dead. 

I'd like walk through a hall of mirrors blindfolded
and visit a brothel, castrated.
I want to feel the wind
and be whipped on the mast again.
upturned and drowned.
Save us all, every face. 

Settling

The examiner knocks upon your door, and defines fear
not the noisy cinematic faux build-up,
but instead a growing, knowing chill,
a cancerous-damp harbinger

A slender thread we- all of us- tread.
A swift fall into darkness threatens us all.
The time of reconciliation is now.

Let us waste not a moment,
let none of us die
without expressing our love
for one another.

Snap

I find myself in crowded elevator in a big city filled 
with tie-wearing, double-breasted ambitious smoothies
and perfumed beauties
floozies and cuties posing forbidden dazzling pleasures
all sweating their sex
smoking '50's style

Snap!

I'm in an airless commuter train in the shrouded lounge
in the smoking section tumescent heavy sweating alcohol


Snap!

alone,
in a vacant tenement brimming with people
I wanted to be but could not keep
adjacent to a room of the perverted defiling
in vile acts and yet I feel myself, full-erect

Snap!

in a tomb in a box in a final room of perverted allure
the taste too rich for the likes of me self, thank you

Snap!

in a newly dug grave full awake
flashlight dimming receding unto death still manicuring my nails on
impenetrable velvet/(wood!) interior ~ hands bleeding frantic sweating

SNAP

The Library

He wandered around this harbor town when he could

finding peace in his anonymity

running from the drunken places and acquaintances

trouble and homelessness



But somehow today he felt free

He sauntered over to the local library

and discovered “The Granger’s Index to Poetry”

He leafed through, holding the sacred names of many poets

Somewhat grandiose he imagined how tidily his name would fit

between Jack Brannon’s, “Evolution on 38th Street”,

and Beth Brandt (b. 1941), who wrote

“Ride the Turtle Back” and “Stillborn Night”

-------------

There will not be water!

We dumb Earthlings are thirsty and thirstier we shall be.
With monstrous straws, we sucked it all clean.

To Run with the Bulls

Turning and turning

in the widening gyre

the falcon cannot hear the falconer,

things fall apart, the center cannot hold.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood- dimmed thee is loosed,

and everywhere the ceremony

of innocence is drowned. 

 

Unfulfilled Symphony

In a foggy dream under the moon-mournful ~ she’s full,
you come to me.  A beautiful flower, you open up under her canopy.
A nervous penitent on bended knees. I place you upon a pedestal,
and worship at the altar. You permit me
admission to secret places.
I touch each soft petal and drink from the sweet fountain.

Dancing the most ancient dance, with joy we cry out in unison.
A new pilgrim, speaking the songs of the ancients,
I solemnly vow to visit no other shrines. ' Goodbye, goodbye to all that.

I will not seed my crop on acres of detritus soil. No!
If I get behind a brilliant harvest, lush, complex,
no longer will I sharecrop the land of the evil and venal.

My harvest will bring life and nourishment.
Harsh winds might render a hard hope.

Valley of Tears

 

My heart is a valley of tears.
The tears flow forever
the deluge never stops ~ flow forever
the only reason is the rainy season
the only time of day is the deadest blackest night.
My valley, a gully, an abyss. . .
holds and encloses the voluminous tear pool.
Winter comes.
The tears freeze, becoming pain-glaciers.
Like a frozen ancient glacial lake,
my cavity, my heart  ~ fills with ice
I am finally wholly frozen,
and thereby protected
from the pangs of the heart. 

 

 

Visit from a Talisman

One foggy morning as I dozed
vacantly from last night's empty revels,
an object shining plummeted from the sky
into my open hand.
She sparkled stellar, smiled upon me
like an innocent child
or severed long-lost lover.
She winked at me, seductively.

Instantly, the weight lifted off
my sunken stooped shoulders.
I felt brand new.
My feet lost the bounds of gravity,
and like feathers in a warn cross-wind, soared.
My eyes lost their red embroiled turmoil.
Thank you for your sweet visitation.
I pray no bill will accrue, I pray this gift is free.

Walker's Concession Speech


The sublime candidate samples whore-
Dewars and waits patiently like Penelope.
Redemption comes ~ the red carpet rolls out for another.
Cast asunder, he shouts hurray for something
and another as another blue-haired, blonde-eyed -
would somebody jumps from the Hollywood sign.

Water's Head


One more cursed blessed trip
to reality's woodshed.
Chastened, you stock and take inventory.

At Waters Head,
Ancient accountants enumerate and ledger.
Weights are balanced and measured.
Records are stored
in the burned-out library at Alexandria.
A blood sacrifice is required.
Placed upon Mayan pedestals,
oaths are exchanged, fires lit.
Burning white-hot the mass rises
skyward
to meet the wan sun.