Everything Becomes Very Strange

Everything, as we age, becomes strange.
Violent compression is our birthright.
Earthbound, our first clue is sudden
Restriction.  No room to turn or twirl,
You will feel confined, trapped in place.
The clock is already ticking--your mother's
Heartbeats are numbered--you'll learn
In time, at her parents' funerals, perhaps.
Necessity, the mother of invention, said
Good things come to those who wait,

But those who hesitate are lost in space. 
Even now you're wandering inside yourself
Checking all the walls for cracks, a way
Out, but all you see there are dark
Mirrors--reflections of your uncertainty.
Eisoptrophobia.  Now, there's a fine word.
Save it for later, or you'll ruin your appetite.

Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.  You chase the wind
East and west, north and south, creating new
Rituals of restriction.  The candle's flame flickers;
Your time is running out.  Hurry.  Hurry.  Hurry.

Something wicked this way comes, and you're all
Thumbs, fumbling, bumbling, down on your knees,
Rummaging through a pile of crap, searching for
A ball you remember you once dropped there.
Never mind.  Leave it then.  You don't need it.
Get up.  Go wash your face and hands.  You know
Everyone is waiting for you, and supper's getting cold.

Nearly Departed

You come to mind
while I sit on the toilet.
I can't help but wonder
what you think about the nature
of such awkward exposure.
Your energy collects itself
into a huge smile, and I imagine
you laugh reminding me: 
If you don't shit, you die.

Gravity

This is an all poem.  This is an every poem.
This is your neighbor's sister's boyfriend's cousin poem.
This is a starfish crunching under your foot poem.
This is a hot poem, a snot poem, a toenail fungus rot poem.
This is a gimme what you got poem.
This poem is wearing Bill Knott's underwear.
This is a tree falling on a bear shitting in the woods poem.
This is a spit in your eye, tie you up, and hang you out to dry poem.
This poem is digging your grave.
You'd open your fly for this poem.  This is a trillion dollar deficit poem.
This poem is hungry. 
This poem wishes you were an Oscar Mayer wiener.
This poem has determined you are ineligible for parole.
This is a go ahead and scream 'til you're blue in the face poem. 
This poem can't hear you. 
This poem is a wolf at the door.
This poem is cracked in three places, and it wants your guns.
This poem is a Tuskegee experiment. 
This poem is your Home, Sweet Home,  your Kit Kat, your black hole.
This a fill-in-the-blank poem.
This poem has a designated free speech zone, but it's closed for repairs.
This poem is a flame-shooting dragon wearing a crown of seven charred elves. 
This is your O holy knight poem.
This poem killed Jesus.
This poem has scheduled you for a routine mammogram.
Stop resisting!  This poem is gargling napalm.
This poem is red, white, and blue and smoking in the boys room.
God bless America.  This poem is your mama.

Confessional

Here lies the disconnect.
Does looking have a price?

There's nothing inside
this confessional.

Habits persist, deep and wide.
We talk about ends,
preoccupied in routine,
clutching our family jewels.

There is no sobbing.
That time has passed.

Locked up, barren
in dead nostalgia,
surrounded by old graves,
what survives is familiar:

something dirty,
misplaced, inappropriate,
a stubborn dream,
a gift stillborn.

There is no new history,
no new trail to follow
forty days, forty nights,
forty years in the desert
where memories lie.

One bumps into me:
What do you need?

I waste a lot of time.

Seven, Nineteen and Forty-Two

I tried to fold something that doesn't exist.
I bended and twisted and came up with this
really big pain in my butt and my head
and a hole in my center I need to dye red.
I counted to three by twelves and by nines.
I scoured the pine trees looking for signs
that nobody left me, that nobody sent,
that nobody cared if I twisted and bent
into shapes that would suit a faceless time,
but all I found was this odd little rhyme


and Elvis.

I've Always Been Crazy

Muse's Journey

A melancholy thing,
this distance between poets--

one sculpted from fire and raven's caw,
one a scarecrow collage
of twisted string, stones, and straw--

there they stand,
a million miles, a million lives
between them,

like a chessboard's opposing kings
waiting for another great last battle.

Old Man

The Show Must Go On

Crone (a birthday poem)

She wakes to creaking
consonants, old and old,
but unwritten like the Tao.
Clustered clouds,
their clingling vowels
undropped, hang
like nooses over her head,
loyal to the end. The day
begins in meditation:
cream swirling into coffee--
short the clank clank clank,
spoon against the cup.
Curious orange tabby cats
conspire between her feet.
She knows a little,
remembers less, ignores
what doesn't matter
like crumbs of toast.

...to see

her broken majesty...

Those days we made suffering
from frosted flakes of corn, mercy
from milk, and cracked our tongues
on long goodbyes.
You can't spell revolution.
The first lie is public service--
body, mind, and spirit isn't enough.
Coffee and cupcake warriors
still wrap dead fish in stars
and stripes. Do you remember
the warmth of rhyme? Hymns lost
in the garden? Drop your mothers
into the earth. Blood on bare wood.
Roots like worms.
It seems like
such a long
way down.
But why
do they
hate
us?
It's their world now, not ours.
There's no reason to panic.

Appropriation

Prior prior poetics:
half devils,
a thousand swoons,
morning mushroom
concentration camp
conversations,
web plunder for lunch.
Oh, how we explore,
murder their fiction
and romantic notions!
I is my life. It's not abstract
where no one ever talks
ownership. But where is it?
Funny happens quickly.
This is what I'm doing.
Grab the need to be,
the center mindset,
the first place.
Be a point
for everyone to ignore.
The state of the world
is a schoolmarm emotion.
Refocus.

There is a World

Contentious
and untamed,
this is my world
above the surface.

Sometimes at night
I blink and glimpse
the possibility
of nothing below.

Interconnected
and unpredictable,
fantasy and truth
collide in blankness.

I can't dwell there.

Motivated by self interest
and the law of emotion,
I bounce back and become
a million hands.

You can only lose
your innocence once.

Ready?

It looks like there's another crazy year ahead.

Hide it! Hide it! Hide it!

I'm Making Some Time

(a found poem)


I'm making some time
from chalk dust
thick with late.
Is that a problem?
Familiar and unrestrained,
sometimes wilder, sometimes swelling twisted
from what I find fascinating, I'm cherry-picking you some style--
old-fashioned self-consciously asymmetrical distain--
distracting God, to put it mildly feminine.
Art, the war-like male,
treacherous and subject to error, is still with us,
ambiguous, loud, nagging a straight line, eating
the fruit invented between signs. Feasts please
me.
But the sentimental wastes time, little and large with vowel.
Warning: Folly uses vocabulary no less loaded, its truth free,
harder and saner than loud complaint. Go now humble,
ungoverned, indifferent,
swirling around the final movement
between tragedies spectacular, self-absorbed, and the problem
we no longer think of repeating.

Goodbye, Paul

I'm not sure what to say,
nor whom to say it to.
It would be better if such news
were the work of a cruel prankster.
I'd rather be angry than mourn.

Yesterday, I was stunned and saddened by the news of the death of Paul Squires of Gingatao. He will be missed by many around the blogsphere, and I will miss finding his comments here.

Paul Squires was a light. The world is darker without him.

In the Middle of the Bible Belt

The clocks were set below the surface.
There is no faith. There is no trust.
Believe nothing, child of God.
Give them stillness.

I find myself listening
when no one is watching,
and I hear the world
praise the devil.
Grave as bourbon clouds,
the ghost of neglect
swirls around us,
desolate as straw.

These crazy drunk days,
our brains explode.
Dangerous stars gaze up,
blinking assassins unmasked.

No Other Truth. No Other Love.

Springing from niches,
the dead pile up
in the neighborhood
like mountains of old tomes--
brutal philosophies,
unpermitted poetry,
odd memoirs.
They guard the horizon.

There is a price to pay
for our faith and our doubt.

I hear them singing. Pulses
of light reveal a corpse in the mud--
a migrating bird--for a moment,
its every move a possibility of escape.
We live on the same earth.
White passages closing the circle,
sections burn themselves
into a steady, winking beat.

It is not too soon
for the melancholy season.

Pleasure powerful, twelve lean dead
towards a beautiful decay
and pity those who can't be miserable.
Saltwater experiments, deep all over,
buy golden anchors and uncommon calm.
Frayed ropes lead from effect
back to cause--better the suffering,
holy upon holy, mind upon mind.

The Great Not

He's the great not.
His parents more than any
failed to notice who came out.
It was too new.

I am before I, he says,
writing the to be true.
It is quite today.
A very everything, he adds,
and frankly sentimental with deep.
He laughs, failing to convince them.

No, it isn't what it isn't.
I wouldn't be the judge.
New, he is today.
I'm a mysteriously immune connection.
What should I do but your desire?