skip to main |
skip to sidebar
We cling so hard to life,
so tightly to each other
like rock climbers
doing crosswords with their bodies
getting deliberate grips
on handholds hardly seen
more felt, or thought.
Like the hollow of my elbow
cradling your right shoulder
my left hand
cupping your left shoulder
our lips murmuring like birds.
In slanting sun,
last light lingering on peaks
we scarcely knew were there
when we began to reach
for an unseen summit, an imagined top
our hearts felt for.
Our eyes clenched,
we picture this pitch,
this short stretch of rock
sheer, gritty, clinging
like a rough crucifix
on a wall of straight gray mountains.
That vault toward happiness or heaven,
toward evengold and blue,
your eyes two soft hymns,
our breaths releasing prayers
as the light dims.
Masses ignorant of their fate
know not their age is growing late.
Rising, setting; the sun shines still.
For all they know it always will.
The war they see as just a threat;
"Don't take our son-- at least not yet"
"We want him not to grow up in fear"
"Go to college, be an engineer."
For all the past-- who did they save?
Amidst freedom they made you a slave.
In the name of freedom they'd never harm
so amidst love they created the bomb.
Who was it for? Mom and her apple pie?
What was the answer? What? Why?
And the third person plural form of "to die."
Into a time of temperance they were born
The social fabric can't be torn.
But under their superficial veil of elation
they're against silly concepts like
brotherhood and cooperation.
"Just a counterculture, it must be laid to rest"
"We'll know with time, for time is the test."
She opens the kitchen door,
feels fresh chill through her white nightgown.
She faces west. The full moon is setting in the dawn,
sliding behind a row of pines.
Moonset-sunrise
provides a certain cycle, she thinks.
She knows. There's a hint in how the moon glows
silver, while golden sun shyly hides in the east,
biding its time.
She likes the plan, or order
to moonphase and the way
her clean bare feet feel on the threshold
of a new day.
Hiding in the darkness with a bee,
I'm all alone and no one comes near;
I'm drowning my sorrows
on dreams of tomorrow.
It's sad to think that this country,
once empty and free,
is quickly filling up with strangers
having nothing to do with me.
I wish they'd fuse or diffuse
and take the burden off the future
for deciding the human geography
and settle down to building
something timeless and true;
That's something I'm feeling
I'm needing tonight.
The sounds of twilight take their toll.
Any minute now strangers will break the spell
by charging in
and catching me off guard
in a moment of control.
Out of the subterranean terrain
where card games may go on all night
some Diogenes is looking for
one honest Platonic relationship
as two technocrats are trading bits and bytes.
Omniscience has subtly descended on my senses;
all six of them are on alert.
I even understand the crickets' cadences
so of course I'm well aware
of the Doppler effect as applied to stairs.
The pitch dips low
and my sense of grandeur is in death throws.
The end of the world,
as the end of the evening,
is in the air.
He turns the corner and sees me there
"come back to the party," he says,
in the dark, in the corner,
all alone,
"It's not a healthy sign."
"I don't know," I say,
"This is where life sometimes hides,
come join me."
We drove down to the Outer Banks,
west wind whisking us along the 2-lane,
till the land flattened and the sky took on the smudge of sea.
Rounding a bend, we saw a flock of birds
take flight from bare branches,
like leaves falling up, scattering to the seasons.
As we arched the causeway bridge
seagulls hovered at the highway's edge
and by the oceanside we flew away the day,
stretching out our arms like wings,
echoing the gulls' laughter.
We soared above the rush and suck of surf,
the plovers darting on swift stilts,
the mesmerizing ripples of dunes
darkening in December's early dusk.
We watched the tide flow out
and the stars ascend, beyond the shorebirds' reach
and the reflection of rising Orion
in the magic silver ebb wash of the beach.
They tell me Venus is just an example
of the greenhouse effect gone crazy
which reminds me of driving through LA
jaded and hazy.
Everything there is crazy.
(And far below on the desert road
rites of passage in the van of passion).
Two sweaty days of leaving home;
nauseous and feeling nascent.
Don't be afraid,
fear will only make it harder
when the flames come to engulf you.
You've been cheating the asphalt shibboleth;
don't kid yourself that you're escaping death.
It's not like going to Venus.
It's not like Hell.
They tell me God is everywhere
and angels can dance on the head of a pin,
but when the van of passion takes to the road
you better get in and sin.
The tires squeal,
and on the horizon you see
Venus is sinking low.
Driving is now taken over by Death;
more dead bodies on the way to TJ.
You don't fit
You're like me
Feel like shit
Can't relax
Want to leave
Face the facts
You don't fit
I don't fit
Odd man out
Your sirloin tips
Make me wanna shout
Gotta get closer
How about...
I never thought I'd live to be a minion
I never thought the ponderous suburbs
And bellicose infrastructure
Would work me up and down
And leave my green and sustainable dreams
Dun and dead ended
A world of opposition made friendly;
You can break me
You never will bend me!
Shake hands with the eurypterid
Don't you know this love is real?
I'm just a creature of flesh and bone
I have feelings just like you
I just want to have a happy home
I am innocent
My heart is pure
I'm just not like you
I just took principled stands
In wrong places, wrong times
It makes me sad to know I'll be crazy
The rest of my life
(It makes me crazy to know I'll be sad
My whole life)
I watch through the peep hole
They put the 20's under the cash tray
They put the 50's and 100's if they take them
too
They put them all under the cash tray
Like a child is put to bed at night
Oh hey
Ride the plesiosaur
Catch the reading bug
Behold the flight of the wiffle hen
You are not alone
(No I am fucking alone)
I wish I knew what was at stake.
Saif and Rani
We don't care about the climate warning
And the promotion of a living hell that your grandchildren will live through
Me kind and friendly
The scariness of red teeth
Bared to you an enamel star
Feline retreats
For murine feints
I think you picked the wrong place to stay
Everything you love will be taken away
Life under the petal throne
The universe is the size of a cat.
Space miner
Mission so clear
What could be finer to a space pioneer?
"Service time is lonely
Live it up before you pass away."
I want to be there when the savage comes
When my savage brother daniel
Who is older than me
And cannot heal my pain
With his devastating mind
Wilfrid S. Bronson has died
And I can't help but elide
Tales of the painful years
Chip Wheelie since 2002
Good grades and Admit One
For now guidance is internal
I called up my dad on New Year's Day morning to wish him a happy new year and, as usual, to make sure he and mom are in good health and good spirits. I dread the day I get the call from one or the other telling me that one or the other is in the hospital and has had a stroke or a heart attack or fell and broke a hip. Having lost two siblings in the past 3 years, I dread the continuing dissolution of my family. The past two years have been a quiet, reassuring interlude.
Anyway, my conversation with dad somehow went from vague niceties and talk about the weather to reviewing all the threats to humankind facing us in the next 100 years. Dad thinks the years around 2050 will be the watershed when things really begin to go downhill. I was reminded what a pessimist dad is at heart (he always called himself a "realist," however). That is where I got that streak, too, and I wish I didn't absorb it as if by osmosis, but there it is. And like dad, I have contained that nuclear core of despair with a protective shell of pacifism and strained positivity and trying to get people to get along. It's weird. I am very much both my mom and dad distilled into something different than either. But I love them both so much.
Thirty days in the hole
Next contestant!
What the hell do you expect me to do?
There's only so much
Slack I can give you--
I spit on your Siberian Khatru.
So stop sitting on
The fence
Roll out your best response or
Your last defense--
Or get the next
Contestant.
Please
I've got anger
And an endless supply of
Victims
And a gun
No one's gonna take
Responsibility
Until it's done--
It's such a perfect, practical
Day.
I follow the drift fence
From anon to thence
Hoping the trail is
Not a fader
And I may spy
The back end trailhead
