The
Sweet
Sound of
Cracking Nuts
Woe to you, great white whale,
slave of academe!
Were you but Melville's anchor
in a sea of frightened sperm,
or but Christ and Christmas
gaily wrapped beneath a barren tree
in April? What has escaped
your clutches to become studied matter,
laboriously hacked into hackneyed theses?
Once I sat beneath the chestnut tree
and did not envy the village smithy.
I saw the damage wrought on natural things,
and picked the blossoms and the nuts.
Ah, to smell sweet New England blossoms!
Herman, what Protestant longings
hold you captive! I sit here
like a restless ocean, swaying
to the sound of the great whale's breath
I hear so distant from this plank road
and its dusty habits and crack each nut
open to find the great white whale
singing.
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The
Art of Being Politically Correct
Throw out all the books you know.
Turn off the faucet dripping wisdom.
Kill off the cultural wildlife.
Shun the mannequins of sameness.
There are no Eurocentric homosexuals,
no black waitoids, no nonmen differently abled.
We are as blank as thoughts must be,
pure as an undiscovered Edenic paradise.
All colors are none of any hue or shade,
the planet is made worshippable object
and we are also.
All the walls have been built again
with no mortar binding together
so that they may be seen individualistically.
Living beings are denied a name
so no living being may be truly known
even as they are perceived.
Give back to me what I knew
as true and good.
I am of life and what that is.
It will not be a dustless house
in which I live.
All vanity and chromosomal pride
will not succumb to this new story.
Sex and color and time
do not alter with the moment.
I only change my clothes,
I do not bury them.
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"New, Longer Hours"
As grains of sand,
as cells of dead shed skin,
all time is fixed, immutable
as the migration of whales.
There is "nothing new under the sun",
no distance of measure different.
Consider the possibilities:
All clocks made useless,
calendars and datelines irrelevant.
Would we really need anything
but the internal organs requiring
sustenance and expulsion?
Wouldn't it be wonderful!
50 billion individual schedules,
50 billion roads never having to intersect,
but only cautious of collision.
The reality is blood on a knife:
one man's minute is another man's eternity.
I want no time transmuted.
I will hold the hour of copulation,
the minute of death,
the flickering second of recognition,
and chew them in monotonous
rhythm.
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The
Bystander
Only watching, he is full of avoidance and delay.
How do the hours and minutes tick?
Asleep in his bed, he passively dreams,
awakes afraid of what he must face.
A day full of wolves,
a funereal night he covers himself with.
All the people, all the activity,
are potholes he must drive around.
His job is a carnival ride
taunted to take,
the only relief is leaving it.
He is fearful of touch, of talking,
only does so to run from death.
He wants the perfection of his body,
the perfection of his family,
the perfection of death if all
his dreams are dust.
Sick of watching, he walks out the door
to go where waters run without effort,
where weather only is, and takes shelter
in all it has. The rain is his rain,
the breeze is his breeze,
and the warmth of the sun is also his.
He realizes he can watch no longer,
must immerse himself in the flood of others,
and becomes an ocean where all the great creatures
pass through him.
The bystander is become a swimmer
in all the currents flowing,
not afraid to drown.
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I Heard
Bukowski Died Today
I was awake,
went to work,
parked my life outside
like a wheezing carburetor.
All the 5-day-a-week people
were lobsters in a tank;
I was managing the fish department.
The smell got to me, finally.
I washed my hands,
and grabbed the newspaper.
Like a porno movie at 4 a.m.,
an unexpected erection,
I saw the name "Bukowski",
the word "poet",
and felt myself
another beer can
rolling around the floor
of someone's car,
not knowing the driver
or the destination.
I continued to live that day,
put sunglasses on my soul,
wrapped up my thoughts
like leftover fish
and old cigar butts,
went home and fell asleep.
The toothbrush falls away,
the clothes fall away,
the clock ticks only in dreams,
and tomorrow I'll be awake again.
The beer cans in the car
never stop rolling.
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I Want to Write Like Pablo
Neruda
On the beach of sanguinity,
Pablo Neruda drinks the blood of nuns,
becomes a sky of azure clouds,
with rosaries falling from an ochre sun,
penetrating his thoughts like a harpoon
cast into the shark's eye
by the weary fisherman
who wants the sun to be a woman,
luscious fruit of Pacific shores.
Pablo Neruda sifts mournful sand
through the fingers of his hands
like
so many tired bulls,
and he is tired.
Tired of the mountains,
tired of the jungles,
tired of Tierra del Fuego,
tired and offering prayers
to a god who is only found
in marketplaces far from Santiago
where gray dogs bark at dust,
where gray women do not smile at tourists,
where gray houses have no color.
The small village priests are revolutionary moths,
fanning the flames of Anaconda insurrections,
fanning the flames of sin,
fanning the flames of Pablo Neruda's guilt.
The rainbow, barely seen,
is Pablo Neruda's oldest pair of sandals,
wearing down the decrepitude of the Andes
where soulless birds are a cathedral dirge
of unremembered penitents.
Pablo Neruda sees all the infants as hungry worms,
wriggling their rebellion toward the moon.
But the moon is an empty plate,
the infants starve,
die a condor's death,
its wings - their arms -
a panoply of tears
on the beach of no horizon
where the nuns
are once again tears of Catholicism,
where the ochre sun
retreats to a night of peasant's curses,
and in Santiago,
the guards before the presidential palace
watch Pablo Neruda walk,
his sullen pencil
bayoneting their fascist desires,
his teeth flashing in their tortured dreams.
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I
Did It
It wasn't him, it was me.
I went to war, came back
gung-ho frenzied and
crewcut stoic.
I killed the enemy in the desert
and became my own.
I turned hard right,
veered off the pavement
and lost my license plate.
Somewhere,
away from the coasts
where the truth of body counts
is a buzzing fly
you can't swat away,
I stowed my bombs and my hatred,
then bestowed these gifts
on faceless children,
on unknown wives and husbands.
(When your family and your friends
are only ciphers in your conspiracy,
it's not hard to kill people you've never met.)
The family is a shattered crystal,
the children are a thousand specks of light
caught in the glance of the sun,
I am the shattering hand that holds them.
I can't be caught,
I can't be brought to trial,
I'll never be convicted.
I cheat on my taxes,
vote down school budgets,
eviscerate the editors.
It's me, not him at all,
it's me, and I knew it all
along.
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The
Verdict
No matter what the jury says,
someone is always guilty.
The racist in me says all blacks are guilty,
the liberal in me says police are pigs.
In television's three-ring seriousness,
everyone maintains their innocence
while they secretly cash
in their collusive guilt.
We all cheat and batter each other,
it doesn't matter
if you put a suit and tie
on a murderer,
no one will ever really know.
We all bury the truth
by planting evidence;
we stay safe from
being murdered that way
and continue
to kill with neandrathalic suavity.
We wring the tree dry of details,
ignore the root of cause,
and excuse the woodsman and his axe,
cursory tears rake up the
fallen leaves.
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The
Beginning
They found them first in Minnesota.
Like honest politicians, something
was missing.
Some thought it was the water,
the air,
maybe something they ate.
Frogs without legs,
without eyes,
without normalcy.
This was the first sign,
then again, maybe it wasn't.
Maybe it was the Challenger explosion,
maybe it was Charlie Manson,
maybe it was the Garden of Eden.
They thought and postulated,
had a cup of coffee,
turned the page
and put down the magazine.
This is
how it started.
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Time,
the Hero
In the frenzy of clocks,
like the antlered deer
at dusk sniffing
for snow-covered apples,
there is a calmness of ticking
that marks the seasons,
that gathers the days
into collectives of crowded minutes.
The holidays and demonic elections
are weeds in the garden of time,
and time itself becomes
guardian of life,
sentinel of our souls.
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Failure, Death and Necessity
A child with dirty hands,
narcissistic grunge,
and a paycheck.
Indecision of clouds
is a heavyweight,
choking the ropes.
The clock ticks bloodletting
like the gleeful surgeon,
the cardiac rivers gurgle and spit.
Pompous media drivel passes on the
right,
speeds toward the exit ramp,
collapses on the corner.
Everyone's mother is dying,
questioning children
about their jewelry,
about the weather.
You know you went to school,
you know when death first knew you,
you know and knowledge doesn't satisfy
your hunger.
Nights wrap themselves around your
days,
and all your imagined comforts
are stray dogs that won't come near
you.
You knock down the hornets' nests,
paint and plaster,
see the doctor,
and pay the bills.
When the neighbors pull up their
gardens
and the sunset is more southerly,
the clarity of dawn is more apparent.
A fully turning circle turns more
fully now,
the slow walking of warm weather
quickens
in the ripening of apples,
all the family ties itself together
like cornstalks in autumn fields.
The equinox takes stock,
calculates the dividend of seasons,
and pays
handsomely to each deserving day.
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Away
How do I measure distance?
I drift in an ocean
of people and things.
They swim, float and sink
and the waves hide time.
If they take away my face,
will anyone know me?
If my arms and legs vanish,
am I just furniture waiting on some curbside?
Everything, everyone I hold close
is dust on the mantle,
the only currency I hold is memory.
Every sound higher than moonlit geese,
becomes fainter, erasing faith in what I see.
Death deals the cards,
I see death crossing the corner.
I want to eat the hand of death
so it will not grab any more.
I want to swallow stars, galaxies,
constellations and become a universe
that knows no distance.
I want to bury all the clocks,
destroy all vestiges of time,
so no one will know of any passages.
I will make a stillness of life
and in that stillness, life will be,
and be.
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Squirrels,
Sailing, and Five Notes
I have no idea of how the mind
works, of how to sail, or why
squirrels leap from branch to branch.
But I do know how to peel a banana
and enjoy an Oreo cookie.
It's these little things that suck up
our attention and make us saints.
If our brains are little forests
and all the thoughts are squirrels,
it is no small wonder our talking
is rain on parched ground.
A wind dies beneath a sobering sun
and we cannot sail until the moon
rises like an old man from an easy chair.
Can we force a wind from thought,
or pray for such? Still, the boat
drifts thoughtlessly on our whispering.
Above all this commotion and conundrum
is the chaotic piano, heaving sounds
at anyone too close to hear. Five notes
slap my face and I burn a melody at the wall.
There it dribbles down, collects itself
into song, only to attack another
unsuspecting fool. Every note takes aim,
seeking rearrangement and now
we know
how the mind works.
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Veterans
War has its children, its
orphans;
all
of us have bleeding wounds.
Each
of us has their own Vietnam,
the secluded teenage bedroom,
the deluded marriage bed,
the half-room where we wait for death
and don't know the nurse's name.
Not just the brave men,
the men of duty, honor and sacrifice,
the children and the women
have hard won their ribbons.
Most of us know no foxholes,
no falling bombs, comrades shot dead
before us.
One day each year, we honor the fallen
and the forgotten.
Who remembers the nameless?
Who will build a wall for us?
I will cry for the children, murdered playing.
I will weep for the women beaten and driven out.
I will mourn for all the nonwhite veterans
eating injustice.
I am a veteran, too.
I have been shot with falsehoods full of salt,
tasted the twisted sea shuffling
poison on its uncaring shore.
We will honor all the veterans,
the abandoned, the abducted,
the amputee who has no voice to cry.
I have died every time you have died,
and I am buried with you.
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You
Know It's Love
If the air's on fire
when you speak her name,
if
her smile shames rainbows,
if together you are unstoppable,
you know it's love.
When your eyes first meet
and all the glaciers melt,
you know it's love.
It's love when you throw away
your self-concerns,
when the world disappears
and
becomes only the two of you,
when Eden is rediscovered.
If
he gives up football Sundays
for country walks,
if she gives up miniseries
for the affection he cannot ask for,
you know it's love.
It's love when wrinkles
and signs of atrophy
are not way stations,
but are seen as beauty
graceful as turning leaves.
When the telegrams of death
no longer can be ignored,</