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.