One

Straightening as I stand

aligning chakras, folded hands

___________

This is the only actual poem I have written in a very long time. I chose the words from options. It has clipped language that tells a story. Language is actually being used.

Morning Time

A stout, robust orange-breasted robin hopped a lot along the ground. I passed him by as I moved, taking long strides in the morning. The grass was long and fell across itself. All the better for worms. A light rain had soaked the earth and the air smelled fresh. The leaves whispered on the trees, shaking off the dew with each breeze. The dark red maple tree was remarkably bright. 

A New Thing

 I am so glad to have found a new thing

to find a new thing is a puppet on a string

I am Pinocchio

rolling in the deep

To find a new thing is a gun on a wing

birds shooting bullets in the sky

Word War II planes

why did anyone have to die

I have found a new thing

a furry hat bling

a fur coat with a moat

and a cash register going

chingachingching

Pinball machine high wire act

grafting my skin back where it was burned

I will be OK.

A Bird to the Sky

The body compared to the heart, the mind, and the soul is like a bird compared to the sky. How do you even begin to weigh? The crossing black feathers of the crow flying over the field of poppies.

My

 I've realized my poems

  are just conversations

 with myself

  where I know all the answers. 

Mirror Radio

Take 2

What if instead of a baby in the reeds it was a radio

and as my hands fumbled for the dial the surface of the water caught in waves an unseen audio signal

and I communicated with the face of the deep

What if I was shallow

but longed to speak in the 

language which has a word

for the calm surface of a lake 

being mirror-like in the rain

________________

Take 1

Radio in the reeds floating towards her

hands fumbling for the surface

the exposed wires and the shiny metal

making peace with the calm surface of the water

there is a language which has a word

for the calm surface of a lake 

being mirror-like in the rain

No Woman is a Desert Island

Speaking in saltwater pirate speech

5 miles left to go before we crash curbside sparkling in Seaspray

tipping over in the waves and dancing with a dolphin

hit the coral reefs 

and spill Rum

Messages in bottles, hearts buried in the sand 

Men don't find women on desert islands

he said with his eye patch gleaming

under the Cuban sun

Mankind & Me & Tea Makes Three

Today is a great day to make hot water on the stove

I will make hot water on the stove

with the hot water I will make tea.

Today is a great day to have some infinite epiphany on the origin of mankind

I will have some infinite epiphany on the origin of mankind

with this epiphany I will have tea.

Today is a great day to look out the window at the trees.

I will look out the window at the trees

with this mindset I will finish the tea.

The Basket

     Some mornings I don't so much as wake

as rise 

like a snake from a basket

upon hearing the music

                out of the corner of my beady eyes

     today is going to be a good day

jazz is playing in the brothel

classical music in the symphony hall

all

   is as it should be

         men in hats

              are winking

                   at strange girls

                       with silk purses

                            lined in lime green lace

                                                    and tiny bells

                                                  for earrings

                                     the clarinet player

             makes the melody

old and ancient

wild and free

and I rise

from the

basket.

Icy Logic

The ice cube broke like glass

in my hand

and struck out a shattering sound

making the act of getting a glass

of water

seem

downright dangerous

What a flight of fancy

to have ice

it must have had 

a layer of water

and a layer

of 

air

and the water froze

on top of the air

but logic doesn't belong

here

Non-Sentimental Poetry

Poetry doesn't have to pretty

Pretty doesn't have to be pink

Pink doesn't have to be pale

Pale doesn't have to be slight

Slight doesn't have to be weak

Weak doesn't have to be lame

Lame doesn't have to be soft

Soft doesn't have to be squishy

Squishy doesn't have to be blobby

Blobby doesn't have to be mushy

Mushy doesn't have to be sentimental

Sentimental doesn't require a poem sometimes it just requires a look a gaze, one hand on the shoulder of the other, silence.

The Corner

This is a series of poems I wrote over a day or two or three (April 2023), and finally turned a "corner" in my mind. I didn't want to publish them but now I don't care as much, although later I'll likely read them and think 'oh yeah that's why I didn't want to publish them' and nowadays I guess we are responsible for our own censorship. The reference to anatomy on a statue is related to someone in Florida allegedly finding the statue of David, a canon of Western art, offensive due to the nudity. Without drapes, without leaves, here's the naked poetry. I think when we finally stop censoring ourselves we feel free. At least that is the "corner" I felt I turned.

Tea Leaves I

The tea was weaker than I meant to brew

The leaves were tattered and that is what is good for flavor

Nature is always on the loose

Paper was once a chunk of wood

On the wooden cross there sits the savior.

Could you, and me, and Jesus have some tea?

Whatever would we talk about?

The Philistines and rapture and the flood

Mary Magdalene and the color of mud

Could we just grab a gypsy off the street

And get our fortune read instead?

My palm is hungry for the opportunity

To know.

Plastic Panthers

His answer is a plastic panther on the wall, after the man and her

tattooed the whole movie on their palms.

Blue tea cup is almost teal in the bright  sun.

Windows up, misery levels are down.

Tea is being consumed, and Tea is from the East.

The West is never won, don’t even try.

Just stay by the Lake, drinking clean water and holding a pound of salt in your palm.

You didn’t understand it the first time and you are dangerously close 

to exposing the sand to the sea shells.

Bits of broken glass have been weathered to a sheen

Why can’t it be the same, for us?

Sheets and Shadows

A simple sheet lay on the bed, white and tight and clean. The mystery of how I will ever get to sleep, with all this pain in my head, is not for us to decide today. Let us bounce a quarter to prove a point that the sheet is taut and the bed is ready. Let us meditate a bit to prepare ourselves to wind down, to fall slow like kite does miss, slowly, a gust of wind, and just lay still until our blackness overtakes us. They say to know your shadow, but does our shadow long to know us?

Reasons

Manganese is a chemical in a weld, the chips of this can be consumed, the doom of razors and the balls of mercury we played with, I remember getting slammed to the ground, and I never stole money again. 

Summer

Planets spinning and it’s hot up in the attic.

Mastery

The mastery of words is mastery of the self

Mastery of our own mind

Mastery of the thoughts that make us human

Mastery of our hands and ideas

Choosing the right word and the right time

And letting the sunlight dance on the curtain

To find that unexpected moment

That is art

Chump Change

I had to work out every odd moment, each spin on the singing bowl

Reverberating in my mind, money didn’t matter a damn bit.

You could come at me with a million dollars

It’s chump change for what I got in my soul

Oh, your attitude is so useless, you don’t even

Mute the channel.

Failure

It’s not okay that my words are failing me

It’s not okay that my words are failing me

It’s not okay that my words are failing me

Lifetimes

A lifetime of grime South of the state line

My mind is finding a fifth of gin

Leads to rapture and a looney bin

They’ve got me there all day,

Just waiting for the lights to go out.

Quiet Disco Revisited

Quiet disco I recall the quietness of being me 

and the slow ride into stardom

kissing the tree

This isn’t helping, dude

you’re going to have to read

Shakespeare and then practice speech

Watch how the actors roll

each line off their tongue

Drink kombucha and dive headfirst into a tire

spinning on the highway

toward a noisy destination

I suppose I have spent so much time in quiet

Now is the time for the noise

It’s so distracting to need to change each letter

To have grammar check with I waaaant too mussspell things dfor effectte.

The Plane

Oh, do not revisit that plane

It’s flown in the sky

Yet there is something there

The stars behind the clouds.

My Legs in Vegas

Rock solid and hollow

Thought leader and shallow

Masked bandit on gameshow

Lowdown barber stepson

Razor candy suicide death watch

Yellow hearted son of a gun

Stepchild reading at a fifth grade level

Mastered by the moonlight sun

Pride freedom fame and gunshots

Plows horses felines and ducks

Games blisters sunburn and woodsheds

Pennies and pristine sense of luck.

Okay

Meningitis freezeframe dildo

Pressure wash groping 

Hunted by gremlins and dimestore grannies

Praised by the leaders and award show contestants

Pleasured by biopic arms making cuts

Soundless and binded by corsets and rust

Pillowtalk Sunday on April new showers

Crimes on the dripping paint

My grape jelly roll

Men who like candy

And women who feed them

Grumpy old queen

Pissed off dogs

Cranes titling up to the sun

Sunlight dripping down on the moon

Radiation nuclear twist fuck

Funk groan window to my god damned soul

No profanity please 

There are children sleeping

Rock my grape jelly roll

Liberals and Expectations

Thought you’d see me sleeping

Making mindless liberal touchpoints

Caressing the statue until it got hard

And welcoming Bernie Sanders to dinner

Me and him have already had a long talk

And I’ve raised his flag on my back porch

While feeding children with a ten foot fork

It’s no wonder I own a ball of yarn

All the better to wrap this up

Colorfully and softly

Just the way you would have wanted

Hollywood is the real criminal

But I don’t have time for that here.

Please pass the peas.

Pass the fleas.

Pass your worn out dog.

Loyalty to the cause has become

A fun way to make new laws

And now you’ve scared every conservative

Into going into a cave 

And they’re on the crusades again

pretending like it’s 1230 A.D.

Please show me David’s dick.

I want to see it.’

Michelangelo isn’t on call

He did his job

And he wanted to be a sculptor way more than he wanted to paint.

The Sistene Chapel was like his living hell.

Oh praise him, don’t get woke and tell.

Is it true that you

Actually like pissing people off?

Well then all you’re going to be

Is writing Howl-type poetry

That doesn’t even land well

We all need 

Someone in a buttoned up shirt

Telling us how to think.

My Voice

I am finding my voice. And not my cute little women in science voice with pink guitars and purple wrist bands. Nope, my actual voice caught in the tears of plastic and shipwrecked faggots, grimy with radio grease and painted with pricked fingers and chasing wabbits. Let me hear the damn thing sing, rip the dress as the 80-year-old aunt gets on the table at the wedding, and let me out of my cage, and then the cage within the cage, let it be like a fractal on a druggie 70s record cover, let it keep going and going and going and going and goingoinoininng.

Distant Carpenters

In dark hallways of sickness

slippery I climb the stairs

disjointed and disgruntled

fragmented and frayed

May flowers bring solace

peace and color

Pity brings a tiny light to the window

Violins from Madagascar

trials and turbulent scents

perfume from the 

distant carpenters

Sawdust and the making of 

the Stratavarious

from various strata

the violin takes 

its heavenly sound

Luthiers of buildings

I long to bend their ear

about how I live in a drum

my apartment is a square

the roof stretched

over it

The Crane

On the way to work, I often pass the homestead of the homeless man under Wacker Drive.

It's an oddly littered place of old blankets and sideways prescription bottles

garbage and dead bird feathers

and when I pass him he is always sitting, staring straight ahead.

Always sitting, always staring, staring straight ahead.

Today was different for when I came to the homestead of the man 

under Wacker Drive

there was a different man

sitting and staring.

He had different skin, different features, and he was a different man.

Yet he was sitting, staring straight ahead.

Before I could mull too long on this, I was taken

by a small, tough man coming toward me on the sidewalk

with tattoos up and down his stocky, hairy arms

a heavy looking t-shirt as white as the cigarette 

in his teeth

he was smoking and it was coming out of his face

like a smokestack

like his whole head, rather than just his mouth, was smoking

reminding me of a cartoon

on a Saturday

he was focused and nervous

possibly as crazy as the man I just saw sitting and staring

But then my attention was taken like luggage on a plane

toward a woman standing on the sidewalk

with a brown cigarillo between her lips

the cigarillo the same color as her skin

and her dark hair fell

as she held up a box of matches

and entire box of matches

to make a light

and last, but oh not least

a woman in a brown leather jacket and tight pants

throwing up her arms like it was a national tragedy

that a cab passed her by

and up, up high

there's a crane

dropping a pile of rope

down into a makeshift wooden basket

where a man in a hardhat seems disinterested

and a man in another color hardhat, a white hard hat

comes out, presumably to undo the rope

from the crane

Bruegel

The middle of each worry

hung on the coat hook

of New Amsterdam

fondling the pearls on the neck of the Saint

grinning admit the twists and turns

of burying bodies

the strange stench of War

is all I smell

after reading the book

on Bruegel

Sketching

The punk rock hairdo of the woman on my sketch

her graphite eyes peering at me

The thousands of faces I've drawn

on notebook pages and folders

with pencil, pen, and marker

each one a character

scratched, scrawled, and enlisted

into being

a moment in time.

To Hear the Sound of Thunder

/ I want nothing more than to hear the sound of thunder

to hear the sound of monks singing in a forest

while I lay down and listen

                  /                   /

feeling violets tickling my feet

as sunlight is scattered on my skull

to rise when I awake

/ / /

and follow the sound of the waterfall

rushing in its madness

then to fall safely down the rocks

///////////

and jump in and walk behind it

hearing the rocks quake

hearing the beautiful sounds

that only the earth can make

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////

////////////////////////////////////////////////////

/////////////////////////////////////////

what is water? what is stone?

what is strength?

In raw power it is all the same

I want nothing more than to hear the sound of thunder/