Saturday, November 20, 2010

An On the Road Memoir
of Where It All Started
in Ouray, Colorado ...


Something about the old noon mining age lunch alarm always creeped me out in Ouray, Colorado. When the town siren went off, it hit a pitch much more inclined toward tornado sirens and pre-bombing wails. That it should be a town gong to celebrating the 19th century ore boom, with its mining boss mentality, scorched-earth policies, to tell us it's noon, that means lunch, was certainly appropriate for the hard-boiled sort of a place ...

Sure, it fit the mood. They work damn hard in these mountain towns just to survive. Those who work, that is, who actually live there. But to get thrown out of heaven, which occurs from time to time, when you play the migrant journalist game ... no need to get too Milton about right, right, since each new chapter begins with a getting thrown down from the sky ...

To do what? Reign over hell? Lucky you.

So when the boss comes in on a cold morning and says, Mac, we got to let you go, the office for the 100-year-old, old as baseball old "Newspaper That Refused to Die," did. At least in spirit. Which was fortunate, I'd run out of things to say. After the election, I felt, without a stable Republic to actually muse on, and the common opponent and fuel for fodder, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, out of the picture, it was if all of the fun circus animals had deserted me. With Obama elected, and the nation in ruins, one can only be sit back and be stunned. At least, that was the way it was starting to look for that southwestern Colorado mountain town. Especially after the first storm moved in ...

So now there are those who didn't vote for Obama who are calling him the anti-Christ .. our some such other sewercide economics cult crap ... As if what occurred while Bush was around (and he still is president), didn't bring enough Taurean bullshit to begin with! Or, as Neil Young might sing, "I don't feel like a devil but I am to them," so anyone who voted for supported him becomes the enemy, again, the children of Satan again then, too, I suppose. The godless American. The ugly fascism rising just in time for a four-score breakout of fringe hate groups, homegrown terrorists, in Mythville. Coming out of the woods, they are, yes ... still binding us by the old Mason Dixon line ... again ...

We can't just all get along. The world needs lines to cross, to invade. Better some invisible monkey-bat dragon-breath with a beard bird far from these shores, than, hells bells, our feudal neighbors in gated communities holding back slums... We need wars, we being the capitalist state, to keep this kind of thing from happening. Old as the crusades. Hate to be a crank about it, really, it's just that the familiar ironies won't work anymore. They just don't sound right. The blame game sounds tinny. All humor is lost. Needs reinventing. The responsibility should be shed evenly. Sadly, though we are hope despite the times, yes, the agitprop REM still ringing true ... but trying to come up with something light and sunny then, well, fuck you too ...

So we come down from the mountains of Blue state Colorado, making Arizona just a little more blue, too. The music as we cross the desert in our 1992 Ford Exploder, a $300 bitch of a buy from a derelict quote friend in the Telluride high-country, a world of troubles onto itself, in full need of an exorcism and a new transmission, the car, not Telluride, that is, the big old green beast taking us across the great expanse,the big wide sky, well noticed after living in canyons and between fourteeners for so long, in the early afternoon shadows, the daylight-muted snows ... the great expanse, through Ship Rock, New Mexico, down the old route 666 ... people ask how it's going, fuck if I know, but it seemed the right thing to do ... to hurl back down to the past, to the burbs of the North Valley of Phoenix, to where everything is comfortable as the bolted down cement, where the meat locker of convenience feeds all, and there's gas, gas, gas, for everyone. New roads, big highways clashing with steal and snaky moans. Why change anything? Who could feel so Blue? Heck, the funniest thing I've seen was the guy, who had the good (fortune?) of working for AIG, having trouble with his brand new custom Mustang, big yellow police attractor, so out of sync with its tech ... couldn't get it out of the parking lot. I thought gee, being on the Governor's ski team was cool ... When the morning begins, you can hear the hum. It vibrates in the heart. ... startles me awake.

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

You were born in a cross-fire hurricane, but you can manage that. But if you go into a modern-day community casino, god have mercy on you. You are not the heathen, so the devil be your firend, my friends, because you are in the Riverside, Iowa casino, and you are about to not die. In fact, you are not even here to make a movie for HBo, and you might as well be in Vegas, loathing, for all you know. Disorientation is everything in a casino. I mean, it’s almost as bad as the mall.

Because malls rarely pay you back. They just take and take and take. But casinos don’t. They give you hope. Rather than creature comfort, and believe my tastes, the music is never as cool in the mall.


No sports betting, because that’s all you really trust. In football, you trust. And coffee, and smokes, nine dollars a pack here. Unlike in many places in Vegas, the alcohol is not free when you gamble. But you only have one cigareete, and you are writing in frantic pirate text now, and the effect of having a cig hanging from your lip is so Hunter S. Thomppson you don’t want to let go of that.

Tou are definitely not making a movie for HBO here in Riverside, Iowa. So you stay in the middle, to keep from getting dizzy and you set your cell phone on maximum, in case you need a rescue. You stay in the center of the place, to keep from spinning out of orbit, but out of orbit is where you really need to go. To talk to the marketing manager: You are definitely not here to make a movie for HBO.

It’s a pretty standard units because all casinos are standard units. The Corvette is available for the big winner, and so on …

But you are not here to make a movie about the future birthplace of Captain Kirk, who isn’t real, no anymore than anything else in the false world. You are not here to make a movie for HBO. Riverside has suffered enough.
You were born in a cross-fire hurricane, but you can manage that. But if you go into a modern-day community casino, god have mercy on you. You are not the heathen, so the devil be your firend, my friends, because you are in the Riverside, Iowa casino, and you are about to not die. In fact, you are not even here to make a movie for HBo, and you might as well be in Vegas, loathing, for all you know. Disorientation is everything in a casino. I mean, it’s almost as bad as the mall.

Because malls rarely pay you back. They just take and take and take. But casinos don’t. They give you hope. Rather than creature comfort, and believe my tastes, the music is never as cool in the mall.


No sports betting, because that’s all you really trust. In football, you trust. And coffee, and smokes, nine dollars a pack here. Unlike in many places in Vegas, the alcohol is not free when you gamble. But you only have one cigareete, and you are writing in frantic pirate text now, and the effect of having a cig hanging from your lip is so Hunter S. Thomppson you don’t want to let go of that.

Tou are definitely not making a movie for HBO here in Riverside, Iowa. So you stay in the middle, to keep from getting dizzy and you set your cell phone on maximum, in case you need a rescue. You stay in the center of the place, to keep from spinning out of orbit, but out of orbit is where you really need to go. To talk to the marketing manager: You are definitely not here to make a movie for HBO.

It’s a pretty standard units because all casinos are standard units. The Corvette is available for the big winner, and so on …

But you are not here to make a movie about the future birthplace of Captain Kirk, who isn’t real, no anymore than anything else in the false world. You are not here to make a movie for HBO. Riverside has suffered enough.

Monday, September 13, 2010

Dog Star Blues

Tough to run, but not too tough
Tough to walk on the morning tufts
of grass in your fields of earth

Your fields of earth are enough
They are enough

Stragglers will be left behind
in the alleys of deceit
and wild animal violence
driven like the tides

Getting a feel for the sun
in the dog park

Life in the dog park
alive in the dog park,
life making me a doggie
dinner, a life made of bad girls
running with me, jumping
into pools of water

But I don't recall seeing you
and I don't recall being seen
and I don't recall when I was me

You never knew me,
the me you never knew,
but knew you well enough
to say, trust me me, say
just go ... I'll say, I told you so

~
Mt. Pleasant, Iowa

Monday, August 23, 2010

J Jaimie O. at the Presby Church in Sharon, Iowa, circ. 2006


Last Water
In America


By Douglas McDaniel

Symmetry comes to mind, but it’s hardly late enough in the hour to consider it fully, completely. More like, it’s this: Listening to a long sad aphorism by Mark Twain, thus misquoted, misre-engineered: The hardest thing in life, the thing that really wears me out, the rub, as they say (some call it entropy), is having to spend most of your life trying to convince completely ignorant, stupid, ill-mannered, superstitious or otherwise plain retarded people that there’s such a thing as being smart.

Not to get too prideful on the subject. To think too much of your own education is no humble way to go on living. In fact, information can really get in the way. Too much information, poison. If you have too many beeping crickets in your head, if you haven’t gone completely Luddite (and therefore mad), then you are simply pushing the envelope on what the mind can actually contain. If you are like one of those poor folks who are suckerfish for data, well, my condolences. And if you wield it all like a sword, using the word (lowercase, though solemnly used) like a shield instead of a sword, well, I’d just have to regretfully inform you that your apologies are not accepted.

On that opposite side of that coin, sometimes yes you just need the fucking noise. Say you are camped along the mad boulevard of St. Charles, outside of Chicago … and it’s a Saturday morning and the motors are roaring in front of you, camped at the Starbucks, sucking down your caffeine, getting your first cig with coffee for the day. A glorious morning, with motors a roarin’. Down America’s snaky trail they go: The rented cars, the newly bought golden bows, all funded by the cash for cars program, making the whole roadway look like a new car lot running like blood from the old century into the new; the cattle trucks, the dump trucks, the pickups carrying horses to their polo games, the motorcycles, the morons and their motors, there they all go … in camper cans and brightly colored vehicles designed in the late 20th century and made to all look like aerodynamic Clorox bottles, the Porches for the Plutocrats, the Lincoln Continentals for the Republicans, the Democrats, seeking prestige, in their Priusi (hybrids of dinos, still, sucking the vampire blood from the earth, but only half as often), the independents in their silvery gleaming galaxies of wheels, the Redcoats in their redcoats, the Blues in their bluesmobiles, sex and death and terror and awe struck to the bottom of the gully in front of the Starbucks, down the red brick canyon, carting coal or gasoline or what the fuck else, corn oil and hydrogen and eternal air in the morning’s last pure light. Lawyers dressed as gangsta bikers. Gangsta bikers dressed as lawyers. All of the dogs and cats and homos and lesbians in their convertibles, their hair glaze getting Beatled down by the sun and blazing classic rock radio, their stereos boom boxing their personal music, their power, their Powaqua, piped in by satellites now right into their husks, into their chests, and the latter, their long blonde hair flying wild and evil in the breeze … a wind, tainted by the St. Charles River, on this day overflowing and reeking of kerosene … Fuck! … if you are downwind today it will make you effing dizzy …

And there you are in front of Starbucks, with your notebooks and designer coffee, your pack of smokes, American Spirits, expensive as a vote in these Chicago gangland parts, with the strange wise guy in a T-shirt staring down at you from his second-floor window right across the street, above the pizza parlor. There you are, with your pride, your conceit. O, you have so much information flowing in your head, faster, faster, faster … alchalides and ketones and raging hormones, from sex denied from living in the burbs for just one week, for living among the so-called (as Tom Wolfe put it), the “Masters of the Universe.” Little do you know that, even as you think all of these wonderful beautiful mind thoughts, he is plotting against you: the Dr. Cyclops, master of all the fatherlands you can currently survey.

And he won’t pick up the phone today. He, who lured you into this state of placated freedom after a full week of endless horrors. He who knows much more than he lets on, some effing one-eyed grandmaster, He! So you thought you had one grand Peter Pan fantasy in yer head … lazy fucker you, without a so-called “pot to piss in,” as you have heard frequently during the week. Every time you heard it you looked into your Navajo-made sacred earn for your cig smoke ash. You with you shaman pretenses, your rael as blood pink sunglass lenses … He, with his plan, working against, and yet, despite his best efforts failing … because she is basic, gorgeous, a queen, true to her times as a bee in some mysterious hive, commanding the spirits of the earth, the underworlds and overworlds, her sex divine, her Joan of Arc in full arc, her animal magnetism, fully magnetized, all sharpened by the wickedly severe engine of grief.

O yeah, it’s real. The day you two arrived in this plastic castle fantasyland Dr. Cyclops was hatching his plot against this fairyland queen and long away from home Ulyesses, both barely unable to even gauge which way was north or south or east or west, save for the unfamiliar sunlight and the direction of the foul winds, blown up this north by the British Petroleum-launched war to re-take America, an undeclared war that now, not even the U.S. military quite gets yet … from the moment the divide and conquer game was on as you are carefully guided into his road raging castle on the hills of the Shire. The whole neighborhood is a military base in the meadows of the Plutocracy, homes for colonels retired but still having their use, for KGB queens, but hell, they aren’t near half as dangerous to this sacred soil as the real estate mavens in their pink Cadillacs and their busy blood for time-is-money ways and means, all meeting the endless ends, the service to the great digitized seas of that false god: The caches of electronified cash, the stolen formulas for beers, the Kentucky fried generals on their furloughs, watching it all go down in deep bunkers beneath their homes … O yeah, trust this, if nothing else: It is so fucking so!

~


Most definitely, a work currently in regress ... try to keep up at http://mythville.blogspot.com/

or for Print-On-Demand ... The Mythville Bookstore

Sunday, April 04, 2010

This Just In

(verse)
Hey you Joe the Terrorist
your humvees out of gas
staring at goats in the desert
in a deadly atmosphere, aye

Men from the future
fly at your command
takin' stolen relics
from the smoking holy lands

(chorus)
This just in from Fox News:
Joe the Terrorist just got refused
This just in
This just in
Got refused,
got refused
Joe the Terrorist just got refused

(verse)
Staring at goats
is just a gas man
O Capricorn Stan
Make your gasoline stand

Turning trees
into smokes
across the Asias
The popular
rage rolls over
in real time fast

(chorus)
This just in from Fox News:
Joe the Terrorist just got refused
This just in
This just in
Got refused,
got refused,

(bridge)
Popps points torpedoes
Toward the tackle
Momma says Go ahead Joe
aims to kill
If wingnut words
won’t work.
or fucked up vote counts
bombs sure will

(Verse)

Like a rough beast
backbeat back at last
flinging flags
with snakes on the porch

This just in from Fox News:
Joe the Terrorist he got bad blues,
Read the oven in our eyes
for a penetratin’ view


(Fade)

This just in from Fox News:
Joe the Terrorist just got refused
This just in
This just in
Got refused,
got refused,
got refused …






Verse

Here comes coach
Riding his Humvee
Leaving cigs and smokes
and butts across the aching Asias
of bloody mountains and sand
You … just soar above the Holy lands
Feel the magic at your command

Chorus

Staring at goats
Is just a gas, Man
Staring at goats
O gasoline Stan

Staring at goats
Is plain fun, son
Staring goats
Better ‘n bigger
Badder Broadband

Verse

Coach points his torpedoes
Toward the tackle
Aims to kill in gridiron
Glories, braying to the mob

This just in from Fox News:
Coach Boehner, well, he got bad blues,
gonna put the oven in the eyes
for and you and you and you

Chorus

Staring at goats
Is just a gas, Man
Staring at goats
O gasoline Stan

Bridge

Like a rough beast backbeat back at last
the popular rage rolls in real time fast
flinging flags with snakes on the porch
of Democracy, livin' free while you die

... and all that know-nothing why

This just in from Fox News:
Joe the Terrorist just got refused


Finale
Staring at goats …
Brother gotta run

This just in from Fox News:
Joe the Terrorist just got refused

Got refused,
got refused,
got refused …

Joe the Terrorist just got refused



Join the Carnival Army

(verse)
Don’t get nervous, don’t get sad
This is the best damn daylight
We ever damn well had

Open your heart or you’ll go mad
The money time continuum
Is going nowhere fast

(chorus)
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other

(verse)
Come back to me,
and I will be your brother
Call off your dogs, and I’ll call
Off my daughters

Bring this pit to peace
Live in this world, no other

(chorus)
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other

(Bridge)

Glass floats on the beach, man,
Crystals in the sand
Get the light, gather it all
‘fore the Kracken lands

(verse)

Don’t be evil, don’t be sad,
This is the best damn daylight
A dead man ever did damn have

(chorus)
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other

We can’t save the world
We have to save each other
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other


Tough to run, but not too tough
Tough to walk on the morning tufts
of grass in your fields of earth

Your fields of earth are enough
They are enough

Stragglers will be left behind
in the alleys of deceit
and wild animal violence
driven like the tides

Getting a feel for the sun
in the dog park

Life in the dog park
alive in the dog park,
life making me a doggie
dinner, a life made of bad girls
running with me, jumping
into pools of water

But I don't recall seeing you
and I don't recall being seen
and I don't recall when I was me

You never knew me,
the me you never knew,
but knew you well enough
to say, trust me me, say
just go ... I'll say,
I told you so
Refugees

We run like
Refugees
Through the neighborhood


We are Bandits running
In Remote country,
One day short
Of a room,

Light is leaking
A little out of each day.
The sheltered share
Nothing,
not even room to rent,
We are stretched
Stretched in piles,
Beside the road.
.
Our hands are cold
And tires hot,
Numb to the labor
Of the road.

If all this roaming
Made sense
We would be laughing
now.

If all this roaming
Makes sense,
We’d find
A limit to pain.


Angel of Anxiety
Storms across America (obscene mix)


Sheriff Joe just robbed a bank
with martial law in Arizona
Kung Fu cougars roam the streets
Its martial law in Arizona
STORMS ACROSS AMERICA

She leans into the sea
keening a song
from the Madonna vagina
of the deep as hailstones
ring white pins honed from Hawaii
and a tide of low pressure
rounds up upon the shore
of the Forty-Fifth parallel,
a crowny curtin of thorns

Unknowing from the unquiet
slumbers of lost ships
still melting in icy currents
below the surface,
the seagulls scatter
and defecate upon her:

Rise, O rise, storms across America
Your plastic passions await you
as cars stream in from the Orient
and gas passes through your ports
of entry, pleased, as they are
from the total penetration
of the perfect plan

Star of India, our captains
catch colds in the bowlegged
polarities of warm seas
and freezing skies
The sun, well-timed,
is a clock-face ticking,
hidden from our view

America, may the tilted jet stream
blow a gale of goth up your nose
May the ocean rise and plaster
a new continent where truth,
chased in the wind, wakes
the ghost dancers from
the Pacific to the Atlantic
before the living dead
can get out of bed

Shipwrecked sailors
found lost at sea
discovered homes
in their own faces,
in bindles of woody words
crushed to hand-length bits

After forty days of fire,
forty days of rain,
the northwesterly El Nino
sheared shanks of wind
off the Oregon coast,
then brought a low blow
to slap the soiled temples
of the City of Angels

Driftwood is piled fore desire
against sandy beach stumps
and stop gaps, infinite and wise:
Infinity stopped here for a day,
a deluge for the dead,
so I could admire
our wood chips,
our broken bones

A winter-long windshear
plucked the breath
from my pressurized lungs,
turning my fire to water.
I floated some, then burst,
mounted a floating oar
then sank into an orb
of sand

The sun, beyond the grey wail,
shaped a man inside here,
inside this calamity of clams;
one-part plastic,
one-part fishhook,
a bonney redwood mast,
a skull & crossbones flying,
walking the plank on dry land
without an anchor, who cares?

Setting of these banalities
of life aside, let me perscribble:
Glass floats on the beach,
I've found, and the ebb-tide
of the avenues are a roar
of trucks in the rain

On tuesdays, Great Food
is closed in a seaside town;
and what a tree lacks,
the wind whispers;
and loving couples
strand tennis shoes
on the frosty morning shores
as missiles are clicked
into load in the underground
caverns of Iran

Also this: The electric truth sheds
the oil slick skin off the CIA
and sickened seagulls
reel in the ninety mile winds
and Pennsylvania miners
with black lung bibles
defuse the threat
with another tragic
mind blast

The sun goes up
and Mercury goes
into retrograde
as our satellite's
telescopic echo fades
and techno-pop
becomes the sea
in which we wade

The camera's eye
is just a catch
for this cuckoo cluck house,
our mourning latch
and what is least
is that which lasts
as buzzard gulls sift
through black morning trash
and I try to unlearn
this noisy cache
of highway moms
speeding by bullet blasts
and taxi driver Thanatoss plants
look like gods in camouflage pants

Glass floats on the beach,
it's endless, at last!
The end is coming near
and it's coming here fast
It's time to drink
from the pirate's flask
and toast a tune
to all of that glass,
to the sun, the sky,
the nuclear smash,
the currents, the past,
the pounding surf,
the manic search
for meaning and gas,
the molten glow,
the melting snow,
the rivers that run
through those who know ...

Glass floats on the beach,
the ebb is endless,
it's here, at last

Storms Across America

See the Madonna Disneyland
lean into the sea, casting a spell
of the deep as hailstones
ring white pins honed from Hawaii
and a tide of low pressure
rounds up upon the shore
of the Forty-Fifth parallel,
of the Forty Fifth Parallel
at the Forty Fifth parallel

And she sings ...

Rise, O rise, storms across America
Your plastic passions await you
as cars stream in from the Orient
and gas passes through your ports
of entry, pleased, as they are
from the total penetration
of the perfect plan

Star of India, our captains
catch colds in the bowlegged
polarities of warm seas
and freezing skies
The sun, well-timed,
is a clock-face ticking,
hidden from our view

America, may the tilted jet stream
blow a gale of goth up your nose
May the ocean rise and plaster
a new continent where truth
gets chased into the wind,
wakes the ghost dancers from
the Pacific to the Atlantic
before the living dead
can get out of bed

Shipwrecked sailors
found lost at sea
discovered homes
in their own faces,
in bindles of woody words
crushed to hand-length bits

After forty days of fire,
forty days of rain,
of the Forty-Fifth parallel,
of the Forty Fifth Paralell
at the Forty Fifth paralell
etc..



Glass Floats on the Beach

The sun goes up
and Mercury goes
into retrograde
as our satellite’s
telescopic echo fades
and techno-pop
becomes the sea
in which we wade
defuse the threat
with another tragic
mind blast

what a tree lacks,
the wind whispers;
and loving couples
strand tennis shoes
on the frosty morning shores
as missiles are clicked
into load in the underground
caverns of Iran

The camera’s eye
is just a catch
for this cuckoo cluck house,
our mourning latch
and what is least
is that which lasts
as buzzard gulls sift
through black morning trash
and I try to unlearn
this noisy cache
of highway moms
speeding by bullet blasts
and taxi driver Thanatoss plants
look like gods in camouflage pants

Glass floats on the beach,
it’s endless, at last!
The end is coming near
and it’s coming here fast
It’s time to drink
from the pirate’s flask
and toast a tune
to all of that glass,
to the sun, the sky,
the nuclear smash,
the currents, the past,
the pounding surf,
the manic search
for meaning and gas,
the molten glow,
the melting snow,
the rivers that run
through those who know ...

Glass floats on the beach,
the ebb is endless,
it’s here, at last


Ginsberg Rolls Over
(Katie Couric Scares the Shit Out of Me)

Saw a flower child
of a flower child
with a ring in her nose
house big as a cloud
Hanging from a cliff
like a prisoner in a noose
facing the wind,
rastling of the trash bin
behind the media megastore

Someday we all will be
forced to where some kind
ofr ridiculous head contraption
and now I can’t get to sleep anymore
and the country crooner
is a caged old bird now


CHorus:

And I think Orwell is right, always right
as Ginsberg rolls over
while the president goes on vacation
the world burns and seas swell
The world heard over your headset
is corporeal, corporal, and Operation
Wannabe Warlord is just a rush
for the kiddies in the suburbs
And those hay bales
in the hay barn won’t dry
mom and pop from American Gothic
have left their pitchforks to rust
and the country crooner
is a caged old bird now

CHorus:

And I think Orwell is right, alwaqys right
as Ginsberg rolls over
the president on vacation
the world burns and seas swell

CHorus:

And I think Orwell is right, alwaqys right
as Ginsberg rolls over
the president on vacation
the world burns and seas swell.

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.


Hothouse Day

On a hothouse day
a solar storm on election day
electrifies a lake of fire
in the sky

The pattern: A tree,
maybe an off-ramp signage shadow,
with pecked And puckered knotty holes,
Where owls perch and eagles play.
I took that last quarter
To the phone booth ...

Oh, if not for so many lonely
And cynical Winnebegos
That drive, ceaselessly,
To bridge the great divide.

The real question isn’t
How to turn lead into gold,
But how to turn gold into soul.



LOOKOUT BURIAL MOUND

I was walking toward the stone circle
overlooking the city of the mind
Leaning over to pick up seven stones
a bone collector, a creature of desire

Both good and evil are in full supply
evil can be found there
in endless supply
great good comes there
at lookout burial mound
overlooking the city
glowing silver town

There on the hill of seven white stones
where the heart will never be found
its made of flesh and cannot ever
be collected, as these bones groan
and so these old bones need flesh
Both good and evil are in full supply
And evil is available
in endless suplly
and great good comes
in endless supply

Both good and evil are in full supply
And evil is available
in endless supply
and great good comes
in endless supply

Out there on the hill of seven quartz white stones
where the heart will never be found
for its is made of flesh and cannot ever
be collected
and so these old bones need flesh

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

This Just In

Hey you fallen conquerer
your humvees out of gas
hunting for goats
in a deadly atmosphere, aye

Men from the future
fly at your command
takin' stolen relics
from the smoking holy lands, aye

Staring at goats
is just a gas man
staring at goats
you make your gasoline stand

Cigs and smokes
across the Asias
while the popular
rage moves
in real time fast

(bridge)

Like a rough beast
backbeat back at last
flinging flags
with snakes on the porch

This just in from Fox News:
Joe the Terrorist just got the blues

Finale

This just in from Fox News:
Joe the Terrorist just got refused
This just in
This just in
Got refused,
got refused,
got refused …

Joe the Terrorist just got refused



Join the Carnival Army

(verse)
Don’t get nervous, don’t get sad
This is the best damn daylight
We ever damn well had

Open your heart or you’ll go mad
The money time continuum
Is going nowhere fast

(chorus)
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other

(verse)
Come back to me,
and I will be your brother
Call off your dogs, and I’ll call
Off my daughters

Bring this pit to peace
Live in this world, no other

(chorus)
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other

(Bridge)

Glass floats on the beach, man,
Crystals in the sand
Get the light, gather it all
‘fore the Kracken lands

(verse)

Don’t be evil, don’t be sad,
This is the best damn daylight
A dead man ever did damn have

(chorus)
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other

We can’t save the world
We have to save each other
We can’t save the world
We have to save each other