Just a LITTLE human condition

Man

Shards of city noise bend

Up into a room where a man

Sits finally in his chair to choke

Down another bitter day

And below in the street

Dogs nest in piles of cinder blocks

       And in this room

       The grappling of his hands

       And in this room

       A neck vein pulses violently

       And in this room

       His bellowing winter cough

And in this room

Blinking Christmas lights

Surround a crucifix like barbed wire

Sending red, green rebounding

Off walls, while wrinkles

Curl across linoleum in a shadow

Neck vein, hands and cough go

Placid, as a man bends into himself

Stark

       (A man dies)

Christ echoes screams through the red

Green of the room.  Horns honk

       Amen

A confined structure, just like the ailment.

I Know

     For my friend

I am constrained to tell you of my woe

You, proud Swede, erudite you—woe

About such plague that vexes in your veins

Hiding diffidently, roaming deep

Shading your shadow with implications

I am in a state of distraction, res angusta domi

You, good Friend, high-minded you—distraction

By eclipse of your round levity, and the tears

Elaborating your exile, blunt tears, holy

By the incongruous you; yes it’s true

I am out of humor, there is none more sound than

You, militant Saint, zany you—humor

Still, from your vertical depths, unleashed

Where vis vitae was built upon a precipice

The milieu of you, sure you, koo koo

I am lonely; can it be my friend has left?

You, generous Cynic, Spartan you—lonely

As a skull in pensive mood, dolorosamente

As a crier in your wilderness, but I

I will not raise a hue and cry about you

I am calm.  The very thought of you

You, true-hearted One, honest you—calm

I know the river’s peaceful end ahead

I know the sanctuary songs begin again

You’ll sleep tonight, though dark, and then

We construct for an end we construct

Constructing It

Constructing it can take some time

And time is all you need

And time is all you have at all

Alongside soul, the seed

And time can come by laying still

And still it comes by speed

And inundates constructing it

Though planned so carefully

Over tombs built down below

The cornerstone is set

From spaces god knows when ago

The time spills over it

Build on, severely, and in stone

So that it might last on

Under the blankets of the hours

Cooked by a drunken sun

So time pours over all of us

As pigeons who have come

To peck the crumbs from which we go

Constructing it, alone

Imagery from a rotten time is fruit for the present.

I Will Pick Their Flowers In The Sun

This July, when Alice died, we buried her

In the backyard and threw in a lilac bush

As the sun made sweat drip from bent

Bodies to the muddy soil

And in August, dogs were unleashed in the

Bedroom, gnashing at the chain link fence

Where I grabbed your arms for you to hear

As your ears were in another land

Like so much slush in the streets

A thaw howling gray for all to see

The winter prescribes cold therapy

Casting rock salt onto ice

Arms linked in incoherence, angry

We circle in confusion with our verbs

Growling with our choices in the rain

Dogs nesting in piles of cinder block

When the flooding stops, the mud line

Across my eyelids burns of sewage

Yet the surface of the water, still

Reflects the sun as a mirror

Branches above the flood line bud

Above the carcasses of bloated dogs

The aromas a crescendo with the spring

I will pick their flowers in the sun

This was then

Breaking News

Issues of Algeria, Dow Jones blare down on us, yet inside hides

Our breaking news:  Our story, imposed across a wrung face

Dormant in bed, arms tight up into chest, breath like an engine

Shut eyes keep out the demons—she is not asleep, but only wishing

For motherhood to become again the perfect parent it has proven

For the incubator to warm and hum another song

Mother Theresa has died; dead the idea done in memory of family

Mary cannot lay an egg; just as we’ve planned our nest for young

Deceased is the dream of seeing wife in child

We will dig up the decayed round of this grave elegy again

And again.  And she… she lives in the land of Why?

A lingering branch over a fallow, despondent ground

Despondent markets, seven hundred billion dollars

Negative advertising, global economic crisis

Congo, Taliban, coca plants, catastrophe

Our family we could never doubt will not become

They scream the young joy of us, but we cannot both hear

“Look Mommy!” will never mean like it should mean

Our breaking news:  Done, wrung, undone

I touch her eyelids, hiding those gorgeous eyes that shall be

Only ever born on her

What we say when we are afraid of just the same

What We Say When We Are Afraid Of Just The Same

     (For Ry)

On our walk from school

With your dirty face, you say

Papa, I don’t like two things

I like kindergarten, but not the grades

Like first grade and second grade

And third grade and fourth

Oh, yeah? Why not, Ry?

Because they don’t celebrate

Birthdays.  They don’t?

No, but we do in kindergarten

So I don’t want to go in the grades

And what’s the other thing?

Papa, I don’t want to die

Someone told me when a person

Dies it’s for ever and ever and

Ever.

You don’t have to worry about that

For a long, long time, Ry

Let’s just enjoy kindergarten

Since you get to celebrate

Birthdays.

Going away to college. Unloading.

Unloading

Dorms of concrete bake at summer’s end

While cameras click near double parked cars

Carrying, laughing.  Moving vans in tears

Their goodbyes: an end to childhood, hands wrapped

Around each other’s memories.  The children, full

Of Dad, full of Mom--assured--as luck would have it

A tradition carries on, parents taking their

Kid to college.  Like a bird leaving the nest

Where beginning, where self, where flight

I pass them for a while, one family after another

Arriving, lifting, parting stories, a prayer

As I haul my boxes by them all, listening

Some go out to lunch.  They all seem to have that

Quality.  I am not sure what it is, I wonder

How hot it is.  My car is almost empty.

What can one do but carry the burden

Along lanes stretched far and wide and clear

Hugging the stretch between From and To Be

My car was full of essentials.  Me and the 101

In a ’79 Rabbit, windows full of boxes

Each one hot and lifted out and up the stairs

Unaccompanied.  No one but I, carried off from

Childhood three hours ago.  Mom did wave

Across our wide lawn, when I flew away.

When a pet dies. Ambience.

Alice

In the morning, July, the windows wide

Humid air rushing in replacing night

Everywhere the air, water on the floor

Urine on the boards of the kitchen floor

She has left us, staring wide open

On the boards of the kitchen floor

Everything is wet.  The air hangs

Sopping wet towels over us, digging

Sodden earth, chopping warm roots

Clean by the shovel blade, dripping

Hole, oblong sopping pit, inside like

A nest.  A long, deep nest.  Alice

Was a very good cat.  Wrapped up

In towels, pink, burgundy, wet

Leaves hanging all about the garden

Wet with sun, wet with rain, weted

By the lone thief, death.  A pet dies

Suddenly.  No, we all knew that she…

The boys talk of sand flowing into her

Mouth.  Can we close her mouth

Or her eyes, wide open in the end

When we just want them closed

And we just want her dry.  All we want

Is to keep dry.  Tears dripping off

Our wrung faces, shrouded in heat

Remembering her glossy coat of black

Fur, petting Alice, deep in the past now

Beautiful cat with cool black coat of fur

Beautiful cat with cool black coat of fur

Beautiful cat with cool black coat of fur 

Shoreline imagery to compliment the meaning

When You Listened I Could Hear Myself

When you listened I could hear myself

In the dog bark hour of Half Moon Bay

The cave-screaming whispers echo in

Scooped dim low wet bat stone

Our earthy bedroom, talking into night

Hear ego, all of my lies

Drown by cicadas beyond the screen

Marking time

When you listened I could hear myself

Did I listen as you did so well?

Could our sons peek into silences

Of jungle to hear the hum?

When we listen--there are the gifts

Laid in the sand, burning

Incense rising at the temple door

Massing high

When you listened I could hear myself

On the caramel sand where birds flew out

And up into far.  Vines grew.  We hung

Into night on the roaring fog

Fixed our eyes on gnarled cliffs at light

Where the caption of the beach read calm

Testament to long listening shores

We’ve walked by

When you listened I could hear myself

Now kelp and I engage the waves

Crabs crawl quick from your bone

Socket into sun, cartilage

Of ear scaffolds up in fragile air

Parched and clean, arched to hear

As you listened when I could hear

Myself cry

Love this woman, a fellow poet leader in Wisconsin

Fran Rose

Fran rose at the reading in a coat of red

Like a preacher, rebuking our sin

We who have softly read our words

Preach, Fran, how to redeem each sound

Sounds, the bones of words

Words, the sinew of sentence

Sentences, marrow of thought

Thoughts, arithmetic of poems

Poems, worth the volume

Poems, the crow landing directly in your path

Fran, bless us with courage to

Lift our chins, speak correct, deliver erect

Red, ripe words across the frozen lake

Words—chosen ones—shouted for civilian

Loud words for troops

Read loud for the learned

Read for the idiot

Read for the poor in spirit

Read for the hungry

Read for the swearing in

Read for the parade

Read for wife read for kids

Into our ears, sounds, formed, tongue

In position, voluminously heaved forth

Fran, forgive us

For we know not how we utter

Lead us not into poor enunciation

But deliver us from quiet poems

And forgive us our low volume

As we forgive those who mutter amidst us.

I believe in the loudly spoken Word Almighty,
Maker of Mind and Motive.  And in Poetry, 
The Son of our Experience--Conceived 
By the Holy Pen, born of the Virgin Ink, 

Suffered under Long Spent Hours, forgotten, 
Dead, and buried.  Poetry descended into hell 
The third day he rose again from the dead 
Ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right hand 
Of Literature, the Father Almighty; from thence
He shall come to judge the writer and the dead. 

I believe in the Blank Page Ghost
The Holy Audible Word
The Communion of Poets
The forgiveness of rhymed words
The resurrection of Memory
And Imagery everlasting.  

AMEN.

3 versions of water psychosis

Three Versions of Water Psychosis

I.

On shore of the Pacific at Montana de Oro

Our moon competes with clouds to be seen

I have found the edge of my personality

Waves thrash on rocks black with fervor

Each, a god—deploying into sky as shards

Where moon’s eyes wince drenched

Salt-stung to heave back bashing

Blows that crash in ears as I collapse in

Silence finally from its ardent roars.

II.

On frozen Lake Mendota with a view to the stones

Aghast at sounds that rumble in its depths

Nothing I have ever known, no one ever told

That lakes moan when strong sheets of ice crack

And I have not begun to love as love howls too

Lying flat above the lake’s booms, echoing

Fear to bowels, lasers in war, shaking the

Soul of the lake.  Cries of casualty and end, for

No one comes to the buried stones’ wake.

III.

Rains of summertime unpeel my clothes, I am

A voyeur of skin felt up by warm sky, the two

Squirm over me until they come.  Upstairs,

Zombie lowers body into the bath.  Porpoise

Tight skin bares the rhythm of heart

Candle shimmers prisms of color across

Tears in its flame.  Lowering myself to

Allow the silent caves of ears, let the flood

Waters sweep me beyond home into sea.

For my brother, or if you know San Francisco, for you too

You Have Been Here, Brother

For Wes

You have been here, brother, to this

Chirping black bird dotted park

Its calm lawn littered with the waste

Of poor, depleted in the afternoon

Billowed shadows smoke and quiver as

Crawling buses, shrouded, utter

“Going home now.  I am tired.”

This place among many yields now

In the clean sun white dog-bark hour

Tender organ of the city, donated

Sprawled as a spleen in Italian Town

Bones meshing tissue, tissue to blood

Chinese girl runs curved path through cool

Long beard bum curled upon plaque

What bodies go about in the park

Sad.  Gay.  Immigrant.  Places everyone!

Arching time across the kissing grass

Do you sit with silence, Wes, on that bench?

Have you known tears, beggars, wisdom

Under the tree by St. Peter and Paul’s?

What joy have you uncovered, Wes,

On the lawn in your green moment?

For you have been here, brother, to this

A lady was hit, and Charleton Heston was Moses, varnished dark in the Egyptian sun.

The Promised Land

1.       Around two o’clock, I walk past a store selling plastic items.

2.       There are red buckets, yellow buckets, blue tarps, nylon rope.

3.       I am unwrapping the foil from a melting chocolate bar.

4.       A melon vendor naps in the shadow of his cart.

5.       In the street, a red Dodge Ram brakes, skidding.

6.       A woman, approximately fifty-eight, is caught in its lane.

7.       She is hammered chest-high by the screaming truck.

8.       Her torso appears to hug the contour of the grill.

9.       The truck grips the asphalt finally, casting the woman forward.

10.    She slides on her back, shoulders first, past the plastic store.

11.    Her movement is graceful, as if across a sheet of ice.

12.    It is Good Friday in Poza Rica, Veracruz.

13.    I drop my chocolate bar into my left pants pocket.

14.    The plastic salesman begins dialing the phone.

15.    I watch the first droplet of blood fall from behind her ear.

16.    Her eyes are closed.  She has beautiful, brown skin.

17.    There is an odor of burnt rubber amid the street’s black heat.

18.    “Señora,” I whisper, “todo será bien.”

19.    “Todo será bien, Señora.”

20.    I stroke the soft underneath of her wrist while telling her this.

21.    Ten or twelve people assemble.  One crosses himself.

22.    Someone collects her bag of rice and places it at her head.

23.    A faint siren becomes clear, then blares close.

24.    “Todo será bien,” is all that I can say.

25.    I walk out from the encircled who have gathered here today.

26.    The sun sears the afternoon in a yellow, blinding haze.

27.    Walking until the highway, I become soaked in sweat.

28.    I stop to rest inside a church with doors swung wide open.

29.    Workmen are draping the cross with a sheet.

30.    Swelled feet slip from my shoes to the cool floor.

31.    Their steam makes patterns on the dark green marble.

32.    I sneak bites of cheap chocolate from my pocket.

33.    The Virgin is transferred from a nave to the steps of the altar.

34.    Men move over her with cleaning rags.

35.    Down the highway, I buy a ticket for the movies.

36.    I settle in with Mike & Ike’s to see The Greatest Story Ever Told.

37.    It is the desert, ages past.  Thank God there is air conditioning.

38.    Charlton Heston is Moses, varnished dark in the Egyptian sun.

39.    And he leads his people to the Promised Land.

40.    Into the Promised Land.