3272. MASKED MAN FIGHTING THE OASIS

MASKED MAN
FIGHTING THE OASIS
They still go on with that settled manner
of pioneers cutting through Iowa - and
even though it's all rubbish, they thrive.
Their dream-mud-hut-cabin is built of
reeds and sticks, sloppy slag-heap stone
with foundations of Indian blood. I
don't know why we read the book and
read it over and over again. See the
flag, yellow and blue, they insist flying.
-
Battering the betterments of batallions
of women and men : offspring decrepit,
those children of wanderers fall at the
wayside screaming out names. Everything
has fallen and all bridges are down. The
last man standing shall not make a sound.
-
This is like a nightmare now :
some Kiowa County Sheriff
beating to death the protesters
outside the old steel-mill. Union
men who blush for daggers and
fornicate until they drop. No cares
like the old cares - everything
else just fades away.

3271. BLUE BOTTLE OF VODKA

BLUE BOTTLE OF VODKA
I found an empty blue bottle 'American made'
vodka, branded by fellows and drunk by a
crew. They'd left it, as an empty, telling
stories all its own on a tidy window ledge.
And oh, those potato eaters, potato drinkers,
what have you : those tales they could weave.
Stories of evil and dogs, mothers with donkeys
and hens. Fathers with cleavers and friends.
-
'Nothing like this had ever occurred before' -
all tawdry bullshit too and they knew it so.
'My fine fellows', I uttered in imagination,
'everything has already happened, and
happened before and already. And I'm
not even drunk with your peppered
elixir.' We all left it at that, and they
stammered away. I've got their
blue bottle, now, in my hands.

3270. JESUS JALOPY JONES

JESUS JALOPY JONES

As it was once there was a man
with cinderblocks, building walls and
painting them red, washing the white wash
down to its essence, facing the cinder with
golden paint. He was making kingdoms for

children and markers for Man. He came

upon a Saturday, dealing cards and dicing
the doubles, calling things wild, and
lining the tables with magical felt.
-
I bowed down, just once, to see if
he reacted. Nothing came from the
face but a very odd light. He seemed
more obscure than was usual. I parsed
a sentence to see his reaction. 'My single
noun to your active verb' was all he said.
-
There is no purpose in lighting the light
where no shadows go. Everything is
plainly seen, and no things
are obscured.

3269. JAMES BOGARDUS

JAMES BOGARDUS

Cooked his goose, ate the
failure, flayed the savage
item, spoiled the mare.
-
His wife Lucinda, drove
the forces home, swept
the backways freely, and
with all intentions to riot,
clowned around for all
to see.
-
James Bogardus, building
lithesome tales, renting
business tuxedos, building
bridges, lining the streets,
shook his jacket clean and
slowly began to walk
towards home.

3268. THIS HAGGARD MIND

THIS HAGGARD MIND

I just about send my post before it
so soon comes back to me : the recipient,
long gone, left nothing behind. No matter.
There are now so many voids where others
used to be that I can no longer stand. It
seems, as well, that I am last and alone.
If I were six foot four I'd have something
to crow about; as it is, midget-mitres this
side of small take my measure. Laughing.
God, I awake and realize once again -
I really do hate myself; this mawkish
body, this swiney soul, decrepit face,
haggard mind. I've shouldered so
many losing burdens that my
mind now races to its end.
Disengage this mediocre
world from me, and cut,
please, this tethered
noose and
let it fly.

3267. THIS ISN'T MY HORN

THIS ISN'T MY HORN

Things are slow in tempest town.
Though I blow the clarion call, this is
not my horn - trumpet, coronet,
alto sax, whatever it is you wish, they
all can be heard in varied increments
trebling your dive and filling your wants.
Tuba or tremelo, basso and brass. I
never really know to tell. The marks
the strange drummer has made on
the skins of his suit seem enough to
drive along this bastard rhythm.
-
Mayhem seems a dog-faced catcher
hereabouts. The landsman sits at
attention, never even varying his
shades - and the shape of his eyes,
those little, sickening slits, can
everyday make me cringe.
-
Jazz times jazz, the nickel man
declaims : 'break that meter, brother,
break it; make that rhythm soar anew!'

3266. TRANSLATION

TRANSLATION
We've left the fort together,
Hiram - you with your bells,
and me with my hammers.
The Russian tongue has a
word for such confusion :
'marushki'. We translate
it here as 'little ants'.

3265. THOUGHTS

THOUGHTS
I am being sized up by things I
do not know - the midnight Sadducees
are writing things down. Dragging
slow feet across my dangerous lane,
I try to leave no marks. But the
children, the children, are dancing
in all the streets. I look at this
tree as it splits in two - like
a thought with two sides,
railing this way and that.

3264. FOUND PAJAMAS

FOUND PAJAMAS

Jesus found pajamas.
Jesus died for those
sins of others - in
a form of spiteful
retribution, the
tale says, he
came, and
he accepted,
and, then,
he died.

3263. LONG GREEN LEGGINGS

LONG GREEN LEGGINGS

You know how you lose something, you
know how you feel? I feel that. I have lost
everything in one place : the yellow ideas
of desert and sun, the wash of the open sea,
rolling back in. Right here, I have nothing left.
Characteristically, I am shamed to say; I turn
about, wistfully regretting the time already spent.
Behind my back, the MacReady Vapors already
exhale - mist and fog down low, hanging from
Bentley Creek to Waverly Glen. Unlike the mist,
I'm all of a mind to disappear, and take
the vast world with me.
-
A new version of a Halloween stoops, drops
down before me, as a ghost in whitened leggings.
I recognize the form, yes, but cannot place the face.
Ghouls and foul curmudgeons, ghosts and spirits
rank, each of them rue me with their noises;
a crescendo of instruments now playing
from Hell, from a place where I am
baffled still and found without a
knowledge, knowing nothing.
-
Before me rises a tall green house; old and
dilapidated, said haunted, running on
nothing but fury and stealth. It has its
own darkness, room to room and
light to light. And that is where
I dwell. Third floor up, at the
top, where that blackening
light now tries to shine.

3262. 1974

1974

And now I have left you I have led you I have
left you I have led you : again and again as a
marksman hits his target once after another
and more. The chickens are dead in the yard.
The old, fevered burro you left me has finally
now expired - his last strange noise still
echoing in my frightened ears. I only wonder
to myself why you first led me here and then
left. Led me left me. Oh I am so confused.
-
I have a nickel magnet I intended for you to
have; now I'll keep it for myself. It holds the
metal in my ears, keeps the singing tribes
from leaving, lets me recall those Bond Street
days when, yes, we, the two, stayed close and
together as a whip does with its snap.
-
I am empty now. I can't recall an earthly thing,
only that stuff of other natures we once together
lived. The domino castle at the top of the fjord,
the lancer who kept his famed redoubt a secret,
the woman I knew from McIver's other farm.
-
I'm watching the fire land onto the lake.
Nothing moves. I will sleep; thinking of
your picture - you, on the curb, with
no shoes, only laughter and mirth.

3261. ELECTRIC MAGNET WAYS

ELECTRIC MAGNET WAYS

No solace in sundry words ten thousand smaller
things than that - miniature cars fallen into
the lake, vintage speeders hanging from trees.
The jackal-man who kills babies is wandering
aimless afoot. He sings of a Madonna with
her harmless Jesus, deflated by time.
-
It isn't only in the majesty of myth that
so many things get colored. The stories
tend to twist and turn, end up short,
revolve back upon themselves. We
look for Gods and guidance in the stars,
and, though there really are none, we
claim those stars and planets as the
guidelines to our crazy cosmic life.
-
Where once the past beseeched us,
now it only leads us on. No solace
in sundry words.

3260. AMULET

AMULET

The river ran its way along a
ridge of sunken rock; cold petals
and frigid air. A willow, bent like a
savage intent on ravage, dropped
its weeping sorrow into a glowing
surface of what appeared to be glass.

3259. THE SONG OF ALFRED MINER

THE SONG OF ALFRED MINER

In my ways of desperate means I have tried

so many things : filled cartfuls of despair
with outlaw angel wings. To both sides of
me, in little ways, others have tried their

infusions, theirs aids. No avail. I have stood,
both steadfast and alone. Those strangled
doors of perception have long ago faded,
a laughable crew, an ample petard. Now,
what passes for my soap is but a cleansing
skull. I leave little behind. I move, crablike,
sideways past rubble and trash; letters
left hanging, dreams that have crashed.
My tent is pitched in graveyards,
all I see is past.

3258. BEDLAM

BEDLAM
(Mr. Windemar please tell me more)
Amidst this crazy cavalcade, I landed in
Bedlam; seeking a satisfaction never there,
like a cigarette lamp burning both ends,
like a stoplight rose already wilted,
the kind the beggars sell. I punched
the clock, I beat the cop, I incarcerated
five million, Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot.
Everything gone nuts, crazy on the
edge, shallow on the waterfall, trimming
on the hedge. Those five girls I saw,
they wallowed in the mire swallowing
for hire. And, in so many other ways,
everything I once imagined I saw in
the flesh, and for real. (Sit me down
a this table, Mr. Windemar,
please tell me more).

3257. 5TH PART OF THE MOON

5TH PART OF THE MOON
(don't discount the Newman Gate)
Throw nothing my way : all things
proving to be broken lie asunder.
The 5th part of the moon I am
watching - with most interest
now settled on the light. I sense
my skin might bubble, might
bulge, food for insects and
worms - in whatever varying
degree, even that I would accept.
-
I know that I have been here before,
and am right now, yet today's seeming
aplomb being broken, nothing now
really seems to matter. Would that
my flesh would melt and I would
fly away, both artless and free.
-
There is nothing here of solace,
neither a smoothed nor a forced
to be had. Already what one has,
one possesses - we are in a creative
mode, always, making what we will
as thought and image flee. Look around.
Before things depart, they first will stay,
(don't discount the Newman Gate), and
they will be. Your false time (itself) is a
nervous tannery, absorbing - for now -
all things. Your greater mind
knows, patterns repeat.

3256. DISINCLINATION TO WORRY

DISINCLINATION TO WORRY
Let's see what we've got with this one last
admission : creamsicle iceberg wandering forth.
I never sensed the admonition true;
I only came here for the weather, and
now even that is gone. Beggarly myopic,
rehashing all tradition, I went to sleep
at the microphone stand. The sense of
endings brings forth the life (yes, yes),
and all things become the adventure.
-
The red line enters my new life, as
the blue sky stretches and I am witness
to a hundred new things. The hawk soars
as the hawk flies - carrying with it the end
of the blue, the expanse of sky, the internal
logic to every exterior motive gone into the
making of all this world and all this
(teeming, so) consciousness now.
-
(All things have become the adventure).
I have a disinclination to worry.

3255. ENAMEL SHELLAC

ENAMEL SHELLAC

Or I don't know; the difference, the shine,
the sheen, the finish. Some vegetable matter,
some chemical sludge. Whatever is mirrored
becomes the sign of the shine - and all that
finish then goes for naught. I never knew
what any of it mattered, and don't now,
for sure. I go and just look away.
-
Jim McCracken told me once that 'the beauty
of the glimmer comes from a well-rubbed
finish, and the better it's rubbed the more
it glows. That's what people most react
to.' Like he knows? Like me? I went,
and just looked away.
-
All that work, and no opinion, really.
It never matters to me; just can't
worked up like the others all do.
Beauty and shine. Quality too -
the only thing it adds up to is
price. Higher by a few,
more expensive too,
and then all those
wanting people
just want
more.

3254. DON'T THINK OF YOURSELF AS PART OF THE COWLING

DON'T THINK OF YOURSELF
AS PART OF THE COWLING
(such a little place indeed)
Adagio this, adagio that -
it seems ten things at once
demand their certain forms
of modest attraction. How many
need you select? I can stand at
attention for nothing, you understand,
(and your head was on your hat,
now how backwards was that)?
-
If lethargy had a song, you would
be it. Instead, it swoons. I hear the
cropper come undone, the long bird's
sobriquet on such a cylindrical theme
as this. I find myself repeating and
misspelling, both single things double
at the very same time. Perhaps only
the morning will save me. Hold my
hand one more time, be a
companion, dear, for life.
-
I do awake as the sky comes open;
I read my mind in the stars. All
this! All this! And such a
little place indeed.

3253. MAKER OF ROADS

MAKER OF ROADS
And things I've forgotten : lost lamps
in the dark and crossed paths after
midnight. He who covets less, covets
most. The man who breaks the plow
builds the roads, gets to see around
the bends, to peer over the tops of
hills, gets farther along, to see the
end of things : father-preacher,
lost-land maniac, blind Teresias
himself extending hands to calm
the sea, crossing the horizon with
intensity. Long lost bags of kroners
and gold; everything alike should be
such a mess, in such a dark'ling
moment as this.
-
I was born where no one should have
been - seawall, Kill Van Kull, tugs and
tankers, splashing ripples salt-wall froth.
As a small, new fly, just out of its break,
I strolled, ambled, and learned to fly -
straight enough, I guess, to hold me.
Behind my back, the squat four-story
housing projects before my face. The
waterfront amusement park,
Staten Island's grimy face.
-
My own taste...Bayonne's funny-fraught
trace, the solid bridge above my head,
aslant my manner, black with cars,
and all going nowhere in a skid - one
steel, silver moment slivered in
successful time. A promise, for some,
that the 'rock of the world
was founded securely
on a faery's wing' -
as Jay Gatz once
had said.

3252. OF ALL THINGS THAT DO NOT EXIST

OF ALL THINGS
THAT DO NOT EXIST
I only know this world the best; that on/off
fluctuation I take part in, the alternating
vague certainty you see. On/off, only/alone,
all one thing to be. I am so sure that matter
projects and through it all projecting we make
other worlds, just as we use them and they
use us. All things conjoin, all myths converge.
We are them, and they are us : owl-light,
candle-flicker, open heart ablaze - the
mirth and factor of a thousand open worlds,
each wide, all agape, and taking as they give.
On/off, and taken, as well, to give. We are
all in some sense kin, pealing back and peeling -
an 'I know you as you know me he she' sensation.
One place of many minds in an all-adjacent Time.
Yes then go. Assume the categories projected.
Round globe and definition : line chart angle heart,
the fractured songstress, the mathematics of a
Sun agreed to - solar wind and micro marsh,
all we say, what we say, and - lastly - as we last.
Enough! Nothing exists at all! One and a thousand
midnights live in such expansive darkness. The
harbor holds its boats and they depart, as too the
mind creates its mental thoughts - all probable
worlds comporting. They too take form and turn
and mire, and then depart. All that is, until
Oneness takes it away.

3251. AT READING PEAK

AT READING PEAK

I may have overstayed the waiting, slicing my back too far

down the marble slab I slept upon : awaiting a deliverance,

seeking a new sky, watching those midnight heavens for the

sight of your shooting star. Had it come, oh, oh, how I would

have known. As it was, in a form of still and desperate silence,

nothing occurred at all; and I waited still, and waited more.

-

I had known the vigil, had known the wake. I'd attended

these things, and even stayed - late, past prime, far deeper

into the night than I should have. For my being, it was all

Experience, that one, with the capital E. I singed my face

looking too deeply in. I scuttled and scoured too many

things - Rumi to Tagore and back again. No, no yes. No.

-

My marvelous reaction to things : Negation, with its

capital N. The tower on Reading's hill, some soulful

minaret, a pagoda, a temple, something narrow past

working. The old gravel road, a test grounds for

Duryea cars, a quarry from a time, long, long ago.

Now, little matters, and there is no rhyme.

These are ugly years, very weathered,

and, I sense, not mine.

3250. CINDER

 CINDER

How well-known all I've wanted, how little-known

all I've got. The charred-scared cinder I kick down

the street knows more about burning than I about

heat. And, next to that, how 'powerless I' walks about

still is a wonder. Blue sky, red and setting sun. I

looked homeward angel, but to realize there is none.

3249. SPELL MY DOOM MADAME SOON

SPELL MY DOOM
MADAME SOON
This much I can say : the moon was
in its lesser orbit and was gone from
swain. I had just dropped down the
letter and put down that book, some
older marvel, Mark Twain, Tom Paine;
neither of them makes much of a
difference now. A new thin light from
a shallow horizon tries breaking through
its memory as I am seen moving from
my home town. I majored, once, in
domestication,and my face was
a frown and the laughing sky
dangled itself before me.
-
This much I can see : the gun matter
mattered as I looked into that deer's
eyes, imagining. I saw the grace and
living passion passing, and I never
could harm a flea, a living thing,
another me. For what difference
did any of it make, 'Nothing'
stood there looking
back at me.

3248. TAKES THE POETRY CURLS

TAKES THE
POETRY CURLS
As much without thinking, he takes
the poetry curls; runs his hand through
his hair, a conflux of confusion, his conflict
his conceit, his conscience no concern at all.
-
'Just seems like a penchant for
dreaming.' Someone else was
heard to utter, 'No specific means
of domination on that one; a walk
in the park, I think.' He takes the
poetry curls, runs his hands
without thinking.