Song of Memory, Kerned

sacred Girl
outside of time
holding the idea

rolling it around
between Your fingers
feel the warmth

channels of song
anchors of cul-de-sacs
She walks through the grass

a glimpse of Her dress
dancing in the wind
She glances back

always there is a maze
the firm rule is there is no firm rule
planets shed matter

sacred Girl
time is Her breath
She imagines me

how can the amphigory break?
does sorrow paint the sky?
will She return?


The Lady as Maiden, discovering humans as a reflection of Her desire to create. She hasn't brought us to being in this poem. She has imagined us. In particular, She has imagined me. There will be pieces of this song from the Mother and the Crone. I see this as very close to a prayer. Kerning is a typographic term, referring to the spacing of letters to adjust the words, graphically.

Here’s the Rub

This endless dream invades the night
Between the bouts of plugged sinus tissue
& the frequent urinations as I age ever
So gracefully and shaking off the piss
I crawl back in the bed, holding close
My wife and circling through the mental
Landscape into the many houses I
Have passed through in my dreams
The Rooms like idealogues impressing
Their nature on my current sensuality
Inevitably there is a ceiling leaking and
Peeling there are walls in faded wallpaper
With small chunks distracting me their
Inobvious decay a minor chord in this
Roundelay. I am, I think, searching, for
Something or someone or what I was
Supposed to know by now. The Secret?
The rationale? The key to the locked
Door, somewhere in an old house is
This west Hollywood? Or Spokane?
Or did this real estate create its own
Illusive peninsula of dirt or flesh,
Somewhere that cannot be tuned
In by Mapquest? I only know that
Every night there is another room
Another house another broken chair
Or remade parlor and someone always
In the next room, laughing at something
I cannot hear. Or that the sweet air
I breath is my wife’s own soul, as she
Dreams her own extraordinary landscape
Much stranger than my own.

Pleasures of the Harbor

Flesh still red, grilled in the wood fire with
a glass of deep, rich wine, the sweetened peppers
flesh crackling and partnered with a vinegar from
an old barrel …is there a way out of this trap?
Feeding from the other creatures after all we
Are the other creatures just as much as we are
Whatever animal this is … Pullman talks about
The soul or that guy with his information from
Mathematica man and the three part dance he
Attributes to Hegel (thesis, antithesis, synthesis)
He talks about the soul. The religionist and co-
Religionists they all redeem themselves with
That hoary undefinable character of self,
The soul. He’s a soul man. She’s a soulless bitch.
The soul departs the body. Soul’ed out. Filet of
Soul. Even Bart sells his soul (to Milhouse) and
There is a lost and lonely boy in a boat by himself.
And is this Self the earthly fragrance of a Soul
More than me in the Great Beyond the place
Unperceived. And greedy for individuation,
I ask are there previous selves? Lives led during
Other aspects of the species becoming what
Aware of the Other, or afraid of the creator
Or needful of a common … understanding?
A shitty bunch of questions, crackers stuffed
With fillings, fish and cheese, baked at an
Indian bakery or matzoh’s from the desert walk
In any case a canapé at this point. Regard
The omnivore: all this perceivable outside
Of self becomes my flesh, my blood,
My poem (my excrement). Is it all the atoms
In our cells in our hurry to the grave we can
Cause order, briefly, as the universe measures
Itself out. Is Stephen Wolfram, mathematica boy,
Right about the natural complexity and the
Way this all came about without my actually
Raising a finger, or is the Lady smiling
Trying not to laugh, like with my two year old?
Darn’ed if I know. Glory Hallelujah.


All apologies to the ghost of Phil Ochs for the title, misleading though it actually is. And I haven't read Wolfram, just reviews, though I live in the town that he lives in, or at least that Mathematica comes from. And who the blank exists within the confines of this flesh is pretty much a guess, but this I do know: the Lady is the question and how I ask it.

Martian Crime Scene

Her scattered remains trail-blazing a failed journey across
The planet’s surface; no diseases, only the same pale flatness
It’s subtle red charter a cold glaze of blood from out of time.
Her hand lay gleaming a thin disastrous fleshtone upon the rocks
The great canyon disguised the yellow strands of her hair,
Cracks in the legendary strata of this martian heart. Across
The endless plain archaic tin whistle singing lures the fool
To his unremarkable disassociation. He waves a wry grin
Disappearing in the tiny-grained sand, its very essence
Her lost bloody child. Hidden Hidden, Shallow, Numismatic.
Is she ever going to be found? The child in her the thing that
Stands for something else. Will he wonder where her coffin
Is delivered? Will he walk down seventh street, unasked? Will
He . . . climb out of . . . the Great Martian Western Sea with
Any piece of her in hand? The yellow man does not know.

Bad Faith

Jump hard into playing that game milady
Night is a samovar & you are sucking
this life out of me. Stars are burnt (diamonds
as a form of coal); the alien life form
tokes up on the gems in your eye sockets
Down at the harbor's last available wharf
the ropes are knotted with pithy remarks
the cold sea water is a metaphor
spawning this big fish; not moby dick
of course. You are still in court,
your briefs filed, your slim tush on its throne.
The vinegar flush mixes with smoke
from your past. Is there an alien taking
my desire? Is there an obvious joke
in the ever present stiffie? Sad fire,
extending through the time zone.

1/2005

Born Twice

Orson Welles Picking His Nose:
"Who shall we eat today?"

The boy
wore his coveralls, covering up
the instant possibility of an endgame.
His fevered selfishness disguising
moments of mendacity as a fey
tic. On the widdershins of this seamless
life came that ship of days; a buttload
to be precise. & suddenly out of the
beaded player arose Orson Welles
with an eye on a blonde or two and
a persimonious rap, waiting to be
absorbed by the dark sorceress.

How many days do thusly pass?
Enough to anchor the seamy memory
of what was that girl's name again?
Heidi and her father who denied him.
While we watched bad television,
smoking endless amounts of cannabis
on Pat's dime, no doubt. & Our Boy
consoled himself with thousands $
electrical toys and books and records
beyond a normal appetite.

Mata Hari, she styled herself, joked
about his "Toy." She, not quite right
herself, ran the silver insult like a
stream of honey down the days. No
escape, like Shelob, she removed
what juice she liked, and handed him
over to the bookstore girl. Not as
kindness, but as placeholder. Dark
lady she reached over to his old friend
and gave it a little tug. & that & a
perk or two took care of that. Left
him in a similar cave on Lowell

with a wife & stepchild
& ever closer to the widening
gate that had once closed
before him.

photos man! beowulfian friend!
co-owner of the red star! amazement
at the spiral of the hours! see you
in its contemplation! You who
were once so close! You who
kept track of your single shrimps,
afraid of being cheated! You
who taped all the movies on SLP
so no one's eyes were undamaged!
you are the last edition of your family now
no fourths in sight
nothing in the record, a fug's discography
the story about eating an infant in the uk
passing passing passing

slouching off down the road to the underworld
not persephone no, but
a monster, coveralls muddy
and ripped. hands empty after
so many seasons, taking nothing

Illiniwek

Truth can be stolen
My son defends the arching
Need, tradition writes its
Version of history, notes
Our respect for the defeated
On the court the sophomore
Dressed like Irving Berlin’s
Sitting Bull, “he’s an Indian,
Too,” jumps in song the
Kally-yope. In Oklahoma
My friend’s child lives
In her mobile home
Her food stamps gone
Her television blurry She
Goes nowhere
Sees nothing
Aches constantly
Orange or blue
Not in this assembly

One of the dark realities of living in Champaign-Urbana are the proliferation of stickers on cars, The Chief Forever, as if anything truly lasted forever. But the local university's long time mascot is a white guy dressed up as a native american (what nation? what tribe? well, certainly not the Illinois nation, and not the Potawatomi either, and not the Lakota; they just don't say) who comes out at half time and prances around like a straight guy trying to be gay and failing. The worse of it for me is that my son, usually a logical person with a science background, will make a great (he thinks) case for why this symbol isn't anything like the Atlanta Braves, or the Washington Redskins. It just shows you how blind we can make ourselves. And yes, I know I have my blindness too. In any case, I don't expect the Chief will ever go away, although his "ancestors" are pretty much dead and gone or living in poverty not in Illinois. Ironic, eh? Oh, and orange and blue are the local school colors. I'll be glad to live in an earth tone town again, some day. The Kallyope is from a Vachel Lindsay poem. Irving Berlin's "I'm an Indian Too," is in the musical "Annie Get Your Gun." Kimb and I did a production at the Springfield Theatre Centre in the late 90s. I have a wonderful picture of Kimberly dressed as a native american. Utterly unbelievable. But certainly in keeping with the actual Buffalo Bill show. I played Pawnee Bill.

post tsunami

witnessed
events over the rainbow
shameful deceits
gambles of the heart
practical dysfunction
the search for orgasm
in this lifeboat

leonard at the turn
of the millenium, big hand
on the tiller, sad song
repeated. Who's
valuable memory
echoed in the pedal steel
strings of her lost song?

cannibal religion
at the door zoroaster
not in this evening
you keep your lists
i'll keep mine
jambalaya on the lake
mists in a treason
shadowing the old
friend never clear
as to the final
disposition

the day breaks
your face in the strewn
detritus post tsunami
on the beach
where I sit
paper in hand

This poem exists primarily as a kluge, a software developer's term meaning a klunky way of accomplishing something the language doesn't allow a more straightforward method of doing. Written after pursuing zoroaster across the web and discovering another truly ludicrous religion that people still believe in, much like Mormonism. How do people convince themselves of stuff that is clearly fantasy? The Book of Mormon is patently a clever workup of other stuff with this man's personal exegesis on why them new testament figures never dealt with all the souls living on the the continents across the water. And Zoroaster was just trying to offer explanations for things that happened to people. Unlike science, though, in religion when these explanations are shown to not work they are still retained as "gospel." That's where we get Creationism. "leonard" here is Leonard Cohen. The tiller image is meant to invoke the fisherman, and also, "Captain, Oh My Captain," Whitman's evocation of Dead Lincoln. Just because I lived in Springfield for several hundred years doesn't mean that I don't love the sixteenth president pretty much more than any of the others. You should read Lincoln's speeches if you want to be truly ashamed of the loser we have in the white house now. When did it become a good thing for our presidents to be anti-intellectual louts?