Poem: Ophiocordyceps camponoti-balzani for All

Possessed by a foreign agent,
we all zombie through life.
Selfish genes guiding our urges,
or a mind controlling fungus
either way freewill is tossed.

From our short existence,
another life extrudes into the future.
Offspring to their own recognizance
or spores released to the wind,
the future is a culmination of singularities.

Given the context of the end,
the location of the gave is inconsequential.
An ashy disturbance on lake,
or rigored tightly under a leaf
makes no difference to my mood.

---

Haiku: On a Plane - I

The clouds from above
have the structure of mountains
breaching a still lake.

I prefer silence,
public spaces crowd my thoughts.
My seat is too small.

A mist of vapor,
we are pointless as a cloud
except less buoyant.


In an airtight can,
A swarm of wet molecules,
I blaze through the sky.

---

Poem: Noel Shivers

Greensboro Gazette:
Man Found Shot In Garage
Suicide Says Police

Noel shivers in boots
on her front porch
at the close of Autumn.

Absolved of her wifely duties
by a summer's deceasing,
she holds an old, wide shovel.

Noel admits, first, to herself
and then the snowy drive,
that she is tired.

---

Poem: Three Houses

Socrates feels for the switch...
Damned old circuits,
could be the whole block.
He peers out the pulled curtain,
the old plate glass
like a freeze-frame waterfall
flashed by lightening.
He feels the old walls again and
smells the floor furnace burning dust.

Thoughts of childhood...
elbows on the window ledge
at grandma's house
during a hail storm;
she got a new roof after that.

Hand along the wall to the back door,
this old glass like carnival mirrors.

Finally the kitchen light comes back
like a camera flash.
The sink knobs turn backward
for a glass of water.
Flashes of a last-minute party
not-even planned...

...tastes like a rusty nail
biting the back of his throat.
The full glass is emptied back
into the sink with revulsion.
The water at his parent's house
tasted so good, so pure.
The midnight glass fulls as a teen
after a hard night of drinking,
cherished like liquid gold
soothing a rough liquored throat...

Going away parties always hurt
–aww, come on one more,
we'll never see you again...
Another flash takes out the lights again
and brings in a solitary drink of failure,
an unwelcomed conclusion
tasting a bit like sour tea.

---

Poem: Lois

Lois absorbs into herself the tragedies of others
from road signs and small crosses at the mountain edge.
Six people killed this year; don't be next.
Like a cream, Lois rubs it in between her breasts
and on her face covering her breathable skin.
She has no wall between herself and others.
They are to her as herself is and are in pain.
Stranger to herself likewise as the others are.
And glorious in anonymity, they are stars
winked out before she think they're due.
Stars die with great force but no will.
Their destiny was cast as they became
to us; our celestial vectors were set
as we were at birth and so to our demise.

Poem: Toothbrush

I threw out you toothbrush today.
After more than a year sitting idle,
watching me scrub every morning
and bedtime floss, it was time.
It had dust on it and debris still
in the soft bristles. Your debris.
Dentists recommend that you change
your toothbrush once a month.
I bought you a new one today;
It's still in the wrapper on the sink,
should you want it.

---

Poem: Divine Digestion

While reading Johannes Scotus Erigena,

I was eating a peach.

"...and eternal he begins to be,

and immobile he moves into all things

and becomes all things in all things."

God has become this peach I am eating.

God is sweet, and I am licking Him.

I am ingesting the divine

and am making it into me.

I am becoming divine.

"...the creator of all things created in all things,

and the maker of all things made in all things;..."

I perceive the creator and

the created in this peach I am eating.

I lick the peach to catch the juice;

I run my tongue up the canal

carved by my chin-wetting bites.

I hold the nectar on my tongue tip

feeling the twinge of the sweet acidity.

I lounge, intoxicated by the infinite.

"...through a certain ineffable descent

into the things that are,..."

Our sight falls upon only material.

The cloak of God is woven peach fuzz.

I strip God to the seed.

I hold the world

between my teeth;

a stone.

---

Poem: Planetary Bubbles

Bathing when I was young, I blew
bubbles clustered from my hand;
oblate (tubby) spheroids floated
out my summer window–unmanned.

Tiny worlds, individually thick and buoyant
swirled with iridescence. A cover of clouds
cloaked the brewing soup below–
a fact hidden to all, but known to be by me.

I created these worlds by breath
and blew them into the Milky Way
to be caught and played with
by my suns and gravities.

---

Poem: Vagabondage (Hank - part 2)

I'm not a well-suited junior executive anymore.
There is no room for sunglasses in my unkempt curls.
Things have changed; I am free.

I gargle schnapps and chew sidewalk gum
because I might bump into you on the street
and finally decide just what to say.

Because of Hank's infection, he gets drunk first
behind Safeway by the dumpster where he eats
and asks me to tell him stories about you.

I fill his head with clear spring days, blonde hair,
blue Levis, green eyes, and a magnetic smoker's rasp
and of course, your sexy dislike for any underwear.

Ever since that night I haven't felt very well.
I drift these streets stopping at every fountain,
but I can't get the taste of you out of my mouth.

---

Poem: Little by little Hank gets to Heaven (Hank - part 1)

I routinely scavenge the dumpsters behind
those apartments next to that Safeway downtown.
It's an easy way to avoid the Good-Will.

Today I found half a bottle of Windex
and a toothbrush and gave them to crazy Hank
so he could clean the maggots out of his leg.

But he pushed them back at me, unwanted,
and muttered something about God's weird way,
Hell on earth, and redemption of human flesh.

Old Hank, he believes in God, a loving God,
but not a God of Good-Will or of giving,
but a God of taking and transforming.

"The maggots don't bother me much," Hank sighs,
"But at night when I sleep, I hear the flies—
the winged angels whispering to their young;
Soon you will fly, but not until you're done."

The hungry cherubs, plump and milky white,
chewing the fat and seeking the light,
making Hank's flesh into their own,
let him know substance is a material loan.

---

Poem: Happiness is Third Gear

Where does happiness come from?
Is it an illusion that we finally believe?

The power of self-deception is strong,
like the scarf blown across your face
as you scream over the custom exhaust
after your lost shoe,
one intersection back.

---

Poem: Hi, how're you doin'?

Another day has come and gone
without so much attention
as one pays a bodily function.
Busy work and time logged,
are the wipe and flush of daily life,
and existence with time, rest somewhere between.
The habitual consumption and expulsion–
as creatures, we eat and shit, instinctively.
Everything we do has origin in that process.
The torture is that we cannot stop.

---

Poem: Whiskey for Lunch

Squinting in the brightness of a straight-up sun,
I flick my cigarette's ash and watch it roll away
on the sidewalk, next to where I'm sitting
leaning back against my front door.

Dark wings flutter overhead and land
by a pool of oil-slicked water on the drive.
A yellow eye peers out from black feathers
to size my danger and determines–none.

I speak loudly at the bird, "If you drink that
it'll make you sick, and you might wake up dead."
Turning its other yellow eye to the pool
as if to consider and weigh my words
regarding the safety of the find, the bird drinks,

and drinks, and drinks, until I stand up finished.
Wiping its oil-slicked beak on black feathered
wings and back, it regards me once again
with the first eye, then returns to his sky
and leaves me with a nagging thirst for whiskey.

---

Poem: (Ananas comosus) my love is a spiny bromeliad

too cumbersome for a house plant,
you demand open fields and free sun

the roots you cork-screw stay shallow,
feeding from windy wet air

your saw-tooth leaves grow rosette round
to contain the dewy droplet rain

thriving and mature you flower your first,
pink and sharp to attract

irresistible are the folds of your blossom
for my pollination buzz

i wander homeward, dizzy headed,
heavy in the day's nectar

in visits to come you grow fat,
thick-skinned and full of juice

hovering around your ripened maternity
waiting for gravity to mid-wife

your pineapple splits on the soil
gushing and wet; I make a bee-line

the sweetest reward for me, my love,
lies in your pulpy fruit

---

Poem: Singles' Night

In the bar light my teeth are white,
and my thin hair is thick and full.
I say your eyes are black
as the sky between now
and the pull of morning shades.
I say important things to you
and funny things too.
You laugh and nod your head
'yes,' and puff Slim Virginias.
I watch my weight and work out.
Although I like dark beer, I drink light.
You smile and walk to the ladies room
and never come back. I finish my drink,
then drink yours, and put up my own chair
at ten after two.

---

Poem: Shakespearian Sonnet 2: Unfinished

A true poet lives not in the moment,
but in the brooding past, after the fact.
From a mental tomb, an encasement,
the poet writes knowledge others have lacked.
From a mystical memory, thoughts come,
to be lined out in black upon the page.
Like others before, Coleridge, Keats, and Donne,
I cast my mind back to an ancient age.
To pen things in an enlightened light,
must surly be a blessing from the Muse.
But the poet's life is dark as night,
the laudanum, TB, and pleasure abuse.

Living a painful life is not my wish.
This, preventing death, remains unfinish...

---

Poem: Solar Functions

When taken one day at a time,
The immense repetitive futility of life bears its full weight
Upon the branches of your potential happiness.

Recalling, I did this yesterday and will again tomorrow,
Is enough to throw me into a fit of never-agains,
Calculated to shake trees and frighten birds.

Inept and ill suited to repetitive tasks, I flounder;
Why tie my shoes, why go to work, why pee?
If it weren't for biology, I would never leave bed.

Reliability is the key to order and stability.
Is the sun punctual of its own accord,
Or because its lower half needs to evacuate?

---

published: March '06
Indian Bay Press

Poem: The Sun is the Flashlight of God Checking his Favorite Terrarium

If the firmament exists,
and we are enclosed by a glass globe,
then God sits, gazing in, outside our sphere.

If we cock our heads to the sky
and strain with our electronic ears,
then we can hear the echo of His last sneeze.

If we fix our eyes to the night stars
and focus with our sharpest lenses,
then we can see His crystallized phlegm twinkling.

---

Poem: Caution Flammable

It starts low in the cavernous self,
a boiling geothermal tarpit of sludge,
flammable and acidic, with carbon for color.

endothermic we are born
composed of all the before
decayed and compressed
recombined to respirate
rearranged to self-ignite

Life is an internal fire and we are all fuel,
our bodies, our minds consumed to the last.
It starts low in the cavernous self.

---

Poem: To the Worms I Bequeath...

The red-eyed fly landed on the gravestone
knowing that a large food source had been buried
inaccessible to its appetite,
given to the worms again.
The fly wondered why Humans gave such offerings to the wigglies.
Was it worship?

From a tree branch above —with thoughts of his own,
a Blue Jay swooped down to stand on the stone
and to pin the fly inescapably under a toe.
The fly lamented of the lost opportunity of reproduction
and of sipping sweet drinks shared with Humans.
Absent of murderous thoughts or the repercussions of killing,
with an open mouthed lunge
the pointed, barbed tongue unceremoniously stabbed the fly,
mashed it in the maw and swallowed it down.
Unabashedly, the avian alto sang of warm sun and tasty snacks.

May a Blue Jay whistle above your grave
to let you know spring has returned,
and that the flies got nothing.

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