Like tears in rain...

The following poems should I hope illustrate my main philosophy of poetics, that poetry like painting is an animal instinct in people. Therefore do I eschew arbitrary formalities and simply move my language with the ebb and flow of my own nature. If it works, it works:

I Love to Remember

I love and that's my blessing; and I desire, and that's my curse.
So goes the wheel of fortune down into misfortune and then up,
And all my life has been a constant rolling round and round
Because a tickle in my brain has ruled me with a strange benevolence
That brings me visions of a keener joy and abiding sadness all at once;
And so I gaze upon the ruins in my dreams of old rock houses in our Farmington,
And I think of the come and gone, of all my own that have come and gone,
And cry for them turned skeletal beneath the earth, and weep for their souls
And long for their company and their smiles and how they once kissed me,
And I was loved by them and now they are stone ruins in the gullies of memory.


My Own Skull Polished White

I'm scraping ancient muck from walls of my skull
The legacy of porridge pouring out in syllables
Attached to the Voyager off in black indifference
Alas, alas I send this excrement to you
But flowers thrive on dung so let us hope
The smells abate as I through some bleak portal
Exit soon enough, and let us pray for that.

People tire of me--that's a fact;
My boring into words becomes a bore into an evening,
Ultimately left to pore into my lexicons
The river of my ignorance and curiosity
The swell of it, the flood flow under nocturnes
Where the enigmatic moon is all the portrait of a sneer.
Syllables in a cadence are the music I love best
Beside herself, the secret goddess of my being.
She held my hands in dreams and gazed into me
Laughing in a meadow that was paradise
And music washed the wispy cumulus above the cedars,
Laughter of the innocent, their childlike play
Where all was endless lawn in velvet carpet verdant
Alongside where a little stream meandered.
Why this dream then? Why this disappointment?
Words come of it merely empty, hollowed, gutted,
Memories of Heaven I will never know again.


My Irish

Asleep, MacDuff?
Hirsute is Macbeth, vest and beard, the best have veered from him.
Oy, evolve Italians to the Jewish answer but the sons of Erin know no usury.
The Scots are in their quaking cots and taking tokes from Angled pipes;
Poor whipsnorts blundrin' how the Irish got away with independence.
Well, you have to have an independent mind. It can't be bought by bigots
Neither had from spigots--may as well shoot straight me Gaelic lads.
Still I'm coughin' now in state, an Irish lad ain't mist but waked,
To the great moon sticks his tongue into the cold damp air of Bantry Bay,
Canoodlin' nothing but the wispy ghost of cold Andromeda arisen eastward
So be it, redbeard bandy-legged cockadoodlin' piper of the Irish night,
All whisky soaked, and may you cry for Cahair who stood his ground
And soaked it with his sacred blood.


Having Sat Through 10,000 BC

Turbid from turgid, sail a [moe]vee cross the muddies,
woulda' clog a balsa flotilla, doan yoo spee bozin'?
Hear then comma raddery gone all off to a fine moovy
sittin' in dark aromas all poppin' jaybirds flittin'
In yon cinematic shadows, sounds fill up the nostrils
Like gas stanks on an izland in Hellay, Mazdas humming in a line;
The readits crawl upon a screen of silk care esses
Chimes swound dissonant as if to milk some supernova
of its crimson character in eyes that are bowls of sloop.
Fair dee whale we sailin' at the mobies sharin' a baggo burst ass-undies
Handfuls scarf across our glistening maws in butter breath
while bleak stars hopeless rise above us in a fever dream:
The chronic olds of Kali Forlornia: Prance Kisspian a thespian [he's gaspyin']
They flit from left to right and exit out an edit like a portal to obscurity,
Back to pressed releases, hints of scandal, sexed up foto glossies,
Warnings never to ignore the artlessness of CGI, the ill that skewers all pills.




The Lizard Cold as Blizzard

The lizard cold as blizzard moves with most indifferent nonchalance
In wildernesses made against his understanding,
Far beyond his feeble chemistry, his physics in the scouring heat of August
Where the sun's descent into the broiling sea of sand, the anguished sweat of tears,
Desires only recognition of itself, humbled by its love for this impervious reptile.
Yet he lies a bed, a hider in the hollows of the massive boulders
Like a universe of planets set in academic sand and emptied of credentials.
Beautiful beast as cold eyed as a lesbian's pudendum to the male's caress,
The hand that pets the brilliant patterns colored like a quilt of Navajo,
Detached as doctors are in clinical analysis of one's desire splashed as blood
Asunder on a boulder, there to bubble, there coagulate in reddened sunset,
All regret and tears upon this barren night of hollow howling.
Weep for him who loves to no avail, whose flesh that did desire once
Is torn apart by carrion birds and scattered with the grinning skulls.
The lizard knows no love of man nor needs that love, requiring only adulation,
Praise for the lurid colors of accomplishment,
The ghastly feel of scales that measure worth in smocks and beakers,
Liquids red as pained expressions, boiling in a hot retort of alchemies
Forever locked in basement labs where passions are eviscerated,
Boiled away in a lizard's desert of the flesh.




Down to the Sea

Down to the sea, down to the rich brine and rot,
Down to the half tire arching from the muddies
Down to the metal cart forever stuck in hard mosses,
Down to the filthy birds that scream from dead branches
Down to the garbage dumped in dank ravines
I go through stenches of the aging human presence
To observe the carp go herding in the garbling morasses,
The roily river that oils the great dank lake;
I tread the spongy ground soft layered in the grasses
Tiny as the March can make them struggling upward
Brisk through breezes brusque in mid-winter,
Walking, forever walking northward near great Redwood
Back to the place of my origin, the alkali grasses,
The chill of the day upon me, the shacks of memory
Standing yet against the merciless lake winds,
The lightning nights in bowls of blackest howling
Rising like the monster mouth from out of the lake,
A gaping and malevolent hunger, vilest of gods
Swelling out of infinite depth, the great waves surging,
Out of the lethal lake, out of the poisoning brine.

The lake today lies calm and gray as an aged woman
Waiting in a clinic as she fingers a facial tumor,
Wincing to fear but nothingness beyond all this,
Become a part of the sea again and soon,
A molecule anonymous in oceans rising over all;
And she will know that gift of immortality,
The sea being everything, eternal, abiding in the cloisters of memory.

The lake has killed my friends.
The treachery that guides it is a devil's guile of calm.
To live beside it is to ask it to bed with you,
To infiltrate your dreams with hideous promise
And to ask for death to guide your future into doom
And there to recognize it like an enemy you'd forgotten.

I feel the forever of the lake, the wind beats through my jacket;
Out across the sand and brine flies blows it ever and ever,
A woman I can never please, a treacherous companion,
Though I long for it, long for that first vision of its hatred
Unabated on the heads of us although we cowered;
So I say this is no lake at all but a demon’s face, a beast
Of salt and water, wind and force uncoiling like a snake.
I stand beside it, longing as I watch the sailboats
Go careening to the west and see them waving cheerfully.




I Invoke the Goddess

I pluck my mandolin, my eyes arise
With moonlight on the crest of bristling Wasatch
Where the high clouds roll like a promenade
Of bearded antique men all marching stooped
Forever northward on this night of stars.
And there I wish to find Her mystery,
Her beating heart above the hum and drum
Of late-night traffic, and Her breath as cool
As breezes down the canyon of her body,
And Her whisper with the rattling leaves
That say 'I love you' in the languages
Of ancient Earth primordial.

My Love,
I pine among the pines, I am a river
With the river rolling ever rolling,
Trembling with the touch of Her, my one,
And feel again her slender fingers
While I shiver and my breath blows hot;
To lie between the cleave and feel the rhythm
Of forever in its cycle wheeling to
This instant of our bliss, and hear from Her
The sigh of leaves that is our name together.

I lie in Her lap, I smell Her warmth, I am
Accepted, and with gratitude I slumber
In Her oceanic wave of breathing,
Fluttering song a moth of gleaming powders
Dissipated in the musty gloom of evening
Over waters that are mysteries
Unto a far horizon under moonlight.
There the watchful eye is on me, child
And lover in the firm embrace of one
Who is the ghost of all my lonely days.


I pluck my mandolin, my ears arise
To hear the language of the Lord above me,
Kind, paternal and most forgiving, saying
That the soul of Her I love is with me
Shaped in song, in one transcendent instant
Living in my mandolin.
Unto
The stars above, in deepest gratitude
I tip my hat and wish them life and love.




I Dreamed I Saw My Mother Earth

I dreamed I saw my mother Earth
Alongside all her sisters stroll
The road into the misty canyon
Over the creek in springtime roll,

While I across the way observed
From hillside waving with the grass,
So longing there and weeping small
To see her with her sisters pass.

Their laughter echoed far and high
A song enveloped in a whist
That fell away around a bend
Of mountain road and rolling mist.

They'd found their place of origin,
A vacant home made all of stones,
Of wooden door and tiny windows
Wherein lay their parents' bones.

A dream of things to come then opened
On the group who posed to laugh
Before the shutter of the lens
That took a psychic photograph

I held as if a million years
Made this my only memory
Of her the daughter of my dreams,
Adrift in endless indigo sea.

And all are numberless sayeth the Grand
Creator of both suns and men,
Of mothering worlds in weaving spin
For brilliant stars to bring them in,

That I recall that simple joy,
Myself her least, anonymous child,
Her eyes alive with lightest laughter,
And her face that kindly smiled.




Five Love Songs for Louise

1.
You who are collective soul,
The living, dead, and yet unborn
Who move upon the sudden rush
Of ghostly spore upon the corn,

To you I sang the moonsong round
To welcome you into this life
That we must share as unmet friends
Oh love that is umbilical knife.

I long to lie upon your breast
And milk the areola there,
As bare not barren with myself,
A burden I can barely bear.

The year my sister passed away
I wept myself to sleep each night
But one day short of that you came,
A year gone by, into my sight.

Shall I proclaim that every poem
That squeezes out my little brain
As if a Hopi's prayer had earned
A modicum of desert rain,

Is salutation unto thee,
Sweet soul I follow down the ages,
Turned to words that pour as sand
Upon these salutary pages?

2.
Under starch of sunless sky I go and know no shade of comfort.
Bleak and blank the world before me yet unsettled as a threat
Of something lurking in the glooms of shuttered rooms
Beloved in her indifference makes unbearable my burden.
How did I arrive to love this perfect being,
Adoring her as I diminish in the farthest reaches of the sunset
Blasting over seas of wasted bloodiness
The open wound a gash emitting howling winds in agony
Asunder over all the world the while she moves away?

Even more than loved her; I adored her sympathetic to the Grand Musician
Humming strings symphonic in the
orchestrations of the planets
And their chorus all abiding harmonies upon the ether
I can hear behind the pulsing heart of me as I stoop humbly at her altar.
Can I simply say I love her, though her expectation so demands such,
That her eyes forever heavenward cannot acknowledge me at all?
But I cannot give up, my love; my need to know your secret stuns me into sadness,
Dreariness my lot as through my empty dreams I wander blindly into alcoves
Wishing for an exit into paradise and yet a slave to my perfidious mind.

So many think I am controllable, the prairie fires in me unabated nonetheless,
A world of tidal waves and earthquakes through the anger in my soul
Defines the energy I cycle like a million turbines making maelstroms
In the secret seat of psyche where the violence explodes in rage
Arising in the steams volcanic out of bubbling stews of language
Sprayed upon the cryptic code of poetry I cannot quite control, myself,
My own volcanic spurts defying circumstances of my life and death,
The spillage of this sea surge into new creation rich with minerals.
Anonymous I spill into the world and mingle with the rest.

I love you, Louise, in this the twilight of my starved existence,
You in musty mysteries who dance before me in the minor keys,
The gloom room brought to eerie lights of amniotic warmth and music,
Swaying with your pelvis swiving to the rhythms of nocturnal need;
Guitars electric sounding down Aeolian the tropic of your groin,
The smile upon you and the dark hair rampant like a million tendrils,
Sliding off your denims to the floor and neither caring
In the syncopated samba of our pelvic dance, conjoined in love,
To bring your face to mine and kiss the tears away, my Love.


3.
You came to me in the glass house of my soul that sits in an evil side of town
Awaiting murder, theft, eviction into garbage-ridden streets,
A sac transparent holding an embryo.
You were tall and beautiful to gaze upon,
You moved like darkest water in the shadows of a mystery,
In a long coat and high boots I see you in from time to time,
Brown and brooding eyes and dark hair tangling in the night's milieu;
And you had come to tell the story of yourself, to sit beside me while I slept,
To speak to me in languages beyond my ken while I lay in my kitchen on a cot,
The while the world of night observed us through transparent walls.

I felt your warm left leg upon my cheek that radiated your maternal ways into my being,
Throughout the coarse mesh of your denims, through the muscle of your long left calf;
I felt it and I touched it with my face while I half heard you tell of your misgivings,
Your arrivals and departures and the state of things that shaped your present,
Speaking on and all I wished to say was love for you, my need to know you,
And to trap you in the hollow cage of empty longing, now become one with my own augmented need.
I offered food. I said I'd cook for you if you could stay another hour,
That I took you on a tour of this my home, my soul that hides no secrets.
I'm an open book who wants to love your body naked with my naked self,
To find the center of your being and penetrate it with my seed and make a child,
To kiss your eyes I love as rich and real as Mother Earth abiding in our midst,
The pungent must between your thighs I part to penetrate and know you pulsing
Wave on wave of stanzas dancing to the distant shores of long lost places in my past,
Where you were ghostly and awaited nascence in my long career of loneliness.
I said I had some food there in my basement I would go and get;
I mean it isn't much but I would gladly feed you my beloved dream friend.

Then I went downstairs into the layered snow and waded to a shelf where sat a can of chili,
And could sense my wife asleep in the far back bedroom where the snow in coldest vapors
Lay forever like an ice-age in a barren bedroom.
You had wandered off into an upstairs hall and stood before my bedroom staring.
What is that I see upon your bed you asked me.
Well I suppose a thing I pilot in my palm, a love detector searching for you past the curtains;
And you held it in your fingers and you read the glowing screen of subtle turquoise.
Your ankles crossed, you lay across my bed upon your stomach smiling at the screen;
And I thought you would have me then, that you would take me then, and understand,
But naught was meant to me as you arose above the bed and spoke my name in terse announcement.
You were leaving and must hurry out of my agenda, out into the night as dark as notions,
Smiling to your other lovers as if to tell me you were nothing but a screen of ghostly turquoise briefly glowing.
But I have little appetite for chili, so I watched you march away into the southern sky
To Scorpius and red Antares hanging like a blood spot over lands unknown to me,
And knew I loved you but would never really know you,
That I was less than ever in your expectation.
As dreams depart the dawn is vacant and accusing like a one-eyed beggar laughing roughly
Just to say I'm all you have you dreamer, all you'll ever know you filthy penis of a man
Who has no right to hope, whose dreams are cardboard escapades with disappointing endings.
I awoke to find myself in tears.

Never address this fact, Beloved by me,
Who blithely wanders off in greener lands
Who thinks we are mere friends, a shake of hands,
Your gloried sunrise in the pool of your reflection
Seeing only self while I await a nod of your approval.
Does your own self love require no addendum?
Reminding me that I, a hollowed carcass in the heat
Devoured by a billion mites that are my increments of memory
Await removal from the earth's ongoing change of scenery
Into final disappointment never knowing love of you?

4.
The grippe of love sickness like a tightness
Where the veins swell swimming in the skull,
The hemorrhage that killed my sister when despair
And awful sadness held her in a skeletal vice,
Is there for me like a rattlesnake in wait.

And I'm not eating while imbalance permeates
And pours in perspirations sickly, glistening,
The fear like silver mucous unto love and envy,
And the ghastliness of wasted years
Drawn taut as a leathery skin across the bone.
So much to do, it seems so little reason to do it.
The hollow pit in my belly won't abate
Whatever amount of mindless poesy piles
In homage to the great Divine; these agonies
Are dedicated by this merest slave
A wretch of a man damned by circumstance.

To be a poet is no dry abstraction of the academic
But the tactile rubbing of the flesh upon the dirty world,
Which is why there ain't much going in this unloving age.
But I adore that human savor that is no stench to me,
The chemistry of lovers sweating together
Under cover of abiding night and chemical ethers,
Male and female consonant with stars and planets
In the marriage and the consummation of matter and light.
I dislike religion otherwise, dourest damnations
Shaming me into some abject and sinning particle,
And all because I love and I desire.

It aches to love, an agony to be in love,
And with the stony monument I most desire.

I'll die a-scatter as she goes on in her milky ways
And toward glory, and yet I love her perfect form,
and always did and will, that mother of my dreams.
I knew her from another time and place I can't account for.
I am nothing to her, a microbe, a little asteroid's
Dwarfish roundness occupying swirling space,
Yet every syllable that pours out of my mouth is love for her.
Yes, and all her incarnations beautify the view.

Suppose it bothers her to know she's loved this way?
I won't apologize as this must come of it:
Creation and the language and the music
Of the planetary dancers always and forever in the majesty
Of everlasting stars, the choral celebration
Of angels singing out across the sky in glories of the morning.


5.
Had I your beauty
With your naked self I'd lay
Within your animal warmth of Earth
And kiss your sea of tears away.

To lose you agonizes
In my anonymity of being,
The hollowed skull that nameless
Lies agape as if to sing.

Although my fingers tremble,
Yet my pencil dares to speak
The facets of my syllables
So crystal they could break.

Louise, immortal being:
Your eyes intelligent and wise
Are oceans drowning all my breath
That you alone may hear my cries.

Forever in your ocean
I will drift alive in death
Waved along by long night's breathing,
Warmed along by whispered breath.