In Death, Your Cold Slack Lips

Like in the dream
I had last night – to my horror
they assembled the small bones of your feet
together with bits of driftwood and shell
into tabletop shrines -
cunning bleached monuments
to their pathetic shoe box diorama
vision of your supposed godhead.

But instead of bones
they presume real words
right into your dead mouth
to confabulate how you would presently feel
about this or that
as if – as if -
a dead man has opinions -
as if they paid attention when you were alive.

Never a gambler, still
I recognize a “tell” when I see one.
In life – depending on the angle
and degree of tension -
your pursed lips
betrayed disapproval, deliberation
or anticipated pleasure.
In death – your cold slack lips
signaled withdrawal from this plane.

I wish you would stop being dead now.
I have tried to make it work
but I just can’t get the knack of it -
can’t muster the arrogance
to counterfeit how you
would feel about anything.
Dead men have no “tell” -

And isn’t the point of gods
that they wont stay dead?

In the dream, they placed
these frangible shrines precariously close
to the doorway or the edge of a shelf
inviting my careless hands
to encourage gravity
arched left eyebrow my “tell”
of vindicated wicked complicity.

Process Of Elimination

Remove the burden of lonely knowledge

Scratch off the dance card any image and likeness referred to
as an image and likeness

Forget the rules, especially the ones that seem to apply

Don’t eat anything that begins with the letter “food”

Don’t put anything sharper than a scalpel in your ear

Cancel the date with the friend who talks about you behind your back
Cancel the date with the friend who complains incessantly
Cancel the date with the friend who complains incessantly
behind your back about your canceled dates

Give away any pets that shed, that you need to keep in the shed,
that shed light on your dependence on human substitutes

Toss out extraneous stigmata:
the nail wounds in the hands and feet can go
ditto the lance pierced side (The little crown of thorn slices
dripping blood down your brow is a nice iconographic visual
for a rainy day – label and store)

Get rid of any machine that dares to talk to you

Haul to the curb the fingernail parings and toenail clippings
you collected into ovaltine jars labeled by date

Return to the author any self help book you didn’t write yourself

Eliminate redundant rorschach cards such as:
two monkeys leaning against a palm tree eating bananas
conjoined ape clowns wearing banana shoes
two-faced baboons worshipping a banana
trapeze monkey demon twins brandishing banana genitalia
all of the other cards which involve bilateral mirror image
simians and phallic fruit
(the cute butterfly-bat blot escaping from evil primates can remain)

The Betty Boop memorabilia goes right in the garbage,
surgically remove the Betty Boop tatoo if applicable

Trash any recipe cards inherited from your maternal grandmother
(lard is a disgusting ingredient)

Torch any orange clothing – it is a horrible, horrible, horrible color
that looks horrible on everyone

Scratch film remakes and song cover versions -
barely time for the originals

Remove from the medicine cabinet any prescription that claims
to make you thin, happy, young, calm, powerful, sexy,
more colorful, more monochromatic, more awake, more asleep
or undead

Evict from your head your spirit animal, psychic guide, ancient ancestor,
your doppelganger, evil twin, past life regressions
and alternate personalities – barely enough room in there for yourself

Just let Pluto go!

Eliminate the words jealousy, anger, fear, hate, alienation, despair
and failure from your vocabulary, also any compound German words
that express nuanced complex states of dark emotional turmoil
Now you can just say “I feel like shit!”

Whatever takes up space is obsolete – abstractify

Wet Haiku

pink shell crumbed sand lips
tide wave flicks its salty tongue
blotting tandem prints

stippled patterns shift
water strider’s contra dance
pool ripples spiral

fearful ones flounder
water allows buoyancy
when struggling stops

sigh of wet lament
bereft of water bearer
brook keeps flowing on

water’s tastelessness
mouth’s wet desire remembered -
baseline of all taste

cobb webbed rock cascade
moss laced fingers trickle tears
needle waterfalls

Why I Love Prison Stories

I drove a rural route through the woods,
late afternoon, and in the rear-view
the sun did time between the verticals
of black bar tree trunks – and I thought:

This is why I love prison stories
they are all exactly about me

Falsely accused, though maybe guilty as hell
about something else
but going down in a blaze of glory
and always always
in the solitary confinement
of a winter sunset
and when my car approaches the bridge
the red orb me is gone,
no color saturated reflection in the river
only pale vernix on gray water,
the ghost ripple of my escape.

Then flash back to the scene where,
though crammed into the metal box
a literal minute ago,
I am dragged out all filthy tatters, mottled skin
pinwheeling eyes and matted hair
to illustrate a cinematically punishing lapse of time.

On New Year’s Eve, I listened to the sculptor
frame his creative intention
about a ball of snow he carried in a cooler
south across the state line,
then jailed behind a locked gate
inside a cage crafted of wood and bamboo.
Eventually the snow would melt -
total transformation essential to its release.

This is why I love prison stories
they are all exactly about me.

Predictably, the governor’s pardon
arrives that melodramatic moment too late,
my fellow inmates sell me out
for a pack of cigarettes.
Good behavior is irrelevant,
the air ducts never lead
to the laundry chute
and with a filed-off spoon handle
I scrape a tunnel into concrete block
while I catalog the warden’s secrets,
biding my time
drop by drop.

Other Uses

My form is dismally narrative
The similies  – too comparative
Ideas vague and unrelated
Ponderous and overstated.

One gerund puts him in a snit -
Two, violent apoplectic fit.
He fails to understand, to me,
Things happen more continually.

No joy in creativity
My professor hates my poetry.

Though I confess I’m not averse
To crafting a more lyric verse
I have no talent to distill
Fine insight from a twilit rill,

One metaphor I can’t sustain
From poem’s first line to last refrain
I’d add more, with varied uses
My trains all engines, no cabooses.

Though I’m not jealous, Euterpe,
My professor hates my poetry.

Whom I address is most unclear
Too wordy are my words, I fear.
Continuous lines like prose do read
Perhaps at novels I’d succeed.

My errors are irreversible
No knack for the impersonal
A penchant for hyperbole
And misuse of synecdoche.

Penultimate in tragedy -
My professor hates my poetry.

My Latin blood its roots preferred,
I shun the Anglo-saxon word.
Toss these pages to the hounds
I’m too cliche – way out of bounds!

Descriptive galloping stampede
An editor is what I need
Haughtily his words advise,
“Revise, revise, again, revise!”

Though I suspect he fancies me
My professor hates my poetry.

All Purpose Survival

From the damp, cob webbed, roach-carcassed
thrumming eternal neon twilight,
their metallic encasement gleamed
like the collective alien glow of dormant pods
awaiting a subsonic signal of eonically timed resuscitation.

A sleep-deprivation induced wanderlust
yielded this cache in the perfect oubliette,
the subbasement of my college dorm.
Walled behind boxes of used punch cards
and remnants of orgy deconstructed sofas,
the containers had been labeled, ten years earlier,
“Civil Defense All Purpose Survival Crackers, June 1962.”

I appropriated several boxes
in defiance of that particular grim future scenario
where Aesop’s ant snuggled down in his coffin shelter
then generated enough smug saliva
to masticate the sawdust textured,
dust and borax flavored wafers,
while grasshoppers like myself
racheted out a grim tune of resignation
to the suicidal exposure of an unimaginable
and ultimately inevitable
unsurvivable slow death nuclear winter.

(This was when “The Bang”
still seemed a more likely
exit scenario than “The Whimper”.
Now, I suppose, it’s a hung jury.)

Most of my friends who were beneficiaries
of these monolithic contraband totems
reassigned them as stools or 2×4 props,
an aesthetic variation on cinder block shelving.
But a gustatorily calloused few -

Like the guy who once romanced me
over to his place for dinner,
tenderly rendered “Martha My Dear”
on the squeaky nylon strings of his accoustic guitar,
rinsed green slime from a package of hot dogs
and stewed them in watered-down ketchup
on a hot plate for the main course -

Or the friend, already alarmingly thin and exophthalmic
from a hyperthyroid condition,
who sublet the greasiest corner of a garage
from the local biker club
after his parents kicked him out of the house
when he dropped out of college -

They actually innovated techniques to betray their palates
into the belief that survival crackers were edible.
This involved the crumbs of these crackers
stirred into more ketchup soup
and the contraband mucky contents
of food service grape jam packets
troweled over them, respectively.

I remember “duck and cover” rehearsal
in tight fetal posture under my metal school desk in 1962,
the nuns had piously instructed us
to place our hands over our heads
by miming the technique on their black veiled wimples.
A few months later they implored us
to kneel in front of those same desks
to pray for the soul of John F. Kennedy,
this time with our palms pressed together.

In 1962, I could no more imagine heaven than nuclear impact
much less worry about the possibility
of  survival past an expiration date of crackers -
the more familiar ones in their wax paper shrouds
were immediate victims of humidity
in our ineptly winterized shoreline cottage.

Today the grasshopper suspects that a knack for survival
may be irrelevant to expiration dates,
duck and cover rehearsals and hedged-cracker bets
that pantomime civil foresight.
The talent may have nothing to do
with that idealized “will to survive” imperative at all
but, rather, the adaptive improvisation
to rinse the mold off of foodstuffs,
to make an imaginary tent over an imaginary wimple,
and when winter rimes the field in frost,
and there IS only ketchup,
the grasshopper ladles out ketchup soup.

“Martha, my dear,don’t forget me.”