Mayflower to Sin City

The Las Vegas lightening was invigorating

much more so than the blippityblingblang

drone of monetary ignorance

and the glare of throbbing neons

through a rainspewn windshield.

Monday morning in Vegas

was so far from my imagining...

somewhere in the distance of the

International Airport

is a single slotmachine

dinging away, and figures with

empty pockets strewn about the floor,

snoring, awaiting

flights back to 9-5 and billcollectors,

debts and the pump of heels on concrete,

pushing rayon skirts beyond the

just-above-the-knee mark.

In the casino a headache crowded my skull,

as if so many of those hoping to make it big were in there, crooning

win the big bling, the faraway glimpse

of millions and millions and forget

all you owe, because this, baby,

is a tabula rasa palimpsest.

Thunder and rain, lightening

and the flame of a distant fire burning

in a home I don't have keep me awake

and clear my aching brain of

indirection and a pain

I can't quite put my foot down on

to stomp out the want of something

I know I don't deserve at this turn

of tides in a desert of vice

and romping indecision.

Like those pilgrims

nearly 400 years ago

who first set foot on that Rock

to face a near future

of starvation and strife with HEATHENS,

this life is studded with the dreams

we don't quite know how to pursue

because we have yet to stumble upon

the resources or the aide of some

abiding alibi, sometimes love.

The heathen strangers like us

who are not along for the promise

of god's chosen this-and-that riprap

of give and give and take even more

gluttonously,

we we will somehow prevail

the loss of a diligence in favor

of a remote-controlled digified hifi

rancor in order to simplify.

We we will scale down to the bare threads

of that which will force us to breathe

in deeply the follies of our ingenuity.

all we must do

is to

realize

that

each

breath

we

take

is our own.

tremors

something runs through my nerves like

mexican jumping beans trailing

long spindles of silk.

At the end of the line,

a slight wallowing, a hollow

yearning for stillness and movement

and novel remedies to an ancient disease;

we were once locked in attics for

these unfounded shakings in a structure

once sturdy.

but who am i to question

the intuitive motions a body endures?

like an unfurling scroll of testament

to perennial adaptation,

the desiderata of my sensorium

will once again go placidly amid

sham, drudgery, and broken dreams.

still, when the drums roll

for change, for future dates merging,

or even for a thing as small as

the loss of a chair with a familiar view,

a constriction wells up

under sternum and scrapes at

the core of my complacency.

A scooping away of stagnant

yet addictive comforts.

And this is good.

Make way for the unknown

pockets of lucid sentience

down my rare-trodden lanes of

vicissitude!

Love Revised

As skies flourish with the waxing storm on waning moon, a sweet languor rises in my chest, warms the gullet bereft of hot breath in the presence of you. These poems are graspings at May footsteps in trodden grass, commitments to change in a lunar sense: the burgeoning and sloughing off of tentative silences. What holds you to what you see of me are those graspings alone. I like to find pleasures not found at once, but hidden within something of another nature. Like icicles dusted with sugary new powder, or the smooth sharp spruce needle budding from resinous sap, we, too, belied our design-- or merely sought to be synergy incarnate.

Split Wood, not Atoms

give me a maul of decisiveness and a splittin’ round of sage foundation, and i will change my swing on things. i will wedge into my conscience: temperance like a green log, unseasoned for burning, hesitant— but with the pull of the freeze, splits, separates, sacrifices itself; the hollow sound of fullness, sonorous in wood under the sway of ice (frosty siren of night and clarity?) and a glimpse of the scarlet horizon; the swooping arc of an axe midair— the threat of precision and plea of narrow aversion; ffwa-chunk! connection, but no division and lift axe locked in log, and schwunk! silence as two promises of warmth breach and fly from one; the devotion of simplicity imbued in sweat

The Smell of Sex

Yesterday thought of nothing but

sloshing mouths, grasping limbs & clutching hands,

flavor of repression released,

and palms sliding down a back moist

with the dew of transpiration-- finally.

Through the mundane day's events

the musk of the coupling--

sweet and cloyingly ancient

like ocean air charged with the harmless weight of thunder

or just the breath of the stars themselves--

wafted around the corners of

doubt & loss,

toward a moment

one moment

dispersed into a zillion soft-edged

planets perfumed in the night's cologne.

I wondered whether others

identified the aroma pervading my periphery,

infused in my hair,

clinging to fingers that touch today

with constant glances

back on a moment

one moment

the distillation of a zillion soft-edged

planets whose synergy bathes my body

in light.

Us as Arcs

So what we are is how we were (where is becomes was) when was meant now… when every it, be, do stops (tenderly, mindlessly) it’s only for these bodies woven, these quivers (like ripples: expansive) of bundles of nerves recharged and calmed. a word is a string of shapes that, evanescent, is sent up once spoken in a rapid and harmless line. but a doing clings and slithers, terribly parallel to the earth. perpendicular straight lines only meet where they began: words and doings divorce and estrange. love and fear and sin are sounds of shapes of what cannot exist until the words are forgotten, and these bodies bend down and take handfuls of dirt.

Polychlorinated Biphenyls: An Apology

“pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease:” -ee cummings 

The old poison might as well be genocide: 
travels with no itinerary, is blown and sucked 
from downtown to uptown to out-of-town 
by industrial fans in flourescent factories, 
the whoosh and halt of afterwork traffic, 
a vacuum of emptiness that exists in quiet places. 

It twiddles thumbs beside us in subway cars, 
drifts into the cab we hail, darts in the door behind us 
to mingle with aromas of dinner and candles and home. 
We create and curse
 the air we embrace in ChicagoSt.PaulSanFranL.A.SeattlePortlandTorontoSaltLakeAlberquerquePhoeni x 
And spacial boundaries implode. 

Arctic wind nips slanted cheekbones.
Icefloes crack and split from jagged shore.
Up and out here, where Polar Bear’s paws pummel seal, 
yellow claws gliding through flesh as spoon through soft-boiled egg, 
tradition rules with a generous hand. 

Ulu meets muktuk, slices tissue fat with warmth. 
Chew for hours, swallow. Stokes the fire within. Melts the insistent shiver. 
And inside, where mother stokes the home fire 
and proffers her breasts like satchels of sunshine, 
the infant is frightfully small at eight months. 
Cannot intuit the nipple. 
Puckering air. 
Wailing frustration. 

Forgive us. 

Forgive us for the missing generation 
of Polar Bear mothers who did not den 
because they could not den— 
half of their reproductive organs male. 

Forgive us for the strained development of your young: 
killing memory and thyroids with our lust 
for the progress that winds up regressing. 
Forgive us for spiking your life blood, 
your Manna, with our exponential pretentions. 
We know not what we do. 

(But we know now that Arctic rural mammals’ milk 
is poisoned with seven times as much PCBs 
as their urban industrial sisters.) 

And now we know that although the old poison still follows us home 
and clings to our suits and highlighted pinned-up hair, 
mostly it settles in the sea, as most things eventually do. 

So plankton to fish to whales and seals… We know now. 

But how can you come to believe 
the fire within kindles 
hormonal imbalance and stunted growth? 

The children adhere eyes 
to the box with a view of the world, 
while the elements weep in bereavement: 

which world wins? 

The assimilated never judge 
and the judges can’t rule the tides as lethargic, 
but the children abandon generous tradition 
to eat sugar in plastic wrappers, 
travel in fast-moving fiberglass, 
create and curse the air they embrace in ChicagoSt.PaulSanFranL.A.SeattlePortlandTorontoSaltLakeAlberquerquePhoeni x 
and I still haven’t figured out 

where we empty the vacuum once we fill it..

on the subject of remorse

some time down the fragmented thick line of tomorrows and mornings, you have to believe that the you you were is somehow a seed of the you you are, even if the enigma of your past drunken blunderings and torn love-lorn poetry (eventually as crumpled as crusty panties) fails to sequin itself on the hem of the evening gown of your fastfading youth. So at some indefinite and blurry point, all those selfish sips of a center which could have been no other than love will purge themselves in the name of conclusion. The regurgitation will only gleam, slippery and reeking of regret, puddled at your feet like maggots on carrion, but it will not peel itself off the barren soil which you have paved with your indulgences. That cast-off you once called love will not grow lanky legs to stomp all over your future with flappy old shoes-- not unless you let it. you could see the maggots for what they are (a little ecology only hurts the loners): decomposers of the substance left over when all the meaning has been sucked out of inspiration. The maggots thrive on the emptiness you should strive to contain.

Poems from the MySpace Vault!

So in 2009, my computer crashed and I lost everything I have ever digitally written... or so I thought! It turned out it WAS a good thing that MySpace wouldn't let me delete my profile, because lo & behold! some old poetry!!! Some of this stuff is pretty good, I must believe. I'll start with the oldest first. This, by the way, is in lieu of preface.