Blue Mountain Blues: Winter Solstice Section 23

Night winds are wan-colored fast with their tied desires, tethered to the muted aspirations of the dead; pale-hued to their chants of regret and to their songs of remorse.

Blue Mountain Blues: Winter Solstice Section 22

Stunted-stilled dead stars, burned out remnants of once fiery suns, fierce in their past glory, shed no more for us any shining.  Remembered words, that were as liquid on live tongues, are dried-out scattered whispers now, are weighted down by our soft, fat, decadent age; for we are watchers in the dark sensing in dumb darkness a scuttling that in heavy silence moves.

Blue Mountain Blues: Winter Solstice Section 21

That which for them shall serve for a futile contradiction is for us a simple confirmation, swallowing the sickly light twining this dank darkness of our lives; neither a moon nor a sun, but a doubled-system of crimson stars.

Blue Mountain Blues: Winter Solstice Section 20

For our reality is a worm-wave, wriggling towards a yellow existence; desiring for recognition, for a final red redemption: a string aspiring between the nothing that is and the stated identity that it's become; ghost that's disclosing false stasis within Nature, hologram of That-Which-Is. 

Blue Mountain Blues: Winter Solstice Section 19

The voice of death has a cutting cleanness to it, a sharp edged shaping of dialog in its commentary on life. Slicing deep and dark spoken knifed from  tongue of an old nostalgia's palest fire, it brings with it a remembrance of the days of thunder; of those nights flamed from the lightnings of desire. 

Blue Mountain Blues: Winter Solstice Section 18

Night is so cold that it shivers with a bitterness. Night becomes brittle broken dark; for hard rains are a-coming down, stinging wet songs on evening dreamers, giving souls ghostly kiss upon their beckoning lips. 

Blue Mountain Blues: Winter Solstice Section 17

From the tenor of hope to the baritone of dread, the thin cello thread of life is severed in two; each part curled into itself, separated, to be drawn up in a parched and dried up fear.

Blue Mountain Blues: Winter Solstice Section 16

Pretense of sound, a cunning deception of direction, enters into the space of the ear, invades the brain and sets the mind afire with its sad story, its ancient histories of evangelism; the mistakes and the regrets of the dead.

Blue Mountain Blues: Winter Solstice Section 15

Bared bars, the prisms of the transit to eternity, black glow of tongues in their white mouths, the pale spirits of the dead are talking.  They are speaking in fire.  They say: A deafness pervades this world, a lacking of that comprehension so necessary for survival. It makes for a turning of those of us, those who are now still alive, of our heads, of our heads being twisted away from the truth. "It's a sad religion that would ever seek to censor love." Yes for it's that they are saying; for it's just this flame of truth they're all conveying.

Blue Mountain Blues: Winter Solstice Section 14

Conversations among the dead slip smothered talk inside their shrouds of swaying grayness, gasping guttered chains of light from toothless mouths, their throttled throats filled with stifled tenderness.

Blue Mountain Blues: Winter solstice Section 13

A trembling awe follows upon the falling of snow, the tears from drunken ghosts; torrents of white in moonlight glistening, ribbons of flannel falling.

Blue Mountain Blues: Winter Solstice Section 12

A rustling high above is come; heard hurricane of days, storm-danced trees sway slender tops, in a syncopated violence, to slant their canopies; and, as by so, to soft catch and to tender counter, those harden throws of winds.

Blue Mountain Blues: Winter Solstice Section 11

This is us.  This is us on our dark journey into the caldera of the soul. Obdurate the light.  Stifle it in sighs.  Let it die while you're walking through this wicked world to burn away in your despair. 

Blue Mountain Blues: Winter Solstice Section 10

Sweating upon the rent of life, of the rank chants coming up from the damp earth; when these hard times that have come again rain down.

Blue Mountain Blues: Winter Solstice Section 9

A slip, a slide, and then a succumbing stumble in the scree; regaining feet upon the path upwards, on upwards, towards the peak of Blue Mountain. 

Blue Mountain Blues: Winter Solstice Section 8

I'm just a visitor here, a temporary transient, and soon I shall be leaving this place of dreams.

Blue Mountain Blues: Winter Solstice Section 7

No man can be happy if he should chose to be an exile from his own nature and soul; for all that is, is thought illuminating Being. 

Blue Mountain Blues: Winter Solstice Section 6

In this day's grayness, the rain has turned to a snow that's falling lightly, lightly falling down; a sea-foam of whiteness, falling in still air, down.

Blue Mountain Blues: Winter Solstice Section 5

A winter's sun, turned blue in a gray sky, gives little light and no warmth at all, in this short day of the solstice.  It bears itself small in the skies, and far away distancing itself from what's below.   And then lightly, ever so lightly, the rain began to fall.

Blue Mountain Blues: Winter Solstice Section 5

On it goes on it goes the crying and the moaning and so it goes with them, these the dead ones, on and on it goes; these zombies, talking dead.

Blue Mountain Blues: Winter Solstice Section 4

"Death is the long insomnia of life sustained forever.  A place of dissonance and no desire."  He moaned.  As did all those others in chorus, those who had been deleted from existence.  


I'm thinking this is no good for me I've got to get out of here I can't move listening to them I have got to move I've got to get on get out get on out.

Blue Mountain Blues: Winter Solstice Section 3

Recalled to life I know nothing of it's advantage. It seems a wearisome thing now, said one of the dead. Nothing there gave me sustenance when I was alive. It seemed all of it to be but an aching of the heart at best. Nothing was changed by my life and I learned nothing from having lived. A waste and a sorrow was my life with nothing to be shown from it; neither the good, nor the bad. Life was an emptiness awaiting death, and now that I am dead, that emptiness remains forever. Life wore me away; here I stand absent even life.

Blue Mountain Blues: Winter Solstice Section 2

"Fair traveler from far away, you who are as yet still living, what you see in us shades is the sad remainder of ourselves, depleted and diseased, and not our original alive inception.  We are they who elected to stay to instruct those still living."

Blue Mountain Blues: Winter Solstice Section 1

Ghost or is it just this mist?  From a shaking light descended, a cloud so close it speaks in crawling whispers on the low-cut foot-paths that gradual rise into the sun-lit spaces at the blue mountain's top; those shapes move inside it in sudden gusts within the deepest gullies. A slow passage of the dead, who are green-lit in their gray garments. Merge then into that fog to listen close enough to hear their conversations. For the dead are seeking opportunity to argue with the living. What is it that they say? They that insist. They that walk so stiffly soft in dark woods, while the dew still nests crisply in the dank grasses, wearing their suits of shrouds, wearing their burial gowns, in the colors of ashes.

Voices

Voices from no observed direction, whispers hung ambient in the air;
Jar of conversations, each competing for separate space to be heard.


There is something about bridges, spanning over rivers of discourse;
Translations connect ancient cultures under-flowing beneath arches.

Four Of The Clock

Four of the clock in the morning. I haven't been able to sleep as of yet.
Damp is the night air. Here I'll lay awake, awaiting for some change to
Come in rising of the morning sun. There's no design to dark evenings.
What is made for sleep became a time for worry; for fear for the dawn.

Parted

A parting of the ways, a detour into the unknown, a fork in the road; which
Way to go?  I'll not be attending you no more. There's no solace in science.


Gathering dust in the attic of the soul is the old assurance and the remedy
For hurt; for time's fast passing, for that country where we're all heading.


I am no more.  Never was you know; didn't know it then, but know it now.
Something better replaced me, something eternal; I'm all the better for it.

Tick-Tock

Drum-flam of the heart. The tick-tock of the body's clock leaks out of time.
Chatter of cell destruction; the miracle of its clockwork paused and stilled.


Stim-shocked back to life, its two-tone beat picks up its rime and rhythm.

Reflected

Reflected in the clear milk glass, were shown a fire-dream of black flames,
From yet another frame, another universe as reversed from this curvature;
While inside the glass, when looking out at this world, all flames are white.

Star-Light Simple

Covered, hidden by moon-light, behind a bright blanket of night-clouds;
Just by being there always available, standing in sky; star-light simple:
Winks.

Rain

There's a smiling dampness in the air.  It feels like a laughing rain.
Coming in. It's maybe too late to help us now. But coming anyway.


Dry inside, shriveled, no moisture left to generate new beginning; 
Striated and stripped, on an empty horizon, a dead tree standing.

Hungry Wind

It's a hungry wind that's been blowing outside my window tonight.
Eating at that pane; pinging, gnawing at the pane with sharp teeth.
Cold orison of biting longing, serrated sharp; wreckage in the dark.

Fox

A smoke of movement in the grass, of no hue at all, suddenly ignites.
Flashes.  O.  It's a fox.

A Neon Life

It's a neon life we've got; a flashing, stuttering interval of sputtering time;
Splash of light, stop of black, then splash of light again, gaudy and sordid.

Maybe

As easy as that you say.  Well.  Maybe.  It's just a gray world here.
Shadows slide against stone walls; invisible, phantoms in the dark.
Some force frees, generates alive the ghosts; some field of energy.
Something outside of us and in us; don't know what it is: It's there.

Mask

Spirit in the flesh, disguises so clever and so subtle, hide fierce nature; its
Destruct ferocity.
The world becomes renewed, reborn, with every infusion of new blood; in
Redemption war.

Aspiration

An aspiration of the breath has kept me here alive. Kept me free of death.
The slow inhalation, a double breath inhaled inside, fills the lungs with air.
First see gold on first breath. See blue on the second. Inhale. Inhale again.
The exhalation is slower than the inhalation; when it's being done, see red.
This is the ancient way of our training. Learn it. Live long:  Gold. Blue. Red.

Perspective

Issued from a photograph, pushed out from an unfocused parallax of view,
The wounded point of what's pictured, what is stated there; kept silenced,
in background, is an accusation, an admonishment; issued from the bright
Fires of faces who were once alive: The dead speak in faded photographs.

Patience

A stolen patience, a forged persistence, is the feigned virtue of any artist:
Was ever artisan born who would not hold his art; not hurry his creation?
Barely begun, we live in an unfinished world, waiting for its furnishings.

Hand

Tender and so soft, best sensitivity of the flesh is expressed in the hand;
In the fine discrimination of its fingers curled, one by one, to make a fist.

Sense

The sense of the absolute subsists within the smallest and strangest place;
In the largest too, within the wildest prairies and the widest deepest seas.
Clasped in cusp of thought, the chalice of the will contains the wine of life;
Rovers to the stars, nothing keeps us from our destiny, but hesitation fear.

Barricades

Born in blood, barricades are smashed out becoming bleeding revolutions.


Broken bars release a snarling beast raging through the streets unleashed.

Many Worlds

Visibility denied, a fading away from line of sight gliding down a desert
Highway in a blue electric light.  There's a better travelling in the night,
A better matching of machine in the long evening into the yellow dawn.
Hum and blur; in many worlds in the west of America, it's a leather life.

Reason

Explain nothing. Give to action no excuse nor any reason. But just commit
No matter the wait no matter the delay. There's no education in the nation.
Expect no answers, no solutions; except those arising from the Self inside.


Crackle and hiss, an old recording play, still stuck in a grove of patriotism;
Stuck in a repetition a siren call of sacrifice, of success of sovereign State,
Demanding an allegiance to a country that supports only an oligarchic few


Who've bequeath to us but blood and dust, yet they'll expect of us an oath;
Obligation to defend their property even when we've been dispossessed of
Our own heritage. Forswear oaths that protect the psychopaths of finance.

Salute

Breakers of bones, we salute you. You, who patrol the forced barricades
Against compassion. The folly of any nation is shown, and is mimed; it is
Best illustrated by they who police, by those referees who law its games.


Those that seek a permission for their lives need some excuse for living,
Desire hierarchy.  So they'll dress in uniform to state their relative rank.
Their clothes make them and not their character. They disguise as men.


You judges in your courts of law, presume and dare in your black-robed
Majesty, to state the case for the prescribing of our lives. You laid down
Sentences which close and confine to a small, tiny, pitch our field of life.  

Canoe

The sea, the sky, the seizure of waters trembling in a rippled wake,
In this slippery silence, in the sudden waking river's morning mist,
Canoe a-heading home smooth sliding ashore; to dock in the dawn.

Mice

Mice eating the grain of conscience are these preachers, these politicians;
Thin-lipped men, who grant a smirk to others, while pocketing their credit.


Poachers and pederasts, they lecture and they'll advise, but have no skill;
Only of poison they serve in their schools and chapels of abject servitude.

Conundrum

Concerning ourself with the greater questions, with the ancient problems;
Not in an expectation of solving them but to make ever new riddle of them:
A restatement of existence.  That's science and that's the real religion too.

Titanic

A frenzied citizenry is caught in a sinking State. The stumble of this fiscal
Storm that's rushing down upon our head topples any remaining morality,
Making for grey men in a grey ship, who will sell themselves for security.
Tearing seams, sabotage occurs, then denial; resulting in rejecting reality.

Weary

The weary fraud that became this world shimmers in hesitant beauty.
Smoke flows and falls from fires in cold November, tracks the ground,
And never rises higher.  There is never a leaping upward of the flame.

Birch

Slender, the silver bark of birch branches,
Wet-stained to brown-black; peels away,
Shows white; to betray its pale beneath.

Fair Reason Fails

Fair reason fails.  There is no logic in this world, no nether foundation;
Nothing underneath to hold the frail structure up to prevent its failure;
An absence only, a void shadow filled with gray, dumb to say its name.

Slow-Dance

It's slow-dance stagger of jazz of trumpet and trombone.  It's moonlight
Blooming out of saxophone.  It's sparked tamping fingers on piano keys;
Making a music.

The Un-Named

Something so obvious, so superfluous, that it need not ever be stated; it's
Concealed in the strange delusion of normality, in commonality of what is.


In the mood, darling period of delight, separate from commerce of the day
Beyond the sea-storm of money and of debt, squeezed fit to be measured,
Confined in suit of worth; distant lands lie beneath different colored suns:


Worlds un-named as yet.

A Contact Life

The fine print of contract has grounded out the course of commerce; has
Made of communication an obscene conversation, but a poem is a phone
Call dialed direct to your heart.  Answer its ring.  Make of it a contact life.

New Lands

It has the worst of it, the anger and the agony, the anguish of discovery;
An argument sitting in the stomach of humanity is this religion and faith,
That shapes men into a race of sleepwalkers, terrified of demon dreams.


Great and restless minds are final stilled by the stasis of fatal indecision;
Stalled within slow space, jailed in cell between an ambition and despair,
That keeps them bound by chains of conformity, from taking foot outside.


The choking yell of conscience maintains its grip upon the throat of talent.
Small imagination smothers aspiration and tethers fast the reins of society,
That yoke back youth from embarkations; from their destined explorations,


Of new lands.

Baroque

Harpsichord and harp, strung horizontal and vertical, make for soft music;
A plucking sound, careful and considerate; none too loud for conversation.
A cleanness and precision, an exactness in the tempo, not too fast or slow;
Within a music that has nothing of regret only hope realized in each chord.

That

An almost named thing, slipped from the tongue, receding into distance:
Yes. That!  Used to have answers.  Don't have any anymore.  Gone away.


Gone away from me.  They don't listen.  They got them something to say.


Fat men talking of sports they could never play, knowing nothing of skill;
A tired people, speaking of tiresome events, over and over, looped again.

Quark Inquiry

Curved small into a tight cocoon of energy, crunched tiny close by gravity,
Its nucleus stripped of its garment of planet electrons, in greatest tension
Within the smallest arc; a quark sits, awaiting its fate; does it exist or not?


Do I?  Do you?

Miasma

Vents deep beneath seas spew forth hot black magma to form new lands;
The island nations were made, created congealed by thick hardened lava.


This is how we too are made; the crusts of old desires subsiding and new
Volcanoes uplifted giving forth new desire to smooth cracks in our hearts. 

Growl

Growl it out; those empty words, from creeds and constitutions;
From the hollow pledges of allegiances to nations and religions.
From the pretentious rhetoric of politicians and of bureaucrats.


Growl it out and stamp it out.

Proxy

An avatar death done in internet way, is gamed for return, for a
Resurrection, for redemption, a rebirth right back to pseudo lie;
So like religion, the player becomes but sad simulacrum for life.

Allies

The habit of danger fashions the trench-coat and cloak of war.
Daily enmities and fights give rise to lengthy feuds and hatreds,
Which, whenever are en-kindled, ignite genocides in tomorrows.
There lives a little holocaust sitting inside us ready to be flamed.
Small sleights engorge to grow; become allies that tumor death.

Out!

Gestured safe or gestured out, the call is yet still
The same. As if one had never played this game.


Bench warmers, judged not able to steal a base;
Not able even to sacrifice to bunt a player home,
Just member of that roster never rotated to bat.


From the start, passed picked to play on a team.

Smile

Tinged softly to green age, her eyes of copper upon this harbor gaze;
Darkness shrunk below these waters carries smudge of soot so near;
Her somber smile frowns in stifling grimace from ten thousand tears;
Acrid, bitter, sour stench of burning flesh fills billowing skies of Fall;
Her torch is stuttering in bigger flames of torch-lit towers of the City.

Tap-Dance

Roiling clouds of feet pounding on wooden decks to hornpipe of the heart;
To skeins of stories sold on rooftops and on fire-escapes of this here City;
To the rock and rolling of slats from shifting grates under pounding boots,
On the streets; on the streets; yeah, on these streets, streets of New York.

Chess

They play with the lives of men like counters upon a board of chess.
Howl hurricanes of storm. Small ships of state are tossed upon seas.
Politicians are deliberating nonsense while the world tumbles to war.


Blue bonnets, their blossoms waving in the breezes of vast prairies,
Show ripples of remembrance, swaying leaning from passing winds,
Stretching forever, grasses of such green the eyes water with them.


What does it matter what these slick-trousered, shiny-bottomed men
Deliberate upon?  Soil will soon forget the inane deliberation of them.
Flowers shall feast upon the bones, fertilizer made from bureaucrats.


Tired of them; tired of dispositions of dilettantes who perjured them! 

Skin

Skin and the shiver upon it, stretching sensations into stunned silences;
There is much in the fingering upon a fiddle, from an E string to A string,
That gives a mournful salute and fond farewell, a satisfaction to ending:
A sweetness is intensified and a savagery slumbered by the art of song. 

Black Waters

Sounds of a stretched saturation, songs of despair; softens the mornings; quiets the evenings, with those sprays, from their never-ending plunges, plangent to the end, cuticle of streams eating at the sands' black waters.


Torn heart, throw down in your well of tears to drown in black waters.
Drowning in black waters. No one to dance with anymore. Drowned in
Black Waters.
Black waters, they be for drowning me, drowning me, in black waters.


Waves of trouble descend in murky trembling one down upon another.
Drowning in black waters. No monies in my pants pockets. Drowned in
Black Waters.
Black waters, they be for drowning me, drowning me, in black waters.


Long time traveler on the moon-tides, of the surging crests of breakers, of their spumed shaking blasts onto beaches; I am the top of the wave; I am surfer of oceans and rivers: Still-standing pile in the swirl of black waters. 

October Skies

October skies spurn the soft sighs of Summer's solicitations.
Settle down and shelter in your stiff parkas of forgetfulness.
A storm is coming. It is coming fast upon us from the South.
Sleep the deep sleep of hibernation. Spring will come again.

Derivative

Derided and despised, every revolution originates in a resentment,
A frown and a displeasure.  Contentment doesn't build barricades.


The shape of the thing unformed shall exist prior to its beginning;
Almost as a separate thing, a shadow of that self still yet to come.


Peoples of the old countries have made loud refusals to their states:
No taxes for less services; a wonder here they've not done the same.


Their silence means an animosity is forming, a surly discontent which
Shall sourly build; surely rise in insurrection, with secession its result.


States that become threats, not helps to the people, ought be replaced.

Bingo

Bingo is a secret numerology of Torah calling forth numerals and letters.
Calling of the places on the cards has as much validity and as much art
As do surahs and verses of sacred text and shares as much a certainty.
Brown bread and butter and bitter beer has more sustenance and solace.
Holiness isn't found in deluded books, but in your heart there's a divinity.

Agony of Air

Not knowing is the cruelest thing. Worse can be faced.
Nothing there; just empty box of sun contains the soul,
But not even the sky could hold the heart's expansion.


Beneath every laugh lies a grimace and complaint, an
Aggression.  A world of smiles hides a world of hurts:
Mouth set and still. Throat holding in an agony of air.


No reply may be made.  Smirk lead to silence forever.

Leverage

Debt is a dagger, a stiletto poised to stab, and pierce the soul;
A long gamble on deflation and shorted bet against the future.
A demon is this debt, ensnaring populace in anxiety and doubt.


Leverage states shall employ to stifle liberties from their peoples
Is to sit the stone of sovereign debt on them, till no breath is left.

Schools

Serfs taught by serfs, these are the teachers of our schools;
Scoundrels tutoring scoundrels, to be servants of the State.
Each day that's spent in school in learning not to learn robs
The young of their vitality and steals their youth from them;
Makes them compliant to adult belief, and stifles creativity:
Colleges for dunces churning out more dunces in the world.

Saturday Night

No money left and anyway no one to spend it on;
Another Saturday, Saturday night. Smooth-soft,
Sapphire and salmon-pink light over dark alleys
Toss amber down to make there double shadow;
Sat is the shark-night here on this street of souls.

Numbers

Tangled numbers, compressed in themselves, burst forth
From their imprisonments to parse equations; statements
For the propositions of a possibility of worlds yet to come.


The numbers come before the worlds to make the worlds,
And the worlds come before me and the worlds made me,
Sum and total of all their making; but what have I made?

Wit

Small wit encased in narrow skulls have these priests and clerics,
Monks and rabbis too; add to them those teachers and professors,
Lawyers and the judges, and all these politicians too; nothing but:
Imams of Banality.

Wild

The studied vine tardy seems to born the wild grape.

Fear

In this land, a foul wind is blowing fierce, a hurricane of fear.
Companioning the stinking gale comes flashflood of paranoia;
Closing houses' shuttered windows, drawn blind to the world.
This is the New Order. It's crept upon us, assassin in the dark.

Citizen

We have no voice over them; no speech to stay our disgust at politicians.
Just
Remember
The problems with them began so long ago in the fumbling beginning of
This
State;


In Constitution fawned upon so much it's become seditious desiccation, a
Casket
Corpse;
There is shown a hatred of tyrannous states and faiths rebelled against, a
Stated
Wrath.  

After

This light that bleaches the clouds of noon of color
Scours deeply inside; decayed angels of the white
Speech of lightning, conveying voice to the blood:


After.  Yes.  Yes.  Yes.

Blue Vespers

As boxers hammer blows upon those bruises already made,
Summer's sadness was hard shown by the hallowed moon's
Blue vespers' chant; its sharp pinching blight of twilight into night.


Short miseries make for long stories by such; those stretched tellings of That Moon.
In these terrors of the night, skies bleed there the bright blood of stars.

Costume

Perhaps once; well now, it was some time ago, this sad world
Presented itself as new; and I, myself, yes, was once new too.
New dress can't hide old face. Summer shows her Winter too.

The Hurricane Season

Everything that bends, bows in.  Like a pulled-back bow,
With the re-curved shrug of shoulders, the world can be
Dismissed; let go entirely, ignored, as its string is spent;
An arrow of time hurled to future, leaving us left behind,


In this Season of the Hurricane. 

Example

Some small semblance of lived art was illustrated here,
Each sentence acting as a semaphore for greater truth,
A pointing of the way hinting at an emergence to come,
In contrast to life ending as example of how not to live;
For skin has eye to see and its sight is an original right.

Cornice

A shadow space of emptiness behind, the cornice
Keeps a bust within its corner of the dark: A face,
Familiar and concealed, set in a determined gaze;
I know not who it is nor even why it stares out so.

Naked

Bare your heart into a nudity; severance of public pose,
A disrobing of your soul, so what you are is same to all.

Strung

Sunder and forever sever the strings of love.  Go: Savage them.
Small epiphanies come unbidden; arrive sudden, unannounced.
Anger the sorrows of the soul, so to make them out loud shout.


The catch and clasp of lust's compulsion, broken now at last;
In smile and with farewell wave to former capture of desire,
Your strung harp of passion, place aside.  Untune the heart.

Drum

Blast this scarred rock, and scrub it phosphorous white;
So, it seems to shine, by a glow that pulses from inside.


This rock, this small arc of aorta, smacks a beat, a pause;
Then becomes drummed again by serum passing through.


Smooth passage, the cleansed artery, bends the blood;
Guides it through all the locks and levels of the heart,


With every pulse, with every drum-spasmodic thump,
To wash life through each portico of organ and of limb.

Dogs

They scent us by the smells of our tongue, by our
Speech; four-legged and fierce in inquisitiveness.


That bitch-bureaucracy of tenured hacks forcing
A curriculum imposed upon the young of simple
Subjects, easy courses; that have no reflection,
No bearing, upon reality and which convey skills
Not needed, nor appreciated, in the workplaces
Of today; no skills necessary for pupils' survival.


These teachers and these professors, are dogs;
Are slaves to the leash and to the reins of their
Faculty master, lecture of life they know nothing
Of; that they are not acquainted with, and have
No experience of, and poison the minds of their
Students in deluded, preposterous propositions.


They leave behind them a devastation; long debt
To be repaid by jobless graduates. And this, this,
These dogs have an audacity to bark and declare
As a public education; when all they've imparted
Is dead language, a swollen tongue of nonsense
And meaningless syllabication; speech of howls.


For the youth, such education is imprisonment;
That jail that keeps them from their play of joy.

Foam

The blare-smacking white foam tops of the waves
Barrels into beaches, smashing sand from its way;
Heavy tread of sodden feet of water tripping over. 


With every wave, some reverie is brought to ruin;
Deluged by a suddenness of an unexpected spray
Of regret, that hangs over the present and bursts;


Smearing the small quiets of a mild summer's day
With intensities of images and sounds, broken and
Distorted; glistening spectacle, in spumes of spite.

Hurricane

Wine-reds and stout-blacks, rivers of blood run
Through the vast infinity of desire and of space;
Making hurricane of sentience and immortality.


A still, soft summer's night holds many a story of stars;
A fascination of bright ribbons of delight floating above,
Strung pearls of brilliance shining there in silver strand.


They who seek a crutch of faith, who lean upon beliefs,
Might pause to gaze above, astonished at what they see;
Currents in heavens, that cause tornadoes of the heart.

History

A telling of it is the making of it to form a history;
To create replacement for sweat (stink of reality),
That fell into silence, not to be recounted nor told.


The park-bench bound traveler sprawled dying;
Destitute upon the green hickory slats of wood,
Hobo to death, drink-dried of surfeit of alcohol,
Was common sight in that day, known to many.


Such sights; served my youth, my adolescence.

Wind

A tumble of the wind tears branches from trees, 
To swing and sway their twigs and silver leaves.


Midnight upon the waters and a moon in the sky;
Mirror to the mind, this sky reflecting sea makes
A melody: Tell me if you feel forgotten.  Tell me
If you feel alone. The stirring of the seas sends
Ripples to shore, long arcs of waves of memory;
Of terrible imagining, tripping over sand-dunes.


Then, after suppuration, slides out again to sea.

Days of Presence

Stretch yesterdays to erase tomorrow to shorten
Sorrow: Struggle to express contraction of days.


The thoughts of today obliterate the past. Should
Give to future some hope of a goal and a destiny,
Without regrets, in days of presence and delight.

A Thunder Upon the Hudson

Old pilings poke their ways to air through water,
Submerged, thrown away and abandoned; were
Proved all in vain, succumbed by seasonal tides:


Weathered gray piling poking to heaven. Then, a heavy rain;
The lightning spikes. Left under a thunder upon the Hudson:
Pier.

At the Terminal Bar

Lingering there, lingering there, at the terminal bar,
Lemon light and scarlet shadow, flair and form again;
Marry light with shadow on floors at the terminal bar.


Dancing in their solitude at the terminal bar.


Angels of the morning, turning to the rough
Religion of the night, dancing in that dream
That doesn't seem a dream at the terminal bar.


Dancing in their solitude at the terminal bar.


Layers of light shimmer there in smoke scented air
In the soft stillness of the night, at the terminal bar;
Shaken from the stun of sound from sax and drum.


And them dancing there, all clad in their sad solitude,
At the terminal bar.


Falling, fading, lights smoothing out the rubber
Faces of the dancers; dancing there, in their
Crimson-Yellow visions, all alone at the terminal bar.


Dancing in their solitude at the terminal bar.

Breeze

Long coolness-es prolong these late afternoons,
Giving yellow light to make mellow of evenings;
A softness and a song of the mists of memories.


What seemed but newly formed in blue mornings,
Love that spun to form a turning axle of the world
In a golden dawn, when we had nothing but time,
Our pockets empty, 'cept for talent and ambition;


They talk of it and they speak of it but they know
Nothing of it: The cause that carries us forward;
The breeze that sweeps into whirlwind of power.

Heat

The gabardine of sorrows was worn and frayed;
What shade there is was narrow and was spare,
Pruned to give solace in shadow of gray somber.


High window and a burning sill let a still light in;
Mote-filled spotlight falls an oblong on the floor,
Spilled there in twisting shaft of obscene white.


Under this heat men die beneath the same sun.

City-Scape

Clouds, dirty and blue, preview coming storms.


With hook on block high upon wide shoulders,
We have made of ourselves stevedores of art.


Raw egg and stout is good breakfast for the City,
Down with fifth of whiskey on a table for guests.


The romance of a yellow warming of the sun
On brick walls resounds strains in the street.


Rain comes unexpectantly and unannounced. 


A small pattering of drops smooths the heat
To smoke the pavements in hisses of steam.  


Life at best is but the briefest of enchantments,
Spaces filled between the cradle and the grave;


Empty of all reason, and savage within its boast
Of meaning and its many religions of conformity.


A hard rain washes away all traces of our sins.

Acquaintances

No more tomorrows; that time has past.
I'm become acquainted with the wind.
Wind has made acquaintance with me.


This is nation for passage of strangers,
Of nodding heads and no word spoken,
Of the sideways glance and the snicker:


The white wine of indifference is served
Cold and chill.

Red upon the Green

Crimson shadows creep across the face
Of an emerald sun, red upon the green,
As the apricot sky floats copper clouds
To sail over a planet of silver and gold:


Invasion!

Mimesis

It has shown itself to be of something else,
Other form entirely; of that spectral music
Of the long expectancy come home at last.


The past is forever denied to us, a foreign
Land; that strange country alive in regret,
But sweetened as it is by passage of time.


Soft thoughts pervade on a summer's day
To give shrewd promise of high tomorrow;
Hot breeze, forcing a mimesis of memory:


Of new hope.

Twi-Lights

Summer wore her white moon glow
With a simple woven gown of night;
Sweat of dreams encased in pearls:
Twi-Lights.

Midnight Face

A sculptured cruelty carved in stone,
Midnight face, a darkening severity,
With storms creased upon its brow;
Somber in its death mask of repose:


Lincoln.