Loud & Quiet Poems

or it tastes like vanilla

and fills in the dark spots

with cream and sweet sticky sugar.

It is good to want

and it wants to move

as fast as possible. 

One exaggerated circumstance,

it seems by now.

You’d think that undoing

the progress of your personal humanity

would be enough to disarm you.

Instead, you fight against yourself

in an arresting dance of chance

and hate-filled drama

proliferating the stars beyond their life expectancy.

Venus floats suspended in the void of ill-thought,

long-ago abandoned

in the far reaches of the purple spheres.

Time grabs your throat and chokes back the years

like a mother mourning her child's death,

wondering how chance could be so cruel,

how the universe could act so conversely

to your every want and desire,

selfish or otherwise.

Take the birds and the babies, for instance--

how they caw and cry

and pucker up to mother moonshine

like a last minute burglar bereft of claw and hue.

Forget mother mayhem and her intoxicating glow

threatening to rob your soul of sustenance.

Glory, shit and piss:

The makings of you and yours

thrown against the cardboard in crude routine. 

(He didn’t ask for much, just enough to be left alone.) 

This life

has opened me up

and I feel as though

I'm everywhere at night. 

Life grinds

when the world turns

on a swollen axis

and bad dreams

convince you of lies:

mad hornet motion

as wings beat & hum. 

My girl's plane was coming down

out of the sky. 

One way 

or another

it was coming down. 

Her airplane wretched bizarrely

in the city night's sky,

its underbelly lit 

with long fluorescent bulbs.

There was no way of contacting her, 

telling her I was witness to everything

and her insane demise. 

The pilot attempted a landing

on the long tarmac 

backlit by the flickering lights

of tall buildings 

(somehow they'd managed a corridor

for this unlikely airport

and this unlikely landing).

On the second attempt

the plane caught a heady updraft 

and nosed up sweet like

to the stars

and appeared to float suspended,

then it began to plummet

tail first to the ground.  

I dashed for the dark canal

wearing nothing but chino shorts

and ran through the tall weeds

down the cement embankment 

into the black water. 

Then I saw the plane hit the asphalt 

and light up the sky with madness. 

The noise was unreal 

and flames licked at the darkness

like the the devil's feline

lapping at magma. 

I knew there were snakes in the water

and while crawling back up the embankment

I felt a sharp pain at my elbow; 

I saw a big black snake slither up the canal wall

and in the light of the explosion

I saw my smaller, nasty offender

cleaving with fangs 

to my elbow. 

By the time I shook it free from my arm,

my body wet and cold,

I could feel the ghastly pain come on

poisoning my arm and my heart:

She was a good girl. 

The inadequacy of speech  To express the taste of my heart Allows blind men To dream in color.

Tuesday present

Contrasting the darkness

Or phlegm confusing the swallow

Of Tuesday prior

Announces the vigor of Grace

Coursing through my veins

In perfect electricity

Mad and ecstatic. 

The style and poise

Of Godsong

Are rich chords

To my ears; 

Hefting the world,

Feeling its throb. 

These may be the complicated musings

Of a complicated child

Sipping through a complicated straw.

In heated jazz display

Vapors expire from deeply dug

Double bass. 

To the bellicose dream making war

With my thoughts: You are the sun

Left to burn out, straining through a cloud. 

Within the seeking hour

I close my eyes to the madness

And squeeze the pain from shuttered lids

Distilling tears into a fine drink.

In silence

Joy throbs through my soul

As I sit and realize

Hate is hard as glass

And if I touch the chaos

When it moves

My heart is either freed

Or littered. 

Your silent screaming

Means I've been dreaming

While we waste each other away

In drams with the crucial lip. 

Bodies are BROKEN

            Against the WIND

When peace is DESTROYED at morning

Like babes in quiet solitudes

            (THE PEACE OF QUIET)

YOU came through open windows

Like an unwelcome guest

            MET by strangers working

In factories IN THE vacant Midwest

Where no WAR raged like

            Fireflies in the tall grass

Of dark warm summer FIELDS.         

Fear of science and the importance of

Suffering:  a man lies, the

Needle damage dangles from his arm

In the rheumy mezzanine

His finger pointed toward the

Door as though something got out. 

Exposed to the elements

My alter-flame laid to waste

The joy in my heart:

My insistence with candy

My masque unkempt

My blue throat!

Toxins of hempen avenues

And bees in the periphery

That do not fall street-side

Like spent cigarettes and newspapers

Drifting thru chaotic streets

Catching anecdotes of sometime lovers

And aficionados of fine aged whiskeys. 

Like delicate kiss a thumbprint pressed

            So softly into clay

The sinews of intertwined love

            Seemed of a joy to be wed

With ardor our lovers cleaved

            To the boughs of fertile trees. 

In a flash the night absconded

With a dream of my mind’s making

Beyond my acquiescence

A thought that fell

From a strange place in my head

And landed with remarkable weight—

I awoke from it to see the night

Fleeing with awesome haste

Across the spheres

Beyond the pane glass irises

Of my eyes.

In the sepulcher I saw

Beast devour beast

Beast of fortune devour

Beast of burden

The former to his own satisfaction

To sate his tongue and teeth.

Nothing is naturally unclean

And nothing consumed defiling

And should advertisement sway me

The cause would blur the self

The mass would blur the soul.

Should man hold dominion

It’d be his ambition to shelter kin

And sustain life

Lives of every consequence.

As boys we’d welcome bugs

Into the shelter of our palms

Who found themselves into our rooms

Merely by curiosity and course

And designation that is nature’s prerogative.

Should I blot out that life

Whose purpose may lie beyond my sight

I’d just as well sever hand from limb

For this is not my house

These are not my clothes

This is not my bed

These are not my bones!

I yield myself to incomparable grace

I contest the pardons of purgatory:

Once do I live

Once will I die

To live no end withal.