Those Clouds - Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4dn21nrP54

A Matter of Moonlight Perspective

Shooting up north through Tex-ass

               in 2006

after a hopeless gig in San Antonio

driving that night

under a vacant moon

with only a song to show for it

a month later, somehow managed to yank

               a sliver of hope

                     from its silver

                     gloss light.

Sometimes all it takes is a song.

A song from a bag of tricks that

used to rattle like bones

           now sings brilliantly

                    tinged

and it never ceases to feel like

a con, that is to say, if I can just

lull everyone to a sort of blank

state, I can jump out of the

           picture, hardly

                           noticed

take on a whole handful of roads

like snakes and summer heat

            leprous hot highway

            sun bake

in the American wilderness

           the floods and

                  folds of

                  countless flatland

                  miles

threatening to eat us alive

in yawn distance of highways

               heard from tiny pin

               point towns.

- - - - - - - - - - -

(May 12, 2013)

The Night Wears a Metallic Edge

The night wears a metallic edge.  We are

hunkered down into our dim lamps

against a giant wilderness of yawning

interstates.  My feet feel warm when

I finally sit down.  Been wandering

the house all day, laundry, tending

to five children scampering running

across the living room floor, pell mell,

hurly burly, lung gust of young screams

against the coming twilight until

silenced into beds, into sleep.

And all these half a million day

start worries over particles, dust

mites, rust bargains on 34th street,

the President’s pockets full of money

whilst his medicine bag is full

of lies.  Countless movements to

accomplish the simplest things (even in

this day and age of befuddled technology)

the slick slime idea of ‘insurance’

as if any group of folks could save

me from myself not to mention all

Russians and Chinese and anyone

else convenient enough to be called

enemy, the feared apocalyptic

horse and fire smoke swirl villain

existing only in the carpetbagger

slum fiction of Washington politicians

spreading wealth like plague next to the

swirl suck Missouri river.  Half

a million day start worries over

an early morning hard on before

the great seething humming void up in

the dark blue bathroom that my wife painted.

There is no salvation in a song itself

unless blended in to ears open enough

to hear it.  Such ears are able to

perceive strings of pearls in

stars, clearest skin of her back

and each mole and birth mark,

every strand of hair in my thoughts

and run through my fingers by

the day’s huff-puff end.  

- - - - - - - -

(May 18th - June 3rd, 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)

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)