Mr. White

Is known not to answer his phone

By the few who know him,

Or his doorbell even if he’s at home.

And he wears a ballcap with the brim

Pulled down over his brow,

Even at Easter Lunch

Which my grandmother mentions when he isn’t around,

That she’s got a hunch.

A couple of old trees spent some decades

Growing out a head of hair, brows and beard;

Shield Mr. White’s home from sunlight.

But not from humidity

On particularly warm and muggy days;

When the sky is darkened by the swell of rainfall

In the rare and beautiful moments just before it falls.

The walls of the stout one-story

Have grown thicker and more rigid with time.

The door closed for so long it is jammed shut.

And the windows remain dark and cold

As a set of corpses eyes

Even when Mr. White is home.

Yet, he makes a fine addition to the dinner table,

Though not particularly interesting at all.

My Father’s Keeper

I sat at the dinner table with the family,

And that charming young man he

Spoke about his life

He set a twinkle to dull eyes.

That gun existed only in the ground

At that point before polymer plastics or steel.

In school we waited,

And could not talk.

The teacher was a gummy stalk of a woman;

With breath baited often a sadist of some sort,

We could not speak or cohort.

But we did anyway and around that time,

The gun was built. Or perhaps only it’s

Cousins, brothers and sisters; not the one exactly,

On assembly lines, somewhere.

A young man had owned it,

And let his friends and the girls hold it.

He cleaned it regularly and methodically;

He carried it haughtily in the car and actually

Only shot it once or twice.

Once out the window in the country,

Just to hear it go bang and bang

Like his heartbeat and the clang of his teeth.

He carried it in his mind twirled in a crimson veil of romance.

Gently sheltered from reality.

Until he was arrested and needed money,

So his bestfriends took it from him

For only a two hundred, he looked

So bummy and distressed;

His friends thought that he might kill himself.

In a matter of weeks, fate did the rest,

The soonest gone, always the best

Among the living, few good men left;

But that gun had stood the test.

It spent some days at the range,

Spent shells were paid and practice aimed.

Then gradually forgotten, stained and rotten

Laden with spills and soot of neglect,

Dusty and sticky now, had once even got wet.

That gun laid near and quiet among the carpet spires,

He was no longer sure it would even fire,

After so much time felled to the mire;

He dreamed from the cavern of his desires,

Where meringue formations and fossils wired

The cave ceilings fanged by stalagmites.

Nightmares of intruders clamoring into the house while he sleep;

And the gun does not fire but simply clinks.

So he grabbed it out of it’s casing,

Trodden in smut and age.

He pulled back the trigger and it blew out the nearest windowpane

And set his ears ringing.

Dedicated

To the fountain pen which touches paper

Like traumatized fists pound cement cell walls,

And carve dates into them.

To the fountain pen of whose inkwell is brimmed with the artist’s perfectly acrylic, bronze smelling blood,

As red as the sweetest of blushing sunsets,

As red as canyon floors.

To the fountain pen that learned to write in gold,

Where every dot is an earthquake and every line is an atomic bomb,

Every texture is a renaissance, and for every draft, a hundred thousand babies are born.

Enemy soldiers drop their guns and trot teary eyed across an open battlefield with open arms…

The artist’s eyes sink a bit, perhaps the hair grays,

His mortal spirit is pried open, with the weight of the world upon his fountain pen…

Scorched Man

Scorched Man,

Who was once,

Simply, man.

And whose white suit ignited, as he sprinted down his final hallway,

By heat and smoke, alone.

He was carried like a newborn, rescued from the burning fortress where so many had perished,

By Firemen he would never meet.

His entire being had softened, trembling as he clung to life,

As a worm of ash clings to the butt of a cigarette,

Smoked in its entirety without being tapped to an ashtrays edge.

The Scorched Man would live on for many years…

Constantly scalded by the world,

His appearance, abominably deformed,

His brow and thus his expression, as well as his genitals, long singed away.

And in the end, he was forced to seek an incredible and brutal god;

Capable of letting him live to find peace once more if ever it was.

The Scorched Man could smell cool relief,

From the still pool of Nirvana nearby.

Family Calamity

Those held conspiracies should say quite a bit about the mechanics of their own families…

Fractured, secretive, characterized by one defining family calamity after the next;

when it finally boils over.

So everyone just goes on not tolerating each other

In silence and with admirable, Zen-like

If not sadomasochistic patience in wait of the next group cleansing which feels so good,

Because we’re finally allowed by a phony, chasing god to drop the act like we may drop off the side of a bridge and

Love each other freely in sickness and in health if at all we can survive it…

Contrarily, death of the soul; fractured, secretive, fearful in all of our affairs

Mourning

The sun is spiders’ silk.

Veiled over infant light still thin and cool.

A newborn puppy struggles through shut eyes

at the very edge of sleep.

Everyone leaves warm radiation in their sheets

where your purest animal scent exists.

The identity unfurls into consciousness…

Domination of investors, advertisers and labels,

seem to keep nothing sacred.

Entertainment distilled down to equations,

tear ducts dried into raisins.

All of the children are round’ up and taken,

to be gradually humiliated.

Maria’s Lament

This corporate world makes me piss in cups,

but they can’t put this dick in cuffs.

I’m forced to lie to my employer,

just for a little bit of enjoyment…

And it’s so much more than just a crutch,

I swear I love it so much…

Day after day my brain is trained to be drained of positivity,

So you could say, Mary Jane is moving in with me.

And lead us not into temptation,

But deliver us from evil, In the hearts of men including in my own,

On the couch, in the comfort of my own home.

Black Swan

Go ahead girl, turn it around

Show me what’s on the other side.

You and I,

I’ll be a ballerina for you if I need to,

So sweetly deceitful…

Damned Savages

They’ll go through bone, pelt and meat.

Even the parts you’re not supposed to eat,

Like eyelids, frenulum’s and feet…

Temptations 1

The warm light of God,

Shone through too many lenses,

Will produce a magnified, white-hot point that

Can start wildfires.

A twisted anti-world exists within ours,

Where every man, woman and child, of every

Race, creed and background;

Is carbon copied, but into gray faced,

lobotomized twin versions of themselves.

And all the audience can recognize as their own,

Is their temptations…

Era Bastards Elegy

Before I pass the pump,

I’ll probably pass the skunk.

And I’ll probably pass the skunk,

before I pass the pump.

Before I suicide,

I’ll probably psilocybe’.

Hairy Bees

Back to the prehistoric age,

where bumblebees stood six foot high,

in order to thrust a darkly woolen, throbbing appendage

into the pollen core of a prehistoric summer Vinca,

with a pedal span as wide as a boxing ring.

My heels planted so flatly to the ground,

Melted, like my phalange bones were taken out.

At once my eyes turned wide shut…

As the new sensations disappeared into the old ones

and the old fears appeared how a robber might surprise you with his pistol,

or a twirling bumblebee may land on a flower.