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
*
Thursday, February 25, 2016
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
flipperMonday, 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
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
*
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!
*
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
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