Oh Panic

Change looms at elbows and slithers around ankles

waiting for a calm in the air before it rankles

and destroys a peace barely even met.

Mouth dry. Strands of hair, tangled in knuckles, blow wet.

Misty air weeps with me. Belly clutching. Belly rumbling 

terror at tomorrow. A wail on the wind. Tumbling

speckles— Blind, angry sky and foreign thump-thumps.

Half moons on palms and red white pumps

blossoms of blood at the corners of my eyes and

dark monsters lurking on the rise and

felt fingers dragging over knees and 

deep fear of nothing but the leaves

creeping at the windows,

tickling at the green Dos

Equis bottle that shivers

as my heart delivers

little fears,

hot tears.

Tight gears:

Spiked spears.

formaldehyde

a mile abreast
and pause to rest
thick neck and chest
shirt, tie and vest
until he spoke
in jest i took
his every look
from 'neath a book
fragmented pair
segmented stare
intent to share
flesh is fresh fare
because the wide
shoulders abide
a pow'rful tide
God save his bride

After a Hard Winter

Because we cannot fall much farther now
We sit inside our cold enclosure. Trees
Encamped around us wave with withered bough
And dance to memories of sun and bees;
Because the last crisp leaf has blown afar,
And synchronated sunbeams signal morn,
Because the waxing crescent sends a bar
Of white across the inky sky, forlorn,
A single songbird whistles something fresh
And night's grim darkness sheds its weariness.
Because each day remakes young nature's creche
And green begins to brighten and to bless,
At last we yawn our hungry mouths agape
And breathe new air that spring has shook awake.

A Sonnet

He lives in silence. Fiercely keeping taut
his tongue: his eyes, his shoulders tell the truth.
Some speak on his behalf, but this is not
his will. Without explicit words, the proof
of his intent lies dark within his eyes.
The dent beside his jaw speaks louder than—
intently louder than— the thousand lies
that fall from mouths of histrionic men.
He lives in silent truth, above reproof,
beyond the laws and judgment of design,
without pretense and perfectly aloof.
This man, whose soul is dark but still benign,
is noble, beautiful, and too above
the mortal plane to feel my paltry love.

On Capulin Mountain

O Capulin! My Capulin!

From your precious heights I see

Three little volcanoes,

Erupted long ago,

Worn down by the ages of wind, water, and grazing

Animals.

O Capulin, I see inside you,

A small lake, scattered cinderstones,

And in my mind’s eye, caverns of petrified horror:

Stalactites and stalagmites of insect burrows,

Eaten out from the inside a million years after erupting.

A metamorphic mess.

I see steam rising, O Capulin,

From my own arms

In the cold desert air.

Creatures a mile away can smell me.

All the mosquitoes in New Mexico are not half so far away.

I see the black red stones pushed aside

By green chutes and stems.

Yellow, orange, blue, and violet

Delicate petals (tiny craters)

Reach toward the burning sun.

I see my own flesh, grizzly pink and glistening, sticky-hot.

The cattle with nothing much to graze leave steaming floes on the lava floes:

Mock miniatures of their scenery

Dotted on the dry land.

It’s so hot and cold here that I can see the temperatures, O Capulin-

I see them hovering midair.

Night's kiss

Imperfect veil of viölet velvet 

Across the sun's face strung at night, A sea

Of stars establishes, Our fears curtains

Misdeeds we would not do under the gaze 

Of watchful days. Instead we wait. We wait.

Until the light may shield each sin (we wait),

For night to say the things our weak hearts think.

We wait until the veil falls 'way; We wait

To sing and wear our innocence (why wait?)

Like a blinding halo. Woe head, woe heart:

Both ache in daylight's lustre. Still I wait 

Because both heart and head may muster night's 

Blue gloom. And then may love begin to heat:

'Neath freckled sky and all the sin we greet.

Evil Nonsense

I remember as a child

Playing on the lawn

How once I caught a wild

Bird to be my pawn

On the painted chessboard

With seven missing pieces

Allegedly pilfered by Lord

Fortesque's young nieces.

One of them tapped the bird

With one intrepid toe

Shrank back without a word

Brought the other girl to show

The gruesome thing to

Half dead, it couldn't sing to

Them or else wise entertain 'em

Until a game of badminton

Became their jeu du jour

I'm calling this one done.

LIZA

A wilting white sun bleeds out all his heat over the tranquil black deep

While the moon grins through a cloud, cold and clear, dimpling from ear to ear,

And white crests rise on the smoke colored waters under a slate dark pier.

There Liza sings about drinking Prosecco,

And Liza's voice in the dark leaves an echo;

As her own song sings her to sleep.

Glutted to burst on the sun's dying sighs and dancing like midnight vampires

The moon and the sea spin in lustful distrust, darting drunkenly over the shore.

Their awful push-pull on a lantern (half-full) spreads a horror around like a whore.

While Liza lies with her head next to mine

And Liza's breath keeps the rhythm in time

With my own and the sea's and the fire's.

There's the soft susurrus of lovers like us rustling far off in a rush;

The moon shuts her eyes and feigns to disguise that she chokes on the smoke in a spire

The moon's crying eyes deride and disguise red watery smoke floating higher,

Then Liza bites her lip at the window

And Liza sighs and sits: limbs akimbo

As her own voice laughs in a hush.

He won't come; he won't come! In a fury she hums with her head in a hot-hungry-haze. 

I watch as she stands with her hope in her hands to see smoke spilling into the air

A rat-tat-tat boom! and the pier lights the gloom as she screams her poor sailor’s despair.

My Liza claps and clutches the window

And Liza smiles to weep as a widow

While dark smoke blackens her gaze.

We'll be free; we'll be free! Now it's just you and me til the day you betray me just once.

I smile and recline while inferno flames climb over the mounting hot pyre

One kick and my Liza, my murderous doll, falls fast toward the flames of her fire.

And sweet Liza's screams echo out, 

My Liza's last ear-splitting shout:

A remembrance of lovelier stunts.

The shimmering seawater surges straight up in a blast of sulfurous fury.

The sky’s many eyes blink in surprise as the air sets fire to her hair

And I watch then as Liza, my beautiful darling, vanishes into the air.

Smoke ushers an end to disguise

And spreads Liza's final goodbyes
Just the moon: my judge and my jury.

Guess the title of this new poem in a COMMENT.

Warm now.

At first it scalded

Satisfied a deep need.

The burn felt good—

A remembrance of life,

A promise of excitement

And energy,

Until that ambience died

OR WAS DISAPPEARED.

Greedy mouths turn it tepid,

Bitter and dissatisfying

In too short a time.

Still, trapped in its own

Memory, the lingering idea

Of comfort and wonder,

Cling on until the last drop

Turns to ash.

Cold now.

Wishing for Summer: A Fool's Game

One morning soon we will awake to stuck sheets and still air abuzz with cicadas and HVAC engines. The quiet of a summer evening will deafen us.

We'll stand by the windows before sunrise just to luxuriate in the moment of relief that dies bloody red and sweaty at dawn.

We'll have burnt calluses on our fingertips from baked steering wheels and we'll have icy white knuckles when the AC finally blows cold on our hands, direct from the vents.

We'll think back to slow days of ice and snow and sweatshirts and heaters and extra socks.

Misery is so forgiving.

We'll fight the sweat slick skin between our toes where the band aide won't stay and the flip flop thong has flayed our feet.

We'll sit in the cool cinema at noon and squint and blink when we walk back out into the broiling parking lot at three.

It's coming. There's no stopping the endless orange and yellow of weather maps crying with exclamation points about the consecutive days of heat, the fire danger, the drought.

There's no avoiding these inevitable woes, but we have some few days yet.

April is the cruellest month

Reminding us that we will sweat out, the old will die, the young will phase to strange fruit-punch-mouthed ice pop eaters.

Their blue, green, purple, orange tongues a foreshadow to each new disease the artificial dyes, sun lotions, and cold potions will conjure one distant day.

As we squint under a too-bright sun at the harry and hurry of too-bright people, collectively we recall the misery of monochrome months.

We remember gray sweatshirts, gray skies, and slushy gray streets. The cars wore gray coats of grime while out feet stayed in the same gray socks for days because it was just too cold to take them off.

Soon, we become chameleons: orange and brown and red to match the toxic air, the dead land, and the hot blood of scraped knees.

Soon, we shuffle layer upon layer of old skins and see how misshapen we have become.

Soon we will think fondly of those days when we complained and wished for the halcyon days of summer.

We were fools to dream so.

Those days will last too long with junebugs and mosquitoes and where did all the fireflies go?

We'll be so tired before each day has even contemplated folding up her blue blanket and packing it away to wait impatiently, fingers tapping at the horizons (both at once), for the new day.

But the children will play on past dusk and can't we stay up late? But going to bed only means you have to set up the coffee pot and face the rumpled sheets that make you feel dirty right after your third tepid shower.

If only you could stop sweating for five-no-three minutes! My god when did this become the sole desire of a day?

Irritation sets in.

And those people half our age with blue slurpee tongues and vodka breath complain that they don't "git" half the things we say.

So we remember and make note of how much less stupid we were back when, but we can't blame them, considering the way kids are dragged through the world these days instead of brought up in loving homes like we were.

And then I tell you the story we both know by heart about getting in trouble for laughing in the house or screaming in a game outside.

I tell you about the bonfire when I cried and my innocence was exterminated, and you tell me all things change.

I correct you, "Things fall apart."

If only we still had that energy and if the heat didn't make us hurry up the season of death with fervent wishes, and if winter didn't hurt so bad-- deep in the bone hurt... If only, think of what this world COULD be.

It is only meet and right that we blame those who pull the cup from us before our thirsts are quenched, just as our progenitors blamed us.

But that man who blames himself, his generation, for creating this mess you and I inherited: the wold where summer angers killed Jack, Bobby, and Mr. King before my eyes were opened-- One man knows what's what.

Is one enough?

The seasons count off the rampages of civilizations on their fingers.

They're older than we and will still be infants when we are extinct.

Winter snows will cover our graves and spring flowers will bloom from our putrid remains.

Summer will see our mighty works baked to dust, and autumn winds will blow the remains of this world away with the fallen leaves.

Somewhere in the detritus, a human tooth, some wrought metal. Plastic. Only this remains.

We fade but our hubris lingers on, like the mighty warning carved in stone upon the empty desert.

The seasons, the broken trash, and if we are lucky, the words, too, will last to the last spin of this globe.

All of these dreads are in my head as I lie in bed wondering if life might be simpler if I could be dead before April kisses us (wetly) goodbye.

The Grandmothers

I am from home-sewn dresses
From Thanksgiving's spiced pecans
And Sonic's chocolate malts (heavy on the malt).
I am from small, dying towns full of
Elderly people and cemeteries.
I am from old men sitting round the courthouse to gossip
And old women popping by for weak tea and everybody's health.
I am from volunteer flowerbeds.
I am from Wandalene.

I'm from the scent of Winston cigarettes over scrambled eggs and coffee.
I'm from the sound of old house shoes scuffing along dusty floorboards.
I am from Alma Lee.

I'm from mockingbirds scolding young squirrels
And calendars that note the comings and goings of deer.
I am from Georgia Raye.

I'm from longing, pain, and wistfulness
Born of decades of condescension and self-doubt.
I am from Paula Jean.
I'm from the house where daughters are silent,
Laughs are dangerous,
And smiles are suspect.

When Pain Attacks Sleep

This articulated curse holds deep, fast
under the flesh, and stinging hot with such
poison-- spurring pain to radiate past
the places your sweet empathy can touch
and on through sinister recesses hid
by cynicism and a sharp tongue. Heard
wrong, you find me taciturn and tart. Bid 
truth, I claim I brood o'er misremembered
sleights glorified by nostalgia to sin.
These seeds I daily sow will bear no fruit,
but they convolute me outside and in.
Still, I attend these nights' wanton pursuit
of rest, for the day I forfeit the cost
is when my mind or life or both are lost.

Same Pony, Same Trick

You hold a clammy hand against your chest

And mop your dry brow with a handkerchief.

You peer inside your own dull heart without

A scrying glass nor microscope nor book

Of gray anatomy. This lesson needs

One thing: a love, a war, a death, or else

A knife to cut the heart out clean to see

What makes it beat and tick and squelch and squeak.

See the little veins and valves (sticky meat)

And learn one thing: aside from blood and squish

It's an empty thing, bereft of passion

Or love. Our pretty lies are precious things

To us. Yet the tepid heart is hollow

As this poem, your passion, or your phony love.

bottle it.
take my fear and my tears and all the empty years.
bottle it all away.
all those things you never said and the places where we never went,
and all the times it should have been just you and me,
but instead-
you bottled it.
you broke it all; you broke it down; you let me fall.
the truth is that this fear is yours. these tears and all those years are yours.
so take them now and bottle them up.
i can't swallow one more drop.

random poetry

refusal

I decline (again) to attend.

Do not expect me in attendance,
For, my friend, I don't attend.
I do not wait on you, dear doctor.
I will not waste amidst those men
In penguin coats and mirrored shoes
Afire with fake modesty and booze.
I will not wait alongside their wives,
Lovers, sisters, concubines…
I will not smile at the musicians
Or thank the man with the champagne.
I have no desire to stand and listen
To the same stories yet again.
No remembrances of the old glory days
Can tempt me from my cocoon.

Donc, je vous réponds, s'il vous plaît,
As I do every other day
That you've sent an invitation,
Or you've happened to drop in,
Or some lady friend has called
To coax me with her bald
Faced lies about what fun we'd have
And how good it would be
If I would grace poor sir and she
With my presence at the barbeque
Next April, May, or June.

I'm sure I've told her every time
That outdoor cooking gives me hives.
Yes, I know it's wrong to lie,
But would it have been any better
Just to open up and tell her
That she is a horrid, scurvy whore?
I shall never walk through her door.

Put an end to these invasions
And insipid linen invitations.
Cease your sad colligraphications.
(At least spell my name correctly.)
In the name of all that's holy
Let me be.

How often have I bent
Your card into my shredder
And then phoned you just to vent
And remind you that I'll never
In a hundred million years consent
To be companion, wife or lover,
Or subject myself to your intent
That I attend.