Poetry

Nueva York ain’t so new
Prissy Manhattanites parade around the pew
Of 5th Avenue Bloomingdales and other such holes
Giving thousands of examples and a hardened credence to the word
Oblivion.

Rick-rick subticks roll underground
The ‘mole people’ homeless keep keen eyes in the darkened moldy abyss
As the silver bullet rips through their hood
And it’s gone just as it has come
Another hour, another ten trains.

Feathered lawyers and top execs spread their wings
In the skies of Manhattan
And watch eagle-eye style as their phallic shadows extend over the city,
As day turns to night,
And they speedily exit through the entrails of their towers into sleek
And shiny corporate cars—nests of solitudonous cash.

From the high to the low
Rains clichéd headaches
Of a city, of a city, of a god-damned city
That ain’t so new
But is sure as hell addictive in its
Topsy-turvy turmoil.

Grandmother’s lost it again
Touting the fly-papered lollipops,
Kindling garbage bin fires
With the heads of her childhood dolls
And cick-cuck cackling at 3:00 in the a.m.

She rides her broomstick high into that dark dream-like dawn
And buzzes the lawns of the neighborhood with a face razor and determination.

She ties her hair to her legs so she doesn’t walk too fast
Likes to keep a snail’s pace,
Smell the roses, taste the lively buds of tree-born ticks,
Smick-smacking lips on little lizard’s heads
Twisting her cockeyed glass eye with her index finger
Till it pops out ‘plop’ into her potato bug soup
And spoons it up, rolls it over her tongue.

Her stockings stretched tightly
Over bony legs of viscous flesh
She applies for modeling positions in the dregs of New York City
Calls herself Marilyn and dons a wig of frizzled bacon.
Thick-rimmed slate glasses adorn her crooked nose
Held together only by the gum of yesteryear
Upside down press-on nails painted orange
Luring butterflies and hummingbirds into her web of nonsequiters.
Grandmother has lost it—completely
My only hope being that time-tested genes have met their fate in her
And found their regeneration in me.

We forget the many tumbled tides
Of lonely days in darkened hours.

Our semblance to our sisters and brothers
In quickened paces and frenzied gazes.

Our compassion in whords of cold, hard cash
And spin-spun streamings of whirlish devil-makers

We forget to say I love you to those who care
In a world where truthfully so few do.
Stretching our necks to continually find profit in other ventures
We forget to say I love you to the arms that hold us still,
The eyes that calm our souls.

We forget to say I love you to the warmth of a smile,
A slight nod of the head, angelic gestures of tenderness that sweep our tiredness to another time,
Another place that is not now.

‘Why do we forget?’ we ask
And we forget that perhaps it is not for us to know.

When we remember, remember well
And for that moment forget that you are
Ever going to forget again.

Water drips, timely tolls
Bring the weather of a rainy stole
To ask upon my breath
What never speaks
And laughs of loving
Wraps the sheath.

Say not what you think
For it is marked upon your lips, your brow, your very face
And you are upon the brink—
Of a coddled and lasting stink.

A.m. comes with the sun and seas of people
Corporate drones march to the hive
In plain, baby-blue shirts and over-sized asses
Heads hung low, briefcases in hand
Unhappiness has become the norm
Plastic smiles and forced laughter coat
A cancer too many
As the machine chug-a-chugs away.

Premature balding on men
Fucked up twisted, junky-chunky knees on women
Stilettos to a painful tomorrow
And a clicking wingtip shoe drives me mad.

Steady, even-paced fury walking
Burning deep drive into souls of push-pin dolls
That some crazed masterful puppet master plays with
In his darkened mahogany offices
Of devils personified.

Money and lucrative personal losses
Breed unspoken discontent and existential yearnings
To know why and what we do
Fro 9-5’s-a-many
And working towards the weekend loses meaning
As we bleed, as our weeks bleed, as our lives bleed
Into the corporate fickle fabric of a never tomorrow.

My fear pushes me forward
As the crowd’s discontented gruntings begin to build
A stop in the flow of ‘progress’
For needless questions
A waste of time
Keep moving,
Keep moving
Just.
Keep.
Moving.

I take a sidelong glance from above my cubicle walls
To observe the madness of the busy bee comrades
And slink back into the recesses of my memory for sustenance.
I can do no more than hide
And wait for the torrential downward blades of skeleton sickles
To cease their slicing
And my soul will arise once the corporate ghosts have perished
In their rat race rave towards nothingness
 And I will have survived by an inch.

But that inch will grow.

For Fathers That Do Not Speak

How time has left its mark on you father.
Your splotched skin tells of truths left untold,
Awakening you in the early morning against your will,
Your skin has taken control of your biological clock
And has left you silencing the very thing which wakes you.
An upbringing of overbearing not-tolds
Leaves you with everything to tell,
But no way to voice it.

Your skin one day will pass
And the rest of you will
Unabidingly follow.
The many things left unsaid will seep from your pores
Into the loamy soil about you
And flowers will burst forth color and delight never before seen
On the very energies which you never released.

And slowly, ever so gradually,
These too will pass
And your stony grave will be inscribed
With the skins of so many things left

Unsaid.

America

America. America is an ill-fated apartment
In the downtown slums,
New by years but old if you smell the smells
Of its worn, peeling, white-washed walls and
The black mold beginning to grow in the corner.

America is a long highway
Filled with cracks and potholes
And tar-brushed
Streaks of an over-worn tarmac.

America is a semi-truck rattling its bones
Down your not-so-small-anymore neighborhood street,
Calling out for the children of a younger generation
To come and play with its oil-streaked grill.

America is a fat man walking a fat dog
On a fat street filled with fat burger joints
And a cloggety-cloggety we run.

America is a stained plush carpet from the 1960’s.
Its liberal leanings crying out for peace and justice and such
But the cat’s just shat on it and
No one is willing to clean it up.

America is an overcrowded high school
Filled with over stimulated kids
Wording overplayed songs from the
Overly monotonous radio stations.

America is a cancer ward bursting at the seams
And no one knows why.

America in all its fame and glory…is not.

It has a taste of wine gone sour,
Muddled heathen breath of non-believers,
Personal gods on their hum-drum war paths
Cruising for that one good hit
That’ll give them stories 45 cocktail parties later.

America is a home like the home next to it,
Surrounded by pesticidal
Fields of production glory,
Labeled safe for human consumption
And the puppeteers steer clear.

America is a hope and dream gone contradiction
And a lie gone sour.
Please stand for the pledge of allegiance…

And I sit.

America is that bag lady on the street corner
Being beaten by a gang of teenage boys—
A movie in the making and
Four-star entertainment for the masses.

America is the bling without the substance,
The gleam without the eye,
The cream without the crop—
A window dressing to sustain its citizens
Through a long, drawn-out winter of know-nothing
Do-dads and banana splits.

America is a tattered flag flying
In the dusty shadows
Of a yard-stick highway.

America is a father without a son.
A patriarchal licenser of ‘Do this’ but ‘Don’t do that’.
Liberals expound their theories and say,
‘Let’s discuss’.

America, in its finality, is veneer
Without sincere or dear
And we are no where near
What we supposedly intended to achieve.

America is a history book gone fanatical.
The deathly bony fingers of
Columbus reaching up
To state that he was a great adventurer
And the discoverer of a new land—
New like water, wind, or air—
And the heads begin to bobble.

America is a series of weekends and 8-5’s
Of commemorative holidays for dead bodies we use
To keep the fiction rolling.

America is entertainment in war or peace—
Although the latter seems to have gone on leave.
It is a White House filled with white people
And white walls that, although they are prim and proper,
Are reminiscent of the ones I mentioned earlier.
On a bad politico day, which is often,
One can smell the reek
Of whitey politicians running circles in their hamster wheels
From damn-near half the world away.

America is tiring, exhausting, trying.
For, for this many people to
Believe in this place
Is an act of will beyond comprehension—
And we spin and spin away.

America was my home—a fiction of white picket fences
And wide open spaces (which closed minds helped constrict).
But, my childhood has ended,
The fiction must stop sometime.
And so I walk—
As far from this patriarchal poodle as my broken bones can bear.

Rising Change, Tempered Falls

The waves remind him of continual change.

Born at sea where moon meets water
They rush towards shore,
Kamikaze waves bent on making one last stand.

White-walled faces arise out of sapphire sea
And then, amongst cousins, face the harsh realities
Of the tempered sand awaiting.

The rise, the fall, the hiss, the backwards crawl
And its over just as it began,
Another time, another wave
Time forever marking one after another,

Change continual,

And there is no need for fear.

Pompous

Sir Edny Reed uplifts his nose as he passes Tuesday’s garbage
A pitiful pile of stubborn alcoholics and druggies,
His wingtip shoes glide over their rotting corpses
And gold glitters in his eyes as he approaches a comfortable eternity.

His position gives him credence to be better than these slobs
And he need not ever pretend they are people.

His Rolls, his wallet, his suit and his Russian-import wife
Will forever cause him to forget that a nose upturned
Is a nose in danger of reaching backwards
Till it smells the shit in the broad-ass behind of its owner.

The stillness of my cubicle unnerving
As the whitewashed walls of human beings
Carouse the parlors of the corporate phallus.
Eyes sunken, lifeless, they peruse the many ways to be marginal
And succeed in all.

Bitty-ritty tick-tocks on my clock
And I stock
Up on the paper clips and file folders that comprise my life
I stack them one on top of the other
Till they touch the ceiling in my 4'x5' cube
In the hopes that through calamitous confusion
They merge to form a robotic companion named Larry
Who I can speak to about philisophical nonsensical menageries
And attend to meaningful repose and reverical rantings
Amidst piles of instant coffee cups and despoiled sugar packets--
Styrofoam as far as the eye can see.

51 floors of what exactly I do not know
But Larry's with me in our towers of paper, computers, pens and garbage
And guides me through my day
One cube of a second at a go.

Truly these are troubled times
When the nearest one can get to one’s brethren
Is a ten-foot pole’s length,
And the most one can talk about
With one’s nearest neighbor
Is the goddamn weather.