NEW JERSEY TRANSIT BUS ROUTE 556
After fifteen years, I ride
New Jersey Transit Bus, Route 556.
The names unroll,
Bayshore Road, Villas, Gaiss’ Meat Market,
Saint Raymond’s Catholic Church,
they are all text of memory fragrant and haunting as honeysuckle,
sharp as broken glass beneath bare feet shod for the workforce long ago.
A thousand buses have intervened, groaning and monotonous
Stinking in winter of day labor and dreams deferred,
in summer of cotton candy and the cheap dates consummated
under the boardwalk.
The night bus, illuminated and forbidden
freedom a buck fifty ticket roundtrip,
all of fourteen and all alone
caressing with urgent, expectant fingers
the painted faces of these shore towns.
Delsea Drive, Menz’s Restaurant, Rio Grande and Dunkin’ Donuts,
honey glazed, cream filled, jelly rolled,
midnight shift in a pink uniform till six a.m.,
before high school, working, waiting
for the unobtainable resurrection of the heart through the flesh,
so young and so old.
Old creaking tin of the menhaden factory on the marsh in Wildwood,
a dirty quilt of working class pastels sewn
across a winter monochrome of asphalt.
Hunched Jersey shore boarding houses
squat in clapboard or asbestos shingles,
battleship grey bungalows
their Navy paint liberated from the shipyards of Philadelphia,
destined for permanent R & R.
The Tom Cat Diner has closed for the season and
the bus rolls over the shallow bridge of hitchhiking ghosts
frozen in January in pink uniforms
forever transversing the inextinguishable twilight of memory,
hungry ghosts the landscape feeds, again:
Summers here a riot of alcohol and rollercoasters,
salt in the mouth from a green ocean,
blue collar men sweating in undershirts on the stoops of their vacations,
beer-bellied men and their pudgy wives with dainty feet and tiny hands
tenaciously gripping the joy burning in a barbecue grill, a Ballentine Ale,
a boil of dirty children screaming off Delaware Bay beach
in stockings of stinking mud
trailing eels and horseshoe crabs and the odor of sewers,
spearing marshmallows and stepping fast
around the campfires scorching short-lived July,
burning the days to ash,
to the silent white bone of winter.
The marshes whistle with hawks
at Cape May Point
the munitions bunker still stands,
now knee-deep in ocean
pilings submerged where once was beach among pilings,
among piling we stood, close, those first kisses
and the razor of wind,
cutting blood from the flesh
cutting the pain of
Never Never Never.
Erosion has eaten the foundation
the heart’s children carried out to sea and drowned,
grainy bits of what has broken
trapped in the soft places between waves,
in the flesh of clams and crabs and cranes that burrow and soar
and spit up pearls before the dawn,
always breaking to awaken us
lest we drown.
CAPE MAY ENTRIES
“In the cold morning, an awakened bird
comes close as the truth” Bei Dao
Downtown, midnight
Lolonis Chardonney, 1993,
a mouthful of honey and spirits:
The Jersey Devil lives up north and
this town is wicked full of memories,
Venus flytrap tendrils,
the thousand tongues of scallops with eyes
kissing you blind in pleasure.
A tangerine bursts in the mouth
sour edges of rind prick the senses
sting to recall
the caress of each detail,
gingerbread fingers crawling across Victorian facades,
the porches dangerously loaded
with our antique youth and all
the muster we possess to snatch it back
reclaim its lucent skin
pull down over our eyes the acts
we refuse to surrender.
Your gaslit streets foreshadow
each chamber of the heart,
the hands are clustered, clasped,
the bread we break glows eggshell blue
with the wishes of our parents’
omniscient eyes slowly closing,
we swallow the tongue of bitterness
with wine that prophesies the future.
Tiresias, I hear you chanting in the parlor,
each syllable a clear bell
summoning the faithless to their knees,
place a coin in our mouths.
Towing these riverboats laden with the past our temperance,
we are tempered,
we are still,
we slice the deft netherworld
with the scissors of Matisse,
forgiving in the twilight, limitations
that fruit in the forage of our dying days.
Sunset Beach, daybreak
Sunset Drive ends at the bay,
beach grill and S. S. Atlantis,
ferroconcrete sunken ship
breaths plumes of brine
as she crawls low beneath the waves’ embrace
they assail her hissing deep currents
and the barnacles’ promise.
Atlantic Trench swallows the Delaware offshore,
whelk and mussel and razor clams,
spouts of whale, leviathan, lantern fish
bathed in phosphorescence a mile below
the carcass of the dunes of South Cape May,
the land erased, foundations awash,
fine china nestled against magnesium nodules,
nibbled by tube worms,
surrendered.
At the horizon, the Cape May-Lewes Ferry
transects the bay and sky
a slow moving cipher
floating the inquiry
Atlantis sighs a mouth of foam,
the waves all hands upon her deck.
The Point, sunset
Sit in a cloister of sand and dune,
the perpetual symmetry of waves
rushes to take the shore.
They claim Cape May Point
beneath sunburnt clouds swept toward dusk,
scaled like fish swimming
across an opalescent infinity.
To the south, Delaware,
to the north, winter and Robert Frank
scratching memory into the negatives of Mabou.
The minutes catch at the throat,
the lengthening shadows of clamshell and rickrack
scatter across the afternoon beach,
swallowed in the meticulous calculation of each breaking wave.
They crash upon the aching rock
and leave it cold, glistening
unspoken ambitions and prayers
ringed with dirty foam;
Unholy cities of ravening appetite,
your spoils seethe upon the sand
and taint the waters,
stain the marshland
Cattails and cordgrass
struggle to defend the body and blood that runs,
eventually, into your own sacrilegious veins
and spills in moribund streets
stinking of carbon and sulfur,
defaced with hatred.
In our beginning is our end,
the footprints of a distant figure
fade into the shadows
of Saint Mary Star of the Sea Convent.
Two lighthouses,
one destroyed on beach beaten back beyond the duneline,
the other blinking a Morse epiphany concerning
the nature of shoal and rock that breeches,
the ineluctable waves that pound to pieces
all unnatural architecture,
the inbred children of vanity and blind ambition
who deny the ancestors in sand and surf,
mud and meadow, sky and wind
who desecrate the burial womb of their own unborn
and so condemn themselves
to the curses of their grandchildren.
“Man is like to vanity:
his days are as a shadow that passeth away”
(Psalms 144. 4)
RENDEZVOUS
Hazy and attenuated, Indian summer
glares off the Atlantic cut into mirrors
sifts sunlight across fading skin turned toward November.
Cold granite juts peninsular,
cleaves swells rolling reluctant grains free of beach and dune.
Cordgrass and seaoats sigh,
beachplum and bayberry undone,
Laughing gulls’ wing rhythms beat and swing
above the hungry sea.
Foam lingers on the lip of land
traceries of quartzite,
mud and magma undone
beneath the waters’ insistence
no hand holds fast;
Sailors bob and prey on the horizon
casting nets against the waves.
Foreign clay spills between broken dunes,
dump trucks whinny, empty,
fill the breach between promise and betrayal,
the sanitary boardwalk bisects the question
of its bared legs gnawed in January by an angry ocean.
Beneath the austere fall sun
shining perambulators roll past poor boys’ shins,
young girls’ knees spread to invite home the mystery
whose syllables remains unspoken,
unmentionable complexities,
scatter like broken clamshell roiled in wrack,
uncollected,
far from any mantle…
In warmup suits,
the fifty something blondes remain particular,
just the right shade of ash and mink
to scold the butler, secure a charity, fund a campaign,
fondle the yardboy and
complain about the bread that remains unbroken
in brown mouths lurking
beyond crenellations of a Victorian sort;
Measuring out the tan lines and fine lines of grief,
laughter, penetration in midnight sands,
counting minutes between wave breaks and moonlight,
between jetties and the insatiable ocean.
Surfers emerge like seals, sleek and glistening,
a fish between the teeth
that begs the question of Passion
or anyone’s rite to define
the flavor of original sin, is salty
between municipal groins holding back the sea
a granite belt to protect the ten digit virtues
of summer mansions full of Gucci and Armani,
croquet mallets and petit fours,
unimaginable as seaweed and lampreys wrapped
around the teacups and broken chandeliers of the Titanic
(A failed exercise in magnitude.)
Between aerobic debutantes and retired bankers an infant wails,
old man weaves a bicycle through legs, past benches,
anonymous couples cluster in salt air, tasting iodine,
brushing thighs, hiding betrayals,
promising forever,
that mortality will not be breached.
While the laughing ocean scalds the jetties,
steam rises, continents groan in their sleep
roused by a distant sun and moon that refuse
to surrender the liquid tide of earth’s embrace,
that drive waves crashing shoreward
to sculpt from indiscretion, grace.
OLD GRAN
My Old Grannie
rolling across time
the sea change weathered,
the sea storm past.
Like smooth stone, a Cape May diamond
Delaware churned and sand polished
to brilliant translucence.
But we still tumble like broken rock
shell and glass in the shore chop,
the undertow’s incessant mumbled detritus
multicolored, fossil coral, predator tooth,
petrified honey comb, ancient arrowhead
black and glinting as a hunter’s eyes
under moonlight, our hungry, driven youth.
And later, the muddy, sea boiled stones
round and compressed with years
sage green and ochre,
shiny underwater as wet tongues in lovers’ mouths
pronouncing their first kiss,
the first taste of the secret that creates the future
and lets in death.
The tug of the next day’s tide
drawing and sucking, relentless, caresses
the human animal crouched to drink.
Moon hooks the horizon baited with light
a gyre of stars rotates the net of hours
fishing us from the depths of waves
worn down, buffed clean
we are claimed in dry air
and sun bleached to bone perfection,
the dull calico clay of earth’s ambition
ground out of us.
DRUMS AND HORSES
For Carl
Ma and I always had an affinity for horses
the scent of straw and tack barns
the breathlessness of canter through the woods.
She and a good time handsome devil even took
their horses out for a drink,
right into the Cedar Tavern, Egg Harbor New Jersey, 1945.
Things were different then
and they served the horses, hitched to barstools.
Downtown Key West Florida, 1994,
one black poet
used his voice as sax and a drum to chant up
the Africa in his blood;
A drum of tongue and teeth
reconstructing rhythms preached from
Ethiopia to Mali to Ghana,
a songline of history unchained,
a harmony of ancestors he never knew
but became.
Afterward,
this body’s dumbness broke to claim
the drumbeat of horses’ hooves,
clamored to know lost riders’ names,
and how many continents had intervened.
Huns thundered across the Steppes to Eastern Europe,
empires won and lost,
courts of the Hapsburgs,
courts of the Inquisition,
were the old herb women chanting?
I cannot hear,
Their poetry smothered in ashes,
midwives and healers burned at the stake,
did they scream incantations to gather flame faster?
Their voices’ embers cooling in the wombs of the unborn,
blown across the fields.
Napoleon fell,
stable hands and charwomen fled over the water
jammed steerage in tall ships of thirst and hunger,
bodies of the dead overboard,
unburied in either homeland
of the past or the present.
Ashore at Ellis Island,
sweating in tenement hungers,
smoke choked, lightless, filthy, cramped,
dead of typhoid, childbirth, consumption,
diphtheria, exhaustion, reaping the tenements,
Irish, Polish, Italian, Germanic,
what did they sing, what did they bring to remember
above the whir of machines and bleating of taxicabs-
this persistent hunger for horses and herbs,
villages and plows and harvest songs,
what unfathomable price
the smoky, grinding freedom of a New World.
Ten acres and a goat,
two dozen hens, rooster, plowhorse,
old International delivery truck,
eggs in a wicker basket sold door to door,
Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1933,
my mother is eight years old,
dressed in floursack shirtwaists
chanting the hucksters’ song of thin Depression dollars
and sense enough to hurry along
with fat broilers to the North End Market,
to Bill’s Diner, full of black customers,
“Mrs. Willis, won’t you have some coffee?”
My weary grandmother sits in the kitchen
for the sake of appearances on both accounts,
although they are all the same shade of faith and exhaustion.
Grandmother,
mother,
hurrying
to the back doors of seaside mansions
to trade with black cooks and pantry women
who, passing that exchange of blood money palm to palm,
felt the aching vestige of estranged continents arc,
the dead birds a penance in flesh,
a sacrifice given for all the vanished voices
of all our peoples still singing behind us,
echoing before us
carrying our souls in their colorless mouths
on tongues of drums and horses’ hooves.
What unfathomable price
the smoky grinding freedom,
the solid gold chains
of America.
Of thee I sing,
Sing.
PALEFACE CANTOS
The Indians called them Paleface,
whatever happened to the immigrant dream, America?
ASS, GAS OR GRASS,
NOBODY RIDES FOR FREE.
Three AM interstate Nine-Five northbound,
laid over on truckstop coffee
I am a wire frying the retinas of night
next to the other midnight riders
in cowboy boots and thousand yard stares
camouflaged in a Marlboro cloud,
the red and white country of America.
Out here,
Everybody saddled up and ready to ride de ranged,
our heartland cold and silent beneath the thundering six-lane,
awash in tail lights and headlights, heads and tails,
beginnings and ends rolling to beat the dawn
to Chicago or Philly, New York, Destroy’t,
anywhere on down the yellow line away from here.
I punch the redline, push the mainline deeper
into the placid consciousness of America’s child-
Get Out Of My Fucking Way.
Who remembers,
The safe mustang drive ins, nineteen sixty what?
danger was the Corvair and Nixon had the answers,
Phase One, Two Three,
they later named a bar of soap
after those tenuous economic recoveries and now
Not-a-Crook’s got his own thirty-two cent stamp,
In the best tradition of these
Excited States of Hysteria.
Gilding the money makers, movers and shakers,
shakers of the common man and woman,
blue collar, cliche suckers who,
when violent get framed for exactly
fifteen seconds on the five o’clock blues;
Otherwise, some New World Order whirls them ‘round
a carnival midway zero ground,
where all shook up, spun upside down
the soul that rolls out of their pockets
representing that proverbial last cent on earth-
Penny for your thoughts, Kilroy?
Gets squashed flat under the freightliners of Commerce
out here on the Innerstate.
Interstate seventy-five, eighty, ninety-five,
the inner-states of America, roaring toward two thousand
Y2K and one new factory landfills,
CD ROM joystick gameboy, cyberspace mega-mall
eight cylinder DOHC infiniti dream machines
designed to choke your children,
steal their minds
and flatten your bank account.
A wooden nickle for your dreams,
Paleface?
DRIFTNET
“The purpose of protest is to hold onto that within our
hearts and minds that dies through acquiescence.”
The hissing’s in the livingroom,
the serpent seduces every night,
tongues of language forked and twisting ‘
drip with Exxon’s Valdez varnish,
trumpet Ronald’s new cow garnish,
networks driftnet for the mind,
talking heads ensnare the blind.
Corporate fathers’ neon daughters
bathe our brains in Holy Water!
Blessed by bankers with golden faucets,
praised by politicians who solicit its endorsement,
hawked by TV anchor admen who preach of course,
Of course it’s the American Way.
In the way of Buddha’s illuminated eye.
Out of the way of trashcan-digging, lice-bearing
unshorn beggars washed up on our shores;
Men who would not be washed and forgiven,
baptized or relieved of sin, who will not win.
Instead who would be washed out of the heartland
by a wave of bank foreclosures;
Washed out of the steel belt
by nipponised bits of old Chevrolets;
Blown out of the coal mines
with dust black lungs and bills to pray.
Blown up on the frontline for lack of man’s love for his brother,
burned down in Tompkins Square because these eyes
do not see the eyes of the other;
Love one another,
Do unto others…
In the malls of America, greed smothers.
TALKING HEADS SAID
BETTER DUCK AND COVER.
SEX SUIT
The headline read
“Sex suit against Clinton gets go ahead.”
We can only imagine
what the president looks like
wearing his sex suit
decorated with dancing penises
prancing Priapus,
identifying marks of a kingdom
about to come
undone.
Behind office doors in Arkansas,
in the Lincoln Bedroom
itchy as Ricochet Rabbit
eluding G-men
to run amok in the Marriott
over and over again.
Wilbur Mills and a stripper
floundering in a fountain,
Dwight and Kay overseas,
Gary Hart set adrift
Teddy and Mary Jo took a swim,
Jack and Marilyn knew too much,
Bill and Monica both impaled on
sex and power, sex and power.
Manpower,
fire power,
sex suits hang in the hallway
outside the Oval Office,
embed themselves in closets of Congress.
A game of cloak the dagger,
b-grade movie, film noir,
lady in blue,
men in black,
loaded guns
laying in wait for
the shot heard round the world.
But ricochet will kill the king and even prudish Nixon,
beneath his plain cloth coat,
managed to shoot himself in the foot
with his cold passion
for conquest.
VIVA ZAPATISTA
Zapatista blood is flowing,
a river of flowers across Mexico,
they battle for their earth right,
land for food, for harvest, home.
Thorns grow in the throat,
America’s media strangles the truth,
Oh! those dangerous revolutionaries,
nothing but unwashed Indians and malcontents,
Proctor and Gamble will protect you,
Standard Oil will empower you
Congress full of shifting amphibians
will speak for you in the language of NAFTA
Do you understand? Do you?
No? Good. Ignorance is bliss.
The bliss of poverty’s workforce coughing blood
in the maquiladoras of Matamoros;
In Monterey where children play in vile waters
and dinner fires burn in the big drums with the English inscription
“Hazardous Waste”, the mark of the beast.
Garbage scrap shacks on the dump house women
who sew the world’s new Nikes for a dollar a day,
this is the way the world ends in a corporate universe,
death placed out of sight, out of mind,
the screams of Bophal have been silenced,
choked in their beds at dawn by the
Gas, gas, gas, quick boys and girls!
Oh inconvenient cost of industrial consumption
hire a lawyer and make it go away.
America said,
Zedillo, better shut them Rebels up,
too many waves in the stock market,
the peso is falling, trade is threatened
agribusiness hungers for that land,
shut them rebels up!
American trained Mexican army marches to cut
freedom’s flower from the throat,
who will continue to speak at the touch of the blade?
Will you read or say a word?
In the air-conditioned livingrooms of America,
in that fast new car clutching cellular phone,
in that fashion mall
burning big bucks to make believe movie star,
in front of that big screen TV,
stuffed with Doritos, awash in Coca Cola,
dead of cancer at sixty,
riding that great piglet of excess
squalled from the womb of the Industrial Revolution,
Who will say a word?
Who are you civilization,
with your gasoline doughnuts and asphalt tourniquets?
These glutted nations never sated:
Ravenous tourists demanding the Magic Kingdom
eat rubber eggs from nuked buffets beneath
a styrofoam pagoda poking holes in heaven.
Herded bumper to bumper
they creep toward Tomorrowland,
they creep and creep toward the lie,
pie in the sky
while
Today in Chiapas,
they weep and die.
TOURIST TRAMP
All my hometowns tourist tramps now,
madeover for money,
advertising their charms on interstate billboards,
in the back pages of Rand-McNally atlases all across the country.
The whole vast USA today become vacation Babylon
for sale to catatonic T.V. families
stoned on Bart and the Bundys, media-mesmerized,
flipping through the channels for the one key experience
that zaps the boredom of real life and makes them hot as
CNN BC AB C BS MTV TNN,
TRANSCENDENCE is a satellite dish of dreams
and a road map to Disneyland.
It’s the same disease all over America.
Here on the Rock, Key West,
Southernmost Point Florida, ninety miles from Cuba,
all the old fishermen been banished to Stock Island.
Wreckers, long gone save for Mel Fisher and
the gold doubloons his pirate government covets.
Not even a cigarmaker’s scent left to savor,
the prized Cuban leaf outlawed y todos vayando
a Calle Ocho o Ybor City, Tampa.
And all gunrunner smugglers busted or split,
slipped off to Panhandle, Louisiana
to escape the heat, open pawnshops, ride big Harleys
through the bayou breezes and fart at the Fed’s
million dollar surveillance blimp menacing Cudjoe.
Gone, gone, gone,
the hippie girls, Sister and Star, their longhair men,
Capt. Easy and Dak, rented into exile.
Cheap housing, vinetumbled Victorians and shotgun shacks
that once listed paintless against exotic night
scented frangipani and indica,
now converted into compound guesthouses with hot tubs
and air conditioning to blot out the coco-rico,
coco-ricos of mourning for the daze of the Old Anchor Inn,
Boat Bar and Mascot, Delmonicos and Shorty’s Diner,
shrimpboats anchored downtown,
lightless nights with sky close enough
to pluck starfruit for a dreamtime snack.
The naked swimmers in the main channel,
dodging barnacles to climb Sylvia’s iron legs
mount her flashing red light and launch
moonlit behinds into the Ocean Gulf.
Red right return, red right return, red right,
there is no return, just a splashdown
for this once wild western island on the stream,
It’s the same neon disease all over America.
WORKING DOWNTOWN
Somebody said
“Working downtown will give you an attitude.”
Uh Huh. Ya got that right.
YOW !
Don’t blame it all on the lost tourists
they just the fat fodder of another industry developing resources,
tourist traps like copper mines
that leave the natives poisoned and homeless.
Every adult a bartender, waitress, hard hat,
store clerk, bus boy, bell hop to it
servicing a town that’s been bought and sold
by solicitous city commissioners
gone arrogant and swollen at the bottom line, escorting
regulatory bodies that go limp at the sight of cold, hard cash,
“We got our own big ugly steel thing now, just like Miami.”
MAKE A BUCK, MAKE A BUCK, MAKE A BUCK, BUCK, BUCK
and fiezuk, fuck and pluck,
all the rest completely invisible
unless they be players or payers
who kiss the hand that bleeds them.
Weird scenes from inside the goldmine, Duval Street 1994:
“Whattaya mean, ya won’t take an third party outta state check?
Whattaya mean, whattaya mean!?”
“Yo! Its a one way street! One way!”
Four beerbottles, a filthy barglass, half a cherry,
and a pack of condoms on the sidewalk.
Next day, a used condom appears.
NO PARKING, ever.
“No, we don’t have a public bathroom.”
3A.M. a drunk pisses on the front door of a Duval Street business.
Crackheads shoplift an entire block. KWPD arrives ten minutes too late
and issues a warning for violating the noise ordinance.
“Buy one tee shirt, get one free.”
Japanese tourists go home with two hundred dollar fruit of the looms
sporting a delinquent Bugs Bunny captioned,
“Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t reach my joint.”
“Where’s the Hemingway House?”
Homeless, homeless, homelesss,
vagrants sleep
in scenic city planters under headlines
“City Approves New Airport Design.”
“Why is it so hot?”
“It’s O.K., it’s my father’s/mother’s/wife’s/ex-husband’s credit card. It’s O.K.”
“Who’s Harry Powell?”
“What’s happened to Key West?”
These tourists see it, mourn it, love it
maybe more than we do, who have lost it.
Finally,
Outta state plate fancy Ford F-150 x-tra cab pickup
can’t parallel park,
knocks three full garbage cans splat
all over the sidewalk. Four adults get out and take off.
“Hey! You knocked over the trash, man!”
Across the street, they turn, annoyed “What?”
“The garbage man, you knocked it all over the place.”
“Oh yeah. Well. We’ll get it later.”
At the corner, they walk faster, don’t look back.
“You could give a damn, right? Not your home.”
No Answer
But enlightenment!
We jog back, right the cans, clean up the mess
and dump half into the truck,
under that snap too shiny bedliner cover,
Free souvenirs from the locals.
NOBODY WANTS TO LIVE LIKE THIS!
But,
working downtown
will give you an attitude.
HELLO SPRING BREAK
Hello Spring Break
they’ re writing nasty things about you
in the paper over at Solares Hill,
saying Key West doesn’t want you
low class beer-pukers covered in Grateful Dead stickers.
You might ruin our reputation with the rich, who blow Big Bucks,
who suck down Dom Perignon
and pay five hundred a night for a closet
and two hundred a plate for vichyssoise,
whose high-class wallets wish we would bend
and pretend to be what they want.
Well, it’s all a lie;
Key West has been a stink, a stain,
a shrimper, salvage wrecker, scalawag,
cigar-rolling, pool-shooting, dope-smoking,
beatnik, biker, saint, holy harlot flashing her ass
in the face of convention since shipwrecked Spaniards named her,
“Cayo Hueso”
“Bone Key”
per todos los Reys del Sol, Kings of the Sun, bleached
skeletons bidding them land on her sacred shores.
Key West ain’t no TV show,
Key West ain’t a Lexus on Duval Street,
Key West ain’t a condo
that locks up the waterfront for paying customers only.
Key West is the wine in a drunken sailor’s rowing arms,
Key West is a big fat mama who wants to hug you all,
who plays magic tricks with your mind at night,
who makes you sweat and feeds you,
who leaves you always calling
calling back to her for more.
Key West is the star of the sea,
who watches over fishermen adrift in liquid night,
she whispers in the artists’ ears,
she lights the lamp beside the golden door
por los balseros Cubanos, rafters
willing to die for freedom on these shores.
Freedom. Liberty. Tolerance. Acceptance.
Once upon a time
everyone you passed on Duval Street
would smile and say hello
no one needed two jobs, or a quarter to park,
or a gold card to spend the night,
or a reservation to touch the sea;
Paradise and free,
but much too much, too tempting,
too much temptation to remain unbitten by the mouth of greed:
INVASION 1973
by men and women wearing suits,
arriving by airplane in the disco decade,
carrying cash
and Robert’s Rules of Order,
bent on improving everything,
civilize this backwater island
(faintly reeking of shrimp and sponge)
and maximize her potential to solicit for their bank accounts.
Maximum neon; maximum traffic jam;
Maximum tax; maximum dead reef; maximum rent;
Maximum code enforcement; maximum concrete;
maximum T-shirt rip-off;
Maximum fifty dollar boiled lobster with a potato… ?
Minimum grouper;
Minimum green space,
Minimum…
ARRGGGHHHH!
What have they done to this island?
Key West, this is terminal.
They’ re stealing the waterfront market, the shrimp houses,
toxic triangle tank island, salt ponds, houseboat row
picking over the bones of paradise;
The city need them!
The city’s gotta big debt!
Gotta pay, gotta pay, somebody’s gotta pay,
we gotta pay, you gotta pay and pay and pay,
sell your house to the rich man,
sell your johnboat to make room for a Long Island yacht,
build condos from one end of the bridal path to the other,
cover Peary Court in concrete
GIVE IT UP!
GIVE THE RICH MAN A BREAK!
CASTRO IS FALLING!
CASINOS ARE COMING!
THIS WILL BE THE AMERICAN RIVIERA!
IT’S HOPELESS!
So, get your raggedy ass out of our parlour.
AHHHHHHhh
“…Give us this day our daily bread
and forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive those who trespass against us,
lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
Can this be forgiven?
Who will raise the waterfront crucified for the sin of poverty?
Should we pray for the resurrection of local culture?
Hide in Bahama Village?
Hope that the Chamber of Commerce will be kind?
Hemingway’s cats laugh and yowl on a decaying fence,
“Doncha get it Bubba?
There’s no room left here for the six-toed,
the one-eyed,
the mongrel dreamers playing guitar sticks
on the sidewalks of paradise,”
NO ROOM AT THE INN for penniless travelers
or their outcast children seeking the Southern Cross.
Exodus Exodus Exodus
Slip away to the mangers of Stock Island
where cows and old hippies live in Airstreams,
where midnight waitresses and bicycle mechanics,
bartenders and store clerks, artists in tin warehouses
Jesus in a shrimp shack
dancers in the alleyways
all plot a resurrection,
a great “rucksack revolution” that quivers over the guava vine.
You heard it here first, listen:
Call up those no class vagabonds,
tell them to come and bring a friend,
Springbreakers and flute-makers,
every pirate in the book:
The Grateful Dead and Wavy Gravy,
Rainbow Children and Earth First!ers, Farmers from Tennessee,
call the Peace-Eye Bookstore,
The Psychedelic Solution
Saint Mark’s Place and Boulder,
The Lakota Tribes of Wounded Knee,
call Mother Teresa, Cesar Chavez, Mahatma Gandhi, Gary Snyder,
call the Hare Krishna
call everyone who’d rather sleep in the sand under the stars
than give a nickel to the Hidden Ocean Key Hyatt Zero House.
Tell them to come
and overrun Truman Annex
and stick flowers in the gunbarrels of greed.
THE PLACE WE LIVE
Chugging out the Northwest channel at dusk,
around midnight we have moored off Cottrell Key
the houseboat rocks in the rhythms of our Mother’s arms,
we are blanketed with stars, the bright sting of the Scorpion,
and a full Dipper tilting earthward,
we lay on our backs as children peering into the universe.
This is the place we live.
The sharp slapping of fin flesh on water wakes us,
invisible leaping and roiling out there in the darkness,
airborne rays or flying fish, some alarmed prey
defying the tightening links of the food chain.
Slap, splash! slap, splash!
a chorus of scales against the sea
waves glittering etched with moonlight
we gaze across dumbfounded
and find ourselves tiny as grains of sand swept within
this infinity of air and water that sustains us.
This is the place we live.
We fall asleep on the roof,
the full brilliant moon drilling our eyelids,
wind from the north rips over the waves
all night roaring savage lullabies into uncovered ears
and all night we awake to watch the constellations
wander westward chased by dawn,
the whole heaven swinging to and fro
rocks the cradle.
This is the place we live.
Solar winds driving the dawn
drive cold night from our mammal skins.
A kettle of vultures wheel over nearby mangroves,
but among them, one borne distinct from the rest,
twice the size, white head unmistakable,
vast wingspan a black crescent moon rising
steady he hovers higher, effortless yet all powerful
Bald Eagle surveys this country whose spirit
has been captured in his crooked claws –
endangered species, broken eggshells, dead chicks, icon of America,
legislation, protection, comeback, comeback, comeback-
The wings’ trailing edges ripple like prairie grass,
those amber waves of grain across America’s slowly eroding heartland.
Eagle, drive open these eyes to see
straight through the New World Disorder,
the corporate morgues and caskets of dollars
bearing our Mother’s body,
let all people see with your blazing yellow eyes the other lives
clustered beneath your furious survival,
your furious wings beating against extinction:
the cormorants and mergansers full of selenium,
the Florida Panthers’ crooked offspring muted with mercury,
the glorious corals choking to blackbanded skeletons,
the seacow and sea turtle prop scarred,
great singing whales entangled in driftnet and sickened in a poisonous ocean
and all the rest carry upon your mighty wingbeats
flying straight off the cursed dollar bill
and back into the wild heart of creation
where beats our common blood.
Carry this message
Our work is no where near done,
our work is barely just begun,
to save this, the place in which we live.
A test for the place we live:
Name the soil.
-Miami and Key Largo limestones, respectively oolitic and coralline.
Where does the drinking water come from?
-Navy Wells on the mainland, drawn from the Biscayne Aquifer,
pumped through one hundred and sixty plus miles of PVC pipeline.
-Or, from the once freshwater lens beneath Key West,
steeped in formaldehyde from the cemetery,
dosed with trickled down DDT from the Army-Navy,
saline infiltrated and seeded
with injected unmentionable bacteria and stormwater runoff
all of which any politician in his deep pockets categorically denies.
Name three edible native species.
-Conch, custard apple, saltwort.
Name three endangered native species.
-Key Deer, Stock Island Snail, Key Largo Woodrat.
Point north.
How many days until the next full moon?
Where does our sewage go?
-Key West Wastewater Plant on Fleming Key for secondary treatment,
no nutrient stripping, processed effluent pumped
directly offshore, next to the ship channel.
-Or, to a neighborhood package treatment plant,
raw waste mixed with chlorine, stirred and dumped
right there, in my bay, your canal and
speaking for heron, egret, kingfisher, osprey,
our estuary, thank you very much!
-Or underground, raw, into septic tanks, or cesspits which fail
-Or down shallow injection wells where,
aided by the churning of the waves
effluent migrates through porous rocks
and in hours or a few days resurfaces in my canal,
your bay or speaking for fish, bird, heron, turtle,
and marine mammals everywhere,
our ocean, thank you very much!
This is the place we live.
On the houseboat,
morning broken over us we prepare to dive
and all the daylight details burst pulsing through these human eyes:
Nurseshark barracuda, spiny lobster, eel grass,
gorgonians, elkhorn, staghorn, finger, star, fire and
brain corals, sandflats, flamingo tongue, sea urchins,
anemones, tophats, angelfish, parrotfish, triggerfish,
hog snapper, grouper, yellowtail, frigatebird, osprey,
pelican, egret, heron, man o’ war, sea cucumber, phytoplankton.
This great web of being wheels above and below us
floating on the living sea we are woven within the waves and come clean,
baptized back into our animal nature of skin and blood, flesh and fin
eye to shining eye within the breathing of the tides and weaving of the stars
This is the Place,
is the Place,
the Place
we all live
praise it.
A CRIME ABOUT TO BE COMMITTED
“Experimental pineapple farms
in the Florida Keys were destined to fail.”
I had some galvanized pineapple this morning
there’s pineapple in them thar hills.
25 July, KWF,
a dozen Hemingways conga down in double vision,
yellow tape snaking across Duval like the
scene of a crime about to be committed
tourists on mopeds running red lights,
tourists on mopeds honking horns,
tourists on mopeds going down
in the middle of Southard street
tourists look so surprised losing the skins of their asses.
Ten boy scouts without their mothers
sail down from Miami,
Boy scouts peeking at High Times and forbidden centerfolds
seeking the merit badge of Universal Knowledge.
Down the block, ten Papas bumble,
drunken stumble into Hooters
seeking “bodacious tatas”
and a little lead for the pencil.
Nevermind
Hem’s Garden of Eden,
a taste for short hair
and all those lacy little dresses
mama loved.
IF IT MOVES SHOOT IT;
his last meal
A Moveable Feast
young man’s banquet of unspoiled joys.
Today’s the first day of the rest of yr life
and William Burroughs rides into town on an old nag:
“What this place needs is a shooting gallery; Now
Dr. Benway’ll have to inject himself in Red’s Place
and later appear throwing raw liver
at a Green Parrot Poetry Slam.”
Whatddaya mean too graphic
whaddaya mean, obscene
who sez we’re obsessed,
you heard the Doctor, get undressed,
the word is a virus
your virus my virus our virus.
A box of new hypodermic syringes were found inside
the police station yesterday;
A notorious Brit gave Papa’s heirs
a hotshot right out in public last year;
An amanuensis to the famous
drinks himself to death
while lizards drop out of trees like papayas
split open at the feet of stray dogs.
Burroughs stared at his left foot
for nine months in Tangiers
until his junk ran out.
When will Cayo Hueso’s junk run out?
Gotta Papa fix,
Banga powerboat injection,
Slam a cruise ship mainline,
CUT
You’ll eventually get used to bugs crawling
all over everything,
geckos screaming in the backyard
Cubans screaming next door
about the Revolution and Castro
who took all their gold;
Mel Fisher took all the gold but he’s a hero.
It’s all a matter of perspective.
The island’s overrun,
a bunch of Junkies sit outside at dusk
count their blood money
and dream of sailing away,
metallic pineapple taste in their mouths,
staring at the yellow bananas overhead
full of lime green sunlight
spilling into a dark and indifferent sea.
It’s all as pure as driven shit,
dropped from silver spoons.
DINNER AT BLUE HEAVEN
Once upon a time
“You don’t have to die to get there.”
The waitress in pearls kisses a dog
black and tan, tail curled
Squeaky lemon yellow cab
slides to a stop against a hail oh of neon pouring
from the electric blue groovy studio cross street
with windows trimmed in sunshine and
shopping out front,
one old latex granny,
hand on hip motionless and unreal
lovely
looking stolen from Miami Beach but
wax-cast in Key West.
Rental cars bearing lost tourists
run the wrong way one way in the benign night,
peeking up intersections
seeking civilization in a gone world.
Up and down Petronia
trash truck’s lights flash sulphur
with the tension of official business,
slowly stinking to a stop, dropping
hungry garbagemen for Gatorade and pork rinds
purchased at Johnson’s Grocery,
“Coldest Beer in Town”
emerges incognito in brown paper sacks.
Sexy girl’s sandals slap time passing while
some beat horn floats out the door and wraps
the jazz cactus of my vision where
a smiling dog savors the drift of delicious
floating off dinner plates–
STRIDENT WOMAN IN COMBAT BOOTS
AND LEOPARD HALTER
LEAVE MY EARS ALONE!
Young black men blow a gang of cool smoke
and pass two white telephone girls in silence,
no funky vibe, no violence jibe
Florida number one gun in the nay-shun
for cutthroat hooligan horrors
and long hot summers in the frying pan:
Crack (is wack attack) and Castro, ugly Americans.
The girl is bare, her wine is red
she feels her mother’s dread as
corner voices crank up
the volume of disrepair, despair.
Make us a place in the face of the Lord,
one Banana Heaven and
pink taxis to swing Io and pick up the tab.
Do me delight tonight,
caress the cactus piercing the limp and dangling flag
without a breath of air
Run this rap, say Uncle Sam,
is life a trap?
Not really hazy dope days of dreaming hallelujahs at the beach,
stealing stars to fill our viper’s hearts.
At thirty-three we taste reality on a
plate borrowed from our grandmothers’ houses,
China with bridges and Buddhist fishermen,
pagodas beneath plum blossoms.
THINKING OF KOSEV@
Boiling a pot of water for tea
try not to take this for granted
think of the Kosev@r refugees,
not a pot,
not even clean water
Tea? a memory ancient as sovereignty,
Families huddled in pine bough tents in the woods
as winter comes
and the hair grows thick on the single cow.
I pour cold milk
from a plastic bottle,
whirling into hot tea it contracts,
then expands
like the spoken prayers
of a hundred thousand hungry mouths
seeking a target
other than their personal god who is indifferent
to their sacrifice in his name;
My spoon stirring,
rings the teacup like a bell.
CHERNOBYL
“Today I have become Shiva, destroyer of Worlds”
Robt. Oppenheimer, 16 July 1945
There stands Pontius Pilate in a lab coat
unlocking the fruit of the tree of knowledge,
is bitter and barren bearing death.
When the mothers are crucified
their stigmata of milk runs
livid with fallout down belly and thighs
toward the womb bearing the Children of Chernobyl.
Look at their small faces crumpled by the green rain,
playgrounds and gardens abandoned too late,
their thyroids withered like old men
or exploded, a bunch of grapes choking the throats
innocent enough to remember their good Russian trust.
Their brothers in uniforms and lead aprons
shoveling the sarcophagus roof while Geiger counters
chattered like the teeth of fever
in a mouth pleading that
they obeyed.
Their fathers flew through the burning cloud
with planeloads of water to put out the sun
and lie now diminished,
the incurable thirst of the atom ravaging
their matchstick bodies,
gasping in dry voices that
they listened, they believed,
while their playful children ate the green snow.
Now close enough to death to cry
that men who steal Plutonic fire
shall burn with it forever,
blazing in their minds
whole villages of hollow eyes,
blinding as the broken atom’s bitter light
that glitters in the faces of withered children
consumed by an innocent hunger for life.
KNOW IT ALL
What happens when you reach the point
where you know too much
it’s all put on
or put up
sit down and shut up and
deal with the plate of days
life sets upon your table,
disheveled, stained
china chipped, spoons missing, forks bent.
Somewhere in the middle, maybe
like a fly frozen in amber,
a perfect ancient place setting, quarried for sweetness
from the vast rock candy mountain of childhood
where all dreams had smooth edges
and bears made tea in Magic Kitchens.
Where dinner never burned nor tears fell
as the most overused seasoning in a
boiled agony of bone and sinew,
garnished paychecks, broken families, smashed glasses
from drink after drink, after drink-
Or not,
perhaps a failed education or flailed intellect,
failure of inquiry, force of profligacy,
domestic quarrel, irreconcilable differences
A pile of crushed cups on the floor
after the tablecloth’s been yanked away,
sleight of hand’s failed and
the floor’s littered with shards and shining pieces
of what Dear Abby predicted
anyone would be most likely to achieve
who knew too much…
and not nearly enough
to put it all back together again,
not all the King’s horses
or all the King’s men.
“London bridge comes falling down,
falling down,
falling down….”
(interpersonal artillery shattered the pylons
between the distant and fantastic countries of the heart.)
SYL AND TED
Well we’re all in this together Syl,
after thirty five years, the truth comes out
or does it.
The anchor of love hooked you
so hard at first sight
you branded him with your mouth,
but couldn’t keep your head
out of the oven.
Not so fast Ted
your verse of hungry predators,
the scarf tom from her neck like Isadora’s
but with a lion’s paws
before the ravishing,
before departure
to hunt again
from a den of bone and sinew.
Oh the things that German fathers do
tell me about it
the faithless lot
leaving their daughters with daggers in the eyes
and rag doll bodies like bloody bandages over
scars that map the deserter’s route rolled out in razors
over the flesh of golden silk
of Fulbright Fellow
of posthumous Pulitzer.
If only we could have kept the
Nightingale longer;
No human cage could hold from her flight
into the setting sun of Night.
HANGED MAN
The Hanged Man
presages violent change.
No room for clairvoyant
madmen, shaman, throwback
pounding nails on the roof of the world
for a stout pint, a black and tan.
Playing one eyed jack
in the back of diner kitchens
after the eggs and dishes
the hundred cups of coffee
after the parade of faces,
the morning’s masks all pinned in places
blue collars or briefcases, sheepskin,
lamb’s blood.
The grit of the Catskills’
hundred years’ sleep slipping under the skin
itching like crazy in between
shock therapy and thorazine.
The mad man sings on the dump
hangs his mind on the moon
counts ten penny nails,
his vision of razors stripping everyone
of their party clothes,
their carnal deceptions, their poses.
A fractured reflection, ghost
who put his finger against
the edge and pushed,
everyone over, falling
with an axe, obscenity, sob,
finally a violent throb
of rough rope.
Trickster, laborer, joker, carpenter
hanged man fingered signs
on barn doors locked from the outside in
and took the last exit
home.
OCTOBER
The month when death comes
craving fresh meat
etching corpses by the side of dry washes
elements converged
the glinting scythe
agile as a filet knife
skins desire from the flesh and
casts its shell out as carrion
down the ravine.
Thunder rumbles in the hungry belly
of birth
context excised
skeletons stripped by the moon
waxing and waning
Diurnal motions unflesh
all resistance
trees stretch skyward grown old,
eternal sea’s perpetual motion
rages uncontrolled;
mortality washes in and out with the tides
exposing broken conceits
empty as the shells surrendered
up and down the beach
footprints without bodies
husked of identity.
“What is the cause of death?”
“Birth!” said Gautama.
FROGS
In the cats’ water bowl
are three tiny frogs
like fallen seeds. They float
upside down underwater
in surrender,
having misjudged the pond,
the bowl like life whose depths
against the blue sky
lends itself to deception:
Where are the shallows,
where the dry rocks?
Who will wet a toe,
who gets pushed in?
CORRESPONDENCE
Dear
don’t tell me you can’t discern
between a six pack
and the asylum.
We were both so young together
now I read you study the lines in sunlight
from every possible angle,
diagnose a jowl,
what that growing bump on the nose signifies.
My mother called it the hardest age,
one day you look in the always friendly mirror
and gasp at the betrayal;
The same way you gasped at the ugly letter
and downed a twelve pack,
trying to decipher an explanation for
once again being left alone.
When he came over to explain,
you were too drunk to care.
You with the photographic memory,
with the quick wit and slim hips,
you flounder home from the bar
and with one beer left
write me this letter.
The alphabet on the page splays
like disintegrated bits
of what the yearbook predicted
we were most likely to achieve.
I should tell you
that the sinews of your beauty
are wrapped in blood,
writhe and pulse beneath the
thin veneer time rends to taunt you
when you are afraid,
then drink yourself numb,
trying to disinherit the inevitable passage
not recognizing
mortality’s a birthright,
the old wise crone’s a best friend
who has memorized history,
who contains time,
who celebrates all ages
who has no fear.
Embrace her.
These blind men
are running not from
the imperfections you’ve bought into,
dealt by hucksters hustling the fountain of youth,
But from the fear within you,
that makes them dread their own mortality.
Only the old mother can weave the circle,
and demonstrate how
by loving our own slow death
we accept life
and live.
NO PROZAC
Flagler Avenue, Thursday morning
bicycles beneath plumeria,
ripe cherimoya studded with seeds
we wrestle to get at the sweet flesh,
lips expertly pluck lacquered beads
from custard fruit, black jujubes
tongue fires to root
in the compost between bananas,
a decade of dirt gathered
from coffee grounds and zucchini skins,
the Sunday Times shredded amid eggshell,
pineapple rinds and exhausted tea bags,
rich loam fattens earth over
island limestone, coral bones
diatoms, oolitic sands,
dig deep here to hold last century’s beach.
Kneeling beneath a needle-blue sky,
The passion flower crucified on the trellis
entices Julia Longwing to supper.
The stained-glass web
of the crab spider vibrates,
the exquisite cathedral geometry
tucked amid cherry blossoms,
folded fruit like Chinese lanterns
fluttering outside a temple;
let us be honest,
even in the terrible moment
sun strikes
the leaf
trembles.
HEMP FOR VICTORY
Have you heard the word about the Chronic?
Talkin’ Bhaang, Boo, Blunt, Big Buds, Stinky Skunk,
Cannabis,
Can a bliss,
talking about a public resurrection,
a new old direction,
not dope but hope,
say Hemp, Hemp, Hemp for Victory
say Marijuana,
mari wanna change the nation,
liberation,
under the counter culture rising
back to our roots:
In 1776 Thomas Jefferson grew Hemp,
so did his friend Washington.
Hemp rigged Old Ironsides in the Revolution,
clothed the Continental Army,
and held the ink of the Constitution.
Betsy Ross sewed hempen cloth,
America’s first flag.
World War II, U.S. Government proclaimed
“Hemp For Victory”,
made a movie and distributed free seeds to
American farmers to support the war effort:
Hemp tough for soldier’s shoes and clothing
Hemp strong for parachutes and rigging,
Hemp gave paper, cloth, food, fuel
and medicine to mankind
Popular Mechanics proclaimed,
“Billion Dollar Crop”,
the plant that would be king
and fill some poor farmer’s plate with gladness.
BUT, THE ROBBER BARONS COULDN’T CONTROL IT.
Now follow this:
Herbert Hoover had a Treasury Secretary named Andrew Mellon
who ran a big bank that financed a company called Dupont.
Mellon appointed his in-law Harry Anslinger head of
The Federal Bureau of Narcotics,
known today as the DEA. WHY?
Because Mellon, Dupont and a
newspaperman named William Randolph Hearst
knew the history and uses of Hemp,
and vowed to smash the competition in its cradle.
“When mechanical hemp stripping machines became
available in the mid’ thirties the enormous timber
acreages and business of Hearst Paper Corp. and
virtually all other timber and large newspaper
companies stood to lose billions of dollars.”
1937, Dupont patented a new process to make
paper from wood pulp,
a new process to make plastic and fibers
from oil and coal.
Mad, mad scientists
with dollars dancing before their eyes, waving patents,
to market!, to market!, but first
a phone call to their main man Anslinger,
petroleum stocks poking out of his pockets
he stared down the threatening herb and proclaimed,
“REEFER MADNESS”
lock up your sons and daughters,
the once patriotic weed a menace,
delinquency, debauchery,
ASSASSIN OF YOUTH !
Beware crazed Jazz Negroes,
ruin wails in the smoky saxophone night.
Hearst’s presses ran yellow with lurid tales.
No American safe until PROHIBITION,
THE MARIJUANA TAX ACT OF SEPTEMBER 1937.
Anslinger fathered the bastard to protect a profit
and Hemp became a POW in the Green War,
one of the first skirmishes
between nature and technology,
industry and the old ways
based on covenant with the earth.
With Righteous use,
Marijuana creates compassion,
not the stab in the back cocaine
of Oliver North’s Contras,
not the mind-fuck crack
born of the Reagan years that
kills your brother for a cigarette
and keeps poverty ghettos
in chaos and chains of fear,
immobilized
and no threat to fat democracy
eating taxes in Washington.
Righteous the Chronic gets a love vibe going,
a good meditation,
a handshake of friendship,
shared contemplation,
community of kindness
flowers within the mind’s eye,
community of thought that questions authority.
Righteous, means use it wisely
Righteous do not abuse,
recognize the medicine
bless sacrament that mends the blues
only when you need it
when you hear the call and heed it,
smoke out the truth:
After sixty years of prohibition,
more than ten million Americans smoke Marijuana.
Say
HEMP FOR UICTORY!
RE-LEGALIZE IT
After all,
“it’s only a weed
that turns to a flower in your mind.”
CANDOR
“TO THE DEAD
You were here on earth, in cities-
where now?
Bones in the ground
thoughts in my mind” -Sad Dust Glories, A. G.
Ginsberg’s dead
sunflower eclipsed
one less naked warrior
monkeywrenching the machine universe.
Who stripped in LA and with genitals flapping
confronted hecklers at poetry readings,
demanding they tell the truth.
Who chased dulcimer Brian’s father
around the kitchen with a carving knife
to prove that he did care after all
whether he lived or died.
Who housed hustlers and hucksters
and untouchables chanting revelations
straight from the genius madhouses,
Greystone and Rockland and Pilgrim.
“Old greybeard scholar” seed of Blake,
illuminated Whitman,
Williams’ student transversing the
ash-can streets of Patterson’s giant,
awakening,
blazing sunflower
scorched the fibrous tendrils of mind
wrapped around square America 1950’s.
Kennedy, Cassidy, Kerouac, Leary,
Huncke, Bukowski, now Ginsberg
Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Atheist
all gone over back to the tomb,
re-birth womb,
the same,
no end and no beginning.
One exits woman
one enters earth
one comes
being fed by the mother,
one goes
becoming food for another,
inhale and exhale
endless encyclical
eaten by the lion of Dharma
roaring
“first thought, best thought”,
without pause
articulating the uni-verse
the rhythms’ pulsing burst
sound in his throat
now born of a billion stars.
Overhead today,
a brilliant high noon comet
slicing fire hydrogen white
as the sun reflecting off the windows
of his kind
mind’s eye
piercing gaze,
“The key is in the window,
the key is in the sunlight at the window-
I have the key-
get married Allen, don’t take drugs…
Love,
your Mother”.
Ginsberg is dead
how can that be
old stone liver,
old blood bursting
up through macrobiotic disciplines,
seven decades traveled,
Benares, Indian Journals,
kicked out of Prague for dissident,
Expelled from Cuba for calling Che Guevara “cute,”
a long life feeding hungry mind
gone supernova.
Time and space compress
into a single point of
infinite density,
Crazy Wisdom,
Angelheaded
blues designed to carry you home,
May King,
riding the Lion’s back,
you humble and obedient servant,
we dip your verse in wine and eat it
Holy Holy Holy.
NAROPA
Or Lunch at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
July spitting hot,
drive up the canyon into cool vagina of trees
and pouring creek, folds of granite,
out of the packed car, hopscotch across hot pavement,
gravel, lenitive grass, scramble down igneous incline,
sage lined intoxication sniff of wetness and
sight of bodies slick as otters,
stripped skin glistening in the light slicing between Cottonwood,
Aspen, birch relative and always big where water prevails.
Water committed hot new bodies dive in gasps of cold pleasure,
snow in the groin and armpits,
loins and shoulders glinting with wild skin knowledge,
Braille of goosebumps tattooing messages down the creek:
Thank you water spirits for this delight,
thank you with our juicy sexes,
thank you with our body rhythms, all glistening fur
and hot blood beat chorus pounding within your icy ripples.
Water nymphs in red lipstick wade with breasts burning white,
nipples cold tightened invite the inquisitive tongues of fishes,
Young men upon the rocks, all thighs and angles of bare behind
warmed skins sculpt ultimate visions of tactile desire,
Together all erotic beyond judgment of the law preacher’s paper,
together all baptized sacred in delight,
the lapping creek’s water tongues lick us everywhere
till we turn fluid in our animal skins,
and flow free from the faces that confine us.
LISTEN, JACK
Lake Jewell at Canterbury:
white cross,
tree fringe deciduous,
sky like cotton drifting in
carried on wingbeats
headed into silence baptized
by dew dripping from Live Oak.
The old gods’ trees breath,
not that white and sapless crucifixion
breaking the horizon to fill our
animal reverie with penitence
for thriving in a house of flesh.
5:40 AM, HOBE SOUND BEACH
The men and fisher women
with buckets rods and reel
come down to the dawn darkened ocean
to chant a prayer of scales.
Their lines sing,
saltwater notes pinned along the translucent skein
hooking man to wave to
seawater womb of the world;
Coalescent forces merge in foam at their feet
scouring the body of beach
salvation placed within hunger’s reach.
Rods and bodies genuflect
flinging lines beyond the break
across the shallow bar
they chase the seething abstraction
back and forth,
darting shadows, unspoken syllables
the supplicant lines remain unanswered;
The overzealous snap the thin thread
the monofilament like their own consciousness
freighted with breaking points.
A moment’s impatience
bad faith
parts
the cord
must be rebuilt painstakingly,
by hand
the lesson comes
the sound of one knot tied patiently.
Slow dawn illuminates a manuscript of waves,
sun breaches a dark glyph of clouds,
a rising sign beyond language and history
translating awe upon every silenced tongue,
defying our proclivity
for definition
with being.
Wordless presence
of light and water almighty
breath,
exhalations of breakers-
after breath,
seashells, ground into sand-
after breath,
eternity-
and the secrets of fishes
defying hooks
mumbled deep beneath the waves
in the dark foaming knot of devoured continents.
SMITHY
Evening sails on grey parchment
tall ships out there too, at anchor
as the light lowers
a red hot vapor
welds the sea and horizon together,
arc of awe
coupling day to night.
God’s a welder by trade,
a smithy don’t you see
using the vast hydrogen tank of the sun
to fire creation,
trees hammered out of earth’s skin
and man, a poor fallen ember
quenched in the vast seas.
So what do you think, i'd love your feedback!