today's poem - "oppressor:

oppressor

star of his own tales

entitled narcissistic

sociopath fool

today's poem - "Why they surrendered"

Why they Surrendered:

 

Innocent thousands

of vaporized Japanese

at Nagasaki    

Today's happy little poem - Marburg Virus

Marburg Virus

 

Virus from fruit bats

spread via unsafe sex and

wounds - treatment unknown

3 1962 Jazz Bar Haikus - Today's Poem (s)

men’s room

this tight booth’s stiff whiff  

causes audience members

to duck furtively

 

women’s room

gab groan and giggle

awkwardly manage relief

try not to return

 

bar

one-eyed bartenders

on sticky dark surfaces

mix weak drinks from hell

Today's Poem - "Little Songbird"

Little Songbird

Graceful in a graceless place

amid rustic joking men

out of place, a puzzle part

a lady though a girl lingers

in the easy way she sits

her manner lightly earthbound

 

Is she a captive bird

caged by nets of need

her wings clipped; song stilled

left on her perch alone

as life swirls around her

glittering peaceful world

 

today's highly misconstrued poem, "Food Charity Performance Tonight on Outdoor Stage #22"

Food Charity Performance Tonight on Outdoor Stage #22

 

Steady payments beyond your lifetimes

      will transform lives and serve society

 

Gift planning teams are now mounting care!

 

Dastardly live audience high anxiety

and marriage disintegration under assumed names

will eventually capture and convict dance captains

 

Not quite overall retail perfection conjoining

3,000 pounds of eggplant in soup kitchen transformation

gives everyday 5 ways to leave your legacy

 

We can solve these problems without demonization

talking about things and having natural friends

who will leech venom out of unfit situations

 

Energetic crew leadership mandatory for tonight

consists of student lighting designers

builders, advisers, seating, and sound engineers

 

Futures of biodiversity in farming, food security

Social Responsibility and habitat destruction

with diseased deforestation cannot be overstated

 

To meet twenty four hours comfort; to lift, shape

and support fashion import theatrical nonprofit

troupes conforming to changes in the audience body

 

Outdoor performance splitting of the three casts

in inclement weather like bee hive expansion

increases crop yields greener and healthier shows

 

Increase your income by giving money away

exhibit high regard to the other work people

create pipelines of talent foundation

today's poem - "crud bums"

crud bums

in olden times crud bums

slept off drunks in filth

were everywhere you looked

rail yards, park benches

doorways, alleys, sidewalks

 

we figured they were worthless

not really human per se

crud bums with no purpose

just flouncing about

getting drunk, smelling bad

eyes unfocused faces unshaven

named Willie or Boots or Clem

some mothers’ sons

come to naught

 

back then drugs were expensive

so they hit Night Train instead

slept out in the cold

unknown what philosophy was followed

abandoned and forgotten men

asking money for soup, yeah soup

on skid row in springtime

the ghetto for crud bums

everyday on my way train to college

winos and those unfortunate otherwise

pretending hunger not thirst

 

What kind of turmoil behind these eyes

rimmed in red hid from my realities

tannins oozing from their pores

threadbare histories of dust coat colors

inside the swirling churn of bummery

all the self-evident truth I couldn’t see

seasoned rapidly in wayward icy wind

subconscious or fully awake in mind

yet I didn’t realize I could also be

one susceptible to human extremity

the vagaries lodged within us all

young, untried but susceptible to fall

as time’s fixtures dissolve in specks

in four alarm fires, explosions, train wrecks

 

 

Snow rain and adversity swirl down  

In wracking pain

physical emotional spiritual existential

lice and vermin

dreams of serpents, rats, and bats

only a priest’s kind word or sympathetic cop

a social worker full of human empathy

ever provide balm things happening a dime at a time

in minute by minute pursuit of fate and faith

a rapture of nothingness

today's poem is 4 short poems - 'Aretha', 575, 'Silken Ships with Silver Skin, 'Elvis Postcard'

 

Aretha

botch and blemish

the Queen is dead

disjoin and disjoint

while mischief larks                   

other machines

streaked with day

are set to wing

and loosed upon us

-all bets are off

 

fear-strangled

the earth has fallen

 

 

575

we’re apt to do these

our scandalously done wrongs

in total darkness

 

 

Silken ships with silver skin

 

Run together like rain

earth borne airiness

distinctly merged

though sharing qualities

 

Rain in movement: sound and water

and wind liquid yet insensible;

physical yet lyrical

love beyond temperate reason

 

 

Elvis Postcard

What’s your address?

I’ll drop you a line

time to time

just to reminisce

we are yet alive

In Beautiful Colorado - today's poem

In Beautiful Colorado

 

On a work trip smarmy co-worker Lou

tosses trash from the passenger window

What the hell are you doing? I ask

He hand-panoramas the vast Rockies

God has a plan for all this, he smirks

I reply: Do that again and you walk

 

On our return, he files a complaint

I am formally warned, then separated

 

The God of Lou is a mechanic I guess

Bear Grind - today's poem

Bear Grind

Cantankerously I gibber

                     like a goober

a mind catawampus

totally bumfuzzled

 

Spewing       gobbledygook

                           tomfoolery   

in bamboozled fiestas  

of mental bilgewater

 

Gruffly I gabble I babble

                       bejeeberish

wild with heebie-jeebies

of omni-dazzlement

 

Tarnation! I will just piffle

a bear in my grindings

3 short poems for today - "manners", "openers", "untitled"

manners

satisfied SHE shrugged

saying OH thank you mister

just as HE sputtered

 

openers

open book

open mind

open arms

open doors

open marriage

open house

 

open sewer

open sea

open secret

open and shut

open up

open casket

 

(untitled)

blossoming bean vines

drill bright green tendrils into

be-here-now sunbeams

 

Today's poem - "a riffle in the continuum"

a riffle in the continuum

 

Rain falls stopping five feet above-ground so the little fellers can ride around on their saddle pigs and stay dry

 

Crazy people hoot and cross busy intersections on hands and knees as the ladies football parade emits loud sounds up and down Castaneda Street

 

some nut in a BE HERE NOW! t-shirt says to me, Hey buddy, words  just put us in boxes!

 

Oh yeah? I ask, Then why do you use words?

 

Suddenly I remembered waking last night at 3 a.m. when I saw bought-out retirees sleepwalk in herds like a great migration all across outspread lawns tinted blue by cloud-interrupted moonlight and had to admit:

 

They live in the future and I live in an old-age trailer park

On Lying - today's poem

On Lying

Though not the best witness

should this ever come to trial

I’m not the untrustworthiest

when paid and promised for lies

 

Twice convicted of perjuries

both times I did my time in style

in luxury, golfing penitentiaries

I met handicap and won parole

 

So if you ask I will testify

-when my account gets money

So, count on me to lie again

if I may avoid a real prison

 

There are things worse than lies

-like truths that help no one else

dying ravens claw out the heart of golden dawn - tomorrow's poem

dying ravens claw out the heart of golden dawn

 

Denali’s frozen shadowy face shouts storm clouds

as vultures circle on high then fall down one-by-one lifeless

 

     Runaway, runaground ships sink into seas, rivers, lakes;

     high trestles grumble through scaling rust

 

A demon stabs paradise in the back as jabbering ceases

     Poison gas ghosts crowd the upper atmosphere

 

Clouds run like pigs to evade sight with no one to see them

Scorpions, insects, and snakes rule reversion continents

 

     Seas teem with phantoms, fantastic seaweed,

     and gurgling chimaeras

 

and all is right in this world of transformed statelessness

today's 3 short poems - "on hold", "575", "music v-blog"

Your call

is very important

  (as an efficient means

   of extraction

   of maximum monies

   at least cost)

to us

575

my memory bard

sings things only I have heard

faintly as I wake

 

music v-blog

orb grated planes of focus overlap

all wash over into confluence

 

gherkins of comprehended knowledge

spritz obscure factoids

accuse imaginary girlfriends of being real

 

slide the cuff link to another time in a new land

the patches are sewn into rigid conformance

 

 

today's poem - "hard sell"

hard sell

 

down a rabbit hole

in dimness: pay now

to later turn cards

in a fairy story

told by a quack

 

we tire of tactics

forcing frowns

losing our heads

force fed doom

by the looking-glass

are misinformed

today's poem - "Kitchen Cabinet"

 

Kitchen Cabinet  

 

Erupt, polymer containerless lids  

Cram your drawers open to the nth degree

Ignore un user friendly cups all people

Clog no tops ocean carbon bigfoot death

 

Don’t shoot dangerous firearm cupboards

Erupt good for business somebody else

Burst scapegoat seamed cancer agents

Decompose no cheap needful marketing

 

Sedans full of party salespeople pyramid

Paper the way to oblivion with dead sharks

Sell-off planetary mass sell-out roulette

Spin angry poison wheels of misfortune

 

Cheer time ending biosphere collapse days

Kiss plastic criminal postulate foibles goodbye

today's poem - "What do I get?"

What do I get?

 

if I make a Robert Johnson

with a dirt devil

do I get free weeding

for life, gardens

extraordinaire no matter what

ills befall the stations of my slow

and out of the way life

blooms, buds, pods,  fruit, legumes, aromas

when the future winds

my past tightly

vining and singing

constrictor-like, squeezing

days and nights greenery

under starry magnetism

a Blake print frameless

standing

when no one else

wills a life sentence

spoken by the Earth

and sky explaining

self to myself

a crossroads where

garden paths

meet calling like cranes

on overhead wings

Sunday's poem - "Leftover Baloney Sandwich Blues"

 

Leftover Baloney Sandwich Blues

Glenda at a Swiss conference clad in a starry Milky-Way-patterned black sequin flapper dress, diamantine aquamarine cloche hat, and looped with lustrous strings of beads, facetimes me, head thrown back in dental libertine laughter

Doing an antique dance of abandon, she phone-poses under a mirror ball spraying time dimension visual cacophony into my dim-by-comparison film noir kitchen with one bare hungdown bulb

At least she seems delirious - at most she is wanded to an old world beldame High Priestess of Shriek; I am the failed Atman of the leftover baloney sandwich blues in my stained and slept-in, threadbare white undershirt

Hey Glenda, what the frig passeth?

I ask, but she just starts singing German to tin-pulsating music as dancers wave dreamlike like reeds in the silvered background swamp– until the screen swiftly freezes, then blips to a fortunate emptiness

I open the 1958 Frigidaire to glumly behold the sandwich

Hey Bolo, I say, let’s take a walk – he levitates from canine-throned leisure and we bumble-blank in outward radiating white daylight

And now, hapless pal Philbrick bewails his inert lawn equipment, so I pass him the leash and clear fuel lines, clean filters, set sparkplugs, clean housings, refill fluids and Goop the area clean to set him humming back to his cherished lawn work

Down home, Bolo and I again face the sandwich

Anneika and her four declared tasteless sisters may be border-hopping to shirk prison, but I call Zildja, sister three – un-convicted, and she throatily croons assent to a downtown jazz soiree as I think, she’s almost Glenda

In a mohair jacket, knit tie, and glowing white shirt, and Zildja in her beatnik sphinx get-up we listen to a hard bop trio of gangling hipsters, and we look unutterably cool while sipping martinis and never feeling so phantasm categorically clued-in

At home after the plastic, cascade night of dynamic scenes Glenda ringtones and screens a charcoal-sketchy look, all black stain and stripe, flattened hair, gray face, swollen eyes, smeared lipstick, and unusual-for-her: doom; Warning: some of this video is troubling.

Come on down, I say (still looking dapper), I left the remaining baloney sandwich blues remnants just for you.

That baloney sandwich is money in the bank

3 Short Poems: "in San Francisco", "Encore" and "Death Sentence"

 

in San Francisco

 

Old Moby Grape is a sailor

his ship a long time comin’

 

Clouds above his head full of sky

are a surrealistic pillow

 

-live, dead, or on happy trails

they are his crown of creation

 

But I feel like I’m fixin’ to die, he felt

just like Santana after the Alamo

 

Wow, when will my war ever end?

 

 

 

Encore

When Elvis is fifty years gone

let’s line the streets

in Hollywood, Memphis

Las Vegas, Tupelo

in the neon lights’ glow

to sing Are You Lonesome Tonight

once again with the King

 

 

 

Death Sentence

 

One distressingly matter of factly

never worn earthbound

ordinarily cruelly brutal Day

 

My first amendment mouth lost its career

-due to loud, unflinching

and Public opposition to the Death Sentence

 

anti-capital punishment capital punishment irony aside

This is a Nightmare!

a corporeal carpool of uncooperative incorporation

 

I’m lost in an amaze of buildings

turning one thing from another

found lost and behind in my work

 

Numb in non-union minion labyrinthine

conundrums of un-presided deregulated

self-reinforcing systems of regret am I

 

and my opposition to the Death Sentence remains fast and true

"Sweep"

Sweep

An alienated sole grim heart

marginal force-pursued

soldier - angling leftward

in tight green fear vision

 

Gravitation shore line marsh

lone lost agent border sweep

to that secure bivouac point

abandoned, never to attain