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Thursday, February 25, 2016

Dinosauria, We

(by Charles Bukowski)


Born like this
Into this
As the chalk faces smile
As Mrs. Death laughs
As the elevators break
As political landscapes dissolve
As the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree
As the oily fish spit out their oily prey
As the sun is masked
We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
Born into this
Walking and living through this
Dying because of this
Muted because of this
Castrated
Debauched
Disinherited
Because of this
Fooled by this
Used by this
Pissed on by this
Made crazy and sick by this
Made violent
Made inhuman
By this
The heart is blackened
The fingers reach for the throat
The gun
The knife
The bomb
The fingers reach toward an unresponsive god
The fingers reach for the bottle
The pill
The powder
We are born into this sorrowful deadliness
We are born into a government 60 years in debt
That soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt
And the banks will burn
Money will be useless
There will be open and unpunished murder in the streets
It will be guns and roving mobs
Land will be useless
Food will become a diminishing return
Nuclear power will be taken over by the many
Explosions will continually shake the earth
Radiated robot men will stalk each other
The rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms
Dante's Inferno will be made to look like a children's playground
The sun will not be seen and it will always be night
Trees will die
All vegetation will die
Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
The sea will be poisoned
The lakes and rivers will vanish
Rain will be the new gold
The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind
The last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases
And the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition
The petering out of supplies
The natural effect of general decay
And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard
Born out of that.
The sun still hidden there
Awaiting the next chapter
*

Saturday, January 25, 2014

English Sonnet


wind!   how the animals remember Noah
this itself is mind restlessly fleet
beckoning down your dark like a smoke boa
to drink it back in green on your two feet

one wonders how these things are o’er-mastered
for fires cannot blaze on fuellessly
nor can a horse walk straight when he is plastered
and all of sense dissolves thus lastly

o granite moon should you ever go out
like the stone hearth at morning writ in charcoal
crushed cold from your crater the words I doubt
that there will not be silence of the soul

at the end of whatever we discover   then
forget I was once a high bouncing lover

Saturday, November 23, 2013

Cnoc Song


hers is the stone like a cnoc
   mountain rills are crawling crystal
      down the valley at night
      toward my box and my oaken floor

who carries what the box
   cries like windfall
      that blows through
      the shadow of my flukes  

who is lost but
   finds winter heretofore
      in the sharp flank
      of the still cold north

while the sea rages by ice
   my dear and froth that freezes
      on breaming waves
      and salt in a felt slipper

who climbs the rock face
   for your health and welfare
      in the oaken valley
      of the old flipper

Monday, October 7, 2013

Mandrake


the clock o’ one in
the beginning stung
every little son
on red flannel fields

the fabled wayward
mind gone craquelure
unsteadied the view
of flowers sprawling

on the starry mask―
if the inhuman
fabric falls away
this late in a life

shows blackly the back
of the remotest
odorless lurking
not this no not this

is a pretty truth
in the ancient sense
vicarious not
hard to disbelieve

‘til the tentacles
of it clutch the breast
and seethe there   pulsing
   inoculating

cool poison   wherefore
should they not so do
now little mandrake
at the clock o’ two?

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

IT'S A COCK AND BULL STORY 
THE TALLEST TALE EVER TOLD 
AN OVER BAKED T; H ; E ; O ; R ;Y
A NEW ART MADE OF THE OLD

Monday, September 30, 2013

I wonder how much of the sun has already been used?
mandatory optimism
as usual
willful ignorance
maintained by a pinhead lobby
of invisible deities
they are busy being happily wounded together
how did you know I would ask that?
propinquity breeds objectivity
the sun is over the roof
but you wouldn’t know it
by the foot prints filling up steadily with black snow
*
dissidents are tortured back into dust
in the name of our valuables
it’s very hard to describe hellfire
sucking the oxygen out of the air
or symbiotic parasites taxing our hallucinations
driving us into their arms
in full knowledge of the default
immoral moment with a full stomach
full of fresh air
the mere poetics of our dubious limits
wobble the wheelchair-paradigm digging its teeth
into gravity
I stack your pancakes on columns of nickles
Oh beautiful feeling that makes everything more beautiful!
*

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

He's Dead


I’m dying to weep for Francis Sweeney,
dead in his eighties, a little too young
   for me, I’m hoping for a longer stint
on earth; lot’s to do ‘fore the last dog’s hung.
   It’s a life of oglemoon and sunsquint
         into the dark finis
manufacturing that aesthetic thrill,
   so long as it doesn’t pay you dim sum
   at all. It’s only ripe as freedom,
a door you open into a deep hill.

A drop in the salmon ladder really;
what do you reckon in earthly years?
   O, rare fertile roe in my wake when I rowed
the fishful of dreams unweepable tears
   to your little son over the charred road,
         which looms ungenteely.
Just beyond where the voltage sags the clay,
   someone holds a picture of your mother.
   ―This is all that’s left, they say. But smother
any concern, for you are well on your way.
  
At my deposition, Fran, you sported      
a bow tie! Some legal types, suing for you.
   I never did learn how it all turned out.
We went on to live as if this life were new;
   I put the melancholy ash to rout
         but it merely loitered
between our plots of brain material.
   There must have been a hole in your fabric
   the shape of his last moments, a rubric                         
I repeat, now that you’re ethereal.

My elegy for the elder binding
tie makes glaring the strangeness of my truth,
   a thing received of each sole emptiness.
My breath and selfish ways have gone aloof,
   so must it be, the very thing you bless―
         This is the last finding.
Somewhere in a library, bowdlerized,
   because they’re each one’s untouchable quinx,
   are books printed in invisible inks,
weightless tomes, imperfectly realized.

Somehow this has to do with Solipsism
because the very Greeks of knowledge light
   up like little planets going round me
when I catch them in my sundance flashfright.
   Which is to cry “I’m buried here, Sweeney,
         under a head schism."
I can wait with dignity forever
   if it means the non-believer suffers
grace as it pours it’s hail on strange, never
   to know for certain if it will snuff hers.

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Mirage

Hawk roasting a
pig in the wild
thick tines of
hedge wenned from
a plain sense of
trackless waste
  in a man―

the sword that’s
erupted upon
it is built with
a practice, airy
sayings that must
be retooled with
the clear and
level mirage
   of one’s gaze―

when the hedge
is coals the pig
  is done, whispering,
  the hawk files (sic)
    away (the sayings).

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Tron


Bink bonk went the Tron eating silicon bits
and the lovely trees Daphned about the orchard
formerly as young girls ungainly looped behind ―
   their quirks of charm fresh as a wave
      through the golden dry acres. 

Wit-free after long offgassing   
as the trees so near to the underworld
come a-moulting glass feathers as in molten-flowing,
   now cool, like cellophane, as ambience ―
     Tron! Glory ‘o the dry gold hills!

The programmer is lonely, isn’t it, Joe?
Well, see through it, Jack, said the VRP.
A dodecahedron of open faces
      where swim the universes,
      laving, then breaching, firewalls;

In the realm of the emanating strophe ―
in one realm, the place and it’s cargo poised
with most of all of it at the back, awake;
      and the food Tron must survive on
      bubbles like the sun in his throat. 

Monday, March 11, 2013

Invisible Weeds of Puissance and Pulchritude


There are hidden precincts as close as skin
To you, simulposed, one on another―
   Closed cavern on vacant nether.
   Yes…  covert are the fields they’re in.
      You go to a back lot
But don’t see the cave, where, I shit you not,―
I battle my own little Ragnarok,
Scarred by the event as a scald must be,
Missing you in the weeds where you stop to pee.

Where you loft your mindwave against the pale
Yellow edge of the concourse―  the daylight world.
   There your cognition may be purled
   Like a cul-de-sac; but, please, Hail!
      The sacramental pitch―
Tumbleweeded flats, perimeter’d by ditch,
That ants abandoned, squatted on by witch―
All but the mine, the middle of alone,
Where the twilight reigns and the gods turn stone.  

We must, perforce, the ancient rites perform―
The inchoate myth, and the phantasm
   Otherness, just a brief spasm
   From solitude to where we’re borne,
      Into the home life, dear―
A ramble in the empty meadows where
The secret places are from year to year,
The well-swept ground under the temple shell
Where, together, all things may, lonely, dwell.   

Friday, January 25, 2013

The Consolation of Poetry



Lumpen inhales this way and he can die here.
The head turns inwardwise to look at what drives out;  
Which obsessions commandeer, what silent hives abut
The bee glade, what constructions over cellar-fear

Are tilting toward effluvia. Odors of rose
Musk turn stink in the plexus that makes the world.
Despite, senses oppose: the projection is hurled
Upon the rocks and waters; while some suppose

The mind is bent under run-on propositions,
Thought experiments in a requisitioned skull,
Quotidian fissions blasting around a small
Wilderness in a universe of omissions.

Make it the case that the clock hands run widdershins.
That gnome doctors dig for the curative specie
Through cave-bound winds in a brain that bides uneasy.
Spring forward the horse, the rider and all his sins.

Is there art in the final illuminated
Hallways of the gods? The aggregate disperses
Into it’s several inks. The rare nib solved verses
Starring Sphinx― now he too shall be extirpated.






Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Nocturne: What Thing



The stairwell holds you in the light
The moon let slip over the sill.
Now remove yourself from the thin
Sample of air in which you’ve been.

Behold the Night! A secret chill
Sustains her silent chords. The slight
   White tremors on the Earth
      Craze the frost
   Into mute chinks of mirth.
      Night is fast

   Falling and shall uptake
   You in arms widely awake.
   That she knows you best,
   Let you contented rest.
Then, when she lays you in the brake,
   Her privilege to forsake,
Let Dawn say what thing ye shall make.

Friday, November 16, 2012

Thyrsus


Three spores in a thyrsus, divine,

    fly to my eyne! Under the sky,
a goddlet little thing of vine
    and leaf, drunken, splendidly wry,
    lifts up a beaming rosy thigh,
props a lolling tumid lily,
    nods and browses in her valley,
laps from his purple lips a sigh,
    “Is there no end to her folly?”

The milkmaids linger. Her dawn’s-flesh,

    black-rock eyes, mesh with old root-fires.
Like lasers in a fog at dawn they rush
    through fields of milling wind, loop flyers,
    valent, avid, their wombs like gyres
turning magnetic purple clouds
    piled in ventral glades; and lauds
pour forth from tongues as rain expires  
    damp breath the little deaths enshrouds.

Sobering one day the grape-faced

    barley-mad straight-laced bhang-farm czar
replaced the mortlette of all grace
    atop the staff of near and far
    (his ways of dalliance ajar),
let all the lithe days of sunshine
    and silk jet nights of wild feline
purring from the lush muscular
    foliage at last bend down his spine.

Little Nonette became taller

    by a cellar and a hairdo;
Autumn couldn't help but holler
    on arrival at the rare view,
    from the aft end of the purlieu:
set like a jewelstone in a timepiece,
    too fearfully historic, prime
for the mythos of the issue
    out of the field into the wine

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

On the night of the Waning Gibbis
she ran
golden in line to meet me
to her death
did she know?
the dog committing
suicide
tumbled her last breath