POEM: NIGHT

Night: that outlying gutter
Sealed in wax and put under glass
Consuming predatory drugs
Put on a butcher’s coat and wine drunk
From glasses of blood
In the shade of peek-a-boo poetry

It is ether or orgy for me
Guided by a logic of madness you could not understand.

Still, I have this recurring dream of me
In this monastic cell, drunk, chanting prayers
With the hint of a smile
Writing letters, eating mints and chopping wood
In perfect rhyme
Willing and able to build a fire for the godly purpose
Of keeping cold at bay.

POEM: Halloween

Sequined October is a match head struck
While we put on our masks
And do our best
To scare each other to death.

We stumble into ourselves drunk
With death
Walking dashed yellow lines
On snakeskin roads - Find
Day old candy
Hardened with ripped paper edges
Not quite as sweet as we’d remembered

Everything rummaged through
Old pillow cases
A beggar’s holiday
Where I hold out an empty sack
And wait for it to be filled.

POEM: Impossible

Impossible?

Let me explain impossible to you –
Me the bastard child of “Never In A Million Years” and
“When Hell Freezes Over” –

I am a child of the ’69 New York Mets.

I am an accidental cancer survivor.

I have impossible programmed into the speed dial of my cell phone.

I have touched its coasts, shore to shore
Planted a flag and put all ten toes into its vast Pacific Ocean.
And still, I count the white capped waves as among my most ardent admirers.

It is the astronaut bouncing on the pockmarked face of the moon
Swinging a golf club, reading from Genesis.

It is a July 4th firecracker that goes off in my hand
The sense of phantom fingers followed by the tingling and the shock.
Like the morning after my father’s death
When that, too, was impossible.

POEM: Wake Up!

I want to shake you by your shoulders
And pour the thick mud of steroid coffee into you

I see your stretching arms and your yawning mouth
I see your slitty eyes, rub out the eye goop with a fat twisting fist!

In the ambient light of goldenrod trees
I want to rustle you from your lolling

Green pastures, your dewy wet dreams
From insomnolent harvest moonlight.

Get up and eat some steel cut oats
And multigrain toast with fresh preserves.

Put on your loudest rock’n’roll and Q-tip your ears
So not a decibel is lost over the silence of awakening.

And quit creeping into the broadest of daylight
It does not become you and is more than just a little creepy.

POEM: On the Serengeti Plains of New England, Searching for El Dorado

I sit in the company of working class potatoes and flamboyant onions that are just so full of themselves amid grandmotherly faces of piebald gourds
there is a pride of cartoonish mums maned with purples, pinks and rusts
which makes these flowery man-eaters seem to growl.

They wince with every tendril-killing frost that coats shadows like white mold
bear witness to this nub of autumn as an oil slick of night seeps onto azure fields above.
The lost gold of conquistadors rolls off its table edges into a leaden dark.

Daylight falls without an ounce of grace unable to walk that flimsy scar horizon like a tightrope any longer.

POEM: Sonoma Blues

Can you sit in luxurious quiet?
  Can the noise fall into you
    Down the deep hole that is you -
       Spreading outward, in ever
          Flattening ripples until it is

                                                          No more?

Can pebbles raked carefully
Into rows

Straight as your desire
Take on the razor edge

That you have sought
So long?