Ode to Upchurch

"I like my poems. They’re
as good as rocks." - Alice Notley, Mysteries of Small Houses

Bud had all boys
across from Whitehead's
furniture store where Pegasus
delivered lightning
when we stopped 
to fuel the Impala.
I didn't know then what I know now,
and we trusted all those boys of his
not to jerk us around.
We shoulda asked Juanita.
Dad clutched and signed
a slip and moved on,
drunk or not, you all moved on
lunging left and right
pulling out and pulling in
to the Hitching Post
next door with a real one
right out front.
Patio orange for the kids,
blood and bar towels for the rest.
All those ponies and Medusa
riding shotgun, near the wheel.

 Here in the prime magnetic moment

so few and so deliberate, I won't say

I told you so but I told you so.

Yes, the secrets were secrets not

kept that way with purpose

but by definition of the secret itself,

out of our hands, completely out of our hands.

There is no forgiveness from the one

who has not the power to forgive.

There is no reward from the one

who has no power to render promises.

The magnetic moment shall pass again

and again until it freezes up and folds

into the homochirality of the records.

Time and the axis of time spins

on the axis of non time.

Everything

 Given enough time there'd be one each of everything

to fashion into a line.

Detail from the Patron Saint Llorona Holding the 12,000 Year Clock-figure 2b

Naco was so beautiful at dusk last night....a little diamond choker beneath one enormous chinchilla collar made of cold steam. Worthy of a Saks Fifth Avenue insert yet all I keep thinking of are the particles the mammoth left behind, the hide and tusk cells still in the air. This mammoth has been after me since I was a child. Out near the old tailings pond, opposite the El Rancho murals and coin op horses...was she there on that broad Savannah, did she run up the old canyon chasing her child before falling under a hail of Clovis projectiles? Certain of finishing my mother's last thoughts as I sat on the front seat in the old Chevy in '72 and she pointed and said, "out there!" What if all those Border Patrol agents just started digging? We'd have a trench instead of a wall and rains like this would form a moat. How big is this castle after all? This. This is how Allah tells time. This is the over-and- over buried in the once-again.

An Easy Riff

Along with JFK which, although I was only just past my first birthday, I do remember...there's the Bob Cranes, the Don Bolles and now, the Rob Reiner's I remember.

Not because of their fame or importance
to me but because of the violence.
The carnage of Sabra and Shatilla,
the blue faced bodies of Halabja,
Elie Hobeika before he reached
the Hague, the car that lodged
above the mezzenine
of the St. George Hotel, warnings
one and all, blatant and yet
some still blame the religions
when in truth, it is their absence.

Fiction Section

"Just now the reader of the letter

Tells of the writer's swift descent

fron wealth to want."

- Edgar Lee Masters, Arabel

When the only benefit inverts,

the thrift store is lending

jewelry and pots and pans and books,

the still dead lie freezing in December

a stone's throw away in plots

called Memory Gardens

amok wid weeds and dreadfully faded

artificial flowers, broken dollarstore vases,

the pattern of shoes and always,

one man standing too far away

to see who he is, the books

were merely old gossip

and seldom worth the paper,

on the so-what number of pages.

Generation 

Of all the greens in the world

under gas soaked walls

I can still gather the smell

of ramshackle, holed up in there

nose close to the previous generation

buried down by the dairy,

our mother

sat us in the corner for spitting.

Of all the greens 

gunboat to glade, an ormolu

one only sees in swamps,

as if a whole village built itself

of nothing but grass and chaw,

tucked as it were into the gullet,

   "Although found in good authors, ... is retained, 

             in this country as in England, only by the illiterate." 

saved for later, for the infinite 

scrape of dawn bird and siren,

and nothing more than grease.

Of all the greens to spachtel a room

they chose that one, the color of hospitals.

We had no pantry or closet nor guests

and painted our shoes, yes

saved our lids and jars,

spent our pennies,

worshipped our Gods, and you?

Delusion 

Talking to my children this morning, the children that have seen three invasions, three escapes, three traumas.....well none of that can compare to this in Gaza. No but when it comes to tasting that bitter boneless cake we know exactly about the texture and flavor. Even Israel knows it well and have it as a creed: Never Again. The one thing I hear often on the few newscasts that I pay attention to, so accustomed I've become to this ongoing problem that appears to descend from the battles of brutal Assyrian kings...I notice when they ask, "who is going to rule Gaza after this is over?" I don't bother answering because afterall, it's a script and a TV screen. I have spent way too much time shouting at those actors who go home to their lakeside properties in windy cities with mass transit, arriving home to martinis and fettucine. Who are they to ask questions when it is the case that they work in front of butcher shops for the butcher selling knives? Why are they even asking? Do they expect a response or are they scheduled to give one? It is no secret, I have the answer. Are they trying to pry it out of me? They know I know the answer, they stare at me all day feigning ignorance. Memory. Memory is going to rule Gaza. It always has.

The oddest thing happened yesterday. I was receiving a new dresser so had to get ready...reorganize all those drawers that had become repositories of history, evidence of past poetry readings, my three Nikons (I'm having no memory of ever obtaining the second two, wth?)....and I came upon this. Only a vague memory of picking it up somewhere in town. Apparently from 2011.

In Memoriam

Yea, I miss those days alright

born bright and white and right

in the right place and with red hair.

I miss those days alright

nothing fit but it was new and blue

shoes run faster than white.

Down past the graveyard

you can see your zombies now

not so dead looking anymore is they.

All that mess is so far away

you'd say as you hee'd and haw'd'

drinking your poison until you chucked.

Days they come to an end and nights

not so short with the walking dead

pestering and pawing at your neck.

Born white and bright and right

did you see that guy fall yet

did you see how everyone ran?

It was like they'd seen a ghost!

He was already on an aeroplane

headed over to the Great Salt Lake

which isn't so great, but it is long.

Bet those graverobbers down in Provo

shuffled tickets like their life

depended on it, hob knockers all of them.

Bet that he got to Phoenix 

at half past three and layed low,

shaved and ordered in, rested up.

They all head to the Bob Crane

memorial expressway that hits

the 10 off of Glendale, without exception.

Don Bolles knew. I knew. You knew.

And here we are watching

Huntley-Brinkley count the dead.

 Jesse May Crawford

 

Shahid

I am home now with the architecture

of the sky in summer. Far away I assure

you all that the rubble is real, the devastation

is widespread and the people are tired.

I will also assure you that in Lebanon where

the end of the world never stops ending

life goes on. It goes on a bit differently

each time, a bit harder, for longer or less time,

the bread is still baked, the zatar collected

and enough olives pressed to bathe every-

thing in oil meal to meal. The villages lost

numerous young men who gave their lives

to deter a genocide and one day,

when the world stops ending, they will

be celebrated as victors, heroes and men.

We still fear to say some things of course

but the manifestation of beliefs, the real

manifestations that can only be seen

from the top side of the clouds in a monsoon

are pouring from the gutters and flooding the streets.

Ode to the Chosen

Is it the case one wants

consent or forgiveness?

When it is too late it's too late

yet it never was too early

until now and now

that it is clear

it was always consent

you begged for,

I will remind you of your begging

but not out of cruelty, no

not at all. The word is

disgust.

A Few Words About Tinnitus

I'd say it was about eleven thirty
or so and this car alarm starts going
off in the still of night. my door
still open to catch the last of summer
through there but then
it needed to be shut because
of the danger out there, it is just
everywhere you know. Outside, the street
lamp flickered a bit and the moths
kept mothing about in the halo
as if it didn't matter to them,
one way or another, just little bugs.
Over in the distance, the dark hills
were gently lit by the few lasting
glimmers and glows of the night
owls who creep into bed as slowly
as the neighbors who came outside
to turn off the siren, another false
alarm and they spoke a bit, went
inside to hit the switches there
lock the doors, some cursing maybe
or perhaps a round of gin rummy.
That one man was thinking of mummies,
I know it, I just know it.
I remember when that sort of thing
happened to me and I felt like
the ground might shake if I asked it to.
I honestly asked the ground to shake
and then the car started to make that noise again.
I wish there weren't such things as mummies.
The moths laughed plenty when I told them,
they sounded like pins, magnets and bells.

ODE TO KIKI

Where are you now not dead
but all these years ahead, four
minutes down they said, just
not really quite dead. Raised
little Kiki up and then nailed
to a folding chair instead,
outside the tavern's walls and hauled
off to bed yet, not really dead.
Arruh umm you said, uh mmm
and the curious smile on
your lop-sided head. Left
arm lifted with this wave
you led street corps of marching
past walls as below us running,
the weary stream fed.
Your right arm was as heavy as lead
as past by you we sped, regretful
thoughts in all of our heads when
the doctor said you'd have been
better off dead. They sat you out there
on a throne with a crown
of invisible thorns, never to wed.

"But we managed to lift him,
up from the dead!"

We love you still Kiki –
your half-dead body and lop-sided head.
The way you knew what went on
inside of our heads as we waved back
and past you we sped. The way
you just held up the tavern's red
wall and you there, the sight of it all.
Next to that the doctor felt small,
his mistake meant so very much to us all.
Not sure what he knew but we all understood,
Kiki was better off not really dead.
So were we because he saw us then tilted his head.
They say now he is a shadow of his former self
but none of us really know which one.

 

 Sailing to Modernity

One day poems will praise

the likes of Baltimore

but probably not.

Half of it is resentment

filled in with envy and regret

holistically speaking.

Saying anything here,

fiddling with my crown,

tired as hell of getting here.

Still, living quietly on the outskirts

of the empire saying

it's too late now, 

the Red Sea yawned and went to bed.

These days you can go anywhere

you want to

but back then, oh!  Back then.

Now all they say is:

People with respiratory issues should stay indoors.

Well, I'll say! Should have already been there,

'specially in the holy city of Baltimore.

 Thermohaline

We tell all the secrets here

full of hindsights, nevertheless

listen to the eyeless creatures

at the bottom of the sea

making their own light...

I repeat: making their own light.

Might I mention the separation

of the seas to the salt? 

Can't you see?

Don't you hear?

they don't even need it

From the sura known as "The Light": 

[24.40] Or like utter darkness in the deep sea: there covers it a wave above which is another wave, above which is a cloud, (layers of) utter darkness one above another; when he holds out his hand, he is almost unable to see it; and to whomsoever Allah does not give light, he has no light.

Okay,

Now that you are gone, it is time, yes?

Take the reigns, I have never been sure

if these were excuses or compromises

the plain lack of time

between knives and timers

and feeding the birds.

My last friends

don't even speak English.

Years are now sentences

without commas and every day

an asterisk-like sun

in a cosmos full of them.