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
He lived fierce
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
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
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
_-_Clovis_roi_des_Francs_(465-511).jpg)
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
.JPG)
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
_-_Clovis_roi_des_Francs_(465-511).jpg)
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
.JPG)
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.
