Category Archives: SelectedPoems2

Hand assembling a stadium-sized puzzle
of interlocking data boulders:
these malware bot modules
go over there in the zettabyte
server farm racks.

Looking up from the pens
beneath the Coliseum,
lions and cheetahs
with sharpened fangs
and jeweled collars
lick us affectionately.

Look, a new David,
has thrown open
the outer gates!
Caesar’s grin freezes.

Dense, viscous,
thicker than reason
(or “libry paste”
as my father used to say.)

Try to dive in
and he’s elusive
going all mystic disputation
in the tumult of integrations on you

until the insurance executive
who won a Pulitzer for poetry
decides to leave you an alleyway
to duck into.

Winding through
his staccato streets
narrowed by lime shuttered houses,

past his glass aswarm with things
backlit just enough
to glimpse his
green fan printed with red willow,

leading to the poolroom
where he sits playing cards
waiting for you to show up
and take him precisely at his word.

back aches
in a torn blue line
of furnaces

Winter braids
the tree branches

into fronded kelp
the wind washes through

(This is an erasure of Eminem’s song Lost Forever)

Look, if you had one shot,
or one opportunity

to seize everything,
the surface goes so loud,

the words run out, up, over,
reality goes gravity.

There goes Rabbit,
back to the lab again.

This whole rhapsody
captures this moment.

The moment comes once–
lose yourself in the music.

The soul’s escaping
only grows harder.

Coast to coast
God’s own daughter

changes what you call rage.
The right type of life

to feed and water,
to formulate a plot

to not grow old in Salem’s lot,
this may be the only opportunity.

Aaron Copeland and Anton Chekov
were orchardists and winter brothers.
How I love the flavors
in their unique hybrids!

Copeland’s winey apples of sound
burst with the smell of the prairies,
the tang of clean labor with horse and wagon
and the cider-drunk hoedowns
in farming towns along the Mississippi.

And Chekov! Grafting the luckless
and misbegotten with the divine ordinary!
I can see him in his study turning
a pear of an idea in his mind over and over,
examining the imperfections.

Ah, there it is, he says!
Masha shall confess to her sisters
that she is in love with commander Vershinin,
the one with the suicidal wife:

“My sisters … I’ve confessed,
now I shall keep silent … like Gogol’s madman.”

And that new strain gets passed down through the ages,
full of the hope and despair and life’s troubled journey
and yet surrounded by love and greatness of heart.
How can one not be filled with their joy?

“In the east fame is won.
In the west deeds are done.”
–Henry David Thoreau

All fathers and sons
feud at times

If not aloud
then in silence

It’s Nature’s way
of passing the torch

Like King David in the bible
You are a wrestler with life

He partied like a rock star too
and became one of God’s favorites

Do your deeds in the east
If that is where Fate has taken you

The west, and I
aren’t going anywhere

A beach house
with new shingles
around two windows
keeps watch with brindled eyes
at what the sea brings
each day.

Some days it’s just wave on wave,
like a furrowed brow.
Some days birds skim the rollers
like penitents walking the breadth
of a watery country.

The sea and the house
tell each other their moods in colors.
Weathered silver on brown means contentment.

A scrim of white rags tearing off
of slate grey mounded water
means I’m out of sorts right now.

New white on clapboard means
I’m trying to impress the neighbors.

A boiling blue black mountain of water
rolling up the beach means
I told you so.

Tender is
the fleet of electric birds
bluing the trees
in their sockets,
wiring the
world with
song–
and how strange
it is that
we hear their words
with the ears
of invalids,
unsteady in
drunken ships
with keels of
calcium and
ribs of sorrow.

Corrugated like words
in the strangely mounded night,
catching us in your rough headlights,
your scorn like lead bullets,
you bought us all time.

Maybe if I had dengue fever
or was a hardshell unbeliever
I wouldn’t have given you a second thought–
with your hungry gypsy women
and your pointed shoes and your bells,
never pointing where true north is,
I would have let you pass by.

But out here in the desert
where the land is softly folded
your words from your new album suddenly cover the hills
like the illuminated manuscript of some mad saint
giving it a patina more refined
than the afternoon could manage on it’s own.

I always thought it would be fun
to bowl with President Nixon
in the basement of the White House.

You know, spot the old boy
a few frames,
watch that goofy grin
slide sideways
as I hook one into the pocket
on the last frame,
beat him by seven,
or even let him win
if I was feeling generous that day.

Maybe Pat would watch us,
clap, bring us a cold one,
laugh at his jokes.

Me and Tricky Dick–
basement bowling buddies.

I miss Mr. High Waisted Pants
with the pancake TV makeup
that could never cover
his sweaty upper lip,
telling us he wasn’t a crook.

Cheap thug, hack,
back stabbing, race baiting,
Jew hating,
whining narcissist politician,
sure.

But ol’ Dicky boy, my friend,
you were a fucking liberal choir boy
compared to the venal mafia dons
who run your party now.

Rest easy, Quaker Dick.
You were the last US President
who spent more on social programs
than on defense.

The “Abraham Lincoln of the American Indian,”
father of the EPA,
the Clean Air Act and Earth Day.

Lower your backswing
and keep your hand and wrist
at nine o’clock, old timer.
The Dude would be proud.

–Burl Whitman

A woman panhandles on a traffic island
standing behind a cardboard sign
I bring my motorcycle alongside her
Something about her strikes me as odd

A green van in front of me
heads under the bridge
As I pass the woman, I notice
she is a double amputee
remounted now on aluminum
and rubber, maybe a vet

The green van stops suddenly
–metal on pavement
like a trash can full of gravel
thrown from a truck

The road stands up
and skids sideways
against my helmet
bees buzzing in my ears

A blond woman from the UK
with white glasses leans over me
her mouth moving kindly
but nothing coming out