Jeff didn't die in a blaze of fire,
Nor did Candy in her slow demise.
We learn upon the tightrope wire.
Age fails to make the old man wise.
____________________________________
Water-hyacinths crawl down river,
choke swift passage to the trading-post.
Aboriginal poison arrows quiver
once before they strike the host.
____________________________________
Fiefdoms built on garbage piles
walled in concrete and barbed wire
can repel the wannabes for miles,
all to suffer cancerous internal fire.
___________________________________
Sargasso seas and private junks
large as islands, with online banks,
Ski resorts in hotel lobbies:
Artists' colonies requiring tanks.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Sunday, June 13, 2010
From Jan. 10 Sunday
Timmy must smile to himself because he's solipsistic--
rolling canvas to the floor and cutting it with scissors,
a private room in his head, to which we are never invited.
Although he can respond to questions, sooner than later
he retreats into a world that we can never guess about.
No one of us would not rather be somewhere else than here.
We are the reason others can sail the bays and harbors
that we travel by imagination dimmed these coastal winters.
We cut the sails for those who can afford to be elsewhere.
On his own power Tim travels out of this space-time continuum.
And no one else in the sail-shop can see what Tim can see.
Eventually the super lets him go. We would have to continue
our vicarious journeys without him, sliding our padded knees
along the floor with a T-square and some colored pieces of chalk
so that the seamstress can bring together the parts of the sail.
Brightly colored bolts of spinnaker cloth spill from shelves
in treacherous elastic folds. It was not hard to see them
as bright geometric shapes on water filling with wind
like the resplendent bladders of exotic birds and fish
for enticing the opposite sex. And a spinnaker
made of such a cloth might do such a thing as well
to female homo sapiens. What woman wouldn't
be smitten with the skipper during such an outing?
We'd leave this hole as soon as we could said we to ourselves,
no light at the end of the tunnel, no end to the tunnel.
Those brightly colored bolts of spinnaker cloth
spilled their slippery and treacherous light from locked up cages.
rolling canvas to the floor and cutting it with scissors,
a private room in his head, to which we are never invited.
Although he can respond to questions, sooner than later
he retreats into a world that we can never guess about.
No one of us would not rather be somewhere else than here.
We are the reason others can sail the bays and harbors
that we travel by imagination dimmed these coastal winters.
We cut the sails for those who can afford to be elsewhere.
On his own power Tim travels out of this space-time continuum.
And no one else in the sail-shop can see what Tim can see.
Eventually the super lets him go. We would have to continue
our vicarious journeys without him, sliding our padded knees
along the floor with a T-square and some colored pieces of chalk
so that the seamstress can bring together the parts of the sail.
Brightly colored bolts of spinnaker cloth spill from shelves
in treacherous elastic folds. It was not hard to see them
as bright geometric shapes on water filling with wind
like the resplendent bladders of exotic birds and fish
for enticing the opposite sex. And a spinnaker
made of such a cloth might do such a thing as well
to female homo sapiens. What woman wouldn't
be smitten with the skipper during such an outing?
We'd leave this hole as soon as we could said we to ourselves,
no light at the end of the tunnel, no end to the tunnel.
Those brightly colored bolts of spinnaker cloth
spilled their slippery and treacherous light from locked up cages.
From Jan. 9-17 2010 (in progress)
Heart of gold in gruff exterior
Describes the old man cycling the back lot
Of his bike shop neighboring the museum
Featuring taxidermized owls and foxes
And sundry things culled from others' attics.
They are having a dispute, this gruff old man
And the museum director whom to reporters
Has frequently catalogued the other's isdeeds.
But things observed change according to observer:
When on guard, he seems pensive
As he applies his wrench to one more used machine,
Renewing its life, releasing a lever,
And lowering the bike onto the concrete,
For a needy kid quotes the cub reporter,
Which makes the usually pacific museum director
Fume! Leading him to relate the man’s misdeeds:
No one knows the old man like I do.
All they can see is that he potters in the back lot
With the broken bikes he claims to fix for kids.
The reporter writes about the heart of gold
Behind the gruff exterior, the old man and his bike shop.
I’m the one who knows just what the old man’s like.
I overhear the things he says, on skin color,
sexual preference, gender. Who hasn’t heard him
When someone parks in the back lot of his shop?
He fools you by circling there to test a bike.
But a citizen found her stolen bike in their shop once.
And he goes along, just pottering around, who knows
What he does there? Whose stolen bike he fixes?
But the reporter who’d written gruff exterior
With heart of gold never returned my voice message.
As the woman who’d lost her bike had said “In Maine
I was used to gruffness followed by genuine helpfulness.
But this is a saltiness to which I am not accustomed.
Among those curses I failed to hear any heart of gold.”
So I’d like to get the story straight with the media tonight.
Who knows how many innocent ears he has bent
In the back lot from which he drive away my customers
With curses when you choose not to be around?
Name the children whom this Santa has given a bike.
Name the beneficiary. Where’s the heart of gold, the sainthood?
REPLY
Well first, we’re a small paper, with few resources, less time.
And time, which is money, we never had for such a feature,
What with the wires giving us the features of the day,
and just ourselves to edit it. Oversights happen, OK?
But of the reporter of which you complain, we can say,
And with no small amount of empathy for how you feel,
That we put credence in his judgment, so if his judgment
Is that the old man is good, that his heart is made of gold,
But his exterior gruff, then we are swayed and have no choice
But to trust him, because those who sense gold hearts have
Gold hearts themselves, and as professionals and citizens,
We believe in the good instead of the worst, choose also
Not to overturn the stones in the field to see what they hide.
So we choose to trust the merits of our intrepid reporters,
Whose jobs are by the way are not easy, who are buffeted
By multitudes of voices with frequently contrary claims.
*****************************
Look. This guy’s bad news. Just hear him rant.
When he got wind of what they'd said of him
he oiled up his ancient rusty Remington
and drove across the border for his shells.
He joked with the cashier, who couldn't smell
his liquor breath, the flask stuffed in his jacket,
who had he known, could’ve cared less anyway.
He'd a coy-dog problem and people problem too,
with peaceniks and tree-huggers, had a problem
with rats and cats and creatures of the field
blasting rock salt through the stars could not cure.
In his daydreams, he'd crash past the ticket-taker
Of the Museum of Relics in White River Junction
shatter the glassed-in displays with his rifle-butt
and topple the stuffed animals, all foxes and owls,
nocturnal beasts of the field you never see
in deer season, spent half-drunk dressing them,
a buck strung against the barn of the family dairy farm,
the premises gone since to a lawyer or a surgeon,
deer-blood dripping to fertilize the white clover
that dotted the tire-tracks of the tractor or horse-cart.
Where a hunchbacked farm-hand might settle
On a plank bench on his coffee-break to drink
The pure and unpasteurized milk from which
He’d have to brush the flies from the pitcher.
Damnit he'd never seen so much junk in his life,
not even among his old lady's rich relatives.
At least in his bike-shop he used the salvage up,
At least he didn’t frame it for eternity--
and if this was the last thing that he ever did,
he'd rebuild another butterfly-handled bicycle
equip it with an unrusting brightly-ringing bell
for another poor kid who'd otherwise be getting by
Christmas and Easter on Catholic Services
Which, to confess all, was mostly his story too.
But no one was going to park in his lot,
Not even the ticket-taker, fetching as she was.
Yes he'd charge into the shop and overturn the stuffed animals,
the screech owl in flight, the red fox coiled as if about to spring,
or recoil from ground that was only a pedestal with a brass plaque.
He continued to stumble through the museum of relics and curiosities
smashing glass with the stock of his rusty but newly oiled hunting rifle.
Christ he'd seen better things in neighbor's homes, hunting trophies,
the heads of eight-point bucks pinned above fireplaces, not butterflies
trapped in glass bells lined with pool-table velvet, nor ticket stubs
to side-shows or to old steam trains he'd known but never missed,
like the one in the back yard they'd cover in Plexiglas if they could.
His mother'd flagged one down across the road from one address
when his father had been drunk for whom he hadn't shed a tear
when he passed away, a violent drunk and a woodsman.
No he wouldn't deal with such an SOB now with his liver and lungs.
He didn't care how much glass in the museum of curiosities he'd break,
his organs on the mend. When the ticket-taker would ask him
what he'd like he'd sweep past her, go to the heart of the problem,
this was the Director of the Museum of Curiosities and Relics.
Who’d ratted him out (he heard) to the newspapers.
[All politics is local my friend]
1/9/10
The guests would pay, and the hotelier would feel like a fool,
what for insulting his wife before the post office like that,
although then he wouldn't know just who dumped
a gallon of kerosene into the hotel pool.
Anyway, the fat man could always drain his damned pool.
But as to his wife, no one would get away insulting his girls.
Returning home he reeled with gratification
you’d get punching out an army buddy who'd been too big
[you’d get during a punch-out with an army buddy who’d been
Too big for his britches]
for his britches, then after showing him just who you were,
make up by buying him another frosty at the Eagles' Club,
then beat him silly and afterward laugh it up in a cramp
but the old man was a screwball alright and as sure as shit
was his old man too. His old man was just a piece of shit,
never an hour without him being on the sauce. Or was nothing,
just a pile of waffle batter, who just sat there, the old man
just sat there, he was as useless as a pile of waffle batter,
he'd sit all day complaining and was useless, just a nobody
mean as a guard dog people would feed cups of liquor to,
a toothless guard dog chained to a fence, trained to bare
his absent teeth to the first passerby. But a dog
that in its day and cage had been as frightful as a baited bear.
before he'd gone in the service when it was a sure thing she wouldn't return,
no he wouldn't deal with such an SOB now with his liver and lungs.
Many know him as a gruff old man test-riding his bicycles in the back-lot of the shop where he fixes bikes the old-fashioned way, one by one. Some know him as a shop owner with a heart of gold, dispensing free bikes to needy children in the neighborhood. Others only know his salty tongue and gruff demeanor as he upbraids drivers parking in his lot, which he shares with a museum of freaks and oddities. The museum director spoke to us briefly of the troubles he'd experienced with the shop owner. I also spoke with the mother of one of the recent beneficiaries, who claimed there were many like her who'd received bikes gratis from the old man, whose pleasure in life seemed to be to fix old bikes and then to make them shiny new again.
See the wedding photo.
She’d been warned
He had a screw loose—
My father’s eye was wild.
Describes the old man cycling the back lot
Of his bike shop neighboring the museum
Featuring taxidermized owls and foxes
And sundry things culled from others' attics.
They are having a dispute, this gruff old man
And the museum director whom to reporters
Has frequently catalogued the other's isdeeds.
But things observed change according to observer:
When on guard, he seems pensive
As he applies his wrench to one more used machine,
Renewing its life, releasing a lever,
And lowering the bike onto the concrete,
For a needy kid quotes the cub reporter,
Which makes the usually pacific museum director
Fume! Leading him to relate the man’s misdeeds:
No one knows the old man like I do.
All they can see is that he potters in the back lot
With the broken bikes he claims to fix for kids.
The reporter writes about the heart of gold
Behind the gruff exterior, the old man and his bike shop.
I’m the one who knows just what the old man’s like.
I overhear the things he says, on skin color,
sexual preference, gender. Who hasn’t heard him
When someone parks in the back lot of his shop?
He fools you by circling there to test a bike.
But a citizen found her stolen bike in their shop once.
And he goes along, just pottering around, who knows
What he does there? Whose stolen bike he fixes?
But the reporter who’d written gruff exterior
With heart of gold never returned my voice message.
As the woman who’d lost her bike had said “In Maine
I was used to gruffness followed by genuine helpfulness.
But this is a saltiness to which I am not accustomed.
Among those curses I failed to hear any heart of gold.”
So I’d like to get the story straight with the media tonight.
Who knows how many innocent ears he has bent
In the back lot from which he drive away my customers
With curses when you choose not to be around?
Name the children whom this Santa has given a bike.
Name the beneficiary. Where’s the heart of gold, the sainthood?
REPLY
Well first, we’re a small paper, with few resources, less time.
And time, which is money, we never had for such a feature,
What with the wires giving us the features of the day,
and just ourselves to edit it. Oversights happen, OK?
But of the reporter of which you complain, we can say,
And with no small amount of empathy for how you feel,
That we put credence in his judgment, so if his judgment
Is that the old man is good, that his heart is made of gold,
But his exterior gruff, then we are swayed and have no choice
But to trust him, because those who sense gold hearts have
Gold hearts themselves, and as professionals and citizens,
We believe in the good instead of the worst, choose also
Not to overturn the stones in the field to see what they hide.
So we choose to trust the merits of our intrepid reporters,
Whose jobs are by the way are not easy, who are buffeted
By multitudes of voices with frequently contrary claims.
*****************************
Look. This guy’s bad news. Just hear him rant.
When he got wind of what they'd said of him
he oiled up his ancient rusty Remington
and drove across the border for his shells.
He joked with the cashier, who couldn't smell
his liquor breath, the flask stuffed in his jacket,
who had he known, could’ve cared less anyway.
He'd a coy-dog problem and people problem too,
with peaceniks and tree-huggers, had a problem
with rats and cats and creatures of the field
blasting rock salt through the stars could not cure.
In his daydreams, he'd crash past the ticket-taker
Of the Museum of Relics in White River Junction
shatter the glassed-in displays with his rifle-butt
and topple the stuffed animals, all foxes and owls,
nocturnal beasts of the field you never see
in deer season, spent half-drunk dressing them,
a buck strung against the barn of the family dairy farm,
the premises gone since to a lawyer or a surgeon,
deer-blood dripping to fertilize the white clover
that dotted the tire-tracks of the tractor or horse-cart.
Where a hunchbacked farm-hand might settle
On a plank bench on his coffee-break to drink
The pure and unpasteurized milk from which
He’d have to brush the flies from the pitcher.
Damnit he'd never seen so much junk in his life,
not even among his old lady's rich relatives.
At least in his bike-shop he used the salvage up,
At least he didn’t frame it for eternity--
and if this was the last thing that he ever did,
he'd rebuild another butterfly-handled bicycle
equip it with an unrusting brightly-ringing bell
for another poor kid who'd otherwise be getting by
Christmas and Easter on Catholic Services
Which, to confess all, was mostly his story too.
But no one was going to park in his lot,
Not even the ticket-taker, fetching as she was.
Yes he'd charge into the shop and overturn the stuffed animals,
the screech owl in flight, the red fox coiled as if about to spring,
or recoil from ground that was only a pedestal with a brass plaque.
He continued to stumble through the museum of relics and curiosities
smashing glass with the stock of his rusty but newly oiled hunting rifle.
Christ he'd seen better things in neighbor's homes, hunting trophies,
the heads of eight-point bucks pinned above fireplaces, not butterflies
trapped in glass bells lined with pool-table velvet, nor ticket stubs
to side-shows or to old steam trains he'd known but never missed,
like the one in the back yard they'd cover in Plexiglas if they could.
His mother'd flagged one down across the road from one address
when his father had been drunk for whom he hadn't shed a tear
when he passed away, a violent drunk and a woodsman.
No he wouldn't deal with such an SOB now with his liver and lungs.
He didn't care how much glass in the museum of curiosities he'd break,
his organs on the mend. When the ticket-taker would ask him
what he'd like he'd sweep past her, go to the heart of the problem,
this was the Director of the Museum of Curiosities and Relics.
Who’d ratted him out (he heard) to the newspapers.
[All politics is local my friend]
1/9/10
The guests would pay, and the hotelier would feel like a fool,
what for insulting his wife before the post office like that,
although then he wouldn't know just who dumped
a gallon of kerosene into the hotel pool.
Anyway, the fat man could always drain his damned pool.
But as to his wife, no one would get away insulting his girls.
Returning home he reeled with gratification
you’d get punching out an army buddy who'd been too big
[you’d get during a punch-out with an army buddy who’d been
Too big for his britches]
for his britches, then after showing him just who you were,
make up by buying him another frosty at the Eagles' Club,
then beat him silly and afterward laugh it up in a cramp
but the old man was a screwball alright and as sure as shit
was his old man too. His old man was just a piece of shit,
never an hour without him being on the sauce. Or was nothing,
just a pile of waffle batter, who just sat there, the old man
just sat there, he was as useless as a pile of waffle batter,
he'd sit all day complaining and was useless, just a nobody
mean as a guard dog people would feed cups of liquor to,
a toothless guard dog chained to a fence, trained to bare
his absent teeth to the first passerby. But a dog
that in its day and cage had been as frightful as a baited bear.
before he'd gone in the service when it was a sure thing she wouldn't return,
no he wouldn't deal with such an SOB now with his liver and lungs.
Many know him as a gruff old man test-riding his bicycles in the back-lot of the shop where he fixes bikes the old-fashioned way, one by one. Some know him as a shop owner with a heart of gold, dispensing free bikes to needy children in the neighborhood. Others only know his salty tongue and gruff demeanor as he upbraids drivers parking in his lot, which he shares with a museum of freaks and oddities. The museum director spoke to us briefly of the troubles he'd experienced with the shop owner. I also spoke with the mother of one of the recent beneficiaries, who claimed there were many like her who'd received bikes gratis from the old man, whose pleasure in life seemed to be to fix old bikes and then to make them shiny new again.
See the wedding photo.
She’d been warned
He had a screw loose—
My father’s eye was wild.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
namby-pamby
chewtoy
aerofloat
table
Well, won't that get me into the annals!
rather than suffering a lesser fate such as
holding down a regular job while participating
in the cottage industry of the mimeo cooperative
as quaint and antiquated as pet rocks
or that Mr. T puzzle I continue to keep
stashed in its original cellophane in a shoebox!
Only a glutton devours two helpings of Chinese food
in a German resturant (how's that for multiculturalism!)
and leaves without feeling like he could conquer the world
although again the feeling shall pass within an hour!
aerofloat
table
Well, won't that get me into the annals!
rather than suffering a lesser fate such as
holding down a regular job while participating
in the cottage industry of the mimeo cooperative
as quaint and antiquated as pet rocks
or that Mr. T puzzle I continue to keep
stashed in its original cellophane in a shoebox!
Only a glutton devours two helpings of Chinese food
in a German resturant (how's that for multiculturalism!)
and leaves without feeling like he could conquer the world
although again the feeling shall pass within an hour!
Monday, March 22, 2010
March 7, 2010
How long since I've seen marbles, noticed veins in them,
schist and mica rubble trapped inside a serene and milky sphere?
And yet I live in the town where globes for libraries and schools
were broadcast to the rest of the world, with borders
a satellite photo falsifies. What is committed to ink,
what dries upon the page to become writing, may be merely
a record of words circulated in memory nearly a week
separate from the thoughts they contain, the chaff from wheat.
Thus the final justice when all comes out haphazardly.
A ladybug settled inside the lampshade instead of a fly.
But the fly that sits inside the lampshade is a ladybug
once in a while. The spotted helmet flares into multiple wings
aflurry, as it flies. A small fly not in its prime
lands on the ceiling, then against the wall, then bumps
between lightbulb and lampshade, and touches you.
It lets itself be swatted away, not juvenile but weak,
enough time to be swatted with the local newsweekly,
in which you'd never know that it was here
where the drafter's hand transposed the mercator projections
to cloth and paper globe with the thickness of this lampshade,
in which the fly finds respite in warmth but insufferable confinement
in its circumference, beating its head against it and circling the lightbulb,
what it knows of the sun that it seeks to crawl within by force alone:
open up, and let me in, a little fly, enter your hot singularity.
The lightbulb is a sun on the center of the earth, the place they
made the globes and sold their projections to themselves, until the
industry expired, leaving these houseflies to circle small suns.
Myself I must be hundreds of feet from where the globes were made.
schist and mica rubble trapped inside a serene and milky sphere?
And yet I live in the town where globes for libraries and schools
were broadcast to the rest of the world, with borders
a satellite photo falsifies. What is committed to ink,
what dries upon the page to become writing, may be merely
a record of words circulated in memory nearly a week
separate from the thoughts they contain, the chaff from wheat.
Thus the final justice when all comes out haphazardly.
A ladybug settled inside the lampshade instead of a fly.
But the fly that sits inside the lampshade is a ladybug
once in a while. The spotted helmet flares into multiple wings
aflurry, as it flies. A small fly not in its prime
lands on the ceiling, then against the wall, then bumps
between lightbulb and lampshade, and touches you.
It lets itself be swatted away, not juvenile but weak,
enough time to be swatted with the local newsweekly,
in which you'd never know that it was here
where the drafter's hand transposed the mercator projections
to cloth and paper globe with the thickness of this lampshade,
in which the fly finds respite in warmth but insufferable confinement
in its circumference, beating its head against it and circling the lightbulb,
what it knows of the sun that it seeks to crawl within by force alone:
open up, and let me in, a little fly, enter your hot singularity.
The lightbulb is a sun on the center of the earth, the place they
made the globes and sold their projections to themselves, until the
industry expired, leaving these houseflies to circle small suns.
Myself I must be hundreds of feet from where the globes were made.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Jan. 9-17 2010
Mixed nuts lightly salted spilled can recall a Fibonaccian sequence
If you observe a single nut at the center, the others in a spiral
That in theory embraces the world if you posit this cashew as a center
And the others in spiraling formation only increase in size and embrace
Until no more mixed nuts are left from the sequence to continue this progression.
The Fibonaccian sequence can drive you nuts in conjunction with time-cubes
when you spill the nuts from the can, unlike cereal, no prizes nor miracles,
only nuts on the floor or the counter-top shaping themselves into a Fibonaccian sequence,
as how the bounty of picked flowers spills from a cornucopia of straw.
Only the numbers accumulate in greater progressions than you can follow.
Why not just eat mixed nuts from the counter-top until the sequence reverses
Or return them to the can that has become a Pandora’s box of thought for you?
The traits you attributed to yourself that made you special only multiply.
If you observe a single nut at the center, the others in a spiral
That in theory embraces the world if you posit this cashew as a center
And the others in spiraling formation only increase in size and embrace
Until no more mixed nuts are left from the sequence to continue this progression.
The Fibonaccian sequence can drive you nuts in conjunction with time-cubes
when you spill the nuts from the can, unlike cereal, no prizes nor miracles,
only nuts on the floor or the counter-top shaping themselves into a Fibonaccian sequence,
as how the bounty of picked flowers spills from a cornucopia of straw.
Only the numbers accumulate in greater progressions than you can follow.
Why not just eat mixed nuts from the counter-top until the sequence reverses
Or return them to the can that has become a Pandora’s box of thought for you?
The traits you attributed to yourself that made you special only multiply.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
12/12/09, 12/20/09
Flip through Death in Venice:
note the old pansy in hipster's attire
with hair dyed and lips rouged
foreshadowing/mirroring/foreshadowing
protagonist Von Aschenbach in his demise,
tansy in his buttonhole, youth restored
by the glib barber, wandering in mazes,
feverish, lost at career's finale.
But this pansy treats you to a frown
no matter what you tip him.
You thought your visits would be kind,
knowing that his partner was sick.
Who is he to seek your straight charity?
So for hair you go to girls instead,
a half-dozen housewives out of town,
their spouses cops or firemen.
One of them doesn't mind pressing her hips
against your knuckles as they grip the leather armrests--
hers are curved as in Rubens or as Charytyn
among her circle of Afro-Caribbean dancers,
animated Venus of Willendorf.
You wonder what her love life's like.
Is the husband, so small in the photograph
taped to her mirror, touching her?
Does she take more interest in male customers
than in children whose hair she cuts
customarily before the baseball season?
She's talks about her old bedroom.
I don't get what neighborhood it's in.
Who does she bring there, her parents gone?
How old is her offspring,
also in the snapshot on the mirror
another stylist will take over
when she leaves, starting her own business?
My knuckles memorize the her jeans
as taut as skin around her hips,
although she'll go to seed, not eating right.
As if I were swayed by rhythm and undulation,
waves within the tides all lunar push and pull.
Nor should she bare her midriff now.
Still I'd enter Shannon without effort,
bathe with her, let friction build.
But inside, I'd make a remark
so ridiculuous or laughable,
the act would become(see Marcus Aurelius),
rubbing of innards and spastic extrusion of slime.
The aftermath feels like a meth crash,
this coming to one's senses. Among bedsheets,
the sated body feels indented as fieldstones or concrete.
O Hold it: she's a barber with a son,
her husband's municipal, her extended family
large as some Irish-Yankee mukhabarat.
Venus' gravity can grind stone
into plate-shaped fragments.
What is the likelihood of bumping
into another woman built like her,
the curves just tracks or trajectories
on which bodies and elements hurl?
Like a rolling stone, begin with the drum-beat, don't end with one.
12/20/09--6/7/10
_____________________________________________________
Last night's blizzard missed Vermont entirely,
but it snowed in Boston and most of the eastern industrial belt,
until there were flight delays clear to Chicago and down to DC.
I've never eaten a Blizzard at a Dairy Queen.
According to the Larouchies, the Queen of England runs
the heroin trade and is the force that drives the Kyoto protocols.
Said Jerry Garcia once, heroin is a great drug for old people.
And old people such as myself, without children to support them,
and with a hard time finding shelter. Heroin will be a great temptation.
Once at an airport such as Idewilde or Logan, I search
for a bus shelter as soon as I am outside the flight gates.
Someone stole the Arbeit Macht Frei sign from the gates
to Auschwitz, or was it to Bergen-Belsen, or was it both?
When the sign says STOP my instinct says do the opposite and GO.
However if my instinct entertains murder, I do not follow the lead.
When again I fish on Lake Morey, I will use lead weights
to hold the bait down below the waterline.
Were people to disappear, fish would overcrowd the sea.
When people overcrowd the planet, the fish will flounder, prices rise.
Surely all airports and stations will be overcrowded during this season.
And a sigh of relief will escape once the season ends.
But from the imprisonment of family, there is neither escape nor relief.
Could you row into the middle of the lake, without friends or family,
would that bring a quiet although lonely respite, satisfactory
to those who are used to being alone, although one hankers for a dog
as a companion, who looks up to you, depending upon you for sustenance,
for food and for shelter, wagging its tail, hanging its tongue out.
Only the weekends, unextended with vacation or personal days,
bring you respite now, your furloughs and holidays spent.
For my furlough week this year, I chose the week before Labor Day,
while the sun still warmed the lawns and gardens,
spending no small amount of time trimming my lawn and weeding my garden,
some weeds with milky pods or stems, some with thorns
or velvet-textured pulpy leaves and impossibly tenacious roots,
ensuring the plant's recurrence next season, suggesting
those eastern resurrection gods who submerge in winter but
in summer ascend before Phoebus--who knows what
poisons or medicinal properties they offer, conceal?
Among the gates of airports in post-industrial cities
and between the broken tarmac and the faded traffic stripes,
rise weeds to a nearly human height, scattering their spores
to the winds that are borne from the Arctic.
Terrorists don't need to hold such airports under siege,
all they need to do is tie up outbound traffic.
Counter-terrorists besiege the post-industrial airports.
It's ideas that are the poisonous weeds rooted in the minds
of both, scattered among the winds like so many spores
that refuse to acknowledge borders or the gates of airports,
the weeds are bringing the wild back to entwine among the ingenious
structures, a field already reforested, repopulated with vines
entwined among the video terminals and concession stands
where Milk-Duds rot among and feed the milkweed
bursting through the summer with the frequency of incendiary devices
released from the hand of the fighter egged on by imam or Bakuninist,
although there remains nothing to conquer but unregistered space
of weeds among perennials I cannot claw from soil, once on my knees, enough.
note the old pansy in hipster's attire
with hair dyed and lips rouged
foreshadowing/mirroring/foreshadowing
protagonist Von Aschenbach in his demise,
tansy in his buttonhole, youth restored
by the glib barber, wandering in mazes,
feverish, lost at career's finale.
But this pansy treats you to a frown
no matter what you tip him.
You thought your visits would be kind,
knowing that his partner was sick.
Who is he to seek your straight charity?
So for hair you go to girls instead,
a half-dozen housewives out of town,
their spouses cops or firemen.
One of them doesn't mind pressing her hips
against your knuckles as they grip the leather armrests--
hers are curved as in Rubens or as Charytyn
among her circle of Afro-Caribbean dancers,
animated Venus of Willendorf.
You wonder what her love life's like.
Is the husband, so small in the photograph
taped to her mirror, touching her?
Does she take more interest in male customers
than in children whose hair she cuts
customarily before the baseball season?
She's talks about her old bedroom.
I don't get what neighborhood it's in.
Who does she bring there, her parents gone?
How old is her offspring,
also in the snapshot on the mirror
another stylist will take over
when she leaves, starting her own business?
My knuckles memorize the her jeans
as taut as skin around her hips,
although she'll go to seed, not eating right.
As if I were swayed by rhythm and undulation,
waves within the tides all lunar push and pull.
Nor should she bare her midriff now.
Still I'd enter Shannon without effort,
bathe with her, let friction build.
But inside, I'd make a remark
so ridiculuous or laughable,
the act would become(see Marcus Aurelius),
rubbing of innards and spastic extrusion of slime.
The aftermath feels like a meth crash,
this coming to one's senses. Among bedsheets,
the sated body feels indented as fieldstones or concrete.
O Hold it: she's a barber with a son,
her husband's municipal, her extended family
large as some Irish-Yankee mukhabarat.
Venus' gravity can grind stone
into plate-shaped fragments.
What is the likelihood of bumping
into another woman built like her,
the curves just tracks or trajectories
on which bodies and elements hurl?
Like a rolling stone, begin with the drum-beat, don't end with one.
12/20/09--6/7/10
_____________________________________________________
Last night's blizzard missed Vermont entirely,
but it snowed in Boston and most of the eastern industrial belt,
until there were flight delays clear to Chicago and down to DC.
I've never eaten a Blizzard at a Dairy Queen.
According to the Larouchies, the Queen of England runs
the heroin trade and is the force that drives the Kyoto protocols.
Said Jerry Garcia once, heroin is a great drug for old people.
And old people such as myself, without children to support them,
and with a hard time finding shelter. Heroin will be a great temptation.
Once at an airport such as Idewilde or Logan, I search
for a bus shelter as soon as I am outside the flight gates.
Someone stole the Arbeit Macht Frei sign from the gates
to Auschwitz, or was it to Bergen-Belsen, or was it both?
When the sign says STOP my instinct says do the opposite and GO.
However if my instinct entertains murder, I do not follow the lead.
When again I fish on Lake Morey, I will use lead weights
to hold the bait down below the waterline.
Were people to disappear, fish would overcrowd the sea.
When people overcrowd the planet, the fish will flounder, prices rise.
Surely all airports and stations will be overcrowded during this season.
And a sigh of relief will escape once the season ends.
But from the imprisonment of family, there is neither escape nor relief.
Could you row into the middle of the lake, without friends or family,
would that bring a quiet although lonely respite, satisfactory
to those who are used to being alone, although one hankers for a dog
as a companion, who looks up to you, depending upon you for sustenance,
for food and for shelter, wagging its tail, hanging its tongue out.
Only the weekends, unextended with vacation or personal days,
bring you respite now, your furloughs and holidays spent.
For my furlough week this year, I chose the week before Labor Day,
while the sun still warmed the lawns and gardens,
spending no small amount of time trimming my lawn and weeding my garden,
some weeds with milky pods or stems, some with thorns
or velvet-textured pulpy leaves and impossibly tenacious roots,
ensuring the plant's recurrence next season, suggesting
those eastern resurrection gods who submerge in winter but
in summer ascend before Phoebus--who knows what
poisons or medicinal properties they offer, conceal?
Among the gates of airports in post-industrial cities
and between the broken tarmac and the faded traffic stripes,
rise weeds to a nearly human height, scattering their spores
to the winds that are borne from the Arctic.
Terrorists don't need to hold such airports under siege,
all they need to do is tie up outbound traffic.
Counter-terrorists besiege the post-industrial airports.
It's ideas that are the poisonous weeds rooted in the minds
of both, scattered among the winds like so many spores
that refuse to acknowledge borders or the gates of airports,
the weeds are bringing the wild back to entwine among the ingenious
structures, a field already reforested, repopulated with vines
entwined among the video terminals and concession stands
where Milk-Duds rot among and feed the milkweed
bursting through the summer with the frequency of incendiary devices
released from the hand of the fighter egged on by imam or Bakuninist,
although there remains nothing to conquer but unregistered space
of weeds among perennials I cannot claw from soil, once on my knees, enough.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
