THE GREEN MAN

IN MY SEARCH for more information on The Green Man, a rather obscure movie I saw partially, and have wanted to see again for years, I discovered this delicious link commenting on Britain's father and son literary dynasty of Kingsley Amis and his son, Martin Amis.

A TASTE OF TRENCH MADNESS

Thanks for keeping up the resistance, Morales. Just know that the busy silence of we who are marked to fall always proceeds the clashing of the cymbals, while those of us who warned the others (now laughing and mocking, hissing and despising our herald) will have witnessed the fullness of truth, not they, and by inertia or grace will be prepared to shield others from the amplified atrocities as they arrive.

That's the extent of whatever hope I have remaining. This country will probably awaken when Europe implodes, but I believe that America is also marked for crisis, a result of having become sadly corrupted and from our national potential far have we strayed.

Don't fear the Marxist-Islamofascism creep, however. Resist it wherever we can, but don't expect any sudden miracles quite yet. People still treasure their fool's gold, reflecting among the dueling mirrors of social consciousness that they've done the math, not quite realizing they've only been using imaginary numbers while letting the real digits slip away...

And allow me this opportunity to insist that I am not naive, no matter what I choose to paint or wrestle into inconsequential line. It's rather obvious by now that I frittered away that excuse six senses and a million miles ago.

BEATING A DEAD HORSE

Well, Josh, deterrence is not a big headline grabber, but it does change the dynamics of who does what to who and when. And besides, yes, indeed there are quite a few instances on record of someone "successfully" defending themselves and others against intruders, but of course the liberal media avoids these stories, and sometimes even the surprised homeowner is hauled into court to defend himself against charges, while the intruder skirts off. It's an outrage. Criminals use and abuse guns all the time, and yet the system coddles them. Meanwhile law abiders are demonized.

But man, ALL the arguments on this issue are old news, if you've truly been honest in researching it. You know them. I know them. We've each made choices. You have your sense of moral high ground. And I have something just as awesome. End of story.

FIGURES OF SPEECH

A SENTENCE LIKE THAT deserves more than a well-rehearsed handshake, but sometimes those of us who live for the calming caresses a fine line insinuates find ourselves too infatuated to make the first move...

AN INTERRUPTION

BUT SUCH IS TIME and perfect timing, off time, under time, in time, time and time again, sloppy time, never time, Miller time, tea time too.

Neat time, time in a bottle, my time, the time of my life, in the life and times of Uncle Joe Stalin, time to shape up, time to get a job, time it all the way to the bank, tell me when it's time to get married the fifth time.

Shallow time. Shag time. Sane time. In the time it took to drive a bus off the cliff on a Seventies cop show, that's show time. For the third time today I needed time. Time to go to the bathroom. Time to shit or get off the pot. Time was when fun just cost a nickel.

Time this. Time that. Time warp. Time tunnel. Time is where the heart is. Time enough to think of a good response this time. Time to grow up. Time to eat and run. Time to suck the chrome off that bumper crop of party time. Time to beg the difference.

Time to cut the mustard. Time to pick out a receiver downfield. All the time in the world. Time to wipe my ass. Timex time. Time to cash a cheque. Time to win the battle but lose the war on drugs. Time it took six women to satisfy each other in a dark room on time. Time to kick the bucket.

Time to write a novel. Time to brush her hair the same way her sister used to brush hers, timing each stroke to the beat of time. Time to draw a conclusion at the bottom of the class. Time to mark a certain number of correct answers to the questions with a number two pencil.

Time to give up a lost cause.

Time to shut down the chicken farms along that river. Time to read the classics in their original language. Time to make lunch bags sing before the children race off to school.

The time it takes to build a universe only to have it collapse in your face is nothing like the time I helped Aunt Mardis rip through a chocolate cake in the olden days of French ascendency.

It takes time to learn to ride a bicycle. Time to reap what one sows. Or maybe not. Maybe that time is instantaneous time, time accurately remembered. Time to sing before she swallows for the last time that nasty pill. Time to harvest a generation. Time to swallow before you hang ten. Time to look before you cross.

By the time it took to dig up the Erie Canal times had changed. It's not about time, it's about attitude. By the time I get to Phoenix many husbands won't have time to take out the garbage. The driver swore to the witness that he didn't have time to stop. Time takes a holiday but time never vacates the premises.

Time laughs at odd moments but time never bargains with leftover sandwiches. Time is that which doesn't kill you. Time kills that child inside only to seemingly reappear later.

Time is a long, cool woman in a black dress. Time is kinky. Time paints by numbers. Time is a disease of the pancreas. Time is a pretty heart-shaped tattoo on Wendy's breast in some window in Times Square. Pi is a variable in a timeless equation.

Time understands all wounds. Time wounds all heels. Time is an asset. Time is a pain in the ass. Time is only as good as your next biological movement. Time is the needle in the haystack. Time is secondary but don't tell her that.

Nothing like a good time in the sack to make time fly. Time has no fear of flying, but Erica and Henry both knew what having a good time was about, and it was not about time, but the enjoyment of time. Grown-up time.

There is no such thing as time travel today, but recordings keep time in ways none of us truly understand past its fetish draw, but time was when a fine time was had by all, double time, life plus time. High time that boy got a job. Time the unfortunate child born without legs who beats a faster smile than you do.

Observe that same child pursue time into measuring itself with old technologies in a world that presumes time can't reverse itself while it can so readily repeat itself dipped in statistics. Time is a two-way mirror. Time is a dirty joke flooding the muddy Missisippi.

Time is nothing but what you or somebody else makes it, except when it's game time, and don't try to tell me about how much time it would take to make the timeless world safe for timelessness because everybody knows it's all in the timing, even though most of us are suffering a bad sense of timing.

There's never enough time to transcend one's station, especially when mobile. Time is far too formidable a friend on feverish afternoons to let stand in the cold rain without knowing that time sometimes stands still.

Without time on my side I perish with the daffodils. Time is a time-honored sport everyone must play in order to graduate. Time forgives. Breaking rules for time is not always a bad time, but does require timing it just right. Time scars. Grab the moment to make time while others bargain, losing time to others, until another time comes.

Time is a stiff upper lip in a compromising position. Time defers to gravity, but for one writer, time is nothing but a madcap schemer bought and sold on the installment plan, money paid back over time, but then two-timing Old Doc Celine didn't live long enough to get mixed up in time, time and time again.

Time is a nightmare to Klaw's girls who prefer time raw and risky than more often than their less time-tortured sisters. Time dresses up for special guests. Time is the major importer, exporter of stolen goods across state lines in situations where time is barely legal. That's time standing in the shadows, losing her shirt to timeless romance.

Time is nobody's business but the rates are skyrocketing. Time is colorless, odorless, tasteless. Time left is time right on time. Time left to itself is useless. Time blows tall buildings to the ground. Time grounds water tables and small asterisks into dust bowls older than TIME ITSELF because time is the wind in the sails of marginality until time itself stops.

MONDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 1955: Relativity Mr. Eliot

(Every opening day event
is safely defined
according to the board
of heavy commissioners,
who having frequently
engaged in parasitic
intercourse with important
anti-matter details, do
thus proclaim this work
to bless the eyes and tongues
and postage stamps of public
yen with fire and dogma, that
these blessings endure secure
as the new lamp post
in the old land of triumph,
as foretold in the chapbook
of Turquoise Laughter,
found on the bookshelves
of those sleazy sectarians,
the Unknown Poets.)


My god! Those scrambled tenses
Are breathing insects
About to inherit the earth
As the meek ones.
Should we give the order to poison them,
The lie more likely to succeed beyond
Crock derivation, say?
The social instincts and mortal thunder
Track across the skies of deprivation. They
Mock us and tell us paradise
Has ranked us this way.

He comes much later than Voltaire.
With able lunacies guarding
Their classical moons,
In numbers too written
To catch a falling
Sparrow by jet liner.

So doggedly
He comes before us,
Letting us spoil him with a role
Abandoned to grief, walking,
To serve eyes never before ruled.
An expanded version of the likeness
Of man is displayed in his temples
More pulled to powerstare.

A coward without wings
Brings no one change, but
To you who think
Without a padlock brigging
Your brain, to you who think
His work is discriminating,
I say knows the difference in universal
Meaning between sugar and salt
And his birthright.

Give fair attention to the perfumery
He exposes, the sweat, the toil,
The semen.

Missing no link!

Question him if in doubt.
The idiom may be lost in translation.
Condemned to die or forty years
He shall return. When he walks among men,
The obvious is hidden, orphic
Associations and fresh failing crops,
And door alarms.

Left Bank will soon pass away like the rest.
And Burnt Norton will accuse Lucifer
As the author of time!

CASE HISTORY IN SO MANY WORDS...

nondum blanda tuas leges
et vacuum pectus ab igne fuit
—Elegy 7, John Milton

The real and the unused.
Crust to call it out of work homages,
thus imply, willed as poet the surveyor—
bust subjugationalism, hurry
grave, easy tones as captor as comforter.
Not yet did I know your laws
and my breast was free from fire.
The missing I. The real and the unused.
Behold your applicant as he struggles to strip
the veil of anguish from the master of ceremonies,
characterized by constant papersludge, choices
that lead to detention, standard sophistications,
irreparable materials at hand. But every
mother worth her milk refuses, calls
us heretic, criminal, an awkward position
endorsing belligerent behavior I say's
better built for lazy ones who street it,
gas grinners, cigarette teeth and whiskey eyeballs,
starving, filthcoated tongues
lost in gutter grime and babythick weathered lips
long ago. Celine's boys. Dreaming dogs.
The real and the unused.
Do you really know this man?
Or they called it infantile ascension.
Case history in so many words.
I mustard promise at every passing fancy,
drill skirts through the pedestal inviting
every passing nancy
to cut out my vital stat,
roll it in dough,
unscrew the nerves keeping me out of work,
in homage, and out of the Goethe Institute.
I feel like night, my creeds as complex
as the birth of an incomplete child,
regardless of pace,
breed or compatibility with a dead hero. The latter,
a pneumatic pretense of distinction. As bloody gnat,
I lust to feel burning glacier women who believe in the holy captive,
the real and the unused, naive truth, blanket nerve, price wars,
comparative nostrils. Wah but, such works of true determination
are reserved for the few, rarely an overnight sensation.
The real and the unused.
I, Gabriel Thy,
I, the richard spalding nix,
I, poet of cull verse and friend to all natives,
I, the missing I, complete the roulette parallelogram,
the pickpocket's trilogy terrorizing
self in search of the city,
this corpus christi,
her sand and her silk and her honesty,
assembled in the punished faces of the wedding tree, wah but
Young Man of resembled talents redeeming
the real and the unused.

That was before I read a book on windmills by Kierkegaard.

WHEELING

With little idea of how emphatically alert
the carrion forces of irony would approach me
in this odd doohickey state of mine,
I was celebrating with moving trucks
and farewell glimpses like signals from another frontier
that I, yes, the royal roving eye
had finally escaped the nation’s capital after twenty-two
scalable years of stifled scream, fish tales, and orgasm,
my formidable punk rock years frothing and frosted beneath me,
punishment enough I had hoped for choosing the prophetic muses
of blathering fifth angel guitar heaps over the deadly aims
of the finely papered greed and arrogance creeps
the city of Washington breeds, imports, and exports
across its continental colonies and beyond, far beyond,
gesture control, this leering lawmaking
jeering jawbreaking city’s major industry,
and by that I mean ONLY industry...

but obviously I had miscalculated the odds—
the shady odds not even a straw hat hombre from south of the imaginary
Mendoza line as legal as lint, can beat. Flattened by repeated failure,
and by failure, I mean absolute and uncompromised failure,
I had become nothing more than an aching suburb of my former self.
I had gone west by God. In smutty nutty wisecracking Wheeling
                      West Virginia
I soon found myself smack dab in the middle
of the next pygmalion effect.

Allow me to elaborate my first full week
here on Main Street in Victorian Old Town, I saw,
and by that I mean O-L-D, the flaking, rotting, stinking carcass
of a former glory gone desperately poor, I saw myself
perched eighty feet on a bluff above the historical
but now quaint yet periodically swelling, raging,
bank-defying Ohio River down below.

First week here POTUS came to town,
a speech at the Capitol Music Hall,

Floods in Wheeling, nope, in DC.
Presidential motoracde.
punk city, nope, wheeling, tats & nose rings
few hicks, lots of itching though.

[ 2006, Wheeling, WV ]

TWEAKING THE MULTICULTURALIST

I CAN'T HELP MYSELF in picking up Charlie's theme of inclusion, even though I am alert to the fact it's not the original thrust of the thread.

One of the many ironies of FORCED multiculturalism, and I do know something about the realties first hand, is the myth that we are all the same. Well, if we are all indeed the SAME, why the great push to make sure we test that theory by forcing all this sameness together? And yet when given the choice of aggregating freely under general conditions, we notice the tendency that real (or superficial) likeness does indeed TEND to gravitate together, but not EXCLUSIVELY.

This predilection is seen everywhere; in nature, in human society, and in logic itself. Some may laugh, and call this an over-simplication. I'd agree, but then ask the question, an over-simplication of what?

A FEW SKY GRAY THOUGHTS ON POLITICS AS A BRITTLE LITERARY DEVICE

A FINE MAN AND DEDICATED PATRIOT named Christopher Logan honored me recently when he sent me a message inquiring, "Do you think I was being too rough with her?"

Damned if I know. She doesn't seem to be backing down, and is remarkably patronizing in her own right. Let's face it. Some people just don't get it, won't get it, can't possibly get it until IT affects them in some personal way. Perhaps a few quotes from Thomas Jefferson, J. Quincy Adams, John Wesley, Bishop Sheen, Winston Churchill, and Mohammed himself will get her attention, but probably not. Because she's of the mindset right now that it is better that 100 guilty terrorists go undetected than one innocent Muslim be given a second glance in an airport line. There's no defeating that logic in these sad, post-modernist, politically incorrect, globalist times since it parallels the romanticism that our own US legal system is grounded in...

For better or for worse, smiley-faced Pollyannas will always be with us.

You and me? We just keep plugging. In due time, we might be prepared to be of even greater service to those who criticize us now...

Q: Thank you for not attacking me but providing me with the information. But your quick turn to the passive-aggressive has not provided much in the form of education. I'll investigate anyway.

Laurie, I'm not here to educate you. One liners on Facebook will never get that done. There is a wealth of information out there just for the picking. You are correct. You must do the investigations, yourself. Take no single source as truth, or at least not until you have determined the source as reputable over a string period of time. That's the best any of us can hope to do. But what seems to be at issue here on this thread is whether or not this question of a global jihad in its myriad of forms is a matter of personal opinion, anecdotal evidence, or mere genuflection, but rather of determinable fact by a tough, keen look at all the evidence available.

Propaganda is very tough to parse with mere cursory efforts...

And I suggest to you that Mr. Logan has the right beat on the issue, Laurie. News that screams forth everyday from all corners of the planet where Islam is actively pursing more territory, more corpses, more power under the guise of sharia, is not a mere blip on the screen. The signage of Islam on the march is everywhere. Signs, signs, everywhere are signs. Perhaps you know the song, perhaps not. But the point is, there's a whole lot more to this Islamic muffin than just some flour and a handful of blueberries.

Gabriel: Information is not knowledge.

Kirsten: This is an often misconstrued concept!. But, to quote: Knowledge is Good.

Bruce: Well I didn't want to say anything but I am glad you know this.

Gabriel: Well dear public, feel free to expose me to what else you and yours might speculate I need to know. The nasty truth is not as mysterious as we've been led to believe. GATHER OR DIVIDE. The whole point of my imaginary punk rock band is to suggest that each one of us must make the play. Bystanders be damned. Ignorance is bliss, twice the fun, bur perilous in spoilage. Our retaliation?

Inherit a role. Allow it to count. Face the music. And realize that this is the only rule by which we know ourselves as intricately as our detractors do.

Josh: Correlation does not imply causation!

Gabriel: Obviously correlation is a more pertinent state of affairs, since to put matters in terms Karl Popper might appreciate, scientists can explain First Cause, but we are stuck with all pending correlations.

Maybe that was Wittgenstein, not Popper, but since they exchanged thoughts with fabulous animosity, the pending correlations in this case are probably nothing more than the dollars and cents of an ego economy - commonly called hubris - rather than the clarity that some uncertainty principle might avail us when the necessary light we might require to accept a generality at the sufferance of a specific is corrupted by political motivations.

In other words, all politics is tainted, and plagued with guesswork, but I am a survivor of my own knowledge, not yours.

Correction: scientists CANNOT explain...well, that unintended typo effectively puts the skid into this thread...

After fielding a few snarky remarks from leftist associates and reading some of the neck-snapping snorts of some rightie cohorts, I feel compelled to state:

Politics is just as irrational and existential a belief system as religion, at times just as pernicious, at times just as comforting, both springing from a loose structure of competing droves. In fact, we know today, there is little difference between politics and religion in its abstract condition or its peculiar habits. Superstition and misconception dominate both. Empty rhetoric imposes and services both.

Faith is central to each, and faithlessness is punished in one form or another at every turn. Some might even say there is no rational distinction between politics and religion, but are merely similar thorns on the same blighted rose bush...

Like Ezra Pound, I cherish the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time.

GT

MONEY FOR THE POETS

DECADES OF PUBLIC and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward.

Read it all.

VACATION EMPHATICA

COME TO THE COUNTRY, sail upon a fetching horse, swoon and sing private lullabies with the dazzling song birds perched keenly outside your colonial window, enjoy the friendship only nature in the natural can bring...

Stare, smirk, and draw forth the nostrils. Might I say without embarrassing either you or me fair Shannon that your face in this photo is quite strikingly one of the most nuanced philosophical statements I have read today. In that 1960s Faye Dunaway mold. From one artist's eye to his mouth...

YELLOW SHIRTS (Death of a Prostitute)

Crayons, crayons, crayons
crayons, crayons, crayons
crayons blowtorch, crayons edgework
crayons, crayons, crayons—yellow shirts
construct clever angles the still merely coping
find new energy to measure!

The hungry prostitute
followed the also slim dark man
fist first into translation alley

where she opened her yellowing blouse.
There fixated no mounds of erotic flesh,
merely several bright reddish-pink scars
countercrossing her vocal rib-cage,
nary a quip existing.

The man not usually the man
dared not gaze nor acknowledge her story, but
reached past dirty lining of empty pockets in gesture
he expected her to understand like clockwork.
Birds of prey sniffed the searchlight air
as she then pulled up borrowed
orange skirt to reveal

coarse frontiers of rife wiry soldiers rising up past her navel
famous and down around her anus. He recognized her
as a fantasy Greek whore fallen from lukewarm grace
shared by her people before the roadbuilders enslaved
her family of talents and trick questions.

Crayons, crayons, crayons
crayons, crayons, crayons
crayons freemount, crayons junkmail
crayons, crayons, crayons—black shirts
instruct beneath 20-year warranty shingles
each vendor vows to insure!

The homebound black man,
ear to the cold stones of the slain past
and frequent remorse spit at him
turning away to walk like Sudan
into a book of warm testaments
jawbone empires of the trade
have cast onto his jaspered milieu.

The prostitute
who now called herself Raferti
in honor of a former lover now threading the eye of America
began screaming the foils of rape only her attacker seemed
to hear with one ear besting the cold stones
the street gives rest. “I am a proud Macedonian woman!”
(buffering the dream state of static language)
she pleaded as if meaning was hers to give
in this twilight part of town
where shadows play night whispers
for a cheap grin despite yesterday’s oil
at tomorrow’s market prices.

The raven suitor,
whipped into a frenzy,
required stitches near his clutch of duty
as I came drunk into the picture
spinning a globe relief on my index finger
hiding a nearby rock which he found to fiercely crush the poor
maven’s skull. “White bitch!” he mumbled as he tore away the skirt
making himself a bandana. Soon a crowd had gathered to hear
him explain how he had to beat off the woman who had
tried to rob him of his manhood,
shouting racist slurs
when he refused to buckle to her will. The commoners
in their way pitched fair, impressed by his oral defense,
better secretly knowing the stranger was hardly
an example of local slavery
where sadness schemes free blood
not random violence.

Crayons, crayons, crayons
crayons, crayons, crayons
crayons motionlure, crayons courtesybound
crayons, crayons, crayons—red shirts
hugging the courier sweeping away jet engine residue
each summed difference makes to another in similar
designs along the surface of the thief’s jaw!

There stood near the well of Bar-Lipscotch
a young Lebanese poet. His name was Gibran,
identical in trespass as another
Lebanese poet gaining fame in frisky Boston
earlier in the century. Young Gibran drew up a drink
of water, not because he was thirsty, but because
he was jealous of the owner of the well, after
failing to woo the daughter of a nearby oil shiek.
Despite his words of humble glory and rich scarlet
the poet had been turned away by her, and the father
threatened to have the young romantic killed if he ever
darkened the skies of his daughter again.

A blue ladder and a pair of crutches sketch the Dali sky
where puffed clouds whirl unnoticeable agents
of peach elegance, detail by detail
into the jaded eye,
but I pay the toll with a word ready
to dismiss all symbols not my own,
should those days ever arrive
under government of one
suffering vitiligo passage with student privileges.
(The scriptures were never this straightforward.)

Gibran the Strong
never fearful of intellectual neutralization,
stopped for a drink of lemonade and swore
he would establish a plan
to overthrow the armchair power
vats of the rich goat-lip, the customary curse
his native tongue seemed to pearl at cost and sell to the peasants
at a healthy profit. Gibran was moved to issue this statement:
“Every man true to himself is a racist!” And then compassion
seeps into the pages. Gibran spits into the flavored water,
and then pours it onto the ground
to rot the teeth of grasshoppers
nearby ill with tape recorders.

He later constructed a response to the itch in his skin,
“Don’t question them
until you see the whites of their eggs and the yellows
of their beds, and then squash the bugs!” Train schedules
were carried out on stretchers but the rain was held up
at gunpoint and then executed gangland style
giving all the newspapers a headline
act it could follow like a bee
to honey I Love You
and Lucy too.

And the band played on
under jock pseudonyms of jealousy and the six-pack foursome.

“Gotta hire an agent so I can fire somebody next fall—”
Hooking up with three hookers from Cincinnati
the guestboy felt relieved at the vociferous news of the hour,
any hour, pick an hour, how about 1:59 PM MAY 9, 1492,
where who cares, then found a rock to stand upon
that he might urinate into the well,
being irregardless and all,
from outside the picket line with pockmarks
any butter girl can love from the inside out.

Crayons, crayons, crayons
crayons, crayons, crayons
crayons idiotsheet, crayons purposebitten
crayons, crayons, crayons—green shirts
wave upon the football fields the nation planted
picking up the pieces of those meeces we hate
to admire without purposes,
called for economic triage!

Prophets of death and doubt enter the googe,
giving the sign for a delayed steal with loaded bases,
“We don’t care if you don’t like us,”
the metallic ones shout, “We are here now. You'd better
grab used guitars or get used to us. We’re the warring tribes here.
We are LuxMachina! Laws bargained on the letter!”
A young woman saw the poet accomplish these things
and came rushing to and fro, semi-pro and ready to con
him within a state of great anxiousness,
Chinatown at 5th and Germaine,
the beeper number reinstated,
needful of a ritual, settling for tattoo, and distant star
named after his pop family, no new river available
while she disrobed and watched the ink carve
justice without a destiny,
last things first.

“My lover, my flawed poet
of mighty high courts and meek
works! You are little endowed to fight
the strengths this managerial team has mastered
and for the black, red, and invisible masses dubbed
platinum, Bar-Lipscotch, come, let us burn eager
night away!” In a wheelchair of passion the poppies
wilted into whizzing pellets, rabbits and the ruined.

It was time to refinance again—last month's agreement
obsolete, culturally numbed, all true meaning reviled.
so off the wall the signature scattered and was sealed.

Line by line
Gibran was visibly shaken
by the quick arm of events. Revolutionary slow tactics
proved a greater success than even he imagined back in the forties
with Sartre over supper and attention to his thumb.
“I think I’ll gather up all my friends
and put them in my pocketful of fumbles the story never tells.
There’s too much nudity but I’ve never seen enough. And
death cannot calm my energies to wrap the world
in God. I feel like a vowel in a German novel.”

You mean Hebrew, don't you?

This time it’s not so stark a rat’s radio
when a woman of unrelaxed beauty begging him to challenge
the heights of his own highly active faith, rips down her veil
and walks high-heeled over me, still strapped to a vow
to please myself in three notes or less,
and a hamburger today for a gift horse tomorrow,
shifting sands of the seashore national synthetic
blasted by another female-triggered hurricane,
now random naming, a squirrel gathering nuts
for Ezra to sell by the pound duty-free
in a little piggy market

to canonize her as he would see fit. The dirty poet
as pure as an oil gusher in a detonation of spirit
wastes no time in serving scant purposes on the girl,
almost dying with devious torpidity upon falling
against her breasts goosed like pineapples,
the texture of her voice like the buzz of the helicopters in the city
where transitional bombs from one echo to another kept it in ruins,
the sweet flutter of this man's history
was none other than the youngest
daughter of Bar-Lipscotch, the sister of his earlier desires.

Now gentle on this stage,
greenlight splashing off marbled rocks of pain
in the background, center pavilion cloaked in summer wages,
I shake hands with and bow before Gibran the Sole Pursuer,
was pleased, not realizing the old system of cages
is an act too ugly to reveal in this account,
for numbers never lie in the eye
of the beholder on the take.

Ice of names storming the desert vivarium
crows along the freckled river many worship
on one hand and pollute with grim ideas on the other,
as she swallows our withering without support of her family,
and Gibran was soon left to dish up another plate of
raging jealousy. Years after he had first spilled impurities into the clean
well, the poet died from an overdose of good luck, shot in the brain
by another young poet who desired Gibran’s gift of poetry. When
the elder poet tried to explain that what was asked of him was impossible
for him to relinquish, the angry young street poet
blew the backlash of history clean off
the old man’s memory.

“Let’s generalize all the forces of nature!”
oddball phantoms crack and conspire in jest, slowing only to pay steep dues
along the singing alley up a tough mountain completely on track
to visually network olive oil and fly papers
seeded among the top three in the division,
the field of old leaders has demanded. Hawks and ugly birds
took the news early as a sort of package deal the tombstoners
must escape if they want pretty doves at their wedding.
“Only don’t be so generous with the lepers
this time. There’s a cockroach
crawling along my toothbrush, and I want him dead,
or at least a bugler that floats on mouthwash.”

Crayons real, crayons true
Crayons, crayons, crayons
crayons comfortskinned, crayons bitterzoned
crayons, crayons, crayons—white shirts
failed to mark the highway spoils
generous to a fault in war,
criminal to a tee in peace,
now a timeout for the two minute warning,
a drill held where even phantoms fear to tread.

RIOT ACT, PART THREE

Avie darling - would you please quit, and I mean RIGHT NOW, please quit bombarding me with all this third party FB gadgetry. I hate to be a snot-nosed scrooge, but all that junk does absolutely nothing for my dystopian frame of mind.

I ALWAYS respond to email, that is to say, words crafted especially for me by someone I know who is sharing a part of themselves with me to communicate, jest, laugh, fear, commiserate, mourn, sneer, enjoy, you name it, I'll claim it, treasure it, commemorate it.

But while I do occasionally break down and respond, and even initiate one of those damnable FB gadgets (out of a nagging but false sense of guilt that I am the one being difficult), I really prefer the literary vices to ANY and ALL of that other virtual pomposity.

Yep, I'm a hard-prick bibliophiliac. And prefer my own kind.

This is your FINAL warning, dearie. I'm drowning in the shallow end of this pond, and will fight back with the most earnest of tools. Now SMILE when I say that. I just did.

Best wishes otherwise you silly goose,

GT

Also known as the sincerest of fools...

TIME OF THE SEASON

Hey sweet cakes, when did I EVER love you? Beheld you with a certain ill-prepared fondness perhaps, but love? That's an overused and far too frequently misappropriated word. And besides, aren't you Our Lady of Perpetual Crisis? Just ragging. But you can be a lady sometimes, I know, I just know it.

Wassup?

On our end of things, we've relocated the studio out to a large historic horse farm on ten acres in a stretch of the good life I call the throbbing nipple of Sweet Virginia. Five miles to Maryland. Ten to West Virginia. Some 60 miles outside the spin of DC. Awesome place, this farm. Will post pictures at some point. Still trying to sell or rent the city condo. Will sign with an agent this week I think. Suzy Blue brought out the papers this weekend, but we have yet to discuss the finer details.

So tell me, how's YOUR wretched deal going? Haven't heard anything new about you and the kids since Clyde swooped in and snagged the old man. Did you guys patch it all up? Was it all just a bad dream? Is this memorex or a badly scratched 78 RPM, thick and unbreakable? Is the Black Hand of Injustice really black, or is that just the shadow of doubt I read about in the tea leaves of the nightly news?

After a rough patch or so near the beginning, things are going okay for "The Chaz" up here. He just got his motorcycle humped together again yesterday. Allan & family have been up here a couple times with Paige now being observed and penetrated at the National Institute of Health. That's a sad case of mistaken identity. But for the grace of God...

All in all, it's been family reunion tour of sorts for us. Not a bad thing, given the circumstances, the timing, and the hare.

Unfortunately, the grace of transitional power is not the only sensation that's left the building of late, as we are still strung out, and will be hobbled until the condo situation is rectified, and we shift our primary household out here in the fastest growing and richest per capita county in the nation. Despite all that, this definitely feels like the right move at the right time. The two loved ones seem to cherish it here even more than I do, but once I am together again with my books to surround and protect me (nods to Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel), I shall embrace the Blue Ridge winds with equal force.

Well, stick it to me, dear. It's the way this game is played. It's true, I never tell you ALL my business. But again, I'm sure you've held out on me as well...

Just thinking about the plural of gravitas...

GT