Doctor, Please

I have knots in my stomach, snakes in my brain, balls of pig iron in my joints and toes. No doctor will cure me. No doctor will treat me. So I calm myself as best I can...eyes fixed on movie Zombies, heart beating like jungle drums. Dance to me, witch Doctor. Exorcise me, priest in Latin tongue. Free me from my devil invaders, my invasive enemies in thought and body. Let me thirst for life once more, to taste its succor of sweet joy. Palliative movies, cease at night. I need, need, need, to untie knots, slay snakes, melt away pig iron and let the soul inside me be mine alone. What course I take, I don't know. But it must be done.

Always Take Care

I'm sore. My muscles are ripped, torn, shredded like sheets of wasted paper. From now forward I'll face my workouts with moderation. I vow to spin my stationary bike sanely and lift weights cautiously. I may even spring for more steady shoes to assuage my angry arches. But that'll have to wait till I find a job. In the mean time I walk slowly, my muscles tinged with pain, my mind tinged with regret.

Now

Dread the night
Tread softly in razor dreams.
Lay down in obscurity to Raise the past
Raise, too, poetic sounds in wayward verse

Empty Poet
Dread the night
And nothingness and do-nothingness
Bow to the past, obscurity and bound memory
Owe to the reveries of day the obligation of contemplation
Owe to the razor dreams your soul and fertile words

Story Tellers

A raconteur met a raconteuse and they both told stories until they fell into each others arms. But that's not where the adventure ended. They married, but the marriage did not prosper from love and soon there was a divorce. People now listen to much repeated stories of anger and disappointment that each teach tells of the other.The old days were better when only words of happiness left their lips.

The Fix-Up

If I were like an old wall I'd need only some plaster and a coat of fresh paint. Instead I eat as well as I can and I exercise on occasion and hope my mirror tells its daily lies. But I await a weekend sale when I'll buy new brushes and paint and begin to fix up my home. The exercise will do me good. Refresh my soul, renew my living room.

The Movie

He's like that guy in The Wrestler. A Has-Been, A Never-Been, a Wannabe all wrapped into one. He's been slammed down, nearly counted out as a the scripted loser. Life, as it is for all of us, is simultaneous in its truths and falsehoods. Sadness is cheap. Happiness is plastic. Both are just twisted mimicries of reality.

Funny Bone

To wit and laughter
Being Tickled to death
To Dying inside a poem, a joke, a vial of laughing gas like Sunday morning sitcoms

Typical

Armies of modern men. Array of asinine a$$holes in Tupperware uniforms and antiseptic ties and nuclear breath mints.

Fruit

Mineolas and Blood Oranges and bags of bad Apples.

Old Forests

Pollsters and Pundits. Prima Donnas and Prima Facie evidence of high priests of plastic pompadours. Scalawags and Sister Souljas. Milli Vinelli and Milquetoast toads in French recipes of plaster Paris with pate and chipped beef. Vanilla and Vegans. Chocolate and corroded arteries. Rust belts and Fan belts on hypnotic freeways of California strip malls and hyper kinetic malapropisms. Fruit pickers and Frugal picket fence painters with Tom Sawyer's turpentine and moral turpitude on glazed ham and green eggs with purple trim. Old I've become. Words escape the mind like thieves in camouflaged forests

Needs to Be Done

Draw poison from the snake. Defang the lion, tiger, cougar, and wild cheetah. No. On second thought let nature be. Defang the long faced politician. Draw poison from the bony money man, shed his Armani suit like a snake's skin.

State of Mind

In my recent state of mind I sense the world is flat. With slight steps I'll creep to the earth's edge and peer downward to gaze the tops of stars, galaxies, and the luminous gases that swirl 'round heavenly black holes. Scions of Newton, Einstein, Galileo, and Copernicus beware: don't stagger too near the edge, nor slip drunkenly into the great Milky Way.

Shhh!

Unemployed with sour drinks and bitter lemons in perambulating quests between volcanic rows of library shelving in corrugated, twisted, peeling steel of osmotic knowledge...seeping books of learned styles sponging through sprockets of skin into caramelized brains like Spanish Onions. Giant paella of the mind...crustacean seafood, saffron rice, cheap Mexican lime and beer. Afforded fines, late charges and expired cards with magnetic strips demagnetized from time. Capricious librarians... seductive, sedentary, punctilious, in rapacious stares. Buns of greying hair and flakes of golden teeth. Happenstance fingers. Knuckles wrapped in anger and solitary judgment of unworked men in frayed jeans. Shhh! To the quiet man. Shhh! To the man on the seamless highway of internet knowledge. Golden pictures. Rumorless, humorless starlets, extinguished fires of Hollywood nights. Cusp of Great Depression. Decompressed cups of beggars hands. Hold on unemployed man. Shhh! To your enemies, the slayers of your independent mind. Live till the libraries no more house hope and despair, sad tales and tails of dinosaurs and Wall Street devils.

The Landing

When the soldier jumps,
boots touch fertile soil
A Chute closes
A moonless sky holds a farmer's red ground

Foreign land, baptism of fire
Ghost shrouds of straw and shadow
Death harvest under a moonless command

A black curtain closes, black jump boots fall, a shallow earth below

Food For Thought

Naked Lunch
Big Sur Sandwich
Dr. Sax on the radio

Call It Prayer

Waitress hustle, middle-aged skin, a wrinkle of time...servitude of rancid cream and pales of sweetner. Gibbering old men spy nylon stockings, baby blue smocks in waiting...cups of white porcelain coffee, counter tops in patina of grease, oil, and lost dreams. Cross dressed with bee-hive hair, whiff of cheap perfume, smart-eyes lose to the sizzle of night; the waitress hustle... gibbering old men call gamblers and pimps, late night owls, hawks of darkness, sinners in the church of moonless prayer.

Banished to Sea

When time runs out, what have you done? When life is over: finished, gone, left in a last breath...What have you been? Fulfilled, unfulfilled? Happy, unhappy? A free man, a slave to money, work, a love that slips away? What have you done? Lived or not lived? Seen or not seen? Rode the great train, the blacktop highway, sailed a vast sea? Oh, says the landlubber, fear the blue sky, repress the spirit and soul, draw nothing from life's blood. When time's yearning is gone a last question you become: What have I done? I banished nothing on a great blue sea.

Fifteen Minute Makeover

Fifteen minutes of fame, said Andy Warhol. Just fifteen minutes for each of us? Expect, my friend, a Wednesday night, a full length PBS documentary with interviews of the people you've known, the people you've loved, hurt, disappointed. See the people for whom you've exceeded their expectations. See the people who like you, who despise you, who help you, who decry you. Friends, acquaintances, enemies, paranoids with their conspiracies of you at the threatening core of alien landings, the annihilation human stock. Watch and beware the experts, the academics, the politicians and pundits who put your life in the context of the times, of the culture, of the way things were. Beware, too, of how you live in the now. For the starchy-collared, button downed, straitlaced, will be that companion guide in glossy details of languor and dullness. Think now the future, think now the consequence of your life with your collection of fast food forks, plastic straws, mustard and ketchup condiments in single serve aluminum foil wrappers. Eat away, bite the Taco Bell tortilla, but hunger for life, before the world sees you in the context of now rather than what you ought to be.