Tuesday, January 14, 2025
Saturday, January 11, 2025
Friday, January 10, 2025
Amerikan Cattle Drive
In this space-open-wide, sky is burnished, air is rare, dust is unto.
Ranging earth whirls up, hooves percussing, trail's a-risin’.
And the drive is driven toward
a Chicago abbatoir at the end of the loaned prayerie.
In this wide-eyed, yippie-eye-ay, comma-space, in this spaced
TexiCaliKansas range, there is rounding, there is up,
there is longing, and there's horning.
There is brand-name-recognition
for those steaks and roasts, those drive-in
burgers for burghers, those leather
shoes and boots and belts.
The Infinite Lored Cattle Drive pours/roars on through fissures
twixt history and mountains, unsettlers and originals
and fishers of men and women and beasts and burdens.
Every horse has a history, every cow has a price, every
woman has an axe, every badge has a bullet, every
man has a man saying {Man, you're in my way.}
Unholster your history, it's time to ride. Look over stampede's
boiling nation of hooves and horns. Sunlight mounts a fence.
American women and men stand staring composed upon
a hill without a city. See them, just west of where
they are. Now your great gathered herd
goes all to sky, and the loop of your lasso makes an {O
bury me not. . . .}, and ghost riders burst through clouds.
Wednesday, January 8, 2025
Tuesday, January 7, 2025
Boot
It pointed toward the painted
crosswalk it stood beside.
Had its inhabitant stepped out
of it and limped across the street
into a single-booted life?
Or had he hauled the other boot
along, walking in socks?
The tokens of absurdity,
calamity, defeat, and sadness
are strewn across all cities.
Of course they are: masses
of people, masses of things
and accidents and fractured
fates. Oh, stride on, stride on,
single-booted city cowboy.
Sunday, January 5, 2025
O, Mouth
an ode, in abc... form
O, mouth,
Abyss of appetite,
Bureau of belching,
Cannon of cursing,
Dungeon of tongue,
Emitic exit,
Fanatic of food.
O mouth,
Groom of gluttony,
Hall of hiccups,
Inventor of intrigue,
Joker and jester,
Knight of bite,
Lover of lick and kiss.
O mouth,
Muse of mucous,
Nobleman of No,
Obnoxious Opinionator,
Penthouse of Prevarication,
Quarrelsome quipster,
Rude rogue of rebuke,
Soothing sayer.
Tabernacle of teeth,
Union of utterance,
Vector of vocabulary,
Wagon of waggery,
Xanadu of flu,
Yodeler and yeller,
Zone of zest, O, mouth.
Monday, December 30, 2024
Saturday, December 28, 2024
Sonnet for Olivia Hussey
A yellow bus hauled us to Sacramento—
A field-trip to Franco Zifferelli’s film.
We were as young as Juliet and Romeo,
Three years too young for Johnson’s war in `Nam,
An ideal audience for R and J--
Infatuated with ourselves, that is to say;
Hormonally volcanic; raised on Coke™,
TV, and Rock. The news had not yet broke
That we were mortal and that Clearasil™
Could not salve every wound. Sex and death,
First crushes, crushing families—these filled
The screen. But soft! She took my breath
Away—Juliet. To this late day, you see,
I have a crush on Olivia Hussey.
Tuesday, December 24, 2024
Leaving the Holiday Party Early
say thanks to the host.
Then thread yourself
through clumps
of standing talkers.
You see yourself
out, as they say,
and close the door.
You deep-breathe
to sample cold air
and walk until
you can't hear
the party at all
anymore. Maybe
you'll go on
forever, past all
gatherings,
past being you,
past being, into infinity's
big get-together.