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A PSALM FOR THREADBARE IMAGES
It's in the headlines and the faces of strangers,
listen carefully,
the night wind carries the cries of children.
The fabric's tearing, you can hear it above the storms.
New clichés for an age on the ropes...
twenty dead here and a family there,
serial murders and senseless terror,
a homeless few so the self appointed thrive,
some must starve so the rest be warned,
a world on the edge and business as usual.
Politicians saunter streets,
leaning against lampposts leering seductive calls
of strength and discipline and death,
"Homage to the greatest country"
all the while infants starve
and the will to strive seeps from tired souls,
sweat glistening hopelessly,
helpless in perplexity,
lied to by a hideous call to glory and riches,
depressed and repressed victims of a facade,
going through the half dead motions
of those dropped from the rolls of conscious being.
And the churched ones rant of God on our side,
they wave flags and slander as they pander
and of the very love of God they smirk.
And the greatest show on earth goes on.
The thought of world's destroyed becomes a fate
that raises few brows and fewer screams still.
It's tearing,
close your eyes and feel it.
Martial minds insure their peace by preparing
the preemptive strike...
knowing full well,
it's really preemptive murder on a cost effective scale.
And so it comes down to this...
and is this all there is,
a surrealistic collage of emotions and fears,
of forces and farces,
a Potemkin Village of the mind self imposed,
the vault of all the ages,
the one,
the one and the only,
the philosopher's goal and the mystic's prize,
unlocked and exposed,
a fable and a myth...
a vast and eternal waiting tomb?
A LITURGY FOR ULTIMATE FREE ACTS
"Many die too late, and a few die too early. The doctrine
still sounds strange: Die at the right time!"
--Nietzsche
Leave it be for what it is,
and more sadly,
for what it isn't.
And in that increasing maelstrom of lament,
most sadly for what it almost was.
The eyes don't lie,
they never did,
and to the artist's chagrin,
they never will.
The eyes of an age turned inward,
easy camaraderie and inner exploration,
the perfectibility of the spirit around every bend,
outward affection and inner tranquility,
chemistry that enlightened and promised,
gone now...
gone, subverted, defiled...no warning rattle.
An age mortally wounded by the perversion of the gift,
a fruit with the seeds of its own destruction.
From the promising power of flowers
to the antithetical monsters and freaks,
times go the way of Marshall Bloom and Phil Ochs.
The heroes dead and dying,
the prophets gray and balding,
wounded within from forces without,
those times, they have been changing,
one views ahead clearly...
the place where all the flowers have gone.
The vagaries of fate and the certainty of time,
most formidable enemies.
From it all it arrives at this,
the power to live is the power to die...
a Pyrrhic Victory somehow noble,
seeking the way out in the first truth style,
the free choice demise of souls in control,
the act and the essence merged and inseparable.
Strange gods these,
that sentence you to death and then bestow,
the right to choose the terms of execution,
and call it freedom.
FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES
--Wanton Places Of The Skull--
My perverse friends see a world rightly divided
among bean pickers and captains of industry.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph--
to one a plaintive plea said as prayer,
to another,
a mindless curse in the swaddling clothes of an epithet.
My perverse friends clutch bankbooks
and recite from what they claim
are good books
and saintly books--
holy books of inspired exposition.
My perverse friends respect a crucifixion,
indeed,
they’ll swear they count on such
even as they mix the mortar
(blood being the bond drenching clay and straw)
to build coliseums of great glory.
These are giants in this earth’s dispensation
--creators of good times
disguised as souls in squalid huts--
“this will be bartered for that”
and ‘cause hunger is a commodity,
and pain is the coin of the realm;
to the victors will belong the spoils.
My perverse friends know not of anything
or at least,
not of culpable accounts of what anyone has sown
or has reaped.
My friends in these high places
inherit their rewards
they paint them an’ bless them;
and on special days they parade them
through their city on a hill.
THE SUICIDE SEED
A city with big shoulders,
perfect place for an abomination,
germination under a place for play,
irony of the first order.
A seed to be planted in the desert,
a bright and beautiful mushrooming
of the ultimate dialectic,
life gives birth to death
and the will to power goes berserk.
With eyes closed I write of this and all I hate,
and all I fear of all I know to be,
the meaning of it all is unlocked in simple truths
of lying kings and greedy prophets,
of divine missions and sacrifices for glory promised,
of gods who must speak through the mouths of fools,
wind with no spirit,
ill wind,
mind child of hate and the lure of gold,
of gods created in the passion of need,
and passions created by the needs of gods,
the low comedy of pulpit and throne,
the growing graves of gods and kings
and all they control,
a moral code for others,
as plastic and elastic as needed to prepare the sewer
as sacrament...
a perverted transubstantiation,
a pledge designed to send the pawn smiling to heavenly oblivion.
The gods of such sins administered the highest blessing
when was sown the suicide seed in desert sand and enemy isle.
BROWN SKINNED GODDESS
Beautiful brown skinned goddess of tender years,
a misused spiritual treasure,
unwed and unbroken
though still a child yourself despite the tiny life inside
and just showing.
I hurt for you and that life conceived without sanction
or ceremony,
or the commitment of another's heart.
Your haughty features evoke the best of a faraway place,
the brightest gift from a long forgotten world...
a world interrupted by cruel indenture.
Dark eyes glisten
and dance to a distant drum,
a tribute to the past, a smile of spirit and class,
in a world which will allow you neither.
Dark skinned child princess,
I fear for your future.
Your life's been lived before and I've seen it.
I've known the sisters you haven't known,
they preceded you in pain and space.
I've seen your face and fate a thousand times...
the blank stares,
elbows leaning from tenement windows.
I've seen all too often
the weary maids on transit benches,
the hopeless eyes,
the broken spirit.
Beautiful dark skinned child,
mother so soon to be,
your fate is the shame of an age,
a soul like yours should save us all,
but how I fear,
so soon you'll be beaten down and left for cold.
Your smiling shyness...such coy liveliness,
destined for despair,
born under a sign of false promise,
doomed to a world of discarded people.
How I wish I could encircle you with my spirit,
and somehow save you.
How I wish you could understand me as a brother,
and feel my love as the father's love you never knew.
ON LIBERTY STREET
Old man leanin' on parkin' meter
blank eyes
starin' down the barrel
of ten thousand yesterdays
meltin' into a diminishing pool
of nevers
an' nothings...
dollar wine bottle eyes,
back alley freezin'
death beckoning eyes...
an' he doesn't even notice nothin'
or anything.
Lupine eyed street hustler...
animal quick flittin' eyes,
takin' in the angles an' the odds...
predator and prey odds,
human carrion goin' down odds
in a jungle of slim pickings
growin' slimmer while he's watchin'.
Mean street Christ image child
of runny nosed bewilderment...
three year old pilgrim in free store coat
of many colors, mostly gray.
Tiny sweet child hurryin' to nowhere,
mama's way,
papa's way,
on his own way on the blank stare Hadj.
GENUINE PLASTIC PARTS
Chemists 'round their caldrons,
boiling forth their toil and trouble,
concoctions of plastic pleasing poisons,
potions and fumes,
fatal wisps of all that is wrong and wanting,
puffs and strings of twisted molecules,
better bitter living through chemistry,
all the while Stygian ravens...
leering gawking forms...
stand firm and chant:
profit, profit, profit.
A dark hymn screeched to the beat
of greedy men stirring forth,
their roiling boiling freak bonded creations.
PENAL COLONY
Macho in miniature,
small child, street child,
barely ten lean years,
a refugee wherever he walks.
Grounded cherub, viper in training,
trades his body for another's evening swill.
Lessons learned in youth as the twig is bent.
Tiny victim of mean streets
littered with broken promises,
and more sadly,
with discarded spirits...
a living legacy of dark prophecy.
Viper in training cries for home,
secretly.
Scourge to be mimics and admires
the manchild with muscles more defined,
father image, brother image,
any image promising protection.
Fallen nestling never had a chance,
born bright and briefly cute,
but never allowed to be sweet.
A shame and a terror in training,
and the weakest link weakens more.
ECCE COWBOY
Siege time in the fatherland and all is right,
as in the triumphs of the red hunts past,
time to circle wagons and proclaim,
it's us against them...
again.
It's Semper Fi and a dose of apple pie,
open a silo so the big stick's showing,
move a nuke to king's pawn three,
let 'em know the power's growing.
Tell me again of this wondrous place,
where white is so right and all is well...
where soon we forget the body counts
and the rows upon rows of young lives ended.
Tell me again the glorious story,
of the jingo god and his delight,
at the worlds we conquered
and the light we spread.
Sweet country it was once tis of thee,
but now so full of idiocy,
sing it loud mein president,
of safety nets and opportunity...
how the poor have their bootstraps
while the mighty have you.
Tell me again the old, old story,
god on our side by dawn's first glory,
tell me the reasons...
if we have so much to offer...
why so seldom we're loved
and so often we fight.
PALACE GUARD
Big blue bastards,
is what they pay you
worth what it costs you?
You're the first to leap to their defense,
breaking strikes and busting heads,
"You're all that stands between..."
or so you'd like to think.
Sworn to your flexible law,
justice is just another victim...
your victim,
when you crawl for your paying master.
Jaded conscience turned outward,
you sold too cheap didn't you know,
it's a law, you reap just what you sow.
Pity you're too calloused to feel
what any man should,
pity to defend decaying forces,
to die unlearned and unmoved,
a tragedy but not an injustice,
you see,
you'll reap just what you sow,
it's a law or didn't you know?
OH HOW I WISH
Oh how I wish,
I wish with all my being,
that the lies of the fathers were truths,
if only what I was told...
the many mansioned deceits...
were true.
Oh how I'd fall and cry,
but all there is...
all there will ever be...
is the meteor slashing bright for just a time.
I wish for so much more...
a creation epigraph no less,
how I'd cry and crawl for such.
If one but wish hard enough,
or so the myth is told,
a myth that tries men's souls.
Desolation's song of delight in the heart of one alone,
one crying sadly and forlorn,
and lonely be the prophet forevermore,
a message without comfort,
no other word save this:
death coming with screeching hawk's claws,
dropping from the sky screaming and unexpected,
but long awaited.
The not proud being...
desolation's comic finality on the wings of white doves
in wolf's spirit.
The end in sight,
whistling like the wind,
a beacon in thick fog shining like the sunrise
on some forgotten plain of the heart.
TO WHOM MUCH IS GIVEN...
My country tis of thee, sweet land of absurdity,
I’d walk a thousand miles--
no, a thousand times a thousand--
if only what I know wasn’t so.
I’d do a sober century--a straight an true hundred years,
if only,
what it was,
was what it’s worth.
Oh my god of hosts say it isn’t so,
but don ‘t you now lie or break it to me some ways gently--
those ways you have of offering death donning life’s raiment.
My God it is the time of final conflicts
--my country--
sweet land on the exit ramps of reality,
amber waves across the fruited plain,
hard acidic rain upon pilgrim’s pain.
You pawned it for a lark
a rich man’s day in the park.
You blew it up, a time in the life
--a poor man’s shot destroyed in strife.
Oh my God of ancient hopes,
say it isn’t so,
the kingdom of potential,
that distant glow,
a meteor shot, flashed and gone,
forever.
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