To Me

She walks up on me in blue shroud jazzness.
I thought her buoy, but she hit me like an island.
She makes me crazy. Her mask of innocence drives me happy.

She talks to me in the indigo highlights of her blackness.
Hers is a neck to snuggle. Hers is a tummy
on which to praise to heaven the potency of coffee.

She takes me down forest paths to shadowed mountains.
She leads me to the glitz of her Coney Island.
She's clothed in nudity. I'm ape in tie and suit.

She walks to me, she talks to me.
She looks through my haze of Wall Street shenanigans.
Is this not 131st Street and Lenox Avenue?

Home

Geese on the lawn and stormy weather evenings,
this is home across the western continent
and the tossed Atlantic.

Fate numbers the days of people
as it does the demise of stars.

Home harbors the heart,
and though we wander, given the chance,
heart returns to the starting point.

Mr. Neanderthal knew it.
I know it too.

Very Me

Over the green rattan love seat,
the portrait of a tiger
whose eyes follow me
wherever I roam in the living room.

The green titled floor,
the green carpeted steps to my bedroom,
the dark nooks, the yellow sunsets,
the one candle dinners,

this is my place of sanctity,
the tiger portrait to remind me of my Taiga origins,
except back home they were Siberians, not Bengals.
That's okay, the albino makes that concession.

An Exchange of Saliva

The beautiful night is a sumptuous garden,
the flowers, planets; the bees, comets;
shimmering darkness covers
under which I hold fast to trellis,

to iron bedposts in trepidation
awaiting your pending entrance
with unsheathed thorn
my blossom fragrances,

you waxing, me imploring,
each accepting the eventuality
there will be reckoning,
but no restraining.

Gaddafi to Benghazi

Totally wired, high tech committed, user friendly programmable,
you can do anything you want with these young, Face Page people
except appeal to their sense of old fashion loyalty.

Ancient Poets in The Bleachers

She decided to work him over as she had from the beginning.
Maybe this time he'd throw his hands in the air and scream,
" I've had sufficient, I'm out of here!"

Her goal was that --- to get him to leave,
that she might marry a man of proper fit,
who could satisfy her every whim.

She was sensual, she was ambitious.
He was a lazy lout who only willed to poetize.
Friend, should you too be sonnet bent, don't contract marriage.

Study human nature, instead.
For amusement, write limericks or visit the Coliseum
to watch the pitching of Christians to the lions.

Popular Lies

Where it takes a village to raise a child,
the product may turn out to be the village idiot.

Mapovia's Theory of Evo Development

The sea has crabs.
The barmaid has crabs.
Every creature on the beach is a relative.

Do you suppose we voyaged from out of space together,
and at the very least we are not distant cousins?

Perverse Benevolence

Treat beggars like royalty.
They'll thank you for it.

A kick in the ass,
and if really appreciative,
they'll send you a Christmas card.

Russain Melancholia on Duck Lake

I feel like distant in faraway country
where day breaks and sunsets are indistinct,
where moments move like antique postcards.

The gray Persian on Widow Keller's fence
is feline watch to the neighborhood rats.

The flag on the widow's pole hangs fagged,
red, white pajama banner, British inspired.
I feel like distant in this time lapse camera.

Home is the stranger.
Stranger than mirror...hope is the stranger.

State What You Want

The black birds are picking at my corpse again
as they did when they and I were dreamed,
The squirrels are digging for nuts around Duck Lake
where Satan died, and Mind roams the woods

with a tongue loose bride

From The Book of Her

Before you can succeed in anything,
you must first discover the value of 1.

Rocket beyond

Filter out confusion, infuse silence,
intercourse with hearing.
See dispassionately the end game.

The moment long awaited!
Release all tethers as has been severed
the umbilical connection to mothership

Suspended Animation

Could the world's clocks be halted simultaneously,
and I were the one to stop them dead instantaneously,
it would be at 11:11 for the stark beauty of two pairs of sticks
separated by one dot on top of another.

Long and Short of It

Life, is a long story, tovarishch.
Don't get snug regarding present circumstances.
They can change in a minute; often in seconds.

Life is a short story.
When you think you've arrived at a definitive moment
you realize, it is but an instant in molecular streaming.

Strenght in Weakness

Any man can be wasted,
plummeted bloody and silly
until you can hardly recognize him.

When you think you're tough,
consider the crucified Jesus,
history's most vexing punctuation;

exclamatory and question mark.

A Writer's Guide to Instants Perfection

He sought perfection, and being one of a kind,
sought to fill the void within by addition to his person
of kindred spirit... or so he thought with all his heart and groin.

One plus one equals two, and what eggs may hatch,
during idle summers and churchless Sundays,
and liquid friction when tortured flesh cries out.

The urge to propagate spurs us to greater heights.
Thus, sought perfection is similar.
Ups are swallowed by depressions.

So, here we are, two years later, Daniel divorced,
hops a bus to Minnesota for purposes of retracing
his first hay romp as material for an intended novella.

And putting to mouth a straw from the family's barn,
as one would cigarettes lit to loin groan memories,
he draws a thousand year writer's block.

Our Kind

Rarely do I meet a likable missionary knocking at my door.
Atheists are more my kind of people. They do not press
nor intrude to evangelize.

Atheists say they do not believe in God (take or leave it.)
I believe them, that the God they do not see,
is the very One I seek.

But who should care what they or I believe,
and what they do not see or who I seek?
To love is what is crucible...

And not to love out of let's-pretend,
as bombers are showered with affection
before they suicide, nor to love as Hitler loved his dog,

nor to love as Goebbels loved his dark knight Hitler,
but to love the human family in its complexity, entirely -
regardless of its condition, no man in my sight an alien;

every woman to me my mother, my sister, my daughter
except the crucifix to which I'm wed.


Love is what is crucible,
and not as Hitler loved his German Shepherd Blondi,
or as Goebbels loved his dark knight Hitler.

Love's flame is lamp not holocaust.
Love profoundly loves the human family,
includes all, excludes no one regardless of condition

Let no man ever be to me an alien;
all women be to me mothers, sisters and daughters,
except the crucifix I married.

A Night in Seville, 1974

Be a man, stew in your misery quietly!
If you must, sauce your lips with strong drink
Unrequited love and/or executions pending,
give license to this.

Because we were adequate in bed?
Or because of our delightful head games,
is why you think I married you?
Because you showered me with finery?

We did wed because once in a romantic interlude,
we mistakenly thought it could last forever.
Why then did we divorce? Because you knew
how to request it politely.

I'm not one to wrestle rings off fingers.
I may be primitive, but I am decidedly non violent.
We did it our way. You purchased the divorce.
I left you the furniture and lap dog.

So here in Andalusia once more amongst my fellow Gypsies,
I strum the instrument of hips like a woman,
strumming achingly this borrowed guitar,
akin, I like to think, like Miles Davis blows his trumpet,

he in a dive in Harlem; me in a den of thieves and flamenco.
To set the record straight, I'm not Spanish but a Russian Gypsy.
To witness, our tribe has virtually no boundaries.
It's what keeps both woe and cheer but fleeting conditions.

The Hole in Space

Parents will take secrets to the grave,
and well we should. Why trouble progeny
with incidentals?

Even if we could recall the groove, should we tell the kids
what on earth we were thinking at that moment, moment of moments
when we shot them body and soul through the hole in space?

Rub

"If's" spelling is strange,
its tone is alarming
Up stairwells it creaks
under the steps of the unknown.

If is always present,
It always feigns,
and in every situation,
obscures the final solution.

"If you're gonna love me..."
Stop in the name of love!
Why so much trauma
just to propagate the unholy species?

Sir, there is no magic,
there is no science
there is no futile hope
comparable to marriage

Twain in Golden Years

I don't recall my hands looking so delicate.
They used to be brawn-built for heavy groping,
the reaching of the aims of man in heat.

My hands look even of a different hue
as if of burnished copper. Maybe so long
having worked the red Georgia dirt.

These hands begin to resemble yours.
Is this what the years have wrought? Your face
a little blacker; my neck a whole lot redder,

our skulls molded to the nuptial pillow,
fixed to the off and on vow of death do us part,
our chats, nothing out of the ordinary.

Badges and Huggers

He was buckling his gun belt when I entered the kitchen
to brew a cup of Sumatra. From coffee to Air Tran, we spoke nada
(which everyone even those who don't speak Castillian know means nothing.)
And that's what we spoke none pause to the airport --- Nada!

At the dividing line between village and cornfields,
dumb-in-law put the car in park to let a freight train go by.
It's metallic rumble would have been symphonic except it wasn't.
A radio a commentator was ranting.

Commentator furiously rants on Wisconsin government striking workers
putting in jeopardy our Western Way of Life, part of a communist conspiracy, stretching from Obama to Cairo. What is this Western Way of Life?
Is there an eastern, northern, southern equivalent?

Dumb-in-law thinks Sarah Palin is America's Joan of Arc.
I think Sarah's cute but a media whore, an all too typical politician.
At the fare ye well, I would have embraced son-in-law,
but he sticks out his hand as if to say, keep your embrace to yourself.

Officer Rod drives back to his backyard grill in Southern Illinois,
to the swigging of patriotic beers with buddies, to the wall memorial
in his basement bar to fallen fellow heroes. I fly on to Hatteras
to my liberal, leftist-leaning, tree hugging agenda.