Sanity

I

In desperation, once, I traded my every passion for one shred of sanity,

And gripping that shred with both hands
Passionless I did wander.

One night the rain woke me sleeping.

I cannot hold both my sanity and your hair with one hand;
So madness overtakes me.

II

As I wander mad
My kingdom thrives.

All the pale yellow hills glow green again.
As do I.

At night that green flame swells to rival the void expanding above.
As do I.

And in the morning the oak tree stretches towards the sun.
As do I.

And the beating of a thousand wings overwhelms your senses.
As do I.

And the pulsing river is eager to fill the empty lakebed.
As am I.

And the ardent white pollen that permeates all else fills you.
As do I.

And the snowcap Sierras shine at a distance.
As do I.

And all the pale dead things that have rotted are new again.
As am I.

III

You would not leave the city with me
To chase the mountains east.

I did not understand what you said before I left.

But I saw the hysterical terror in you face
When I raved of the fire that consumes all.

Perhaps I am mad.

The fire you wince at half blinded
Is the same flame that binds us all.

And if you fear that pure heat;
There is no mercy from fear.

The Firing Squad

He concedes his feelings of yesterday. Stealing time for congealing real dream. The Dreamer is trapped by his own schemes. Preened in the sand. Beaming ecstasy sunshine.

“I’se striding the night divine,” is the last thing he says, “with moonlight homicide. Hiding in the sides, lines, and paradigms,
Then
playing the fated caged against their prison gates."

Braying wasted on just a taste of sedation.

Termination

He did not see for all the caution,
and went crumbling asunder
with machine guns
and dust.

Atrophy

Stagnant summer heat encompasses  me where I lay half-blanketed by shade.  The breeze brings with it the ease of opium smoke.  I grow ever heavier watching as the sidewalk procession before me passes as endlessly as a river, my eyes level with their ankles.  I name each one with the emotion they evoke on their way passed.

This woman's name is Desire.  The spikes on her shoes announce her arrival like a drumroll in staccato slowmotion.  Her smile echos her white clothes and her yellow hair billows in the wind like flames.  I sink into the ground.  She is a walking reverie.  Even music would fail to describe her.  Helpless, I do not deign to make her real by speaking.  When she smiles everything, even the very daylight, is irrelevant. I do not look away until she disappears.

This man's name is Paranoid Mechanophobia. Noticing the stiffness of his gait I can hear the pistons whirring in his head and the gears grinding their teeth in his clenched jaws.  He wears a steel-wool grey sweater and his slacks are blacker than a mechanics hands.  Not a corner contorts in his rigid mask, the android's stare is vacant of reaction to the street life he passes. He does not look toward the park but his head finally swivels to check for traffic before he disappears across the block.

This woman's name is Haughtily Discriminate.  Her dress looks like it was sewn from the drapes at her mothers house. She does not wear shoes on her black feet.  She has a face like a pink bullfrog whose bulbous eyes frown at the people hurrying past.  As a breeze lifts the thought of the wind on her slimy complexion makes me shiver in the sun light.  She drags a bulging bag at her shoulder that anyone can guess is stuffed with the sins of her past and future.  I can still hear the din from her toothless mouth long after she disappears.

This man's name is Stoic Respect.  His old leather shoes are as soft and worn as his aged body.  Kinky hair sprawls over his head like a mess of tarnished copper wire, here red, there silver, there black.  He wears a shabby wool blazer and faded slacks.  I strain to imagine the nature of the thoughts that streaked his face with such deep creases and of the irreconcilable disillusionment that has so exaggerated his tired eyes.  What books are in the small stack he carries and what myriad had he carried before. What unholy miracles and righteous crimes does he remember, while the rest of our race has chosen to forget. I miss him when he disappears.

This man's name is Pensive Boredom.  I recognize his shoes, they are the same black and white canvass shoes every passing schoolboy is wearing.  On his white shirt is an advertisement for its designer.  His eyes are as dull as his military haircut.  He walks with stiff motions of an automaton.  The conversation between him and his small group of clones has no rhythm to it. Not even a marching cadence, it is only a monotone droning.  Nothing is said in their sentences. Through their constant efforts to shock each other, their word lose meaning.  I don't even notice when they have disappeared.

This man's name is Pious Disgust.  His skin and clothes are greasier than the parking lot asphalt   He reeks at a distance.  Dirt crusted toes poke out from large holes in the side of his shoes.  He fills his dingy mailbag with parcels pilfered from the garbage can.  His skin is the same grey hue as his hair.  It is sagging leather that he has worn for too long. And I relax a little bit when I notice he has disappeared.

This woman's name is Lust.  From the hoof-like points of her shoes, her legs stand taller than me.  They vanish into a dress the color of freshly spilled blood.  Her breasts hang riper than any fruit could hope to be and even silk would offend her bronze skin with it's envy.  Her stride is submissively violent.  Devastating. Had she not tied her hair back, I'm sure that it would block out the sun.  And her delicately pointed eyes, the night is not so black.  I was so enrapt, I didn't think to call to her until after she had disappeared.

It will be late soon.
I slowly stand, stretching the atrophy from my limbs.
I am delighted when I see my friend the professor.
I call to him, rushing to relate all the lives
I witnessed today.
I tell him the names of the men and women who
I have seen this afternoon.

He retorts: "All these people live lives deeper than the shallow observations you've made in the few moments as they pass.  Some might seem grotesquely terrible and terribly ordinary but you  have watched them in vegetative stillness.  And after they disappeared from your sight they arrived at some destination with an anticipated aim or chance experience waiting for them. You have experienced only their passing.  Your only aim has been to lie in the grass like a corpse, dead on the war-field of a battle you didn't fight."

We stood staring at each other in silence for a little while both of us wearing guilty expressions on our face.  He apologizes for speaking harshly and invites me someplace that I do not go. We part in feigned politeness. And I go home to sink into a deep, tedious insomnia.

"I'm Gonna Fuck You Til You Love Me" at the iHOP Poetry Slam, at the Arlene Francis Center in Santa Rosa, California

This is actually three co-related poems strung together to make an entry into the iHOP Slam Poetry Contest. The first poem is Girlies, one of the very first I wrote.  The second is an untitled fragment I wrote about five years ago and the last is also an untitled poem that appears on this blog in January, 2011.

This is a Bad Poem

My original sin in presenting this piece is to speak it with a man’s voice, that

lacks both the music of a women’s

and the thunder of God’s.

Tonight I will bite and murder slam poet’s entire style at the same time.

I will say things just because they sound cool when they rhyme.

I’m a chrome-lightning, multi-paradigm wind-chime.

I’m the macho borracho that curb-stomped the Gestapo.

I’m a well hung, sprung-out, punk-ass bungalow-junkie.

I’m a man of the world and I’m a man of other worlds

And I’ve only been doing this rhyme-thing so I can have sex with girls.

Depicting a conflict which is self inflicted.

I spin my fiction out of vindictive friction.

I’m spraying clichés faster than gamma rays.

I’m braying inane, more of the same.

I stay extra lame, like a human brain.

But I might win the slam tonight, if I spit a sound-byte

So tight that the light-bulbs blow like your mind

I might be untrue, but kind.

I grind like a finey on a cocaine high

when Ride the Lightning comes on KMFY.

But don’t you see? That flow was weak.

I didn’t say anything, all I did was speak.

I embellish my pretenses at the

expense of making sense.

My words spew like light refracted.

I’m tactless, the wack-ness.

If these lines were meant to impact kids

And the revolution is back then

We need leaders to enact this

So that the poetry slam would just

be soap-box practice. 

This is how I make a slam poem:

I retrace my steps to something real

And I degrade it. 

I make it my rude answer to any unasked questions.

I only wanted to tell the truth for once.

But the truth is, this poem is so trifling it is stifling.

The subject matter is far too self involved and

My rephrased clichés are less fresh than a whore’s bath.

The vulgar word play is my ego masturbating.

"This is a Bad Poem" at the iHOP Poetry Slam, at the Arlene Francis Center in Santa Rosa, CA.

This is my parody of slam poetry. This is a Bad Poem.

"Three Regrets" live at the iHOP Poetry Slam, at the Arlene Francis Center in Santa Rosa, CA.

"We are the Orphans of the Dying King" at the iHOP Poetry Slam, at the Arlene Francis Center in Santa Rosa, CA.

Perfect

A perfect coin sun shone upon
the highest leaves and trickled
all the way down onto the grass
and our faces.

The river below was the cloudy
hue of water in a cup that a
painter has been cleaning his
brushes in. Aloft all the birds
chased each other. Squirrels
grabbed acorns and dragged
them into the trees that they
had recently fallen from. The
stretching flowers were politely
vain.
A spring breeze pushed the only
cloud away.

And then
the girl with the pretty, long hair
told me she loves me!

She Doesn’t Know

It is silent.

Her voice---like music resounding
Greatly---is gentle smoke in the air.
Yet it devastates me. She says,
“I don’t know.”
Airs of disdain point her nose.
Her eyes sharpen,
Lashes rigid.
Derision raises her eyebrows several
Degrees.
So I say something clever quick like,
“I think you’re going to miss me!”
Her lips are red-flower-petal coals that
Burn and lacerate my soul.

“I’ve no control,” I confess; pressing
Against velvet flesh.

Trapped for months and
Her limbs are pleasurable fetters.

Her hair---the scent of yellow summer
At its purest---reaches down long
Vines in which I contemplate inevitable
submission to entanglement.
Facing her, as I feared she is not smiling;
However stolidly feigning self-assurance.

But even still the dark points in her eyes rival
The mystery of the void at its deepest.

What she doesn’t know is that her face glows
So that I’ve grown slightly blinded to those other
Duller faces.

I lay down at her feet
In abject devotion
And she is cunningly aloof as she steps over me
And continues to walk away.