Tuesday, January 21, 2025
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
Coupons
my stuff's bar-codes across
the mysterious prone mirror.
I didn't know what her forearm's
tattoos represented. To me
they stayed abstract &
so I liked them very much.
She continued: "He was a sweet
guy but not very smart." "You,"
she added, "saved 20 dollars
on your groceries today."
"Thank you very much," I said.
"Of course!" she said--which seems
to be what people say now
instead of "You're welcome."
It Burns Low
who stays alive through
a post-mortem force of will.
And to Ma, who is I'm sure
glad to be past life. To an
aunt or two and friends
who went away too, too early.
To James Baldwin, whom
I met once but who wonders
who is this person? I tell him
his book, The Fire Next Time,
which I found in the back of a
classroom and read at 17,
changed my life. No response.
I spoke briefly to some people
who went out of their way
to be unkind to me. I find
I didn't have much to say
to them. Nor did they to me.
They are smoke, and truly,
my own fire burns low.
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.