Your Morning Briefing
Don't take phone calls from world leaders
for they are the breeders of mass delusions
fed by morning briefings spit out by think tanks,
mainline caffeine and cocaine fiends mainlining
what the pajama Obama wants to hear, Putin on the Ritz
on the cheesy crackered characters awakened
by the prospects of coffee, fresh roses
in the vase at the palace, roaming about the place
in silk robes, surveillance shots on the sofa,
as long black cars get all gassed up and doors slam
like mortar shells in some distant land,
down the block from the crumbling monuments
of Giza cats roaring into the ear of bazillions
withheld for military aid held or flooded
into the Egypts of the mind, the O'Reagan-o-nomics
as the Bushites flood into the Safeways, failing
to manage the scanners at the check-out scanners,
asking themselves of public assistance to get through
these newfangled devices: But, unable to get assistance,
call on the secret service agent to get the price
on the parmesan in, you know, the next fifteen seconds
or, ya know, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do
because that's how he rolls, since he's gotta
cook dinner for important people, and Dick Cheney
likes things pretty preppered, a hood only event,
very hush hush ... meatballs, sauce, barbecued
buffalo meat ... so he, the bull in the deli section,
finding loads of the cold stuff, buried deep,
way underpriced, see? Listed at three bucks,
maybe a little more; most times that cheese
is nineteen eighty four, but hells bells,
money means nothing to the him or the she devil
who can buy the whole store, because where they
are from no deals a deal, and tomato sauce
may as well be catnip or ketchup for the People,
that kind of snuff, more than enough
for Governator Chris Christie to finish lunch
with director David Lynch at the last Bob's Big Boy
over a snack and a shake, shake, shake
over a cold stone rolled over Charelton Heston
still dead after all these years with an AK-Forty Seven
still clutched and pointed at his eagle-nose beaked,
daming the children of Camden, Chicago and Houston
to the grave because big Bob remains for eternity
buried in the sands of the pummulled Jersey shore
by king tides so unpredictable we can barely
load our guns fast enough while we exceptional
Americans can barely manifest the destinies
of faraway nations about their own dead peasant
voters who ordered the same green salads,
blown-back hairstyles, supersized fresh fries,
so metallic in miss-direction they can point
in many misdirections, all four of them,
east versus west and north versus south,
Assad this and Ali that and McCain this and that,
commanding his own imaginary armies by default
with Hollywood's ghost of Noah reassuring us all
from "the safety of being out of range,"
home, home homing it in with a pinprick precision
of condon-shaped missiles with little notes
tucked inside with Aramaic copies of Common Sense
for those last aristocracies hanging on with one hand,
waving to us from the carriage running through towns
sucked dry by the feverish drive for money clouds
whirling before the the sacred pass-the-plates
sliding back into the sand, the secret sauce saucers
held back by big Bob's checkered shirt and suspenders,
and the bosomy waitress half-dunked by the rising sea,
a lost place called Lady Liberty, Missouri,
but still within the anxious apex of the Supreme Leader
who says, "Come to our Diamond Mountain Ski Resort
or we will nuke you ... enjoy our powder daze
or we will atomize you into dust, because we will nuke you
if you don't pay five-hundred dollars for a cup of coffee
or we will nuke you, teach Dennis Rodman to snowboard
or we will nuke you and kindly please do make
the Harlem Globetrotters an ice hockey team
or we will nuke you and kindly please make anti-gravity
games Supreme Leader's idea or we will nuke you
and kindly please turn skis into chopsticks
for Mongolian giants roaming Eurasia or
we will nuke you, kindly please say
to hell we will all ride for free Seoul food
or we will nuke you, the Obanamable Boehner man
and Colonel Kurtz, who is taking a big black helicopter
for a bit of a vacation from his jungle, deep in the Congo,
to catch a few shows in New York City, maybe to see Macy's
and search the military supply stores for designer gas masks,
T-shirts reading "The Horror. The Horror," rasberry berets
for the folks back home as we all finally hear back
from all of those prayers we sang on Wall street corner
as we got all charged up by the last
super-sized Mountain Dew sold, letting
that last sugar-sweet ice cube roll
and melt like hot butter in our mouth ...
For more about poet Douglas McDaniel ...
Go to This Week Under the Sun ...
For more about poet Douglas McDaniel ...
Go to This Week Under the Sun ...
The Information Thief
Bandied about
dilly dallied
soaked the stuff
in like a dirty
used up old rag
When ready to receive
I'm dangerous as a bone
raised like a fist
in the class war
Picked up something
about days gone by,
of headless queens
and the kings of yore
Today, don't think
I can do much more
since when I'm done
they wipe off the table,
due to the database germs ...
Information disease
is a rael thang:
At that point
the birds call out
my name: Since
the flood began
I haven't been the same
Just Doin' the News
Gibraltar ... Gibraltar,
Gibraltar ... Gibraltar,
England versus Spain, once again,
the ages of empire returning, unlearning,
as the ancient superpowers retest
the waters of sanctioned, official
violence for fishing rights
Jesus, get me re-write
Jesus, get me a fish, fast,
faster ... Even the quickening
seasons slow now so get me
some low now, making the pie,
higher as the news adds
fuel to this fire:
Angry motors, tossing the boaters
who sink or swim or just run
round and round and round
the public squares, the cracking roads,
the sudden floods, the little ships
no longer safe in their harbors ...
The ghosts of conquistadors
choke through the thin veil breaking down
about the walk up the Peralta Trail,
the Dutchman, no longer lost,
and Geronimo up ahead,
noting the troops heading up
to his hidden cave
and dinosaurs ride on
the backs of Fred Flinstone
and Barney Rubble reads
Bam Bam the news
and the Washington Posts
go sour as they wait, just
one moment on superior
electronic machines
about how they, themselves
are in shock about being sold off
like slaves ...
A Navajo man gives me the big spooky
believing I owed him a dollar because
some spider woman runs on and rants
into marketplace America screaming
about yuppies without rubbers
and how Babe Ruth took the pill
and then took the Fifth, passing
the fifth plate on the diamond,
failing to excuse him for his disorders,
his sanctimonious shield, his lawyers,
his dogmas, Dharma, Shakespearean dramas,
coating the world in oil and trash
and pictures of food on boxes of cereal,
little boxes of store-bought lasagna
to be baked in the Bush, giving me
the evil eye, with just a hint
of personal superstition ...
My eyes grieve in the salts
cut from the Grand Canyon,
the sandstone all blown around
in the irradiated winds,
the acquifers getting sucked dry
by Big Blob Phoenix
as trains skip, accidentally
into the red rock canyons
of the east as I go "Toro!"
to the madness of the world,
weeping for what I wish
I couldn't feel, soapy clean,
greasy and real ...
Foundation Fire, Unworldly Waters
Little birds, fear not;
smoke is overrated.
Now fire, like, wow!
Hope and jump
and follow your instincts:
sure, sure, sure
Even the volcano,
in the grand scheme
of things is a mere
Dimple upon the Earth:
Just as life is just paper
exposed to black ink
Civilization keeps
the fire lion in storage
for the burnishing of your white walls
This image, this mirror,
is the alternate universe,
so each side is of no matter
This sleeping fat cat,
finding no bluesy suitors
is just like nature denied its day
Such is the way
for men and women:
Constant are both frost and fire
And the vanquished,
concrete moon
pulls light off the world
The blackened well, beneath the surface,
is all man or animals will need
for one-thousand years
The Portico of Complaints
Hear yea, hear yea,
the polemic pandemonium
dedicated to Salvador Dali
because the watch
is freezing back into summer
as smoke signals fade,
as fences fall in high winds
destined for the tornado alleys
of Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Arkansas,
dusty bowls rising with temperatures,
dropping into the cold turkeys selling
at high dough in the commodity aisles
of Wall Street, whose surrogate,
the U.S. government, the price being right,
crush the crazed population into noodle factories
for blond spokeswomen on political talk shows,
from brunette blues historians on radio shows,
for beats and bleats in morning light, dusky damsels
of disaster restoration industries soaking in cash,
paranormal as X-class solar flares pumping up the volume
for tomes, old as Dante, cooking up the mortal coils of desire,
for layers of cakes, sold on saucers in the medieval
meteors thrown down at earth by the nightly news gods
who sell fear, beer, batteries and basketballs,
shock-worn baseballs obvious and mournful
as a black cat's quarter-moon shaped cry
from Siam to the Himalayan Rockies, from Hawaii to Mars,
to heal the ever present aches of what we use to bake
when the in-and-out burglar light beats us
back to sanity when the new word
for "bad" is Syria
and the rotting core
of democracy
is a "Here's to looking
at you kid" call
to "winning the future"
and our miserable new habit
for showing disdain
for each other
walks on, waxes off ...
Surely, there must be
better breezes
after all of this ...
Surely, there is hope
in the fact
not all winds
bring down our tents
as the spooks,
in the shadows
reveal butterflies
on fire
Last Water
The last drop
of water in Meteor City,
a parched hole in the desert
with a few mobile homes, maybe,
echoes of steel pedal romantics
in action, still seeking factions
to fight off Black Mesa coal companies,
joining other drops of water, rising,
to make or break into clouds,
cloud computing sympathies
and waving into grains:
Behold, the national sacrifice areas,
the place once known as First Water,
a ten-thousand-year walk by the third drop,
pushed through sandstone beneath concrete
sidewalks in the city, good to the last cop,
wearing a belt secretly glowing of uranium,
coal and waters pressurized through slurry pipes
by chicken hawks, or, black parking lot crows
big-breasted, looking slightly tasty,
as we walk home, desolate and lonely
back into the wilderness, two Pahannas
who pretended to understand for a decade
the pain of sacred springs drying up,
the kachinas dancing down to mathematic,
automated figures at your cash registers,
ya, you, you know who, how do you do,
say halleluja, as you carve into up into space masks
inserting pictures of the glassy knolls, hogan holes,
Merlin's magic wands to the center of the crystalline earth
The fourth drop of water, a drip down the throat,
issued through a rubber tube, hardly enough
to rush down the rocks of the red desert stream,
the drying heat of seventy-mile-per-hour winds
jack ripping, ripping jack
over the navel of the fourth world
powered by the Navajo generational station,
the dynamite that broke the highway,
the lions of commerce, roaring and erect,
bread bears, steel-eyed salmons from far away
dreaming up plumes of steams, making cloud,
making raining, falling onto the earth again,
the fifth drop of water, most likely your last,
video punked across the nation, one last drop
of coffee on the tongue for salvation,
one last drop for the animals of immigration,
a red dirt crust of crunchy sourdough
for order on the border, an entire stitch
of moleculed waters for a set of signals
for the matrix, a crowd, a crisis swamping
into a last great flood, for one last river boat,
one last drop of ink on a single sheet of paper,
rippling now into a red stratos curtain
like a flug hung upside down across
the Little Colorado River Valley
as the national canyon anthem sounds off:
O say can you tame the raw dead Sainty Clause,
O disbelievers, O, pain relievers of our kitchen sink,
the green tinge of tornadoes, predicted by the hour,
moving north almost fast as the brown soldiers
on the Hopi mesas holding back the end of the world,
wearing the many coasts of winter, still, in the mourning chill,
cast off in spring around the small hogan rooms
in a confusion about the new currents,
closing the roads in the Dust Bowl daze
of explosive gusts, that last water
summed up by sweet sugar fairies
draining into hot choco-lates
in the nasty Nestles
of your no longer say so,
into Perrier bottles
for celebrities,
public relations
people fibbing up
Fijis tipped
for industry,
petting down,
your last puddle,
your last well,
your last water
stolen and sold
in the grocery
store
aisle,
and kept in
in the phaoroh's urn
of our mutual
no more
say
so
Survival in the Spring
The fool moon
is an unjust cliche
passing directly overhead
and I've ached out of exhaustion
so many times the tired millions
of meteoric terrors, media-mad errors,
the pa-rum-pum-pum of Christmas,
now long behind us, is only the echo
of a car crash we never witnessed,
only heard in the siren song
beneath the loud roar of daily trains
passing along the highway,
and our soft whispers
muted in each minute of distance
remains as a glassy tranquility
in the lunar space, the ice nine
of the night sky, as the dust swirls
into a sound so lonely,
a solace at the end of March,
we thank the great sky
for no more murder
The white stripe of the local skunk,
confused as the buds on trees,
in unending misunderstanding
of the new weather patterns,
limbs freezing then thawing,
chilling over again, forgotten
as the breeze, teasing towels
of numerous cold showers
for all seasons in a single day,
twenty-four-hour revelations
of the mountain lion warning us
with a growl in the Gaian solace
at midnight into the back-stepping
mystery of the morning, cars running
late, buses running late, trucks,
running furious late to avoid garbage beasts,
cement mixers awake, alive as thirsty ants,
churning up into government, then corporations,
into bellicose budgies happy to pave the world
Gone are those long lost minutes
where you unleashed your moorings,
when your screamed out your sorrows
and locked your mechanical door
without a master as the snow storm's
marshal lawyer, a colonel clinking
his dry cup for a salute of sunless,
derisive, jarring melodies unheard,
the fire of the gut-rotten belly,
rip-ribbed fat, toothless and mean
in his oily flannel cotton shirt:
O, who is chuckling now, you cheating
Chubby Checker! We are free of you.
Free! And winter is a dead and past
as we feel well enough
to start worrying again
about what is normal,
as our eyes, moist in emotion,
push out the main street iron
ions of ancient dirt, seeking
to join the information flow
of geese, buzzards and eagles
flying north into the blindness
of the king, the queen, the jesters
jeering in the crowd, the black crows,
re-entering the Earth's atmosphere
to regain unearthly sanity
