....From The Tree Of........................Isolation & Thought
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_______________________________________________________ What We Are And How We Got Here Deucalion and Pyrrha climbed up Mt. Parnassus, raced ahead of flood waters. Old Jupiter and Neptune, hotter than coals, sick of all the nonsense, decided to drown the lot but stopped dead on those two lovers who danced with water at their toes, laughed at churned sky. After Parnassus, no where to go but float like fish, sideways in a brackish bowl, their hearts a consternation to gods who could not penetrate their full, skiddadded joy laughing, high as it could. In order to study them, the gods drew water back into their own confabulation; told them to re sow the earth with 'bones of their mother'. Stones, they kissed and tossed, never looked behind them, over shoulder pitched and here we are: shapes of love and loss. Stones with throats crying out for God, rolling toward each other, try to shake a leg, but skud back to the bottom. Climb the mountain, mindful always: Wait for flood... Pay Up Someday it'll happen. I'll be drying a dish or talking on the phone and this old black bitch will be on me, bitch of god's, to take me, she'll be comin round the mountain at a hundred and frigging ten, taking a curve in the middle right out the back of my life like straw through a potato, ever try that trick? Behind the wheel today, sixty five miles an hour hurling back at me ten inches to the left, I got a glimpse. Her smile the coldest thing you'll ever see the heavy dumbell drop on shoulders, something pulled the picture tube a dot is all I got for half a sec; don't kid yourself. She sees you when you're sleeping. So does He. Only One Just another poem about Death and somebody saying, 'No!'- and I wonder if all the poems in the whole world aren't about just that? The Secret You think your arms hold all of me so close, we melt. You wonder at my smallest smile, below the eyes that twinkle, twinkle drinking in the world. I smile because the smallest, sharpest piece I've kept, and always just a hair's breadth from a vein. I don't know how to tell you it's the only way I breathe. Call it a cigarette left burning, a heavy-footed drive or it's a door unlocked, a coffee pot left on, some pipeline ready to blow- the feeling of a bubble here at base of brain that's always saying hey, c'mon let's go that's how I stop and stay, and see, I've scared you- but not half as hard as it's been scaring me. Don't Blink Sunday nights are the same everywhere I imagine. Dread. Off-balance edgy hems of ragged thoughts about how your life isn't yours, how tomorrow you will rise to see a sun that doesn't feel like it belongs to you- and sit in a car that's paid for by performing this senseless ritual over and over and how for a few moments only that one perfect cloud will look like Italy in a sky of that particular azure -then it's gone. Burnt Feet Out in the desert of Nevada, out where there is no space between the land and sun, where sun is just six inches from each face, droves of cast off cells, the sloughing off Chagall nightmares ripple in the heat, the very fringes of our DNA, where all the libidinous, crusty stuff accumulates- it's there like ringworm burning. Burning Man, walking coals he shouldn't have even lit. Odds & enDs There's something about a couplet strikes me as "precious" preten tious, too lean and and perfect. Give me snaggletoothed lines anytime. They have the look of really smiling, talking: broken bottle edged smiles, and unfinished sweaters with the rows coming undone. Someone show me how Em O tioN s are .....ever or.......ly? ...der And if poetry does not feel like living tissue straining out its juice in mismatched jelly glasses, how real could it be, and if not real, then tell me sire ......................-why write? Why not just wire? I Know Some writers have a facility to reach inside the reeking, secret parts of you and draw out all the pus, cum, hurt- whatever flows, and it's ridiculous to think that they just know this: you've been talking. They've been studying you so carefully. Every Approach Save One We've been a wassailing, a-maying, a helluva lotta nay-saying. We've been through it with every spin of the ball and yet I'll bet the big one still will take our breath away and don't that just beat all. Fuzzy At The Edges Pushing through glue, thick viscosity of morning after not enough sleep; my limbs are logs. My brain, a fog of broken images, like a pretty plate thrown to the floor, smashed atoms of fractured thought and at my feet the zigzag cuts of roses; in my mind, the ruined connections of last night's dreams, where warped ...............records played on hand-cranked phonographs: Rudy Vallee's rah-rah in a raccoon coat. I mope because I am so very underslept, swept up in the traffic of a new day; not prepared to meet it on its own terms, but on mine. Here's to the new sun; careful you don't ................trip on it it's sharp, and these new feet are soft, the mind is soft and laps around this day like waves or moth wings flapping flapping. On To Page 21 .............. Return To Contents This site sponsered by 
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