A Sort of Eisensteinian Stocking

Invent Capital in the armpits of Indian women =
The sleepless housewife becomes his snake
metaphor for the splits of Germany. No ideas but in
misogyny. Let untold apartments bloom with teacups
and shifts and sharp battleships. The people
of uncapitalised carapace wait in the glass house.
Quick, the strike
starts under the sign of the dialectic and the writing
is a death-gripped scotch on the rocks. Compose yourself
and wait is the usual order for Saxifrage, at those slow words
from directors struggling to reconcile their gods and the
writing of October. His weed stones us all, women are
to be everywhere ‘things’ or ‘flower’ through to, obviously,
‘quiet’. And that, ‘my credo’, was all that was left in the notebook

with a cry of ‘EINE PAAR SEIDENE STRUMPF’.

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

gull

the gulls her
voice is fixed to tense the drum
the neck, hair clear on end, the gull her
voice to what she’ll call the flock of them, each one
clawed as human talk: grip let the arc of her
is taut: the neck its hum
her skin of the
drum

amp all of tremble
in the caw: gull form
please this turn of her
each bliss gull form
dumb wave disturb
not arm nor wing:
the flock at that new call

is bristling: what space for seabirds!
but each just backs up higher
at her, high enough to be edged out

not space but room: her voice formed that

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

‘One more feather and I’ll fly’

Cocky Bennett was a sulphur-crested Cockatoo who lived to the ripe old age of 119 years. After a life of seafaring he came to live at the Seabreeze Hotel at Tom Ugly’s Point, Sydney – where he died in May 1916. The bird had been featherless for much of its life due to suspected Psittacine disease. Cocky was stuffed by Taxidermists ‘Tost and Rohu’ and now resides with the Kogarah Historical Society.

A sentence of one hundred and nineteen years
reveals a portrait of the bird as a pirate.
A claw-beaked sailor of dark brews and beers,

purveyor of bawdy discourse, bar-room brawler.
He circumnavigates the wiry longitudes of his cage,
pale and puckered, scant feathers whorl

and stub pink cockatoo skin as if the cook
had left mid-pluck. The drinkers gather,
they offer profanities as plumage and gawk

at his status as living kitsch, ‘One at a time,
gentlemen, please! Let me think!’

As a centenarian, Cocky’s earned his shrine

in the cabinet of quirk and circumstance.
Now he’s dead they’ve glassed him in.
One hundred and nineteen years. A sentence

twice caged – in life and in death,
tethering freedom in case a bird might fly,
or explore a feather’s breadth.

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

Feather

All day those birds, the nurses
flutter in their blue plumage.

He stares through the window
at a swatch of heaven,

sees the neat white
stitches of a jet.

Something flickers
in the corner of his eye:

a feather, buoyed by a cobweb
outside the glass,

buoyant on the currents
of the air.

He understands
why the feather moves,

how a spider’s net
has ensnared it

as he has understood
from the surgeon

that it will take six weeks
moored by the ballast of traction,

until the unhinged wing
of his pelvis heals.

All day he hears birds
praising the sky

until dusk
when sparrows scatter

their crumbs of song
and the nurse completes

the diurnal graph
of his vital signs

like the curves and dips
of a swallow–

the closest he’ll get
to flying.

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

Pirate

No one saw who did the deed.
No one saw who pushed the giddy counselor
off the ledge of the dam towards the
copper-bottomed lake down below.
Male staff simply guffawed as the top of her two piece
floated on the water like a green duck,
while the pretty victim, herself, resurfaced in a daze,
her left cheek shaved raw
where it had scraped the rough stones.
Was she twisting her shoulders to hide her bosoms bouncy and pink?

We little girls stood stock still, peeing into the chilly water
suddenly made warm with fear. Would we be pushed next?
We watched the big, hairy college boys now scrambling
down from the heights of the dam, whooping like pirates, pleased with their prank.
We waited for them to swoop down, heron-like, and snatch one of us away, like a fish, grabbing us from the shallow safety of the red and white ropes and the dog paddle lane.
We held our breaths and stretched our flat little chests out onto the water, holding ourselves still and stiff, hoping to be taken for dead,
just as the swimming instructor had once advised.

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

Eulogy For Someone In The Room

Recently I’ve been thinking about ghosts

ones that seem to have nothing to do with
the enhanced or rather …
accentuated being of those they
appear to, but have their own quest …

Elena told me that her husband had
haunted her, yet only before he died

Then she said she had grown up with …
couple of ghosts in the country. They were
old bushmen that had been murdered or …
maybe just fallen in a hole …

Poetry brought them out she said. When my
father died I went through all his books to
save them from the Salvo’s; I used to go
down to the creek and read the bleaker …
moments of King Lear, and snippets from …
Faerie Queene, though I was barely aware
of their meaning. The ghosts would sidle up
quietly and sit on a log. After I
wondered if they would have smoked if I’d …
offered them tobacco. When I dream …
about them they’re always my father – both
of them. I told Andrew and Janine most
of this last week, when we were heading to
the beach. Andrew was predictably …
skeptical that Elena had ever
been in the bush: it’s that colonial
research crowd she’s mixed up in, he said: as
if they were bootleggers or bikies …

Elena had taken to …
academia in her sixties and
had been experimenting with her hair
colour, having been either blonde or …
brunette (not a mixture as so many
are now) all her life. Andrew always …
insists on the urbanism of …
Australia, as if the country’s …
distant past, and something basically …
shameful. Janine said nothing at the time
it would have been like her though to launch …
into a complex monologue on …
subject about three days later, if we
hadn’t gone off the road soon after …
hit a poplar. Elena’s a very
good public speaker. She has a rich tone
to her voice, encompassing sympathy
irony, dry humour. She has been asked
on occasion to speak at …
funerals of strangers, of people who’d
come to deliver something and had …
heart attack on the steps for example

Elena could make a joke of this …
manner of dying and be thanked for it
afterwards. Elena was speaking
suavely about the self-consciousness she
had felt giving a paper at …
conference on a writer who was in …
room. Then she shifted to …
conversations on ghosts we’d been having
recently. I can see him now she said
in quasi Lady Macbeth voice, standing
by the dahlias; and that’s just where I was

Andrew and Janine were outside, ashing
in the pond, not wanting to have …
anything to do with …
Elena’s ironic praise – how absurd!

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

india v aus 11-12 1st test day 4

unison umps stretch fins
kind of game children play
zaheer sucking pattos bat
attention wanders returns
finds sehwag on the ground
dont worry nothins happened
zap! trigger fin!
beckons the rammer!
expand outwards from a point
amass a chronicle
a field of decay
mow outwards from a point dive
in the seas green n lustrous gold
umps spectators gatorade monsters
ravi ashwin arranged at the bottom of a bowl
dam cricket! down the
ramp dive in
umps stretch their triggers
hussey can clap
in gloves he claps his bat
pats his shadow
hollers into the thin air n swallows
shadows bent by handsome yadavs line
good judge of a run
field bulges round batters ghost
flash! bug eyes!
backs of heads tops of heads
thats how ya line up the beast!
trigger fin!
fish swallows bugs
vodafone melbourne
quietly waiting
wagging work tail
triggers heads
smoky bullshit chilpotle roebuckdve dropped a line
in the marlindve respected
the solitary spectatorship
say whack! smashes through 4th slips
a ghost! pattos bending gambhir umps
leading the field in health hustle
its nice taking this time
making lineages
ponted ponting warne warner warnest exhausting!
worried m behavin antisocially
THESE HEIGHTSRE MAKIN ME WOBBLE N LIST
BACK OF THE HEADLIGHTS LAST NIGHT THERE
WAS A MEMORIAL FOR ROEBUCK CAMPBELL READ
SOME POEMS SOME OF HIS SOME OF MINE
HARSHA BHOGLE SPOKE GIDEON AND JIM
MAXWELL SPOKE TOMEK WAS THERE WE
DISCUSSED THE NEED FOR CHARISMA IN THE
REDS CC THE KIDS A BAT! HOLLER FOR A MARSHALL
S M MUMS NAME CRICKETS N ATTEMPT
TO REPRODUCE THE WILD MOON
THEY BUILD CRATERS UP
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
crowd hoos
m only ever wise in retrospect
reproducing anothers wisdom
amassing a symphony crowd
pings a little
makes a tiny breeze
the indian contingent doesnt care what flags they wave
its more about the waving than the representation
pontings ponted! body jerks as the catch takes
hold pontings a catch but sachins the whole crater!
silences gone up a notch
dravid tendulkar
listen the bugsve stopped
kids dream of being a bat
therere lapses! theres no let up in the lapses
the red hands of bug haddin
wait
theyre so referential soon
tip run
push
push – change the angle a degree
go under
a ghost
catch
butt patting
ponted haunted
a series of singles
fizzing waiting
take the time
to express an idea
not in a stream
but in a broken stream
a series of dams
which reflect one another
n create resonances
echoes in wells
bucket sounds!
pouched!
they run out of references
1 hand pick up
thats the rub
heat n power
easy 4 10dulkar
a chance
ponting haunting
haunted the cordon
explosions in series
the dravid 10dulkar race
not in a stream
take the time
but a series of impacts
such that the stream
lifts
and arches over
the action
here n there
re points
connecting the metaphysical
film commentary w the pitch it rears from
buckets!
commentarys not spoken but understood immediately as its spoken the rifts in sensere the pull
of the moon sucking bats hasslin castles (those tiny castles!) siddles stomach burns chorus/flash!
hoursre gone 10dulkar! see him seeing the ball ya cant see him seeing the ball cmon cheeky boy
dont lose yr adidas sandal if an adidas sandals a century sachins 100 of em! thats 10dulkar x
10dulkar x 10dulkar x 10dulkar his back to the southern stand he disappears into the race is he
taking a piss? no gone for good a sandal n a sun visor forgotten on a red beach solitary but
for the company each object provides the other dravid 10dulkar dravid
10 dulkar vodafone
decides dravid 10
dulkar at the velodrome
pairs of bugs
with oval markings
how many pairs of iridescent eyes?
this ovals sliced n bleeding
runs wkts
the field buzzes for a kill
in brunswick n lyon
at one point lyon runs from mid on
to point to congratulate warner
on a piece of fielding
a red balloon a piece of rubbish
swallows moths bubbles a yellow
balloon horses living on the beach
half chances full flight
the ball picks fielders up n throws em
to the ground dont worry nothins
happened velodromafone green balloon
legsre next to me!
cops an injury in the celebration SPEARS!
BEER DIRT! BATTERS RACE
TO BEAT THE SPEARS THROWERS
SPREAD OUT N WAIT FOR THE
IMPLEMENTS TO COME ALCHEMISTS
SPREAD OUT N WAIT FOR RAW
MATERIALS N PHASES OF THE MOON to coincide
 
 
 
 
 
 
‘vodafone ‘vodafone
the desire 4 a helmet
s signalled by miming
the action of pulling a
helmet onto the head
out of the park
the kids need walking sticks
n say things like ‘good onya mate’
the having of a cornettos
signalled by the act
of holding a cornetto
n saying ‘gday mate
are you enjoying
the cricket today yes’
‘yes’
handsome yadav
walks to the crease
the ring of security
tightens too early
a bail falls
overs later red hands

‘vodafone ‘vodafone
miming the action
of pulling a helmet
onto the head
‘good onya mate’
the desire 4 a
walking sticks
signalled by
miming the act of
pulling 1 onto the
head n saying things
like ‘good onya
mate’ ‘yes’
the tightening of the
ring of security =
handsome yadavs
walkin to the crease
a prescient bail
falls ‘technical things’
 
flapping

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

Syntactics (for three players)

positivism
consequential
the rise of prose		     capital is						
    printing press          	      capital(ism     matter of ‘f’act			     credit
    context								                                                                 you remember that which is not yet structured
														                                                                                                                                       appropriate
experience
								                                                                                 object
				                               the problem is not the problem	              naming         word for god which is never spoken	                                 stayle
			                     but the recognition of the problem			                    all other words organized in direct harmonic structure
Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

Notes after Fort Worth

For NO’R

Freeze, salt, shiver then slap: it’s a lethal dose margarita
that shoots us back, without fair warning, to overheated
Southern Crossed boyhoods, continuous cricket, hot chips.

Footnoting Picnic at Hanging Rock, me humming
US Forces, we walk about the old stockyards, in Texas
but not here (you Ballarat, me Cronulla) before we list

at Remington’s The Luckless Hunter, recognize
that pale-faced Apache as yet another last aborigine,
one sentenced to brave it alone through ancestral lands,

every lone star a tombstone, every sound a lost noun,
every remorseful painting an additional subtraction.
This is for the tourists. This is not for the tourists at all.

We stall before a vainglorious statue of a cowboy
wrangling a writhing bull, man triumphs over bronze.
Then heel-and-toe it over western heroes, star-pressed

into the trail, set to favourably brand history, or its opposite
as a family films two dudes on horses, neon winks: Sirloin!
and Caravaggios fill museums, contrasting light and crude.

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

12/4/12

from ZEROFOURZEROFIVEZEROSIXTWENTYTWELVE


dawn chorus at six

grey

light fading to grey-blue

tea

&/or coffee

pending credit card details & Rent-A-Wreck, the key to

a silver Hyundai Accent sedan, license plate 4PJA659, this time,

& a half tank of gas

a trip over the Painted Hills (calling for more regular) to Roughley Manor (no you
couldn’t

make it up 165 miles due

east of LA on I-60 East

Twentynine Palms

Dick Dale its most famous resident, Wikipedia sez

‘Misirlou’ (with the Del Tones) 1963

& the biggest U.S. military base in the World training for desert operations

‘I-RACK’ Operation Desert Storm

the ‘Third World Man’ ‘he’s been mobilized since dawn’

his lawn sprinkler reveille at zero five thirty

US Marine Corps cheek by jowl with ‘leezur’

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

CV

let’s play Survivor psychology
I sculpt eyelids for your snakes
hang your stress from mother’s best tree
bring you back clean as Vietnamese salad

I sculpt eyelids for your snakes
the opiate baby is now thirteen
bring you back clean as Vietnamese salad
elliptical stories of bruises on bread

the opiate baby is now thirteen
I didn’t hit him mum cries in her spoon
elliptical stories of bruises on bread
chunking his chair at a system’s red face

I didn’t hit him mum cries in her spoon
girl buries dad in a pile of gold glitter
chunking his chair at a system’s red face
whoever can hurdle the most shit wins

girl buries dad in a pile of gold glitter
hang your stress from mother’s best tree
whoever can hurdle the most shit wins
let’s play Survivor psychology

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

The Channel-billed Cuckoo

In competition with the music
belting from the party next door
the channel-billed cuckoo falls,
uncharacteristically, silent. Its red eyes glint
from the tree tops like holly berries.
The channel-billed cuckoo is the enemy of sleep.
A brood parasite, normally it transmits
its single electronic note like an erratic pulse
on a cardiac monitor, the last signal from a polar
submarine, growing in urgency, or else it plays
one obsessive, amplified key all night.
That is to say – all night. What must
the other sleep-deprived birds think?
Maybe it needs to get out of the nest more,
or rather out of someone else’s nest,
like an unwelcome interloper
who will not leave, no matter
how late it gets; who drinks all the beer
dances too wildly, who night
after night asks to crash on the couch
and snores.

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

Wasted Heaven

nautical, thrust grey at twilight
on a rapid basis

not of the tree
that could be re-used

pessimistically already
& complete with entry-exit permit

numbered summer comes
a canned order

squeezed onto prepositions
your liver cancels

near the earphones
in a trapped universe

why not presume
that others are alike

only poorer,
the kidneys of a sandwiched

stare into instructional words

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

Final Eighties Exposé

At an auction of Jacqueline Fahey’s art,
all your old teachers in their
batik headbands drink Henkell Trocken
and swing parrot earrings from
pulled lobes.

Every face is almost the one
you want to see and
every conversation about a
daughter that isn’t quite you –

she’s an awfully clever scholar

she’s beautiful at science

and her algebra is simply
magnifique.

On the floor a river of pee-wees,
clinkers and galaxies roll in a
stream toward a small hole in the corner
of the room

and children scrabble about on
their knees dragging collaged
party hats behind them like
parachutes.

From downstairs there is
a rhythmic thump
thump
thump

where a Morrissey concert
that you’re dying to get to has
already begun but

the auction hasn’t started yet
and you’re fretting because you
need to get away and because

you need that painting, the
one where your mother,
finished teaching for the day,
sits at a table

her diamond rings hazed in
Pall Mall smoke

and the wispy brown
quarter-moon of a
child’s head can be
seen to rest against
her knees.

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

The Ocean Is Prolix

and talks with its mouth full
of tapered ships deltas the bon voyage tube worms
It calls out in trains and crumpled paper
with its water engines it stores its voice in shells
Hypnotic as fire as it brings out wistfulness
and questions for the glassy shrimp
and sex-changing fishes Stilettos of thoughts
are honed on its splintered water lights
Corals beckon from cloud parishes
barnacles sea-squirts saltwater hearts
The more I look down from the dock I subdivide
to chapters of wonder gists contingencies
whole gamuts of liquid supposes what-if’s
dizzy ladders of sequiturs and floating egg jellies
tides between my thoughts and the breathing water
I evert with the sea cuke my shell goes soft
When I leave my body stays in a plankton dream
I drag off a home of ideas like a hermit crab
my head leaving a plow mark

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

Scenic Overlook

Stop Go On the road
into town
out of town, sits

Horseshoe Horseshoe Bend, King Bend
Bend Navajo Sandstone against
Overlook de-silted green

and Colorado stripped back
from red-brown mudflow
A mile over more slickrock and sand

pools in late morning skin-
piercing sun Car park
to cliff-edge, an ultra-violet voyage

and then a sighting of the wild river
before she vanishes again
Holidayers gambol, hover at the edge

of accelerating waters A pair
with parasols wander the ledge
pointing to B-grade sci-fi slime green depths

and shelf-borne sage-green sedge
The flock surround the astonishing
meander, pay no mind

to the moment eons from now

erosion when the flow will laser

through meander wall

and the oxbow lake will stand
will dry, a diminishing organ cut off
from the trunk, sliding

inexorably into sun-beaten earth
sun-soaked air
as the river straightens her course

yokes the landscape to speed

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

Another Madonna

Master of Italian marble shapes
you in white,
framed in blue royalty.
Jesus held in one arm your
hand points to your womb, your
engagement with God,
some say Joseph.
Gold halos, you and your son,
he makes the sign, the Trinity,
two fingers point up, one down.
You and Jesus are stained,
but you stand immaculata,
the sculpture maculata,
unpolished white,
darkened folds in your dress.
Your neck tarnished, shoulders
almost black. What happened to the
angelic face?
Dirty creases from candles
and incessant prayers
touches and kisses
clay stains smear you both,
footprints on your faces, and
Jesus knees look bruised.
Your virginal body thrown to the pigs.
Your eyes and his,
shattered.

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

Shooting “Correspondence” Gallery

for Toby Fitch

Scrape hard for the ruins, duke,
I am at Heide thinking of birth
and you, you are at the NSW
thinking of Bacon and me.
Think hamburgers of slag metal
and contortion scrapped.
Agreed, cloister as bedroom,
as squat indefinition.
This is not the last we speak of Isao,
blistering light, the long-necked
poppies, calmatives, moral
cuckoldry, comeuppance-ville.
The orifices of the work were vistas
in the rambles, he vaunts, tied
weightless to the tallest tangerine,
buds not fruit like hung by nativity,
not kumquat, the genii to first
love affair’s drive in Lesmurdie,
homestead instead, pageant of weeping,
vacant workshop.
Hard-done-by severance nearby
still night, for you and me, we say, yes,
hard to come by such quality silence.
Flung spigot to the well flue,
well-deep cited to my surprise
is hardly treading.
And the waters of Yarra reflux,
which could’ve been aspic, after all.
You want money? What will Cashies
give for Edward Gordon Craig’s
screens? To stave off the present
drafted, instead – since summer’s
lovely hue cheapens the north-facing –
a gelding correspondence. They circle
Moonee Ponds racecourse bullet-shy,
cowboy and charlatan-dogged.

The Bacon I hope sealed that moratorium
where salvia booms, tendentious
cowed mass any place if drugged for the win,
hence the 10,000 falls easily. Winsome
salvia gave this Clifton Hill ramble
something to look forward to, when I give up
my taxi, that is, as lasso it makes a great
burden. Whence brew
no blues rushing, and at speed ugly, no doubt,
but the flesh accumulated, like that
Marinetti turn – if only he’d bartered
better with the spirit world – miraculous,
for flesh to tear all fleshly.

Enter attack of the beast, a consolation
as much as influential, since if favour for the machine
by Tiffany’s on Collins reproduces M. H.
shredding his unpurposive trachea,
I should like to ask M. H., who knows
Schopenhauer, how M.H. remains the denomination
common in a fruit fly transition?
Petitionary memo, yes, I decide otherwise, leaving it
to a reader to enjoy the more interesting task,
regarding denominators, of working out of which
M.H. here is speaking. Two or more.

Cloister as bedroom is best lit, and sharpest view
of the weeping pageant – doppelgangers too in the glare
of triffids. The lasso marks around this neck, the smoke trail.
There is no clean way to shirk devoted correspondents.

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

Hinkypunk

Ignus Fatuus (Fools’ fire)

It’s you, Elizabeth, got left behind.
Black clouds mass on the hill above. Here’s how
it goes: head full of shadows, tired, spaced out;
pipe smoke, wet collie, hob-nail clack in hall.
This time, pain-blitzed, churchyard in mind, your toy
half-grave, blue bobbing candle flames float past
the gaping parlour door. Signposts, head height,
omens of fate, my baneful toxic plight,
your death lament, this jack o’lantern fugue
of grief, remorse and dread lures me towards
the darkness where your doll-size coffin lies.
Your perfect angel eyes are marrow-less,
like when they snapped us both, in hospital,
you folded on my breast, voiceless, gene-cracked.

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

Marriage Review: Mine, 1993

Offers aromas of winter layered with toasted hair and cold finger tips, sweet herbal trails and a questioning core, dry palate, melody of green tea, foggy persistence, nicotine. Altogether a somewhat weedy flavour, hint of microfleece, a woolly darkness and lingering, perhaps endless, finish.

Pair with several children, three wrapped in adolescence, the savoury word choices of a 12 year old girl, the salty wit of a highly talkative nine year old boy and the heady scent of independence, open doors and the less than flattering appraisal of young adults.

Move over, Bordeaux,
melon spears, soft cheese and fig crostini.

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

Another Chardin in Need of Cleaning

Forearmed is foredefeated,
a spragged illusion that had me forever
check the silver-leafed backing.
What seemed like a vermillion mirror of sea,
the work of rash gods competing over
nose-powder and light. Salient image
as tonnage of froth, the superficial pleasure
of being someone else for the day.
What wasn’t there cannot disappear,
so why regret that awkward kiss
over the smoker’s box
when you decided to sit and clean the turnips.
One employs colours in the afternoon glare
but my feelings remain diffuse.
Each memory from the same genre,
duly sentimental,
yet indistinguishable in the over-populated world.
Does it matter who can gauge the lapping dark
for you were everything once
returning to dead layer, a general of still life
hanging on the end of the dauphine’s stays.

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

Gestalt with Seagulls

Late at night, in the rain
I drove to the end of the quay,
past the frosted lights of the refinery,
its single outlet flame
streaming in the wind like a pennant.
Between the hulking dark of the shipbuilders
and a car-park jungle of dillweed
was a wide curved verge, seamless with the road.
It was there that I found them:
the seagulls – the secret
of where they go at night.
Like snowfall on the road,
a tight-hooked rug of white fleece nubs:
no road, no verge, only birds.

I drove at them. The carpet rose, as if shaken out
by a mighty hand, peeled up and off the ground
and dispersed, shredded, in the rain,
in the instant of discovery
already swept away,
just as the impulse that had woken me,
angry, from a dream of my mother, and sent me
to the car, to drive the docks at night
was already gone.

I parked at the edge of the quay,
at the crest of a bluestone wall
holding back the leaping bay.
The light of the city lay in sheets
on the face of the rain. And then,
above the rude
maracas of water on the roof
came the delicate thud and shuffle
of countless seagulls settling on the car.

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

The Ritual of the Cup

Eventide. Three small pills and a cup
Of water are all that hold a mind
Grown unruly, and yet knowing
My soul sinks inevitably down
Into what my wife would call a one.
The dark cloud will come to stay
For a season. It will stay
Despite the ritual of pills and a cup
And the system my wife has, from one
Which is too low, to five where my mind
Soars into the red before the next down.
I may have a month of balance, knowing
This is all the normalcy we have – knowing
I cannot ask my wife to stay
Forever, with a husband so up and down.
Our joke is that the picture on the cup
Is Daffy Duck, and this is one
Piece of truth, for Daffy has his five and one
Episodes as well. Still, there is no knowing
If the balance of my mood and mind
Will improve, or simply stay
A lurching ritual of the cup
And pills, and the endless up and down
Scored by my wife’s numbers -marked down
For me to manage. I fear the one
The most, when the pills and the cup
Seem no use. Two is the harbinger, knowing
That the clear times seem to stay
Less and less. Five arrives galloping on a mind
Bent on excess and zeal, never mind
The unbearable grandeur, worse than the down
That is sure to come. I seem to stay
In constant flux, or as one
Blown on a wind, always knowing
I am tied to numbers, three pills and a cup.

I long for a mind that for one time
Is nailed down and knowing
It can stay independent of any cup.

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

L/A

The City of Angels wields

hair stylist slash model
bartender slash agent

a flaming sword that cuts between

dishwasher slash iron-willed chef
busker slash America’s idol

what you are

barista slash screen writer
toy department manager slash director

what you dream to be

grocery clerk slash producer
receptionist slash talk show host

and convinces you

porn star slash actor
paparazzi slash celebrity

they’re seared into one.

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged