Telluride Sang Rael

Citizen Action over the "Gateway" to Telluride

2007-01-05T10:32:00.000-08:00

No one is quite sure, yet, how long it has been since the Telluride Historic and Architectural Review Commission has denied an application, certainly not a project as large as the Clark's Market expansion.
But last week HARC did just that, setting the three-year-old project into a tailspin. Exhausted by the conflict of economics and the visual impact of the project, which at points would reach 48 feet in height, the plan for the 20,000 square foot grocery store, plus six new units of deed-restricted employee housing, six new free market condominiums and 24 parking spaces below, most of the members decreed that the project created the wrong kind of architectural statement for the so-called "Gateway" to the Town of Telluride.
While recused HARC Chairman Chance Leoff waited outside the building as the rest of the commission deliberated, the appearance of community support to deny the project based on issues of "mass and scale" made it easy to overcome his main concern: That the remaining board members might succumb to the political pressure from the city fathers, or, the refusal of the project directors to reduce the scope and, especially, square footage, to reduce the impact.
"We are here and the application is not architecturally compliant," HARC Vice Chair Sonchia Jilek told the board and those present at the special meeting to discuss unresolved issues prior to the commission granting a "certificate of appropriateness." "A lot of our guidelines have been overlooked. I cannot approve this project. I don't see why we are continuing this process."

2006-07-04T12:33:00.000-07:00

23 Roads to Mythville
An apocalyptic journey across America and meditation on the imposition of order in space, both cyber and dirt real. By experiential author Douglas McDaniel, who explores the mysteries of American networked life. Read more

Ipswich at War
A few days after Sept. 11, 2001, poet and essayist Douglas McDaniel moved to Ipswich, on the North Shore of Massachusetts. A collection of poems from that period of fear and anxiety, as well as the polemic essay, "Media Arts and War."
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Glasnost Lost
As an act of defiance after the botched election of 2000, experiential author launched himself into a journey into the underworld of American life, or, what he calls: The Science of Descent. Read more

Godz, Cars & Cannon
Experiential author Douglas McDaniel launches drives into the networked thickets of American life, looking for signs of myth and romance in the age of automotive machines.
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Many Moons the Mythville: The Collected Road Poems
Poetry written during a 10-year span of criss-crossing America in a roving-eye view of the turn-of-the-century landscape of Mythville, or, as the author puts it: "It's all a bunch of Mythville." With work from four separate books by Arizona-based author and poet Douglas McDaniel, the bard-inspired voices of Milton, Blake and Yeats, as well as the saturnine streak of early beat poesy, ring through this collection of poems and essays. From the southwestern deserts to the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts, "Many Moons to Mythville" is a foot-to-the-floor blast through the mythical roads of American life.
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Human Search Engine

The journey continues as the quest for myth in an age of information overload leads to online life as an editor for Access Internet Magazine. A story about all human search engines as they chase the ghost in the machine.
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William Blake in Cyberspace

Experiential author Douglas McDaniel takes on the visionary art and poetry of William Blake, comparing an otherworldly worldview to that revolutionary, romantic era to our own wild, wired, mythic world.
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The Kachina's Son

Poems about the Four Corners area written while author Douglas McDaniel was living in Telluride, Colorado.
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The Road to Mythville
A collection of poems on the new millennium in America, drawing from decade of bouncing across the country as a journalist and Kerouac-style poet, from the Southwestern deserts to the shores of New England and back again.
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Bull Run Fire

2005-10-05T10:21:00.000-07:00

Five miles east
wind in my face
and the fire plume,
a violet volcano

Five miles east, but close enough,
the white wash coat of burned juniper
forcing the Saturn in the nostrils,
Hackberry Mountain, fizzling out
in a downpour, monsoon downdrafts
blowing ash into a many shouldered beast

We went home and made a list
of what we would need when
the call for evacuation came,
craving a disaster to bring
the memory awake, the dreaming down.

Great thin-legged clouds spiderwalk
their way across the purple ridge,
purple with weather; precious things
shake in their cupboards, forgotten.

Lightning pounds the mesas,
the wind pushing down in atomic bundles
of white orange flasks of violence,
a curtain on the sun, a dirty window of light,
a blowout of compressed desires
pressing the sky, re-animating us.

2005-05-07T10:29:00.001-07:00

The Kachina's Son

The gravity of the red sun in Navajoland,
impatient in the evening sky, held me down
to sixty-five miles per hour. The darkness came
as the mesas turned to introversion, purple shadows,
to trucks passing trucks passing little beat up Pontiacs
& brights resisting the temptation for head-on collision.
The blue-black raven gasped in the clouds
for a little sweet warm morsel of hope
of fresh road kill & the other fumes of promise.
Children played by the long-straight roadside
while mom & dad & uncle
& Bennie pushed a new Ford
toward the distance of the trading post's
ghostly red gas light glow.
Kayenta stood in a protracted war
against the holy emptiness of the crossroads
to Monument Valley, Dennehotso, Toe En Loc,
against the bog in the hole where the animals fell,
to the perennial stream emerging from a sandstone
quarry, reaching toward Laguna Canyon,
where flows concede themselves at Chinle Valley,
then the San Juan River, which is ecstasy.
Here, on the Redlands, the face gets long
& hollowed out as the stone children
at the roadside rest spot at Baby Rock.

Here, I came into the presence of the Kachina's son.
I could tell, I attest, I swear by the sudden drop
in temperature in the flat-bed truck,
the shadow passing through the back window,
an intuitive kick of fear
& the fall, like a cemetery stone chip,
of a cassette tape to the floor.
It happened where the plains became flat and the sunset,
lost in the hot winds, had long past dropped
into the curvature
of the canyon cut into Skeleton Mesa.
Later, after the Black Mesa coal elevator,
the duende jumped off
to claim its lonely home.
I thought I saw a wolf
in the rearview mirror.

Good Morning Rubicon!

complex chemical components
Give me speed ... Speed!
Important volatiles,
Organic acids, aldehydes,
Ketones, esters, amines,
Mercaptans, el Capitan,
Oh caffeine King
Robust rubiaceae
Everybody is recovering
From something
From sleep, death,
Love's blind dark alleys
Oh come down to me
From the high altitudes
Make me aware, oh agent
First millenia Arabians
Gave the tree to Yemen
Which sent a hot breeze
To Dutch colonists
And French Martinists turned
The Eden of the West Indies
Into the first great coffee
Plantations of Latin America
Oh alkaloid, oh C8H1002N4,
Tamed by H2 oh, oh, oh,

Touch me, taste my
Boiling blood, my mercury rising
Through the celebratory cortex
Into a computer at the FDA
Spitting out murky evidence:
Everybody is recovering From something

Bar Code

Black and white vertical lines,
of varying width: Our worst
subterranean fears attuned
for positivism, licensed, packaged
for material accumulation,
logical logistics for America
the Database, DNA and identity.

Code of conduct, the angel
or devil you know, or, don't know.
Each decision to click you either
adapt or resist, filling in other
black vertical lines...
Better the devil you know,
as the blue light of a encircling globe
emits a scan across this very page,
then recedes, the ebb
and cache of a Tesla coil.

What is now proved was once only imagined.
Urizen's code, Napsterized,
the imaginator subsumed beneath the hierarchical
layers of the Void. Layers of forgetfulness.

The Bar Code girl at the bar,
taking my credit card.
Material law mandates:
One cannot buy or sell without code.
We need not ask why. It is just so.
The blue light scan,
that Eye, again,
expanding the artificial
consciousness of database.
The divine aggregator
crunches the code
and the fittest meaning survives:
... New Rules Game Bar,
... Rules Game New Bar,
... Game Rules New Bar,
... Bar Rules Game New ...
The bee in the hive
never knows why
it makes honey.
Why should I?
The limit of thought
is based on the code,
on the versatility
of each and every sign.

Repurpose thyself ...
free the code ... Merchandise code,
genetic code, moral code
and the code of the one and only law.

Wellington Station

I saw you across
the commuter aisle
twitching and huffing
at Wellington Station.

I, too, am a loser
in the war. I lay
down my sword.
Set my auto alight.
Left it a funereal husk,
just a memory
to the challenges
of sunny October days.

Be still, my brother,
my angel of anxiety.
I see you gasping,
reading the news,
oh so careful
about what you touch,
what we all touch.
We meet in common
places of terror, our
shared communiqués ...

Oh veteran.
Oh war lord;
I lay down my arms,
I comply, I let go,
I ride smoothly
into the inner-city
bowels of tension
and glittering dreams.

Then I will take on the attire
of Napoleon's three-pointed hat.
I will curtsy, bend, that is,
into the sweet reflection
of what a peaceful city
wants to be.

The war news is hard,
ubiquitous as pearls and steel
and mobile phones.

My train runs silently,
beneath the stars and stripes
of all conquering heroes.

The Bunker Hill spire
is muted through glass
running by in the opposite,
direction. I descend
down the catwalk
of morbid hell. Silence
encloses me in a lightless
pipe of dread.

I am a monster.
I confess it all.
Just this, please,
after this night,
on the battlefield
of Boston,
will you let me
safely caress
my love, my sweet
daughter's face, or,
anything else I can keep
perfect or sane
for a whole rail yard
of days.

Let me retreat
with my bag of games,
my pen, my spear,
my telefrantic machines.
Let me walk, just one more time
into the target valley
of technology.

And though I will breathe
the very microbes of hell,
through pile drives, tunnels,
lost wheels and poisoned wells,
the endless botched catacomb
of the world you made:
Oh Wellington, allow my return
to Corsica, even Elbe, I will allow.

Where I can be at peace.
With who? Myself, at least,
as I wait for the night
to fall upon your victory.
If Napoleon could stoop
this far into the refrigerator,

he would have become a suburban monk like me.
The Trouble With Laundry
The trouble with laundry
Is that I let you see my soil
And you told me I never
Learned to fold.
Now I fold in my own way

On a windy Sunday morning
After a short drive to see wave caps break,
I got home, turned off the car, and sighed,
Im free. No more technology.
Then I went down to my dank cold cellar,
Hauled a blue laundry bag over my shoulder
And pulled taught its string. I skipped a peace
Down the hill to the mat, remembering.

It isnt easy being clean, this much I need to see.
Cant even tie my own shoelaces. Its a motherless thing.
But more than that, this ongoing entropy
Is a shudder in the halt of who I will ever be.
I have to practice the art of cycling slow.
Around me now even the tossed churchgoer,
The hurried newspaper I never completely read,
Forgets to know.

And somewhere back
In the long gone dung of my brain
I recall a bum who called himself Change.
He told me about what it takes to survive
with a laundry list better than at least three
commandments. The first was sleep,

A good nights sleep, and a place to bathe,
A post office box, and you can always
Stay warm in the library (which is why
Many destitute men are so well read).
But more than anything else,
A place to shower the baptismal self,
And a laundry, now boy, thats the key.

I enter the rows of circles and machines
And carefully pry my prickly dirty things apart.
This takes so much care, Oh God, the anguish;
My shoes are untied again. My mother gone,
My father isolated in a city of noisome dream.
Of all things I failed to learn, Im really learning
Laundry now. I crawl a pace, buying
A little orange box of sandy blue and white soap.
My dirt is the cause of a loss of no small fortune.

Then I remember to take out the change
From my pockets, Im richer than I think.
Small wrappers and pocket tumbled follies
Spill into my hand. Im just a beat up shirt
and wreckage in the wrinkled laundry land.

What else, theres this: The little shortcuts
I learn from making mistakes. Not my mistakes,
So much, but the machines.
Not so much the machines mistake,
But a failure to meet the tumble dry
needs of man. Redemption goes on a spin
and returns again as you fumble for buttons
at the bottom of the pan.

Then I wait. Then I wait some more.
Then I walk down the street, smoke,
Buy a fifty cent piano for my daughters
doll house. The wind up part still plays,
Memories of the Way We Were.
I wince at the mat, but I do not weep.
My laundry is my dirt to keep.

The Land of God & Cannon

With nothing but a compass in Concord
I landed at the Milldam cobblestone street square,
head aching, ancien' General Gage on my tail,
too much God & cannon coming up the road,
I scribbled a few now-forgotten notes
and moved into the spoiled woods of fabled Walden.
I made a roommate Of Henry David Thoreau.
We were in love at Thanksgiving ...
Now Plymouth Rock leads to
a bloodline of highways with no horizon,
A string of tree-lined tunnels, dirty snow,
beer cans and cigarette butts
sans a sniff of smoke for a soul.
You, the cool clear impossible place of my desire
became my jumbled and jumpy New Jerusalem
of steel and stone. The pond was surveyed and sold.
Henry David, he became a bit of a bore,
What's worse, he snored. Now he's a new shoe style,
Sturdy and rubbery and oh so dysfunctional,
all sold over the electronic Web of Life
via a mass major national megastore
From sea to shining shore.
Came and went as an angel of light.
So I moved West, following a tattered map:
Where the Tasty Freeze is going to be,
next to soon-to-be the Banco de Post-Democratica,
next to the next nouveau salon of old Saint Lou,
next to the yet-to-be named municipal zoo.
Still I trudged, and entered a golden Anasazi ruin,
sun-baked brick and clay, a chimney for a tomb,
a below-ground tunnel temple to the last great escape
for threadbare me, impossible though rational you.
Somebody, some angel, fell right off the map,
and left me here to consider both an arc of light
& the fly-shit tempest of a teapot domed scandal.
They left no other marker, but a megalith of rubble.
My compass spun wildly, and the wind swirled up a scare.
And now we pass through a narrow port.
From Concord to discord ... eventually ...
Ah, I know this much: There's no such thing.
There's a long-running song on an ever-running string.
All ripples, soft or made of jade, will eventually still.
I moved further up the hill, following a wire.
The wire led to a hook, and the hook led
to a phone. But the line was dead.
Finally, I thought: Paradise, silence.
This last great emptiness is my consolation,
This last dime I spend, a mere dollar in a donated nation.
It borrows on lands south, over the range, down the road past
Ralph Lauren's ranch, the sandblasted expanse,
the holy lands ... Arizona looms ...
a dime in a dollar nation.
Hear the rumble of cattle trucks at 3 a.m.,
the tumult of Ohioans fleeing tornados,
bankruptcies, divorces, economic forces,
see nickel-made cowboys on false horses.
In Chicago they read magazines about Sedona roads
and they run there, trampling the Navajo, the Apache, the Hopi,
who are holding back the end of the world.
Feel the hot winds smooth the sandstone,
the cold river California drinks.
In another time, they'd be a happy, redoubtable people.
Count the three million men, women, children,
dogs, llamas, circus elephants ...
When the army came to imprison the Apache
they left experimental camels
to wander from here to Harqua Halla.
Get a good price for a skull
in Skull Valley. See the hollow nostrils,
blood fright, little white lies
about real estate & the fourth estate.
Touch the bomb trigger that killed Don Bolles.
Feel the dying pulse of Goldwater Republicans,
the furnace of God that makes churches and cannon
Glimpse the ancien' regime, the descending gyre
of infused Northlanders from New York, Minneapolis,
Acropolis, too (two).
See that man is a city
& the city is a man.
Kiss the fine girl there
with a Greek name, buttery desires.
Read her awkward green eyes
on the way to her dead-end job
in the half-filled office complex.
Analyze her weakening resolve
at the touch of my hand
on her smooth brown knee
-- her shudder engendered there.
Then see her drift away,
seeking younger men,
who keep coming, coming
from California,
which is pushing east now,
which is pushing pestilence
like a salesman,
carbon monoxide in winter,
the angel's breath in spring.

California Zephyr

Take the train. The mystery whistle
gives warning as a service
to each and hovel and burgh along the line.
Take the train. Shape your body
At a bad angle, to sleep with
One eye open,
a hand on your backpack:
Walk the aisle of the peaceful.
Tiptoe through the dead.
Take the train, but do not envy
The conductors in beautiful
blue caps, who tell tall tales
of DEA rousts, great rivers
frozen over,
whole cities rolling
alive into possibility.
Take the train, leave the attendant
regrets of lost love behind
with the voice of reason
that rules the iron-fisted
tracks of time, faith
and paper-thin legal fantasies
concerning the state
of our nation.
Take the train. Avoid the bad energy
of airports. Smoke in the smoking car.
Listen to long and endless movement
and look toward the Northern Lights.
Take the train, but just know
Charlie Vaughn, he's just
a shape changer
in a checkered shirt.
The roust was real.
Take the train,
and he'll confirm
The sun behind the sun.
Take the train, note the brown burned
empty water tank on its side,
feel the mystery rail move forward
again. The observation deck is a churchy
made-for-tv movie ... a transition space
of carpet and glass, frozen stiff,
the great white world,
grafting all tracks
within the context
of our mutual lost
and lonely selves.
Take. The. Train. The late
lifeline and link from Boston
to San Francisco, monk's tea,
fuel-stained air, electricity humming
up ozone
from East to West.
Take the train,
But send it all back down the hill,
The anger, the fear, laments that fall
upon thine eyes.
Take the train, drilling through
a one-tracked meditation
on your soul's cruelest capabilities.
Take the train, step off,
greasy, forbidden
and a little too real.

Colorless

Falling from the startled sky,
a ping pong ball hits a hardwood
floor. Earthy groundlings look up
as they plant their vacillating
ports of thirsts and wolves plow
through woven bursts of hunger.
It goes like this:
Last night I realized
this tussle is bigger
than all of us, this war,
and everyone else, too.

The world does not need
saving. We need to save
each other.

In our place of power
the humidity cave contracts,
pushing me out. My wall,
porous and impossible,
quakes into birth
in a bottomed-out boat
on awkward waters.

The world does not need
saving. We need to save
each other.

Penetrate me and you will fell
the timid tree of earthen polarity.
Open yourself and I will pour out
an endless river of myth
and information. I will become
that blank, vacant stone face
of the autocratic cowboy,
plugging the pipeline
with blood and tufts
of wool, terror and wonder.

We are the air between the clouds,
the unembellished force between you,
me, silent pulse in cell phone static,
tongues that lick, pendulous TV.
If I smoke, I will be like smoke,
and of smoke I will be ... Myth
and Turks, tongue and TV. Our vapor,
my steam, colorless and apt, cools
the firestorm of the big mistake.

But all politics aside, this thing
is bigger than you, bigger than me.
We are sick and sad and shuddering
tense toward all roads leading
to darkness within darkness.
This dark place, colorless and free.
This congenial mix of ebony leaf,
taurine, fear, cell phones and TV.
The world does not need
saving. We need to save
each other. Lies and myth,
steel and money, cell phones
and tongues, Taurine and TV.

Piggy Taking Inventory

Thou earth mother
whose art made a heaven,
hollow is thy name,
hollow as a donut hole
downed by Dunkies sugar suckers
Across this dirty BVD
they come in, saltless and mean,
sucking dry for purple and orange
styroafoam cup containers,
cattle car crates of donut holes,
great salty sea-vats of caffeine,
akiline and molten H20;
See their blood boil
Tremble at the knowledge:
To know is to burn
High blood-sugar zonks
the dust of freedom
moldered in solo donut hole
clusters. They cram their gassy
gutter rollers up to the bar,
slamming their BMW brakes,
coming to a halt, dead-walking
out of the morning light into
the Orange Coated Cluster Pill,
pulling Dunky air in behind them
in gentle whorls of ache ...
Piggy needs to take inventory, Piggy needs to take.
Not so lean and snaking mean, she sucks down
a donut hole as her last breath
and testament to the desert ...

II.

I dreamt of your skull & crossbones
and it read me like an X-ray machine
as you lay there, the master,
in our silence and slumber:
I skulked about the place
Lightning last night;
It licked the world mean
and Piggy called six times,
six! Just as we had discussed
the ghost dancers' return,
the rent of the buffalo,
the assassination
of Sitting Bull
Just as plasma fields, unified,
rippled in the chemtrail orange sky
as it tumbled up and angry roll
of pressure and purity
friction and dread.
Piggy called six times, six!

III.

You said the desert sheds
us of our vanity
as the wind blew a scare
up the trees.
You awoke in a stir
of anger and vengeance
raving about "The Law Of 3s."
You awoke in a stir
and everyday I wonder,
why Gaia? Why? So nurturing,
so pure. Why so angry? Why!
Tremble to know the angel
of vengeance: To know is to burn ...
You said something about the dark,
but light was everywhere
in a system of pretty pearly stars

IV.

Piggy crossed the desert in a Humvee
moving eastward fast, loaded down
with software and stolen sacred relics,
as her brother Jacob threw beer cans
along the long, twisty road, northeasterly ...
Piggy crossed the desert
and the mirage followed her:
A man made of metal, in a mod
fright wig, shreeking laugh,
a blast of gunmetal, modal fire,
schist, plaster, a blast of rock.
O man, you left a mess,
tore it all up out of spite,
what a waste, this scorched earth,
bedding tossed like a body
into the garbage pail pile

V.

Knocked to my knees
but bleeding clean,
Man rises and thunders!
Three a.m., O son of Sam!
She didn't consider
that castle re-enter
When all is dark.
The message:
Clear. Clear out!
Gaia scooped me out,
sucking the cold, even,
out of the refrigerator!

VI.

Piggy needs to take inventory,
Piggy needs to take.
She leaves Ulysses on the shelf
a misquote from Sir Thomas More ...
flower petals on the white tile floor.
Then you hear that sucking sound
Then your hear
that sucking sound
Coming down the highway, Whoof!
The missing inventory includes
but is not limited to:
Three red maple leaves from Walden,
one copy of the Grapes of Rats,
one moonbeam, one bolt of light,
lots of lights ..
"I am the light taker of the world!
There shall be no
interior lighting
without me!"
Lightbulbs missing. More than just three.

VII.

Ozo sam
Urizen Man!
Christian saint,
O, house full of pain
Twisted rock
upon the oak
the river bends,
it bleeds and dries
See them, over the expanse,
the hot rubbered wheels,
the Holy lands: The Bull is rising,
O, Don't mess with Tex!
Of e-mail shouts,
the doctor is out
Piggy has left the bulding
crossing state lines,
crisscrossing America
O house full of pain!
Urizen man!
O Christian Saint!
A road made of sand!

Portrait
of a Suburban Legend
as a Young Man

Street skates ply the highway
leading to the lost children
They line up in court
after scarring their arms
with bursts of blue blood
and butane
Skateboard dude. Holy ranger.
Stiff shouldered, with close-cropped hair,
lanky as a sorrowful willow,
standing at attention,
sulking in regret, hand-bound,
the silent rebuke.
Stiff shouldered, snearing wise,
the great white defendant,
in nasal tremors, flares,
stares, surrenders the deed,
the vice, the miscue.
The lawyer shouts, in xenophobic
redoubt: Tall soliders, unite!
Vivi livi o muertes!
O, Lost children of sight!
But the judge hands over their
car keys, then, pleases them
with their rights.
What is truth, O judge
What is truth? They challenged
him, this Romeo, this stalker
with a guitar, strumming
on the sidewalk, who slept
in the desperation of this city's
plastic grace, this suburban
meatlocker of convenvience
and shame, where they
pop cold pills like candy,
then get suckerpunched
by gun-toting dads
in their SUVs, and O yes,
the cops, old Cyclops,
watching these streets,
the machine eye
loading this motherlode
of video games and hormones
and fear onto the conveyer belt
of justice, O yes, your justice, sure.
They hand over their rights,
compliant souls, one by one
They hand over their rights.
Compliant souls. One by one.
They take the deal
then spin roller wheels
down the photo radar lane
lusting and loitering,
lingering, in love.

In the Beginning
There Was a Word
from Our Sponsors

Welcome, O welcome
the many winged archetypes,
supple and black,
enfolded in milky white,
milky way white,
hanging in midair,
peering through
the portal, the slinky tube
of the time traveling
Dream Catcher wheel.

Help is on the way ...
Hooray. Hooray.
Help is on the way ?
Hooray. Hooray.

For whom?
I cannot say.
They exist in the imperfect
Shapeless spaces unifying
Our oppositional own imperfect
Spaces. They resonate in
The ripples of the swimming
Pool light at moonlight,
And intimate choices
Made by man and volcano
Long ago.

Help is on the way ?
Hooray. Hooray.
Help is on the way ..

As they wave, pleading,
Begging for business deals,
Moving closer to our dreams,
Tumbling through timeless
Synchronistic switches
That speak our name.
They twitch in the fierce
Firestorm of the Eve-bitten
Apple, and dance,
frightened and purple
Help is on the way,
They hope and pray:
Hooray. Hooray.
Their master, like ours,
Has up and gone away.

Milton Morning Song

Celestial heavenly lights blinking
At dawn over Camelback Mountain.
The rose is left in view, rosy
And true. The sky is a blue frame
For madness or his nameless name.

Milton wrote, he choked and smoked:
The mind is its own place,
and in itself,
Can make heaven a hell,
A hell of heaven.

But if this the Void,
it`s a Void of truth.
The stirs of green cirrus streaks
In the cloud, the chair-back
Alignment of Venus and Mars,
The waning dusty moon;
All simple proof there`s no real
Distance between me
And unknowable you.

Silhouette of a Praying Monk,
I smolder and move
to get a better view,
lay my shitty pocket things
into a fire pit and sit
on a merry temporary throne.

Light up. Listen to
a raven`s haunting call,
The trickling of cool waters running
Beneath the surface of the desert:
O Milton, poor bastard, you only
Had it half right. Man, his heart;
The only Void in view.

I climb this tree, O Bard,
And sing a sad song for thee:
Thy sun,
thy surface,
thy furnace.

2005-05-07T10:29:00.000-07:00

Hotel Jerome

2004-11-16T04:40:00.000-08:00

Staircases leading up
the old mining town,
now a town of ghosts,
not ghosts so much,
people in some kind
of haze. So many steps
to climb and they resist,
step in your way, but she
makes this place her hairdo

Set aside the residents
who fail to rhyme, act
upon their ghosts inside;
summoning the angels
who roll on scant radio
clattering on the street below

The city is falling off her back
and the dark daemons of Jerome
lust and burn, kept in tow.
Every feminine hijink
is working in bouncing,
pairs unbound, every
blitzed biker in the bar
locked onto the information
of her strawberry hips:
You out of love, into fear,
become the charmer,
drawing in the lusty,
flies licking, stuck on honey.

O, do keep your dearest near,
‘cause the next day, I rise,
look up the hotel second-floor
window, up to you,
the porcelain sheen shy as your lips,
glitters, graceful, in morning light,
I quiver and crawl, take photos
of two birds on the wire,
wonderin’ which one was right.

The rolling of the radio
clatters onthe street below
I lust and burn and dream
of return to Hotel Jerome,
knowing I will be there,
with you or alone like
a lost thing, counted
but forgotten, coughed up,
lost things spinning, in flames,
lost things, rotten things,
rusted things, the dead stare:
Stupid little things, the blue fame,
a memory, a cool lamp
at the bottom of an empty beer can.

We left as bits of corrugated
rusted metal, cut and bled,
needing tetnus from the gash
upon our hands.

Sacrifice Me

2004-10-28T16:23:00.000-07:00

Let me be your lamb tonight
Let me be your meat
Sacrifice me before a prayer
For thy fasted sacrificial meal
Let me be your hunted due
Let your claws sink into my skull
Send love into the Venus transit
Of my eviscerated soul
Let me be your sacrifice
Let me be your meat
Tonight, take my blood
Tonight, take my heat

Bardstown, Kentucky

2004-10-27T19:08:00.000-07:00

Happy Hollow Road
is a place where grain elevators
watch over Ford trucks
in an asphalt parking lot
& steam rises from pipes
as birds fly south
& I lay stretched
and pray for Booker Noe,
master distiller emeritus
to explain why, exactly,
she is lying to me right
now, and I cannot forgive,
should never forgive
as I swallow my pain whole,
hoping for invisible Bourbon
to set my soul alight
as ash burns holes into my chest
and long soft little fingers
move away from me

Savage Pilgrim

2004-10-27T04:24:00.000-07:00

Sparks flew off her fingertips
the first time they met, this much
we know. It was a blue flame, a red
dot of light. She had sad dreams, blue eyes.

When he saw her for the first time it was over
before it even began. So terrified was he
of the process, well not the process,
but the end game of love, well,
the Savage Pilgrim was terrified
of the threat of lost love,
what it could do, how it would feel

Terrified of what love can do to him;
but without love, there is death,
death moving in, fine and slow,
in white wings, a mercy

He told her: Keep all my passwords, please,
and my money, my keys, when you receive
this note, don`t look back, just go.

The Savage Pilgrim lies in state tonight.
He loved the girl so much it hurt,
he told her so much it was all he could
do to stunt his words as they crawled up
through his lips, into the Void, that botched
job, That Fake.

Silently, he would ask: Marry me? Bound me
to this mortal soil? She said No.

Preposterous, sayeth she, not the marrying kind,
and so love and failure became simultaneous
epitaphs in his brain. His weakened, tormented,
chemical addled mind. Of the heart?
Who knows for sure? The Savage Pilgrim,
a sprinter, a conjurer, in leather boots,
a time traveler, a breach birth, just another
botched job as it moved through space, a misfit
full of lies and sacred music, his tomb, his life,
his death ... the long distance race ended
when he met her.

Not much choice in these matters: Not for love,
who he loved, who he plundered, where he ran for cover,
like a vampire, he, stealing hearts for fuel, even
in the end (though the Savage Pilgrim knew better),
this is all a test, really, a lesson. Life is practice, see?

So they lay there, on the stones overlooking
the Red Rock valley. He told her: It`s all right
with me if you just want to lay here and die together.

She was completely free (well, not really)
but connected to him (yeah, right buddy)
in ways they would never completely understand.
In the Valley of Death, the psychoanalyst roamed,
she bobbed and weaved through a dotted juniper grove,
stamping through pinion and prickly pear below.

That was right after he saw the face of Gaia
in meditation, of Esha Na Glese, of Changing Woman,
with a broad pudgy face, broad lips, wide forehead,
bad teeth (now that was a detail he would have never
considered ...)

There would be no sexual healing, no earth healing,
for the Savage Pilgrim, who lies in state here,
stretched out, stretched, a stretching wretch,
victim of psychoanalyzing half-truths, and worse,
dopey metaphysical mush about love and lust, truth and trust,
for he knew: The other side of every wing is higher, even,
than the spiritual thing.

Gaia, moving in mysterious ways, was just a manifestation,
and so the Savage Pilgrim moved across the earth and plowed
it asunder; haunting for the sound of her thunder, her body
moving under. For her torso to worship or whip, it was obvious.
His church was her passion, his city her lips, her toes he kissed
in mythic bliss.

But she forgets like the moon bouncing back light, like a monsoon
storm in summer, barren and cold by the fall. Weary and old, with a love
that just scolds, frowning its brow, all enclosed, refusing his heat
as the Savage Pilgrim ran from his dimming soul and found it, again,
on the empty still streets before dawn. For a time, her churned,
for maybe a full moon, maybe an eclipse, maybe two, yearning for her touch.

But ashen and true, a white lunar dust, she made a bland dream
of mountain and bones. The Savage Pilgrim, in a chilly mornin`
moondance, walked into the city square, left on a razor sharp boat,
a fine edge he borrowed from some woman, some new soon-gone tommorrow.
He lifted from here, in the Tao of Ra, dreaming of her ta tas, her
black eyeliner, her jaw, eclipsing his blood within the dark
in staccato chants, morbid, then silent, his last big romance.

Seventy Two Hours as a Social Darwinist

2004-10-26T21:16:00.000-07:00

To the sound of silent cyberpunk we go:

Spent seventy two hours as a social Darwinist
Gotta get ahead of you (Seventy two hours)
Seventy two hours as a Social Darwinist
Gotta get an edge over the loss,
vengeance is hip you know
Gotta get a handle on the guilt I miss
gotta get a multiple set a girlies to kiss

Spent seventy two hours as a social Darwinist
Gotta get over you (seventy two, seventy two, seventy two hours)
Seventy two fucking shitty hours as a Social Darwinist
As you tried to convince me of your Know Nothing bliss,
I let my eyes look away, if for just a minute (Seventy two, seventy two seventy two)
Being anti-social ain`t darlin little Darwin
You won`t like the feeling, your empty hand will be shaking (seventy two, seventy two)
Won`t like the smell as the whole world is quaking (seventy two, seventy two seventy seventy seventy two)

(Refrain)
On the third day I flew across the sky
rebuilt the temple of love, I did pray
Sure, I fell, makin` a heaven of hell,
and man O man let the bunker busters fly.

I ran for cover, O sweet Seventy Two (eyes of blue, eyes of blue)
After Seventy two hours as a social Darwinist
I ran for cover, looking for the way you look at me,
hoping and I`m praying to look up to you.

(Jaggedy Guitar riffs here)

Seventy hours as a social Darwinist
for just three days I forgot about you (seventy two, O, seventy two, yeah)
Seventy two hours of living from your hand to my fist
Seperate but equal, sure, gotta get a step on you.
Treated every living thing like my private little toy
Dreamin of the cosmos now, when I was just a boy
Wore your love like a glove but there was no joy
Gotta get around these blank walls, gotta get over you

Mythville Book Store - Lulu.com

2004-10-23T09:16:00.000-07:00

Mythville Book Store - Lulu.com

Black Madonna

2004-10-22T06:59:00.000-07:00

In the beginning was de word,
de talking drum & de invention of sword,
followed by de blood of de prophets,
and de blood of de best sanger.
He sang rael well. He was a rael good sanger.
The roll of daughter blues, of Martin Luther Jr. hues,
in France, ders de clues, de meaning & good news,
the ebb and the flow, de coming and de go.
Away from de ego, into our DNA soul.
Her graal is de Grail, since de sweet Sarah did sail.
She sang rael well. She was de rael sangraal.

In the Beginning There Was a Word from Our Sponsors

2004-10-18T17:14:00.000-07:00

Welcome, O welcome
the many winged archetypes,
supple and black,
enfolded in milky white,
milky way white,
hanging in midair,
peering through
the portal, the slinky tube
of the time traveling
Dream Catcher wheel.

Help is on the way ...
Hooray. Hooray.
Help is on the way …
Hooray. Hooray.
For whom?
I cannot say.

They exist in the imperfect
Shapeless spaces unifying
Our oppositional own imperfect
Spaces. They resonate in
The ripples of the swimming
Pool light at moonlight,
And intimate choices
Made by man and volcano
Long ago.

Help is on the way …
Hooray. Hooray.
Help is on the way ..

As they wave, pleading,
Begging for business deals,
Moving closer to our dreams,
Tumbling through timeless
Synchronistic switches
That speak our name.
They twitch in the fierce
Firestorm of the Eve-bitten
Apple, and dance,
frightened and purple

Help is on the way,
They hope and pray:
Hooray. Hooray.
Their master, like ours,
Has gone away.

The Gothic Playhouse

2004-10-18T17:12:00.000-07:00

She knows we are watching …
The rows of flowers, I mean.
They feel us, our hardness
Beneath impish petals ..
O how they lean. You can just
Burn them in permafrost temptation,
Stunned solidity, escapist solutions,
Theatrical human glue mendings,
The box office disconnects of love,
The heart, the sickened old heart,
The swinging rhythm of the play,
Held over, the amputated hand,
Held taught until it applauses,
Bursts out, busts out, held tight
In the embrace beneath the sacred
geometric Etherian proscenium stares,
Shape changers in the spotlight,
Masonic brick, stone, barbed rebar,
Twisted by the pleasures of rain
Soaking down to the center of the earth,
This hearth, denying Manhattan heat,
Rising equal to the brown cloud,
Distributed in leaflets into a sea of saline
And walking meat, all to the benefit of birds,
Pushed around by sensational breezes …

They come, cloistered here
In this downtown Gothic playhouse,
Sit still, pert, filling up red cushioned seats,
Grinding down their fine eats, whispering
In penumbral light, vanishing into bliss.

The Diva stands, soaks in the night,
Empty inside, a messenger, a portal,
A lacerated vessel of both dark and light,
All sponsored by corporate angels
As the demigods of ego and desire
Blow through her flaxen hair.

Elijah

2004-10-18T17:11:00.001-07:00

The raven mocked the wolf
In telepathic echoes,
In impervious communiques
Bounding off the sandstone
Walls north of Baal.

Bible black carrion and hummock bread –
Each taste a feast of denial, turning thoughts
Of candle oil into acetylene joys
For twenty centuries of drought.

Elijah communes with the One,
Dodging white-hot torment at noon,
Gouging on locusts, batting away
Frisky cave bats at night, shaking,
In silence at snakes that crawl,
Bleachy or blue at until dawn,
Until they are tranquil at dusk,
The calm of heat, brighter than neon
Red, rising at the first spark of stones …

There is smoke and fire enough to eat
All of the grey devils, their brains,
Their wisdom, their greasy flesh,
Feeding electromagnetic energy
Into a second millennia.

Coulda been a habadasher.
Coulda cut stone.
Coulda built three temples
To overshadow the lost innocence
Of the three-fingered whore.

Longed but did not lust. His only error
Was trusting the raw earthen crust.
He could have done better
If he was just one of us.

Begging for the Muse

2004-10-16T20:47:00.000-07:00

Blue lady down the lane,
Dialing up a dream
Of vanilla ice cream
In the morning bright …
Got a light?

True lady on top of the hill,
Sipping from a stream
Of chocolate milk,
Near the high-wire zone …
Got a smoke?

Red-hair runner along the root canal,
Bouncing up dust, a trail of pheromones,
jogging a pot of molten silver
At the end of a world-weary rainbow,
Got a rose? A nose, a toe to hold.

Feeling pretty lonely,
Don’t you know?
It’s Saturday night,
Mexican bandito music
And whoops fill night,
But I aunt quite right.

Centered, alone, feasting on electricity,
Stereo, electromagnetic sparks and TV,
Waiting for the phone,
On my black-metal folding throne,
Ask the mute city stars for answers.

I close my eyes, the vampire
Winged dragon does recall,
His glory days of an angel before the fall:
None, he says, in aged infant ego disdain.
Get answers for yourself. Now go away.

Olive-skinned warrior lass
of flatlands and little hippie towns,
In the sublime corn-fed country
of April floods, crazy need and dread,
Puts a laundry list over her eyes,
tugs bed sheet covers over her head.

Feeling pretty lonely.
It’s a Saturday night.
I aunt quite right.
Centered, alone, feasting on electricity,
Waiting for the phone,
On my black-metal folding throne,
Ask the dirty city street for answers.

Sight, answers the angel,
Of self-possession,
Yearning, awe and woe:
Tis more a matter of how often, you know,
And when. You sin a bit; pay the rent, do it again.
Ask your infant anxiety to halt the ill winds.

Brightly, the archangel Gabriel beams:
Be yourself that you own. Just know.
Stare down this melt of lightweight,
porous pumice stone. Kiss
The maternal metaphysician on the mouth,
Move north, move south … do not doubt.

With that I moved outside
Perfect prison cell and broke
My gravitational sorcerer’s bone,
and floated away, Aye,
In a hot rush of helium
burning in heavenly thin
Rocky Mountain air,
Bidding the eternal
territorial gloom, adieu.

The Second Eclipse

2004-10-16T20:44:00.000-07:00

I wept about what I feared,
Feared what she wept,
Wrote up a list of timid sorrows
And faults, fell dead, laying awake,
Trying it out in wordless whispers
Into a mirror: Pride, hypocrisy, manic
Moods and shame; finally fell asleep,
A fuel-stained moment of empty bliss.

She pegged her donkey to a target
And sealed it with a kiss. Told me
I had to wait till the second eclipse.

I turned a half-moon, mooned white my ass,
Unbuttoning my Levi mask of blue ash,
Went back to my puny dry barrio abode,
Listened to the sweet Popsicle truck bells
And faced a loaded gun. Couldn’t keep still.

Her delicate rebirth. My cold season.
My prayer, a whisper of self-made ritual,
My salty Hohokam tongue licking
Small circles around
The anatomy of love.

You crave my body, I crave you,
When moonlight passes cool.
I live in terror and wonder
Of a woman’s churning bones.

Listening to music
So loud it’s not true.
I could go deaf
Trying not to
telephone you.

Le Bicycle Thief

2004-10-15T13:15:00.000-07:00

Fear not thy brother in shame.
Given the opportunity, in the past,
I would do the same. May my bicycle
wheels roll you to your dream.

Fear not thy sister in shame.
You did you what did, as did I;
in warlord acts, we are the same.
May my lost sacred things,
propel you to a new dream.

Fear not thy angels of thy mind`s eye,
whose silent code I dare not speak.
You come to me in my lidded twighlight,
your dragon eyes and wide black wings
only come when I know and believe.
May you lead us all to a perfect
pretty dream, as us to you,
reason to bring Ra back home.

Fear not, my love, I am all
now that I do not say. Your life
is tough, but love is enough
to fill my wind-dried sea.

Priestess

2004-10-14T13:43:00.000-07:00

O you know the magic
words to lay me low
in your unchecked depths
of irrational rationality

Human only half, Horus the other:
In one hand I carry an olive branch,
in the other hand, fitful flighty war.

If we can`t be peaceful as two eagles
flying apart, what is the hope
for the rest?

Let us strike a deal,
O grim Priestess,
to make the dark angel
shudder in woe.

Milton Morning Song

2004-10-14T13:40:00.000-07:00

Celestial heavenly lights blinking
At dawn over Camelback Mountain.
The rose is left in view, rosy
And true. The sky is a blue frame
For madness or his nameless name.

Milton wrote, he choked and smoked:
The mind is its own place,
and in itself,
Can make heaven a hell,
A hell of heaven.

But if this the Void,
it`s a Void of truth.
The stirs of green cirrus streaks
In the cloud, the chair-back
Alignment of Venus and Mars,
The waning dusty moon;
All simple proof there`s no real
Distance between me
And unknowable you.

Silhouette of a Praying Monk,
I smolder and move
to get a better view,
lay my shitty pocket things
into a fire pit and sit
on a merry temporary throne.

Light up. Listen to
a raven`s haunting call,
The trickling of cool waters running
Beneath the surface of the desert:
O Milton, poor bastard, you only
Had it half right. Man, his heart;
The only Void in view.

I climb this tree, O Bard,
And sing a sad song for thee:
Thy sun,
thy surface,
thy furnace.

Queen of the Tigress

2004-10-14T13:36:00.000-07:00

Done early, done often,
My queen sifts in the shadows
Of silky sheets; in the indivisible
Darkness of morning, she disappears
In a bed of cloud, perfume and loam

I wonder: Is she really there?
Is my dawn receiver recepter
Merely reacting to trickster light?

Returning to mount her,
my Tigress Queen,
And release all the pleasures
Of a spinning soul & sour world.

Hermes the Dog

2004-10-14T13:32:00.000-07:00

Chasing birds two-by-two
In morning light, I, a Ra,
Who comes long in shadows,
Dies, trickling at dusk, sifts
In the breeze for cigarette butts
At the hidden hacienda.

Morning here, is lined up with stars,
Camelback Mountain holds back
The rabbits running across
The Manicured trail, a still pool.
The roadrunner is still possible.

In deed we leave Hermes the dog
Suddenly, let go the leash,
And drive away. Oh sure,
Last night she killed some worms
And took them right into her mouth.

Hermes ran and ran, chasing our car,
Despite being tired from chasing birds
Through the prickly pear, the palm,
The lamp-lined thoroughfares. He never
Got to fall asleep, a cuddling kitten.

Barrio Fire Kiss

2004-10-13T11:05:00.000-07:00

Don`t have much time to smoke,
damn, I line up the little critters
in a row upon the ashtray, unfinished
bizness. And unfinished is as business
does and does not. Fear of failure
and whatnot.

What I do know, well, the teen Latinos
line up in the stairwells here,
kissing up a firestorm.

Time enough to swell in the emotions
stirring in your sudden disappearance:
O gawd, how many cassette recordings
you must inspire. O gawd, that hope
you might listen to this song or that,
so you feel what we all end up feeling.

Longing along, leaving it alone.
A kiss under a streetlight, a wave
goodbye. I guess where there`s fire,
there`s hope. I don`t have time to smoke.

Raising Arizona

2004-10-12T16:42:00.000-07:00

Caught a hot summer updraft outta Sky Harbor,
lifted over the barrios of the sun, the hosed
prostitutes along Roosevelt, where beauty
is as far away as the savior, his hands,
reaching out, graceful, willing to love,
despite all that damned human DNA in his loins,
as a handout, stay quick for a five-dollar table dance,
the only cure for the moon-bounced heat of el sol,
and water, always lacking, strolls on down the street.

The girl trashed the place. Every living, breathing
thing cussed up a torment. Walked right in, kicked her way
through security, demanding money and vengeance;
Which is quite popular for most. Vengeance is hip, right?
`Cause even if unattended baggage gets the evil eye,
we are living in diaphanous times. When the scroll
unrolls, crackling, and the creaking and the blind
call out for reason and the shreiking: O fuck, I`m leaving.
These night lights, flying over Central in wind-blown Phoenix,
illumines the real issue going on here: The lack of rain.

- Telluride, 1996

Horus

2004-10-12T16:19:00.000-07:00

Internet accessed
Horus the database,
and banks sold
you my name,
and with my database
you make war.

Brahman

2004-10-12T16:17:00.000-07:00

Jesus walked
two thousand years
away from Hindu masters.

Even Cicero knew:
Nothing is new
with the eternal.

Young Girls

2004-10-12T16:15:00.000-07:00

Easy to talk about nothing.
Come like a storm and go in gloom.
Shallow waters dry on a lukewarm,
empty moon.

Planet

2004-10-12T16:13:00.000-07:00

Glued to the tube.
Swirling, agaze.
Bombing is Olympic sport.

The Weatherford Hotel

2004-10-12T16:01:00.000-07:00

Smoking Sher Bidis
in front of brick made Charley`s.
The red wine glasses clink
and loved ones clatter.

Went next door, business booms.
Looking through the round clear glass -
the mug of Ed Abbey,
the monkeywrencher.

That Cowboy hat; ah, el sol nuestro estrella.
That white beard, elfish grin, I tell you,
I still saw the white light in his eagle eyes.

- Flagstaff, 1996

Two Sleeping Tigers

2004-10-12T11:42:00.000-07:00

I, the living high-wave amplitude
of sleep disturbance, disturb thee,
my sweet imperfect beauty,
in coughs and sputters
and whoring whirls of ache.
You stir as you hear my sick heart
quicken, hear thunder in eyes that blink
You mutter meek slumber sounds, not a purr,
dreaming of antelope and emu, the great wide plain,
wheels spinning round and round

Soft, hot-soaked meanders of tangled blankets,
cloud banks of knawing pairs, you and I,
we are unruly emotions, unbinding in rules,
tossing in the shallow sleepy deeps
of a dark world imploding, spinning apart,
quaking in the volcano`s molten cone

When I awake before dawn
I kiss thyne eyes
and crawl upon the hearth
a stalking Romeo on misfit earth

There are no little lies in you,
nothing I can find but innocence
and periodic mists of bottomless brood
As you dream, I scheme, scour the earth
for sign of the easiest meatiest meat

Now I rise, being way too careful, remote
and tiptoe out the door and into the heat
having learned how to leave you alone
to let you grow and gather those old woes
for a circle of stones, minding the bad omens
alerting you to self-fulfulling stars, finding
you inert as a lunar eclipse, parched dry lips

And now I, in undying low-wave longitude, long,
lie down, weary and old, grimmacing the hyper-manic
hunt for enduring truth, running from imagined angst
and for this I am grateful, for this I give thanks
for my still strong growl, but still hoping
for a soft purr, a paw, a little tiger smile,
good spirits, good humor, good love
and abundance to last a Serengetti mile

Sioux Me

2004-10-12T11:34:00.000-07:00

She gave me an Ogallala Sioux bracelet,
My Ogallala blue-eyed Sue
I wear this key, this bind to keep
From going blind in her underworld.
So it starts to come apart,
My Ogallala blue-eyed Sue

The black porcupine twines unwind.
Entropy threatened to unbind. The blues
are good, oranges, the reds, the yellows,
all kinds of code of striped white peace paint.
O, what happened to you?
O, My Ogallala blue-eyed Sue

The adornment grasped to me, a circle
around my left wrist, and unraveled.
I stumbled in her dark, her bone-dry
Sea of Tranquility rubbed my clockwise
Watch against her counter-clockwise screw.
O, what happened to you
My Ogallala blue-eyed Sue

In a war-painted world, I couldn’t
help but think, this was very bad magic,
so I took it off, sadly, mournful in disgrace,
couldn’t get the star for me to shine in her face.
I asked for more the muse to hand-bound me,
But she was bone-dry in her stormy Sea of Tranquility.
O, what happened to you
O My Ogallala blue-eyed Sue

Rather than give up, I became the re-engineer,
mixed an epoxy of Ogallala Sioux glue:
a mend of Scotch tape, Elmers and wax,
a molten melt of a sacred red candle, which I fire up
whenever her darkness gets outta sight.

Now its on my right wrist, fragile to the touch,
Ghost dancing in the space between my skin
and the porcupine quills, but it`s just too tough,
only our air-tight grasping makes us true,
a tentative clasp is just not enough.
O, what happened to you?
O, My Ogallala blue-eyed Sue

Piggy Taking Inventory

2004-09-23T13:11:00.000-07:00

Thou earth mother
whose art made a heaven,
hollow is thy name,
hollow as a donut hole
downed by Dunkies sugar suckers

Across this dirty BVD
they come in, saltless and mean,
sucking dry for purple and orange
styroafoam cup containers,
cattle car crates of donut holes,
great salty sea-vats of caffeine,
akiline and molten H20;

See their blood boil
Tremble at the knowledge:
To know is to burn

High blood-sugar zonks
the dust of freedom
moldered in solo donut hole
clusters. They cram their gassy
gutter rollers up to the bar,
slamming their BMW brakes,
coming to a halt, dead-walking
out of the morning light into
the Orange Coated Cluster Pill,
pulling Dunky air in behind them
in gentle whorls of ache ...

Piggy needs to take inventory, Piggy needs to take.
Not so lean and snaking mean, she sucks down
a donut hole as her last breath
and testament to the desert ...

II.

I dreamt of your skull & crossbones
and it read me like an X-ray machine
as you lay there, the master,
in our silence and slumber:

I skulked about the place

Lightning last night;
It licked the world mean
and Piggy called six times,
six! Just as we had discussed
the ghost dancers' return,
the rent of the buffalo,
the assassination
of Sitting Bull

Just as plasma fields, unified,
rippled in the chemtrail orange sky
as it tumbled up and angry roll
of pressure and purity
friction and dread.

Piggy called six times, six!

III.

You said the desert sheds
us of our vanity
as the wind blew a scare
up the trees.

You awoke in a stir
of anger and vengeance
raving about "The Law Of 3s."
You awoke in a stir
and everyday I wonder,
why Gaia? Why? So nurturing,
so pure. Why so angry? Why!

Tremble to know the angel
of vengeance: To know is to burn ...

You said something about the dark,
but light was everywhere
in a system of pretty pearly stars

IV.

Piggy crossed the desert in a Humvee
moving eastward fast, loaded down
with software and stolen sacred relics,
as her brother Jacob threw beer cans
along the long, twisty road, northeasterly ...

Piggy crossed the desert
and the mirage followed her:
A man made of metal, in a mod
fright wig, shreeking laugh,
a blast of gunmetal, modal fire,
schist, plaster, a blast of rock.

O man, you left a mess,
tore it all up out of spite,
what a waste, this scorched earth,
bedding tossed like a body
into the garbage pail pile

V.

Knocked to my knees
but bleeding clean,
Man rises and thunders!

Three a.m., O son of Sam!
She didn't consider
that castle re-enter

When all is dark.

The message:
Clear. Clear out!
Gaia scooped me out,
sucking the cold, even,
out of the refrigerator!

VI.

Piggy needs to take inventory,
Piggy needs to take.

She leaves Ulysses on the shelf
a misquote from Sir Thomas More ...
flower petals on the white tile floor.

Then you hear that sucking sound
Then your hear
that sucking sound

Coming down the highway, Whoof!
The missing inventory includes
but is not limited to:

Three red maple leaves from Walden,
one copy of the Grapes of Rats,
one moonbeam, one bolt of light,
lots of lights ...

"I am the light taker of the world!
There shall be no
interior lighting
without me!"

Lightbulbs missing. More than just three.

VII.

Ozo sam
Urizen Man!
Christian saint,

O, house full of pain

Twisted rock
upon the oak
the river bends,
it bleeds and dries

See them, over the expanse,
the hot rubbered wheels,
the Holy lands: The Bull is rising,
O, Don't mess with Tex!

Of e-mail shouts,
the doctor is out
Piggy has left the bulding
crossing state lines,
crisscrossing America

O house full of pain!
Urizen man!
O Christian Saint!

A road made of sand!

Portrait of a Suburban Legend as a Young Man

2004-09-22T08:01:00.000-07:00

Street skates ply the highway
leading to the lost children

They line up in court
after scarring their arms
with bursts of blue blood
and butane

Skateboard dude. Holy ranger.
Stiff shouldered, with close-cropped hair,
lanky as a sorrowful willow,
standing at attention,
sulking in regret, hand-bound,
the silent rebuke.

Stiff shouldered, snearing wise,
the great white defendant,
in nasal tremors, flares,
stares, surrenders the deed,
the vice, the miscue.

The lawyer shouts, in xenophobic
redoubt: Tall soliders, unite!
Vivi livi o muertes!
O, Lost children of sight!
But the judge hands over their
car keys, then, pleases them
with their rights.

What is truth, O judge
What is truth? They challenged
him, this Romeo, this stalker
with a guitar, strumming
on the sidewalk, who slept
in the desperation of this city's
plastic grace, this suburban
meatlocker of convenvience
and shame, where they
pop cold pills like candy,
then get suckerpunched
by gun-toting dads
in their SUVs, and O yes,
the cops, old Cyclops,
watching these streets,
the machine eye
loading this motherlode
of video games and hormones
and fear onto the conveyer belt
of justice, O yes, your justice, sure.

They hand over their rights,
compliant souls, one by one
They hand over their rights.
Compliant souls. One by one.

They take the deal
then spin roller wheels
down the photo radar lane
lusting and loitering,
lingering, in love.

Google Search: Mythville

2004-08-30T13:37:00.000-07:00

Google Search: Mythville

Mythville

2004-08-24T03:52:00.000-07:00

Mythville

Kevlar Blankets for the Indians

2004-08-11T09:49:00.000-07:00

No one had the courage
to sign up and fight the Patriot Act.
Time to give Kevlar blankets to the Indians.

No one had the courage
to apply their damn rights.
They just took the deal.

No one had the courage
to stay awake and wail
as the moon waned in the night.

No one had the courage
to light my cigarette and blow
the smoke right back at my face.

No one had the courage
to step off the grid with King Lud.
No one had the courage to say "No code! No way!"

No one had the courage
to faith-leap into the mythic abyss,
nor to stare into the eye in the sky with pity.

One had the courage to try ...
Another had the courage to lie ... then ...
one tried and tried and tired ... and then ...

Dear friends, this IS the end! But end fear.
No one needs to care if the sun's tongue will lick
the world clean of green carpets with steam;
nor will they tussel over
Kevlar coats & hats & blankets within the year:

As long as we are One with the Creator
all else is ash turning to cloud, turning to rain,
turning to seed ...

Colorless

2004-06-29T21:02:00.000-07:00

Falling from the startled sky
a ping pong ball hits a hardwood
floor. Earthy groundlings look up
as they plant their vacillating
ports of thirsts and wolves plow
through woven bursts of hunger.

It goes like this:
Last night I realized
this tussle is bigger
than all of us, this war,
and everyone else, too.

The world does not need
saving. We need to save
each other.

In our place of power
the humidity cave contracts,
pushing me out. My wall,
porous and impossible,
quakes into birth
in a bottomed-out boat
on awkward waters.

The world does not need
saving. We need to save
each other.

Penetrate me and you will fell
the timid tree of earthen polarity.
Open yourself and I will pour out
an endless river of myth
and information. I will become
that blank, vacant stone face
of the autocratic cowboy,
plugging the pipeline
with blood and tufts
of wool, terror and wonder.

We are the air between the clouds,
the unembellished force between you,
me, silent pulse in cell phone static,
tongues that lick, pendulous TV.

If I smoke, I will be like smoke,
and of smoke I will be ... Myth
and Turks, tongue and TV. Our vapor,
my steam, colorless and apt, cools
the firestorm of the big mistake.

But all politics aside, this thing
is bigger than you, bigger than me.
We are sick and sad and shuddering
tense toward all roads leading
to darkness within darkness.

This dark place, colorless and free.
This congenial mix of ebony leaf,
taurine, fear, cell phones and TV.

The world does not need
saving. We need to save
each other. Lies and myth,
steel and money, cell phones
and tongues, Taurine and TV.