Thursday, June 11, 2015

Blanketed Potato

Sometimes watching a movie
I'll get by a commercial’s gauzy
Drama, with a daughter in tears
Reconnecting with her long lost
Father, who was captured or dis-
Oriented, or developed amnesia
And couldn’t find his way back
To his loved ones, his world,
The one he knows like the green
Eyes of his daughter, now happier
Than ever, as if in the presence of God.
Incomprehensibly, as if there were
No 49 dollar a month telephone
Package to peddle, no deal to make,
No fineprint, impossible terms,
I’ll start weeping, bawling like
A little boy who lost his truck
And then harder and harder
In shame at falling for their trick,
Cooked through eye, ear, my heart 
As I sit there, a blanketed potato.

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Bedtime for Diogenes

Sleep sleep you cute little marauding undisturbed sleeper
Sleep like a pampered prince my parasitic paranoid
My dimwitted bombdropping cloak and dagger Frankenstien
My diabolical human piece of heartless earthbound scum

My violent unredeemable piece of misery-dishing fleshfat
Like a cute little prince little runway-swishing coke-snorting
Yacht-sailing meat-packing slave-driving hightalking fool
Sleep my sleepy cute little rapacious dollhouse schmuck

My cataclysmic gene abomination my evolutionary teardrop
My rotten mismanaged illeducated foul-aimed dunce
Sleep my poor little misunderstood pillager my murderer my holy
Little unashamed prince in bed with innocents sleep sleep my baby

So we can starve them in the morning and bomb them later
So we can poison their water and mama's milk to kill them slowly
Make sure they die a painful nightmare so sleep little prince my
Little self-righteous auto-icon sap-souled sweetie of the world

Try to get some sleep we have a big day tomorrow

Tuesday, June 9, 2015

The Chair

Hurry, someone, bring us a chair. 
If we don’t sit this minute
Who knows what will happen
Next, what we’ll do to regret.

I go grab the junk cabinet, ASAP.
I rip apart its four sides
For a good one to sit on.
I take a limb from the birch

We felled to save the rest
And saw it in half. I notice the old
Well-pin, hand-hewn with the care
Of someone who drew water

From the earth, absurdly
Abandoned in the weeds. I grab it,
And on the way pick up a steel rod that sat
A hundred years under the smokehouse.

I mount the new legs on the new seat
With old nails, rope, and a welded
Anchor bolt. I remove my sweater
Unraveling at the cuff, torn

At the hem, the one grandma
Knitted, and ball it for a cushion.
Here, I say, it’s all yours,
The way poems get made

To be sat upon
To put off whatever comes next.

We Christians

Since Constantine
We've been as sweet
As Jesus, killing
With the passion of pagans.
At some point in the life
Of an alcoholic,
A choice has to be made:
Your story, or your life. 
Words go on
As smoothly as the plaster
Plasterers use
To fill the cracks
Or the artisan uses
To shape the acts
Of a Saint
On the façade of a church
Built to repel an attack.
The heart is
Like a monk
Buried in the library
Looking for proof
He doesn’t need any.

Foot, Tongue, Boot

Twenty-six
bones, thirty-
three joints,
one hundred
muscles
and tendons,
ligaments,
tongues
of thousands
of miles;
who could forget
that dish
of hard candy,
ten lollipops
to worship—red,
green, peachy
as the day
God made them.
What foot lives
without a tongue
to soothe it? 
The boot heats up
the confusion
my mind is—
I raise to my nose,
sniff you out
when elsewhere
rules the hour,
has you all
to itself, like
a bloodhound
on a leash,
drooling
for the fugitive's
return to the scene
of the crime. 

Monday, June 8, 2015

Deathbed Poets

Will hold your hand. Wipe your ass.
Tell tall tales about the coming glories,
Fetch your slippers, fluff the pillow.
Deathbed poets agree with all you say
And will echo it back with genuine pride
In their voices; but otherly, with a lofty
Flair. If weeping threatens to breach
The walls built against such onslaught,
It’s unlikely to bear surprises. Reborn
So often—who would ever want to be
Deathbed poets for them?—they wither
On vines, in bed with the roses. But this
Isn’t about their martyrdom, it’s about yours
And the magnificence that awaits you. 
Take my hand, and start at the beginning.
Tell me what things were like when you
Were little, or have you always been
This old, confined to this deathbed? 
In that case, you might be a poet, too! 
Take my hand; let’s make the thorns
And perfume sing till the nurse returns!

Sunday, June 7, 2015

DRONE ENVY

Missiles out of the blue
Is a string of pretty sounds,
A whistling in the woods,
In the dark, the park
Preferable to wasting
Alone in a room
On wards designed for it. 
Thus, I envy the ones
We bug-splat,
We liberate
From elderly pain,
And its foot-tapping goodbye. 
Lucky bullseye bastards
Is the way
My impotence sees them.

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Judgement Day Was Every Day

I hope God, when the famous day
Of reckoning arrives, so-called
Judgement Day, which had always
Scared the living shit out of me,

Can relate to my bucketlist.
I hope he takes into consideration
The things I've seen and the places
I've travelled to (hardly ever in luxury)

And that if I did sin, I had no clue
There was a rule against it.  It was
Accidental, all of it.  The only plan

I ever had came already damaged in a dream
After a long bout of insomnia
Counting options on my fingers.