She
Disappeared
Like a dot on the
Pagewhite, snowwisped
Mountain peak, scrubbrush
Hiding her like pronouns.
The sky is a walnut,
A prune,
A lady in waiting
For yet another
Eruption,
Another immortal moment
Inside the rock,
Bad poetry is a miasma of molten mulch,
Making more muck grow in the dawn
Of unrelenting reason and foregone promise.
Iris seed on full lawn
The silos swim into solstice clouded
Tubers of dark. Bearded grackles
Heavy the metal weeds come, feet,
Dance the empty
I was a fat tub
Standing on squat legs
Young and begging
To be entered
But you gave me a diamond scrub
Descended upon me from above
And, in bubblebath crystals,
You brought me lilacs.
Cancerous crocuses
Cry captured breath.
Buying bedpan beauty
Admiration,
Angina anticipates anxiety
How will you complete the soaring flight of thought
Your bird sense, like songs on high, over skyscape
skyscrapers,
Resting on concrete cracks where beautiful seeds hide
In dormancy, unable to reach fertile ground
The young complexity
That never was me
Jams my strawberry
Memories
I go to war
For my mother’s pasty
Fingers, her orchard,
And glory
I was awake as never before, black rain on oily breeze
A sneeze at the pepper on the potato soup
My Vichyssoise with floating chives distract me from
The smoke outside.
Mr. Potatohead in the drawer
Growing eyes in the dark
Waits for the dust to settle
So he can see some place
To root, suspended and stabbed
He has no bouquets, in pretty positions
To sweeten the smell of putrefying thoughts
Poverty has taken his indignation,
He savages himself into submission
Keeps fertilizing his dreams with manure
To, maybe, grow a flower
To place on her grave.
ALLEGHENY
GONE
WOODLANDS
Your tree has more circles,
Knots from broken branches, leaves that left,
So I use my chainsaw, cut you down to my level,
Sculpt a galloping stallion for friends to fawn over
And leave a giant clearing, too empty for does in
Winter.
Spring
The beautiful brown fingers of Oak in Spring
Are malignant with uncontrolled green budding
Against glorious grey clouds, laden with acid
Too soon, Summer’s leaves will make them look flaccid.
Under mossy rocks
Under (water) pressure
In the muck miasma
Under the big toe of poverty
The sponge
Dreams starfish darknesses
And separation
Ancient grave site
Angel orange
Granite lilies
Any old sky
We went up with fat orange backpacks
Puffing morning mist into thin scrubbrush
Offered quail Familia crumbs
As the treeline faded downward
Posthumous accolades
Are better than being forgotten,
Rotten, swamp succor
In the everglades of the immediate
The
Iris is black
When tossed
away.
BELLFLOWER
DING DONG
STAMEN AND PISTOL
CLAPPER AND CLAP
ALL BREEDS OF IGNORANCE
Fig yesterday
Cicada cast
Long legs lured
My baited breath
Worm cast
Plaster cast
The whole noisy
Play of figeating,
Loud, insect actors
With broken spirits
And brittlemarrowed souls.
She stuck a flower
In his barrel
He stuck a barrel
In her flower
SHRIVELING
BITTERROOT
BLACK APPLE
BLACK BOUGH
The grass is the cousin
Of my ass
She is the motorized hum
Of a lawnmower
She is the growing
Prunedoctor
She is the weedeater
And sodlayer
She is the trimmer
Fingernails pulling at me
I’ve got a chair and a stray dog
That comes by for food. I’ve got trees diing,
Invaded by insects. They belong to the city,
Both larvae and leaves, and the air
Comes in stinky from Pasadena;
It rains white ash flakes,
Late at night when no one is supposed to notice
When the smell is only registered upon aloevera dreams.
Houston has its Blue Light Cemetery
With silky ghosts and Spanish Moss
Mythology, appearing in weak moments,
Every so often, blue vapor phosphorescence
Explained away as swamp gas
My poetry
Makes
You nuts
Falling from a
Poet tree
Moon and willow
Evening shade
Over cool grass
CACHE
CASHED GREEN
Cash crop
Confused
Corn
A
Cop(e)
Ia
Almost out of the maze
Modern man
Turns around to embrace
The haphazard hedgerows
I see
Icy crocuses
The icy crow
Cusses
$@&*!@#$%^&
(And that’s a word too)
I see!
Barrenness was planted
In that Winter field
By only one frost
And a proclivity for gold
Rather than the green
Shoots of family farming
With heaters and husbandry
Ice flow, creamy quartz
Ugly meadow, long bermuda shorts
Tattered Petunias, teetering stalks
Not ready to shiver, I walk
Watching the road
You were supposed to change slowly,
Not become silver Winter
Without warning, without fluffy snow
CAPERS AWEIGH
MY BUDS
SALAD ALL DAY
Melonmush
Is the honeydew
Green or orange?
Is the daughter seed
White inside?
Is Minsk the only specific
With accordion flowers,
Expanding stars,
Hillhaloed sky
And a thousand million smiles
To share?
From a seething pool
Of industrial pollutants
Grow pretty, little flower mutants
not only
unclear
thoughts trees
with no connecting
roots but
also rhythm
made leafy
by line breaks
and shortstanza
branches
On Washington Square
Bug carpet leaves
Sail on the wind
Multiple visions
Of a greybrown
Day, insect eyes
That don’t see
“The Bottom Line”
And you blame your wife
For dustpan inspiration
In a nation of roses
And false posers
And lonely, wrecked lives?
I will seal some strawberries
In the hubcap of my orneryness
And throw them in the pamplemousse pudding,
Like fate with a twist of lemon,
For your mother to eat
Flowerless husband
Bearing bulbs
Removes his wife’s leg
From his flatulence.
Outside, bed bugs
Run to the warmth
Of hot air
Under satin sheets
Flowers catch fire
So they expose themselves to a rose?
Snowy crocuses
Snowy crow cusses
Entropy and the hermit’s ears
My fear has been that no fir
Would grow, and Summer heat
Would beat me down under fallow ground
Carbohydrate cravings
Abridge an asphalt escape
You are distracted by pizza smells
On our drive to a glistening garden
Clown delight
Alright, alright!
Let’s save some trees
Your fertilizer falls
Unto other people’s lawns
Monologue
Of foreign intrigue
From a flower vision
Familial ties
Your crest on your chest
Baretta behind you
Smoking in the brains
Of your alien words’
Bullet marks
DIALOGUE
About other senses
For the blind poets
The flowers have different meaning
Get only visuals from bird names
And flowers named and blood,
Got lazy imaginations but try to
Get an image of this In my shower cap
I envied the elephant
Cats are immune to the hairy greens
Of okra poetry
Battle writer’s block
With barren fields?
Rhyming Hyphens
I celebrate a free lunch,
Okra grown in suntoil
And gumbo soil, veggies
With wellwater
Roses against a log cabin wall
Roses anywhere
Roses and fragrance
In Montana, too.
Must photos of sunsets and relatives
And pictures painted with colored
Words and the names of certain
Fauna or flora enter every poem?
Have we so tightly defined what is
And is not the beauty of existence?
Is it Tiger Lily time
Or the grey goose down?
What the fuck does a Yucca look like?
Artichoke
I never saw a rainstorm of children
Or an art
Choke
At the throttle of fad
I grow green, deprived of midnight
Milky skin with rainbow wings.
The trucks scream cranberry, bounce
Pebbles backwards. Neon blurs my sodium
Yellow lenses. The wind pushes us
Like a drunkard. Leaves, paper, plastic slaps
Against our faces. A twenty dollar bill
Gets stuck to your shoes.
Money was never the problem.
The bough of boyhood
Bent under the high top
The guilty discipline
Of the puppy that went wild
For its entire life thereafter
Betrayed by clear vision
But not enough information
You beat hollow trees
With rhythmic messages
Had to get Limas
Between someone’s knees
Farming words
Can’t seem to break
The weed cycle
Winter, Winter, Winter
You are so insulted
But I understand
You purify the bulbous land
Once upon a time
There used to be men roaming the land
Now men hide in the forest
Of rhetoric
Colors for a blind man?
Poetry for the emotionally barren?
Feel the photo? Find the flower
In a reference book?
Loneliness
Is a dry marker
And fear
A broken ball
No!
Loneliness is
Peat moss
And fear
A plate of beans
No!
Loneliness is….
My excrementation
Is a kind of loving
Being a generous soul
I wish nutrients for plants
And trees
I love you like a modem
Our love burns like a modem
The orange and prune juice taste like a modem
The sky and water are a modem
The page sits like a modem
The like phrase is like a modem
Liking the like phrase is like liking a modem
Like is like
Is like
Like is modem
Like is to like as like is to modem is like a modem
A modem is like a cherry
The cartoon was like a cherry
Wanting you was like wanting a cherry
The shore line burns like a cherry
The cherry pie burns like a teacup
The cherry is like a burn
One burn is just like the other
In the fiction game
I could go on
Rain is a symbol for what?
Sun is a symbol for what?
In this poem, rain grows okra
And the sun causes skin cancer
Life almost ended
And still writing only
As plum dead
Marching petunias
Marching to war
Against Hyacinth
For the sake of Morning Glory
Crying for better water
And integration
More militant flora
Conspire against
The farmer
Who imprisons them
In mounds and rows
Knots in wood are dead eyes.
Every dirty space between planks
Is a prison bar.
Every boat on every lake or ocean
Is a forefinger pressed into the Earth’s belly
Every Sunrise covers a gaping black hole
In the universe.
Every bed is a galaxy of insects and germs
Moving the printpatterned sheets with vaporous
vibrations.
Every sound tells of the atmosphere splitting in quakes
at various distances,
Here, in paranoia, deathpoetry.
Ineluctable Joyce
Crawls on the grass
Like a cherry blossom
Dickweed
Peckerwood
No line to remember
Just another list
Of picture words,
With “I”s like hers
Shrubbery verity
“Ni!”
And humming bird farts
For a whiff of the arts
“Ni!”
Amherst is buried under snow
But the pantyhose still come out
To aim a dart
In broccoli directions.
Asparagus takes years
To root and settle
While Carol contrives herself
As a hummingbird feeder
“Ni!”
Between two of them
Grateful
Cheese
Licking up dew
Sentences.
Verbs have or do
Dart up
Dart up!
Down boy.
Climb a tree.
They do not dare you to pick them,
They dare you to name them
Color and flowerbased
Poetry is not racism
But is something like it
Life
Is a missed
Tree
Over grass meadow,
Mirrored birds,
Breathless,
She went
Barefoot to the Buffet
When advertisements
And Hallmark
And the war effort
Take the pretty and heroic poetry (for effect)
Then poetry must be
About something other than (just) flowers
And sunsets
If cut flowers and the sunset
Of life, the inevitable death
Are okay (for adverts, Hallmark and propaganda)
Then poetry must
“Rage, rage against” it.(them)
COLORS AND FLOWERS AND DEATH
AND GOSSAMER
VEILED SEX
EROTICA, BUT NO PORNOGRAPHY
REVERSE DISCRIMINATION
REVERSE HYPOPARISTALSIS
REGULAR OLD LIFE
HEIGHTENED TO THE HEAVENS
OF UNREALITY
BOREDOM AND GRIEF
CHEWED LIKE DELICACIES
IS THIS ALL THERE IS FOR POETRY?
NO MORE SPINE TINGLES?
NO MORE LIFE MADE FRESH?
MEMORIES, MEMORIES
OF OLD IMAGES, IN CREATIVE COMBINATIONS
BUT NOT A NEW VISION
I put a flower on the bottom
Of these lines so that someone
Will think they might be poetry
Iris
Singing the greens
Because 8 percent of males
Are colorimpaired
Orchard Memories
Trees growing back
But what does not?
What is this sense of loss
I feel?
What have I forgotten, here?
I’m going to do it again.
Hope you get fooled this time:
Irises
Desperation Crocuses
Planting early
To remind us of life,
Hidden under Winter
(`Cus we can’t seem to remember
There’s life if we don’t see flowers)
When I see the pear,
Passed over the counter,
I see…..
Ah, shit, I can’t lie
I see a pear passed over the counter
I need an image, a new image
I need imagery, NOW,
Or I’ll go all prosey
Uh, uh
Petunia in a pancake
Uh, uh
Six galloping julien fries
Uh, uh
The moon, sandwiched between lettuce and bacon
Uh, uh
Ice cream dripping onto my sweating cleavage,
Strawberry bosom, scooped by tender tendrils of butterfly
Shrimp
Oh! ….
Uh, nevermind.
Maybe all I needed was lunch
Hey, icehole
That’s some bitchin’ lichen
Ooooops! I must end up
Liking lichen
When the blackberry moon rises
When the grapefruit moon rises
When the aspirin moon rises
When the crescent moon rises
When the dixiecup moon rises
When the donut moon rises
When the pastry moon rises
The pepsi moon
The bloodshot moon
The beandip moon
The umlaut moon
The incandescent moon
The silkstockinged moon
The sugarcane moon
When the mayonnaise moon rises
When the starkissed moon
The bumblebee moon
The tunafish moon
The albacore moon
The dolphin moon
The blowfish moon
The whaler’s moon
When the wornout moon
When the pizza moon
When the pockmarked moon
The chocolate moon
The coldcoffee moon
The constant moon
When the dental floss moon
When the breakdown moon
The morning moon
When the toilet paper moon rises
When the moon rises
I’ll be there
Waiting for your reflection
Still pulled, like the water
By a tide of memory.
Bud trees the oh!
The Mountains See It Before We Do
But we keep the day
And feed it celery.
Colors,
Fruit
And what they do
(mostly during the weekend
and on vacation)
Sweet tree lines
(Awash) In fall colors
So to hear the sound of “timber”
Tramp tree
Out of mythology
Pulls up its roots
And leaves
In toto, illiterate, I
Envision
Myself endowed
With romance
Languages
but
uh
Well,
That’s no excuse
To “éclabousse”
The “pamplemousse”
Is it?
A muckraking ox
In an Oz of ours
Ran amuck, broke his chain
And trampled the flowers
(And took a big chunk
Out
Of the freedom of the press)
VIVO
Durable river on dramamine
Luminous air polluted by pollination of words
Where “Death is Granite
With an underwater iris
I can’t bring myself to comment Vivo!
Poems are acts of acts
So fax me
Axe simile
So I can cut down
Your poet
Tree
WHITE
WITH
WHITE ROSE
IN
WHITE SANDS
The poem neighed in the saddle of lines
Ellipsis was the horse’s name
Cantering over a field
Of barley in the wind….
No,
Maybe it was a field of rye
October juniper, fleshed civil,
Fused to the present
In shrill fidelities,
Deciduous divisions
Wreathe the woodbine.
Cool chatter remembers
Merciless intervals
Separate growth,
Into itself.
Clearer Than
The moon roamed even these landscapes
Of flying haystacks
And the pond’s hot buttresses, thunder colors,
Mysterious wind of scummed peonies,
And magenta poplars.
Bleeding blossoms bloomed
Like there were clouds
And won’t stop
Mallard makes green you bow?
What would a loon make brown you do?
Beauty heaped upon beauty
Pinkly profligate
Mulch pile with carrot peels, broccoli and beets
Green World!
Floral revolution
Under the floral leadership
Of ruling vegetables