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Archive for the ‘Poetry’ Category

First Draft Prophets

Posted in Poetry, tagged on September 14, 2025| Leave a Comment »

After the grid shut down, 
A religious order rose in the darkness
The charismatic types
They suddenly had found new purpose.

The lord gave animals
To those on whom 
New grace was shown

The winners and losers now
Had rearranged themselves somehow

The cries in the dark that night
Pretend not to hear it
Pretend not to hear it

Follow me and I’ll promise to
Show you land God gave to you
And the beasts you will be husband to

There was a lottery
Someone’s riding point tonight
New faces have appeared 
Like ghosts lost in the night

A world of orphans needs
A patriarch no matriarch
The tribe it must decide before 
The eyes go dark 
What lessons are learned
Principles barked

And a leeward green and windward blue
The ark’s bacteria carried mostly in you
Gut flora hosannas and minuscule cheers
Carried the day; they were our seers

A world of orphans needs no dogma now
Leviathan the blush blue cow
Still chases us in reddish ruts
Leaves us yearning with tiny cuts
Leaves us burning in sun’s russeted butts
And hoping to churn in a new god’s guts.

(Photo: prozac1 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

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Want To And Forget To See

Posted in Poetry, tagged on May 14, 2025| Leave a Comment »

It was a good day
And the sun ran round the rabid tree
And no thought could stop
The grabbing of an unfamiliar green

And no introspection could
Stop the car’s mighty engine
And its desire to maim and mince
And kill

No extrospection could make a timing
Belt dance and squeal
Or the yellow leaves make felt for a
hand to feel

Cross is the wet eye that has decided
before it lands
on a course of action
Or the definition that bends its hands

Enemies, eye and me
You have to feel around again
Now and again
If you want to and forget to see

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Just Facts

Posted in Poetry, tagged on April 24, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Facts are poor and pissing things
Lost in a green lawn
Where the pool was shocked
For eyes to be stung
Facts have no meaning unless shrieked
Screamed so loud they stress the picture
window and its scoop of suburb
to point of fracture
A scream smoked and peaty and single malt
“You kept sleeping you bitch
when you heard our daughter had snuck out.
Get out of that bed now.”
And then a gun made its appearance
Oddly shy and quiet the .357
Serving as punctuation, an exclamation point
On a husband’s scattered thoughts
Words too fussily labored over
This fact gone went missing amid the ph-balanced water
Gushing the next day from the side of the pool
Like innocence aborted
Forgotten, all this that happened,
In a Sunday scrum over a steaming fowl.

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You Are the Screw

Posted in Poetry on April 22, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Something to hold
Something to wrangle
They put your soul in a jail
Your ribs in a mangle

The daylight that struck you through
She knew the light in your eye
Was reflected pages of other people’s news
The cauterizing fish
Sealed fate in memories of stew

And a mother dressed as a stove
Hove a dish as easy as a sorry slur
Then sorry to have spoken or to have moved
I am both of them, thrower and thrown
Unleashed to anger when in the throat it should be sewn

I am my father’s yell and my mother’s quiet
And you could see in the long genetic party of the bridegroom pictures
Some 60 eyes of generations looking through
Looking through you

And you hove with all of them
To make the play twist forward
You are the screw

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Nothing To Do

Posted in Poetry on October 8, 2023| Leave a Comment »

I got no chores
Nothing to wake up for

Nothing on TV nowhere to
Explore
Nothing to wake up for 

Got no thoughts to write
No verse to put forth
Nothing to wake up for

But I had a thought and a mug to drink from
And I’ve got two eyes and legs and thumbs
And I’ve got the memory of you
and know you have a memory too
And that will have to do

I’ve read all the books and watched all the porn
Got nothing to wake up for
I’ve been to Florida and seen some of Rome
Got nothing to wake up for
I’ve made some love and built a home
And now I’ve got to roam it alone

But I have a toothbrush and some food
And a sink
and I still have thoughts to think
And I’ve got an ocean and flowers and vines
The things I put in my head are mine

And so I open my eyes and stare at the floor
That’s something to wake up for

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The Waste Ferry

Posted in Poetry, tagged , on June 20, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Sights of minnow, despair
Fish dream to nonaction
The rudderless course of a ship
Its hull beating against a manless dock

Upended cups on bollards
Cranky pier beams
And glinty eyed gulls
Are harbinger of somebody’s breakfast

Mere muff grazers
Spill onto the dock
Warning of a fatuous Sunday
Afternoon
When the boat will be full
But not full of anybody
Willing to say what needs to be said

One thought is embarrassed to death
In a throat
Because the men want what they want
And you will have what you have

Late in the day
Jackson lost on the beam
One thought parts
Into milk and cream

Your eyes too full of pain and fear
You couldn’t tell me the truth right then
Not about anything
Not right here

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Siesta

Posted in Poetry, tagged on June 20, 2023| Leave a Comment »

The farmers move inland,
Brushing their scythes
away forever from the cool crests of wheat

Before siesta

When old men and little boys
alike
Come to sleep in a chain
of hands

Here they rest in rough dirt
made soft
By the bodies of young girls

Here they float over cankers in the Earth
Old salt furrows that can no longer
be farmed

Holes with no sympathy

Slumber is not measured here
in pounds
But in inches:

Rain hurts the mud wall
Unleashes dirt from the grooves
While a yeast goes to work on its millet

Otherwise, the whole world
is asleep
or dying

Across the handle of a rake

–1994

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Life On Mars

Posted in Poetry, tagged , on June 19, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Curses spilled from her mouth
And milk leaked into the shirt
The baby biting hard
at new blood
And macrophages
Baby still colostrum-laughing
Licking poems off her pages

A poem of milk
Is to be consumed by whomever needs it
And blood is fed
Brain, stomach and heart
The whole water bed

And even light can cut
And conjugate
Talk soft to
The Earth that was its mate

And even life on Mars
In tiny yurts and huts
Can’t lose the link to Earth
Still stirring in our guts

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Breaking News

Posted in Poetry, tagged , on November 5, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Breaking news,
Anne Sexton died almost 50 years ago
Jar lids were pulled off
With rubber grips in
Mourning
The wings beat at the dozens per second
And the peroxide told its secrets to hair

Dogs have powerful bone jaws
And scrape metaphors off ribs
And they eat us out from the inside
With ravenous disloyalty
On Moloch lakes
Where former angels watched
Their wings become ash and turds

Another day a mind contends with
Living in flesh
Flued and sooted
But loses
And forgets itself
Dissolves
Into heroic glands

Talk to them
Not to me

I’ll be new tomorrow
We all are
Until ossified
And broken as news

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When The Sultan Got Thirsty

Posted in Poetry, tagged , , , on October 23, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Watered with limitless
Liquor
Amber ton’c
Profane as a red sky
Tonight you laughed so hard
You made a faint
vasovagal syncope
on the Seraglio toilet
The head Selim
Ghazals rushing from bibulous skull
When a sultan thirsts
Apollyon cracks
Visions of Greeks escaping
Wooden smack
Skin flayed
Eyes on Famagusta
Eyes on the Pale Spaniards
And Venetian’s
Every lipstick, a traitor
Every betrayal, a bath
A mouth minty
With curses.
A seaman by nature
Is impulsive;
In dream canals,
He smashed his navies.
Under arched eyebrows,
A grand vizier
birthed Serb Bosnian
Who laddered the bones of
The fratricides
Mapped around the lake,
“Sappers sell to Volga and Don
Janissaries mail for the water
Communication,” said
A shaved beard grows faster
Than a severed arm.
Lent his lettered brain for a
Sot writing about orgies during his orgies
While their Mustafa
Was lent Cyprus ears and noses
To harvest rape grape
And vintage vine
And the sot
Wrote poems of heedless love
As hateful history somehow
left the bastard happy innocent
Dying in her behind.

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