tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36845114705303366752023-06-20T06:42:52.682-07:00The Master ReaderPoems by William A. SiglerWAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comBlogger81125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-51522803524132263052009-10-23T22:42:00.000-07:002009-10-23T23:11:52.766-07:00<p><span style="color:#33CCFF;"><span style="font-size:180%;">The Invisible People Of The Woods</span><br /><blockquote>For Michelle<br /><br /><i>They cry and cry, only to deny they ever cried...</i></blockquote></span></p>WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-81619642947899790372009-10-23T22:41:00.000-07:002009-10-23T22:42:24.776-07:00A CERTAIN CHILLTranscendence, please —<br />The unforgiving evening has wrapped its shredded shawl<br />Around us all, the castaways spellbound,<br />Chattering and weeping.<br />We shiver over dim fires beneath a green tent<br />— Steel drums, liquor and guitars.<br />Our face meets your face<br />Like our eyes meet the light,<br />Poor children of the central nervous naked moon<br />Seeking entrance to the cold of the cities' exposed glow,<br />Peeking through the evening's shroud.<br />With autumn winds come autumn sadness,<br />Grates throbbing with lentian Toulouse-Lautrec light,<br />A long-lost romance offering one last clear chance.<br />The harvest guitars bleat like ghosts<br />Before they are put to one wall<br />To wear the faces of the dead.WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-61572803775309180692009-10-23T22:40:00.000-07:002009-10-23T22:41:10.919-07:00ON THE SIDE OF THE HIGHWAYChrist descended on the Vagabond Inn,<br />Involved himself in a domestic dispute<br />Inside, where inbred outcasts burn with sin<br />In what was once a place of ill repute.<br />Now they scatter at the first gunshot wound,<br />Gnaw when they talk, express any feeling with a loud<br />Slamming of doors, faces, the chaos of utter ruin<br />Impels them back and away like a cloud<br />Of brown rain, taking the nothing for the taking,<br />Sweating poison on barren fields, tattooed and maimed.<br />The inarticulate shriek while those who can formulate<br />Confuse themselves and bore everyone in range.<br />Christ brings down a Thermos of forgiveness<br />To share like coffee in the wilderness.WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-53474890029257398962009-10-23T22:39:00.000-07:002009-10-23T22:40:08.040-07:00PROFIT TAKINGOn Howard Street the cigar merchants<br />Peddle their virtues and roll their wares<br />As they perfume the air<br />Already thick with<br />Wharves of salted fish<br />And the chink of coopers and hawsers<br />Trying to contain like vests.<br /><br />The ladies must dress their best<br />To look in the windows down Howard Street<br />With its deco facades and old world arcades,<br />Its specialty shops like the knobmaker,<br />The chandelier chiseler, the violin stringer<br />Sheltered for the pleasure of ladies with blue minks and chromium hair<br /><br />Just across the street from<br />The liquor prison with the two-way plexiglass chute<br />Called Gold Rush in bold yellow.<br />In the ghetto there is profit.WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-62149154779214302852009-10-23T22:38:00.000-07:002009-10-23T22:39:06.054-07:00ROADSIDE ARCANAI'm in love with dark American movies<br />And bad coffee, but why, in diners<br />With pink space age lighting, with steel resisting neon,<br />Like the Chinese restaurant of your dreams,<br />That wide-brimmed bent hat slumps<br />Over the white coffee cup, the iconoclast stares<br />With the remorse of loneliness, with savage skepticism,<br />At a scene it seems is made for his needs,<br />As he smokes a Pall Mall as if the waitress<br />Hates him as an interloper, in for the ambiance,<br />Not the enormous clacking aspect of poverty<br />With white gloves and oversized shoes,<br />Sand dancing furiously, but with bare reverberations<br />Of feeling, tapping when no one has any dough,<br />And they've seen it all before, becoming violent and ugly.<br />The unrestricted face detaches itself<br />To bus depots, hard luck walk-ups, fleabag hitching posts at the dark end<br />Of the dice, stoically moving to the empty fruit crates at the junction,<br />The place where failure is no longer dangerous,<br />Seeing in its blue light not so much a gross distortion<br />Of those magnificent lying set of rules<br />We call America, but a gross distortion of need,<br />Fed by well-lit vending machines, and finally facing<br />The knuckled resistance,<br />As if almost nothing is too much.<br />One contemplates someone so wounded by the thought of failure<br />He can't lift his craggy, unsatisfied face from the plate<br />To see how his toothless, overwrought position is not<br />Evil, is not failure, but the kind of lean endurance<br />Every American movie hero is driven towards,<br />And one expects the tourists to drive up in their Subarus,<br />With film, their way of enduring it.WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-8807817264626504072009-10-23T22:36:00.000-07:002009-10-23T22:37:37.586-07:00ONE FRIDAY EVENINGI had just one blanket need<br />Last bleary evening when I hailed a cab at<br />Bond and Edmondson. I was no more than<br />An article of clothing at a showgirl's command.<br />I was a ghost picked up by a phantom<br />Who will let you be a celebrity<br />On one last moonshine ride to the hatted goons at the border,<br />Or worse. The cabbie, gazing at the unimaginable,<br />Muttered familiar particulars as I told him where we were going,<br />To Pulaski highway, leaving one neighborhood of dim joints for another.<br />He inquired of my sick motives, keening on twisted sexual apocalypses<br />That leave one hanging, rendezvous in blue rooms with red electrified vixens;<br />No, there are <em>those</em> motels on the strip, I said,<br />But it's further in, so he took me past<br />The lumberyards and post offices and all the outposts of the sexually mistaken night,<br />Every regulated act searing in neon, up the salmon-spawning red-hot road,<br />I let him carry me where he, if he had been totally free, would go,<br />Where those who have no one or nothing go, holding on to the last stool of extremity;<br />He was taking me to see my baby.<br />He is hesitant at the roadhouse destination, hearing<br />That Patsy Cline was alive and living in the jukebox,<br />And seeing the blue pool tables and the cigarette machines dispensing decades-old brands,<br />Still, for 10 bucks extra, he handed me over like a parcel.<br />My baby smiles at me from behind the bar<br />While a scatological scattershot shovels quarters into the jukebox<br />And half dead wails of the lonely give him some small consolation,<br />The songs of the missing angel. He, who had spent his whole<br />Childhood in the nearby motels, was moved and purified enough<br />By this song to make you feel he'd had his heart ripped clean out.<br />And then he buys me a drink, because I'm Shelly's boy,<br />While a model of the Statue of Liberty rotates on the bar TV.WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-29974113127931082912009-10-23T22:33:00.000-07:002009-10-23T22:35:57.156-07:00"THE COLDEST BEER IN TOWN"I traipse the streets on the Fourth of July<br />(The buses don't run on Satchelmouth's birthday);<br />Downtown is empty, but the projects are full,<br />Teeming into the Seven-Eleven. I roll in<br />For some snakes, but there is only chaos, not fireworks<br />And the highest prices in town. A white man<br />Asks for a quarter, but seeing my guitar<br />Won't leave me alone, asking if I blow blues in G. I say<br />"Anything but that key," sparing him more than me.<br />I pass more homeless lined up shivering outside the shelter<br />Closed for the holiday, eyeing me as though I were a slave<br />Not quite worth eating. I cut away, through what I'd always<br />Assumed was an abandoned city block, only to find a kind of<br />Solution, a sort of reverse commercial strip where every<br />Beggar from downtown wandered around, advertising scars<br />To each other — a paraplegic here, a blind albino there,<br />An unconscious Indian vet propped up against a slat,<br />A man with his face torn off talking out the corner<br />Of his mouth. Concrete blocks broken all over the street,<br />Trash and plaster everywhere, syringes scattered, not a window<br />Unboarded, but people everywhere, dealing in alleys, leaning<br />From dead balconies, mostly silent on this, their day off.<br />I mingled in with them to an unnamed bar through plywood<br />Doors. Inside, no music, no pool, just a hand<br />Written sign — "the first bar in Baltimore" — and a poster<br />For Thunderbird, a crooked fashion model posing<br />Dirty and disheveled, dressed in a New York fashion designer's<br />Conception of rags, smiling "taste the experience."<br />The place reminded me of nothing so much as a Western movie bar,<br />With Indians perched like hyenas, an obscenely powerless<br />Ghost family. Even here I felt outcast,<br />Without even a cigarette to be hounded.<br />Soon I would be home, understanding a little better<br />That Hell is a constant repetition of the same missteps<br />While one learns the parameters of the trap, obsessed<br />With getting out, but always unable to,<br />Seeing only the present place,<br />Not the pastures at the end of the street.WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-69896921741425041662009-10-23T22:32:00.000-07:002009-10-23T22:33:01.247-07:00FOURTH OF JULY IN MARBLEHEADThe clock tower is stuffed with cotton.<br />The lean times have gone<br />And there's work to be done.<br />You can face the sea with everything reachable<br />That time can give a value to,<br />Your valuable time,<br />Small consolation for the indignant hammer of bells,<br />The cloying gong, the empty revelry of pain sounding<br />Keeping the fish still,<br />Clanging with history as vindication,<br />Holding our disturbance in pregnant air.<br />Now, you treat history with noblesse obligée,<br />Sip martinis, ravish cocaine, read Rimbaud in the hot tub<br />Behind the bar while Tuff Gong skanks on the CD.<br />There's a Haitian art gallery across the street from where<br />A lunatic gimcrack collector used to sell me wax lips and<br />Plastic alligator jaws full of bubble gum.<br />A boy delivers the town newspaper in a Volvo.<br />Most of the old fishermen are in jail now for smuggling drugs.<br />A seagull commutes out to the distant islands,<br />Not staying to accompany the bells<br />That are not ringing under the stars.<br />Helicopters would swoop down with their roto-blades<br />To whip up a wake against the current,<br />A reverberation to slap meaningless grey rock<br />And roll back like the lean times along the gravel.<br /><br />The harbor blues descend, through intermediate oranges,<br />People in boats hoot, in unison, their alarms<br />Off-key, the distortion of private pains<br />In a conglomerate of paranoid honks and shameless dissatisfaction<br />At their daily spraying like insecticide out into the world.<br />They shriek for the free fireworks,<br />Continuing their pursuit of a candy beyond all candy.<br />Even in this paradise green, the wide-lipped bay,<br />The sound of conflict brings in the darkness,<br />Sirens must come in before the triggers are dimmed.<br />Feeble colors strafe the charcoal horizon.<br />The beating is as tribal as pain ever gets.<br />A whirlwind of inconclusion<br />Eddies to a close.<br />The absence in the wake of the bells sounds.WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-84436133391413211882009-10-23T22:31:00.001-07:002009-10-23T22:31:52.838-07:00ECHOING WAREHOUSESHere I am where dreams die young,<br />Where I see the trapped faces everyday,<br />Who think of the multi-mega-media star<br />Who can't deliver his lines this time<br />As if he finally played his card.<br />The pages of glory turn<br />And we are still mired in the smoke of its friction,<br />The journey through the baseline wilderness where<br />Everything is not plotted against you, only darkest fog.<br /><br />The soft padded cats who leap in their youth<br />From laundry line to drainpipe<br />Eventually get mist covered<br />And eat the vermin under the porch,<br />And start collapsing their way through days<br />Where joys are more circumscribed and downward leaning;<br />Gaudy ice patches on the cracked sidewalk<br />Turn quickly slate grey, that's part of the<br />Humming forgetfulness, the savage sleep.<br />I am almost among them, who have almost the knowledge<br />That human beings don't do these sorts of things.<br />We were meant to leap and catch and praise,<br />Prevailing against ice mountains and surly rapids,<br />Crafting a slingshot from supple young trees.<br />Who thinks that this urge inevitably leads<br />To neighborhoods bulldozed down,<br />Full-capacity trucks moving the bones along,<br />Machines designed to act and belch as men<br />Huffing with inhuman persistence,<br />Mashing steel with rough-shod motions<br />To ingrained catches, gagging full tilt toward some<br />Jackpot of gold at the end of the road, some shiny largesse<br />Left over after the fat of the land has been stripped and sold<br />To meet the growing need pool. The chairman of the board<br />Might as well be driving this rig, with his Delaware lawyer<br />Counting the Hardee's in the side cab, but as the penetration<br />Goes on all night, the haze and the fur smoke<br />Take the truck grappler in numb cigarette drags away.<br />The distant sounds that flow in from other islands<br />Keep us intact in shared reverie,<br />Longing for the place no one yet has found<br />Where we belong.<br /><br />The cancer stick factory looms, its walls once absorbed<br />Many charmed voices, who rattled chords,<br />Who festered in chains, claimed while they sat against its will,<br />The blazing flame that delivered the hot bombshells<br />So the choosers had a choice.<br />One could look through the steel to see the almost reflection of our lesser selves,<br />Wide magnanimous smiles and brighter than life eyes,<br />Which we adjusted internally, to what we remembered of mirrors and descriptions.<br />But the mill allocates to everyone, and takes pain to deny<br />That it has denied something or someone.<br />So many changed as the loom adjusted itself in their minds,<br />Not feeling how its resistance was what kept all of us apart.<br /><br />Now it drops its saddened shades across<br />The changing play of bitter winds, an empty warehouse<br />Echoing, negligible, still stoking against a bare bulb.<br />Windows without glass, U.S. Government tags, faded slogans,<br />While the roads have diverted, off to greener fabrications<br />Of the same life-sustaining illusion.<br />Now the extras have populated the backdrop,<br />The needle was pulled out, people exploded out onto the street,<br />Dashing doleful disenfranchisees<br />Bounce like pinballs or rats<br />Along the salted irrigation streams of this city,<br />Seeking sirloins in dead walks and emptied nooks.<br />The building still fumes its commands<br />To these few who have not elected, and so stay.<br /><br />Stray gladiolas are picked at the corner of Fifth and Edgar,<br />Herded and shipped to office parks and professional buildings<br />To muse together and share a well-potted plot<br />Where mum's the word and the scars are hung like flags to dry.<br />Others come from temperature controlled rose rooms, misted and massaged,<br />But they ain't worth a shit unless they're like a million more, only better.<br />The rivet rattle goes with you everywhere, you carry<br />The soap scum to another part of the city,<br />Another scene of another crime,<br />Another well-oiled mousetrap<br />That answers us with our order.<br />This forest is ready to burn.WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-33910208931986471652009-10-23T22:30:00.000-07:002009-10-23T22:31:09.541-07:00ANNUAL COMPENSATIONHe's as handsome as any, yet the girls swoon more.<br />He talks all the time just like everyone else, but everyone listens.<br />He walks to the same parking stone, but walks with meaning.<br />Every moment to him is a brilliant intricacy. It's easy to oversee<br />When all he has to do is appear and everyone looks at him<br />With the fear of some children at parents.<br />His jokes shape a thousand ships<br />In force at dynamic moments<br />That stop at his tongue, who is not bogged down in trivia,<br />Who fancies himself everyman, not making more than the necessary<br />Decisions any man would make, that's the secret of his success,<br />But <em>how could that be?</em><br /><br />Walking in the glow, sometimes he must want to get kicked.<br /><br />I thought I saw him at George's,<br />Mouthing Java, unshaven, chain-smoking,<br />Trying to cash a rumpled ticket.<br />You put that expression in your pocket<br />To flash at a mail-room clerk<br />Too slow with more meaningless subpoenas.WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-56790465492625967872009-10-23T22:28:00.000-07:002009-10-23T22:29:53.680-07:00EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSONButton-holed, stitched up with society's threads<br />As wolves are left the rancid meat of singular bread.<br />There is no need of consequence.<br /><br />The foul bell chimes, and the sinners jump the cliffs.<br />The saints are shot like renegades, rebels left adrift<br />In the space between innocence and evanescence.<br /><br />The Indians work the kitty litter mines.<br />The billionaire walks past panhandlers with the same education, depth and drive.<br />There is no need of consequence.<br /><br />After many a moonrise, the spectators see<br />It doesn't inflict for their glittering applause and merciless charity<br />In the space between innocence and evanescence.<br /><br />While we pile all our efforts on time bombs ticking,<br />Others back off and retract all they've been given.<br />There is no need of consequence.<br /><br />We rise to angers that die out as failures of will.<br />We move quickly past victories and linger too long in losses distilled<br />In the space between innocence and evanescence<br />There is no need of consequence.WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-364390426925229862009-10-23T22:27:00.000-07:002009-10-23T22:28:18.970-07:00THE LAST ROMANTICWith austere ambivalence<br />And benevolent stare<br />Christ is caught holding<br />A whip and a chair,<br />Crucified in Peoria<br />And everywhere. "What was the one<br />Wrong thing I did?" he blares,<br />Exchanging his passion for a peace pipe and air,<br />Leaving the crippled souls<br />Down there.<br />But at this distance<br />His vision seems more rare,<br />That he is no further<br />Or closer here<br />As when the arms grabbed on his sleeve<br />They were not seeking miracles as much as<br />Waiting for miracles to fail<br />And the optimist promising to kneel and admit<br />That all he inspired was wrong<br />That they were right all along.<br />Such occasional moments sustained them<br />Even as God brought their troubles to an end.<br />Bitterness languished beneath the rock<br />That took Christ beyond them<br />Laughing how connections are all in the head.WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-40274719287882407012009-10-23T22:25:00.000-07:002009-10-23T22:26:57.266-07:00GAY STREETAt the inner cities' deserted frontiers<br />The most vulnerable wear masks.<br />The brick skeletons are black against the lilac sky<br />While lights are strung over the graveyard's burnt grass.<br />The brooding beauty of the left-behinds<br />Under a thoughtless thumb<br />In the perfect light where everything counts<br />And no one ever comes.WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-53876227902514655832009-10-23T22:23:00.000-07:002011-08-24T17:06:12.412-07:00PAEAN TO THE PRESTON STREET LONELY MENWhile women are destroying men everywhere simultaneously,<br />
The men who lose are surrounded in grey,<br />
Making occasional forays to the liquor store,<br />
Waiting through streetcorner cigarettes.<br />
<br />
Their brains are unused chambers,<br />
The souls sucked by a pervasive self pity,<br />
The wind can't be felt, it is only a sound<br />
Of winter crying — in the flames of spring air.<br />
<br />
The homes where they can be drenched in every emollient save one<br />
Seem vacant and distressing to them from even a slight distance;<br />
A new low pang forms when they think of returning<br />
But another block more of such men is too much.<br />
<br />
They think of the innumerable, in animal robes<br />
Sharing wine by the fireside, with crescents and roses,<br />
While on their shelves, priceless words collect dust<br />
That could be gold to lozenge the smoky air.<br />
<br />
They return to their own neglected treasure.<br />
What they are has no value. They converse<br />
With ghosts, but it is they who are doing the talking<br />
And the ghosts too selfish to respond.<br />
<br />
They practice being artists, weave threads of pain<br />
In bundles of knots, a gift to love.<br />
They seek out the junkies who suck grey dick<br />
And look enraptured in vapors of light.<br />
<br />
They stay in the tavern, desecrate the art on its walls,<br />
Making it more red with violation, keen with irony<br />
For these devotees of affectation, who still look at occasional couples<br />
With longing, even as they throw all subtlety to the wind.<br />
<br />
Tough men embrace cold glasses with delicate hands,<br />
Quail at the sight of young girls out for the night<br />
Under the romance of the beer light. The men just slap pinballs<br />
Hitting snags and alarms on the way down.<br />
<br />
A few wonder about those other people,<br />
The ones who listen to the radio, who sell<br />
Their souls for a wife, home, kids and career<br />
When there is so much anguish that can never be shaped.<br />
<br />
They may sit there sulking for years,<br />
As failures create new, less sustainable fantasies.<br />
They dissent on bootleg Nancy Sinatra<br />
And try to find a name for another doomed band.<br />
<br />
Most of them sleep, eventually, and make amends with the familiar.<br />
They find ways to wake up and cook themselves eggs<br />
And try to look on the morning with someone else's eyes,<br />
One whose small room can receive the whole world.WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-76745209997640174742009-10-23T22:21:00.000-07:002009-10-23T22:23:01.529-07:00LUKE LOOKS FOR A JOBSince I lost my way, I spend my days hiding<br />Tense behind curtains, trying to be invisible,<br />Working out new places to be when the postman arrives.<br />I wait for the wife to get home from work with the kids<br />And thank me savagely once again for nothing.<br />The kids whose joy saps the life out of me<br />Tie me down with their eyes, so that I must watch them<br />Struggle with toy alarm clocks and shriek<br />Whether happy or sad.<br />Occasionally, I hear from the kitchen "don't fall asleep.<br />I don't want them out in the street again. It's dark."<br />But I find I must spread myself out on the carpet<br />And rest bones too weary from way too much scotch.<br />I awake to an hysterical harrangue,<br />Three wordless mouths when my ear can't take one,<br />And I find I must leave, so I walk<br />To Marty's, but he won't let me in,<br />Seems his wife wants him all to herself this evening.<br />I'd go to the bar, but I don't feel too guileful tonight.<br />So I walk down the unlit streets,<br />Jealous of the dogs that bark at me,<br />Surveying my difficulties, the least of which are what I've described.<br />I can't get clear of my memory.<br />I can't dream at a baseball game like I used to.<br />I can't lose this sense of dread<br />That all that has happened will be taken away from me.<br />There are too many stars tonight,<br />So I'll go back home once I can<br />Figure out a way to get in<br />(Maybe I can sneak in when she takes out the trash).<br />I envy the smile on the face of the man<br />I saw escorted in shackles from the court to a van —<br />His worries were over.WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-13497099229308949562009-10-23T22:16:00.000-07:002009-10-23T22:20:57.274-07:00OSWALD'S CREATIONSI.<br /><em>"I developed a streak of independence brought on by neglect" - Lee Harvey Oswald</em><br /><br />Unloved boys<br />Who learn what they know alone<br />Are seen coldly, in terms of their isolation,<br />Not what they are isolated from,<br />The violence they pick up on radar.<br /><br />Local loser fires three rifle shots...<br />But we can't clothe the killer of America<br />In such humble robes, we must look beyond him.<br />He learned Communism in the public library.<br />He read all the conspiracy theories.<br />He joined the Marines to preach<br />International Communist doctrine<br />But the troops didn't care<br />And the CO's yawned<br />And he learned how to shoot a high-powered gun.<br />He defected to Russia because he couldn't stand the way<br />America turned his mother into a pathological liar, or so he would say,<br />But he also wanted to invent conspiracies of his own,<br />To shed his experience to the other side,<br />To make deals with the darkness, with a poker face<br />That held nothing but lies, and all only to be recognized,<br />Illuminated. The KGB laughed,<br />And only after he mocked a suicide attempt<br />Did they let him stay as a model worker<br />Building televisions. But, making deals in his dreams with some third force,<br />Came back home, to the FBI, and Che Guevrolet, but they<br />Were professional, and this man offered only vanity.<br />The CIA wouldn't waste its time on a returned defector,<br />Especially one looking for a job.<br />How could they have expected<br />Their grand manufacture to have converted any souls?<br />He didn't know who to kill, and when he settled<br />On the bullet that grazed General Walker's hair,<br />He got away with it because he took the bus;<br />His pursuers couldn't think of a man without a car.<br />To the lawlessness and voodoo of New Orleans he returned,<br />To peddle himself as the fall guy<br />To the Cuban maelstrom's talk show fantasies.<br />He became Fidel Castro in his mind, resentful at all the cigars<br />Kennedy had stashed away.<br />When the KGB saw him in Mexico City, pleading that the CIA<br />Was tracking him, they would have laughed<br />If they weren't so saddened.<br />The long ride back, another dream shattered,<br />His fantasies forced a more fervent desire<br />That could never be requited,<br />But, as luck would have it, the work he got<br />Opened the door like a bolt of light<br />To the purpose of his life<br />— Oswald means "the power of God" —<br />So he left Marina his last $70 and his wedding ring<br />And walked with a large bag of "curtain rods" for his job at Dealey Plaza.<br />The whole thing was easy, there was no one to stop him,<br />Even his gun did not attract attention,<br />Even the cops, after the shooting, let him out of the building.<br />He had to kill a cop to get any respect at all.<br />When caught, playing for attention like a schoolboy,<br />He protested of any attention,<br />Was violently innocent, desperate for response.<br />He bantered with the cameras, making sure his smiling denials<br />Left no doubt of the truth. "You won't find it there,"<br />He said to his brother Roy when he looked into his eyes.<br />A sickened Jacob Rubinstein, another bit player in a play<br />Whose designs he did not understand, pulled the trigger for all of us.<br /><br />II.<br /><em>"Football is the opiate of the people" -Lee Harvey Oswald</em><br /><br />Thirty years and 500 books later,<br />Oswald's creations do not recognize his cry.<br />We don't understand how he did, alone, what they,<br />Together, thought they couldn't do. We notice<br />How the mob chieftain toasted Kennedy's death and offered congratulations;<br />We see Hoover's glee at breaking the news to Bobby;<br />We hear word reaching the CIA just as Fidel's death serum is being delivered;<br />No one seemed content to have their violent hungers<br />Just hang there in respectful silence, without measurable response.<br /><br />When the myth of one generation's youth vanished,<br />The procession was fantasized — as theater, as subterfuge,<br />For if we are who we feel ourselves to be,<br />We all died, as we all pulled the trigger, as we all conjured assassins<br />In our efforts to connect ourselves to the empty center no one sees.WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-47930082956241688102009-10-23T22:14:00.000-07:002011-08-24T17:06:37.242-07:00DRAFTIn <em>Peanut's Bar</em>, the disabled veterans room,<br />
They are forever tuned to war sounds droning,<br />
The moose noises of battles never fought<br />
And men never born to begin with.<br />
They help handicapped kids on gum machines,<br />
And hate another war coming, will hate to see it go.<br />
They were saved by the planes, but slowly destroyed<br />
By rounds from the king they saved.<br />
When it's over, political cover<br />
Explaining inhuman orders, meaningless crates,<br />
But here the stakes are tied more tightly,<br />
To elude the reasons men have to die.WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-61237312819890454632009-10-23T22:12:00.000-07:002009-10-23T22:14:31.624-07:00WE INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAM FOR A SPECIAL LIVE REPORTPresident Liberace is selling off the museum again<br />To feed his fat dead father, whose unquiet spirit<br />Is possessed by Geronimo, for when stole this last Indian's bones<br />For his campus clubhouse, and so the blood of America<br />Is demanded in sacrifice.<br />Housing, health care, clean air, freedom, truth —<br />These are the trinkets he is pawning with his glitzy smile,<br />As if the buyer should be pleased with these luxuries.<br />"One should learn to live without such things," he says,<br />As he stashes the receipts in a secret bank account.<br />"There are things more important than these," he blinks,<br />As he stumbles to the keys, and plays the insane<br />Melodies of long-dead patronized and patronizing composers<br />Who not less than ten years ago were scorned with a rage<br />Now reserved for the cacophonous moderns.<br />He forgets some notes, glosses over archaic flourishes,<br />But the song comes out about the same:<br /><br />"...The magnificent flag remembers magnificent wars,<br />When men thought with their guns on<br />And all women were whores,<br />When those who toiled for our liberty<br />Were not merely sores<br />We must fight so hard to ignore.<br />Recall when the truth served at the pleasure of kings,<br />Not the underfed press<br />And disinterested magazines,<br />When righteousness reigned all over the land,<br />There were no coup d'etats,<br />No dirtied hands.<br />When we picked and we chose and we made our demands,<br />There was no one to talk of the wounded or missing,<br />They were drowned by the brass of the band.<br />A tone of voice could open doors<br />(Not like now when the rich are subjected to scorn),<br />Goodness depended on how you adorned it,<br />The ones with nothing were the scoundrels.<br />The trains couldn't run if the rich went to jail,<br />Ministers could always open your mail,<br />The weak willed were in chains, not begging for meat,<br />The unjustly imprisoned could keep quiet and meek,<br />Because the free were better than the enslaved."<br /><br />Amid this nostalgic revelry he paused —<br />"Ah, but things now are not that bad after all...<br />The streets can be cleaned by declaring a war.<br />Our friends have seen to it that we can't help the poor.<br />We've gouged and we've gouged and we've gouged some more,<br />And none of the people have anything to show,<br />And, as we predicted, the gold is back in good hands.<br />We've revved up the dream machines and plugged up the holes,<br />The price of admission is your dark-hearted soul,<br />It's what you have, not what you know,<br />There are better off than you who can't say no.<br />We've bribed the do-gooders, fine-printed the sentiment of compassion,<br />And shown everyone that wiping your ass with the Constitution aids the digestion.<br />Those who oppose our wars are unpatriotic...<br />Those who question our values are immoral...<br />The poor, not the rich, are the selfish ones..."<br /><br />And on and on this broadcast went on,<br />Followed by opponents who said "Yes, but look at my hairdo"<br />And critics who noted how strong and finely tuned his tone,<br />Then back to Liberace, with songs that went out<br />To every home, and no one was sure if anyone was listening,<br />But they stayed still, as one by one, all the doors were sealed.WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-46099590739701958162009-10-23T22:08:00.000-07:002009-10-23T22:10:30.722-07:00HARMLESS FANTASY #1Klondike at the gallows<br />Staring away his sentence,<br />The lonely people lined up for a thrill —<br />His creaking fall, as Christ rises every Spring.<br />The phone rings — not the Governor<br />(He's trying to find out when life begins),<br />It's just another angry commentator<br />Taking away more of his precious sympathy.<br />When he almost died, at thirty five,<br />He thought of how his billions couldn't help him,<br />And there, in the hospital ward, he swore<br />He would never ask for favors<br />And would never hurt a creature any more.<br />But this vow entailed certain compromises<br />He was not equipped to make —<br />So he gave away his money<br />To the most undeserving and ungrateful,<br />The violently powerless, the anti-social homeless.<br />He waited with a wad for the first rip-off artist to approach,<br />So he could hand him the cash without having to be asked.<br />He funded shelters in the suburbs,<br />Methadone clinics in the shopping malls,<br />He had some twisted dream that with all his money<br />He was beyond the law.<br />He thought if he returned the phone calls<br />And answered every letter with enough diplomacy and hope<br />That would be enough.<br />But wars are not like that.<br />They carted off his refugees, thinking them his friends,<br />And nodded, smelled corruption, when he purchased the jail<br />And replaced it with a high rise to house the murderers —<br />The white doctor they sent to him came away shaking<br />So hard he couldn't hold a cigarette.<br />The newspapers printed stories of sleaze and gross debaucheries,<br />Knowing he would meekly protest, but he proudly declared<br />All of it was true, what a shame they only printed<br />A small fraction of his indiscretions.<br />It was time to call in the law.<br />Treason, bribery, revolution, read the warrant,<br />So he hired the worst lawyers he could find<br />(Who were not only inept, but wanted to see him fry),<br />Rigged the jury, delivered the evidence, but, of course, he got off<br />And the people rose in fury how the rich escape justice.<br />All he could say to the murderous mob<br />Was that the rich invented justice to give the poor something to do<br />Besides dream of being rich.<br />At that, the New York Times rethought its position on lynching,<br />And with corporations held a telethon<br />With starving babies and crippled retards<br />All screaming "Klondike must go."<br />Philosophers came down from their mountain caves<br />To declaim "the man who would make us believe<br />That money is a vacuum to fill empty values<br />And that freedom is only selfishness,<br />When it is quite the other way around."<br />They even brought M.L. King back from the dead<br />To say "I cannot trust a man like him, who has never,<br />For justification, cited my name."<br />Then they rolled the horrifying pictures:<br />Klondike driving hundreds of Porches into the sea,<br />Passing out Rolexes to people without jobs,<br />Dropping a confetti of $100 bills on the White House lawn<br />As the first children stooped to pick some up.<br />He was so amused he called in a pledge himself,<br />And almost wished he had friends, so they could laugh with him,<br />But he knew they wouldn't be laughing.<br />The cops came several times to get him, but the smell and sight<br />Of the wasted people who lived in his house always drew them away.<br />Special tactical squads went in with helicopters to snatch him up,<br />But they came away with a double-breasted gentleman<br />Who swore that Teddy Roosevelt was President.<br />The real President came on TV one day asking for help,<br />For suggestions on how to get Klondike.<br />The letters poured in; they sent ruffians with Third World experience<br />Into his den, but they were arrested by the police before entering.<br />They tried again. They told the police, the media, the Pope,<br />But they neglected to tell Klondike<br />Who, if he'd heard, would have gladly obliged them by being there,<br />But, as it was, he was in Mexico City trading<br />Personal computers for indian beads to junkies.<br />By the time he got back, someone had freaked<br />At all the undercover cops and torched his house.<br />So Klondike found seedy dives, the better to get caught,<br />He mistakenly thought, for they somehow imagined lavish penthouse suites,<br />So Klondike remained miserable and free.<br />He turned himself in at some ghetto police station,<br />But they laughed at his presumption, that someone so well behaved<br />Could be so corrupt.<br />He rode the subway, pulled his money out of bank machines.<br />He had used the assumed names so that no one could know<br />Where the gifts came from, but it saddened him now<br />That it made him impossible to track.<br />Getting desperate, he ran up against a gang of prostitutes<br />Shrieking "look, I am Klondike" but they thought him too sick<br />For anything but the perfunctory offer of sex,<br />Which he gratefully refused, wondering at last how he ever came to care<br />For this madness now pursuing him.<br />The profligate horror continued, and the authorities<br />Were no closer to bringing him to justice<br />When he was spotted one day, buying every confection from an ancient Mister Softee truck<br />That had strayed too far from the green fields.<br />The driver sensed something as Klondike threw all the eclairs in the dumpster,<br />So he tailed him, at a distance, as he peeled off<br />Hundred dollar bills to spike-haired urchins in high tops,<br />Not even smiling, as they begged for more.<br />When he walked into the doughnut shop, his fate was sealed.<br />Klondike at the gallows<br />Reached into his junkyard of philosophies<br />Searching for the right final gift as he scanned<br />The imperturbable faces that paid to see his demise;<br />What lesson could he tell those who had seen his<br />Generosity with envy, who had seen him as another power among many<br />That didn't come through in the end, who didn't understand<br />That he really didn't care anyway?<br />He tried to explain, but all he could say was<br />"As long as the oppressed would rather suffer than educate,<br />I'll suffer."<br />Which would have been fine if<br />The rope hadn't broke.WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-1817987793947963362009-10-23T22:03:00.000-07:002009-10-23T22:07:34.252-07:00<p><span style="color:#cc0000;"><span style="font-size:180%;">Sad Summer Eyes<br /></span><br /><blockquote><p>For Robert<br /><br /><br /><i>Another gesture is shunted.<br /><br />Nothing here tonight will be totally redeemed.</i></p></blockquote></span><p></p>WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-28589922451343904522009-10-23T22:02:00.000-07:002009-10-23T22:03:21.801-07:00JAZZ AT SUNSETThe blue notes come down when the sky deepens,<br />The intangible is lost at the stroke of night,<br />Vanishing all but the moon and our created things<br />Glowing, blurred, and bleary, our captive energy<br />Hissing against the empty increments of the moments,<br />The rest of the daily machinations,<br />The dimming of the acetylene.<br />A jagged shriek, a soughful, humid horn,<br />A quenchless cough and singing groan occupy<br />This unwound, ground-down lighted room<br />And escape like gas. Dissipation shimmers and shakes.<br />We stoke the fires of a sax solo,<br />We brush color into our faces.<br />The demons are now in the air,<br />By morning they will snake away.WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-87622955703677328382009-10-23T22:01:00.001-07:002009-10-23T22:01:52.323-07:00FOR DAVID MURRAYHow quickly the sounds outside turn<br />From trance to threat:<br />A tap once too quickly, a gasp too plangent.<br />Every time I pick up my pen, I am up against<br />A palimpsest of cliché — natural expression.<br />I don't know what a good musician is<br />But I know good music<br />And hear it almost every time I play<br />With my ear.<br /><br />Dance to the bitterness.<br />The sweet heat is<br />Sweeping<br />The moping prisoners<br />Squeeming to get away<br />Into a pleasurable trance.<br />The hollow wing ascending,<br />The croak billowing<br />Over the deknotted, labial lands<br />Shading them like a cloak one sees from below<br />And scarcely understands, yet yearns to know<br />Of this something promising reward,<br />This evidence for hope<br />Sends hope springing in hot pursuit of an object<br />It can outrace.<br />Only the eyes burn away<br />Like seed shells falling...<br />Chamomile grass, fuchsia, spath<br />Sassafras stalks in a flax field<br />Ripe with lobelia,<br />Calanchoe, colendura, catmint<br />In a mind that remembers<br />That the sunlight received is commuted to flower<br />(As ears of bone transfer inside, to the net,<br />What, once in, is engraved in stone)<br />Whose only purpose<br />To attract<br />Pecky nosy birds:<br />There are no prim vanities in the bush,<br />No crafted aesthetic pursuit.<br />Beauty is just a response to the threat of extinction.<br />We pick the stem,<br />Dismember it to show our love.<br />Love was required by the pining stamen and pistol.<br />Love is what is sought,<br />But it cannot be given, only received;<br />The thing does not reside in the beauty.<br /><br />On either side,<br />Terms are laid out<br />As if in opposition.<br />Both lovers and enemies stalk you,<br />Both lovers and enemies listen.<br />Matted with all the arcane simulations<br />That preceded your introduction,<br />You heard them all as well as we,<br />Heard them so well, we listen to you<br />Because we don't want to hear them again.<br />Out of boredom, we are prepared for the insanity<br />Of your combinations.<br />You must keep on challenging us<br />Even when, after stoning you for so long<br />We are finally allowed to ignore you.<br />Keep on blowing history out of your pores<br />And sucking it back in with conscious, hesitant breaths<br />With the generous passion for hoping<br />We can, must go on again.WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-66723405882728052902009-10-23T22:00:00.001-07:002009-10-23T22:00:59.613-07:00HEARING ALBERT COLLINSArtful as they go down, cagey,<br />Mangy with contrivance,<br />The patterns fold out into spirits<br />Each with a rhythm<br />That dances around the whole<br />With salty plum lickings,<br />Shaking in the hot quicksand,<br />Rolling with the bells<br />Of breeze through the branches<br />And bellowing hollows —<br />Roaring voices<br />Climb the pounding floor<br />As sticks, insistent, hit, and blades, tickling, twitch<br />And cut the dullness of the skin that singes<br />And gasps for breath amidst smoke and alcohol.<br />Scoured metal tubs misdirect,<br />Mangle, and modulate<br />The proddings of nerves<br />Broken in the sweetness of their pulp;<br />As they are brushed in cadence, their pain bends and stiffens<br />In the back and forth dynamic to the divine:<br />Rhythm as logic,<br />As the massing of electrons around the empty space<br />Of which all matter chiefly consists,<br />Strokes of order:<br />Dancing becomes painting,<br />Painting becomes forests,<br />Forests become the heavens,<br />Which are precisely the sky, as the wind is the word<br />That in its whispers gives form to the prison,<br />The freedom that feeds on itself,<br />The whammy bar bent on the sunlight.<br /><br />Out of the sounds of stellar shells<br />Grow imagined universes that light up the northern sky<br />And reveal the streams running through us.WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-68814819310818941052009-10-23T21:57:00.000-07:002009-10-23T21:59:06.087-07:00THE IMMORTAL COFFEE URNQuest,<br />The band,<br />Whose egos were too huge to co-exist<br />They didn't try, and agreed to cynically vie<br />To make each new song worst than the last,<br />And succeeded magnificently;<br />The band who wore boas, pink silk and mustaches,<br />Betty Davis hair,<br />And preened like California surf studs,<br />Never whining of their renown,<br />For they clothed in high school sentiments the subversions of high school poets,<br />Discovering and proclaiming loudly<br />That "love" means death<br />And "dreams" mean life itself,<br />As every prom band from Brownsville to Sault Saint Marie<br />Will agree, as long as the songs, in any key, can be<br />Bombastically stirring, beautifully pretentious;<br />The band that in a million posters summed us up:<br />The singing hair stylist, the gas station guitarist,<br />The house painter bass player, the disturbed church organist and<br />Fight manager drummer,<br />They toured towns in every exurb of Savage Plenty,<br />Holding businessmen hostage in elevators,<br />Moving cars, producing children<br />Who were born to seek this secret, for twenty-one futile years<br />Of radios too embarrassed to remember<br />Until the times, ever cruel, forgot,<br />And the wardrobe of the hip ones became the uncool threads of their parents,<br />And the birthsong plays again as if for the first time,<br />And decades dissolve into a stone that gracelessly holds the center.<br /><br />We cannot escape, we who fled this madness years ago,<br />It comes back in all its lazy mendacity,<br />The symbol for what really is,<br />Not some Greek aspiration we call Art,<br />Just five guys powered by jellybeans in a studio for five hours<br />Producing sounds that still keep the Tsitsele crazy<br />Stamping and chanting its yeah yeah's for weeks.WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3684511470530336675.post-11525478703566903882009-10-23T21:56:00.001-07:002009-10-23T21:56:49.302-07:00SONG OF THE ARRANGERGhost music.<br />I used to listen more<br />And copy less.<br />I used to let it ruin me more than I<br />Ruined it.<br />It was itself before me<br />Now it submits<br />To my gentle stress against it,<br />A slight taint,<br />Not on it,<br />On me; I have not gained the friendship<br />Of the devil rhythm.<br />It hath gained mine.WAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.com