2 New Poems, New Themes, New Styles: "Childhood Calling" & "Bitter Rivers"

Childhood Calling
***
your childhood is calling
collect, because
you left it stranded on the
inflammation super-
highway to hell.
no pocket change, and no
pockets in footie pajamas for that
matter. you
amputated it like an appendix when
they told you
GROW UP
like it was anything to aspire to,
when things like belief and wonder and
imagination
were too immature for a
comp'ny man.
your childhood is calling
long distance, because
wolfchild howling epiphanies don't reach your
ears, years
down the line when the bottom
dropped out of your bottom
line, like roadkill behnd the limo
double-parked when you had to
drive yourself or just
walk from point A to point B,
discovering a secret alphabet of
outcast letters between the two that
resonated with the ones carved in your
bones, the things that should be
engraved on your tombstone, just another
dead kid dressed in old man's
clothes.
your childhood is calling
you names, playground
vernacular, street urchin gospel,
words you thought you outgrew by
degrees: BS or BA, MSW, PhD, MD,
A through Z when
A is for Another Aspirin and
Z is for Zoloft, anything pharma-
copious and
alphapolitically correct to
disconnect your train of thought and
leave your childhood behind, a
useless caboose, and when,
and when you need,
and when you NEED it
most, no
ghost of a map shows you the
tracks of your tears to reconnect,
recollect, because
your childhood has hung up the
phone, and now, something
worse is calling your name . . . .

------------------------------------------------

Bitter Rivers
***
bitter rivers
shiver your reflection
into shards of imperfection, seven
centuries of bad luck every time
you cry, and whales and coyotes are
symphonies for
"goodbye." croon, tune,
misfortune, all to soon, and other things that
rhyme with rune, scrawled
on the wall
above your
hollow ckull
mouldering like a jack-o-lantern
mourning its candle of thought in
November;
nine hundred ninety nine points of
light, outposts blown out
in a countdown,
empty integers all adding up to
zero. ignorance
is bliss because it's
blind to all you've left behind,
and only lasts until, at last,
history
catches up with you.

15 Things that Make Me Angry

Essentially, what I'm trying to do here is write out my frustrations. I seem to have lots of them. I seriously have to watch my oil pressure. I'm surprised there aren't jets of steam coming out of my ears sometimes.
One thing that often helps to soothe the savage mind is making lists. So, here's a list of things that piss me off:

1) Lame-ass remarks on the web that are supposed to be cute and clever ways of getting sex, but they're only cute and/or clever in the minds of those who compose them. Which leads us to,
2) Mental midgets whose brainpower would be increased by having one of those hamster-wheels hooked up to their heads. Even a SLOW hamster would be an improvement. Shit, even a DEAD hamster could at least swing back and forth a little and produce SOME current.

3) Politicians. Any and all.

4) Muscleheaded jocks who don't have the ability to engage in verbal repartee or even peaceable discussion, so they beat the shit out of anyone who looks, thinks, acts, talks, or smells a little differently from what passes in their minds for "the Norm;" these selfsame jocks are the entities that spawn Columbine-like reactions, and have the AUDACITY to look SURPRISED when somebody wants to shoot that smug look off their faces.

5) Stupid neo-nazi-wannabe kids with no coping mechanisms who think a bunch of guns and plastique is gonna solve anything, or that Hitler was anything but a maniac who should have been shot up with thorazine and locked in one of his own concentration camps, but like the gutless phony he was he took the coward's way out.

6) Muscleheaded jocks and stupid neo-nazi-wannabe kids who grow up and either become soldiers or cops so they can continue their barbarism and total ethical meltdown on even larger scales.

7) Oblivious fat people in supermarkets who look at YOU like it's YOUR fault they're walking around creating impact tremors like Jurassic Park as you try to squeeze past one of their elephantine buttocks just to get some fucking BREAD while they're moseying around buying diet soda to eat with their 500-pound lardburgers, or deciding which fat-free dressing to top off their salad with (said salad loaded with more cheese, ham, pepperoni, and anything else greasy and fattening that can be put into a salad and still be considered a salad).

8) Anorexic yuppie chicks who think that Barbie is overweight, and so they compensate by making themselves so damn thin a strong wind would snap them into, but they don't have to worry because they'll be DEAD from NOT EATING long before a strong enough wind comes along, unless Rush Limbaugh starts talking to them.

9) Rush Limbaugh. The very IDEA.

10) When my mother calls me "paranoid," as if that's an excuse to avoid admitting that there are some things out there, PARTICULARLY with regards to the government and big business, that one should be suspicious about. They're not out to get "me," they're just out to get EVERYONE.

11) People with a knee-jerk first response tendency to MEDICATE in order to solve whatever perceived mental/emotional problems they may have. Big surprise: when people do shitty things, they're SUPPOSED to feel like shit. And just because your kid's mind is moving faster than yours is no excuse to dope them up with ritalin. And when you act so HORRIFIED that somebody is smoking pot, you'd have a fit of the screaming heebie-jeebies if you couldn't get a refill on your valium prescription (which is an ADDICTION).

12) People who favor one "brand" of politician over another (see above under "politicians.") If you have to choose between the "lesser of two evils," THEY'RE STILL BOTH EVILS.

13) Racists. Any and all.

14) "Officers of the peace" and/or "peace-keeping operations," which are Orwellian neologisms for "forces of oppression" and "Hi, i'm a cop, i'm going to kick your ass and get away with it!" And, finally,

15) Making a list of things that make me angry in order to calm me down, only to find out that i'm more angry than i was when i started it!

Now THAT was a total waste of time.

New Poem: I Identify "I" (maybe retitled at a later date)

the only thing that links these things
is time, and the times in which
i identify "i"
this whole concept of "i"
like why i write, what my eye
sees, and the trainwreck of mixed metaphors
and past participles that form the collective whole
of "i."

walk around Bonsack.
i can tell you where the sweetest water
flows into a cattail swamp,
where a naiad lives in a waterfall
with bloodroots around her feet,
where Solomon's-seal, black nightshade,
water hemlock, St. Jonhswart, and jimsonweed grow,
where the red barn once stood in a suburb,
one road named "Red Barn Road" after they tore it down.
this is where myth and reality walked hand-in-hand
as i walked, learning the lay of the land,
finding places that seemed like dreaming legends
and the made-up names i gave them in my heart.

walk around Union Square, NYC.
i can take you to the circle where the park-rats sit,
where street intellectuals and sidewalk philosophers talk.
i can introduce you to people with legendary names:
Smoke, Spider, Conscience, Old School, Papo, Shadow, King Twice.
i know where to find: street artisans that would make Salvador
weep with joy, nag champa incense, chess games, sparring, and cannabis.
there's a map in my soul that i could follow blindfolded
to restaurants, poetry dives, coffeehouses, and bookstores.
this is where i wed myth to reality, becoming mythical myself,
an outsider looking in and an insider looking out,
finding a hunger, and learning what hunger was all about,
and growing a few streetwise hairs in my ragged, thinning pelt.

walk around Hinton, WV.
i can point to the land that my great-great-grandfather owned,
and sold when they came to build the dam.
i can take you to the place where the water sounds like thunder,
and where a single misstep can pull you under.
i can show you the Cave Ridge, the Old Rail-Yards, the point
where Greenbrier and New River's join in their flow.
i can show you the building that held the store
where my great-grandfather worked when i was a boy.
this is where i merged bitter with sweet,
just like the Greenbrier and New River meet,
and flow together like nostalgia and nightmares join
and from troubled waters dive for darker pearls.

the only common element is this insignificant particle
that i identify "i," and the thread that binds
them all together
is time.
at any point along that line, i could have turned
another way, made
another choice, or breathed
my last breath. this mortal thread
is finite. i keep the cords
wrapped tightly as i can,
binding them with words, binding
words into poetry, and trying to make sense
of senseless things,
and when people tell me these things aren't connected,
i tell them, "yes, they are.
you're looking at the common element,
the rare earth that has tied the knot."

New Poem: Untitled

there was a deer stepping with unconscious precision
through the scrubby brushthat borders the field
where, i'm told, a strip-mall
was once pondered
but, real-estate being what it was,
and the economy being where it is,
was a discarded concept.

what was the pretext of adding yet another
bland carbon-copy
of a thousand other strip-malls
to our already blighted landscape?

there's nothing missing from this picture.
gray, flat sky, evanescing on the mountain;
tawny field, shrubs, people passing in cars
staring at somebody
who isn't indoors letting the simple plans of wonder
occur beyond their sight-lines,sacrificing something insignificant
on the altar that would make life
so much more convenient.
what kind of a man
would do that?

can't you see that we're dying here,
not for want of another Starbucks
or Burger King
or nail salon,
but from an overdose?

i hope that deer survives hunting season
when hordes of idiots with guns
will descend upon the unspoiled
in faux appreciation of nature
to mount a stuffed head on their wall
and let the meat get freezer-burn
because Whoppers have ruined our palates
for venison.

watch out for that tree . . . it's only growing there
so that a winter storm
can send it crashing down
on your crackerbox
and spill your human crumbs
out into the street
that's due to be repaved next week.

Giving Thanks: Grace, Mercy, and American History

After a long hiatus of poetry and various rantings, it's time to take the cap off the old blogger's pen and actually write about some things in a more organized fashion.

This time of year, most folks--including my own family--are preparing to celebrate Thanksgiving. When i was younger, the basis of Thanksgiving as a holiday was given to us by our history teachers, obviously boiled down and sanitized, that it was a "time when the settlers and the Indians (which is what they called Native Americans at the time) gathered together and shared a feast." This was, one presumes, before the settlers decided that they'd rather just intoxicate the natives with firewater, slaughter them wholesale, and kill them with kindness by giving them blankets--smallpox blankets. A lot of the food that we now enjoy in America--corn and pumpkins being two of many--was given to us by long years of historical use by the Native Americans. The early settlers of Jamestown, not knowing what they were doing, at one point tried to eat datura stramonium, now known as "Jimsonweed," a contraction of "Jamestown Weed," in memory of their stupidity. A large number of them, of course, died from the lethal poisons--including atropine and scopolamine--in the plant. I'm certain the Native Americans could have told them--had they been asked--that this was a stupid idea.

The early settlers had moved into a world (not a "new world," as it was often referred to) that was in many ways different from the one they left behind. "Manifest Destiny," in its amoebic march to engulf and digest other cultures for its own benefit, had expanded into a new era of exploitation. The natives had lived in this land for millennia, quite independent of European culture. Even Amerigo Vespucci (after whom the Americas were named) and Christopher Columbus (a geographic dunderhead who died of syphillis) weren't the first Europeans to land on the soil of this land . . . archaeological evidence shows that the Vikings landed on American soil much earlier. Europeans, for the most part fleeing religious and social oppression, eventually began a new type of oppression, seeing the "savage and hostile natives" as ignorant creatures who needed to be "educated" and/or eliminated. Some people don't regard anything done by white Europeans as "wrong." The Native Americans attacked them, made war on them (nevermind the fact that they WERE here first, and had every right to defend their homeland from what eventually became aggressive and destructive expansion), and so it was obvious that the only "logical" course was to kill the natives to make "homesteads" where the white settlers could (over the course of time): plow under, clear-cut, and hunt species like the buffalo into near-extinction. Perhaps one of the earliest forms of biowarfare practiced on American soil was the "smallpox blankets," exposing the Native Americans to a disease that their immune systems had no defense against.

But i started talking about Thanksgiving, didn't i?

Jesus told a parable, once, about a Pharisee and a Publican (a tax collector) coming to the temple. The Pharisee "bragged" to God about what a good person he was, how he tithed from his largesse, and how glad he was that he wasn't a "heathen" like "that Publican over there." The Publican, not even daring to raise his eyes, begged instead for forgiveness for his wrongs. He was considered the lowest of the low in ancient Israel, a man who had literally "made a deal with the devil" by working for the invading Romans. Jesus told his listeners that the Publican went away right with God. At a time when we, in America, enjoy more wealth and freedom than many other nations, and have in recent times--with the exception of 9/11--been free from attacks from outside nations, we have it good. We were told after 9/11 that the terrorists "hate our freedom;" if that's the case, then the draconian wipeout of the Constitution done by the "Patriot Act" must have pleased them mightily. Even after that, we still have a great deal of freedom that a lot of other nations don't enjoy. And yet, rather than being grateful of this, we lord it over the "heathen nations," acting like simply being born on American soil makes us somehow "better" or "more moral." We act like the "planet police" as we invade other countries to "make them safe for democracy"--as long as it's our kind of democracy. God bless America? How about "God FORGIVE America?" I still believe that the USA is one of the best places on the planet to live. Even though there are forces within our own government who are hell-bent on removing any individual autonomy--the freedoms we send our children to war in foreign countries to protect--and eroding the Bill of Rights to the point where it's only a vain posturing, a fragile skeleton of the once robust concept it represented. We are hardly AWARE of the profound nature of these things we enjoy. The odious self-righteousness of our politicians and "world leaders"--here and abroad--is not only a smear to the reputation of America as it has been presented to the world, a land flowing with milk and honey . . . it is blasphemy. This year, at Thanksgiving, i want all of us . . . Christians in particular . . . to think HARD about everything that we DO have. When we sit down to tables laden with food, watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and the football games on television, and relish good times with our family, friends, and loved ones, we should be astounded by what we have. And a part of that astonishment should be shame, both for the apathetic way we take these good things for granted, and for the evils falsely perpretrated in the name of God and of liberty. There should be no attempt to whitewash the history of the nation that proudly proclaims "in God we trust" when that hardly applies. Gratitude--true appreciation for the quality of God we call "Grace" (which is defined as the good things we receive that we don't deserve)--can never be blind, lest we forget to be grateful as well for "Mercy" (defined as the punishment we deserve that we don't get). People who are raised in comfort and relative wealth may develop a false sense of entitlement, that the world somehow owes them something . . . the World doesn't owe us anything but suffering and death.

I'm not saying you should spend Thanksgiving day in mourning, appalled at the gravity of our history. In fact, Thaksgiving should be just that . . . giving thanks to God for his mercy and grace, which surely staggers the imagination. When you're eating, sitting with your loved ones, enjoying creature comforts great and small, remember to be thankful for them. Be grateful to the men and women of the armed forces who are honoring their commitment, and who for the most part--in my opinion--are honestly going to war because they want to protect the freedoms we enjoy. And be constantly aware just how fragile those rights and freedoms are. They are, in fact, like muscles . . . they have to be fed and exercised in order to be kept strong. If they are neglected, they will grow weak and will atrophy, and when we most need to depend on them, they will fail us. It is that part of defending freedom that falls to each of us, as citizens of America. It is, really, a profound gift for those of us who have been born and raised in America, and such a gift should NEVER be taken lightly. NOTHING should be taken for granted; circumstances can change, and those good things you enjoy could be snatched away while you're not looking. Thank God also that each and every one of us has the capacity for a critical intelligence, if we only have the willingness to use it. Do not be wasteful ingrates . . . because much will be expected from those who are given much.

New Poem: No Accidents (work in progress)

No Accidents
***
i have seen the smile in the alligator's eye
on the Suwanee River,
and worked with one teenager
who had the same look in his.

i have waded the waters of the Gulf Shore,
a school of rays parting around me,
making me for one moment
a part of their dance,
and from there to New Orleans
in a car filled with laughter
and the redolent reek of marijuana
for a Ghost Tour in the Vieux Carre.

i have looked through a telescope, breathless,
at the Orion Nebula;
my friend, an astronomer, beside me,
telling me, "You're watching a star
being born." That crucible of Creation
is a spark reflected in God's eye,
in Whose eye i also dance.

i am not the protagonist of this story,
but these are no accidents of Fate . . .
tracing these lines back to their Source,
i feel as ever the incredible force
of the first poem spoken
into the audient void:
"Let there be light."

And there was.

Rescued from Myspace: Untitled Poem

am i at the right station to catch the train i'm chasin'?
you tell me . . . is it just one of my phases, traces, ornate
races from place to place, cannonball-crazed through
this maze of worm-tunnels of the womb-belly beneath
this bawdy beldame, the city that i can't claim as home
where i'm still takin' chances? i fell in love with her like
one of those doomed romances.
she rode a wrecking ball through my poetry in one of our first dances,
raped my sleep-schedule like a lioness in heat,
laughed an icy gasp down my throat
with a January kiss to a reggaeton beat,
clenched me in her sweaty, dusky thighs in the August streets
right there where the juices run hot and the flesh tastes sweet
. . . by turns fiery and frigid, fitting firmly into the grooves and
ridges of my bipolar soul--and that's no small feat.
what makes me believe i belong here? i long to believe i can
be strong here, although i know i could go wrong here, become
just another outcast that the throngs fear, but i'm trying so hard
just to be here, to stay here . . . stay. please, just listen to what i say.
i want my poetry to be
what warfare is to a piano, like shooting a man
with a guitar solo, like ripping your balls off
and making you sing soprano
i want my poetry to be
the margarita-colored eyes of the 13-year-old street-rat
who sells me pot in the park,
to be tough enough to walk the Bedford-Stuy
after dark, to cry like an angel with
the body of a wolf, howlin'
like Ginsberg to Giovanni to Gilgamesh,
thrash like a skateboard-huckster kicking
apart a Wal-Mart, giving all the old ladies
a heart attack. am i on the right track?
you tell me,'cuz i'm still dazzled by the mystery,
still hassled by my misery,
still fallin through the shadows of my history,
stallin' for time still hustlin' twilight through a pen
that's runnin' dry.
hey, i only laugh when it hurts, but that's all the time--and you don't wanna see me cry.
i'm on a mission, receiving a transmission
that could drive like fission into the big dictators,
the master baiters who regard me with
derision til i'm screaming a revision
that's turning the tables, drive this corkscrew
into their souls, yank 'em out, tell 'em just for whom the hell's bell tolls.
write the runes of their doom on the walls
of this city, this bitch, this angel, this whore,this queen of mine--am i on the right line?
you tell me, 'cuz i'm running out of time.