I heard they were runnin’ a sale down to the river
on absolution but I didn’t pick none up for me
or you either ‘cuz the car’s battery died and
I still owe money for a whole mess of things
and that Chinese dinner was a fine expenditure
just like the picture and the gasoline and
I’d say you should grab a little bit for the
pair of us but you’d probably buy a bottle
or a couple good pies instead and that’s just
fine with me what with the economy like it’s
been we don’t need to spend no money we don’t
have to

He is a simple man on the inside
and a martyr and a legend
and he loves the people that reject him
but he does not touch them, for fear
that they’ll melt
and he’s got enough messes to clean
I swear

He moves with impunity
down any city street he chooses
and he does not show his passport
and he has no homeland, at least
not in this universe,
but he wanders among us and he
wonders at us anyway

He speaks to children, sometimes
he whispers in their ears to tell them
all the things that their moms
and dads are doing wrong
and sometimes the children listen
so they try to do the right thing
but sometimes they
just run

And maybe you would to, I mean
he did kill all those people
all those years ago.

Fella’s been drinking whiskey half the night
the other half spent counting coins for the trip
down the road to the liquor store and his taste
is rather extravagant but desperate times call
for lower standards and fella’s okay with it even
if he has to mix his medicine with Cherry Coke
just to make it palatable but when the only cash
you’ve got to your name is tied up in a bottle corner
the mixer is the lesat of a fella’s problems, yeah?

His mouth moves but no words come out
and I am accountable for not comprehending

but the dictum thus passed down is lost
as he is lost for words it would seem,
though I can make out some mumbling
if I listen very closely.

And when his flesh starts to rot from
his pearly white bones and sloughs off
on to the floor of his pantry,
I will be held accountable for his woes.

And when I refuse to accept the dictum
thus passed down, I will be slotted
to burn with the rest, but at least
my meat will stay virile and fresh,
and stuck to my skeleton until
the moment just before it is
burned away.

I told this guy a story of lost love
and heartbreak so he’d know
what kind of lines to use
when he had to present his list of lies
to the class the next day
but the professor wasn’t feeling it
and it was an unceremonious
‘that’s enough’ that finally
put the fella down and I
wish he’d listened a bit closer
to my story ‘cuz maybe if he had
he wouldn’t have enrolled
in that difficult of a class
in the first place.

A kid I knew
dug some old
music out
from a box
he found under
a bed in
the spare room
that his mother
always sort of
hoped he
wouldn’t poke
around in.

It was two tapes
and a record
and he dusted
off the family
stereo and he
spun the albums
one by one while
his dear old
mother held her
bible close
to her heart.

Ten years or so
gone by now
and he still spins
those three
albums and
his mother
is dead but
she died a
Good Christian
and even
though it was
the Devil’s
music he plays
every song
when he grabs
his guitar
for her.

All of these photos,
they sort of make you look
like the Devil,
in a strange sort of way.

Perhaps the fangs, always visible,
or the claws, seem like they’re
scratching, or the
hollow, unloved look in your eyes
(though I think, in some places,
it’s okay to love the Devil).

I would offer to help a bit,
but I think you’d
run away, and anyway,
I could be wrong.

But then,
a picture is traditionally appraised
at a thousand words per,
and with my eye for values
I can only hope you end up
in some place where
it’s okay to love the Devil,

and around here
just isn’t it.

And every time you take a step
it’s like another one of your bones snap
but you’ve run out of bones to break,
you thought,
and you probably shouldn’t be walking
anyway

and really it’s what you get for
not eating healthy all these years
(there’s a reason they prefix the term
‘essential vitamins’ with the word
‘essential’)

and I’m glad your legs are pulverized
stumps and I really enjoy watching you
drag yourself along like this and sure
I’ll keep pushing your weight around
but I’m not going to help you up,
you evil bastard,
not if I can help it.

He always did have a strong back
and a temper as slow as the day is
long
and I
never could figure why he up and
killed all those people like he did

Must have been the poison in the well
or some sickness in the livestock
got him twisted up
like a bed spring
and wound up tighter than an
eight day clock

but I’ll tell you, sick or
salve or whathaveyou,
I have never seen yet or since
blood on all the walls like that.
Why,
it’s darn near like he
painted them

and I guess it just goes to show
that folk ought not fool
with other folk’s lives like that.
They’re liable to get all
kinds
of mussed up,

I’d reckon

There’s a lot more country road than I thought there was
and a lot less gas in the tank than this trip will take
and the cash in my pocket is hardly worth two gallons
and the watch on my wrist was a yard-sale find
and sometimes the only thing you can do is keep driving
until the gas runs out and at least all this country road
is beautiful this time of year and evening, what with
the sun filtering through the already-turned leaves like that.

You had your claws pressing
against skin and stretching it
so it looked like it would break
but the pain was borderline at worst
though the threat was understood
fully and you hated it but
all it did was make them grin

So now you sit quietly, as
every disenfranchised harpy must
watching your so-near-prey
bounce on unrequited-ly
while you flex your fingers
and make sharp your claws
on the timbers of passing ships

With the weather like it is
there won’t be much hunting –
not this season, anyway –
but you’ll survive I’m sure,
for even the kindest harpy
learns to dig deep eventually,
and a harpy you still be.

I HAVE BEEN INFORMED OF MY FAILURES AND TERRIBLENESS
BY YOU AND YOURS AND ALL AT ONCE IN THE FACE OF IT’S OWN
SPECIAL KIND OF ADVERSITY BUT EVER SINCE WE HAD THAT TALK
I’VE HAD SIX PHONE CALLS FROM SIX PEOPLE FOR NO REAL REASON
TELLING ME IMPLICITLY THAT I’M ALL RIGHT
AND EXPLICITLY THAT YOU’RE WRONG
AND SURE IT’S NOT QUITE THE TRADITIONAL FRACTION BUT
WHEN YOU GET DOWN TO BRASS TACKS, GENTLEMEN,
SIX OUT OF SEVEN AIN’T BAD

There is an unyielding natural force
that keeps one’s feet on the ground
and one’s pencil rolling on one’s desk
in lieu of floating out one’s window
And it is a boon and a quality
and a reasonable necessity in these days

But yours is an unnecessary gravity,
a stress and a stretch and an
erroneous sort of thing, and it seems
but a weight to drag one down
rather than a hook to keep one grounded

And though I feel your less-than-sublte pressures,
There is one grace that saves me from their hold:
Newton’s may be a law,
but yours is just a caveat

The leaves are turning
and so comes the obligatory photos
and poems (and this one included):
Dry crumpled detritus snaps from branches
and blows away, coloring sidewalks
and church-yards and golf courses. It is
an ironically colorful sort of death
that permeates these late days.
I’m sure, too, it’s the end of an era
in someone’s overall inconsequential
microcosm, but that’s to be expected:
The winds blow change in every year,
don’t they?

And if your soul is hurting
I’ll lend you mine and you
can use it however you need
and I’ll fix it if you break it
and I’ll wash it if you scuff it up
and it’ll be yours forever
or at least until that haystack hair
grows out

To plant a kiss on the hood of an idling car
and pray it makes the next rest stop
because that’s all the more you have to drive
so Triple ‘A’ will cover the tow
while your child is in the back seat
crying because the heater’s broken
and the Air Conditioner is on in dead of winter
just to keep the windows half-transparent
is a blessing in disguise:

Your ride has 3 “A’s on the side,
not one, that ends in ‘Mbulance’.

Across the hills and things
we discovered a derelict power station
with no lines connected to anything
and a concrete driveway that’d been
halfway milled back to dust and I thought
that a power station with no lines
was a sorry sort of power station indeed
and the way time moves there’s no saving it
and the way things go we can’t hook it back up
so there it’s going to sit and rot and things
and I’ll go back and try to be nothing like it
but goodness knows I probably will be.

It’s a good felt hat
come all the way from Germany
and yea, you look pretty good in it
but I can’t say that out loud,
if only because that’s what you want
and sister, I can’t have none of it.

Your smile’s nice, too,
and body language is careless
and were I but another man
or a lesser man, you’d have me
and hook and line too
(sinkers are for bottom-feeders)

But my leg muscles are strong
when riding a bar stool
and my body does not always speak
when spoken to
and you can keep smiling
but when you finally give my hat back,
you won’t get anything in return.

Sorry.

There haven’t been colors in the sky
like there were that day. He remembers it solemnly.
Red and gray on blue and purple
recalling both beauty and dying flesh
like the world had got the shit beat out of it.

He had cried a bit that morning. No wonder,
with all those bodies on the news like that.
Somebody’s kids weren’t coming home.
Someone else had lost a caregiver.
Nobody was cooking family dinner that night.

Oh, but had it been a Russian bomb!
Had it been a bombardment from China or Taiwan!
It was so much worse, that God had done it.
There was nobody to blame this time around.

I didn’t live so close to the epicenter
so the pictures on the news were only pictures to me.
I went to work that day just the same,
on account of the world was still turning,
and all there was for us, was
one more thing to talk about at lunchtime.

I have read of the gullibility of Castillians
and the sanctity your martyrs hold:
these are points that do not escape me,
but I let them moulder all the same.

I have taken note of Caesar and his armies,
of Napoleon and his broken nose.
I swam deep once, to find Atlantis
but it is a fairytale and Plato said so too.

So I wonder what the truth is in these histories.
I am drawn to think that none of it is so.
I am pressed, I think, to try and make my own,
and though there is no difficulty, these days,
in the publishing,
the caring is another matter.