DIVERSITY

The black one eyed dog

looked to its tail

and never saw the car that hit it.

The white one trick pony

broke its leg

and never saw the bullet that replaced misery.

Oh the bitter pointless rage

of them who never see a future

different from an insane past.

11-22-09

LOOKING BEYOND YESTERDAY

Tomorrow is the last one.

There are no more after it.

Never has there been another tomorrow except the one.

Odd isn’t it, that with so many today’s

stretching in a line of ten multiplied to the tenth millennium

from then ‘til now, how there has ever only been one tomorrow?

You can have my tomorrow

if you think you can stack it with yours

and make another beyond the next.

I can’t care for time that has not arrived yet.

There is work to be done today.

Today, the only place my hands exist.

11-22-09

FIFTH GEAR AND ROLLING ALONG

I SLEEP

Touch me softly,
hold me in my sleep,
turn my dreams to sighs of pleasure
as I once again plunge away
from day to deep.

11-21-09

WAL-MART JESUS

Wal-Mart Jesus

hung on a hook

in the auto department,

just below the anti-freeze shelf.

Patiently waits in bar coded

security enhanced

triple glued oyster packaging.

Plastic icon encased to prevent theft

and make him harder to get to.

(you have to work to get at the Wal-Mart Jesus.)

Wal-Mart Jesus knows in his plastic death throws

the price conscious people will liberate him

from the 24 hour lights that never go dim,

unlike them that purchase him.

He is a traveling Jesus after all.

Wal-Mart Jesus

started his journey’s call

to rear view mirror crucifixion

(or the optional sticky pad for the dashboard)

from Communist China,

where the lead filled colors just aren’t quite bright

but then for a $4.99 Wal-Mart Jesus,

 it’s a bargain, right?

Wal-Mart Jesus hates fags and liberals,

doesn’t think much of blacks, Puerto Ricans or Jews.

Nope Wal-Mart Jesus only loves the white people

stuck on their knees in pews

whose holy discount promise is

to always wear hob nailed shoes

as they kick the ass

of pro choice dudettes and dudes. 

Wal-Mart Jesus is well pleased when

Wal-Mart shoppers decry health care for all

even when they have none for themselves;

Wal-Mart Jesus loves his emergency room visits

which Wal-Mart Jesus needs after

Wal-Mart Jesus owners spew from drinking

drippings from their hate leaking shelves.

11-21-09

VERY EARLY RISING

THE BREATHING FREIGHT

With my wife asleep in the next room,
I listen to her breathe
and compare it to the lone freight horn
I hear quietly echoing in the distance.

I no longer dream of being in the cars
swaying on the rails to somewhere else.
Once I liked the lull of the sway
and the coldness of November in the north
as the countryside slipped by the slightly cracked door.

Now though fond of the files of memory
I am found comfortably fat and weaker
pounding words out instead of miles
and not in train yards playing the eluding game
with security men tough and testy
and me ready to be tested.

Listening to the lone freight horn
coming to me quietly from the distance
I compare it to my wife’s breathing in the next room.
I know only the method of transport has changed
but the journey goes on still.

11-20-09

LIVING LIFE WHERE YOU BELONG

You lay awake during the night

wishing the starless darkness

encased in plaster bored walls would soon end.

Dreams of youth and loving days gone by elude you,

there can not be, there is no sleep.

The silence shattered

only by the breathing abode

and the screams you can not make deafen you

as you quietly tearfully give in to your fears

until the light of another day

brings little solace or illumination,

only a bit of diminishing of the tears.

You wipe your mind and rise
to listlessly attend to the business of the sun.

Children need eat,

pets need pet,

spouse need kiss,

bills need paid,

work need done,

laundry need clean,

clean need laundry,

dinner need made,

talk need spoke,

sleep needs slept

and

you lay awake during the night

wishing the starless darkness

encased in plaster bored walls would soon end.

Dreams of youth and loving days gone by elude you,

there can not be, there is no sleep.

I sit and tap on these keys under the same sky

contained in spaces bordered by no walls

and I think upon you,

your fears flowing in tears down your tired beloved face.

I wonder if could you would you flee the night with me?

Would you place your foot on Polaris

and your eye across a galaxy filled sky and be stunned

at the smallness of we and the profitless troubles

of seeming endless dark nights full of trembling I’s?

What truly need we fear or have care over,

what constrains the heart of your soul so?

Death the greatest fear of fears will truly visit and go

free yourself from that concern

then you will the eternal discern and be now in that place,

the furthest reaches of your divinity bound forever to infinity.

Look outside, beyond your feet bound earth

into the cosmos beyond this ball of rock and dirt

there love,

is your hearts desire so long denied

your sight blinded by the useless fear fraught night.

We send our hearts together a roaming

over waves intoning our mutual attendance

to places long sought, not yet known by eye

but deeded to us by and by.

When we look to the starry space

we understand that is our true home place.

The earth bound cares though not to be ignored

are not your master, but you with infinities power

can own the demon bastards.

Sleep gently my love and be without affliction,

the things which so easily set upon you

are nothing but a bit a dust in your I,

darkness’ deception to ruin your perception

of where it is you truly live in that place

beyond the bounds of time and space.

11-20-09

SCULPTED SELF IMAGE

The pieta turned to stone

matching the ruthless heart of the country

overgrown in thistle and thorns.

The Madonna eternally weeps silent tears

with no words able to express

the love of a mother for her child.

No plea from her could stop

the transformation from life to rock.

She whispered in my dead ear

that I was love,

I could love and my love was softly tender.

I told her to turn the radio off;

love is a granite heart not a pop song idyll.

Her silent tear fell on my chest,

she knew there was nothing she could say

to change me back from stone to flesh.

11-19-09

CHANGE THE METAPHOR

The Garden of Eden died,
dried up in a drought of
thought and understanding.

Someone is always left behind,
ever trying to catch up.
Always seeing the pack ahead,
never gaining any ground.
life is a wearying, wearing
tiring trial of endurance.

Sometimes the runner falls
never to get up
and with others
the finish line
is their only victory.

It is time to change the metaphor…
life is not a race,
we are not rats running it.
We are not rodents ever scrambling
through an overcrowded maze
looking for ways
to not bump into walls
until we learn the path to the cheese,
and once the path falls
some one rearranges walls
barring the way to the prize,
forcing us to start all over again.

Life is a farm.
You’re the tiller of it,
growing crops in the dirt embedded
in scarred knuckles on calloused hands.
Not all soil is the same
not everywhere
is equal in sun or rain.
Still it is not body food growing
nor grain seeds sowing
where life’s cost is counted.

Every acre touches another,
not necessarily adjacent,
some tilled with vigor
some worked complacent.

There is the beauty of a flower deadly
and the edible fruit of a bramble;
one to harm seducing with elegant attraction
the other with no awe readily, openly, apparent.
feeding the soul by trying it, taking a gamble.

It is useless and worthless
to fear the storms
when you should rage alongside them,
never submitting to the winds within,
turning them out as you truly can,
forcing the power if them back to them
who sent a tempest to assail you,
weather from demon or man,
has no power over you
‘less you submit to the lies
sowed and growing inside you.

And once your own garden is well tended
do you think that the work is over, the labor ended?
When you see your neighbor struggling yet
still trying to grow a crop do you tractor over or
let your knowing of him drop?

Do you freely share from your abundance
or grudgingly bemoan giving with paltry reluctance?
What do we send to market
from our garden home?
How do we set the cost,
compared to the worth?
Think not now or anymore
upon a race but rather
how we all share this place,
how every bit o land is common upon the Earth.
Our singular demise is a collective downfall;
Our enlivening one by one becomes
a common, all for each,
each for all
winter, spring, summer, and fall.

11-18-09

This form of poetry

is called a didactic.

I am, I admit, a windbag.

YOU NEED NOT DIG YOUR OWN GRAVE

Dig a shallow grave and place your soul within it.

Cover up the all that you dream and languish,

hidden under every bit of dirt others place above it.

Fall into the plodding waking sleep and

despair of what you could have been

if only you could have escaped

from the darkness of this narrow world

and the ever delivered trouble of it.

Under the soil find the supposedly safe places

where no one longer looks for your mind

to defile the beauty held silently within it.

And when you have been neath the dirt

for a long, long bit of time

you may discover there is trouble ever found

just to attempt to rise again to be above it.

Soil is compacted and hardened

when you can’t stop the rolling machines

that assault your mind and all the goodness once found in it

followed by brigades of doubt treading willfully upon it.

Preferable for the soul at peril

and the spirit contained within the loving heart of it

to sharpen your shovel to a knife’s edge

using the rasping file of knowledge

and  determinedly slay your demons with it.

Considering that while you still breathe

the air of the earth and all that is upon it,

the silent strong warrior within you knows it be

better to die upon your feet above the sublunary

than lay quietly alive but dead beneath it.

11-17-09

EDGE OF A COIN

Take a coin and flip it,
land it on the narrow edge.
Balance everything
from everywhere
on that slender ledge.

Every war and every treaty,
every good and every bad,
every one who’s living still
and everyone who’s a’ready passed.

All precariously perched
upon the smallest point
waiting for the whisper of a breeze
or a slight table tremble slip.
It is the narrowest side
where all that was and is,
small and mighty, worst and best
balanced on the seemingly slim tip
steadied by the hand of God
holding us still and upright yet.



11-16-09

after a few hours sleep I found I really didn't like the last two lines
He is simply waiting for the end of mans
long present too resilient lack of eternal sight.
*shrug* they seemed discordant with the metered flow let's see if this works better.