Mythville

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,

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