There are winds and rains
that reach you on these rooftops
and they don’t seem to phase you

Your soul was escaping that night,
though,
you told me.

So we stood for a couple of hours
and counted things quietly
and self-referenced our past lives
so that nobody else could hear us

There were insects crawling in your hair
but you didn’t notice them. You never had.
They’d been with you a long, long time I think.

And the starlight did not do those billboards
justice,
they just glared so that the giant smiling faces
were on what was like fire.

So I kept my coat buttoned and
kept pulling down my hat so
it would not fly away, and you were
preoccupied too, and there we were

I think I saw it all in a dream, once.
It wasn’t as cold as I remember
but there was quite a lot of wind and rain,
that much I am certain of.

The pressboard underneath you
will only hold you up for so long.

I fear you are in the waiting
for a long, hard fall.

Try not to take anyone else out
on your way down.

With a pipe in his mouth and a stern
unscolding look beneath it Mr. Hugo
climbed in to the passenger seat of
the large, weathered Luxury car from
another era which I had recently taken
to driving and we began, floating
easily down the roads and byroads
of the town in which we had found ourselves

We spoke softly of the other cars
on the road, which seemed to speed
past us with abandon and an uncaring,
foolish sort of gait. We considered that
the drivers had no real concept of the
power they were handling. That they
did not know they could change the world.

I changed lanes easily as the powerband
shifted and before I knew it we were on
a highway heading north and out of town.

Though another poor woman who we passed
was not so lucky in her green minivan,
we did not kill a soul that day
and so the topic ended
as the blue lights flashed
and we digressed.

Our wonder soon turned to the ways
and wiles of our fellow woman, particularly
a wife that Mr. Hugo had taken and
had run in to a stretch of rather
unfortunate luck with concerning her
comings and goings and other parts.

There were conclusions made, but alas
none could be delivered so surely for
the mind of the human being is a strange
and difficult-to-manage thing, so even
with all the thought and consideration
that we two could muster, eventually
we found to cede to be a simpler way.
Soon the thing had drifted
and we pair did digress.

I spoke with Mr. Hugo some time ago
and asked him, from his professional
point-of-view how the gentleman in question
had come to so vegetative a state as
his current delusion would require of him

He responded simply that he did not know
and that it was not so important, was it?
That the gentleman in question was
roiling as a signal through an out-of-phase
loudspeaker should be topic enough
to pontificate upon,
and so we digressed.

He avoided the dread monsters of the New World
and passed peacefully from the back to the front,
stepping jovially and uncarefully and stopping
just beneath the longest, tallest bridge and he said
he didn’t much mean to cross it for fear of
being blown in to the ice water – a cold wet grave –
but he’d have to give it a shot and so he
climbed up the hill to where he’d pay his toll, and
when he did not have quite enough change the man
was very nice and let him walk on anyway.
so he went and made it half-way along the longest
tallest bridge, but the wind had picked up and,
it is such a shame that a man who avoided
the dread monsters of the New World, would
be blown so unceremoniously in to the coldest
water he had yet been in. It then became
his everlasting grave, oh what a shame it is.

So pretty soon
your hands are off the wheel
and you dodged what you could
and you’re already floating

and when the first hit sounds
you don’t feel so bad
and the second one,
it rattles you loose

But the music keeps playing
and it’s still okay to drive
as long as the going’s slow.
The cops won’t seem to mind.

A Breath:
A single sound in silence
and inspired
and again
And her hands move.

She works
sort of badly, you know?
but the resulting mess
the endings up
is/are/am beautiful.

And I sit perturbed.
I sit watching and
waiting and I
don’t think I have it in me
and I’m not sure
it’s such a bad thing.

But the resulting mess
The endings up
are Beautiful.

And really
that’s the
only part that matters.

Drop-Dead is just the adjective
and not the effect
thank god
or tonight I’m sure
you would have killed me

The wind roared as a fury
and I
like a fool
tried to grip you just as tight
as when the ships were
dead on water

But I should have held you tighter
because it wasn’t good enough

But those were your winds
I found
and perhaps I should have
loosed my grip instead
so my fingers
were not so sore
when you finally flew from me

I breathed
and every star was gone from my sight
but not gone from me
because I could remember
the shape of Ursa Major
and I could feel the Dipper
and taste the Southern Cross
and in a moment the heater,
it flared to life and suddenly
the stars came back to me,
and now I remember
that I remembered,
and I think that may be
just a tad more beautiful
than all these sweet, sweet stars

So at least we cut ties
like we should have cut ties
so many ties before.

There’s a big brass bell
that hangs
on the side of a building
downtown, near the
galleries and Delicatessen

It shakes so hard that
I think it will fall off
and perhaps I will stand
just
beneath it, so the fall
will crush me so

But my trusts had no
issues,
they were issued freely
if carefully and well funded
and I know trust fund kids
and this ain’t how
it’s supposed to work

But here I am, just beneath
a big brass bell
hoping
that I will crush myself
beneath the weight
of my own red rage

I heard about a man,
once,
with trust issues and when
he was proved right
no one was amused
and there was no mirth
in that vindication.

Never met the man
or his problems
but I feel his pains
as they reverberate
off of every wall and
corner and the big brass
bell
on the building downtown

I wonder if he’ll ever
trust again. Then,
I guess he hasn’t so far
and I guess he was right
and so what does that say?
Should all our trusts
have issues?

Do they?

We have compiled a list
based solely on the various
aspects of the true nature
of your eternal, immortal souls

The list has been limited,
by virtue of sheer necessity,
to the men, women, and monsters
gathered in this room.

They have been judged
unceremoniously, and will be
persecuted in kind.

The brown-skinned woman in
the corner has shown no lust
for life and no drive or
want for any sort of goodness.

She has stripped the love away
from each of her friends in turn
until the hand-full that remain
are but names to whisper curses
to in the lonelier evenings.

The tall, fleshy man with
the greasy hair and the smile
ever-present has faltered
time and time again.

He has taken advantage
of the hearts held out to him
and cut them as deeply
as he could while they stayed
beating. His words are
minced and rotted and have
no use, least one needs to check
the foulest speech through
a microphone. His silence
smells near as wretched.

The thin fellow who has
difficulty speaking has
forced every hand and taken
every chance and particularly
those chances that
were never his to take.

He is ruthless and spineless
in even measure, and he
dares make waves where
he can barely swim himself.
He had potential once, but
he proves evermore that
‘potential’ is a dirty word.

We have deemed these men
and women and monsters
unfit to persist in this world,
and would press to set
this room on fire with doors
locked and barricades stacked
unbreakably. It would be,
however, unfair, for
the other poor souls trapped
with you.

And as you stood there
as I played, your gaze
leveled from behind those
spectacles and your denim
jacket pulling your dare
-I-say perfect breasts
out just enough, I could
hear your voice over
the blaring of my saxophone,
and could feel the burn
from your big green eyes,
and I don’t know where
you are, and I don’t know
who you are, and I don’t
think either of us give
a good god damn, but
I could feel the burn
from your big green eyes,
and the saxophone was
in the way, but I was
smiling

I was an action figure
with my legs taped to a model rocket
and when the experiment took place
the rocket did not fly
and the exploding solid-state engine
blew me to smithereens

I was a Wagon Driver
out in the Old West (Probably North Texas)
and when those bandits waylaid me
I was left to starve and melt to death
in the harshest of the desert suns
over someone else’s delivery

I was a Brittish Grenadier
back in old ’39, and there was
not a place for me to hide from
the flying, screaming, burning shrapnel
of mortar-fire that ripped out
my throat and guts

And now, I am a poet
and I drive an old car all day
and my radio doesn’t work quite right
and sometimes my ends don’t meet
and I swear to God, some people
just get all the luck

My friend John,
He’s a sonofabitch,
and he knows just what to expect
when he steps in to a room
full of every other motherfucker
that he hates with all his passion

And if he could,
I know for all but a fact,
he’d take a Louisville Slugger up-side
the skull of every motherfucker
in every room that he walks in to,
because he hates them with all his passion

Really, that John
is no friend of mine,
but Jesus Fucking Christ they all
seem to love him so, and even though
he only wants to brain them so
he can laugh about it with his Jo-ann,
An acidic bitch all her own

And if I could,
I’d send them both downstream
in a side-by-side, custom-made Douglas Fir
casket with pontoons to keep it floating
and maybe even a sail just to make sure
it got the fuck away from us

But I can’t,
I know, because Douglas Fir
is a high-priced commodity, and the wind
just doesn’t blow so consistently upriver
and anyway, these motherfuckers, they
love their John and Jo-ann and I guess
they’ve never seen John’s bat
but I have

Vortexes swirl as
wheels spin on the
vehicles that carry
the people and the world
in to the next set
of tricky situations
and arguments concerning
politics and economics
and other ‘ics’ and
then there arre the
wrong turns and then
there are the routine
police-initiated traffic
stops and then there
are accidents and fender
benders and trains and
deer (always runaway
deer) and all that just
before we roll in to one
of a million spinning vortexes
that pull us somewhere
that’s nothing like the future
and nothing like we’ve ever
been.

Now you’re gonna be a manager
and run things just like you always
dreamed you would but what you
don’t know is you won’t be running
anything except yourself into the
ground for the good of all the other
ungrateful little pukes that are useless
but to bitch about the state of things
and call in sick at the least opportune
sorts of times but there are at least three
good employees aside from yourself and
they run in to the ground too and just
like you and just like four little mounting
screws and you won’t ‘come undone until
twelve years from now when they decide
to remodel and a pair of large men with
crowbars and hammers come in and knock
the whole place down