....From The Tree Of........................Isolation & Thought
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_______________________________________________________ When Your Last Plug Nickel Is A Button It's one of those days when heaven's ceiling is six inches from my face. There's not enough air. I've taken the last bullet, put it into the last belly who'd put up with me. The ground is hard. Harder than expected, this walking on flat bottom at the lowest rung. I wish I wish I'd never had a tongue at all, like Nell I'd fan the air and spin and croon a language for my heart alone; no sound harsher than a dandelion hair. Someone should put these socks on my hands and try to pin me so I cannot hurt anyone. I am a danger only bed will take, where dreams stay in my skull, where they scratch at concave bone, leaving marks that only rune-readers, madmen or broken children know how to read and the rest of you are safe from any curses, dug out spells or radioactive fallout even I don't understand. Sledge Flat as Kansas, sometimes there are thoughts like these that tread on through November never varying a step; a measured, gray-tone plain like an O'Keefe desert rolls across the mind; changes from flat to slowly spherical. A shot put ball, only bigger- bigger, an Indiana Jones stone, turning, turning, rolling into winter, where before its white made death a something lacy, light and lyrical, it had weight. No, it is the under snow of winter where I walk in leaden shoes wearing heaviness of years. I will not overtake it- I only know to follow, and it appears, there's merely one way left to go. The Elements Car's waiting out on the frozen port, locked in winter cubed. I lube my mind with thoughts of gliding surely over ice riding on the good grace of God -how odd we do not hibernate. Do the sensible thing and sleep till April. Magnificent Obsessions There's a trick I've learned by scooting across the inside rims of cocktails: never stay on the ice cubes long enough to have the heat of your feet stick to them permanently, unable to move at all, afloat in someone else's gimlet. Do I really leapfrog ice, as small as Thumbelina or Tinkerbell--making the soft chink chink chink chink in wide-mouthed crystal glasses as I race for a likely edge? No of course not, it's a metaphor for fleetness, a kind of ghosting I will do to get out quick; especially things like eyeing alcoholic drinks- or anything has a grip that's proven tougher than my will, I will out wit and hop skip jump-- I am the disappearing rabbit in a hat, and all you'll see is puff of tail- then piff and 'poof'. At The Dig What are we but shimmerings on a horizon, out of nowhere, returning to a somewhere no one knows. We are swamp gas animations- the burning exhalations from the old volcano, flowing whitehot movement down a mountain cooled to concrete shape and weight .............. but only burning, only quicksilver for a moment till we're bedded to the earth again and still. General traces of our downhill race survive the generations, boiling over. Our history is the layered flow, the shape of waves of bones before they cool. Each piece of art and artifact, each poem and every tool tells who we were and what we wanted, where we went but hardly ever gives a slender clue to why. Florist Somedays, my head feels like it will explode. The thoughts align inside into detonating elements. One plus or minus too many, one image too much, and all the wails behind me pull into rockets. Fire inside the skull to leave the pocked marks of confusion, a cranial moon whose one sea of tranquility is all but lost in rubble even Hubble with it's enhanced, superimposed photography would not find pretty. Some births in innerspace are not the gorgeous, gaseous swirls of God. Mine are the Marne -twisted wire, flesh sticking to the ragged barbs like horrid, blood-flecked roses. I gather the tortured flowers. Make bouquets. No Words It's dawn. I hear a mourning dove; I have to concur. The sound is one my heart makes- just like that. Taking Care A messy business, changing sheets that should have been doffed a week ago. There on the pillowcase, rusty drool that happened the day of the tooth extractions, turned good side up, so I didn't have to see them. But these past few days leaking urine at every racking cough, - the flu, the bladder bug that makes the stains look sickly red and scary, these are the winding sheets of corpses died of plague, and plague is what it feels like I may have, so even though I shook I manhandled the filthy suckers off and made a clean, new bower for my illnesses to camp in. Not having a mother here, I had to be my own. Eve Up in the mind maple there are limbs to walk out on where boughs bend, but do not break where the first snake of temptation coils and coils; his tongue a slick and sliding thread of split-end promise, gliding in and out the mouth's mousehole like a finger beckoning. If you see me wrapping round in perfect undulation, know that I am planning some Second Fall. This Poem Included Pots of paint, spackling paste and drop cloths draped in sterile white in rooms of streaming godly light couches filled with pillows with the tags still sticking out, a Berber carpet, thick as Bresnev's head and magazines, thick magazines opened on the coffee table, matching colors, soft pastels, a glass of Galiano like a melted topaz, stirring slightly, hypnotizing one who's love of alcohol was legendary, one who's love of fantasy, imaginary worlds has conjured -this. But look around this crumbling house -this ceiling hanging low with blown-out hole that's underneath the toilet leaking from above, the cobwebs strung from lamp to lamp, the inch of dust on everything, its bunnies running off beneath the bed in furry balls of failure. Time piles heavily and sad on so much baggage that's beyond me now to fix. I am a fairy-headed scribbler with such dreams and dreams are all that's fed in here. There'll be no Home and Garden bower, no, not ever. That's beyond me now. Beyond me lies a narrow line that closes to a dot of all I'm not. It's true about the house, but houses any psychoanalyst will say, are metaphors for self, this poem included. On To Page 8 .............. Return To Contents This site sponsered by 
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