Tuesday, May 27, 2014

The May King

Sitting in the pleasant May-shade of back
yard pulling at my tobacco pipe
watching my wife explain the plants to the
                      kids.


The early afternoon sunshine sparkles and
glows off of everything.  I’m sitting here thinking
about deals made in far away distances
when all I did was nod with the pen and
a few chords.  Set some wheels in motion
on the streets of vast desert town
Albuquerque (not the first time I did
this) and children sneeze and wine
at my back, now out on the back porch
as distant sirens wail and echo
through the soft sun streets of May.


The dumbest of politicians have stolen the
required seats over this vast Nebraska
throttle.  The drama of the neighborhood
is quieted down, at least this evening.
I just had time enough for small shut eye
on the living room couch.  Now
awakening to dixie-cup coffee, pen and
paper, a strange pale wind and thousands
of chalky wiry chirps of various birds
in the waving tree tops.


- - - - - - - - - -

(May 8th, 2014)












Monday, May 26, 2014

Testing Ground


Saturday morning thoughts on how
every passing second of this life might
be the fertile testing ground for some
thing else.

I can stand out at the front porch
of my ramshackle midtown home
with its multitudes of creaks and
splinters, look down at the
canyon park / tiny park across
Cuming street, see the cops pulled up
to a halfway house on the other
side of the park, enough distance
to make the cop car seem like one
of my infant son’s toy cars, and
I wonder at our testing ground, the
bureaucratic muck of bust and
jail and prison, the sheer over-all
waste of time of it.   

Time pushes all forward
with every paycheck gobbled up
fruitless and theoretically spent before
its even made, facts and
figures of the human tribulation over
the dynamics of a dimly conceived
universe, probes pushing forward past
planets and outer edges of untraveled
nothing-dark.  Before I know it I’ll be
coughing my last on some death bed
as the rest of humanity guesses
at the universal spin wheel.  

Why should I follow the rest over an
infinite guessed-at lip of a God-
dream whilst I still breath and fuck
and stammer and write and sing and
toil and work?  I still smell the cult
stench of Jonestown, yet still can
identify with the Boxer’s Rebellion,
mayhaps look at Waco TX
warily but not without some kind
of understanding and yet
I keep the daylight filtered through my
own two eyes, taste with my own tongue
and feel with my own skin - no need to
exit at the behest of some god
damn lunatic, all those empty  
vessels filled with shadows.

A mirror tells the truth but still I see
it with my own two eyes.  If God is
in there someplace his face is veiled
and voice is silenced.  To see or hear
it is strictly my own choice.  I’ll not
hear any other voice and consider it
           divine lest it be my own.  

- - - - - - - -

(May 24th, 2014)

Monday, May 19, 2014

Quick Fix

The economy is a hand crushing our
skulls.  The internet is down this
morning because despite payments
made to the cable company, they
can barely keep the digital
lines going.  Meanwhile, can’t imagine
having some kind of maintenance
job cleaning out standard computer
problems, member of some geek
squad buzzing around business’s
and neighborhoods breathing in
other people’s dust, old dust, mythic
behind-the-furniture- dust.  You run
a finger on the surface and leave
your mark for the overtly controlling
bug-eyed soccer mom to see.  Fill up the
van full of ‘o’ mouthed kiddies
and keep the little bastards quite
with back seat TV’s.  Just recently
saw one of those on 84th street
west Omaha gunning up the busy
four land street past business’s with old
store front fonts and next to those,
insistent widespread pandemic
of fluorescent lit Bucky’s gas station
spreading its ink black parking lot
and too-many gas pumps like an
octopus inking prey or predator.
And who knows when this eye sore of
a gas station will be so short
of funds as not to stay open, no longer
able to employ its stare-at-the -ground
employees or fill up anxious coffee cups
of blue and white collar alike, hordes
and lines of insect people on a quick
fix before work-a-day.

- - - - - - - -

(November 3rd, 2013)

Friday, May 16, 2014

That Old Musty Chair


This evening’s wind comes from God
knows where.  It’s a hot sun filled wind
carrying the dust and pollen of nearby
abysmal empties into the cracks of
the city, to roost, to stammer
and break the old wild river city
                 wide open.

It’s the same green I used to see
choking up certain forgotten highways
up down twist about motion as my
whisky hand always gripped the steering
wheel with biting oiled alkie-hate
and senses keen for the law.  The
gray cracked ground of dried up
river beds under tiny half
remembered viaducts where my soul
used to preside.  

This evening I drink hot coffee out of
a wax dixie cup made for coffee complete
with topper so as not to spill and stain.
I sit in an old maroon faded chair
from the 30’s I bought from a thrift
shop with my estranged girlfriend but
soon to be wife in the chill fall of
2011.  I remember the way she buried
her face in my neck when she said
‘good bye’ after that thrift store trip and I
took that chair up stairs to my lonely room
and sat on it to write 16 songs over the
course of two months being apart.  I won
her back with my songs and the help
of that old musty chair.  I’ll probably
still be sitting in it when the world ends.

- - - - - - - - -

(May __ 2014)  

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Children of the Rust Wire Jaw

Sunday morning rain fall, down in misty
torrents, wind ripping shapes of itself
across hundreds of jutting ramshackle roofs
like an uneven jaw.  Rust wire jaw.  Who
knows what really holds it all together.

Ferrets tumbled around their makeshift cage
this morning, also rumbled playfully last
night around 1:15 AM.  Playful noisy movement
while across our vast living room
cluttered down in cozy couches and
a couple of easy chairs, was the sleeping
form of my son breathing evenly in deep
sleep, the ferret noise not bothering him
one bit as he lay back languidly in his
play pen like a king.  Who says kings never
sleep - just before St. Crispin's day
mayhaps.  Enemy troops botched up in
the mud of my baby son’s deepest dreams,
clouds of arrows zipwhip the
                sky.

My sons Lowen and Jesse in the family
room light of day now close to noon.
My oldest boy Max reluctantly washing
dishes in the kitchen.  My wife and step
daughter Zoey, off to the store as some
kids program yammers endlessly over
the moon eyed hypno-gaze of my boys.

The wind waits to blow, now a break in a
series of storms supposedly coming our
way.  And a small break at that, no real
sunshine but the day is still young, will
be before twilight springboards all into
                        dark
                        soft human
                        shoulders of
                        sleep.

- - - - - - - - - - -

(May 11th, 2014)

Monday, May 5, 2014

Beyond Those Horizons

Such lights as these rust colored street
lights on 34th street swaths of it cast
groundward in wide cones barely catch
the spectral glint deep within the cracked
open sidewalks and walk/slant, pitch
me forward, feet.
    Most likely, the flavor be sweet
beyond all horizons, across the lines
of their edges, but at once imagined
from our home, ramshackle window tremble
shake is the mainstay, for now.  Change
waits to spring out there in solemn dark
empty garages out from behind front
picture window TV flashes as hosts of
skulls are glued to fishbowl or lava
screen television.
    Thank God I’m the architect of
our own route of escape.  Thank God
I walk whole and unbowed.  Consider
the chicken coop on 33rd and California
clucking, giving eggs, pecking at the
ground all within the heart of this
river city, train town bustle big Omaha
where a foot was planted down on
the flat prairie and dissolved as the
old building plaques blackened
and their prophetic words faded
                   away
                   forever.


- - - - - - - - - - - -


(November 6th, 2013)
     

Saturday, May 3, 2014

Seasonal Implements

All shovels, hoes, rakes, groundling spike
wheels of gardening implements stored
away in the shed attached to the garage
facing 34th street.
    The amp tubes are warm and glowing,
fingertips also fully zinged from sing song
guitar on into 5 PM evening shade.  The wind
trembles at the bush on the northeast
corner of the porch and light off behind
multitudes of Gibraltarian stately old-aged
trees is a dim sky glowing evenly from pink
down to turquoise at its edge.  Time for
home cooked meals and more music,
coffee’s on, the muse-lust has returned
                         full throttle.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

(November 17th, 2013)

Friday, May 2, 2014

The Past

It was the morning the wind howled and
stammered at the windows, shook the panes
in their frames and clashed our giant
wind chimes in the back yard with an
unsettled fury.

The past can be like the wind, invisible
to the naked eye yet if I let myself, am
tossed around like the angry discordant
wind chimes.  The world breaths in the
past with such effort and lets it out
                    pell
                    mell.

I used to sit in the eye of the storm of it
slitted suspicious eyes gloating over
past wrongs but now

I move forward and in the effort of it
feel that wind toss around the garbage
at my back as the clearest sun the world
has ever seen shines brightly with
the heat of a million dreams clamoring
inside my skull waiting to get out.

- - - - - - - - -