My Last Cigarette

Hear that sound?

Jackhammers at eight a.m.

jumbled Jesus is all I am.

May the desert sun

dry my tears for the salt

I am worth.

Oh, holy ghost

in the machine:

Why do the heathen rage?

May they be sorry

they did not kill us yesterday.

For Tramps & Thieves (Steal This Song)

At a memory place called the Spirit Room
See the mining town slip off the mountainside
See the day go long in bikers attire
into the Saturday gloom as the vultures stare
and two birds return to their tenuous wire
after a crazy night in Jerome, Arizona
two art thieves with their hair on fire

Tramps & Thieves are playing tonight
Smell like an animal, it's quite all right
We'll find our shoes in the morning light
Tramps & Thieves are praying for sight

Hard to explain love with a difficult dame
May the desert sky dry our tears for what we're worth
She dropped off the shelf from my savage breath
then broke into pieces now I'm lonely to death
I howled out loud hoping it would fix itself
then leaned into love songs with bass for breasts
then sold my guitar at the pawn shop or at the bar
Took the train across the country but I went too far

Tramps & Thieves are playing tonight
Smell like an animal, it's quite all right
We'll find our shoes in the morning light
Tramps & Thieves are praying for sight

(bridge)
Me chasing her, her chasing him
I beat 'em all off with a stick
but I'm not made of tin
Tried to write a poem
but I typed it with mittens
tried to write a book
but it's already been written

(guitar solo here)

The girl, the witch, is gone for good
though you might see her wandering
a mystical waif in your neighborhood
Gone underground gone for good
How I long for those old creosote sounds
Pile-driving guitar and Southwestern twang
of cactus and trees and reasons for singing
of desert beings only out for the evening

Tramps & Thieves are playing tonight
Smell like an animal, it's quite all right
We'll find out shoes in the morning light
Tramps & Thieves are praying for sight

Down the Road from Crawfordsville

Somewhere at the end of the road

Down where the railroad used to go

In her trailer she slept with a frown

Trying to stare her demons down

The statue of libertines came around

The wolf had already walked the town

I wrote poetry without much sound

Except for a laugh

from all of the dumbing down

Down the road from Crawfordsville

the broken motor man turned to stone

like Apache copters a'rotoring on

and wagons circling from raging clowns

they argued the point

till the town burned down

Though they paid the rent

for ten dollars a week

the world was shred

by wolves among sheep

as smokes he borrowed

he burned to keep from weeping

and anhydrous ammonia

came up from the deep

and she worshiped her stars

when lacking sleep

while pine needles fell

in symmetries at her feet

before the dogs all howled

in the morning light

down the road from Crawfordsville

They all got a book out

about self-proclaiming,

about water-board wording

and daylight savings,

burning bushes, barns,

the hay needle's laughter

about the unicorn dying

while the Republican Party's

secret headquarters

has gone to rust

down the road

in Crawfordsville

Yeah, down the road

from that tiny Ta'Iowa town

a pig farmer named Lester

is happier than hell

He's driving by

with a sleeping hawkeye

his parallax view

can tell no more lies

and the good book sold now

to the controverted

stands in the way

of truth's memory

of the local sounds

in Crawfordsville

Cardinal square in sharp-cut corners

the coroner croons with each hard winter

turning summer waters cancer cluster bitter

Down the road from Crawfordsville

"climate is dead" for the motorhead,

fertilizer falls from the fire-up sky,

we need not ask for the season of why

Down the road from Crawfordsville

the maharishi's prayer is for a limo

in need of more corn-fed gasoline

and up the road: the Wal Mart roadkill

is churned up dust from that shuttered

restaurant full of crap for the ghostly haunt

Down the road from Crawfordsville

that old shack is burning still

with bushels full of Monsanto seed corn

breaking your teeth on porky porn

as the Synergy trucker waves goodbye

but even with buckets full of energy

we want heroes, well here are three

with eleven cups of free coffee, cigs,

some sanity for satiety, a kind kinda

Fire Safety Week society

for squeaking toys and dogs

to run free

Down the road from Crawfordsville

there's good folks out there, out there still,

while the eye in the sky is scorching 'em dry

they don't even ask the reason why

since loose lips sink ships, Holy Reagan cow!

The washing machine's roll is terror, Wow!

But the tenderloin's pound is a tender drum

of country folk who ain't ho hum

Can you hear them tommy tum tums

of the super farmer's food taught, like magic,

by a hand-held Fibonacci sequence tool

Down the road from Crawfordsville

the Big Box trucker armies

broke 'em up bad,

so forget those things

you learned in school

about how Frodo kept the ring

and the Golden Rule,

about how mega Hertz

made German tanks,

cause techno Teotihucuan

gives good thanks

at the dinner table, to the cops,

to your loan at your banks

Just let it roll by, let it fire its blanks,

'cause down the road from Crawfordsville

you can still greet the sun in sacrificial light

and the morning moon will come a day too soon,

so swim with the shore you supper fools ...

Down the road from Crawfordsville

worms from the air get carved up, cool,

the super farmer's just awe right

'cause disinformation is far outta sight

and William Shatner just plain lied

to those poor folks in Riverside

and east to west the buffalo returns

to beat the dust from the Bible belt's urn

Down the road from Crawfordsville

a bard's lament is the ever-giving quest,

despite the wormwood, yer guns, yer tongue,

you'll give great thanks when mourning is done,

when her sacrificial second sight is Mary singing

about storms to come, about enough blood to drown

the terrorists of shock, awe, the dumbing down,

just can't avoid the daily bank scam man

who hits the train station burned to the ground

and the bump in the road will kill you if found

Meanwhile the ranch gets saved up the road

from Crawfordsville, where sileage choppers

look like haircut machines by day, E.T. by night,

like giant Sandworms harvesting spice,

and the golf course tanned Dan

is a thousand miles away, tinkering

with puppets to sway, like bobcats

shot and killed and made into hats,

the collection plate is eternal

as the frightly nightly news

the heroes go on despite these views

when asked how she feels she sighs and says,

"Peaceful," she says, "and peaceful is nice."

~ Ames, Iowa

Note: The first private meeting of what would become the Republican Party came when Whig Party defectors met privately in Crawfordsville in February, 1854. The meeting was to lay the groundwork for the creation of a new political party. The first public meeting was held in Ripon, Wisconsin one month later.

This is Your Facebook Page Bursting into Flames

Match to match, tree to tree, soul to soul,

disembodied faces roiling into a roar:

This is your Facebook page set on fire. 

Coffee house man. In his black danger shirt.

A style set alight in Cambridge and San Francisco.

Distant and divisible. Locked into his spacey game face.

Day traders with caps on backwards.

Facing each other at a table, but not seeing,

talking, an electrical frenzy feeding.

Headphones plugged in.

Tommy knows where to put his cork

as more vacant ghosts enter each door.

Crew cut hipster male in a tight T-shirt

walking up and down the caffeine freak floor.

Waving his arms. Speaking to the invisible ether.

No one calls for the men in white suits.

No one says this is the quickening,

the fall of the robot on his auto-pilot throne.

Pressing all buttons! Pressing all buttons!

Faster fire faster fire! See and Say toys

pressed into weapons for desire.

Help me! Help me! 

Look at me! Look at me!

Immersion is art is affirmation.

One faces suicide as one faces toast,

another's salad has done and gone soft,

another selfie's on a yacht and you want it to sink.

Political rage. Monkeys in a cage.

The narcissist echo going ping ping ping.

The troll leaping out like a jack-in-the-box,

Eternal documentation for our verification.

The anniversary meme bounces back

like a bad dream. What were you thinking?

There's a rumble in the hacking.

Is this Rome for the sacking?

The lit-up void gone paranoid for peeping.

The click-per-minute pace.

The ache in your back

as the moment is breaking.

Disembodied avatars burning brown

as fake news reels as real news keeps faking.

God is the cyborg but God is just joking.

You sit still so long you can't take a shit.

A leader who will take us all down

just for the clicks.

~ Douglas McDaniel

Of God and Garbage

Mountain Dew container

rolls free along the road

in the hot Sonoran wind

Going tink, clink,

a-chink-a-clank

Plucky and determined

Heading up

the down lane

With courtesy

to stop for the light

as the summer breath

stalls for a sec

Then moves again

as the rambling goes on ...

By the year Twenty Fifty,

at this crunched pace,

it will make

the Mogollon Rim ...

Returning to the mountains

from where it began

God loves

the tenacity

of the aluminum can

9 Trumpidor

On 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794), the French politician Maximilien Robespierre was denounced by members of the National Convention as "a tyrant", leading to Robespierre and twenty-one associates including Louis Antoine de Saint-Just to be arrested that night and to be beheaded on 28 July.

The tyranny of the son

arrests the tyranny

of the father, who arrests

the tyranny of eternity

I am the punisher of the son

I irradiate the wind anhydrous

So no one smiles, no one cares

no one dares to challenge me

and no river meets the sea

I am the revolution

to dissolve the ancient regime

and blood soaks the land

and lies dissolve reality

I am the fear of the wreck

as we wreck ourselves

I once was a painter

and I put on the helmet

of Cortez to conquer

the land with golf courses

But now a balancing woman

looks over her shoulder,

naming a guillotine date

for me

She is pitiless and swinging free

as my fun house mirror mind

is cut loose

from the body of the world

Going Underground (for William Blake)

Let us all retreat now into the secrecy of poetry,

into the pedestrian road rage of incomprehensible symbols,

into pages white burned pages black, into rambling mangled encryption,

away from a world rendered remorseless of mad made up words,

just as the morning blues-hued crows squawk to each other

for no reason other than to announce, "the fool is here,

the fool is there, the fool in the clouds is everywhere."

And if the dog has howled, 

then is promptly disemboweled,

then let us read the entrails as real history.

It comes from below, like thunder so we know

the lingering echo of the empty minded sound

is the most profound mystery

of the poet gone underground

Does he know from where it came,

as a bargain with his shame,

from me, and most certainly not her,

maybe him or not him,

from the stomach or the groin,

from the heart but not the brain,

from the sunshine on the hot moon,

from the mirror of private imagining?

Get out of the way! 

Get out of the way!

Get out of your own way!

Down, down, down we go, down we go, down we go

into the immense pinprick of angels set to wandering,

beneath the surveillance of prying sick society

to save ourselves with muffled ringing bells

made of murky meanings, dual and dark,

from the molten core, a sacred fire,

a revolution that starts at home

Bank American Blues

The pedestrian road rager

sat down and listened to the deaf man,

can to string to broken cracked can man,

confessing he worked with Steven Spielberg's dad

in 1957, when they were drumming up plans

for a main frame computer program

to undo the earth, the heart, our American home,

from Huns to Hunstra, who came to a Southwestern

desert, house-built by the mob, dreamed up in Vegas,

to the compromised creosote landscape

of horny toads and rattle snakes nabbed

in trash cans, tumbleweeds built up

along fences, a witch hunt for the wilds;

He who came to town for General Electric,

He who died on a Sunday afternoon

in a small plane crash in New Mexico,

flying back from the East, when Gee Hee,

very shortly thereafter, gave up on taikos

and the remaining Promethean games

games to come, working for golf putter

designers, golf coursey hunters of the bank

of American dreams as I now enter

the sleek confines, the cat box catcher

of red and white walls and fixed furniture,

with not much blue anywhere, not much else

but blue type spelling "Bank of America,"

lots of beeping noises, alerting the authorities

of the dangerous Danton armed to rob you,

with his big ass damn scary pen, strange

and haunted, shell-shocked eyes,

home loads of red, charged off years ago,

in overdraft fees that should be given back

to the people you croaked, the dead peasants

you croaked with check systems given out

like blankets to nineteenth century Apaches

to gather accounts made up of less than zeroes,

for third-party collection companies,

as the wind cries Mary ...