Blur Dome

Up in early morning sticky-mouth

day.  The heater kicks in and steals

all moisture from my mouth, up

in the deep freeze feeling as though

I’m completely gone in a desert

tin-shack.

But no dessert this particular morning,

outside is killing cold and snow heaping

up on the surface of long midwest

voids and rolling hill ‘flat land’ -

limitless chalky cold sky blending in

with the horizon - no distinction

between sky and land, only cold.

Slicked up secret Omaha streets, more

dead ends than any other

city I’ve known, except for Munich

with its myriad mazes of narrow streets.

Nobody rules these streets or night or

stray plastic grocery bag trapped in

iced over gnarl of tree branches

stripped of all leaves and signalling

winter to come.  

Gifts and merriment, home

at full tables, plentiful harvest,

land of plenty, blank dreams

in the warm hush of heater mornings.

Planted like afterburner thought in the

frozen husks nodding broken twigged

trembling phantom stillness, the retreated

blur-dome and I never know what I

have dreamed until

the outside elbows me towards it,

Nebraska - stillness that breathes like an old

                    woman.

- - - - - - - - -

(December, 2013)

Near Dark

Bones are buried under thoughtful crosses

perched on high steeples marking up the wilderness,

abysmal wild wind, church tower giving shelter

to the wrens and the sparrows circulating

undulating groups in crowded peppery feathery

masses against the chalk white sky,

clustered in groups on high thick

electrical cable waiting to move in

group think for food to be picking at in

near-dark shortest days of the

                         year.

- - - - - - - - -

(December 21rst 2013)  

Songs of Sin and Hellfire

https://soundcloud.com/urlp/sets/songs-of-sin-and-hellfire

These are some songs I've written and recorded over the last ten years that somehow (sometimes on purpose but mostly by default) fall into the sinful songs category, not in the old Black Sabbath - Satan Worship thing the US government tried to use in the 80's to censor music, but rather an exploration into personal potentials for evil thoughts and acts. This is how I deal with my own sense of evil: I write a song.

Tacos

Savory homey scent of taco meat (from

scratch) sizzling spitting on the stove.

I’ve seen this part of the city groan and

exhale its steam now for several years.

It has occasionally been occupied

by crazies and open dumpster

porches, trading of hands,

shifting of tiny insignificant powers

calicoed adjoining blocks and snarl

hum boom chuck of Cuming street

traffic, warm dreams of airports,

take on that vast cloud mangled

sky and fly on out of here.

Honeyed looks my way.  Kitchen erotocism

stretched out into the dark living room (window

shake with the passing of empty clunk truck

beds) but never mind the traffic, lost in each

other’s willful sex-blossom hot breath

fully luxuriously winded and love.

Perfect skin, she, and warm mouth

passions breathing into my ear

and I’m going in there rock solid, no room left

except blissful clasp squeeze.

All this in a lost but tempered down

weekend of sheer rare kick back,

the aloevera plants fixed

and potted, still life sentiments against

the studio windows, box of matches

in my pant pocket, tiny percussive

toothpick ramshackle snarl bums,

save what’s left of all worldly sense

                    and MOVE.

Up stairs kids blankets wait to warm

the shoulders of our children and

                     warmth.

Shadows pass over the whole world.

The tacos are almost done and my

stomach is empty, growls like traffic

out front until satiated and full.

- - - - - - - -

(April 6th, 2014)

Ghetto Steak

Steaks are thawing out on the warmth of

the stove, set on a plate between burners,

mini-cube steaks

sealed in vacuumed plastic

wrap.  Just pan fry ‘em with the usual

seasoning (salt, pepper, garlic powder)

and call it the land of plenty ghetto

steak, kind of steak I used to make

in that tiny studio apartment in Denver’s

Capitol Hill when I had nothing but

dreams and bottles.

So now all is late night December, my

stomach full of steak with bleak dark

swallowing up street lights as

Omaha’s overall phosphorescent

glow goes back to ground from cloud

bellies threatening snow and frozen

                    rain.

- - - - - - - - -

(December 21rst, 2013)

Salad Maker Me

A bitter slack-n-gut at the thought

of words for my poems drying up

to salad crouton dry, tough, tooth

breaking crunch shaking up eyes in

skull and what all did it do but

blend the whole of it in better.

I expected

more from my word groupings

                 than that.  

- - - - - -

(December 22nd, 2014)

The Walls of Jericho Were Poorly Built Anyway

This is the time of the trumpet.  Trumpet

of heavy loads, trumpet of back seat

tension trash and crummies.  Trumpet

of gold.  Trumpet of glory, beyond

dust, coal dust on the winter’s dash

board and off into thousands

of false warm-jellied tail lights.

Trumpet of early mornings long past

honky tonks and cocaine-years-ago.

Trumpet of agony, of fire, of million

devils in the sun, fat snake-man through

               the eye of a needle.

- - - - - - - - - -

(December, 2013)

Acoustic Ramblings - #2

https://soundcloud.com/urlp/sets/acoustic-ramblings-2

Dog Star - The Doneofits

https://soundcloud.com/thedoneofits/dog-star

Keep on whistling in the dark
It will make it right
You're going to make it right

Dream of highways lights and gleam
Angelic gleam
Early morning dream

Chase the dog star
To the end of the night
You've reached the early morning sun

Chase that dog star
To the end of the town
Chase it 'till we've begun

Race the ragged sailing stars
Into a shades
Of a distant place

Place the maps before your eyes
Navigate your vice
Another shadow ride

Chase the dog star till the end of the night
You've reached the early morning sun
Chase that dog star till the end of the town
Watch it burn and watch them run

Your gonna make it right
Your gonna make it right

Passing

He died as the toads ceaselessly

croaked from the culvert

                outside

died

sometime whilst old movies

flashed silently on a void

                tv screen,

died with one leg left - the other

blown off at Ima Jima

when he was 19 years old,

died to join his wife in the

giant fantastical where ever,

family in knots and priest

chanting the last rites as

candles wave fluid glow

                  sparkle,

no confessions left, everything

spent as toads ceaselessly

croak blurt call before the

winter wraps them up

              in death.

- - - - - - - - -

(August 20th, 2013)

Summer Will Come

Out there beyond the walls of this Saturday

morning ramshackle a river flows.

Gravity keeps to the river’s quiet

flow-shimmer.  This summer I’ll take

my wife to Surfside next to the Missouri

river and throw chicken bones to the

fish, giant river fish mealy mouthed

slime skulled at the river’s edge mouthing

at chicken remains.

Feverish.  Summer mad muck.  Curious

fly swarms over mud moss and

deep stench of life and death, transition

of gravity pushing the moisture down into

the ground cracks and mist expelling to

the permanent blue sky, cirrus clouds

grazing high above sparrows

wings and jet streams.

Summer will come as a shimmer wall

of heat lumbering heavy stumble step across

the continent, twill bake up the highways

and San Antonio will shimmer once

again as it did eight years ago in its

liquid perfect distance and bent

over heads of palm trees, a city

choked in pulpy green vines.

I remember all those summer heats

and basement pitfalls, seasons where

it seemed the walls could sweat.  

perhaps the memory flows out like that

river, adds to the oceans and seas

lost in the secret reason, the grandiose

secret experiment of water and gravity

and no-blink sunshine, summer comes

and will storm every day end in thunder

claps and lightning strobes.

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

(March 29th, 2014)

Roughs #1 - The Last Bottle

https://soundcloud.com/urlp/sets/roughs-1-the-last-bottle-2008

Mostly the result of Nick Ryan coming over to my studio apartment on Capitol Hill setting up microphones and a lap top and capturing it that way. We drank a lot of whiskey whilst we did it, or at least I did. Not a good idea - - - alcohol has never agreed with me. The song Ribbons was recorded with Billy Pigati in North Platte when I was driving a great deal between Denver and Omaha. These are the last recordings I would do while living in Denver.

Compost

Water stained brown of my work boots

out in the backyard Saturday evening,

sun glossed over by a thin curtain sheen

of milky filmy clouds so the evening deepening

glow is bleached out, huff-tired.

The garden is now a series of dead lumps

and dirt clods, tomatoes of yesteryear

pinged and popped by mornings of intense cold and ice

frost, compost pile up at the end of the

garden near the ramshackled lean of

the garage, the pile ever-increasing in its

putrescent magnitude.

Birds twitter out early evening dots and

wiry bleeps and short terrified melodies.

I’ll sing into a microphone tonight.  I’ll

carelessly scratch at the walls.

- - - - - - - - - -

(March 29th, 2014)