Anacreon’s Place

Decimation, propagation; why do I continue to self-destruct
long after the need for drama is dead? Everything I own, training,
will fit inside a serpent-spine; frightening off the double-tongues
from between the rafters, they taught me how to ride a horse;
it took six months to get comfortable and two years to get good
at it. In a week the singularity will have passed; heretics with gold
don’t generally work. The appearance of wealth only incites termites
to teem like spiders from the ceiling onto your forehead shortly before
you would have drifted off to sleep. A star has fallen too far; this is
the last divining done for white lightning; a midnight widening of the
pericardium to provide joy for herdless boys. Then it will all be over
and the stars will burn black, the spaces between them
churn white as sin.

Some people – many people - whole societies I have seen,
in fact, have a strong need to affix blame for the occurrence
of any perceived unrightness. The need to lay blame is
a bug that burrows so deeply into their hindquarters that
it nests in their spinal column, and gives birth to
its own reinforcements.

I have never really understood this, because the impulse to lay blame
is part of the world view which is itself the reason that this world has
become the free-for-all of war, pestilence,greed, and myriad
other unpleasant mal-adaptations.

Remember this: the present instant is the product of a concatention of
instants; so-called “traditional” values are not the answer. Very frequently, those are the biggest part of why we got to this landfill in the middle of the road in which we presently stand. What is needed is life-centered thinking. To understand what life itself needs, and how to propagate, sustain, and nourish it. Return to the center;
not the mediocre midstream, but to sanity itself.

again to love
a foolish notion
wondering what
matters when
we’re all dying one
day at a time anyway

gonna be a star
when the planet blows up
leaving the dog’s bowl spinning
down some forlorn vector toward the
Kuiper belt.

Minor Heresiarchs

Reprehensible heresies are
unspoken after midnight.
The tractor fell over,
pinning the farmer
beneath it. He had to
dig himself out with
hands and feet, and
was bruised for weeks afterward.

Dementia in the oval office; masses voting
for crapola. Stop blaming the politicians.
They are rotten because the people who elect
them are rotten. I stopped fooling myself
that the average american voter
means well.

The fools worm out
of the amphitheater as though
they had understood anything
of what they had seen. In fact,
all the secrets of the universe
have been stripped bare upon
the gurney, but all they noted
was the profusion of blood,
and the handsomeness
of the doctor.

Percentile rolls trammel my good fortune,
a mash of ham and potatoes with melted cheese.
The dragon slashes with cat claws the primrose
behind the shed. The government keeps pushing
down on us, the little people.

Hope flourished in the gloaming, but today the
burn marks ache like sin and I am not sure how
I am going to make it to town with no water and
no gas and no money.

I find an oasis which stills my thirsts, and I scry
all pasts and the future in its waters. But it’s
not home, at least not the one my marrow was
sculpted for.

Fingers move, though the mind
that drives them pushes invisible;
the sun heats red earth and
caresses wind to breath life into
tired fallow ground. From sky and
brackish sea such questions
shiver immaterial.

No shaking flesh may restrain dirt-Adam
from a calling that extends to endless
futurity, outstretched Hand and Heart
that bled for the ones who repulse
but cannot quench eternity.

She knew it and was it and is it.
She loves and lives the substance
behind masks of deity.

Making dreams come true, is that what you really want to do?
Do the truth and live in a bucket of cattle hangman reservoir
stagnancies? National Geographic sent a photographer and
snapped shutter on greens and yellows, gray barn-board and
peeling white and red paint, and deep, deep bovine fecal stench.
Somebody intimated to me that the glint in the eye of that pheasant
on the ridge overlooking the leased groves’ tight sprawl might not have been the grandiloquent shuddering of gossamer nebulae I fancied, but I took it in stride. He has not ridden the Ferris Wheel, or tested the tear in Isis’ eye.