It’s a neighbor with a bad car
parked on the street
without plates, the cops
hovering around then having it towed.
It’s the couple screaming at
each other on the sidewalk and
one of them tears a rock out of your wall,
raising it overhead, and now
it’s your concern. Did they screw up
the succulents that grow there,
the hen and chicks? You yell down from
the bedroom window to put it back.
That breaks the anger spell.
They leave after tossing the rock
onto the top of the wall.
You will replace it later
now that all is well and after
the tow truck leaves with the bad car?
It’s almost as suburban out here as it is back home
where high school friends live who say
“the city is a cesspool” and trot around
boastfully shaking their heads at me
from their beautiful yards
where the hen and chicks grow from holes
artfully cut into the sides of barrels
transformed into planters they bought
at the hardware store down the street
from the place where that guy
stabbed another guy in the back of the head
at a lazy evening barbecue a couple of years ago,
an isolated incident among isolated people,
insulated people who choose to turn away.
To those high school friends I say:
welcome to the cesspool
where I see my shit and name it
while you hide yours.
In the longest of long runs
it all smells the same.
It all spills out eventually
just like those tough little plants do when they
bloom, long translucent stems and flowers
drooping out of barrel holes and stonewall cracks,
trying to make the best
of wherever they find themselves.
Tag Archives: poems
Hen And Chicks
Folderol
Wish I could take back
everything I’ve ever said —
each word, ill timed grunt,
sigh in passion, moan of distress.
It’s language that has cut
all my crops down, set the fires
in each of my villages.
If I’d just been silent,
things would have been different.
But I just had to do this. Had
to open my big fat mouth. Had to
make a whole series of noises
and call them art, say I was
seeking beauty, truth, that
folderol; forgot that a stone has beauty
on its own without making a sound,
reveals truth when hurled through
a window; the noise you hear then
doesn’t come from the stone
that lands mutely on the castle floor.
Wish I’d stayed silent. It’s done me
little good not to be. It’s made me
want to sit with a glued-up mouth
on my scorched earth till I’m gone.
People say I owed it to them, to the earth,
to be this, to make noise, to rumble
like a damn volcano, tweet like a bird.
What I owed myself, they tell me,
is unimportant. It’s the artist’s just fate
to disappear into their hollering,
happily or not. I say no, then say
no more. Be here that way till I’m not.
Dad’s Close Order Drill
Revised, from 2009.
The five purposes of close order drill are to:
1. Provide simple formation from which various combat formations could readily be assumed.
Look for their fear.
Slip your hand into it, make it
your puppet,
pull it close,
make it rigid,
make it dance.
The dinner table provides
the ideal setting for this, so
2. Move units from one place to another in a standard and orderly manner, while maintaining the best possible appearance.
speak to them
with great attention
to their faults. Do not fail
to hit the same notes again and again:
inadequacy, failure, shame at heritage
denied and betrayed…and ensure
that nothing of the conversation
will be heard outside that room.
3. Provide the troops an opportunity to handle individual weapons.
If you are focused
soon enough the words
will come from them,
tailored, well-pressed,
4. Instill discipline through precision and automatic response to orders.
and when they cringe
you won’t even have to watch
to know it’s happening.
5. Increase a leader’s confidence through the exercise of command by giving
proper commands and drilling troops.
Won’t you accept the salute,
the hands above their eyes,
shading themselves from the heat?
You have earned it.
* close order drill objectives, in boldface, taken from USMC Website
It’s Not That Simple
I don’t have an answer
Don’t know the right questions
to get from one end of this
to the other
It’s not that simple
Not an equation
Stuck in my head with
A jumble of words
that feel like maybe
Might lead somewhere
It’s not that simple
Incorrect directions
I turn from one to another
I turn from the certain to doubt
I turn away from the road
with the well-marked signs
To the dense darkness under the trees
I don’t have a sense of direction
Can’t make any sense of the landscape
Don’t know the right way
to any destination
It’s not that simple
Not an equation
It’s not that simple
Incorrect directions
It’s not the arrival
It’s the journey they tell you
No, it is the arrival
They lie as they’ve lied for all of my life
They Are Yelling At Me
I don’t know who they are
but they keep yelling at me:
Enough, enough! What’s with
the moaning, all the doom-poems?
You are sitting in a warm-enough room.
You are still warm to the touch.
Look out the window at that one cardinal.
There’s the woman across the street
starting her Jeep. There’s so much going on
that isn’t the direct result of some tragedy.
Write a damn love poem,
they say. An ice-cream poem,
cool and sweet. A feather pillow poem,
soft and easy to clutch. A poem with
a roar-shaped kiss. A metric ton
of roar-shaped kisses, in fact. Why
the constant scream of pain and
anger at how the worms of money and hate
twist through all our guts
all day and night? Write us
out of that with a love poem,
a bird poem, a stars in your eyes poem
or two or three hundred, Mr. Prolific,
Mr. I Got Words For Everyone, Buddy?
All my poems are love poems, I answer back.
I wouldn’t stand for them if they were not.
I would not be here with them clustered around me
if I did not think they held love within.
The poems with the guns will do what’s right
for love. The poems full of moans are the echo
of wishing for better. Every word
may taste like rocky road
to a parched and bitter mouth.
And why is there roaring at all in these words
if not to speak of love for the world as loudly as I can
in the face of so many teeth and such greedy claws?
They don’t answer. They never do.
I wish I could do anything else but this.
This morning I shall settle at the keyboard
to put flowers upon all the unmarked graves.
It’s not a living. It’s a life.
Shh, I tell them. Enough, enough.
As American As Petting A Bison
Some context for this:
How To Lose Your Pants By Being Dumb
If I were to become a bully
I’d do my business
righteously, historically.
I’d fill my raging belly
with ghost egret flesh,
drink nothing but spectral bison’s tears,
grow horns
the size of a railroad car
and start looking around
for a bison-petting tourist with
jeans and blood to spare.
Watch them run away after trying
to pet me. Thinking
I’m tame. Believing the
schoolbooks they’d seen.
You’d think I’d have learned
about how such behavior
tends to pan out over time.
You’d think that — and you’d
be wrong. This is mild. It isn’t about
replicating their history of violence.
There’s a whole country out there
the wants us lovable enough
to keep on a shelf in the living room.
Someone’s got to set them straight
in the name of survival. Put them
pantsless on the hook
for everything
they never learned in school
or subsequently.
It’s not their fault, you say,
that they bought the myth they were sold.
But it is. It’s not like
they haven’t been told.
Anyway, I’m starting small.
No need to panic yet.
Your jeans
don’t begin to pay off
what was stolen, but it’s a start.
What Drives Me
Bags filled with
broken promises and
hands full of random illnesses
and injuries: that’s where I am
in this late middle age. I have
the residuals of bad choices
to weigh me down
and of course
the words, the Work,
always and forever
driving me.
To feel better
I’d give up a lot,
but not the drive, not the Work.
I’d let blacktop cover me,
let the city take my home,
let me fall on a sidewalk
outside the library. Let them
use me as a warning, let them
slip me into forgotten history
and leave me there — but the Work
shall remain on my tongue
poised for release
then fight its way past
my light stripped eyes through
frozen fingers into the world
where it will live or not on its own
because that’s my Work
and I’m not done with my job.
I’m not quitting it just to die
at peace with my body
and my wallet. No.
Looking Ahead
When the end comes
will you be able to sit with it
and keep telling yourself
it is all going to be OK?
Are you willing to find a park bench
upon which to sit by yourself
in the last green grove on earth
and tell yourself this too shall pass?
Think about how you are trying
to make the best of this, of how
everything you’ve known till now
is coming to a point:
all existence squeezed into a dot now,
a pencil mark
on a dirty scrap of paper;
the world compressed to a period
at the end of
a sentence fragment,
and it’s harder that ever to recall
what that sentence was.
It made sense.
That’s all you know.
It was uttered by someone
you loved, or could have loved.
All you’ve got to go on
is one faded period and
an illegible word
to puzzle over. Same as it has been
for most of existence: broken puzzles
are offered with great authority
and finality. No answer, no clues.
All you have to do is figure it out
and speak it for it to be real. Are you willing?
Are you ready to have this be the way it ends?
Reprieve
When you look outside
expecting trumpets and fire
and all you hear is the drone
of photo opps legions seeking
clicks and likes and affirmations
from the devils or angels they prefer
Peeking past the blinds
into a gray morning with no
distinguishing features beyond
unseasonable weather and more
humans signing on the street these days
jerking drug dances for survival
When you turn with a headshake back around
to the relative warmth of shabby rooms and rugs
and your yet to fail walls and aged thin pipes
it all doesn’t seem as bad as the trumpets
and fires you expected at this point
since you are warm and for the moment aecure
You raise a shout and toss a dance move
A wipe of the forehead and a raised glass
A song to whatever lord you think has saved you
from the trumpets and the fire and the nights in the cold
Forgetting the imminent snuffing of all candles and lanterns
You exhale in uneasy and unwarranted relief
Three Chords And
REVISED from 10/19; originally from 2008 or so.
Once you were a chucked berry,
a fogerty full of sloppy chords,
a skip to my lou reed.
You got all slippery
with clean sauce. Turned down, tuned up,
tossed out your faded paper bag
of dark wanderings. Bought into
commercial anthems that worked well
in the fluorescent aisles of big-box stores.
Come back to your game desire.
Come back slaphappy, sharpened
for the war against plastic.
You used to have
a mouth full of splinters. Used to
honor dingbat and idiot,
all those
who broke the social charm
with a fart. Do you remember yourself?
Gas monster.
Blunt huffer.
Smoker of the right goddamn herbs.
You chased the scent
of acorn porridge, worked
Delta mysterious.
That devil in the crossroads
still valued
your willing ass.
You used to not be such
a freak for safety.
You used to not be
such a doom escape. Children
hate you more
now that you’re safer
and nearly devoid of a scrap
of care left
for your sulfur traditions.
We love some of you still,
even with your
crystal fraud hippie faking.
We love some of you still,
you wall street loving
gutterpunks.
It’s like watching
the fattest rats in the world
pretend they aren’t rabid.
Bite me.
Better yet?
Infect yourself.
Be the sick fuck we loved to love,
no matter how bad
you made us feel.
Last Call for the Rip-Up Reading
On February 23 at 7:30 PM EST I’ll be doing a live via Zoom reading (tomorrow night) of a special set of poems. No one has seen them; they will be printed, read once, and destroyed after the reading. Literally, a one time only event.
I’d planned this to be a Patrons-only event but am opening it to the general public on a pay per view basis.
It will be $10 USD for the performance, payable through either PayPal or Venmo. Message me here and we can work through the details. I’d love to have some of you attend.
Thanks,
T
A Big Bowl Of Mythology
Having a big bowl of mythology
as the first act of the day
is better than taking a shower,
better than anything one can do
except for having sex and
because the bowl of mythology
contains enough sex
to choke Dionysius or lay
Thor low, it is not as if
you can’t get that too, slurping
legends down in the kitchen
where all you have to go by
is window light. Forget the news,
forget checking e-mails until after
you are full. The old gods know
what’s good for you and they say,
fill yourself with the good news
of how we ran amok once
in our time
and still kept the world spinning.
It will give you hope and then,
your belly full, you can take on chaos
secure in the knowledge that
given enough stories, enough examples
of randy and bloody and now and then
noble tragedy, you can get up
and be a god yourself — randomly
screwing, assuming perfect disguises,
pressing nuclear buttons
if that’s your thing; the taste of Valhalla
on your lips, the image of the Cross
throwing its redemption shadow over all.
You’ve got big shoes to fill,
a landscape to change, lightning in your belt
waiting to be hurled. It’s the breakfast of
champions: a bowl of mythology
in one of so many flavors you’ll want
to try them all. Now
in Mixed Indigenous Berry
and East Asian Crunch!
Available for a limited time.
A Posse Of Deadly Clowns
the form I see before me
is not the true form.
do you see what I do not?
it is possible my eyes deceive me.
it would not be the first time for those little liars,
those deceitful balls playing with tricky light.
if you say my true name I’ll change
into my true form, if the tales are to be believed,
but why should they be? the writers
have eyes which may be just as dishonest
as my own. they might have no backstory
to support the legend. so the legendary true form
may be not a true form at all but simply that
which kills the perceiver before they solve the mystery.
never trust a writer to give you all you need
to seize control of the world. they’re a posse of deadly clowns
riding out in search of illusions they’ll tell you are true,
and they may be right but they don’t know and won’t know
until you are staring into the mirror they’ve given you.
they wait to see what happens.
no matter what happens,
they try again.
An Uneven Day
What an uneven day
it has been already.
Rose late and made coffee
before I showered
because priorities
and rituals must be
honored to make things work
as they should
and now I’m sitting here
with a pile of notes and
something that purports to be
the start of the greatest poem
I’ve ever written and seeing that
it’s clearly on its way to being
more crap than canon. Which
hurts more because
when it comes to all of my work
those may not be
contradictions.
Later on someone
will call out of the blue
to say, can you
come help me move?
and inside I’ll hem and haw
but get up grudgingly and go
because I have a station wagon
and while it’s no pickup truck
priorities and rituals
must be honored.
When we’re done
one apartment will be empty
and another will be full
and I will come home
to my own that is both full
and empty at once.
Then I’ll take a second look
at the Work I left behind.
I’ll sigh and light a pipe
and after that close my eyes on the day
hoping to find myself tomorrow
back on the winding road
that leads from the bones
of one uneven day
to the next one,
where there is still
possibility
to be chased regardless
of faint chance of snatching it,
because priorities and
rituals must be observed,
even in the absence of honor.
The Smaller Mugs, Etc.
As we approached the time
that had been announced
for the end of the world,
I packed away the large
coffee mugs and took out
the smaller ones, hoping
to reduce the chance
I’d be awake when it happened.
As we approached the time
that thad been suggested
would bring us the end of the world,
I took out my winter clothes
and and put them into
donation bins, hoping that
the next big species would find a use
for them. I wanted to be
as bare as possible when it came,
to sleep in comfort as it washed in.
As we approached the time
that had been foretold
for the end of the world,
I paid all the bills and emptied
all my accounts, canceled all my subscriptions
and memberships, sat back satisfied
that if it didn’t happen
I’d be in good shape upon waking, cool
and rested and solvent — and if it did happen
I’d perish knowing tha while it didn’t matter
I could die knowing I’d done my best
to leave little trace of myself in the ruins
of the mess I’d help to make of the world.
Dark Matter 