The Hollow Command

How silly the man,
demanding that
the love he gives, 

to be returned in equal measure.  

Like Shylock,

with his contract,

It's what was on the paper, he says,

It's what was on the paper. 

Hollow is this order,

For consequence of failure,

Of  covenant not upheld,

When hearts wandered uncontrolled,

From one whose own shame,

was mortared brick by brick.

Go little angel,

To where your heart is happy,

You cannot be ordered to love,

You have changed,

your not the same,

like the river you walk through,

The waters rush on.

-s-

Ghosts of Dominion

The ghost of every Indian killed,
who died of musket, sword or virus,
in five hundred years of dominion done
in jungle, plains or rivered forests,
Now sub-rosa swells our borders,
haunts our cellars cleaning
and serves up hot our meals.

Yet, still we call for his end.
Unlearned from progress plied,
we believe lines drawn on paper
serve as shields against our own terror

Our second chance at grace
goes unheeded,
undeeded,
unearned.

Overcome

The air was of a particulate dispersion
lending to it's consumption an effort of moderate vitality

Body moisture secretly accumulated
in the musky crevices of armpits
tight shoed toes and crotches twixt crossed legs

Random blurts of electronic beepery
intermittently accent the cosmic hum
The Om
of a million churning internal combustion engines
all humming
expending the sighs of energy
all over the seven hills
as the first lights of the evening came alive
and I was overcome

Sabotage

The soft sabotage of love
makes me lay in the puke of my weakness

I search for the strength of my father
and seeing he had none to give me
I resign

The sanctity of salvation I deny myself
with the trappings of my own failures

I must face what I have denied-
that I am scum

The deceit I born comes to kill me now
Can I deny any longer it's rightful death?

The vengeance of hipocracy was the
death of my soul
Without a soul, every breath I take
is a lie to life

The brooding cloud that shadows me
repeats it's evil spell

Neither my heart nor my love is mine it cries,
I know this tale too well

Sick

Pathetic painful utterences
projected through the telephone
Short raspy bleats
struggling through her lips
Sound as if a death nell

Confessions of the confused
and condemned

Surely tomorrow she will
awake anew

And beam again
her bright white light
of hope and cheer

My friend is sick today
and I'm wishing she were near

Used To Be

It is the afternoon of Thanksgiving Day,
Sporadic bursts of brisk wind whip at my skin
drying the moisture from my eyes
and slightly stinging
while whisking leaves and debris
down a path of micro cyclones
along the gutters and sidewalks

If only those paper coffee cups
were not tumbling amongst those cigarette butts
It would be almost like it used to be
on Burlingame Avenue
in the quiet of an autumn day

Tom Pages Telescope

As if a Sign from the Heavens
I saw the Moons of Saturn
through Tom Page's eye

And another random act
of human kindness
intervened my path

And you ask if there is a god
Oh, yeah there is and he's workin'

Hey look out there, man,
there's another world out there
See that other world?

Collins Lake



Right when I believe

that I'm halfway to Auburn

I see Collins Lake

Cat Dance

Dancing with my cat
and he does not want to dance

The beat infects me
and I shake and rock and spin

The first thing to learn
about communication:
How to take a hint

Get it?

Thin Lipped

Her lips were so thin
as if they were drawn tight
to hold the soul and keep it in

To protect what was left
and not give away this beauty
she did not even know was there

When not smiling
they are tucked so tight
they disappear from her face

But they could pout too, those lips
and I would want to suck and savor
both top and bottom with a kiss

A rarified and delicate meal
served sparsely at this exotic inn

And smell the breath that left between them
But sup no more while they stay thin.

The Town

The town gets ugly at night.
Sunlight's bright warmth long gone
leaving the dark, sweaty, musky warmth
Of belched out exhaust fumes
that did not blow away in the heat

The little movie theater is even closing
the last patrons ushered out
And the marquis fades to black

Suddenly the whole street seems as sticky
and tacky and unknown as the floor of that theater

Every door is shut,
every light is off
All the charming little shops
with their sparkly snares of the daytime
Are stripped and naked and dead.

Only the garish glow of beer brand neon
sending smarmy salutations to the disenfranchised.
Infrequent emergents stumble and stagger
from this xanthic zoo of misfitten misbegots

Shoed with scruff and shirted tatter,
they share their chatter of shattered lives
Their idiotic mumblings
of blame and accusation

Cortney


My God, Cortney! He's old enough to be your father.
Several of them said that, whether it was said to warn her,
or just exclaiming their own shock at the situation.
Whatever was the reason, that's what each of them said when he finally showed up.

"So what?" rebutted Cortney "we're not getting married, just going to dinner"


She had watched him intently as he approached.
Her beautiful welcoming smile fading to concerned anticipation
not knowing what to say, right up to the end.

"Should I say yes or should I say no?" she thought to herself.
Unconsciously placing her big left hiking boot at an angle across the laces or her big right boot.
She looked up, pushed with one finger the bridge of her glasses further up on her perfect nose.

"Veeblefeltzer" he said, trying so very hard to look calm, appear worldly and witty, and to be cool all at once,
but feeling ever such a fraud for doing so.
Veeblefeltzer, the code word.
The word picked to identify the mystery man. The unknown giver of roses.
"Veeblefeltzer" she thought, "what does it mean? It's stupid!"

"You!" she blurted. "I had NO idea!"
There they were, face to face.
She reminded him greatly of the first girl he ever loved, in the unconsecrated pre-teen sense, Phoebe Higgins.
Tomboy of the fifth grade and ...oh so cute.
In order to impress her, he had let her punch him hard in the stomach a half a dozen times or so to prove that he was tough.
A month later he was in the hospital with a hernia operation.
Boy, could she hit hard.

But that was so, so long ago and he had no right to be feeling like that towards the beautiful young bookseller.
This girl who would look rather like a daughter than a dinner date.

Then, with the blood pulsing so rapidly through the veins in his neck that his tongue seemed to thicken making it difficult to sputter out the next few words.
"I...I, uh, I was wondering if you would care to accompany me to dinner tonight?"
Oh my god! His head was pounding so hard he was feeling embarrassed, as if he was going to croak or stroke or choke and she would have to call the paramedics for him or something.

But he had said it. He had asked the question. And it was just like the first time he had ever asked a girl that question.
"You see," he said "I really hate to eat alone when I go out."

She looked at him. Their eyes met.
He smiled. She smiled.
Then she said....

Stop


If I was a bird
I would want to stop singing

If I was a bell
I would want to stop ringing

If I was Einstein
I would want to stop thinking

Once your voice had spoken
and once your words were heard

Daughter


My daughter called
and I stopped my world

And remembered every burden
I had put upon her

Such a beautiful woman.
She has become.
Such a beautiful woman.

Clouded


Driving straight into the sunset
Clouds form fire shaped visions across the sky

Briefly beaming then dissolving
Grouped and regrouped by the flight of winds

Rorsharch must have day-dreamed
on such cloudy windy days

Now an empty large and bluing dome
the clouds finally remind me of you
in their absence

My Time To Hear


The stories have been told,
many are ancient and
many are just old

But is wasn't my time to hear

Buddhist Chance


Over and over again

came the Buddhist chance

On and on and om and om

went the Buddhist chants

Broken Deal

Some covenant was broken
Some promise unfulfilled.
The weight of which was unbearable

How did it happen?
They were only words she had spoken
which once left the breath
could float feather light
and disburse into the atmosphere
disappear,
dissolve

How heavy could they be?
Prisons of air
A lifetime sentence.
Invisible chains
Bondage born by babble
Mere utterances
Expressing some affection
impossible to reveal

Can this child whose youth was stolen
Ever really make this kind of deal?

Short Circuit

His eyeballs were telling his gonads
to get the fluids ready for dispersion

The cries of the sirens
had him fooled once again

If he re-engaged the power source
would the short circuit recur
between the heart and brain?

Would it once more go out of control
take another weird turn and
drive off some cliff again?

Did he need another habeas corpus
to prove this flower deadly?

Face

She was but a face in the window
at the end of a sentence
in a parenthetical aside
a small and smaller part
in the epochal journey
that itself is just a flicker of moonlight
from the pond
as viewed form the bank of the shore

knowing the reflection of the moon
is not the moon

Big Bang


The never ending emptiness of outer space
the infinite Universe, the great Cosmos,
has nothing on the loneliness of my heart

My heart did the Big Bang for you, Baby,
when our worlds collided.

The Big Bang, Baby.

Needs Work


Whatever can I do
but put him in his cage

A swipe of his claws
is bad enough
But the nubs on his tongue
can reduce an adult human
into a shadow of a shell
with just a single licking

It will be best for all
if he's put in his cage

His ranting will subside
Smoldering slowly
will be his rage

Cycles

Horses on a hillside
Barn bent by insistent wind

Barbed fences edge the fields
Horizons blending with the infinite

Can I imagine being
where I have never been?

Are the struggles and the pleasures
of this hard road life
More basic and more pure
than the troubled one I'm in?

Is that grass really greener?
Life more in line with plans?

Those cycles of primal living
will I ever understand?

Oh Father

(Oh)
Father why did you leave me
as I have left myself?

Can I blame you? I do
Can I blame myself? I do too

Father where are you?
are you in me?
Like the seed and the tree
I am bound to be you again

Who you were I did not know
nor do I know myself
As I see me
I see what the tree sees in it's seeds
And the seed can not know the tree
until it is one

And the tree only wants
the sun and rain
and only looks to the sky

sb

Wound

When the wound becomes the being
the soul sees only pain
The heart will wear a shroud of clouds
and love gets lost in rain

sb

This world we live in is spinning like a top.
Sometimes whizzing smoothly along in a furious whirl.
Other times tipping and tossing and out of balance.
Ready to twist right out of control and crash.

On the trip I will have thoughts and rants and recommendations
that I will want to share with you.
Pardon me for thinking.