THEN  

if radiant energy
if the prism with well-lit blossoms
if a tambourine sparks the scent of orange-blue

walk with me through the forest of log cabins
near the path of the river of gold
into the cave where diamonds echo vibrations of taste

this could be a maybe
this could be a possibility
this could be the silent laughter

in the end what if
if could be anything else
but the if it allows itself to be

No Room at the In


fretting pineal 
the flume hotel transit 
disposed 
its torpor militia

breaking a somnolent rumor 
from its disport habitat
a worn boomerang vocalist
caught the horned legions

reversing the bearskin
to ghost their venom pageants 
declines frontage 
under the madwoman habitat

the next dreamer
temples a sentient breath
precision simmer
elicits a resuscitator tonic

replication
lowered its climb ladder
its stain fin
sentenced to bromide

The Vision

In the vision of myself as electricity
encased in a black rubber
sheath, there are wires in the walls
of my body. Lightning bolts
drop from my fingertips
and the jerky squirrels
in my yard are seized by lightning,
the epileptic squirrels.
How this energy is in hell is this
fireball harnessed how it
could be held if needed.
Power lines lasso my horizon.
Transformers on the march across Kansas
drag their heavy lines and for once
I am lacey light. My lines are sails that lift
in the tender morning air.
My webs invisible in this light.

the cherry coke brain waves

alone with the nothing of the old world
I’m stuffing my skull with new brains

in the glove of forgiveness
the new world is a clean hand

the machine of the head
the eye of the rainbow

the bible of the broken clock
the berry named for an apple

milk mulch is some serious ammo
I have the power to be the soft ape

what does the skull say?
o nocturnal earth!

from AMERICAN TYPEWRITER FONT SAYS – Disgusting Trump: “Putin is a genius”

Among the Forgetters #57


This is a city that never unzips
its pants.

A sad city in need of a good
scrub down.

A repressed city. 
Everyone owns a copy.
A statue.
A war

hero whose pirouette in the thick
of battle
 
hardens and cracks 
off into history.
I love the idea

of juxtaposing colorful flowers
with gun barrels,
but they say

I am a little 
too loving,
 
too trusting.

I love the juxtaposition of dancing
and snakes,

of public art and rigor mortis 
in theory,

 in theory

Fashionable Words 11-13-20

I was almost fifty years old when I added the word sartorial
to my supposedly-superior vocabulary. If I am not mistaken,
I was wearing on that occasion the legendary T-shirt and jeans,
or something of that sort or of those means.
Nicely-tailored lexical item that I was fortunate to befriend,
for it even provoked rumblings in the well-worn memory banks.
So, like, I was truly a motley teen, in myriad ways.
I even had a sartrian phase, though I would've spelled it Sartrean.
I'd barely begun to shave on a daily basis, yet I was reading,
what was the title? ... The Transcendental Ego I do believe.
Uh, no, sorry, that should be The Transcendence of the Ego.
Get beyond it and for that matter your self while you're at it.
There's a difference, a coated voice says, you dressed-down dope.
Next, little hope for you, averred a former college roommate
upon our unplanned reunion, you still take the prize
for worst-dressed person in the room and in the class.
And on did he babble about some disheveled playwright from Spain
named Alfonso Sastre who sewed together versions of Irish plays
and came to publish dramas in New York even though in Spanish
plus a few scissored translations with such endearing titles as
"Death Thrust" and "Tragic Prelude". Morbid stage mood indeed.
At least you've avoided that level, mumbled, decades later,
my exquisitely-clothed physical therapist while he tried to sort out
my real sore maybe torn tendons, as I lay in my grey jump suit,
adding that I was lucky, sort of, not to have aggravated the sartorius,
a connective upper-leg muscle about which I learned
absolutely nothing in my philosophy, drama, and anatomy courses.

Blind Spring Lilac Plunge

of an opera sandstorm
   last over breakfast
, rain summons a siren
knees, converging, an
El Dorado all down WaY,
   neatly brain HelD, felt,
drowned USA tune To
approach TuNa, shopping,
   best DreSSeD, baked IN
reserve. / Against light of
   recessive RIOT squad
that pinches, guts, stuck
SPOKE, speaking, lashed
grandiose stocking. / Wi
   ll & horn, a refusal
that, which, upsell,
SaIl OK-OK-OK-OK-OK,
[manic frothing against]
,   guess you refuse think
ing, witty as daylight
utters backbreaking. / He
art A total of TOTALITY,
   FOR Sake [needle as a
cream to SHAVE], loosen
ed grasping for low, a letter
IN a BaNk vault, red amnes
ia dropping substation TrIbE,
Famously, [slurping, slurping]
,   dangling PrAy follow knife.
/ As always ScHooL collects
gifts, taken FoR worse, in
reverse melted as a tail. / .

HOMAGE TO UKRAINE

Is this the earth unlocked—Gog and Magog
The smashed logos of buried time
The coded universe’s familiar death pattern
Advancing furtively inflated metaphors
The ones about democratic Ukraine needing “de-Nazification”
As fuel depots explode from Russian missiles
Spewing oily plumes formed like Cyrillic script
With misspellings and war crimes
As arctic cold and snow linger in late March
And grocery shoppers return across mine-fields of words
Are those rock stars patrolling Kyiv’s outskirts on Tik Tok?
The sun without warmth. A people erased.
Could a virgin-spring be bubbling up in Blue-and-Yellow
Grave-markers stooped from undaunted chants of freedom
Dreams attacked continuously day and night
Dreams of terminologies and cyber-security
The coveted dimensionality of infinite children
Odessa—accountable violins playing the national anthem
In the face of pure destruction and random tyrannical storms
Is this the moment unreality becomes reality
With the Black Sea pounding the grand piano of world-wide globalism
An eternal NATO museum of artistic red rubble
Versus charred autos piled high in materialist forests
And obsolete myths of incontestable forevers