PARALLEL

I must be interconnected
with oxygenated organs
of generations extending

through nature’s grammar
nature’s gramophone
I’m on that mountain

I call it my escape
& while I stood out in a near
translucent halo-like light

this muggy afternoon
I thought of the year 1985
when the brown wasp

flew dizzyingly by the rose
like a choreographed
interlude as if drunk on

the flower’s enticing aroma
as if blushing the same color
in a Mediterranean air

moments like this make me
freeze in awe yet prepared
to hit the bricks just in case

but MAD I tell you! MAD
with some kind of ecstasy!
what Chesterton would call

the natural elements of nature
as Supernatural Before
that wasp stung the air

with imposing presence
flying past that rose
I had watched the local news

on television report
a brutal crime in Cobb County
With all of those details

fresh in-mind watermelon-fresh
I stood in a still-warm shade
frozen like the wooly mammoth

that Russian scientists
recently found recovering blood
that ran out of the frozen carcass

& I felt an immensity
of sustainable beauty
that no effervescent element

could slant the shifting atoms
of this moment that
impregnates plump-full

my mind my paralleled
reflection of century after century
uplifted energized harmonized

& indeed I thought of 1985
The year that Pete Rose passed
Ty Cobb for most hits all-time

POEM

Blogsites                      are modern moons
                                    I produce latitude
with the proper “ago” of Imagination
                                                   Cold
that made all such skin                not retain division
 were to be                          pale & dim as iron         ironing
board       burning                   is this how you want me
to carry onward?                 Flaming in a
miry multiplex of icy scythe’d plash           splash
 in the throat                    verbose verbiage invalued
She then said                 “Why weren’t we born rich
instead of beautiful?”          “How about both?” I said
in a tune of tone-deafness

Blogsites are modern planets               where can one
purchase a poisonous dart frog in Georgia?  
                   To the moon & beyond
                                        bullet in the eye              Daylight
dismantled              Night’s nappies tear me to shreds
Give me my youth back                   palatable with ribbons
coming out of my wrists                strip away the somber
                                 tinted window over the soul
                                                        strip away the stinking virus
with whatever petty scrutiny you’ll face                    watch
as Aphrodite’s golden girdle comes undone
            This sketchy locale                   this messy planet
those V for Vendetta masks that I see
                            ravenous kindergartners wearing
why am I not on a wooden
fishing boat       unbalanced       feeling wholly liberated?

The sustenance of life
               has been replaced by digital maps & interactive screens
                               of sniffing stray dogs in the meadow
that I can see off in the distance                 where odors are rising
amongst the green boulevards                   where medical benefits
should be where we eat the flowers of the earth
edible violets       calendula       borage     where perplexing demands
disaffection & disunity becomes an amazon of lavender buds
the floral notes of jasmine     lilac   &     rose                
                                 Here I am
in a soft shade
                            toying with the margins of leaves
in a wall of fragrant floral                         biting into fresh fruit
as a small rivulet of glistening juice
                       runs down my chin
not quite dripping off

POEM

Cat pauses when the hand,       —a complexion
entwined with savored attention,       —reaches
to twist the door-knob of the closed door,
longing towards only & of every ratio,
sickly yellowed resolutions, returning
to the original satisfaction of offering my voice
to the wall, presuming that walls record voices,
voices of animals, ancient soundscapes
(silent bootlegs, but listen closely, soft as cotton)—
hands swipe thereupon across the chilled wall—
the horizon is the wall facing me—
behind me, I ask whether the clock wakes
with the sun’s peacock’d possessedness
that is amassed, finely opened.  

Æthiop’s pathos. Pleural Space.  Hook it to my veins.

Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante
participates in this thought, thieves what remains,
infinite obscurities rush to bombard me
where the crane’s domain tears the air.
Starry-eyed in the core, fomented vitium durations,
a kind of richness that my ears conceive, milder by manner.

What you must never do is remove
the optimistic Garden from the blackness
of hopelessness; the seeds will dissolve into your youth’s mouth,
your prime-era fountains       —O, allow your All
to receive the Lips of Northward Love!—
it takes one kiss to confirm manifested Mercury-rising,
which, by degree, may indulge the moist habitations
of fertile transmission of bone-dry, yet blessed sands.

The cat, native of carpet or shining hardwood,
is our example of loyalty, or like this poem
that could brace the graceful frame of a swan’s neck.

ADULT-LIFE NEEDS TRAINING-WHEELS

Adult-life needs training-wheels, full hip-replacement,
squatting on a dream, of wit, of wetness, of a Mugs Reality,
Mug Life, rank-&-file.  I look out of the car window as I drive
down the highway & I am flipped-off repetitively.  Only fools
use “fool” as an insult, repetitively, or do I “read” their lips
transiently?  I downgrade people’s anger, as if windbaggery
to some is the meaning of life, tackles the whole person—
the heart, head & hands of daily living.  The woman at the diner
tells L. & I that her girlfriend wasn’t wearing a seatbelt on April
fourteenth when she wrecked, & now she is in extensive care.
She showed us pictures of her lover’s battered body; she
repetitively told us how her life is screwed up.  I wanted to
tell her that most people’s lives are screwed up.  Truth often
warrants bad, unbearable esteem, steaming from out-of-nowhere.
Being book-smart doesn’t mean one is street-smart, or
even practical, but the mean, slimy, coal-black streets are where
one’s mistakes happen & where one’s mistakes happen often
& where mistakes get accepted amongst everyone else’s woes.
This woman, this same woman, with tattoos of hearts above
both thumbs, also made it a point to speak of her vagina.
She had shaved her pubic hair “down low” one night,
& obtained a staff infection, spent seven months in the hospital,
& now her lawyer warns that she will probably be sued by
Insurance companies.  She told us how her life is so screwed up
with a laugh that Sean Connery would’ve had if he had of been
a woman. I wonder what Bukowksi would be doing right now
if he were alive, were not a writer & hated post offices.

POEM

You—with your olive tones, sweet with citrus ascending—
completed me, fructifying, heavily, heavenly bits,
such brass, engulfed me in oceans
of mammoth macrocephalis mind-pull
in layered winds that now blow, with gail-force,
through the Colosseum of the future
where I may someday see your efflorescence,
burning, blurring,
between Nowness & Pastime:
It is then, what satisfaction may warrant glances,
enforced by the roots of our history—
terrestrial hue, superficial twilight?
Mock me, spawn what you said was your “dark side”—

Stone me! I’ll bleed & bleed with sublime southern herb,
first sulphuric floods, without flame—
as if color was a curse—I shall be the black-bird
that grows white, as your darkly darts of monstrosity
seeks distinct extinction,
blatant voice of fiery sorrow
unlighting the candle, frozen wax,
there is no elixir, no cure-all,
for I still love you, could still love you more,
even as a resurrection would soothe for a time,
or would a cloud of smothering soot keep shadows
lying upon where the flower yearns to grow,
but cannot?

CHERRIES

Cherries at five o’clock     The cherry
                          blossoms on the surface are a bit
    onerous   a vignette around speech

clouds hang from the sky like cotton
    on invisible strings

I am what I eat? soil to the lips
            coffee bean to the skull   hyper
    people doped on Red Bull

throwing Spaniards to the wind
             donning red wool   I charged

through this day as if muscles
        are weakened   bull-horn stabbed
    the picador   famous for getting

            beaten up on camera   a red cape
    is used only to conceal the blood

THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO GEORGIA

The devil came down here to Georgia, alright,
when he tempted the Pine tree
to throw its cones at me,

& it worked, except that I caught two of them
with my bare hands,
& the devil hated it, & he ran

off into swine,
& I said, while yawning & stretching: 
“I am in control of this four-way joystick of temptation—

get behind me, Satan!”—that flaming form
of voyeurism—the idea of being too scholarly
to the point of being unaware of the outside world

from a bird’s eye view,
may ring with gongs of truth.
The devil came down here to Georgia, alright,

& he got a dose of his own medicine—
I have re-named him, Untitled.
I’m as free as a bird, as free as a bird.