Mythville

Wall of Sound

Waking to the working man music,

seeking the shadows in the sounds

of the nineteen seventies,

since we are all churned

into semi-sweet baked cookies

in the summer, flipped on

by the big thaws of winter

The Teflon dons

of the nineteen eighties

are switched on, switched off

Reagan era commands,

the hyper-Gothic rhymes,

the guitar-crunching cries

after the Berlin Walls

all falls down, down, down,

as the angel of lights

floats into the alternating

lime greens as the money

turns into big seas of digits,

feeding the Taurus bull

at the beginning of the new

century, swearing to sea salts

of ubiquitous security

Sure, you tried to turn

your sword of words

into plowshares

looking for a re-boot

and now the black raven

cries over your shoulder

as you spit and cuss and croon

like a barnyard babe, street-tough

as the last-born child,

when you are actually

the first as the second cloud

of the day rises in the sky

But you can stop the insanity

outside your door anymore

than you can disassemble

the arching winds working

on your bunker, Archie,

since the pride of sin

is to admit, at some point,

that we are all overpriced

princes of peace,

at ease, at best, but ill

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 Last Water

The Year 
in the 
Rear View Mirror

Carry the candle carefully
across the darkened room
to let the drenching of earthly flesh
shine brightly in all cathedrals
curving into a bit of hope,
exchanged for the rope,
a horizon made dangerous
by lakes of ice clear as glass

Pythagoreans, Franklins, Da Vincis,
Miltons and Blakes: Mithras
is a self-made man,
independent of media scams ...
Oh words, words, what were the words?

If the hand signals to space
hidden from reasonable, orderly beings
were thrashed out of the tides,
to live here, then die,
the call of the crazed daemon
who saw the angels
in the great stadiums
of those profoundly humbled
by the mere disappearance
of one benevolent being,
then the cooperation of choruses,
a music made by band mates
never would have been a throng

But the whistles, the voices,
the bass were all dreamed here then.
in these ears, deadened as they are
from the tone of too many super stars

Surely, the sunlight, cutting through the rain
creating a hole in the sky,
means the game is on, a rapture, a sacred dance
on the holiest of grounds

A Trade That Helps Both Teams

Oscillation nation

flinch inducing accidents

justifying the new money god

into Miltonian pandemonium

about man as a one-winged

white-feathered deity,

a flying Anarch deist,

an an Icarus flying too

high toward the moon

in a flow state

of dust and stone

You can see it through

a small window in the morning

serving as a mirror

to individual creative cacoons

moved by the approaching

lunar eclipse: Read their lips,

cool the revolution down, man

Waves of light, dark and bright,

bringing together those within

to speak the same language

of the masses going without,

those out or in, trading

in equal as partners

in the same dance

The megamonster money god,

blinking, climbing off the wall,

a new modern man descending

the road out of hell

hatching scores of angels

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 ...

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