142 MI.²

BOMB

The almond trees

The apricot orchard

The antique store

The archway centuries old

BOMB

The bakeries

The banks

The beaches

The bookstores

BOMB

The coffee shop

The care home

The cats under the awnings

The calendar on the wall

BOMB

The dentist's office

The dessert shop

The dogs on the rooftops

The domino players

BOMB

The eccentrics

The elders

The engineers

The extroverts

BOMB

The farms growing eggplant & garlic

The fig trees

The flock of sheep

The funeral procession

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The gardens

The graveyards

The goats grazing

The grocery stores

BOMB

The hidden

The homeless

The hopeless

The hungry

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The jetty shimmering blue

The journalists dodging drones

The junkyard

The jump rope game

BOMB

The kebab stand

The kindergarten

The kiosk selling jewelry

The kite shop

BOMB

The lavender patch

The lost child

The last call to prayer

The long road

BOMB

The marble staircase

The men wandering alone

The mice in the eaves

The mistaken step

BOMB

The nest of swallows

The nearest dreamer

The next person exiting the house

The nurse on the night shift

BOMB

The osprey

The ocean at dusk

The occasional lovers

The olive trees swaying

BOMB

The people dreaming

The people who can't dream

The pots of mint & thyme

The poets unheard

BOMB

The questions typed into phones

The questions formed at dawn

The questions conceived in the drone-buzzing night

The questions not yet answered

BOMB

The rabbits running

The root cellars

The roosters who've stopped crowing

The rugs tinted scarlet in the sunset

BOMB

The safe havens

The starving dreaming of bread

The starving running for bread

The starving too tired to run

BOMB

The teachers of Arabic, Hebrew, English

The towers ornate with tiles & script

The twisting path in the missile-whistling night

The tents crowded into the square

BOMB

The underpaid

The uncomprehending

The unseen

The unknown futures

BOMB

The Victorian poetry books of the English tutor

The violin shop

The vintage records of the songwriter

The vineyards blurry in the smoke-drenched haze

BOMB

The water filtration systems

The western light in the alleys

The wishes not spoken

The wonders not yet beheld

BOMB

The X-typing activist

The X-reading nonsleeper

The x-ray machine in the shaking hospital

The xylophone in the music school

BOMB

The yellow marigolds in the vase

The yarn gathered in the baskets

The yard with the donkey at rest

The youth out looking out at moonlight

BOMB

The zigzag path of the bee

The zodiac pondered by flashlight in the rumbling dark

The zone reserved for the removed

The zoo where the animals starve

Connections

 

Foxconn puts up nets

Around the rim of the factory roof

So workers don't

jump to their deaths

In New York City

Speakers of languages

Sparking and fading

On apartment stairwells

Wonder about the verses

Of 100 poets every 100 years

For dozens of centuries

Vanishing like vapor

Risen up from the steam grates

Or the windows of food carts

Cadences caught in Central Park trees

Metabolizing in North Atlantic clouds

Rhymes rebounding

Off pavements in Chinatown

Off synagogue stones in Alphabet City

Poet Xu Lizhi recalls he looks like

His grandfather "beanpole"

As he "clothes hanger" falls asleep

Standing up again

On the line in Shenzhen

Verses scribbled into notebooks

On timed breaks

Will he find the time

To say what

Must be said

(paintings by Christine Ferrera)

I Didn't Know Patti Smith

 

I didn't move to London

I didn't live in the East Village

I didn't know Patti Smith

Things didn't work out

I lived bohemian decline

The freedom was partial

Mine was a typical story

Survival was victory

Day jobs without glamour

I acquired cooking skills

I learned languages

I outlived friends in more rapid

Bohemian decline

I didn't realize my dreams

Or they laid down by the river

And emerged on the other side

Transformed

Into water beasts walking

Weed-draped moon–driven

The least American story

And the most American story

Verses written furtively

Spiral notebooks of neurosis

Medical mishaps

Love affairs like spiritual possession

Writing songs about UFOs

Theatrical productions in sheds

My footprints in Baltimore graveyards

The indentations deeper

As I hummed a song

And carried a ghost on my shoulders

Sensing this vaguely

My weight and the ghost's

Imprinting into the fossil record

Encountered as enigma

In 20 million years

After the Chesapeake rose

And receded again and birthed

Species now unknown

Will they know

I struggled

I spoke

I sang

I made

things

(photo: author in the play "De camino a la ahorita" by Colectivo El Pozo 2018)

A Soul Scrolls Social Media

 

What I didn't become

What I didn't make

What I am not

What I lack

Where I've failed

What went wrong

What fell through

What went up in smoke

What came to naught

What ran aground

What met with disaster

What went down the tubes

The musical score of ruin

The pages of living unsuccessfully

Psychological ticks lost to stalemate

There's no such thing as society

Tony Robbins is not your guru

This he told me

Under the gazebo

In a silent park named Dvorak

Fractures in the purple sky

Tony Robbins ascending

(His mesmerizing teeth)

Then plummeting missile-like

Into temporary fencing

Landing barefoot in the tent city

Tony Robbins now beat fellaheen blue

Striding broke-kneed callous-footed

Grateful to be fallen wandering

(drawing by Robert Jessup, 1985) 

All reac

Survivor's Guilt 6000 Miles Away

 

what am I seeing

are other people seeing this

did we really need

to learn again

how this can happen

Poems Needed

 

we have poems

about madness

and poems written

in states of madness

no poems yet about

the guitar amp buzzing

dark electric fuzz

of the madness sparked

coming off psychmeds

we lack poems about

the inner fast-motion

tectonic mortar and pestle

funny car fuck up

metabolic cataclysm

of reducing lexapro benzos

seroquel risperdal trazodone zyprexa

indeed more poems

are needed about

the sludge avalanche

transistor radio

crackle-to-explosion

elephant collapsing

shocked with methamphetamines

poised on crumbling ramparts

overlooking seas of swamp water

pulsed with armies of electric eels

you can't work

organs revolt

no sanctuary

for a brain

seemingly pointed

only toward death

till some nautical boundary

is crossed

the senses calm

like the equation

for a nuclear explosion

gradually erasing itself

clumped numbers

alphabet city lines

cryptic clusters dissolving

until all that remains is

the empty board

permitting

different formulas

of perception

finally

Three Dads

 

I run across him in a cafe

Editing the 200 Sonnets

He wrote 20 years ago

As a grand move

In order to make it so

He could stop writing

And focus only on painting

(It didn't work

He still does both)

I said I'm at my folks' house

And my dad

Is several miles

To the right

Of Ronald Reagan

When he worked

In the Boston post office

In the 60s

They called him Little Barry

"After Barry Goldwater"

The poet-painter said

That in 1963 in third grade

He read a Goldwater speech

For a presidential debate

Done by 8-year-olds

Only he couldn't stop

Laughing every few lines

He said that

Around the time

He completed the 200 sonnets

His father the newspaper humorist

Passed away & he recited me

The poem his dad

Wrote for him

When he was only three

In the rhyming verse

The three-year-old

Approaches a robin

And the robin hops away

Now it was 2024

And my dad was still

Hopping away toward

Aggrieved distant angry men

And even toward a madman

From Queens who was

Beating up kids at a military

Academy while my dad

Was looking around trying

To find his father

First Time (monologue)

What would it be like to live back then in Germany, Rwanda, Myanmar, Bosnia, Cambodia, Darfur or even in the US pushing west and bringing people in chains across the ocean from the east? What were they thinking?! We would not seal people into a walled zone, rain down bombs like a metallic meteor shower and stop food from entering the zone. Because that's not who we are. Or if we did, we would have a damn good reason why... We would not destroy universities, historical archives, museums, mosques, churches, archaeological sites, the history of a people...'Sometimes you must destroy a village in order to save it.' Ha ha. They said that in Vietnam and that was wrong. But a firm hand is sometimes needed when children are not really children but merely 3 foot-tall terrorists, hating & plotting your death. Because every man who attacked was once a boy and this boy came from a mother, and she must also be killed, and her mother too, of course, it's only logical... Wait, now that sounds fanatical and deranged. And we are not fanatical and deranged. But there always had to be a first time. There had to be a first time when eliminating a people really was justified. It's sad. It's a tragedy, but this time it's true. Every other time was a lie. This time it's true. It must be.

(painting by Robert Motherwell)

We Do the Best We Can

In this world that rewards

The cruel the ruthless and the mad

We grow sick fall into chronic pain

Or go mad ourselves

When we get hurt

There is no way to stop working

And the hospitals ask for our papers

We take drugs drink alcohol

Fall asleep in the sun in blurry

Booziness or stay high all day

Trying to remain apart from it

But we are in it and we see

Them pilot private jets

Into the burning horizon

Build tract homes

On the wildflower prairies

To get by you must live

Without consequences

And this we must teach to those

Who do not understand this

Living in their villages

Weaving textiles feeding their animals

Greeting the sun the earth the rain

Please listen that is the dance of fools

We must tell them

Don't you understand this

Charge money for water

And sell guns to enforce this

Let each other die

And be indifferent to this

This is very important

Chop dig demolish burn

And some of you will ascend

A golden ladder

Because you have earned it

(Photo by Victoria Vera)

Two Pasts

Meaning of Irish Portuguese

Both are on the Atlantic

With the cold sea winds blowing

The lands taken

Famine snatching lives

Grimly from the fields

I understand why the Irish left

Though I do not know

What they left behind

Moving south over

The tumbling blue-gray ocean

Madeira's another island

Limned by cliffs though

Black volcanic stone

Covered in flowers

The same small chapels

Now ringed by weeds

Why they left

I can't be sure

But I think I know

What they left behind

The two peoples' songs

Are not so different

Souls venturing out

Into the waves

To return or not

Or disappearing into

The green hills and valleys

And leaving behind

The memory of a song

Sung one midnight

The same white moon

Looking down

On the north Atlantic

The North African Atlantic

Through the clear air

You could see

Contours of gray mountains

On the distant lunar landscape

All that remained now

Were the melody

And the words

Some forgotten

JB Plays God

You will be penned into

A 142 mi.² space

Your food and water

Will be cut

And as you expire

And begin to buckle

Like stalks of plants

Unwatered

Food will fall

From the sky

You won't know where

You won't know when

Suddenly

JB! JB! his power over

Life & death

Is magical

Such mercy to have

His bombs kill us

While boxes of cans

And dry packaged

Calories shower us

From above

Little parachutes

And drones

Floating and humming

Snatched by hungry hands

Now we may decide

Who will live

Who will die

Our son or our daughter

The "Border Crisis"

Into your lands

We will send bullets

Forest-eating machines

Drill platforms

Poised in the waters

Like metallic death birds

We will send food items

Glazed with polymers

Infused with sweetness

And oceans of films

Devoid of meaning

You will dig

Mine and harvest

And we will consume

And what we emit

Will trouble the rains

Ravage the coastlines

Increase the sun's heat

Parch the meadows

Spoil your crops

Soldiers we train and pay

Will ransack your towns

And kill your animals

Each effort at movement

We will thwart with plots

Impenetrable and wicked

Our sailors will crowd your ports

Overthrow your states

Many times

You will be shot

By guns we sell

To people harvesting

Distilling cooking substances

That we consume

As we languish and shatter

Their bullets will break you

You will live in fear

You will flee

Cross deserts

Scale fences

Crouch leap

Stand still

Drink warm water

From dusty milk jugs

In slivers of shadow

And when you arrive

We will turn you away

Curse and blaspheme you

Say you are the reason

For everything bad

We will say

We were really something

Before you got here

It was lemonade and Cadillacs

How dare you come

To feed off of our largesse

Our good heartedness

Our hard work

Why must you

Make us act so cruel

What must we do now

To keep you away