Local and Express

I've been riding buses and trains
since I was knee high to my mother on many an errands with her
once under the elevated line through the Bowery
where on every street congregated alcoholics, stumbling dizzily
in the sorry state of zombie, bolts of sunlight flashing their movements
from the trusses overhead.

How many poets were among them,
their grievances moon shine distilled and bottled?
On Third Avenue when I was 10, on the way to be fitted
for a first Communion suit.

Later, much later I'd cross the Pampas,
west to east, south to north, hauled by restlessness
and smokey locomotives up the backbone of the Andes
to the lunar landscape of Potosi.

The planet seems to me to be a massive railroad terminal,
billions of people milling about, eyes some blue, eyes some night
eyes of shattered mirrors,
eyes of criminals and their victims

Am I still a hobo passenger,
or have I been promoted to porter?

Invention

I'm the voyager
You're the trip

You're the inventor
I'm the invention

I struggle to create the letter A
You're the finished Alphabet

Am I thrilled!
You bet I am!

Zealot to Poet

I fancy poetry,
really I do...
its rear view detachment
to trauma and/or other emergencies

But show me a guy who can contrive a haiku
while fleeing for his life
from a machete-wielding crowd,
that's the guy I'd wanna emulate.

Show me a bloke who can sonnetize
an iceberg's luminous geometry
as the Titanic slides through currents to its grave,
that's a romantic zealot to envy.

Loneliness Forever Banished

I might as well be from Mars.
I enter a restroom in Walmart.

"Restroom" --- strange designation
for a place to piss and defecate.

I note with interest, that the person in the stall adjacent
to the mirror where I refresh my face ---

with no apparent strain ---maintains a perfectly normal conversation
with an invisible acquaintance.

Who needs silence.
They have cell phones.

Name of The Game

When I play uninhibited
by the thought of losing,
I invariably score.

When I play, giving prime importance
to advancing a position rather than to winning,
I rarely miss the clues which enable me to reach the goal.

Police Action on The Prarie

It would be the last big shootout between settlers and Redskins
on that desolate stretch of the Great Plains.
A cattle baron by the name of Hawkins
decides it's high time to end the tenancy of the aborigines.
Clashes of culture and commercial interests have peaked
The standing peace treaty needs
revisiting.

On the last Thursday of November, 50 of the Baron's cowpokes
ride thunderously towards a Sioux encampment,
descending upon it like a brush fire.
In less than an hour the eviction is complete.
Not a tepee stands erect. Some of the victims die huddled.
Mrs. Hawkins, family and friends watch from a distance.

Unbeknown to the adults, the kids had separated
to view the day's events from a bit closer,
and there in the heat of battle are massacred themselves.
Mrs. Hawkins shall see the rest of her life in an insane asylum
where she dies at the age of 52, as loony as the day she entered.

Jack Hawkins personally shoots the men responsible for the mishap,
then turns the revolver on himself. His eyes had been deceived,
mistaking the fruit of his loins for Indian kids.
It was he who gave the order:

Kill every last one of them,
including their dogs,
and painted ponies.

The Ship's Rocking

On blustery days, I'm left to imagine,
I'm walking backwards. I'm at the wheel again.
My world was a ship, before I went blind.

My sea legs were all the balance I ever needed.
Sea and sky were soul mates of mine.
My colored world was aquatic tinged.

I shunned the idea of relationships surviving.
I have circumnavigated this globe many times.
I was the man, before I went blind.

In the long voyages I'd get channel fever
The smell of shore would draw me in
One more barroom raucous, and call it quits.

Then once again, down to the sea in ships.
The dockside girls wave their farewell.
The mariner waves back at them.