Scammerland (for P.T. Barnum)

This call is a response
to our concern
over the expiring warranty
on your lifespan

The following is based
on falsified events,
only the names
and locations are factual

What we share is one big lie,
the revolution on Youtube,
in pixilated smoke,
mirrors of deceit

Such pretenses
are the leading export
of a continent fashioned
out of genocidal nothingness

The bigger the fiddle
the better the misanthrope,
the longer the street urchin
sleeps at the bus stop bench

With evidence in layers
of the disinformation kind,
let me tell you the tale
and let your snake unwind

A nation built on hypocrisy
willing to believe
the moon is just a bulb of hope
made permanent in parking lot light

Cynical leaders, confidence men,
apprentices out of the obscuring clouds,
pictures of food on grocery shelves,
churches bound in black books of delusion

Brown is the only color
white isn't white
and buckets of blood
water down our action words

Oh say can you see
the sedentary stacks
of trash, inanimate
and animate in gory glory

God is a fume of tricky red shifts
and blues, sung from the deep
a solar storm. a meteor hour,
inducing the sleep of Dorothies

History is bunk, sayeth Henry Ford,
and your automobile museum
attracts the burning deer
in your mud-covered headlights

Notoriety is the self-serving flame
on the conspicuous boulevard,
knees aching from fanciful dreams,
eyes blighted by car part stores

If you could lend P.T. Barnum's eyes
to the lion blinded by the optometrist,
the movie might be more realistic,
and each note, a saxophone solo shining

This call is a robot voice
reminder about the hoax
on your lapsed liberty
that is forever unreal

Information Disease (for Vladimir Putin)

After seeing the morning light
through three motel room windows
the dog came out, trained by a member
of the Select Committee to Keep Me
From Doing Anything But Writing Poetry,
and in that morning blight, the red and yellow haze, 
degenerated all of mankind
into a dumbed down Cromagnon electric gun, 
that, blossoming into Cambridge Analytica,
into access to too much information, 
imagined itself into a slick of lies,
And just as fast, although less permanent,
in the corner of my eye, the painful strain of the deep,
caught up with conversation with the Russian ambassador, 
who sent a secret heiress donation for the Grand Old Party
and the NRA's unpleasant grip on the dominion of sin quaked, rattled, rolled and water vapor seeped up, toward the surface,
from underground and flowers, and idiocy was born,
it had a face and a name and an opaque plan to rule,
and then, booming louder, we all got younger, 
and the wind softened and the internet sent sex sighs
into the fog, thus metastasizing its own enemy: truth

Bermuda Triangulated (for Robert Anton Wilson)

For those about
to wake up
for their next
tropical depression:
I blow a kiss
and an antidote
loaded with Vitamin D

For my brothers
and sisters,
weak, picked on,
flipped on their backs
like doomed sea turtles
for the past twenty years:
I push a little blue button
issuing a satellite beep
causing instant pain relief

For a phony Noah's Ark
full of pixilated African animals
diving deep into twin lakes,
moving slow or fast,
enjoined at their hips:
I call up a might cloud,
concealing a thunderbird

For illegal immigrants
(as well as half-human aliens)
hiding like Apaches
in the motel rooms
of America: I send
a silent warning,
a three-hour head start,
initiating a two-year
launch sequence before
the power all goes off

For dangerous rip currents
building something together
in cascades of waves,
the top one silent, deadly:
a unified nomenclature,
be you rogue waves,
sneeker waves,
baddass high tides,
a roiling, boiling
but quite sexed up
good egg project
shaping smoother shores
so we can all learn
just a little bit more
under mostly cloudy skies

For all of the supposedly poisonous
under toads, intelligent horny toadies,
a tinted glass manufactured
by mere mortal men,
to hide behind
and therefore
to evolve anew
and grow

For all of the rest
of you angel hatchlings
in your fleshy husks:
for each, a single ticket
to ride, to sink and then fly,
riding high up in wood coffins,
rising up to the sea's surface,
like the meek in the Hopi bible
swimming with the shore

My Morning Moo

Fog rolls me out, then back in
dropped down the drain,
my brain, civically insane

Tide rolls in, then out
Listened to "Tainted Love,"
wondered what it was about

Amber alert
revolver
burnt toast on a rack

Tangiers, tiger,
stoned and stunted,
pacing the gated isle

Don't connect
to the music of regret,
not much hope for that yet

My eyes shine this way,
got dark at that,
some authority issues here

The marshmallow sky
seen only through a window,
to lie would be unwise

She is pretty over there,
in her green smock,
never meeting my mouth

Wish I could
go to sleep
touching her summer hair

Ode to the Homeless

Trying to kick the cigs
but the patch led to paranoia
as the watcher of my sleep
snoozed secretly as his cell phone
slipped from sad to sick,
every regret slipping into the dark
of my toss and turn,
rationally revealed
as the merely impossible existence
of mountains to be climbed
as the lady in leopard pajamas,
waiting for the transition light to change,
for the Latifa queen who left
telephonic computers
in the motel room
of her only friend
for the easy free electricity recharge,
moving on for another bus ride
to the Greyhound bus station
and the big bellied man with no shirt
sunned himself atop the highway overpass bridge
and a cluster of birds sang sweet warm winter songs
as the rising tide of crypto currency sank their boats,
the rising tide lifting some,
but all others drowned
and left behind in the tide

Boy oh boy, my boys and girls,
boredom is the devil to keep at bay,
and overstimulation rocked the nation
stunned into checkmate, mates,
and I gave my brown spotted black
Depot Bay pirate T-shirt,
stating, "The seas will be our empire,"
was given away to the lost Navajo
two days into sobriety
Boxed in illusion. Illusion boxed.
the citadel of concrete cracked
in harsh Southwestern light
filtered by the dust
of dinosaur remains
Got the psychiatrist on the line
as the eavesdroppers listened in
as they honed in for thought crimes
of me giving all my clothes away
and the arrogance
of the Brahman innkeeper
spun dry the mourning morning
Daylong you can her the la de da
of motorists passing buy
in the moving tombs
of wheels and metal and chrome
Horseman, pass on by,
since the walking dead
refuse to meet our eyes

Before the Wall

Winning fame through fine language,
clever as a fool outside the castle walls,
somewhere between windswept Winslow
and grey Purgatory and dapper Dante's hell,
I watched the petrified forest sink and melt,
the sun sank and the sea turned back,
then returned as a tsunami,
swallowing the entire cities
of Periander, Segeum and Cleophon,
leaving to float the caskets and tomb flowers

We spoke in epithets, cursed spells in cursive,
ran from the lion, speaking in tongues, no verses
for Eve or Adam, up a tree, down a canyon,
hiding behind browned and heat-burdened leaves,
making a special dinner for the snake,
jumping Jake Satan, who was not so bad,
once you got to know him,
his cup running over the brim,
and we, forced to be deaf,
suffered in the silence
of the One True Lord!

Before the rhinoceros was made white,
before Eden was made less recognizable,
before the first stones were cracked and stacked,
before the animals lost their voice,
of the first drum, the musical tones,
before the first sunset was made diffuse by dust,
and the double-hearted angels
made portals for rights of passage,
I walked lonely and isolated,
down rows of bright tulips and roses

Fortified against the relapse,
leaning toward resistence,
nontheless surrendered, rested,
before the precautionary comfort
of the pill yet to be invented

Thy Father's Needs

In the secret agent shades
along the dirty boulevard,
the disquieted boys try
to hunt down new divas
with energies circling,
tryin' not to rust

As the shadows get longer
no longer rough
is no longer enough
and the divine fems
keep in their corners
reportin' on their formers

Thy father's needs
Thy father's needs
Thy father's needs
cause the earth
to bleed

Who is left or right
of the center
keep untying hearts
and poisoned darts
together feelin'

funny about the weather

And the Overlord plays
his fiddle to bards split
right down the middle
letting the dust of fast
polarities just plain settle


Thy father's needs
Thy father's needs
Thy father's needs
just suck the rust
off the gristy griddle

There's a guy here
waitin' for the gals
to complete their
conversations
dreamin' of their
own truths to private
Cherokee nations,
Cherokee people
as wedding bells ring
and a divided nation
fails to swing or sing
on either wing

Thy father's needs
Thy father's needs
Thy father's needs
boilin' up corn seeds
to cut all those Joans
of Arc but deep

Don't you feel
O so incomplete
due to thy Father's needs

Thy father's needs
Thy Father's needs
dryin' corn seeds
O so incomplete
to his dirty deeds
his dirty deeds
crossed up
cotton seeds

Ozo incomplete
Ozo incomplete
Ozo incomplete
to thy father's needs
thy father's needs
cut down those weeds
let it all just bleed
for Thy father's needs

Thy Father's needs
Thy father's needs
the whole damn earth
plain gone to seed