Thursday, March 28, 2024

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
BOMB
The gardens
The graveyards
The goats grazing
The grocery stores
BOMB
The hidden
The homeless
The hopeless
The hungry
BOMB
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

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

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

Monday, March 4, 2024

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

Sunday, March 3, 2024

The "Border Crisis"



Into your lands
We will send bullets
Forest-eating machines
Drill platforms
Poised in the waters
Like thirsty metallic 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