broken promise

I am a naturalized citizen of the time
having found degrees of self
in the act of searching

I am an immigrant on america's shore
wanting to believe

these fragments have been scattered
on scarritt street for many years
I found detente and put the pieces to use
in the jigsaw

if you only were to come to me
this afternoon
the promise could be mended
I am serious about this

Once again, a statement regarding broken vows. Well, a woman who calmly cheats on her husband time and again, can hardly be held responsible for breaking a vow or two along the way. And therein lies my failure, the inability to see and accept the actual person living in the flesh. I suppose this is actually the reason so many romances fail. I am saying that my vision of Alison was probably never realistic, and certainly not true. Even now, I understand that I am too harsh on her; making her far more consciously responsible than she actually was. I have mutual friends who would tell me that she was just another slightly brainy blonde chick who dabbled. Who can say that they aren't exactly right? Even Alison would probably agree with that statement to some extent. It's not like I'm Allen Ginsberg, idolizing Neal Cassady. Though if you've ever read Cassady's novel project you might wonder what the idolization was about. I come to understand that so much of this is really self-directed. Even if this is only a mood tonight I think I need to point out that I am the one posting poems from thirty years ago. She has a life entirely devoid of me and probably of my memory to a great extent. It often surprises me how little people I have known remember of their pasts. I remember far too much; I understand that. Is it a positive or a negative? Damned if I know. But I have to accept the person I have turned out to be. In any case I feel what I feel about Alison and I feel bad that this all lays under the soil of my life. Somewhere below this a river runs.

roadside shrine

sad animals
stumbling to various
versions of death
limbs fighting for
balance their
fear measuring the self
only desire
interrupts

hope equals longing for the duration
of this lifetime
in a gray sky clouds act as confidants
of our self destruction

this house is always haunted
I thought I'd give up
find the love in fantasy
my private thoughts a
river of flesh
but there is no way out of
this haunted room

so I'm like a medieval saint
trying to pass through this life
as fast as I can when what I really want
is to become a sinner
with you my only sin

To Internet Researchers: Removed Posts

I have removed some posts from this blog because the information in those posts was not accurate. If you have come here seeking information about Janet Hanrahan, there isn't any and there wasn't much to begin with. If you have come here seeking information about Larry and Leslie Owens, or the person who was convicted of their deaths, this information is no longer on this blog and will never be posted again. There are a lot of serious poems here that require a careful reading. If you do not care to spend the energy doing that, please leave and go elsewhere in the online world. Thanks for your attention.

Tim Osburn

resistance

there is a moon tonight an accounting a shadowing on this heart
it is you leaving you walking away the steady unhurried natural pace
the moon changes
we dwell in the universe accepting the cycle as inevitable
the engine purrs
I listen too closely
the noise in the darkness: choirs of cicadas the fan beating air out
too many losses
it suggests that loss is the defining characteristic of this existence
why do I kid myself that I can resist this tide?
you're not here
the dark is a vast ovation to the blind god
no happy fortune just breath drawn alone
no twin heartbeat


I will say that this poem is not about any specific romantic attachment, though it did come from a date I had in the mid-90s before I met the woman Kimberly. It is also in the period where I was slipping into the gnostic materials on and off. Any examination of the god of the old testament finds a rotten hideous bastard who gives not a crap about us except insofar as we feed his hideous ego. The gnostics characterized this god as Samael, the blind god. The god who had gone made and created this universe, the one we inhabit. He is, as Phil Dick put it, insane, and therefore this universe is insane. Dick believed that because of this we need "medical attention" and that the avatars, Jesus, Buddha, Asklepios, were all microforms of the true god sent in to bring us back to sanity. It's a lovely theory, really. I spent quite awhile reading the texts and thinking in these terms. But it just didn't really work for me.

And then I truly found the Lady in my heart and in the night sky. On Bryn Mawr Street, after Becky Bradway left me, I started sleeping in the sun room at the back of the house. At night I would open all the blinds, except those on John and Gael's side because they had a little porch light back there. On full moon nights I could see plainly across my backyard and over the fence to tenth street. And I would open myself up to the natural world, the fir trees, the holly tree, the wind through the many windows. In the room in a planter I had this ficus tree I had grown from a tiny plant bought at the grocery store. By this time it had grown to be about eight feet tall. I recommend living with a tree.

In that room I found the Lady for real. And I asked Her the chance to love again. I met Kimb the next January. She changed everything for me. The Lady's mercy is real. There may be a blind god, but he is sad figure if he exists. I feel so bad for all the xtians and jews and muslims. I know what god really is, and She is merciful and beautiful and always on our side. Just look at the leaves and the stones, the waters of the oceans and the rivers, the breath of wind. This world has its own internal reasoning; that is the Lady's mercy.

This poem was also one of many attempts at writing the longer line. I think it works passably well. So much of contemporary voice poetry works on the short line/statement. I love a lot of rock and roll lyrics because of how well they balance their content with their rhythmic needs, and that is primarily short line statements. But, I also truly love both Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, particularly for their long lines.

the lunar conquered

the sky is gray lucite, inescapable,
smothering in its cold and filth, the rain
unclean, rank in puddles of bacteria
the morning frightens me

something must happen: the lunar conquered,
the story of the aztecs revealed, the screenplay
sold, the love returned, sun again ...

something must happen:
wounds or discovery
love or murder
this evening birthed by caeserean section

I can see the static clearing
the lunar conquered, the story of the aztecs
revealed, your hands bare in the dusk

the breathing stills

I still love you
even in my dying moments
even though you gave in
and the surrender was artistic, beautiful
even though you no longer write
or seem to feel
except in your privacy
even though it is easy to dwell
in the aquarium

there will never be
another way to see this apparition
you will never be more
than a ghost of your old self
another incarnation shot
how could you be so stupid?
how could I let you?
but I did everything there was for me
to do except, perhaps, to kill myself
and this, I resist

go away go away please go away
leave me alone let me live
goddamn you go away

The Fall of '68

Later it's the fall of '68 and I am walking Katy Wilson down Clayton Boulevard. We are on our way back to her dorm on the south forty where we will not make love. But the trees are dropping leaves, a hundred versions of red & gold. The wind is just mild enough, the odor is that evening perfume from October. The girl is short, darkhaired, catholic girl ready to break away.And I am on my own, cruising St. Louis, looking for what I imagine truth is. One thing truth is: my arm around her shoulders, our words still pregnant with ideas that haven't been knocked down by the wintery intellects of the University, the semi-erect penis in my jeans. Somewhere June Christy is singing that song "I'll Take Romance." So Katy Wilson became a psychiatrist, & I never really was a writer. But I can put myself on the corner of Clayton & Big Bend in the Fall of 1968 any time that I want. There's June, singing in the other room.

A leaf from my memory, falling to earth in this, the Autumn of my years. Katy Wilson went to Washington University, but I knew her well in Wichita where she was the valedictorian for Mount Carmel Academy's class of 1968. Marcia Froelke and I used to go hang out with Katy some. After the Marcia thing went away for me I started seeing Katy. I was at St. Louis University, and she was five miles up the road at Washington University. Her dorm didn't have parietal hours so boys could be there any time and me and my friends from SLU would go over there and hang out until all hours. She was a pretty little girl, one of the few brunettes in my life, and I certainly could have made love to her and almost did. But, not quite. And then she moved on, tired of waitng for me to pull the trigger no doubt. I remember she wore panty girdles. Girls did that in those days. Here's what she was like, though, she bought me a book of Rod McKuen's poetry. That is to say, someone who was more of a pop artist than an actual poet.

I often think about Katy Wilson when I see Hillary Rodham. If you went to a catholic school in the sixties you knew that girl. And I'm not being negative at all here. I appreciated Katy, but I was never going to be good enough, or successful enough, for what she wanted from her life. Good enough, though, for a roll in the hay. The artist thing. It did work for me, occasionally. I gave her a handmade book of my poems for xmas, 1968. I'm sure she threw it out years ago.

settling like snow

wan almond gone away
hands slipped from slick flesh
only scents remain
her coconut white limbs
terribly concealed
her egyptian eyes
darkened with desire
her hard snake tongue
a remembered psalm
again and again
wan almond gone

Tone poem about the physical sensuality of Alison Gaughan.

potter's wheel

the year goes cycling on this tour of my life
I mix my bone's ash with seminal fluid
and follow now the woman who won't be captured
in this spinning yin and yang we make this vase
a bottle of Einstein's space, and time
she fills it with roses, I fill it with rhyme

the frescoes of friends glazing my self-described brochures
dark & light daguerrotype, marked in silver the singers
chasten this clay, knead the dough to its consistency,
fasten the chainwheel on the day, follow the girl,
her song vowels in siren, taking shape on the potter's wheel

Phil Dick uses the image of a thrown pot as a hiding place for the deity in his remarkable book, Valis. The idea of the universe as some sort of art studio is interesting to me. The distance between the potter's wheel and the great centrifuge at CERN is just not that great, really. I have to say that my old friend Greg Lakebrink's long term relationship to bicycles and cycling gave me the idea of life as a "tour" and the chainwheel as a tool that we all have in a symbolic way. Perhaps, for me, poetry is like a chainwheel, giving regularity to my imagistic reasoning. Maybe this is useful. Maybe it isn't.

many strong desires

many strong desires
have slipped into memory their
edges become poems their
fantasies become novels
it is the only expiation I allow
it is just the same as prayer
but not as good as rock and roll
outside the shadows of rose leaves
tremble in october breath
boogie woogie blues on the radio


A tone poem from 1977.

Answers

What do I want
is it help or assassination?
certainly can't be answers
I've had them
they're like popcorn always
disappearing with the salt

I don't want no phenobarbs
clogging up my clogged up throat
no messy veins slit up a treat
with slick depressing words
in puddles on the floor

I don't want no false hopes
in my prophets no false bottoms
in these boxes I keep taping shut

I don't want no revolutionaries
cutting open my bowels
to prove their fucking truth

I will kill you
I will kill you
I will never write you, never phone
I will not answer the door
I will hide in the attic
I will not see you
I will kill you
and in that dying
I will destroy myself

Sort of a riff on Dorothy Parker's Resume poem. A dismissal of suicide, only to find it in an attempt to get shut of that blonde girl. Well, I was overly dramatic in those days. Probably smoked too many cigarettes. This piece is from 1977, during the period when I removed myself from Alison in an attempt to diminish her importance in my life. I wish I had been stronger and had stayed away from her. It colored far too much of the next decade of my life. Becky Bradway was hard on me, too, but she didn't have talent for the knife that Alison had.

angel of dying

to remember you is to remember rooms
your conversations awaken schizophrenia
I remember the snow, alive, like chaff
separated by your swinging arms

I find myself fallen, on a xmas course
the plurals of cold take my pain
your imprecisions are a code I cannot understand
your words are, at best, knives


I think I published another version of this in the spring. This is the original version. I will have to go through everything and see if this is phantom memory. The poem itself is pretty clear, relating the subject to the snow angel and to homicide.

More Than Style

This is Garamond at 16 point on this computer
Subject to, pursuant to, the hegemony of this time
This is the story thus far
The wind scattering the leaves
In the capitol

Can you see the time in motion?
Born in the usa, completed catholic schooling
Managed to rise out of superstition
But it took forty years and truly I am still a
Man who seeks retribution, a xtian/jewish need

Could I rise above this time?
This is Garamond at 16 points

***

Jaguar Fred you distress me and I see you may have left now.
Your satellite in the Beach Cities there is nothing I can tell you
That you don’t already understand but where does that
Take us, in the nightly depths?

He ports his ancient altered self
Into today’s remembrance.
Are you there with your brother?
Is there alchemy in your life?
Does She come to you in your dreams
as She does in mine?

Because I can't control the typeface here, so I lose the actual image that started this. I have occasionally spoken to my friend on the west coast, trying to clear out the destructive brush in my mind, but I haven't heard from him in awhile. We both celebrate the Lady, in our own ways. Ranyard once wrote a novel in which a Jaguar, the car, defeated a Corvette, in a reprise of the Jan and Dean song "Dead Man's Curve".

The title is a reference to Arthur Lee and his group Love, from their seminal sixties album, Forever Changes. Here is the reference from "The Red Telephone":

This is the time and life that I am living
And I'll face each day with a smile
For the time that I've been given's such a little while
And the things that I must do consist of more than style.

mis-carrying

we talk of what might be real
how brave we are
we can remember, foretell
our selves, our other selves
the selves before
we are children climbing trees
planted in the grave of an old man's ghost
under tamsen donner's broadcloth skirts
on washington street, 1979

inside of me:
the sweet rage, & the bitter choir

why don't we understand each other?
there's just the one story, told over
and over, broken, the foetus in the wind

By the time I was living on Washington Street, across from Springfield High, in the house with the hundred plus year old cottonwood that I imagined the Donner party leaving Springfield from (and there is some real possibility of that in the historical record), Alison was carrying on with the greek-american poet, Tony Kallas. Someone I respected, poetry-wise, and someone who was a handsome man. It wasn't surprising, and I have to say I never expected sexual faithfulness from A.(although I think her husband believed she was faithful). Still, it comes out in these lines, the sense of an aborted life. Alison once wrote a poem entitled "stillborn" (published in The Village Magazine, 1979). And there is that strong sense to what happened between us, the sense it was never resolved. The lack of closure. Of course I blamed her, and of course she shirked all responsibility. It was her way in those days. Probably still is. Of course, now she's a lawyer so she's really good at it.

Denmark, 788 AD

you know its the chemicals
the acids and the alkaloids
arranged through the centuries—

maybe I knew you in the blood
in a cave/blue metal rock lit by
the lightening of a coastal storm
maybe you were wet with the sea
but I said it doesn't matter
and it didn't, then

now, you won't trust me
and I won't trust you
I don't even trust myself
afraid of that bersarkr
who's cock is only another hammer,
pretending its lightening is magic

I knew your blood
your slit, swollen with the true god,
sodomy was the only realm
that wouldn't remind me of my lack

no wonder man is restless
he has no home in him, no womb

next time
it will be in a boat
& when I die, you die
this is just a prediction
of course

I have written many poems that have dream visions at their core. And many of these dream visions have to do with being a Danish viking from around the time of the Danelaw. This was true 35 years ago, and it is still true today. I'm sure it fulfills some sort of weird need to contact a previous mode of human existence. Whatever. This piece once again talks a great deal about my relationship with Alison Gaughan. I recognise more than ever that she too came from the viking experience in the british isles.

The wearing of the bear skin, the bersark, was a way of allowing the rapaciousness of nature to inhabit the warrior. You became the bear. Thus, the need to be "divine" flows from this existence in the natural world as that great creature, the Bear. But putting on the bear skin allowed the wearer to murder without human feeling. The hammer is obviously a Thor reference. The acids and the alkaloids refer to the steps in the double helix, the ladder of reference for the physical being that is the human. I believe strongly in racial memory, the encoding of our ancestor's existence in our DNA. This explains a lot about my dreams and my desires.

It is interesting to me the implicit recognition in this piece that what I wanted from her, which she was never willing to even go near, was to have a child. Having a child is an odd theme in her poetry; it comes up again and again, but in her life she struggled against the concept. Eventually, after I no longer knew her, she finally did have a child in her later life. I knew several women from my generation who did that. A chancy thing, but there you go. She had a boy. If we had reproduced I am certain we would have had a girl child. How do I know something like this? I have seen that child in my dreams. Too bad, I guess. But once again, I find myself leaving by the back door.

flashing yellow light

ha well I got you rotting
in the grave even though I know you're in
your husband's bed giving him some
of that inept oral sex you thought
was so good
I got bad news
I seen your flesh
all diseased up with mine in the hall
of nazi atrocities
ain't no goddamn difference either
you long lost celtic bitch
you could have had half a hundred
newly dreamed visions
like the children the race eschews in
its selfishness
but you even lost your camera
even lost your voice
even lost your sense of being
numbed out in seventy seven's
cold I didn't come here to insult
you though only came to cry
over that sickly sweet flesh
you thought meant so much
I know, I know, I am just the same
that is true

in the bonecave

so we are separate after all
just like the two halves of the brain
so you knew it all along
but couldn't bear to tell me
perhaps now that the cortex is cut
each half will grow whole
as it is capable of doing

but it's cold in the bonecave
and I can hear you breathing
in the next room

reparations

she's so alone in her funny funny room
with her postcards and her coitus interruptus
plans but she's known she'll see me soon
catafalqued, bumped by the dark and she'll
remember she would never tell me
what I desperately needed to know

so now she closes all the windows
seeks the space beneath her table
writes no more postcards
makes no more pleasurable noises
takes her football player for masochistic sex
(his angelic fantasies understood)
the memories of that previous life
are fading for her
leprosy striking the heart first
then lops off the fingers
a kindness, a silence


Alison was married most of the time I knew her to a man named JL. I only met him a couple of times along the way. I couldn't describe him to you, though I could tell you a lot about how they got along and what he liked to do. One of his big interests was in playing Rugby. He played with a team who prided themselves on getting thrown out of bars. Alison lied to him pretty much constantly the entire time I was around. She lied to me, too. And probably to everybody who ever knew her. Now that she's a lawyer she can apply this skill professionally.

foolish hyperbole

dear one who leaves me alone:
it's appropriate, the waste that
surrounds you & me
the ephemera of my words
the shadows of your lovers
your bastille stands intact
in southern Illinois
night passes with its
signature of deception
but we are all a version
of that villain
myself with my many words
my explanations that translate
into foolish hyperbole there is
no distinguishable difference
between this one and that one
just the death of children
in your poems, this then an
example of your real fear:
growing old is only a form of dying
but your words never go clear
they are just added, and added,
and added, purchasing a patina
of cool, burying panic's knife
in your unused belly


I think, to this day, that Alison had a special relationship to the children she was destined not to have. Interestingly enough, she did reproduce, though late in her life. In 1993 she had a son. She was 42 that year. In October. The Sixth actually. Today.

Going "clear" is a scientology term that essentially means recovering all your memory. Phil Dick would've loved it, but of course we know the scientologists don't actually do that. Too bad, too.

moon in ascendance

tuesday again love
your weekend began several hours ago
you took special pains
remembering your way
through the city of dreams
this seems eminently practical
from the desertion of my distance
your limbs hang in a mobile
over my remembered keyboard
it was always like this
on tuesdays
you would pretend you knew the city
as I wandered its streets
I finally asked you for a map
but you would only say it was
all in your head

there's really nothing left
to repair


Another Alison poem. I note that Tuesdays were for a long time a special day for me, signifying perhaps the norse god Ty, who I deemed the first great loser god. He has a day named for him, but nobody but nobody knows who he was. I, of course, related to the god Ty. I am so great, but nobody knows it. Pretty funny in retrospect. This poem is clearly from the period when I was trying hard to separate myself from Alison. I like the way the map of the city is used as a metaphor for life itself. Also there are some throw away references to the multiple incarnation theory of our relationship. Goddess knows I pray that it is not true.

Won't You Come See Me, Queen Jane?

The following piece comes from the tragic murder of my twin cousins in 1971. They were taken from us by their socalled friend, Herman Biersdorf, who himself spent some minor time in prison for this act. Lately, June of 2009, several people have come to this blog, looking for information on this tragic act. I invite them to email me at tosburn@msn.com with any questions they may have. I can't offer too much in information, but I would be interested in their involvement in this long ago act that lives in my family to this day. I remember going to family reunions in Oklahoma long ago and seeing that large family tree with the lop-offed limb bearing their names. I remember them well. Most of my childhood was spent going to see them or having them come up to Wichita to see us.




We were at their house when I first played
Highway 61 Revisited.
We had gone to Enid for that weekend and
I bought the album at my uncle's record
store, at a steep discount. My brother
and I always played hearts with
Larry and Leslie. That's what we did
at their house.

Larry was the joker who never won.
My brother Greg, the con artist card shark
who always had the cards.
I was two years older than the three of them.
But I lost, mostly. Leslie could play
like a sonafabitch, I should mention.

I never could tell them apart.
Identical twins, and not like Patty Duke on tv.
They played football, electric guitar,
and drums. They won national merit scholarships
to Rice, in Houston. Real, all round dudes
who were letting their hair get long.
It was 1970.

My mother called me, I remember,
and told me they were dead. And I wept
there, in my kitchen in Laclede Town, central
St. Louis, while my wife, Becky, hugged me,
not knowing what was going on.

It took me hours to get ahold of my
brother and sister in St. Louis. My brother
at Washington U., my sister teaching
at Forest Park Community College.

I just kept listening to the rings,
counting them, smoking dope to stay calm.

Greg went to dinner when his suitemate
told him I was calling all afternoon. He
figured it was bad news, so he went
to dinner. And the first thing my sister
said, was "is it daddy?"

This guy who did it, Herman Biersdorf
(what a dingbat name, what a loser name,
no wonder he was fucked up), Herman
turned himself in the next day.
He said he wanted to do what was right.

What was right, asshole?

They were the best of friends.
Worked together.
Had some fun.
Were gonna save the world.
It was the sixties, man.

But it didn't work out.
The twins, my cousins, my friends,
were going back to Enid, partially
to get away from Herman, the genius
boy. He tried to talk them
out of this new plan. But
they betrayed him, in his mind.
They knew they needed to get away.
So he shot them in the head
and now

my dreams are nightmares, my friends
are gone, my days are numbered. I know
my own death. Does Herman know his?

He actually tried to buy all the plots
around their graves, in Enid. So when he
dies he can be with them. What a dork.
What a loser. Put my rotting flesh
in that hole. That'll give me back
my love. Fuck you Herman.

And I've got Larry's boots on now.
Like a pair of aces, man these are good boots.
And Greg, he won't talk about Larry and Leslie
with me. Something passed out of our life
when they were taken. We don't talk
to this day.

My Aunt Betty, the one true xtian I know
(maybe along with my sister Diane)
told me to take one of their records
when we went to the funeral and I
picked out Leslie's copy of
Highway 61, Revisited...

Revisited.
But I can't bring myself to play it.


Thanksgiving of 1971. My twin cousins, Larry and Leslie Owens, identical twins, brilliant boys, good guys in every aspect, were murdered by their friend when they were supposed to be seeing Pete Townshend and company in Houston, before leaving to return to their home in Enid, Oklahoma, after dropping out of their second year at Rice University. This reverberates in my family to this day. I will never forget that terrible weekend in Oklahoma. Everything that could go wrong, did. I didn't even get to stay for the funeral because I worked for the postal service and they wouldn't cut me the slack, because my cousins weren't close enough relatives to let me go. At that time the post office treated most of its employees in St. Louis as if they were in high school, complete with demerits. I saw the dark face of bureacracy then. To say that I never got over this experience is to really understate it. My oldest daughter is named "Lesley" Paige, because of my friend Leslie Owens. I can sit here, now, 36 years later and be shaken by the fact that I will never see those guys again. That really really sucks. Herman, who got out of prison some years ago, I hope you understand that you will be required to deal with all of this when you pass over. And where you have buried your pitiful mortal remains won't make any difference. You will have to explain to them why you thought it was your right to take away their entire lives. They would both have children in college now. The circle would be unbroken. I would like to thank the Lady for making these memories sharp and clear. For making the faces of my friends appear in my mind as they were the night we watched "Little Shop of Horrors" (the Nicholson one) on the cots in their family room in 1964. I miss you guys. I miss my brother Greg, too. He's a sad figure these days. Not that I am a bouquet of roses, myself.