Rio Grande Wind
In the Dallas airport,
I’m on the way
to greet my mother’s death.
We had to pull the plug.
You know the joke…
The little dirty one about
Three accused priests
by the pay telephone:
One of them says
the sky is falling,
The other two say,
“No, we are rushing
To meet the wind,
moon, sun and stars
With a gravity
We’ve come to call
Forgiveness.”
It was a horrible, horrible ride,
God throwin’ stones
in the sky. Every passenger
had a tale to tell about the way
the wings rang cell phones
and the fuselage buckled
in the Rio Grande wind.
Stuck at the terminal
I had an “estresso”
and thanked the Lord;
the small things being
just small enough.
DFDubya was a zoo
with American animals,
Cold and huddled,
dumped off like refugees
in the Rio Grande rain;
a hub of darkness,
as total darkness glows,
when it covers flesh
close to the ground.
So I floated around,
the lost and lonely
disembodied ranger,
Wild and terrified
at the fragile fullness
of being me, exposed;
pulling my coat over
my left shoulder,
imagining how I must
seem to the gray-bearded
masters of Judaic lore.
The Rio Grande wind
had never rolled a leaf
quite this far before.
That’s the thing
about airports:
All of that anxiety
and bad energy.
Sometimes,
we have a life.
Sometimes,
you don’t want
to leave or wave goodbye.
But death is a meal
on the jittery flight,
the Rio Grande wind
Blowin’ ya, outta sight.
Do You Know Me?
Night basement
alley sweats
meet on
the fashionably iced
mountain resort street.
Our time together
is the fate we keep
Strolling circles
bone to bone,
the Maker is making
our Time together;
Time that bends
with the wind.
We got silly with sin.
You played a game,
puckered and stroked
and waved me home
You know where I live,
and lived with you I did.
My penny price
was a plastic flower,
and poetry …
Enough!
Magic in a broken
bottle of vitamins.
Enough!
William Blake
kissed and ran,
ran and kissed.
Albion’s son took
safe harbor
in the box canyon's shadow
of mountain and mist;
Lingering there in early
afternoon cold shade;
and in the darkness,
howling at his phantom's
fire by electric streetlight.
His mind got quiet
out there, somewhere.
She saved a single
scrapple of soul,
petting his dry skull
as the river ran by.
He starved her,
got sorry later,
and fell in love.
Creek water ran
through their veins
and cleansed the salt
from his tear-duct dreams
They matched steps,
and in stepping claimed heights,
then showered to be sanctified,
then wined and dined, borrowing
on Telluride time ...
He wept and feared
and feared what she wept.
He wrote up a list of his faults,
or fell dead asleep trying:
Pride, shame, manic moods,
moments of empty bliss.
She pegged
her donkey
to a target,
sealed it
with a kiss
He was stunned
by the beauty
and purity of this.
Ulysses in Post-Industrial Hell
And this day,
this week of
the hammer of the law ...
a traffic ticket
for a miniscule complaint,
in which he,
a magnificent lost king,
was in virtual compliance,
now requires two different
court appearances
to avoid paying the fine ...
A far-flung Capricorn goat
on a tethered telephone line
“Massachusetts is a liberal state,
so there are many, many rules ...”
sayeth Ulysses, observing
the fallen coastal city
from a submarine periscope
within the wine-dark sea.
But then Poseidon's
sea-lash brewed again,
agonizing Ulysses anew
in his port of complaint:
“Six dollars! For what?
Breathing the air in Concord
home of the First Shot
Heard Round the World.
Paradise Lost, indeed!”
With great care Ulysses
crawls the water-rim of earth,
because the state will not let him be ...
Judgment cometh upon us all,
and we must all face Zeus alone,
Prometheus bound to wave-wet rock
In shackles and taxes and pay
and an unfortunate lack of shame.
He cries out to the shore,
“Make your hand close,
and my hand will closer be.”
He wished to see thy face
by thy river, in hopes she
were still dwelling there,
so that late at night
he would fall upon thee
in care and kisses
as seeds planted for evermore.
But he could ask not what
sick psychophants
dwell there, nor will you
lately, find he, for you see,
wind in a bottle becomes
a stale thing to breathe.
He slumbered off-shore
Afraid but safe, humdrum and alone,
safe from the doldrums of summer
or the Salem hangman’s scythe.
“Make your hand close,
and my hand will closer be,”
he still cries there,
lashed by waves,
chain-ganged along a highway,
told to sit still in a chapel,
an impertinent gull
eating dry scallions
by a poisoned pretty sea.
A Paranoid Plan for the Day
Yes Kitty,
there is a Santa Claus.
When you see him,
run as fast as you can.
You must trust me ‘cause
one such clown
killed my dad.
We will take the train.
It's cheaper. You can carry more things.
We don't need cars. They are dangerous,
foul smoke chokers, Satan's practical jokers,
unbreathing earth-eating unbeings.
How can you be a free-blowing leaf
if you are munching the bark of the tree?
When our work is done here, we'll escape,
perhaps the first part of the year. Before the bomb.
But I won't rush, or plan, till then we'll make our stand.
I'll just let the wind spirit make it so. Let the leaf blow.
In death, as in life,
before winter, beneath a blanket,
we will pretend we are dead.
we must till the soil. Bury ourselves.
Let each morning's bright light
tell us what we need to know.
Let the darkness instruct us
like the devil to his foe.
You seem to be
knowing less all the time,
sleeping more.
I'll bet you are sleeping,
but then, it's 2:30 a.m.
The muse has come to visit.
Wake up, Kitty! Rise and wake up.
Get out of that house
before you become
a complete cynic,
a non-romantic robotic being.
You are not saving your family
by being Narcissus' siren
mirror to them now.
You write beautifully,
but that is a mere shadow
in the distortion machine.
I know. I cannot tell a lie
when I get inside.
In the real world,
the truth is a snake
that must uncoil its tail.
I was at the fire mound
last night in Ipswich,
and a man told me
an interesting story there
while we both watched members
of the Cape Anne Task Force
prepare for another raid.
He said the first secret agent of fire
left a Tyranosaur's claw in the rock,
and this geological imprint is known
to the local churchgoers
as "The Devil's Footprint."
Apparently, say the legends,
a great hoofed Satan
blew out of the fiery earth here,
broke out through the ground,
burning down the church.
The fire liar landed on the stone
and his hot talons
melted a scrape
into the molten earth.
I told this crazy guy,
"Hey, give the serpent a break.
It could have just been
the spirit of fiery Orc,
of poetic imagination,
fighting its way
through the logical
cold sphere of Urizen."
I told him: " these very churches,
pointing to the other one across the street,
were elements of those same cold waters
that dim the human spirit
as a necessary and beneficial
element of earth-bound control.
Then, he told me something even stranger.
He said, as a janitor
for that high-steepled church across the street,
which we visited, well,
there are five telephone lines
in the telephone tower, and catacombs
of freemason-like layers
in the basement and downward,
to the center of the earth.
That once, MIBs, who came
in unmarked black vans,
came to the church
bearing metal suitcases.
That they refused
to acknowledge
his humanity.
I told him: "Hey, do not fear
just because you've seen
something you do not understand.
All sides, dark or light,
are a part of the same unknowable plan
to immenitsize the escaton,
which is, translated,
to make ready and speedier
the return of Christ.
That the church tower
is simply an undercover facility,
due to its great height,
for U.S. government surveillance.
That is, Echelon, for lack of a better term,
on Great Neck, overlooking the bay."
He said people have seen
a great satellite dish come out
from underneath the ground
on Great Neck,
Which shouldn't surprise anyone, anymore.
Except for you skeptics out there
who can only see the sun,
and not the sun behind the sun.
Now, Kitty, you have all that you need.
On the grey rock overlooking Ipswich,
the Devil’s footstep reveals the science
of the October spirits,
born when the black moon,
vanished from the sky, holds her
wintry horn. Wake up, hon, it's morn.
Jail Pace on a Sunday
Wet snow falls in clumps
on a barbed wire fence;
Eyes through mesh,
a dream of democracies
crushing grim,
grim in the throat,
choking up, flowing out
In discountenance.
Once a prisoner pushed
his Shakespearean heart
through an electric fence;
His face turned to muck
and blood, and crossed a sea
to meet his hard-headed woman
at the palatial prance pace
of love’s familial intolerance.
But the snow fell harder
and the twisty tin wire
became a shovel,
the shovel became a plow,
the plow became a motor,
and the motor drove
the car over the edge.
Just as Aaron Burr shot
Alexander Hamilton
right above the heart,
the pendulum of law
is a swinging limb
of steel and foul weather.
The snow sticks upon
needle threads of green grass.
Middleton prison is summery
warm in January, even as cattle cars
are loaded with witches from Salem,
and even as shooting range guns sound off
in the distance and we trade
German Shepherd shouts,
for brief bouts of Gaelic ire
to cause of lost love is punished.
Shout. Shout out for plainspoken truth!
The Constitution is a cold and wet tissue
in the lavatory bowl of the discontented and damned,
and that carcass out there, over the fence,
marring your view due to the barbed wire,
is a twinge of agony over the breeze,
while Lefty here, taught to swing right,
he paces out his misfortune across the floor.
Unfortunate in the choice his DNA made,
unfortunate in the dice that fell the day he was born.
He’s sneezing up dustbunnies, phlem and TB,
straining his eyes through his jail cell's glass
to catch a glimpse of primal football on TV.
The newly unbearded Aaron Burr is in caves
somewhere, in Pakistan, Maui or Peru,
flicking out a light, turning on a flashlight.
The preamble of love is a target on a sheet,
the sheet becomes a bullseye on a wall,
while the guard dog sniffs, his master pouts,
the FDA nurse shouts, “Meds only! Meds Only,
If that doesn’t mean you, lock yourself down!”
Lefty leaves the big metal door open, to resist
is to enhance sanity and salvation. The clamp
may disfigure his hands, yet he abstains, feigns sleep,
waiting for the breathy dream of the whore
to dream up sex, slithery and sleepy,
shaking off the conspiratorial frame,
from the other side of the door.
Quantum Quandary
Great poetry is a failure
Of perception
Great perception
Is a failure of poetry
Great failure is the poetry
Of perception
Failed greatness is
The perception of poetry
