Winter Vision (Excerpts From "Found Poetry in the Titles and Some Lines From The Poet's Market") by Q.Z. Blaze

Is a sleazy breeze

Escaping the skull’s horizon

Grief is my (moon) beam,

Sucking breeze.

An orange smog carpet of clouds,

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

Mourning eyes

Make my memory

Her tearstained dress

Distresses my skipping

Slows me like a silk kite

Anchor

Cancerous crocuses

Cry captured breath.

Buying bedpan beauty

Admiration,

Angina anticipates anxiety

SWATTING ASTEROIDS,

AERIAL

FLIES FLY

IN THE FACE OF REALITY.

GO AHEAD GO AHEAD AND LIVE!!!!

In Emphysema Emphasis

Smoking is all there

Is as your lungs grow old,

A beat or two at a time

This heartbeat is the proof

As sucked air gets thicker

Glastonbury

What keeps me away

An obese woman

Once a prisoner of fad

Now retired to a feast

Tiny bits of the best

In the flatlands under the mountains

Grandfather left us

Grandmother

She left

The wind

YOU

DO CONTINUE

Peter’s pop

Lost a leg and, limping

On hurting heart,

Left with generous abandon,

Left the business to “Mom”.

I cried when Peter,

Pretending again,

The way it was his habit

To pretend on paper

Placed a short story

In its envelope in his father’s

Cool hands, saying

“You loved my stories.

So, here’s a tale of a Spaniard

Whose remains nourish the soil of Spain.

These pages were the only journey

I could afford for your last wish,

After the cost of the head stone and coffin.”

You think it’s fun

To remind me of pigeons

Pecking at the celluloid eyes

Of marketversion, imitated audiences,

Pictures of pictures.

Chewing cannibal ribs,

You avoid the true horror

Of the human heart

Southern Fall

It’s where the serpentine

Constriction of Summer

Squeezes the hot iron lung

Of the still, humid air,

Until Winter Pops In For a Visit

He Reads

A Postcard From Iraq for Christmas

The people snub us

But to surrender. Send toothpaste.

Met many terrible, smelly men barracks crowded.

Great to be on shore patrol, off the ship.

It was a long four months at sea.

I may be home after a second wave

Of blood soaks the sand. Baby’s due

In July. No contraceptives or abortions

Available. It won’t have your eyes.

Your loving wife,

Chastity

Small blue thesaurus

Sits dioxidizing

Dinosaur creations,

Penned plumage

Of toothless tripescented

Feline, pharaohfollowing,

Ankhishly holding sparrows

Like Teflon pterodactyls

GrandeMere Despair

What history will tell her story

“Nanny” to so many; no child was kept guessing

About love and life as life’s real glory

And deathmourning makes

Her lessons less; His whorey

Heart took the cash blessing

And he didn’t help his sister, Laurie.

Houseflies humming in incandescence

While the war raged on television,

Hovering over the maggotridden beerbellies

Of the boys we sent to prime (rib) time.

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.

Okay,

I remember a thunderous funnel

Of birds before they

Were beaten down

Birds like

Worms

In birds

Fallen flightless

In Iraq

The brick and concrete are shattered

“Brilliant” bombs are flying in; chickens

Rebels, eagles and fraternizers

Crawl amongst the wreckage

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.

Reincarnation

Gilds us

With the guilt

Of our flighty ignorance.

Bird songs

Bird soarings

Bird pictures

Word moorings

Pellet sentences

Seeking birdsoup

Nourishment

Bird names

More words

Psychic loop

Lipserviced

Birdnamed

Eaglestall

Sparrow fall

Dropping leaves

Leaving droppings

Bird word Winter

Skeleton trees

A feather floats

Slowly to the ground

The condo cries with lonely abandon

When they move on once more,

Is soothed by the caress

Of the paintbrush and spackle

Another color, yellow this time,

To cover the waterstains and wrinkles

OMEGA FLARES

AGAINST

ALPHA BEAT SOUP,

Lobster inspiration

Antennae and eyes

In a high pressure, blood,

Redsurfaced world,

Without other lives

To live vicariously

Or other

Wise

MAKING GRAVEN MISTAKES OF YOURSELF

You say

“I am”

I am?

Touching God?

Is someone

Not any more

Than you are?

The incandescent sprinkles of distant stars

Are porch lights in patterned mythology

Guarding yards where families went supernova

Cher(ig)noble care

In waves

Radiates from you

WITH THE

AMERICAN ATHEIST

SAYING

“I highercase the crazy little things”

For habit?

What’s the mildest mild you can conjure,

Tar in the mind’s eye?

Mildew on a tarnished sword grip?

Waiting

Called destination

Unpromising

But not promising nothing

Garbage glistened in the round receptacle

Frost glazed the morning meadow

Flies made babies, not knowing

The trash men come at noon.

Entropy poetry

Falls from the form

Of voiced verse

Asphasia forever

Most holes are not (W)holes

To fall into in the Fall.

Waiting for Winter to winter

The storm, window screens scream, ripped

Death spares nothing

Entropy always

Worms live within us

Hope hangs in there

Like red meat

(Unless we make a god of death, forgetting any religion

and any reason for life)

Does our fence really need

Feathers from the dead bird

You dream?

Cold, cold, soothing peace

(Full enough? Full enough)

Ancient grave site

Angel orange

Granite lilies

Any old sky

The magician I know

Conjured a family

With my mother

Sunday is not his Sabbath

Saturday is

Sunday, pulling and bagging,

He rakes Autumn’s refuse.

Poem equals religion equals

Only whole type of thinking equals poem?

Poem equals sunset equals

Only whole type of thinking equals poem?

Poem equals entropy equals….

……… prayers ……

… wiped ….. tears ……

…………… falling ….

… angel ………

……….. hell ……

….. death ……… flames

(editing) wept

My life is apropos

And every day is wonder

I listen to the falling snow

And thank God for my blindness

JUXTAPOSITION LIKE THAT

SOOTHES SOME PEOPLE.

Juxtaposition

Allows me to let out

The anger, you know,

At new platitudes

Because dreams are

Worth dreaming even when

Not “preserved”

Even if they only quell

The twitching temporarily

Sometime later, Grandmother’s wind spoke to me

“You remember, don’t you? You were supposed to take

Care of me. She stood at the water’s edge with you,

Awaiting the squall line, her white hair flowing free

And she passed me along, left me as her legacy.”

The still Summer air, here, crushes my resolve

To keep her smile and wind alive, glowing, wild.

Mirror morning lake

Ripples with a loon’s light

Frolic, escaping under

To leave only laughing echoes

Being the Janis Joplin

Of philosophy, I

Scrape my perception over

Wellstrung screams

My reality plucked precisely

Far enough into

Death to wail

God’s anthem

Posthumous accolades

Are better than being forgotten,

Rotten, swamp succor

In the everglades of the immediate

Handicapped vocal cords

Scrape against hot breath.

If I thought you wouldn’t be bored

I’d just say “I love you” until my death

Death

Dreams

Life

Hokma Nistarah

Translates like this

Secret wisdom

The poet, her typing table, the poet

Braindead inside a cluttered inspiration trap

The coke bottle behind the book

The ashtray sticky with chewing gum

Wishing the last page preceded this one

The poet, the poet

Never knows

When daylight disturbs her lists of losses

The

Iris is black

When tossed

away.

Chewing on your words

I see an old “B” movie

Not pain

But selfflatuation

Of a twisted sort

Drooling your blood

Like a glasssplintering

Baby

I saw the bloodsoaked body

The stain on the cool carpet

Of the crack house we razed

Then I remembered the green oil

Leaking from my mother’s unfixed car

ALA PRINE

Their “brains thrown into a hurricane”

The nipple will summit up

The hair will enter a test tube

The genitals will fall like baggy trousers

Disengorged

The soul/will

Entering or exiting

Must be resolute and pure

Of this, at least, I think I am sure

Beneathness

You want

A city frozen

Under ice

So that you won’t

Need to put up

With pity

For the chilly mollusks

Creeping into your heart

Winter watercolors

The grey and white and brown

Are all God’s colors, too,

So stop always putting them down.

Shellshocked or posttraumaticstressdisordered

Someone was saved that day

Sit on your arse

And cherish an appetite

For looking at the solemn, the foolish,

Looking for the dark spots on the sun,

Retinafrying

Hamhock, sirloin,

Filet, shoulder,

Butt and Chuck

He separates his lovers

Into parts

Gravity pulls pagans, too

Split chest, ripe

Gets us all,

Like Peeping Toms,

Gossips and exhibitionists,

Ineluctable

People write books about it

Collect photos for years,

But what was important

To tell was the dis

Solution of memory???

The potassium storage

Sodium and serotonine

In cytoplasm surrounded

By a science of emotion

And photo albums of words

Picking contagion,

Cleaning like slaves,

Born to janitorial joy

Without mops or Spic and Span

Without really loving man

The maggot makes its living

On a quest of germ destruction

We were talking philosophy

Aunt Grace said “family”

I said “Thanksgiving together?”

She said, “Not anymore”

I said, “Grandma?”

She said, “Both of them, two weeks apart”

“Just us now?”

“Just us now.” she replied

Neither of us said “Why?”

NO, no

I said “Grandpa too?”

She said “Uh huh.”

I said “Why?”

She said nothing

No, no

She said, “Do you want their car?”

I said, “I told them I wanted the Luger”

She said, “They threw it into the lake.”

I said, “I do need a car.”

NO, no

She said “Are you coming to the funeral?”

I talked about how poor I am and, now, I don’t even know

the address of the graveyard.

Name the news event

Blame the blood

Versify variations

Of Voltaire’s What Frenchman

Was it? maggots

Growing out of a cat’s

Vagina; telling the whore

“That soon will be you”

And hit the stomach

The groin, the heart

The brain, with one

Tiny, little, rosecolored stain.

Somehow, the maggots

And oatmeal

Connect

By my scorn

Tries to put a hierarchy

Upon the food chain

Tries to separate the superficial

From a shotgun facial

Tapioca from Topeka

Toast on a Buttered Tray

Tea to the Side

Visit from A Boyfriend Who Smelled of Perfume and Stale Sex

Sickly drowsed

Sickly heard weeping

Sickly survived

To write

Sickly verse

BLACK BOOKS

BLACK THOUGHTS

BACKSTABBED BY BAD IMPRESSIONS

Ageism all old men don’t have loose teeth

Serpentsight most pines are straight

Fear of more than just “frictions”

Children are always throwing death

In their parents’ faces

AIDS aides

Should we breathe the same air?

Should we care?

I never saw (not, “I’d never seen”)

Someone already dead, smiling, so brightly

In their Spring flower bed.

We planted love

In rows and mounds around his house

But the Fall came early.

That’s the way

Baking

Delicate delights

No noise in the kitchen

Ingredients and temperature

Just right, perfect texture

On the cooling tray

And someone with a sledge hammer

Comes in to smash

The table and counter

The cookies and sink

Sometimes truth leaks out

Of Winter’s broken pipes

Unintended

The house cries

Through tissuepaper walls

And tells the waterstain

Story of aging glory,

Painted over, repaired,

Listing a bit, but still standing

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

The swan flew faster than ever

For fearfrozen fish,

Dived and then

BAM!!!!

Headfirst it glided through clear ice,

Outside the Pyrex factory;

A feather landed in the snow

Rosegarnished

Dinner

A lost recipe

Describing grief

Because love

Can be laughed at

You give yourself too much credit

To think the bank

Will keep your records and give you a history

After all your debts are paid.

BUCKING BRONCOS

ELECTRIC

BOOMTOWN

KNOCKING YOU OUT OF YOUR

BOOTS FOR FOLKS WITH THEIR BOOTS ON

Rodeo boots???

Bucketkicking boots?

Sparkling boots?

Toeup boots?

Showup toeup

You keep falling deeper

Into suicidal bliss,

Imagining how pretty

All the red will be

Against this season’s fashions

Sleep tight

Blanket’s big enough

To ward off

Fitful images

Someone died

Are you going to get laid

Down with them?

Pantheism poetry

And all religion

Is religion;

The isolationist universal

The singular sunset

The whole enchilada

Sauce and teeth and chopped liver

Winter

Cicada

Silence

Almost out of the maze

Modern man

Turns around to embrace

The haphazard hedgerows

“GOODBYE, JOHN CAGE”

Birds

How pretty they are

Before the pellets hit them

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

Called

You followed

The dead albino

Image

Of life’s

Metamorphosis

Mention

Sex and death:

Advertiser’s

Poetry of imprisonment

And plain appreciation

Of life unspent

Becomes premium

Insurance bait

Philosophy

Is what touches Earth?

It isn’t the connection?

It isn’t the improbable?

It is the meaning of “chance”?

It’s about suburbs in Heaven?

The soul’s extremity

Touched by all

During daytime?

Planes (made me almost deaf) landing

Nearby; John Lennon’s “Imagine”

Comes on the television this Sunday

Morning; Cat’s crazed, knocking over

The books from their shelves

And, as far as I know, the rest

Of the family is still alive.

An empty mug reminds me

Sunlight calls for coffee

To be dripped and drunk

My imagination grasps for Scotch Tape

SOME KILL BUT WE ALL DIE.

THAT’S THE SPOOKY CONNECTION

Every hunter becomes a prey

On the celestial marriage day

Every dream is real enough

When spooky ether gets coarse and rough

The Fear of Feeling Human

So,

Suck on this syringe

As I speed

AIDSinfected blood

Into your mouth

Unknown patchwork

Creeping cold confident

Winter?

So that’s the end of the story,

No web to wonder over and remember

No tales of spider glory,

An arachnid dismembered

And a poem about life?

Rilke screamed

But you didn’t listen

(He was dead and white)

Or did you?

“Let people die their own little death,

Each the one they choose!”

They lived a life for it, didn’t they?

How can you condemn the way they look

Or feel on the way out?

Dr. Pain’s a pane of squeaky glass

Poor or guilty

Sure trashes

The sixlane

Hatred as the only sin

In all its manifestations

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

Cirrhosis

Seeps in

But she’s always late

Looking deeper into dawn

I see that “God’s Peace”

Includes mollusks crushed

By those same seagulls

And crabs clawing at

Each other

Bent

If you think God’s poetry

Needs a name to sing

Christ’s frayed nerves?

Christ’s hopeless?

Love’s everywhere?

Even in the Winter snow

That covers its seeds?

Nahnana poo poo

My God is better than your God

There still are pockets

For the jingling change

Of your dreams and desires

Leaf balls?

Wind down

Creak bed

Fluff blanket

Leaf ballet

Wind down creek bed

Fluff blanket

Cool Winter sleep

Drawing angels

On every spare surface

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

You heal

You die

Trying to PUMP!… this poem up,

Another oily feather falls

GOOD FEATHERBOA

BIRDS

DIE YOUNG.

ONLY THE LONELY

DIE FAST

FLY PAST

Remind me of the razor

For your simple delight.

The candles can now do nothing for you,

Sharing hollow night.

I know when the blood comes out.

Stare into my eyes.

The horror hacks knees, lacks impact on me.

Your cold cruel cuts get old and tired;

The rusty razor holds no surprise,

But the soft, reoccurring warmth of the candle’s glow,

That, is the one great surprise I know.

With love,

Misplaced shotgun mercy,

Unable to let a doctor stick him

Or listen to his last,

Short, spastic, silent screams,

Killing Blind Boy,

The puppy whose brain

Ran out, run over, crushed,

Will be an image

I carry forever deep.

Skull (In Place)

Skulks

Cemetery

Silence

Hawk’s Flight

Diving into the last line,

Captured by a hunger for the beautiful

Stuffed rabbit on display,

Smashing against the plate glass,

Falling into a pile of feathers,

A couple of which I pick up for luck,

Stick them into the defrost vent,

Under my car window.

The catsup smells homey

The way Grandma did

Sleeping alone

In her apartment

She weathered

New Hampshire Winters

Without him.

Smoky death

Ghost mingles

Incense

In sense

Incensed

In sent

Incentive

Cancer isn’t

Only in chemical plants

Migraines make more militants

Quit complaining, you still are alive

You still can do something

What is the plural of faith? Flocks?

Fit the fit, the kinipshen to the fate

Of worms and fog? Could faith be skulduggery

In the delta or the warm glow inflamed?

Or is it something that continues

Throughout the storm

To hold the house together?

Vatican III

Through bad poetry?

Got a ruptured disk

Trying to rebreathe life

Into my grandpa

Not the way the cookie crumbles do I go.

Necrodice?

Doctor’s delight?

Entropy poetry?

Intimately,

Doctors watch people

Get old,

Ultimately, die.

Her breath was heavy like death

Smelled, as well.

Where silence is the object

Secret spirits reign

The WellTailored Pseudo of Cashmere Blame

Kvatch!

Blame your lover if he knew

Blame analogies for things kept secret

Blame authority

Blame lies

Blame me, for all the good it does.

There’s as much blame as there is

Virus

Life without life

Death

From pseudolife

Pseudolove

Pseudoblame

Pseudosuits of armor

With cashmere cloaks and ribbed edges

Head in hands

Whose head?

Whose hands?

Doesn’t matter

Does it?

Death’s a nextdoor

Gingko

Life is a thousand minuscule mindaltering

Amazements every fucking day!

Oh, get off your dead ass, formaldehyde breath!

If I thought I would

Get old, you know,

I’d …….

I don’t know what I’d do.

To be a poet

Don’t be impressed

By lifeless lines

Cacophony

Is God’s way

Of waking up the worried

Funny how the smog makes

Such beautiful sunsets

You embrace your nightmares

Write and talk about them

To hide deeper fears

About worlds you didn’t save

They let go of their mother

Before she was dead

Lost her when the doctor

Said, “Two years left”

Doppler’s effect

Is often affectation

Blue trailing red

You still could be dead

‘Snuff

Snuff poetry

Holistic health

Holding on

With no insurance

Who’s a Hecht?

That’s okay

Any memoriam of yours

Is a memoriam of mine

Dreams

Dust to dust

These lines did not need to be written

Actors and birds slamming against an invisible wall

Murder

Planned

Karma

Cracked

What’s in a name?

Bartleby bounces

Pinkerton colors the guard shack

Margaret could smoke a cigarette

And make more of a difference

Planktonfaced gods?

Glorify weakness to feel fresh?

My sister has a family album

Grandma was a Santa Claus to the mind

Sang lullabies to babies

As gifts

Daisy , hazy, dazy, lazy days

Of slumber

And a fountain of humid

Tumid roomtemperature

Terror

I can’t tell

You what these

Lines are really about

Talking

Like an insurance adjuster

Asking questions

After an incident

The equator

Ate her

Someone said it’s genius to think up one new idea

Someone else said the same about asking the right questions

I say it’s genius to be unaffected when you wish to be

Or is that the one that’s normalcy?

Pansies in Winter

Beauty’s still extant

Baking before her losstoothed smile,

Best molasses cookies and fudge

Until we all got fat

And Grandma was retired

To her rocking chair

And later her bed

And now the recipes

Are lost.

We would create “beauty”

In a box

A dark box

A cold dark box

A closed dark box

If it were all we had,

We would create beauty in a box

All the goods are mean

Anyone who likes Rilke

Can’t be all wrong

Preoccupied with lightning thighs

And swollen kisses

Preparing for a little death

That is not a sneeze

Age

Inverted

Is agelessness

Grandma turned toward her favorite tune

Whose

Fetus

Mends

Memory?

My grandma didn’t love another

Stayed true to Grandpa until she died

Gave us his memory like and orgasm

Made us see him

His heart exploding

Love

The photographer

Remains removed

From the scene,

Distant

While her subjects

Are dying for her

Haughty aspirations

Truth is obscured

By the dry lens

Without light haloes

At the crash sight

Night is a buffet

Shock the monkey

Train

Foul wince

Daunting stitches

Follow exactly

Coals live when we

Need them to stoke the fire

I cancel my subscription

Is this what poetry is supposed to be?

Of the house I must say

I let the termites,

Cockroaches, ants

Mice, rats and robbers

Carry it all away

House symbols

More cracks

To lick with love’s

Psychodrama

Painted with spittle

Sinking into the soft foundation

Of mortality

The center sagging

In a wide gaping smile

Surgical Haiku

Cut out foliage

Find a leaf

Fungus fever

The virus

To inspire us

Imagine

The way Münch

Would have painted

Judi

Luminous after lactation,

We cycle recycled

Knowledge

On the ledge

Of extinction

World War Two hero

Drives his old green car

When the children leave school

Screams maniacal

Hurls insults at them

Through closed windows

That sappy pine

Is pining for a comb

I heard the steam music

From the bankrupt resort

Haunting the lake with

Whist and melody

For one last time

To turn us around

She died on a couch you could see?

Were you watching a movie?

Or could you have helped her?

Green tongue

Ought to see a doctor

Nothing satisfies

The line

Searching for a period

Death

Is not a freak show

Oh well, to the living,

Death’s whatever one wishes

Lobsters still claw

Bluff backwards

Under rocks

Before they are red,

Embarrassed on ice,

Under glass

Winter, Winter, Winter

You are so insulted

But I understand

You purify the bulbous land

Freelancer

Is a doctor

Who doesn’t charge to break boils

Set the night before

The plates remain

Where my grandparents

Used to breakfast

Wheeze away

Wasted breath

He devoted his life

Two thousand words maximum

Last saltlizard

A sex lick

Slick sex

On the slippery slope

Of the passion levee

Filled with the power

Of the hard swat of waves

Along the warm, lapping

Of the ocean’s edge

The cute one,

The third pig

From the left

Is the suckling

One we want

To impale

Upon a spit

And roast

Tunnel dug

Into no light

Ending

Pretty landscape of bleached skulls

To tell us

You visited Hell

And what rock did you push

Or, rather, is the emotional retreat

Into words and memory enough

To pay for the paradox, for the clean

Sand the land agent promised?

Mirrors and ripples

Waves and warm spots

And no electricity hum

No boombox distraction

No news about the war

Widows

Wanting

Windows on the world

Worry about

Wanton moments

With wasted gigolos

Wrinkles and riches

With real words

A rarity

Landmines

Turned us

Back to the sea

My fastidious stomach

My illuminated belly button

My interrogative woolybooger

My forensic flea

Injustice fills me with distain

Doesn’t discourage But aids resolve

In these tired hands,

Fortifies the soft bread of my life force;

My hurting heart pounds with purpose,

Sometimes pretends to.

Walking along the shore

…….That’s all.

The more I studied humor,

The more comics made me cry

And cringe and nothing

Seemed funny anymore and that

Was just the beginning

Stuck, broken, on a halfsawed limb

Blood ran before

Lot’s wife

Salted the land

He was to be king

Didn’t stop for or need a crown

Going to war

They gloat about glory

Because a bluff is better

Than a cliff edge

Some days deserve

A good spanking

Snow waters

Grief

Both melt

At their own speed

My mind clicks like a grandfather clock

Too loud and stulted too late sometimes

Wound too tight or loosely offbalance

Yeah, right, all the good ones are already dead

Might as well give up then, huh?

Homey hexagons

Are not enough reward

For the waxworm crowded Queen Bee

Most poetry is words to me

But are screams my music

Is blood my ink

Is death my medium

Is anyone out there?

Pap

Smear

Finds junk

Mayflies do not despair

Over the comparison of moment

To moment, make snowy

Piles on asphalt anyway

My boy isn’t born

Death will not steal him today

Your children are under

Employed

Falling into the water

Under London Bridge

Living

But not laughing

I secede

From my drawl

Loom

Over

A carpet of lies

Guilty pictures in the attic

Rain lilies

Cut

By the lawnmower

My guy keeps saying

“Stop whining about it

We’re all dying”

Yesterday

Is a highway

Strewn

With exploded toll gates

I will never fear Summer

Nor falling faint in humidity

Your A/C love keeps me chilly

Poetry/History Lesson

This was not being read by Einstein when he died

Liverwurster

Glycerine glyphcyst

Assists extra words

Quasiplings

Neck springs

Economy of manifest wavy collapse

Fragment anything

Midlength lakeside

Night flight

From some

Live evil

I’d like to explore the future

The sadness of your eye

Eye sad

Sad looking eye

Me sad to your eye

Christian science fiction

Fiction christian science

Science christian fiction

Christian fiction science

Fiction science christian

Science fiction christian

Rain is a symbol for what?

Sun is a symbol for what?

In this poem, rain grows okra

And the sun causes skin cancer

STICKING TO THE ROOTS OF TREES

IN THE WASH BETWEEN SHORES

No Poe in the shadows

NOT REMEMBERING

IN CAPITAL D DESPERATE

MANIC D

GROPING FOR THOUGHTS WAYS

THAT INDICATE “I AM”

Grass connects the house

To the road. St. Augustine,

Browned by Manichaean mites

Mother prayed would go away.

It took Ambrose spectracide,

Defender of the grass,

To bring it back, green.

Rakes

Trees

Arms

Waiting

A leaf falls

All “spectral evidence”

Is in the speckled darkness

The light of desire and comfort

Relative silence grandparents gone

Youth is wasted

Always

In retrospect

Vatican II

Precession procession

A wobble every 26,000 years

Or so

I prefer dewberries

Crawling along the pasture

Under the grass in the bushes

Gone in two weeks

Ice warriors that melt in Spring

Are all but forgotten during exams

Swallow me whole

You’ll get more nourishment,

More than death pondered over

To assuage your night hunger

Pretend emotion

With a pseudo name

“And away go troubles down the drain”

I hear the skin of the Governor of Texas wrinkling

Poetry about people dying

Ritual cues

With romantic names

And foreign graves

Practiced passion

Precisely on the point

To praise the petty Prince in Paris

While warriors waste words

And are wounded way around the world

The single beat drummer

Pounds once

The heartbeat

Of an instant

Dad didn’t want to explain how hopeless things

Seemed after all the terrible things he’d seen

That’s why he was silent.

Writing drought poems

While St. Louis sits

Under ten feet of water

Trying for earthquakeinspired

Resurrection, trying to pull out

Of a deep pussy willow sleep

Blushing bells toll?

Trying to avoid the mawkish,

You explain your sorrow as “of the human race”

SITTING IN THE FREEZER

CAN BITE AT THE TOES

Tell the history

Of our society

In social security numbers,

Credit card records,

Passports and obituaries

That the temptations of Christ

Were just like mine, He

Being sure of his place

In Heaven, on the right hand

Of God, me trying not to lose

God’s favor, can not be called

The same, can they? The story is elsewhere

“But she loved me” he says

To himself, though destroyed

Teeth, liver, mind, romance,

As his body swells and he

Loses control of his colon

After questioning that lost

Love for so long

Consider the cat

Run over

Softly squeezing out colors

The gentle beast strangles

For purpleblueyellowgreen

Face effects

The flame of Maple and Oak

In Autumn

Not as fertile as Summer wildfire

Blackening the green slopes

Becomes Rum Winter

Antihistamine Spring

With smoldering heart

Burning

Life almost ended

And still writing only

As plum dead

One, two, three

Four syllables

Five more `til you die

Marriages

Only a certain

Amount of syllables

My mother said some beautiful things

One of them was that nothing is wasted,

Not in a human life of learning and love

In life we define life

The woman next door got scared over the years

She yelled that she would shoot me when I offered

To fix her gate, hid her lover in a backyard trailer

Let the dog doo build up inside the house so that

When the church finally came to take her to a home

It was six inches thick over the whole floor

The burro she left lame was fed for a while but

Soon disappeared. The church sends men to mow her lawn

The people on the other side said she was once a very

Important person in town, loved by everyone.

His mind moves serene

But not into the silence

Like a whole bunch of things that sound really good

It’s what follows that counts on a menu

The price tag that exposes the lie

The Apocrypha

The Bible

Its books

Which books?

Prayers are admission but any God that is

Does not need to ask for your ticket

Relish the death of those that annoy you?

Must hard actions be matched by hard thoughts?

Catsup, will ya?!!!

The first time I say a dead man

I grew my first grey hair no lie!

Let the world be the child

You can not bear

Those bugs drive me toward

Frustrated insanity

In Summer’s insistence

Stuck here in Houston,

Without a fresh Spring

The sky should not leak watercolors

No one wants to hear

that someone was killed for them

Where the doe dies is today’s poetry

WHERE I GO INTO DETAIL ABOUT THE

NEXT EXIT

To combat “no exit”

Cathedral conundrum the nub

Tell me the truth about laughter, old man

You let your father become a petrified postcard?

The Bible Belt is twisted between loops

Earth in October dusk

Fights

Does not call it

A night

Funny pop machine

Popping hilarious caps

Into my head

Goodbye Grandpa

Goodbye Grandma

Goodbye Grandpa

The smallest rose in the world was his gift

the house, the inheritance, the fooling around

Didn’t matter so much, after he was gone.

Okay, okay, you got away, dainty words

and faith intact

Diaphanous diaphram of death’s digressions

Night drops the drapes

Lights out

Engines humming in the sky

The shriek of falling secanols

Childhood includes enhanced healing powers

There are not two ways to save it

I’M LOST, I’M LOST

WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO NOW?

There’s war

After there’s

War with rules

Poets always want to revise their acceptance

Editors usually want to revise their lives

Waves and wind want to revise the beach

Darkness sparks

Fire flies

Wing ding

In car headlights

Evil playgrounds waiting

Niagara calling

Wave crochets the wind

Earth blushing, frost crawling

And I sit writing, frightened,

Inundated, undated, dated, ate D Ted Ed D

He slipped away

Loud, abruptly, like the cork

He so favored in his red wine.

The dead are protected from living curses

But not from the curses of the living

A mosquito dance

Praying for light

During the night

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.

Blue eyes surround me

Interior rain

Fills my cold brown

Foothills

Stock shock

The blood stroke

Spoke in a heartbeat

The broker broke

The bad news

On a black day

Putting her on her back

Speechless

Peachless

Each less

Ach! Less

Chess moves

To make tomorrow

Dune cradles

Sand cracks

Under inverted

Sky, dripping

Foam

These could be the lines of a living man.

Shit, man, I’ll listen the best I can,

Will understand the mirror,

As it reflects what I think I am.

The steam in your moustache

Sticks to you like Winter love

A steam that recycles and starts again.

You search for yourself

Without seeing your father,

Mortar and brick hands,

Squish, squish, stroke,

Tweek, nibble; he did

Have other rhythm

Practiced laying more than bricks,

With kisses and butterfly fingers

All over your mother’s breasts,

Squeek, squish, circle around.

Licking, sand sometimes,

Memories and houses

Were not all he built,

All he left,

His only healing art.

Dickweed

Peckerwood

No line to remember

Just another list

Of picture words,

With “I”s like hers

Why plant and plow

For Hemlock now

When poison is so

Omnipresent? Hoho.

MENTALITY RAGES AND WISHES

LIKE OCEAN WAVES SWISH AND ROAR

ONE STORY ONLY

Ring around the campfire

Pocket full of ___(blank)___ shit?

I decree there will be

Time and, well, …. that’s it!

Existential Closet

Solipsistic

Son of a cedar

Get back into your closet!

Slow Thinking

Using Einstein equations

To reach past the heavens?

Alcoved All

Dragonfly heart

Behind

Peering sunrise

Awaiting more universe

One shore

One one one one

Pretty shabby grace

To forget

A last embrace

Whose waves crush?

Hose waves crush

Hose aves rush

S ave r us

S ave us

What’s hard to accept

Is the gums giving up

Tick tock

Life is lingering

Death, sickness, philosophy

All become unreal when the doctor

Labels you

Fickle musiclover

Haunted by the ghosts

Of one note after another

Haunted, exorcised, haunted, exorcised

Because there has to be something

To fill the silences

Dawn pushes down;

Darkness drops into the West

I would rather have heard those old men’s stories

in that poetic post office than the fact that you

remember men, there, enhancing the flag with them.

…..Or Other Titles, Heads Without Bodies

(But Not Without Tales)

Few rest

Actual pour

Compassion blood

Then quiet

Silenced words

Valhalla was conceived

When war was not a lie

Now men deceived

(And women too)

Talk peace before they die

Hidden, peace

Is innundated

By surrounding words

Son being sad at your death

Is your reason for life?

I’m sorry he died, but on the ice

He was skating toward the shore

Maybe he slid to the other side

Without bruising his bum

Hockey Huff

A dead star, a lost game:

It’s all the same

Without a name

And such a shame

That you’re to blame

With your sick puck,

Your tightwrapped stick,

Skating the circled ruts,

Like you’re lame,

On pale blue lines,

Tinted tame

Peppering Snowblower is the Wrong Title for This Poem

Cheap fashion coat

To last only one Winter

Of no particular season

(ing)

Fun

eral

Flow

ers

Proccess

ional

Into

lerable

Lease

What’s the matter

In mind and matter?

Who will/would mind

The soul?

No smut here

Sluts think of death angels

Mourners fear a slip of the tongue

What’s a dead man a metaphor for?

I’m sorry your father had to die.

What does life mean to you now?

He pictures them

Fucking in Heaven

At closing time

At the void’s

Edge

The campfire

Never Say Never

“Nothing is right”

This Spring, but you don’t write (or do you?) that

“Nothing is left”

Resurrection of tuberous fibrils

No Freud in the closet

Not the one without clothing, dark

Enough to imagine our existence,

But here, alive again

Browning the edges

Of a light ray’s paint

Made glossy to remember

Grandma

I’m tired of people dying!!!!!!!!!!!

What do we have here?

Words to remember

People

To remember words?

Hard to Make You Count

A list of lists

Or a list of live things

Is as hard to count

As a list of dead mementos

So I add a dropped angel wing,

Ripped from her left side

For your violent poetry

Your “Mommy! Mommy!

It’s a mummy!” lines

Your obituary imagery

Your seashore sloth

Preferring poetry penned for lazy tongues

Like aural sex without foreplay for play

Depending, so much, upon who does the reading

And for whom

Life

Is a missed

Tree

We hardly ever see those shadows

Throwing dead bodies into the Dempsey Dumpster;

All these poets trying to be remembered in words

All of us, poets,

Trying to be remembered

In words

Rather than words

Remembered

………………..

………..BUT

“I did not kill no cat”

So heavy

So heavy, you hope

It’s all fat in there

The fan on the IBM XT

Winding down after the circuit’s cut

That’s an eighties metaphor for death

During a blackout

Boy, oh boy, there’s a dead body, there,

And this is a poem about it

Vulture

Hidden

In the raven’s shadow

We tear at the scabs

Weave word butterfly

Bandages

To seal the wounds

Frigid dark

Images in the flashing light

To avoid what things mean to me.

Is it enough? Is it enough

To let the heart know it means… something?

Isn’t that something like a moon without a sun?

Like an asteroid in a black hole?

So, Rilke lives?

Like Elvis?

I’m beginning to feel like a YouthVampire

Blow your breath cold

Rebreathing

Life into me

Rushing River

It’s not fair to the delta

To be so close to the ocean

With you,

Seedless, tired, running away.

DeerPoet

Runs forest paths

Scavenging for death

Skull skull skull skull skull

I think I’ll call this

RiverRhythm Poetry

(With analogous oars)

Tonight, I will not talk

About death at all

Oops! Already did it.

Diamonds and death

Flowers and death

Cold wind and death

Dancing and death

Cars and death

Poetry and death

Death and death

Every martyr is sacred

Every suicide is sacred

Every life is sacred

But some tongueless people

Work on computers

Bone dirt

Gas

From dead body

Yellow cardboard

That plastic smell

Of old photos

Mass graves to hide swollen

Reasons

Sand turned to help blood seep

Away

We go on with a certain

Justice

But justice

Just

Ice

In this desert

Bagel Dog

Has tire marks

Where the car ran over

His back legs.

He’ll never but crawl

Maybe we can build him a dolly

To skate over the hyperbole

Of “days that tread on” your “face”.

I’m almost used to not knowing where I’m going

Since they bought that trailer and sawed off my tail

I get the eerie feeling they’re going to make a show

Of me. (At least give me a luxury ride to the glue

factory)

Death is not the poet’s

Only job.

My favorite poets use it

Like a garnish

Orchard Memories

Trees growing back

But what does not?

What is this sense of loss

I feel?

What have I forgotten, here?

Okay, if I agree

That there’s no use

That all is lost,

Will you still strive

To be a cunning linguist?

Will you test your talent on me?

Hey, poet, hey hey

Help me make it through

The day

Poet reads the obituaries

To think up new ways

To write about death

The Altar

I found the title

And expect you

To do the rest

Of the work of

Knowing what

This poem is

“Hey, Stewy, this is Fred

Just thought I’d call to make sure

You knew there’s a crumpled body

Of dead poetry on your front lawn

And it’s starting to stink up the neighborhood”

BITTER, READY TO SETTLE SOME

SCORE

AFRAID OF AIDS BECAUSE OF THAT

SCRATCH

FROM A JUNKIE’S NEEDLE

When 3: PM dies

Ian cries

AFRAID CUS THE SEALS HAVE IT,

`CUS DOLPHINS HAVE SOMETHING,

AFRAID OF THE

SCREAM, ALTERNATING CRIMES

IN PERPETUAL SURPRISE CONFIGURATIONS IGNORE THE

Redundant ambiguity

SCREAM OF THE BUDDHA AFTER THE BUDDHA ROSE IN CRYPTIC WHITE

Casual, anonymous suicide

AMONGST

SCREAMING TREES

Poetry For No Cause

From an immortal Autumn

And select songs of scarlet

Procession, in perfumed evangel passion

Of tumbling crystal and windflight,

Swift moon, slipping into ardent freefall

Become elements and, with their velvet vessels,

Press to swiftly multiply

Icarus Hiccups

Dad’s hot air

And sporatic spasms

Are killing me

Words For A Poet’s Funeral

“That elegy really sucked”

Death, Disease, Destruction:

One would think

Poets could get published

Before them

If you had any idea of it,

You would not invoke

…….. Poetry, so lightly

When the poem ends,

The world begins

Blood rains and tears rain

And coffee rains down drains

And love juice rains

And we dance in the rain

What is time

Called in

Heaven?

Where is

God

Not manifest?

Are here and now

Only a deadend intersection

To the hereafter?

Uncle memories

What did you make of them?

All boundaries are lies

And the bullet is a lie

And its whistling is a lie

And the pain is a lie

And falling down

Inside some boundary is a lie

You gave your life to

The dream you dreamt of me

I did too

So sorry

Moon like an opening jar,

Flowers (let’s cut to the quick)

And death

Grave robbers!

Father’s Lesson

All love is precious

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)

Forever frozen in midsentence

Kickboxing karate angels

I will tell you that I really …..

Consider the options,

What you could be doing, right now:

Curing cancer

Creating a world

Resting your brain

Licking my bosom

Love

Does not always take on

A particular tone,

Gives in peculiar,

Unexpected ways

What people do you remember?

The ones who slurped and burped?

Or the weird ones that they wanted to be?

Battered

War and pancakes

Withered

Before mankind was so terrible

So hopeless and hollow

You heard the tones of “in whose image”

I don’t even see

Yesterday

Though these tears

The poem without words

Said

Everything I was going to say

Necklaces

There are people who are combustible

We know this because our solid waste policy

Allows the burning of tires

Seeds sown in our slippers

We throw out old laundry

Check the pockets of our jeans

For loose grandmothers

Oh me, oh my

Oh, why isn’t life

As dreary and dull

And awful as it is in books

Of poetry?

Ill,

I’ll

Will

To Willy

Who will

Love me for it.

Or will he?

If morning is the matrix

Dusk is the determinant

Finding a familiar, commonplace

Thing

Hefty bags to cart away all the

Rejections

Carrot peelings that were

Poetry

Blue bathroom tissue that was used

To wipe

Puddles of tears

After learning about

Death

Just a little

You read these lines, nothing.

Hey, honey,

Your eyes are deviled eggs

You ought to see a doctor

The game warden

And poacher

Entertain each other

Chalk crumbles to bits

In the excited teacher’s hands

We, the experienced, know the value of chalk

No embers, here

You

Really mean nothing to me

I’d rather have a revolver

Than your facedown, flat poetry

Nan’s Last Sneeze

Blew her brains out

Busted a blood vessel

The ears go first….

….eh?

God’s gone

On vacation

During dreary days?

Tragicly pretty

Cyan starburst

Burning out before

It reaches 7 billion

GET OFF IT!!

Dust in the Wind Variations

Ashes in the wind

Dust in the ocean

Ashes in the ocean

Asses in the river

Quick, someone get a camera!

The minute of the cat

The hour of the cat

The year of the cat

One has more publicity

When The Work Is Done

Spotlessly clean kitchen

Shining, prim,

Is eerie at midnight,

Smells of death

Floating into twilight

On a raft of lashed

Corpses, bloated,

Rotting, I hope the sharks

Aren’t hungry tonight

Love is

Turning a Daughter’s

Bedroom into

A guest room

Or a den

Or something useful,

Not doll house memories

And stuffed animals,

Collecting dust

Preferring to Admire Her Tanned

Youth

Blinding, golden

Sun slips

Under her bikini,

Dries the sand,

Digs UV into

Disrupted skin

(Should we tell her

The trouble she’s

Going to be in?

These Tears

I won’t be happy

Until the whole world,

Maggot to magistrate,

Plant, vegetable, fish, animal,

All hear me crying these tears

Oblivious

Complacent, comfortable

In a cage,

Squeezing in on you

Begging for romance,

Deprived of your beauty,

I press my lips against your window,

Melt the coating of ice

So what, if I get stuck here

For the Winter?

You bring down the hatchet

To chop the timeline,

Cut me off from the past

Rasp

Crusty wood

Filing away

At your unshaped

Life

To expose

The whittling

Death

Underneath

Nothing delicate

About the

Spring

In my couch

Joy

Is a timerelease capsule

And grief is a bad cold

No! Wait!

Grief is a timerelease capsule

And joy is a bad cold

Graycoloured,

British

Beauty fades

(While some of us, here,

Keep replacing parts

Until the car rusts away

From inside)

12Step Addiction Addiction

Poetry is not a drug

If anything is not a

Drug like the little pills

In the brain of prayer

We don’t bake bread

For simplicity or smell,

Forget about Grandma

Nuzzling soft,

Wonderfluff flour

And Chips Ahoy!

Disability?

Are the “disabled”

Still

“Disabled” when

Dead?

Sickness shows up

In those Dr. Kildare, Ben Casey poets’ lines

Because they can’t face death and censor sex

And lost their “Birds of North America Guidebook”

And lent flower catalogues to a real gardener

And gave Bullfinch’s Mythology to Grandma

And all they have left for reference

(Since they mostly avoid boisterous life)

Is that yellowed Gray’s Anatomy from when

They thought they might study “PreMed”,

Until they realized that physician’s assistants

Were going to be having all the fun and profit

Was going to be reserved.

On the road to neither a prairie nor a prayery poem

You think the spilling of blood

Will make you remembered

When anyone anywhere

Can spill more than your match

See what I mean?

Blood, blood, blood

Blood and it’s the fourth

Blood you’ll always remember?

Blood , blood

Horror is a hiding place

From

Mortality

Sex and Death

Rope burns

From

Suffocation sex,

I prefer to keep the two

Separate, as far as possible,

Feeling His Eye

Then lumpy

Oatmeal warmed

His insides

There was fire

In the furnace

Astigmatism

Of crosseyed

References

Poking fun at

A sty and stigma

Attached

To infection

Inflection

Flecks of dust

Witnessing

Takes no certain tone

And it’s your religion’s

Failure to leave that unknown

Nighvisiton

….. He said

Past crying, men and boys, left naked before

Heaven, scream before she has taken all eyes.

Hell ghosts in floats left a window

Times a thousand. Veiled dreaming of the thousand

Naked midnights, more lady to princess,

She’s my my and and through.

Can’t

“Revoke”

Life fuckups

On the laws

That created them

Pulling violence out

With limbic insertions

Implanting the peace

Of a mere machine

That only requires gas and oil

Fuck You, May

When you personify

Me out of the picture

Don’t expect me

Not to cry foul

Or take it personally,

But of course, you can’t tell

And don’t really care,

So, I say, “Oh, well”

At least sun and earth are there

For you To pay attention to

A year before he died,

My grandfather didn’t say anything

To me and I didn’t call him.

I was far off and working on a

Callgirl’s career

Mortified But Not Fried

…. And “she” will be

Ever mortalized

In the dying lines

Of my “she” poetry

fall down

walnut

pudding maker

Daisy chain

Of Herpes/syphilis

(spirochete)

Genital sandwich

Of HIV crystals

Norepinepherine

Minus one

Oh please

minus one!

Dad explained

How hard it is

To understand.

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!

Oh well

When I sat the shrunken

Onions

With green shoots

In the hanging basket,

The kitchen

Smelled

Of the sauteed liver

You used to prepare

So well

Oh well

Subtlety about AIDS

Is not uncalled for

Deceit

But it is in a higher sense

Uncalled for

Face in hand…………..

I’m an old fart

Publish me!

Death

Lies

Life

Lies

Death

Let’s see….

Patient as bacteria

Patient as pockmarks

Patient as plaster

Patient as a rubberband lobster

Patient as a bullet

Patient as a hungry goldfish

Patient as a lump in the throat

Never forget……

Shit!

….. I forgot what.

FREAK OUT!

DON’T MAKE A SCENE

FREAK OUT!

HOW MUCH DO I FREAK OUT?

LET ME COUNT THE WAYS.

I FREAK OUT WHEN I HAVE TROUBLE

BELIEVING IN THE RHYMES AND REASON

FUCK IT!

I FREAK OUT WHEN I FEEL SICK

I FREAK OUT WHEN IT DOESN’T SEEM

WORTH IT ANYMORE TO TRY TO CHANGE

MYSELF AND OTHERS

WHEN MOVEMENT IS JUST

TOO MUCH FUCKING TROUBLE

FUCK IT AND FREAK OUT!

FUCK THE PUNCTUATION,

FUCK THE COMMAS,

I GOT A POETIC LICENCE

ELITIST, I KNOW, BECAUSE

THERE ARE SO FEW OF THEM ISSUED

EVERYONE HAS POETRY TO SHOW MOMMY

FUCK THIS SHIT

I WANT TO CRY

I DON’T WANT TO DIE

I THINK I’M CALMING DOWN

I DON’T WANT TO HAVE A HEART ATTACK

DON’T WANT TO BE

FORGOTTEN UNTIL THE VERY LAST MINUTE

R,_W,_&_B

My words

Are blue

Varicose veins

Of patriotic

Coloration

Caucasian

With high high

Blood pressure

A beautiful day

With Daddy

And all I think of

Is death

We buried her dad

In chemical waste

Foxy

Caught in a trap

She forgot

All about the chickens

Flaccid time

Is a delicacy

When savored

Dear Walt,

So happy you’ve been learning

Getting educated

So glad you now know

That night follows whereever you go

Yeah, “A world

Only we can build”

Imagine no possession

Elders

As dying comes

What’s a MASTIFF?

A mast if the wind is blowing?

A mass tiff when we all are angry?

A Dead mother? (Sick Mom with arthritis?)

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

3 lines forsaken

For the “good idea”

Of the following 6 lines

(Which I won’t include here)

A snifter of Summer

(But only one

At a time)

The only things

That are even a little different

Are the poetry pieces

Under these seasons of change

Written

In this old house

And the barn

That needs rebuilding

And the windows

That crack in the Winter

A Sighting, A Gift

Gulls lifting land crabs to sky

All at once

Dropping them

Lapin Love

After rabbit stew

The worms come out

Attach to the stomach

And wall like calamari

In the dark acid ocean

Of a full belly

That ‘s where starvation

Begins its paradox

The more you eat

The more hollow you become

Bloated, tight, like a drum

Ready to explode release

What was I thinking

When I moved to the country

With you, hoping I’d be

Kept comfortable

In the (sainted) sated (sainted)

Warmth of your lapin love?

Don’t give us any more time

To excuse our selfimposed blindness

That’s why images are poetry

We don’t see for ourselves

It is October

Everything is

Cool, smells of wholes,

Concrete blisters,

Ice to fill them

Soon.

(And then, of course, it’s going to twist and turn them,

make them swell out of shape and break through their

boundaries and have holey babies so that soon there’ll be

more holes to fill and then leaves will leave, it will

leave and be a different season)

Scrubbing the dirty bottom

Of the twoheaded baby

You bore and called Poetry

Already stinging it sightless with soap

Putting screams in its burbling mouths

Considering murder vicariously

You say they say “Stop, you’re killing me!”

Winter heart contracts

Unborn

Ungathered

Unpotato

Unto

Una

Unroaming

Unfarm

Undog

Unleave me together

Unstars

Undigestion

Life is a long Learning

Lesson listing names

On Gravestones

For recognition

And memory exercise

WHAT THE FUCK

AM I GOING TO TO NOW?

FORGOTTEN, UNTIL THE VERY LAST MINUTE?

Sick old

Simbiotic

Sucker lines

To soothe

Some

“So & so”

(FORGOTTEN UNTIL THE VERY LAST MINUTE?)

Lamentation: Limerick Lamentation

A writer who courts lamentation

With grief as the seed of gestation

If pumping the pud

Of a world full of crud

And fucking all cause for elation

Cynic

Cyborgpicnic

Boring pick

Ring or pie

Go cynic go

Snicker to your candy

Bar none you’re undone

Belt one down

And die in pieces

Replaced easily

Surprise amputations

Surprise, surprise!

I lose

Letters

Along

Way

B t

Ok .

Why could God want a ranch

When his sheep roam without boundary?

God’s ranch with spurs and barbed wire

Beauty heaped upon beauty

Pinkly profligate

Mulch pile with carrot peels, broccoli and beets

Make humans stupid and weak enough

And they’ll not fight for love,

Nor land, nor freedom, nor food,

Nor comfort, nor ideals, nor self,

Nor soul

After Any Particular Thing

Future family tree

Fucking without aim

Or aiming

Toward a future with

Oh, my Gosh! Imagine that!

A future with things I never

Thought about imagining!

On other worlds, to boot!

Why do the wee old men hide?

Is it something inside

They don’t want the children to see?

Oh! Injury!

What could mollusks

Mean to me?

Oh! Injury!

Insects are swatted

By the sea

Oh! Injury!

Fish taken breathless

Uneaten, rotting

Oh! Injury!

How terribly trite

Compared to the way you treated me

Oh! Injury!

It’s a big world of art, now

Commemorate your ass off!