Me, who sifted through the symbols,
gold miner on a creekside, in love
with the facts, bread crumbs
down the path to the future I chose
from the constant scan of what
means what. Yes, paleo hunter
looking for twig breaks to see
which way the wild boar went...
food for two days, gratitude, pride,
and maybe a moment's rest...
belt buckles, shoes, numbers
on the boarding pass, key fobs,
phones, silver content of a fork,
thinness of the wine glass,
volume of fake wood inside a car,
type on everything from clothes
to billboards, headlines about the same
old shit...and I whisper to friends
and family, I'm better than the rest!
Processor! We'll be going to war again
with the best bombs, bullets, toxins
money can buy, as we use up all
the water and soil until the die-off
comes, when we're crushed by clues
on who's sorry, who's next, and why
there are no extraterrestrials.
The Way Old People Think If They Could Talk
1)
Born pregnant, we all carry
the secret, slippery thing, held
in a balloon, stuffed somewhere
behnd the ribs, inside the stomach,
within the entrails, maybe travelling
around as we walk into the bar
to a new place as we stagger out.
Yet we know nothing of its birth,
shocked one day to ache of gone,
with no evidence in the world
the missing child was ever born,
had ever lived, had unfurled
in action and color in example
for this still world that still exists.
2)
Look, he never was
the man behind that name,
and now his keys to identity lie
splat flat on the breakfast bar,
exhausted landlord, hunched
over coffee, jail reluctant
to start another cage day.
That name was an address,
a building, its architecture past,
with tenants in the hundreds,
and management tired
of all the yelling, loud parties,
sad stories when the rent's due,
evictions, and those gone missing.
Once more, a knocking at the door,
and he mumbles loud as a troll
from beneath a wooden bridge
as schoolchildren dance on over,
"Ahhh, shurrruppp." Daydreams
in the colors of dried blood and smoke
of the moment he gives his keys up.
3)
People live with a spirit hat,
only once removed:
in line to heaven’s gate,
so the dead can discover
the single thing they collected
all their lives, every day, stuffed
into the cap, fedodra, beanie, beret,
or big and bouncy thing with wings and lace.
The dead are puzzled at what they'd done.
One person dofts a hatful of snowflakes.
Another a hatful of post-it notes.
Pocket knives, flower petals, rocks
shaped like hearts, tears of friends,
beer bottle caps, old pencils, good pens,
ATM receipts, funeral cards, shiny pennies....
Each night the angels talk as they unwind;
again one asks, “What was the point of that?”
The old people then just sit and talk about their kids.
“They suffer so from language,” angels all agree.
4)
And the next thing that happened
arrived in a slurry of raspberries
and gravel in the mouth of a salesman
type sitting next to me on a plane
bound for Orlando, my new hell,
a guy in a suit you buy 3 at a time,
drunk upon boarding, ready to talk,
and I hate revelation. God shock:
"That song, Vous Deux Love, I
sang it, I wrote it, I designed it."
!One of my favorite songs of all time!
It was Mark LeFevre, of Bango!
I hated him for being old,
the puffy, sagging skin, and hair
hanging like dead ferns
off a grey, pink, yellow cliffside.
"It's more beautiful than me,
man, it still makes women fall;
it still makes people wonder about
whatever they can't figure out, man."
And I wished he'd shut up, a dead end
for sure, an old street out of my hometown
all barricaded up. Like it never was.
"That's just the way it is, man.
I shrivel, and will die one day, but
the song sails out forever, if
it's done right, to unknowable code.
We die. The nothingness of song
lives, man. Everything is about
the nothing, the nothing beyond us,
the nothing that lives forever
until God is finally born, man."
When he said we're all bags
of swamp water, I ordered drinks
so he'd fall asleep and I could finish
my PowerPoint presentation.
"...we create the afterlife..."
Born pregnant, we all carry
the secret, slippery thing, held
in a balloon, stuffed somewhere
behnd the ribs, inside the stomach,
within the entrails, maybe travelling
around as we walk into the bar
to a new place as we stagger out.
Yet we know nothing of its birth,
shocked one day to ache of gone,
with no evidence in the world
the missing child was ever born,
had ever lived, had unfurled
in action and color in example
for this still world that still exists.
2)
Look, he never was
the man behind that name,
and now his keys to identity lie
splat flat on the breakfast bar,
exhausted landlord, hunched
over coffee, jail reluctant
to start another cage day.
That name was an address,
a building, its architecture past,
with tenants in the hundreds,
and management tired
of all the yelling, loud parties,
sad stories when the rent's due,
evictions, and those gone missing.
Once more, a knocking at the door,
and he mumbles loud as a troll
from beneath a wooden bridge
as schoolchildren dance on over,
"Ahhh, shurrruppp." Daydreams
in the colors of dried blood and smoke
of the moment he gives his keys up.
3)
People live with a spirit hat,
only once removed:
in line to heaven’s gate,
so the dead can discover
the single thing they collected
all their lives, every day, stuffed
into the cap, fedodra, beanie, beret,
or big and bouncy thing with wings and lace.
The dead are puzzled at what they'd done.
One person dofts a hatful of snowflakes.
Another a hatful of post-it notes.
Pocket knives, flower petals, rocks
shaped like hearts, tears of friends,
beer bottle caps, old pencils, good pens,
ATM receipts, funeral cards, shiny pennies....
Each night the angels talk as they unwind;
again one asks, “What was the point of that?”
The old people then just sit and talk about their kids.
“They suffer so from language,” angels all agree.
4)
And the next thing that happened
arrived in a slurry of raspberries
and gravel in the mouth of a salesman
type sitting next to me on a plane
bound for Orlando, my new hell,
a guy in a suit you buy 3 at a time,
drunk upon boarding, ready to talk,
and I hate revelation. God shock:
"That song, Vous Deux Love, I
sang it, I wrote it, I designed it."
!One of my favorite songs of all time!
It was Mark LeFevre, of Bango!
I hated him for being old,
the puffy, sagging skin, and hair
hanging like dead ferns
off a grey, pink, yellow cliffside.
"It's more beautiful than me,
man, it still makes women fall;
it still makes people wonder about
whatever they can't figure out, man."
And I wished he'd shut up, a dead end
for sure, an old street out of my hometown
all barricaded up. Like it never was.
"That's just the way it is, man.
I shrivel, and will die one day, but
the song sails out forever, if
it's done right, to unknowable code.
We die. The nothingness of song
lives, man. Everything is about
the nothing, the nothing beyond us,
the nothing that lives forever
until God is finally born, man."
When he said we're all bags
of swamp water, I ordered drinks
so he'd fall asleep and I could finish
my PowerPoint presentation.
"...we create the afterlife..."
Dream Of Mass
Night breeze slithers round your neck,
your waist, a snake, python that ropes
you into its grip, until what you are is the place
you wave goodbye to as you get into the car,
as if you were dressed in old front porch,
gravel driveway and aluminum siding.
The only map is something someone said
once
about a hilltop
in a distant city,
neighborhood that began with what can
percolate and bubble up through manholes,
the old ways, the demands of earth for us
to go on and connect it somehow to sky.
We cannot be anything else but hope
that escape colludes with will
to make something, finally,
akin to brick and mortar, and not song
or laughter or story, cursed as we are
by a sprinkle of time. And so worship mass.
We'll drive once more to that place
looking for something that can be put
in a pocket, and kept in a drawer,
long after we're gone, buzzing,
hissing, sparking, smoking.
And we'll yell from the other side
what to do with it, but only
small children will hear, and
they, too, are told not to go near it.
your waist, a snake, python that ropes
you into its grip, until what you are is the place
you wave goodbye to as you get into the car,
as if you were dressed in old front porch,
gravel driveway and aluminum siding.
The only map is something someone said
once
about a hilltop
in a distant city,
neighborhood that began with what can
percolate and bubble up through manholes,
the old ways, the demands of earth for us
to go on and connect it somehow to sky.
We cannot be anything else but hope
that escape colludes with will
to make something, finally,
akin to brick and mortar, and not song
or laughter or story, cursed as we are
by a sprinkle of time. And so worship mass.
We'll drive once more to that place
looking for something that can be put
in a pocket, and kept in a drawer,
long after we're gone, buzzing,
hissing, sparking, smoking.
And we'll yell from the other side
what to do with it, but only
small children will hear, and
they, too, are told not to go near it.
Hamlet Days
Inaction piles up, freeway crashes in a death fog.
Voting is a long mangled chain to pull a trigger and kill some kid.
A river of dead bodies, and the neighbors decide
they, too, want to just jump in and float...
live life face down in the diseased water,
breeze on the back their only sense of travel.
Merchants set their hometown ablaze for the money in charcoal.
So much fear that every general gets his own parade.
Hunters and gatherers lock themselves into place. Permanent.
And teach the children food first, then joy, maybe,
until they’re dropped in the box truly marked Forever.
Or so, my friend more or less says. He’s right.
It’s all true. Everything we know is true.
No words exist to argue this.
And, yet, there is a poem.
For no reason at all.
Nothing is the stuff
of our only maybe future.
That’s what I try to say.
Tell me I’m wrong. You're right.
Voting is a long mangled chain to pull a trigger and kill some kid.
A river of dead bodies, and the neighbors decide
they, too, want to just jump in and float...
live life face down in the diseased water,
breeze on the back their only sense of travel.
Merchants set their hometown ablaze for the money in charcoal.
So much fear that every general gets his own parade.
Hunters and gatherers lock themselves into place. Permanent.
And teach the children food first, then joy, maybe,
until they’re dropped in the box truly marked Forever.
Or so, my friend more or less says. He’s right.
It’s all true. Everything we know is true.
No words exist to argue this.
And, yet, there is a poem.
For no reason at all.
Nothing is the stuff
of our only maybe future.
That’s what I try to say.
Tell me I’m wrong. You're right.
!
Ah, these words come far too cheap at times.
Sky and sea, cloud and star, wolf and bird,
and the only way to talk is not of our time.
Er, that is, to talk of only life that defeats
the notion of our death, elevate to myth,
writing poems that were heavenly writ.
The treachery of each dawn, its night.
A math starts anew each day, ends.
Poor Pan gone coughing up old gin
vapors, cigarette smoke, memory.
Cleopatra returns, horrified at all
we’ve done. Yeats merely says,
“The lines appear shorter.”
Our ancestors live, talk,
as we murmur about.
Death is the dodge.
Forever, is
a moment
we know
when it
takes.
!
Sky and sea, cloud and star, wolf and bird,
and the only way to talk is not of our time.
Er, that is, to talk of only life that defeats
the notion of our death, elevate to myth,
writing poems that were heavenly writ.
The treachery of each dawn, its night.
A math starts anew each day, ends.
Poor Pan gone coughing up old gin
vapors, cigarette smoke, memory.
Cleopatra returns, horrified at all
we’ve done. Yeats merely says,
“The lines appear shorter.”
Our ancestors live, talk,
as we murmur about.
Death is the dodge.
Forever, is
a moment
we know
when it
takes.
!
Corsair
With my hips cocked and slanted,
my belt tilted (a black restaurant tray
in the hands of a waitress
shocked as her ex enters the joint,
better looking than she remembers,
with a bimbo neath a good haircut,
the hamburgers, fries and Cokes
sliding off to the plaid carpet below),
I look around for the camera lit red
in this world, and I recall once more
the crystal ball we live in, and see
the seer, the smile and the sneer,
all fingers splayed wide in half surprise
that I would scope the celestial,
find my soul, reveal it to light show,
and shout, “I do whatever I want!”
Then strike the moment into print
for you in distance, and your sails,
of which you’re mostly hopeful,
until the wind off this strange storm
moves you, and you realize there is no
weather without will. Sail, reader!
I will never be me, but I'll die well
if I help set the corsairs free
from our meanest, safest harbor.
Next, we'll turn corsairs to comets,
so the watcher despairs of control
to wonder whose stars these truly are.
my belt tilted (a black restaurant tray
in the hands of a waitress
shocked as her ex enters the joint,
better looking than she remembers,
with a bimbo neath a good haircut,
the hamburgers, fries and Cokes
sliding off to the plaid carpet below),
I look around for the camera lit red
in this world, and I recall once more
the crystal ball we live in, and see
the seer, the smile and the sneer,
all fingers splayed wide in half surprise
that I would scope the celestial,
find my soul, reveal it to light show,
and shout, “I do whatever I want!”
Then strike the moment into print
for you in distance, and your sails,
of which you’re mostly hopeful,
until the wind off this strange storm
moves you, and you realize there is no
weather without will. Sail, reader!
I will never be me, but I'll die well
if I help set the corsairs free
from our meanest, safest harbor.
Next, we'll turn corsairs to comets,
so the watcher despairs of control
to wonder whose stars these truly are.
How To Cut A Light In A Sentient Universe
What if the dawn never happens until your eyes open?
And everyone disappears when you fall asleep?
What would God say if He ever found out
you thought this way? How many priests
would it take to turn such sinful thoughts around?
Say you’re at the drag strip, on the starting line,
and the other car is faster according to history
but you think you found something new,
either added horsepower alone or traction
like no one’s ever seen before. You fear
you can’t cut the light, trained to lose
to everything that’s already happened,
even if it’s mostly dream and propaganda.
Friends tremble right in public. They can’t
do it either, and can’t hardly hope
someone they know is going to try.
You lived right. All has been intended.
The guy in the other lane is only there
because you opened your eyes today
to meet him on the quarter mile.
Doubt is a flock of black birds.
You summon a naked sky.
Just don’t let God know
we know (eating apples still)
death does not exist,
despite all the stories.
And I'll create a new universe
at the micro-first flash of green.
And everyone disappears when you fall asleep?
What would God say if He ever found out
you thought this way? How many priests
would it take to turn such sinful thoughts around?
Say you’re at the drag strip, on the starting line,
and the other car is faster according to history
but you think you found something new,
either added horsepower alone or traction
like no one’s ever seen before. You fear
you can’t cut the light, trained to lose
to everything that’s already happened,
even if it’s mostly dream and propaganda.
Friends tremble right in public. They can’t
do it either, and can’t hardly hope
someone they know is going to try.
You lived right. All has been intended.
The guy in the other lane is only there
because you opened your eyes today
to meet him on the quarter mile.
Doubt is a flock of black birds.
You summon a naked sky.
Just don’t let God know
we know (eating apples still)
death does not exist,
despite all the stories.
And I'll create a new universe
at the micro-first flash of green.
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