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

today's poem - "Loud Elf"

Loud Elf

so - Full Penny Elvette’s voice-volumized circle amplifies prayer-flag-flapping night train sound canyon loudness in chronic whirlwinds across centuries of borrowed wandering

     so nothing standstills wind and sound nothing

     heartbeatlessly aught squelch her noninterruptibility

 

and so into garrets shouts belfried id bound flying creature sounds in cyclotronic reactions of human clatter-phonic displacement

 

so too shouldn’t never want nother nothing known shoulda look forever seeing frantic fancy should ever stray

 

so to encompass Half Penny Elffa takes-one-to-know-invisible-one transparent hurricanes of unwound sound words blimping together overhead subtopical micro air navies of uncommunicable speak

 

so Loud Elf shouten parse-i-cal rafters of dust slat motes snow fall dingles downrupture broadcast loudmouth sound

 

all night and all day long

today's poem - "Napoleon in Exile"

Napoleon in Exile

 

not much yeah

I go outside

at noon rain ice

remaining sludge

Tuesday again

I thought she was

 

This is all wopperjawed

 

I click TV, cable is splat

I decide to whittle

it sounds like work

At 3, I open the radio

news sucks

I’m always waiting

 

Suffering succotash

 

Stare-into-space-porch

the mail arrives

I need a window here

if banana boats dock

tarantulas and scorpions

are company for lunch

 

is this a flux capacitor?

 

oh well. the dog barks

nature call of the wild

not really a revolution

walk dog one more time

the sun abandons

as day wanes

 

like infernal monologue

today's poem - "View Master"

 View Master

 

Spin the wheel and broken elevators descend dark slopes

seen as if through the wrong end of a sailor’s spyglass

 

Click and behold a decaying hillside subsistence Eden  

carved like stairways of greenery glimpsed from a ship

 

Peek into galleries of suffering, disaster, and reduction

scribed on reels of a world collapsing and wave-imperiled

 

Crank past spectral mills and lopsided warehouses

tilted open-sky roofs and ribbed steel dripping rust

 

Sort and spindle storm-damaged border town images

scraped scenes impoverished, windblown, and flooded

 

Inspect instead a city’s cracked eyes holding back tears

slithering murkily out decrepit, dimly lit portals