Art (from Glen)

Go ahead and take your knife,
rip me open to save my life.
Tear through the skin,
abdominal muscle,
a layer of fat,
the body's defenses.

What is your name?
Not work,
not Bach,
not logic or order.

Your name is Sylvia,
or Wendy, young,
younger than I am now;
I know your name,
but I can't see your face.

I remember a redbush, burning in May.
We walked without shoes in the sun by the school.
We held hands then and again in the fall.
You gave me five poems and left in December.
I remember your words and that's all I remember.

Withal Without

The fight to face
The gadfly fear
Of being alone
Alone here within my skull
With chemicals and memories and pain and all
Waiting (for what?) in this empty house here
Vision blurred, eyes full of tears
Withal without
A hope for feeling fine
Into mother earth I step out...

Winding Down

It's all winding down.
Every thing's winding up dead.
High School students graduating.
Uranium turning to lead.

This is the Last Whole Earth.
All the others are gone.
Entropy's mower cutting the grass
Of life's eternal lawn.

I'm standing beneath towering trees
Wondering at earth and sky;
The sad/glad vision of endless life
You see when you're going to die.

I would like to sit beneath these boughs
Like a buddha, till the light shines through
Some truth I can hold and save and use
But there are people I must see to.

urban backyard (from Glen)

Even here I feel nature.
Nightfall smudges the clutter of houses,
awnings, phone wires, power lines,
and sitting still on the back stoop
I am surrounded by life.

Dogs, fenced in, yelp at the silent stalking cats.
Birds talk too, in brief repeated trills
or mourning doves' haunting hoots,
and with a faint flutter of wings
two cardinals alight on the side gate.

A cricket sings somewhere.
Bees home in on their pecan-tree hive
and hovering above the porch floor, a butterfly,
silent and shadowy, seems to mark a sacred spot,
a monument, a grave for the day.

Symmes Township Suicide Club

Down the road at 90
Falling rocks and caved in trestles
Lose it at 100
Packs of wild dogs and killer frogs
Axe murderers in the vicinity
Hidden bogs and fallen logs
And sudden loss of virginity
It's suicide with symme-try
Get to the corporation line!
Get to the corporation line!
Gotta be out by five of nine
Gotta get out of here in time!
Point me down the road to Indian Hill
Hurry me out of this homicidal hell
Their bikes are all polished, engines are tuned
Leather vaseline coated
Hair slicked back and well groomed
They ride at nine, under the full moon
Your chances are slim tonight
Your headlights are dimmed tonight
It's not safe in Symmes tonight
With the Symmes Township Suicide Club
On the loose!

spring (from Glen)

A pair of old shoes by the toolbox,
set on the steps at the cellar door.

Sycamore tree reaching a peeling limb
over the back porch, painfully bending a knee.

Great gusts of wind gnash round the house this noon.
A spirit with something to say--
but what? Is it the way the screen door slams,
the leaves, blown down from above, as they dance
in skittery circles on the brown grass?

St Francis Bird Bath (from Glen)

My face frozen in afternoon sun,
I bid birds to come visit me
like children, one by one.
December frost rims my chin
and I fear my flighty friends
have no need for my ice pool,
not even to drink.

But I can wait.
I shall stay still, noble and statuesque
perched with arms outstretched;
Christ carried a cross.
I will wait for my flock.

Nukes on Parade

Those problems you've got:
"which deodorant is best?"
"my baby is pissed at me"
won't mean diddly-squat
(if indeed they ever meant anything)
because I can feel it in my bones:
we're heading for
nuclear war
yes the skies grow black
in my mind
fill with visions of SAC
the jets of doom
fly across my lonely room
but my mind is overactive
radioactive
isn't it strange
for a nice young thing like me
to be so afraid
of armageddon nightmares
nukes on parade
mutants and generals
and cities aglow
waves of ICBMs again
and again
and punk rockers enjoying it all.

Ploughs in Heavy Snow

Try to sleep: forever night.

That dragging rasp on the road through town,
a change in pitch when it hits the incline.

Trucks come and go. Yellow strobes
bounce off low clouds, the only motion
in darkness that is white.

It will always snow.
Freezing as it falls,
the same filled frame,
sequences in a dream beyond time.

Evil Maria

On.
They want to turn you on.
You're just like a machine.
You respond to the routine
of the high luster virgins
who do a DNA dance
in their tight-as-a-nut robot pants
while their transistor lovers
leave the bar and take a chance,
case the gyrating host with an x-ray eye glance.

They've been scouring Metropolis
for an evil Maria.
at all the robot hang outs
on the chance they might see her
and take her home, well greased,
plug her in, and at least
exchange sparks and a laugh or two.

Maria's been programmed
to activate glands,
and she always makes her mark
when she lures them into her gunmetal dark.
her TV eyes measure every robot move
as this machine-age guy slips into her sterile groove.
Then the biggest surprise in the life of this sex-robot
is when Maria takes forever
and everything he's got.

Evil Maria left her robot lover
drained and unconscious in the alley;
a shattered libido recorded on graphs
a series of peaks and valleys.
And somewhere in a box of silver
good Maria slumbers, waiting
for the day her womanhood is regained
and the cyborg finishes mating.

So if you happen to be in some nightclub
catching the machine age scene
and you meet a girl with electricity
but no spark--
well, I warned you, because she might be
Maria.
Mechanical Andro-Responsive Indexing Automaton.
On.

(none: I wrote this back when I was 16 or 17 and was obsessed withe the classic art deco
Fritz Lang movie Metropolis and was blissfully ignorant of patriarchal images and themes. Also it was the Age of Disco, so there's that, too.)

North Woods

Land of shadows and silence
burns with cold smoke like pine.

You who fly by night, read the empty echoes.
Lake's still silver streaks speak in signs.

Grey lords of the long season,
not a single star or a green needle fall
or leaf go gold in autumn
that you have not known.
Each comes full with time.
Each has a place for it alone.

Summer wildflowers bloom and grow
on endless afternoons,
every petal precise.
When the winter of the Wolf Moon blows
they slumber under ice.

Veins

mainline feels fine
when it's heavy fare
'sokay, it'll go away
I'm already halfway there
and soon I'll need some more
it was never this way before
virgin veins in ecstasy
pierced by heaven's artillery
I became god on command.

Can't You Feel

Can't you feel the wheel
rolling over you?
Can't you feel the steel
that is ripping?
Won't your dough even grow
in the oven... hot?
Don't you want to know
if the weed you smoke is pot?
Does it make you smile?
Make you grin?
Are you imagining
your tummy full of gin?
Can't think straight?
Better watch yourself.
There are those outside that hate you,
gonna make you lose,
gonna get you,
gonna get you
in those disco shoes.

I've been hit and run so many times
it isn't funny
but in the end
yes in the end
it's kinda intangible.

Look at me
I'm just a kid;
never had a chance
caught me with my pants
down.
Somebody get the number of that truck.

Flood

Lady in black,
stop the rain.
The river's rising,
fields are flowing.
Muddy water's lapping at the levee,
Families fleeing floodplain for the bluff.

Dark mother,
sky is crying.
The wind is rising,
night's full of tears.
Centuries of sorrow blowing on the storm.
Mommas need a dry place for their babies to be born.

Coal-dark soul,
full of sin.
I am rising,
no roof over my head.
Raindrops make soft patter,
gently rock me down the river.

Starman's Guide Part 2

Protein factors stare me right in the face
The tapes roll by of the human race
One man's infinity is just another's empty space
Here where uncertainty quivers
At the eighth decimal place.

And lace curtains add the little touch
that, except for the fusion drive hum,
lets you almost imagine you are home;
the smell of home cooking
on the front porch
and a generation's lazy dreams
of flying mother nature's silver seed
to a new home in the sun.

Next Door (from Glen)

Randy's got his Model T torn up again,
balanced on blocks half-out, half-in
of the garage under the house.

Rear axle and drivetrain
draw hopscotch lines
where he lay them on the driveway.
He crouches under the car,
contentedly tinkering at midnight.

He's hung his workman's light
below the rear right wheel
and shadows of the spokes
project a giant Japanese fan
against the garden wall.

Randy's black hands probe
the known beloved bearings,
vital greasy gears,
casting shadow characters
on the stage-fan of light.

The Fall of the Roman Empire

Kiss me

I speak Latin

Kill me

I worshipped false gods

Sex  money  power

You know what they say

Autant d'hommes, autant d'avis

Whatever that means

It means

I'll bet any scholar

Up to twenty dollars

That I know the real reason

That the Roman Empire fell:

Keeping track of emperors

Was hard as hell.

The Poetry of Dying (from Glen)

A few final drops,

then the crickets start up.

The night storm has stopped.

Light is still far off

somewhere beyond house and clouds and silence.

A shade hangs in the window.

There is no way out

just a drawn breath of waiting

and praying for angels to sing me to sleep.

Seagulls on Copp's Hill

A harbor wind,
warm summer's breath.
White wings askew blue sky.

Your blown brown hair, white dress
against granite.
Grey gravestones surround us in lines.

There's a hole in the fence where we sneaked in here.
Love loves death and an edge on the air.

Endless Sea

Her waters wash the dregs of centuries
upon the dogged shore
-- she comes in swiftly
-- she goes out slowly
And she will forever more
Yes she will forever more.

My father was a man of the ocean
his ocean flows in me
-- she makes me restless
-- she makes me pine
To find his endless sea
To find his endless sea.

Her boundless stretch
I see on high
her sparkling azure waves;
The dauntless heroes
of ages past 
lie deep in watery graves.

To me she is
a barrier
dividing separate shores;
To my life's quest
to find the lands
of which I've heard in lore.

Sail on!
Sail on!
The wonders you will see
when you set sail for the end
of the endless sea.

A land of mighty sailors
with silver sailing ships;
In iron plated clippers
their heroes went on trips.

Challenging the very sky
the bonds of earth were freed;
my father saw their blazing boats
traverse the endless sea.

But that was very long ago
and now they quest no more;
now I am but a dreaming waif
upon an endless shore.

Oh god there's go to be some thing
over the horizon
I want to know what mysteries lie
across the endless sea;
it beckons me
to wonder at the things I cannot see.

I want to go
oh I want to go
Lord I want to go
I want to sail--
what can there be
beyond the mighty endless sea?