Saturday, May 21, 2011

Where you gonna run to...

"I said Lord, please help me Lord, can't you see I'm praying. But the Lord said, Go to the Devil....so I ran to the Devil, he was waiting, I ran to the Devil and I cried out, powerrrrrr, powerrrrrrrr!"

So todays nonsense of a Rapture has come and gone.  May 21st, 2011. 

Friday, May 20, 2011

Quote from 'Triggering Town' by Richard Hugo

Hey Wally, i still didn't forget about you....I am such a private poet, and I am working hard to not be restricted by my obsessiveness.

If you are a private poet, then your vocabulary is limited by your obsessions. It doesn't bother me
that the word "stone" appears more than thirty times in my third book, or that "wind" and "gray"
appear over and over in my poems to the disdain of some reviewers. If I didn't use them that often
I'd be lying about my feelings, and I consider that unforgivable. In fact, most poets write the same
poem over and over. Wallace Stevens was honest enough not to try to hide it. Frost's statement that he
tried to make every poem as different as possible from the last one is a way of saying that he knew it
couldn't be.

Monday, May 16, 2011

Sheenless


Sheen-less

The uneasiness

leaves me wool
grey-eyed and sheen-less,

clumped lifeless, a lump
of lint in a belly button,

unsettling the mind

like warm pillows
in the summertime.

The voice that we wait for,

the weight of the air
that irritates,

like mosquitoes chattering
in the endless night.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

The Public House

PUBLISHED IN THE COPPERFIELD REVIEW: Volume 10 Number 4 AUTUMN 2011 Edition



The Public House

The public house
challenges me to a duel again.
I walk to it as though
I intend to answer.

Behind the sky
the great senseless
eye un-blinks at me.

The clouds roll overhead
like knotted mounds of change  
as I go shuffling along into
a field of a lesser yield.

The harvest:
bloated gobs of shadow,
the overgrowth of the forgotten
and the tomorrow nights.

In the bar room haze,
we keep to a steady sway,
clinging to the drinks in hand

and howling
to the rafters
like a naked choir
in the Church of night.

We clink
our hanging heads
in obscurity,

little mechanical phantoms,
grazing together on the edges
of a muffled horizon.

Friday, May 13, 2011

A glimpse of the eternal(2003)

I counted the steps today
on my way out of the apartment.
It's not uncommon. Children do it all the time.
When I was little, I was always counting.
I always hope a staircase will have precisely eleven steps.

Eleven is the number that matters,
two lines running ever parallel.
You can't say the word parallel
without evoking the spirit of eleven
--a manifestation of some primordial magic!

In separating things, we are forever linked!

It is not uncommon.
Baseball players and golfers do it. 
Musicians, accountants, actors
and suicide bombers do it.

Maybe even big boss Bush does it,
"seven blinks in the left eye, five on the right
and now I'm ready for a thorough lie-fiesta, yee haw!" 



While we are on common, well understood themes,
Time, that other deceiver, catches me in its voracious jaws
and joins in on the fun; chews my mind like a licorice twig.


I don't wear wrist watches anymore, especially the digital ones.
My mother says to me, "when are you going to join the adult world
and get yourself a watch. Maybe for Christmas, I'll buy you one."


I turn her down. I cannot wear them anymore.
At first it was a playful thing, silly fun, then I became addicted.
"Look", I'd say to my friends and family, "1:01 and 01 seconds".  
A minute later, waiting to pounce on it,
"look now, 1:02 and 01 seconds". The apex of it all,
exhausted in a sweat of obsessive delirium,
"look, look, 1:11 and 11 seconds."

Five ones in a row, my straight-line guides to infinity. 
They mean that I have somehow captured the eternal.

They mean, nothing at all! 


All day I would be trapped like this, in a cage of moments.
When I saw a clock change to 1:23 and 45 seconds,
I thought I was using my time appropriately. 
Sorry mom, wrist watches are forever banished.


Pocket watches I can manage. 
If I have to reach into my pocket to get the watch,
Without really wanting to know the time for practical purposes,
my mind becomes aware of the pending lunacy
and the mania fizzles out with a series of deep breathes.


Something about symmetry, inherent and omnipotent;
Numbers, sidewalk squares and bathroom tiles. They soothe me.


I'm tracking the quiet movement of things,
propelled by a need to know.  I'm aware of the patterns,
keeping control on top of a bubbling planet!


Its not so bad anymore, not that I care much for those terms
That bind us to our fears, the phobias and the disorders.
Yet sometimes I search the bricks on buildings

or count the drops from a leaking faucet,
--at eleven I start all over again, 'again and again, 
--always eleven, eleven, my control and my relief!

Monday, May 9, 2011

We children who become men...

We children who become men


We children who become men

I will not speak for everyone.
In fact, I am less and less comfortable
with the 'we' as the years go on.

We children who go fast becoming men,
we who might not pan out before the day's end.

I will not educate with my experience,
you will learn by watching all the others,
we children steeped in our becoming
and the empty shell casings of our undoing.

Then there is the matter of my family.
Among that 'love' I am the last to let them know.
Among that 'we' I am the last to let it go.

I will not speak for everyone,
because so many, they may have chosen to forget,
we, the children who resist becoming men.

Outside the word

In the safety of skin

You have to know when to keep certain things separate, its a delicate trick.  It may seem like a fine idea to put some people among the snakes but in the end, the snakes would rather rest beside a hot stone and be free of bad breath and snapshot judgments.  "We are not the same" they'll say,  "It is you who created the devil, who laugh at the moon and sea and masterbate all over the quiet face of goodness.  It is you, not us."