Psychedelic Furs with The Church is a revenge of the post-punks

     When Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols broke upon the music scene with a ferocious guitar assault, screaming about the queen and how there was no future, the whole question of artistic integrity in rock was revived. If anything, punk was about opposing authority. The pre-existing rock stars in Britain had become, in the punk view, too much like a form of aristocracy.

     Growing up in London in the 1970s, brothers Tim and Richard Butler, the first in secondary school and the second enrolled in art school, loved the intensity of the Sex Pistols. The example of Johnny Rotten (Johnny Lydon) starting a cultural revolt by only knowing three chords on his guitar was a revelation.

     "A whole new world opened up," says Tim Butler from his current home in Kentucky. "Music was the only way out. There was mass unemployment. As soon as you left school, you were immediately unemployed. Kids didn't have any hope. When we formed, we were influenced by the energy and the attitude of the Sex Pistols. But everyone was playing three-chord, three-minute songs, and we started to look for something else."

     A few years later, on the other side of the world, in Sydney, Australia, Steve Kilbey formed a band with a bloke from Liverpool, England -- Marty Wilson-Piper -- originally calling the band The Church of Man, later shortening it to The Church. By that time punk had led to new wave, but neither Kilbey nor Wilson-Piper wanted anything to do with such fashionability. By that time many of the new bands had eschewed the whole idea of a guitar solo. The Church pursued a twin-guitar sound, creating a kind of post-rock psychedelia with extended instrumental sections.

     "We were deliberately trying to buck the trend," Kilbey says over the phone line from Sydney. "We were classicists trying to find our way back to Yes, Genesis, to the Beatles and Bob Dylan. We kept playing the guitar solos, doing the long hair, even to the point of wearing paisley shirts."

     Considering their different attitudes about how to approach music in a post-punk world, it's ironic that the Psychedelic Furs and The Church have become a successful double bill for nearly two years.

     The Psychedelic Furs had disbanded in the early 1990s because, according to Butler, they were tired of playing such hits as "Love My Way" and "Pretty in Pink." The Butler brothers then formed a new band, Love Spit Love, and the pressure was off. "Nobody knew who we were and we could play what we wanted," he says. But in the late 1990s, they got invited to play a short set for a punk and new wave era nostalgia show.

     "We had an offer to play with the B52s and the Go Gos. They asked us to do a 50-minute set," Butler says. "We did that and found out that people remembered us, that people needed to hear us. We started to hear how younger bands were influenced by us. We were finding we were getting the respect that we had sort of lost."

     The Church never stopped making albums, but at around that same time in the late 1990s, they were ready to break up the band. But the popularity of a farewell concert tour caused them to change their minds.

     "We were always going in and out of fashion," Kilbey says. "There was always something that would wipe us out, and then we'd decide we'd keep on doing shows. We had lots of times when we almost called it quits. Everyone has that frustration, whether it's in a marriage, a business relationship or a band. And then after that, we would say it was a mistake. It becomes a little embarrassing to say you are going to call it quits and then come back. We kept deciding that we still had more music to contribute."

~

     The Psychedelic Furs responded to the three-minute blaster style of punk by trying to do something different. Instead of raging for three minutes, they would just play one song with ferocious energy for 10 minutes.

     "When we started out, none of us could really play," Butler says. "We would go into the studio and just jam and say, 'Everybody play at once.' Our first album ... someone (a music critic) called it 'beautiful chaos.' It was cacaphonous but it seemed to draw an audience."

     Butler says the band had the good fortune to get teamed up with a hot young producer, Steve Lillywhite, who had already produced one of the early solo albums for Peter Gabriel, as well as U2's first album, "Boy."

     "He was the first person to help turn those jams into songs," Butler says. "Richard would be singing with a ton of anger and he (Lillywhite) would say, 'Try singing it more and calm it down.' "
That first self-titled Psychedelic Furs album, as well as their follow-up also produced by Lillywhite,

     "Talk, Talk, Talk," features washes of dissonant guitars, straight-ahead drumming, brash bursts of saxophone and Richard Butler's growling vocals, with his skill for finding a kind of roundabout melody above the din. The noise-drenched cacophony was still there. So was the anger.

     The song "Pretty in Pink" caught the attention of director John Hughes, who used the track for a hit film of the same name. But Butler says the original song isn't about a girl who was pretty but didn't know it. He says it was about a girl who "slept around and didn't respect herself" and "nobody wanted to know."

     The success that the "Pretty in Pink" soundtrack brought to the band was a bit problematic, however.

     "That was a blessing and a curse," he says. "We got more of a following but we lost some of our hardcore fans. There were all of these young girls showing up in 'Pretty in Pink' t-shirts. The old fans left us as we gained a huge audience, but it was a very fickle pop audience. In that respect it was a downside."

     But as the Psychedelic Furs rode the MTV generation into international fame with a sort of new wave pop laced with cynicism, The Church spent the early 1980s pursuing artistic integrity while fighting the trends. This made them something of a rock critic's misfit. Their songs were ethereal, cerebral, tending toward mysticism. Not the "dumb rock" of AC/DC, says Kilbey.

     "The source of that was my study of Greek and Egyptian mythology, a study of ancient history. I even studied Latin in school, things like art movies," Kilbey says. "I just wanted to get all of that into rock'n'roll."

     But it wasn't easy. They weren't punks but the attitude was anti-social, and very anti-commercial. They were signed to Capitol Records, only to find that the record company executives didn't like the brainy sort of art-rock they were doing. Kilbey recalled the day one record company official asked them to sound more like another Australian act, the Little River Band, an easy listening sort of group.

     "It's always a struggle," he says. "It was in the early days, was in the middle days, and still is now. All the record companies do is sign you up, say they like you how you are, then try to do everything they can to change you. They want you to wear different clothes. Different hair. They will say 'I love you, now change.' "

     Even during their most successful days, the members of The Church were anti-authoritarian, an attitude usually expressed in the form of resisting the advice of their handlers and their record producers. After some up-and-down experiences with producers and record labels, the band was able find its signature sound on Arista Records with "Starfish." The album's spacious sound has arching, twining twin-guitar interplay with a shimmering sort of chiming, chimerical brilliance. The track "Under the Milky Way" became a hit. That was followed up with another successful album, "Gold Afternoon Fix," which includes several other pieces that are still part of their regular set list. This was recorded during a period of their regular rebellion against their producer Bob Clearmountain and their settings in Los Angeles.

     Disenchantment became a kind of artistic muse. As Kilbey stated at the time: "The Church came to L.A. and really reacted against the place because none of us liked it. I hated where I was living. I hated driving this horrible little red car around on the wrong side of the road. I hate that there's no one walking on the streets and I missed my home. All the billboards, conversations I'd overhear, TV shows, everything that was happening to us was going into the music."

     Throughout their career, The Church has remained out of sync with their generation of MTV bands from the 1980s. For example, prior to touring with the Psychedelic Furs, they were teamed up with a reunion of Duran Duran, perhaps one of the most beloved and hated pop groups of their time.

     "That was terrible. That was the worst tour ever," Kilbey says. "They were the worst band in the world. I hated touring with them. What an absolutely hopeless bunch of girlies. It makes my skin crawl just listening to them ... That's one of the reasons I really like touring with the Psychedelic Furs. It's a much better fit."

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Blues-punk The Yawpers are the best new thing I've heard in a year

A standard conversation with someone espousing a lifelong passion for guitar-based rock'n'roll might go like this: "What do you think of music today?" says the first, with the response being "it sucks," or, "I can't think of one good new band today." As long-time Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau recently put it, while espousing the primacy of hip hop and world music, if you are into guitar-based rock, which is to say, the blues turned up, then you are "shit out of luck."

 And this is more than American Idol disease. If you scan the zeitgeist of such modern music web outlets as Pitchfork.com, you might learn that all music began with David Bowie and was perfected by Sonic Youth. The site's collective vibe about a miraculous number of new performers, none of whom you've ever heard of (for one pretty sure that all rock began with Robert Johnson and was then appropriated by Elvis and Mick) pretty much eschews the blues. Steve Earle, after releasing the album "Terraplane Blues," said recently he couldn't understand why some critics said it was "derivative." How can an approach to expression that snaked its way into the 20th century to change the world's tune, well delivered on a raw Dukes' recording, be derivative, instead of traditional, Earle asks. One wonders: like Fox News Papa Bill O'Reilly's mournful "War on Christmas," is there a war on the blues?

Well, if there is, the Denver-based band The Yawpers might be able to turn the tide. Or, a lot more bands like the power-trio would. Even lead singer and songwriter Nate Cook has felt the sting of the war on the blues on the new record "American Man" released on the Bloodshot label. He says some of the early reviews criticized the new release -- "some bad reviews" -- for some of the same reasons as what Earle yawped about as being "derivative."

"Our music has been a paradigm for the better part of the twentieth century," he says, agreeing that after all that time, there might now be a "backlash."

But blues-based rock, now charged up by a new generation with punk and heavy metal running through the veins, is in good hands with The Yawpers, who are capable of adding a fresh intelligence to the lyrics and, knowing how to build the momentum, to produce mountains of focused and gritty blues-bashed goodness like only a great three-piece can.

The really scary thing about The Yawpers is they do hard-edged Americana with two acoustic guitars and drums. The low grinds of the two guitars make you feel like there's bass there, when there isn't, and cascades of steel pedal riffs make it hard to believe the instrument hadn't been modified for Zepped-up electric amps by R.L. Burnside. The record, produced fully live by Johnny Hickman, the guitarist for Cracker, has a crackling authenticity, with the teamwork for pacing and volume heavy youthful abandon reminiscent of one of their heroes and musical forebears, The Meat Puppets. Reviewers have taken amazing leaps to describe their sound, most of it having to do with dirt, blood, beer, cavernous bars or the 70s bands Mountain, MC5 and Blue Cheer (who knew?). But The Yawpers' Cook leaves all of that journalistic poetry splicing to greater minds, saying reviews of music are "like trying to describe architecture."

Yes, The Yawpers dish out punked up blues with a thought in its head, lyrically speaking. Cook says he wasn't sure about how the band's name aesthetic would work out, but he's now much more comfortable with the fact the name came from a poem by Walt Whitman, from "Leaves of Grass": " “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” Linking the pre-literate age of America to the current post-literate, in a world neutron bombed with musical ditties suited for waiting in line at the store to buy the newest smart watch, Cook says the Denver music scene, where waves of folkies had been coming out snack food crisp, is finally breaking away into a more rumbling, rocking era. Great sounds will always float over the land of just plain stupid, and yawping frequently seems to be the cure. Regarding Whitman, Cook now says the band name works because the title, and their music, is about "the blessed individual. The individual as sacrament."

As in: "The death of the individual," says Cook. "It is an intentionally brash record, but it's not outwardly un-PC. It's not a manifesto, but it does draw from a set of guidelines with songs about the state of the individual in the Western World."

The title track, "American Man," and a song about how real freedom comes when you can work "Nine to Five" all feature themes of the vacated belief that not only can a single individual not make a difference, a person cannot even be an individual. Not, at least, in the epic American way of thinking about it. With the tough economic backdrop, he sings of the burned out land: "This is my home but I’m a stranger here / If I had any left I’d cry American tears."

Cook grew up in a small town near San Antonio that he described as a "gun-toting, right wing" dystopia. So he's picked up a few things about how yearning and desperation are two sides of the same coin. He attended classes at Northern Arizona University 11 years ago before moving on to Colorado, where he latched onto the recession era bumcore sound of Denver's Colfax Avenue music scene and such bands as Bluebird Theater regulars American Relay, which blasted walls of Jimi Hendrix style blues with just drums and guitar. "I never met them," Cook says, "but I did see them play."

Another banjo-and-washboard minimalist folk-riot, Reverand Peyton's Big Damn Band, also fits the organic elements inspiring The Yawpers assault on American roots rock. A small band, which didn't evolve with a bass because there wasn't anyone around to play it by the time they were doing shows, is just good economic sense. Cook had adopted his parents love for Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Neil Young, and especially Bruce Springsteen, and now there's a lot of the Boss in the way he creates characters for his common man themes on "American Man."

"I always had an interest in doing proletarian music with more of a literary slant," he says. "We have a twisted take on the blues, a more high-minded approach to the blues. We like recording things totally live, and for whatever reason that has worked out for us."

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Dale Watson thinks country music is a crazy whore and wants a divorce

    So where and when did country music cross the line? Just ask Dale Watson, perhaps one of the leading critics of the genre. With his taste for fine western wear and trademark pompadour, he's a purist, for sure. There was no evolution in Dale Watson's music. He started out thirty years ago as an authentic, and if you want to know what authentic is, you still listen to Dale Watson, with his bass-tenor range and brilliant phrasing of the great American twang. And then, when you ask him what he's doing, he'll say it's something else, not country. Country music, he says, agreeing with Tom Petty, "has become bad rock'n'roll with a fiddle."
     Oh, it's worse. Much worse. Petty was just being polite. Watson is not polite. In fact, his first album produced a bit of an alt-country hit, "Nashville Rash," which only goes to show that Watson has made a career out of being impolite about the whole drift of the country music game. As he sang, in 1995:

Help me Merle, I'm breakin' out in a Nashville rash
It's a-looking like I'm fallin' in the cracks
I'm too country now for country, just like Johnny Cash
Help me Merle, I'm breakin' out in a Nashville rash

Shoulda' known it when they closed the Opry down
Things are bound to change in that town
You can't grow when you rip the roots out of the ground
Looks like that Nashville rash is getting 'round

     So yes, songs like "Country My Ass" indicate a gift for inspiring the rebel in anyone who prefers George Jones and Johnny Cash to the radio ready salutes found on mainstream country radio. According to the Austin Chronicle, "country music's a crazy, gold-diggin whore, and Dale Watson wants a divorce." Asked if this sensationally colorful line might be included in one of his songs someday, he responded, "I kind of think I already did ..." then taking a pause, saying, "It's not a bad idea, actually."
    Watson says country music went off the rails well before he released his first record, "Cheatin' Heart Attack," in 1995. That was the beginning of his career as an outspoken outsider.
Actually, he blames Dolly Parton, as well as Kenny Rogers. He blames the success of the film "Urban Cowboy," which, if it had been a serious, thoughtful, sociological masterpiece, would have said a lot more about the drift of the population from the rural areas into the cities. Somewhere along the line, country plugged in, and before you knew it, Garth Brooks was leap-frogging around the stage for fully amplified shows before tens of thousands of people, like David Lee Roth with a cowboy hat.
     "Antler rock'n'roll," grouses Watson over the phone from his home in Austin. "It was a bunch of L.A. guys, and before you knew it, we had Hootie and the Catfish. When I came out, it wasn't so unbalanced as it is now. There is just no reverence when you put out fake music. If there is any reverence, it's fake. They'll call some old guys onto the stage during the show, but it's a fake reverence."
     In order to make the art form formerly known as "country" great again, Watson has coined a new phrase, "Ameripolitan," dedicated to themaintenance of four musical styles: "Honky-tonk, western swing, outlaw and rock'a'billy," he says. "I do bits of all four. If you don't want to be associated with country music, then hey, come up to the Museum Club show to hear some Ameripolitan music."
     If honky-tonk music is about a style of music, it's also about a place for music. Watson says his music doesn't translate as well before thousands of people on a big amphitheatre stage as it does in the smaller Museum Club-like venue.
     "Ameripolitan means small cities, small communities, intimate places that exist everywhere," he says.
     Based out of Austin, Watson's "Ameripolitan" movement even has its own rewards show, now entering its third year.
     Watson comes from an Ameripolitan place, Pasadena, Texas, south of Houston. He grew up poor and started sneaking into bars to hear live country music in the area at an early age.
     "I got to hear the good music at the age of 14, when I first started going into honky tonks," he says. "The first show I snuck into was Willie Nelson at Gilly's," ironically, the same citified country bar made famous by a bull-riding John Travolta. "There was still Conway Twitty on the radio. Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard were still on the radio," recalling it as if it were a distant dream.
    He considered the military as a career but an eye injury when he was 12 (since corrected) kept him from enlisting, so he worked for the Shasta Bottling Company in Houston. At the same time, he was playing in local country bands in clubs. "I finally decided I was making more money playing music than working at that warehouse job, so I started playing music full time."
     His first group was called The Classic Country Bandin.
     "We did the shuffles, George Jones, we played Texas honky tonks," he says. "The more time that passed, the more the likes of Merle Haggard became an old timer thing. The neighborhood changed so much. It drove people out that had a different style. It was in frustration to what country music was doing that I went back to driving trucks. I enrolled in truck-driving school but shortly into that the record company called and said they liked the album that included  'Nashville Rash,' and it became the independent album of the year."
     There is a little bit of Hollywood, too, in Watson, he admits. After his first record came out, he moved on to Los Angeles, at the suggestion of Rosie Flores. He teamed up with John Jorgenson of the Desert Rose Band and the burgeoning alt-country scene at Curb Records.
     "That was a really important learning experience," he says. "When I got to L.A., I was able to write my own songs and sing them."
     His new record, "Call Me Insane," produced by Lloyd Maines, remains true to the roots of his rural music heroes. Dedicated to George Jones, Watson says he wrote most of the songs for the album just after Jones had passed away.
     "I miss the presence of George Jones," he says. "What he meant and symbolized. The roots of the music keep dying, and the roots of the country music today are being firmly planted in thin air. It's gotten to the point that now I'm ashamed to be called country music."

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Xenophobia in Iowa

I have a personal dread for the fact Iowa sets the tempo for the presidential campaign by having the first primary, and it really began to sink in during my last visit, well, exile really, to southeastern Iowa, only a few miles from the historic birthplace of the Republican Party, in Crawfordsville, Iowa. There's not much to see now at the original headquarters for the future GOP, mostly a single door, perhaps a historical site in a small white building, at a one-intersection at a crossing for other burghs along the road, miles and miles of barns and farm houses, rolling hills, the great expanse of sky. Maybe 300 people live within a mile of it all now. In 1854 Whig Party defectors meet in a closed meeting to pave the way of the new political party. Fittingly, I found myself, a college-educated professional journalist, looking for a place to fit in among the ghosts of no-nothingism, still alive and well across the county and beyond.

More or less found myself as a refugee of the economic crisis they now call the Recession, but really it was a depression. As I walked among the ruins of a cratered party of the country, with small communities turned into ghost towns, the Walmart economy sucking them all dry, and the good ol' boys, still running things, running the temperature of some of the most hateful people I've ever run across. Yeah, a lot of running. Trying to get out in front of the near medieval hatred out there. Indeed, if they grow anything out there on the farms of Iowa it's xenophobia.

As a refuge while convalescing in an anonymoplace in the corn fields of southeastern Iowa, there was a big barn next to an anhydrous amonia distribution facility. If you drove by it on the highway, the entire civilized area, actually an old broken down railroad stop with an old grain silo and several empty buildings representing days gone by. The barn, more like a large aluminum shed structure with several rooms and open areas inside, a kind of hodgepodge after years of additions and remodels, was filled with all kinds of useful, potentially, items collected from around the region: furniture, farm implements, old tractors, piping, chemicals, paint, wiring, fertilizer, old toys, enough trinkets to fill an antique store. Early in the morning I would go there as I wandered around the remnants of an enclave including maybe a half-dozen residences scattered around a large open field with dozens of wrecked and usually burned vehicles parked on the lawns like trophies. Most of these were fabled demolition derby vehicles.

When the sun came up the big barn was a place to watch the sun rise and fall and stay warm. In all directions were cornfields. This was right smack in the middle of Monsanto's iron-fisted grip on the agricultural life of the region and also a cancer cluster. On windy days methane from pig farms would roll across the earth, making you feel dizzy and a little (more insane). Alcoholism, disguised in the form of football tail-gating style total inebriation, also ruled the countryside. One nearby town, so bombed out by the Walmart sucking action, had no market to sell beer ...

Anyway, one other ringing memory from that period was the night a presidential candidate arrived at the Iowa City airport past midnight, and was then taken away into the city with a full caravan of police cars blaring the sirens. Maybe they were bringing in the big wig to meet with this one farmer (featured in the photo above), some crazy old crackpot hooked up to Fox News and the local Christian cult. That Donald Trump and Ted Cruz lead in this country should be no surprise. The scarecrow is out there for all to see.

Time and 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

~

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

Goldwater

Institutionalized

Most recent news from Arizona's politics includes bills being discussed in the state legislature to allow guns to be carried on college campuses. The curious irony in northern Arizona is the best-known appearance of hand guns resulted in a deadly shooting on the campus of Northern Arizona University. The basis for this wave of open carry stuff is, of course, the Second Amendment, built upon the premise, among other things, that a militia would be needed to remain armed in case, say, the British came back. And in the case of the shooting right down the street, it turned out it wasn't a British invasion, but a fleet of television trucks to display what, exactly? is the benefit of having guns on campus. But extremism is ... blah, blah, blah ...

If you follow this flintlock musket policy initiative to a few logical implications, all part of a Barry Goldwater meme buried like valley fever in the sands of the Southwest, then the sovereign principality of Arizona should send away all federal employees, including the military and border patrol. Then it can establish its own constitution, supreme court, and enforce what it really has in mind, a rigidly biblical caliphate where everyone should be carrying a rifle to everything.

Arizona voters are the first to blame for the apparent dysfunction of this crew. But rather than voting out the designers of the budget crisis, a governor was put in to reinvent the wheel. And Goldwater Institute goons were brought in to be the "yes" men. Sounds like the crunch over school funds is just the tip of the iceberg since these designers, not being scientists, won't embrace the wheel until more research comes in. It's good advice to keep following the money for all kinds of categories as the radicals seek to privatize law enforcement, prisons, social safety nets or hand over public lands to developers. They seem to be intent on handing over government programs to a legion of mercenaries, reintroducing a system that we haven't seen since the 19th century, or, in some cases, the Middle Ages. It's becoming a cruel world, indeed. Which is why, I suppose, all of these rifles are needed.

The Goldwater Institute, hunkered down in the melted money mounts of Paradise Valley, is a menace to compassionate governance. If we had listened to that bunch, there would be no light rail system in the Valley. It's an anti-union, anti public healthcare think tank for the tax dodging cronies of the New Capitalism, replacing social ideals fought for across the Western World with a new religion called "profit." We haven't seen this wave greed hounds since the Reagan era, and now the fate of the 99 percent is at their mercy.

Paranoia goes pop, again

Anticipating "The X-Files"

I want to believe. Really, I do. Surely, the truth is out there. But I'm wondering if "The X-Files," when it returns to TV later this month, will be able to recapture the pre-millennial moods and mysteries that made it a cult hit in the 1990s.

Should we yearn for the days when an empty factory could be a secret base for otherwordly conspirators, when white unmarked vans were filled with shape-shifting apparitions of unspeakable menace, when that small town in the Midwest was the sinister nest for a psychic serial killer, thus making Area 51 the real dream destination for a millions of fans of the show?

Fourteen years since its last show,"The X-Files" returns to television on FOX-TV on Jan. 24 to re-introduce viewers to its supernatural darkness, with its own mythological arc, kept in the unlit basement of the American psyche. After more than a decade of only having the re-runs, "The X-Files" is ready to spring again like a Jack-in-the-box of ill-fated portents.

While Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) will return for a mere six episodes, they are most certainly doing a victory lap for the two beloved characters who embody the rational and irrational in all of us. One is left to wonder if the show might feel naive, out of place in an entertainment mecca overwhelmed by dangers reflecting a brutal world like in "Game of Thrones," except without the dragons. The sci-fi horror drama will return to a world challenged by fluctuating economic conditions, climate change and terrorism.

And so how can you top that?

Will the return of "The X-Files" really reflect the mysteries for our times?

The world has changed a lot since the show first aired on Sept. 10, 1993. The internet had not yet been popularized, the World Trade Center's Twin Towers were still standing, and the country had yet to face the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. The show petered out less than a year after Sept. 11, 2001, as the television universe moved into a more anti-terrorism narrative, with shows like "24," which made it look like the landscape was being taken over by cell phones, or films such as "Zero Dark Thirty," which peered into the behind-the-scenes machinations of torture and military special ops with a patriotic sheen.

But "The X-Files" creator Chris Carter says he sees potential episodes for the show by reading the news every day, and few could argue that the real world is far weirder than it once was. Just look at your cell phone with the app set for panic.

The common view on the show was that it emerged out of the cynicism of the 1990s. However, I believe it really dug further into the roots of national paranoia going back to the 1950s, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy ratcheted up the Cold War with charges of communist infiltration, when people still believed aliens crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, and then the 1960s, when the unsatisfactory results of the Warren Commission turned theories about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy into a cottage industry for conspiracy theories. Since World War II and the atomic bomb, politics and fear have become twin sides of the same coin, and if anything, "The X-Files" managed to capture all of it with a slick, post-modern show that turned the relatively calm and seeming stability of the Clinton years into a looming dystopian nightmare.

By tackling marginal FBI cases where the paranomal was involved, agents Mulder and Scully rode the fear wave into the approaching century, that, as some might remember, was likely to begin with all of the computers turning off across the world within the first minutes of 2000 (didn't happen). And yes, by 2012 you might have wondered if the super rich were pilfering the economy to buy tickets for space flights to get off the planet, but four years since then we have realized the billionaire elite were just plain greedy.

For myself, "The X-Files" ended as America's zeitgeist show, with one of the first episodes of the spinoff created about the geeks from X-Files, "The Lone Gunmen," in the summer of 2001. That episode dealt with a conspiracy to crash airliners into the World Trade Center. Shot shortly before 9/11, the episode was certainly prescient, but also more than a little sickening.

The main question is that, in the shadow of all that's happened since "The X-Files" last aired in 2002, is the appetite there for themes that aren't mostly character driven? Without a doubt, the mere appearance of Mulder-Scully on TV is a resuscitation of two of the great heroes in television history. But I have my doubts if all of those sewer monsters and hick vampires are going to scare anybody in an age of anthrax and super storms and Donald Trump. Global surveillance and cyber wars are certainly cause for concern. However, do they make for good "X-Files" episodes?

Sounds like a lot of looking at computer screens to me.

"The X-Files" was certainly a show for its time, but like bringing back the boys for that name brand band to go on tour again, the return of the show may make us feel sentimental for the good ol' days when all that you had to worry about was whether some intergallactic fiend is going to inject you with a black fluid to turn you into some kind of alien-Earth hybrid.

The truth is out there, sure. It's in plain view. It's hanging out with ebola and freaks like Bernie Madoff. Now I wonder if the masses are in the mood for an ever-expanding mystery. This time answers are in need, and somebody needs to tell that uncle who is into conspiracy theories to get real. That UFOs are swamp gas. That flying unidentified stuff tested at Area 51 years ago now flies over parades and football games to heighten the fun and celebration and excitement of modern aviation. That the white unmarked van parked outside the door was always, thankfully, just the caterer. Right?

Just name the whole country 'Trump'

Like the rest of the media I'm suffering from writer's block because I can't think of anything else but Donald Trump. Not because I'm part of that baffling sect of lookiloos who attend his rallys, which look like mocking roasts of the disenfranchised, tuning up America's worst fears, with the punchlines being the most outrageous of solutions, a horrible spectacle, like in a "Godzilla" movie. Trump must emit some kind of invisible gravitational force, activated by my own and others' negativity on historic and cultural perspectives, causing one to think of old film stock of pre-World War II events in Germany, of a blustering Mussolini. Except in this case the reality TV set is a high-definition red, white and blue television oasis, a post-literate Twitterverse as the new mob subculture seeks to divide and conquer.

When politics as reality TV is the overwhelming entertainment option, you just can't look away. At first it seemed bizarre, comic about the Republican frontrunner's reality TV style campaign, offered free by the national media (writer's blocked) until he only just recently started to buy advertising. But the humor, if there was any, is gone now. The entire social demeanor has taken an awful turn.

How do we find our happy place? How about baseball? Think about baseball. Total Jedi mind trick, baseball.

For example, how happy were many Arizona Diamondbacks fans when the team backed up the truck and signed the pitcher Zack Grienke for just over $200 million? But, stumped by the Trump again, I'm imagining that, for that kind of money, the team could have just re-enginered the entire stadium by building a clear unbreakable plastic wall from left field to right. Turn the whole place into a handball arena, with outfielders geared to handle the ball once it is rejected by the mighty Trump-like fence? Who needs pitching in a no-homer dome?

Ah, but finally, I found that unsatisfying. Outrageous. Un-American, even.

But since two hundred million dollars won't do, seemingly, what it once did for being able to buy the presidency, which now requires a self-funded billionaire to turn the entire process around, it's really not worth saying the Diamondbacks could have found very much better to spend their money on.

Two hundred million dollars won't do what it once did. I checked. Oh, the freakonomics of it all. To me, the most awesome demonstration of per unit cost, globally, are modern warplanes. For example, you can get an aircraft carrier fighter/bomber for around $55 million, or, three fighters for the price of one front line big league free agent pitcher, with change left over for maintenance, ammunition, fuel, bribes to local officials, whatever you need. A decent second baseman is going for about $50 million, also. A F-22 fighter, advertised as the most lethal of such planes in the world, costs $200 million each, too, but how do you cover the outfield, or any other border, for that matter, with just one airplane?

Presidential candidate Jeb Bush has spent $50 million in the Republican race, but has thrown all of that money out the window against Trump, beneficiary of free publicity provided by the talking heads ... Ah, the anguish, back on Trump again. Jeb should buy a cheaper fighter, give it to his brother, and let them both land on some carrier deck somewhere, greeted by, I dunno, Paula Abdul. Maybe that would help improve his campaign, which lacks theatrics.

It's looking like there's no cure for the big Trump stump.

Time to close the eyes and vanish into a galaxy far away, where, diving into the great recycle bin of 20th century culture, which we never seem to be able to escape from, the latest Star Wars installment made more than $200 million on its first weekend: Or, four fighter bombers, or, one front-line starting pitcher.

You could think about Hillary Clinton, the likely democratic nominee, who staked an early position on the whole "Star Wars" theme. At the last Democratic debate in December, she ended her bit by saying, "Thank you, good night, and may the force be with you," instead of the usual God bless America. President Barrack Obama followed this up by wrapping up an hour-long end-of-the-year press conference by saying, “OK, everybody, I got to get to 'Star Wars.’ ” The movie's director, J.J. Abrams, has given $1 million (which buys you what? A tooth brush?) to the Clinton campaign cause, so clearly the force is breaking to the left so far.

To get back on top of this, the first Donald Trump television ad admonished the president for wanting to get to the "Star Wars" screening when he should have been out, I don't know, directing bombing raids against ISIS. But it's hard to know how far the Republicans want to play the anti-nerd card. That sounds like political suicide.

But needless to say, it's Trump again! With this kind of disruption in the force, it's a wonder how anybody can get a grip.

Porterville

Rain Station

The hurricane journal colonel

meets the wind at the Porterville

train station as birds fall

out of a fallen tree

Shoeshine wet steel along

a busted up railroad line,

heading to nowhere

in the eternal now

Isaac Smith took the first

bullet train away from the coast

and the pellet is  a richochet

from sea to sinning sea

Storm riders in white robes

lost the battle but won

the water war: The one-eyed leper

watches the stain running up

the wailing wall ...

Meanwhile, back at the submarine

boat show of snakes running

beneath the floorboards of Boston

to the Milldam corner of Concord,

discord cannot carry any cannons

across the creek as history repeats

each and every morning, twice,

and the ripples still by morning light.

A Brief Visit 

to Ballpark Earth

First thing I've got to say is this:

I'm pissed I never got to play

Major League Baseball

Second, and this is a big one

She looked so good

in her fishnet stockings

and we were in sixth grade still

and I still haven't

been able to keep my eye

on the ball

ever since

Third ... sure,

the psychologist

apologized

for getting

the whole thing

more than half wrong

and these are bad

percentages

and you paid

the bill to guard

the lunatic asylum

and it sure doesn't

bring all of the dead

dead doggies all back

Fourth, equally unimportant ...

Just who is keeping

score, Dear Lord ...

Who has all of the stats,

Stan the Man,

and who is keeping

the big statistical

law book of life?

I mean shit, shit, shit ...

I can't even spit here

and I have not looked

at a box score

since last spring,

when I still had hope

for the Diamond King

and sure, forty thousand

princes and queens are seated

in the stands now

text messaging, waving

to their kids back at home,

but they aren't watching anyway,

since fishnets are back in style

and so are their fuck me

I'm a ho tattoosies

on the telly and the Jumbotron,

which caught them kissing

doesn't even record,

just flashes,

then flies on by

~ Douglas McDaniel,

Sedona, Arizona

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 Partydefectors 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.

  

A Conspiracy of Ducks

The entanglements of the Spider Woman

led me here to tell you of too many things,

but hear me now and keep all a secret:

Only half of what Soutenang spoke

of yesterday is Wormwood true:

Tomorrow it will all be a lie.

The company we keep must shift

from year to year, day to day, hour by hour ...

Shush, my sweet, silence! Everything and nothing

we say can ever be heard or listened to, or, known.

This is the shady place, dark and in smoke

where the paranoids go pop to meet on the street

of the most disowned, dark and unfavored muses.

Networked societies throughout history and herstory,

powered in the puppeteer's mechanized iron arms

are frightening to the uninitiated anxiety angels

of change ... Trust me. And trust me alone!

I like it on top that way ...

Damn you! We've been discovered!

Who talked! Who!

If not for my dragon visage they would not run.

I did not kill the three headless women they speak

of in the shadows of the dying afternoons ...

Now I need a new cave to breathe my fire from!

Fore they will chase me down and kill the truth ...

I weep for them. They do not know what they do.

II

These crystalline stones in the center of the Earth

contain values within values leading to absolute nowhere.

These mountains will tell you nothing, my final secret,

without the keys forged in the four corners of my mind

and if I squint my leaden cold eyes tight enough,

the Sarcosuchus of my dreams held in the sarcophagus

will once again share a dream with the Eddie Allen Poe

ravens tweeking in the deep dark wounds of our dreams ...

These ravens speak just as we do, just as all of the birds

of the world understand in accordance to our mutual

misunderstanding, just as I keep my watch stuck on eleven

to remind me how real the hour is, the day is, near or far:

Your heartbeat will tell me the rest and the black helicopter

is just a fairy tale, a whiff of helicopter blade, echoing

in your circuitous canyons and endless energy fields

of mere rumors repeated, for sales purposes, only to be

maximized in the marketplaces for my profit,

and my profit alone.

III

I saw three ghosts

through the window

and they were posing

as three nude females

as if it were part

of the same damn plan.

I saw them again

in the fanatic swirl

of teenage faces,

happy and light

and forbidden.

Finally, they appeared

as blue topped, short-cropped,

senior citizens who could give

a damn about your generation,

who were around long enough

to catch the last sweet scent

of the wild white roses, caught,

tight in the controlled gardens,

imprisoned, elect, in enlightenment

and mutual decay.

IV

Despite fundamental needs of fear

and the aquamarine teardrop

of your sad eyes,

when my MIB sunglasses

fell into my tortilla soup

my personal cosmic rodeo clown

was kicked out of the bucket

by the Bull, and the cartoon cowboy,

listening to Jefferson Airplane,

fell down the hill with laughter,

because, see, the movies

don't show you their eyes

behind cool black shades

to keep you believing

in the narcolepsy of suspense

about inhuman Blackhawk riders

who quite literally actually really

need to feed and fight and feel and pee

like children, too.

And that Spider? It shudders

to our mutual Sarcosuchus,

running to underground homes

to atomize quick harvests of love,

just as the secret government agent,

quietly, soulfully, somewhere in some

movie theater near you is weeping,

sentimental, quite literally sorry

as he or she watches the slow motion

action of the sequence about the birth

of baby ducks in the spring.

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

The Sniper

He lived fierce

but not long enough

to clear out

the elegance

hidden beneath

his cloud, red

as the liver,
silent as a sniper
in Laos

He used all of his hearing

on Deep Purple,

the Allman Brothers

and trains rolling

both ways along

Route 66

moving nightly, daily,

always east and west

for the resupply ...

Semper Fi! Semper Fi!

That was his religion

after the Catholic

do and die ...

His duty was his

faith and he loved

defended even his wife

in death

He lived his life,

left nothing to spare

didn't waste a thing

for the resupply

II

We made this place up. You were used,

brought here to recite Faulkner,

to champion great beasts from the sea,

thwarting the diamond-hearted vistas

of America, sold, bought, traded ...

No, another scene: Closer, a yard

of broken concrete, cowards,

laughing, chasing some old lady,

down the road ... No, closer, closer!

You called the police car. You!

Now my nerves are jangled

and the ambulance is gone

and the TV news crew

never arrived like it does

in the movies and the

music is the reason

why I cannot live

without you.

Closer? Can't be. Just can't.

I mean, it's too close, too soon.

The curtains, full of holes,

like a planetarium at mid-day

of endless siestas: My god,

you stayed here with me?

You endured this tormented

corner of trains going in both

directions and audible

rattlesnakes ripping

through the night

and automobile drivers

who just don't get it

and never will?

Don't you see who I am?

I am a man who cannot

even think about leaving

because if I do, it will be

the end of music for me

and I will have to walk down

the straight without your

sweet warm palm

inside my hand and man,

that's just to close, woman

You got no right, just no right

to shed such salty tears

on my brow as we hide,

trembling, behind walls

stained by forgotten

details, jagged angry

mad loafers who once

made these roadside

spaces home

III

In the stillness

only gamblers

light their fires

In the forests

of time, money

where no choppers go

and Captain Napalm

can't command,

the likes of me

always in demand

One-eyed fire bird arts

at the secret command

you'll feel no detection

when your dark heaven

is my cross-hair selection

Semper Fi! Semper Fi!

Nixon called

and I denied

never knew a camera crew

I fought, you died,

that's all we knew

IV

Covert, overt, bread crumbs for crows,
with vows on the dangers of falling in love
over roses and medical records,
building enemies golden bridges to escape from,
burning down the lines of supplies leading into Vietnam,
sucking in the agent orange, dirty in black and green face paint:
All of these things he did for you, or so he thought ... well, anyway,
did what he was taught, which was the honor onto itself

When rising blood bruises arose along the arm, he kept covert,
secret in the protections of you, again!
And when I took out the trash and got in the scuffle
with another of your walking wounded,
he urged on the fight like Johnny Rebel
and later we all apologized and hugged and tried to move on,
but we never did, never do, because of the ripples
now running in tsunamis across the seas

When he came home he was told to stand down
when the Hari Krishna spat on him at LAX:
Must have been like, relax, soldier, stand down, man,
just stand down, keep it quiet, to yourselves,
because it never ends ...
Never will

Plowshares

Eat, breathe, sleep, dream,


so when we wake


we can face the cold wind


burning of death,


brave and bold;


Let those who find


the merchants of fear


behind their backs turn


to face the paranoid fringe


down to fire off memos


for one-thousand-year laws


to assuage disbelief


in the disinformation


that we are separate, not One:


Let the dawn rise


for the information farmers,


the witch doctors, the divine women,


the primal poets, the horsemen


melting their brands into plow shares,


the cosmic truckers and spinning ballerinas;


Lead these bright sons and daughters


to contentment beneath


the new Sun of Creation


and then, let them eat, breathe,


sleep and dream again beneath


the Old Moons of the imagination

Resolution Revolution

Nobody is going to rob me of my joy,

not even here in this deepest and coldest

of winters, this dark place of toothless

tormentors, of mouthpieces spitting teeth

of fights you lost, howling mad, decades ago,

not your droning, green or black helicopter

sad, money grabbing, cash registers of pain,

clinking in metallic perfect motormouth

mullahs of intense, sugar-free MSG,

sputtering a doormat out for me,

as if spirit were a mere rumor

created by the machine-heart

doctors on the twin days

of my Capricorn birth,

somnambulatin' an echo

of my perfect ear

for the loving

beat of your heart,

true art, not the furies

of hell-bent masters

of enclosures

cast in the bitter

pounding of hammers

intended to wound

me, not the ever-growing

radars of fear, nor

the trenchant statistic,

nor the static

clinging to your

clanking chains

of the dissenting

voice that believes

it can keep me

from speaking

love's name ...

Nope.