sometimes just to feel the life inside of me
i like to bust open the doors of the retirement home and
with my pants off i make a break for it in my chair
wheeling down the street in the snow i
slip and slide like a youth on drugs
except I’m old and on heart medication

but the wind is in my hair.

i gathered up rocks on a beach
i put them in order and began
the inquiry

which of you will kill me?

these rocks being people, though
after the inquisition i
ran up a hill

lost my foothold and fell

passing through the void
i knew i knew i knew i’d
been right

but i could never know which

and this is how it always goes

Let me be like Thomas
that I would say,
I have felt his wounds.

Put your finger here,
see my hands.

He has awakened me
from the dead.

Reach out our hand
and put it into my side.
Stop doubting and believe.

i pick up the phone and give it the old
english try

but there is something distinctly
un-english
about my bad english
my lack of manners
and general confusion about social
norms in the country i’m supposed to identify
with

because here the clouds nearly reflect the sunshine like the moon at night
the air is perfectly thin
and the grass,
the attitude
knowing why I left is not regretting.
but then, ignorance would be blissful

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.

Motherland

A string of pathos
loathing
sadness
irreality/absurdity
On the up hand
tenderness
humor
empathy

Introspection

I have been on a voyage (and slowly coming through)
searching for a place to be and fly higher
longing for reprieve and harmony
while feeling toyed with invisible forces
stranded without direction
falling into the narrow
losing sight of what is
with only a fiery energy within calling me back to myself
So, I have been away
in between worlds
in between jobs
but this time I might just come into being
hummer my ego and expand
build a home of true embrace and connectedness

Gratitude

Opening myself
to a landscape so pure [gratitude]
[a silencing kick to the ego]
realizing that we all have our own gifts
energy and enthusiastic beauty
[Praise to the universe
May we all be blessed, and radiate joy
and hope for others]

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.

a String of Thoughts I

Porn:
under the bed
a stack of cathodic whores and stallions
with cataclysmic charms and vices
to propel his sail into minutes of sulfurous lonely passions

shamelessness:
Friday night club
Huddled together
Pain shimmers
and If Jesus had been Jesusina
he’d wipe his tears and snots with Jesusina’s skirt

Redemption:
she is so rough she doesn’t mind
when fate calls on her
she does not rally around trust
someone got away with her innocence
she breaks
she hates
she leaves trails
exhaling in a fog
regrets that aren’t hers
a contagious distress
aftershocks from a childhood poison
her light is done and gone
but she sings right
right to everything she has
true to the sounds in her soul
she bends and screams
pushing pain back an inch
she can hear her own voice
brimming with rage
she feels powerful under
the same sky she breaks
and hates under
and that’s how she knows that someday she’ll hold herself up
roll down the valley
pick up a stone
and defeat that giant on top of her world

Festooned with an array of fresh-picked weeds
in the breast-pocket of his light blue button-down shirt
a gentleman rides a subway car quietly
in the early evening of a warm New York night:
There is a suitcase sitting next to him
that does not belong to either he
or the dirtied waif on the other side
of the upright bar they both grip.

The waif glances sidelong at the gentleman –
the only other passenger in that particular car –
and takes interested note of the weeds which
so prominently adorned his person. He nods.
“Got a little girl?” The waif asks, making clear
that the nod was toward the gentleman’s greenery.
“Yeah,” The gentleman replies sheepishly,
“She’s 7 today. A real sweetheart. A gem, really.”

“Seems like it.” The waif says with another nod
as the subway begins to slow, finally screeching
to a soft, if shaky, stop. The doors open but
no one gets on. The gentleman does not move an inch.
The waif is fingering a knife in his pocket,
but the Gentleman does not see it.

It is a swift and fluid motion that the waif makes
as he spins suddenly and draws his knife. He stabs
the gentleman seven or eight times (neither of them
were counting, really) and lets him drop to the floor
while snatching up the now (and always) unguarded suitcase.
The waif leaps from the car just as soon
as the doors start closing, making off with
another man’s tax information from the previous year,
and leaving a bloodied father of one to die,
and everything right with the world,
unfortunately.

I, as a vulgar man
have made mention of you
and in polite company, too.

Nearly was I ejected from that brood
and sent on my way to colder climes
but I swore, on my life,
to never speak of you again.

But alas, an absolute
is such a fickle, wish-washed thing
and sooner or later I,
try against though I might,
will curse your name again.

Right about now,
specifically.

And pretty soon things
got so bad that I
had to process all
forwarding messages
and take the responses
as Gospel

the greatest speech i ever wrote
was told in front of the hangman’s noose
for a moments time the nearly departed did think
“why maybe this aint’ so bad”
and the greatest moment in my career
was communicated through the still, dead feet

no twitching

a relaxed hanging, i thought
is a good one

i felt most human then.

i wander these woods looking for a tree
to mock nature in revenge for the many
times it’s merely cried with me
when i needed to be cheered up.

on that late night walk home
(already melancholy from a rough
and lonely day) nature gave me silencing
snow
enveloping the world in beauty but
giving me ear muffs and sending the world
inside as if to say, “you’re lonely?
i can dig that knife deeper for you.”

but now my life overwhelmed with joy,
i need me a weeping willow to sit beneath
and laugh hysterically at it, rather than it
at me.

alas nature knows my intentions and gives
me nothing but sunshine, tulips, and fields
of green grass where i swear there were
woods last year.

i read today the writer’s juices flow
best in the morning.
i write at night.
hence the lack of quality emitting from
my fingers of late.

oh i smiles
sometimes you know
i smelly done good good
and never look back
the thing in my pants
i store it there
a brand i can depend on
holds it there
and i carry it around
i smiles you know
sometimes just so right right
take off, throw out now
and carry on.
makes me to smiles

the web is flooded with the need-to-know-now
and the more i know the less i’m valuable to
the world wanting to more about the news
so newsworthy it passes in five minutes notifying
me if i need to know i’d best not linger
or get up for a beer

it’s the grey cloud
that will be all there
is to write down that
you were here.
frustration is not
quite the word for
what it feels like
screaming into this
thing wondering
what it will write
if it writes
anything at all.