Sins
anemone tentacles
on the throat of a dove,
or threads unwinding
from a beggar’s coat,
they barely bind,
hints of jail cells or guilt,
a trace that won’t sleep.
adulterous silence.
they chant, soft as dew,
patterns in clammy octaves,
when it’s dark enough,
wards of skeleton keys.
an armoire opens. who guessed?
grandparents pine there,
frowns that turn thumbscrews.
hands secretive as moths.
==========================
9/5/24 .... changed a word
Thank you for looking at the poems!
A quick note. I often edit a piece quite a bit after it goes up. The more-or-less final version, the one that settles in, arrives after a few days of the initial posting. (It's almost fair to say that a true 'final version' is like the Holy Grail and not likely to ever materialize).
Admittedly, this is a feeble strategy. I use it simply because it gets me to edit faster and more attentively than if the poems were merely tucked away in a folder.
The big downside is that readers who visit right after a work goes up are often met with a less-than-stellar version. For this I apologize. Again, my only excuse, albeit feeble, is the quirkiness of my own craft.
If you have comments or suggestions, or potential topics you'd like to see, you can email me:
owlwholaughs@gmail.com
Fly Well in the Dark,
OWL
============
A Widow
a Widow culls
the failures of lovers,
wanton as she goes,
smiling still
from mansion to shack
to home to hearth,
every incident of bed
beleaguered.
She watches dreams
from ants to lions and
elephants who dwindle
down tusky roads,
and the ill to violent swarms
who beat on misunderstood ground,
clutching as they sink,
their sentimental lies.
almost everyone
lurches when lungs stall,
cashiering for a coffin
their chains and chores.
chirp last fermatas,
and these, the Widow thinks,
never turn to dust.
but those tethered to tombstones,
or ladderlike prayers, they go down.
those who archive lists
of what wasn’t or was--
because because because …
and so it goes
from mansion to shack to home to hearth,
incursions everywhere,
wherever cruelty lies naked.
==================================
9/7/24 ... radically altered poem ... scary poem
=======
I would prefer to use "wym" instead of the male-aligned "men." "Wym" escapes gender. But the neologism would be distractive.
===========
A Love Poem
dawns and heights,
this mansion of my throat and heart
and my breath,
this rootstock of my life,
my laughter and reflections,
every molecule and aura,
her hands their sextant. such hands!
the lockpicks of my evolution.
and her eyes redolent healers.
and her body swoops and slopes to avalanches,
agile against the cordillera of my chest.
my tides, my faultlines, my fails,
lean into her oceans.
i float on her fluent bed.
candles serenade us, such wooed stars,
celestial, unfathomable, irreligious,
transformed by the mystery of her.
her fair hypnosis, she
melts protean under my kisses,
shivers a rain of pleasures
down through the lack of my secrecy.
her whispers
curve crescent-curls of mysterious music.
astride our scale of hourglasses,
nocturnes or sun-burnished,
chasms or rapt pinnacles,
across seasons which sprout or sink,
aloft or wept, rough-clad or satin,
i need not search,
and i her.
sculptress of my muscles,
weaver of my moved veins,
she
seduces as art which finds lost inspiration,
this hurt magic that i am, had forgotten;
and so in each other’s arms to play,
seamless in a theater of senses, alive
pulse by pulse, moment by motion,
a spell where tempests behold what must be,
revealed by us, by her, by me,
to form stairs.
=====================
9/7/24 ... many mods..
Still Life Late
wafer
of pearl and eve
soon to fade
i see myself
in its dim depth
weak
this glum gloss
daubs my thoughts
with a nimbus of doubt
this puddle of hope
dusky with an offer
of communion bread.
all hue wanes
from such tender heat
when my thoughts
mimic wax
slow yet fluid
melted then caught
in its reflection.
=====================
9/8/24 eds,
A Gamble
mousy,
brown against black,
scurrying on paws
once maple lobes,
wind its muscle,
decay its flesh.
mottle dripping off,
such brittle rot.
it rushes a busy tire,
eager to kiss,
earn an autograph,
or perhaps a speck of peace.
always so swift,
Fate obsessed with dice games,
rolling over and over,
bidding leaves to tumble
and resolve.
=================
Serviceberry and Doe
a doe in the woods
shies from an effortless signpost
of thorns.
none
of the ten thousand points scrape her.
hasteless she flows,
snaps no twig.
jags of shadblow
comb her fur
in meek quiescence.
drops of sun,
sifted by noonday birches,
accentuate when she cranes
fair.
============
Quiet Bay
azure basks in a slack breeze.
it's hard to tell reflection
from lobster boat.
water scolds skipped rocks,
successive with brief mouths.
nothing is supposed to be quick.
clouds are origami.
rocks gargoyles.
the flick of an arm
unwanted flame.
=================
At the Keyboard
fingertips. bishops and rooks primed.
diagonal. orthogonal.
hostage to a rash hopscotch,
obsessed yet servile
over sleek prim tiles.
troublesome tiles, tiles which somehow
invoke the odor of Darth Vader’s chest.
my eyes track mumbo jumbo.
ears dog a ridicule of clicks.
hours of this. hands twin crabs
doing the mountebank shuffle.
fingertips--later--
fade through a falter of clog dance.
heart yanked
as if in an Id-space-time machine:
Z's to ampersands,
drowsy then aroused.
gleeful hate and fear and sex.
commas are chores then look like semen.
hyphens become hymens
wasting their innocence.
'how long
can the repeated period marks last?'
my fingerprints ask to erode drip by drip.
'how much touch can i lose
on this psycho-topo-dramo-topological trip?'
whether to retreat,
exhausted yet stimulated
from this multiemotional mission,
should i
into the far simpler math
of a game of chess.
===================
10/3/24 eds.
Diagnosis
infested with warfare,
blood on your blue
and white.
we’re not sure
how to remove the bullets
sunk in your organs.
in effect, cysts.
you have canons for femurs.
sabers for ribs.
why did you embrace the Enola Gay
in the first place?
did you know
you’ve had radiation sickness
ever since?
we're putting you on a diet.
no more bingeing on prejudice.
this sclerosis of fear,
its paroxysms of hate--
they attack the heart.
and the gold that plates your veins,
quite the heaviness, you know.
it sucks up all the warmth.
we'll send a shovel, not a scalpel,
to extract the corpses.
==========
10/3/24 eds.
This is styled as an op-ed for newspaper submissions. Unfortunately, I have less than a 5% acceptance rate. Part of the reason is that the biggest newspaper in my State (Maine), the Bangor Daily News, leans Republican in its endorsements. They did take one of my pieces last year, though.
============
The Democrats Need to Do Much Better
We live in a corrupt system, and the Democrats have been a big contributor to the problem. They need to do much better. Otherwise, a redoubling of outrage will make their recent victories short-lived.
The wealth curve in our country, over the last several decades, has been like a broken lung, one that deflates the middle class and pumps up the wealthiest. Four hundred citizens now have as much wealth as 50% of Americans (about 150 million people). The mathematics of the distribution graph don't lie. It is the clear sign of a sickly nation, not a healthy capitalism.
Who has spoken up about this? Until the last election cycle, Bernie Sanders, who was not even a Democrat until recently, was the lone standout when it came to wealth inequality and obscene grift.
Consider our healthcare system. It has come to the point where a hospital is ready to fleece someone for their entire lifesavings if they dare, heaven forbid, to get sick or injured. Big pharma has no cap on pricing, unlike in other countries. Once affordable drugs, such as insulin, have skyrocketed in cost. Not long ago, the pharmaceutical industry had no qualms about flooding the country with addictive opioids to make a buck.
I won't even go into the maddening, byzantine machinations of the health insurance companies.
The Democrats have been onboard with this decades-long moral decay. They take plenty of donations from big insurance and big pharma. Jobs went overseas or to Mexico thanks to Bill Clinton as much as the GOP. Even very recently, Democrats have defended absurd tax cuts for the wealthy (such as the SALT deduction).
We have become an Alice-in-Wonderland nation. If wages increase, the stock market suffers (worries of inflation). If people lose jobs, the stock market benefits (overseas profits). With a slant worthy of Svengali, increases in the Dow Jones are seen as more vital to our country than indices that monitor the health, income and happiness of the people.
Case in point: The Dow has soared to over thirty thousand points while Americans suffer the worst phase of a pandemic.
The siege on the middle class has been so sustained, so awful, that Donald Trump, an extreme outlier, took the White House in 2016. He would not have been able to accede without tapping into outrage at how rotten our structures of governance and finance have become.
Trump is even more blatant in his corruption. But that's not the point. Large segments of the population, say the 85% who don't have sizeable investments in the stock market, have lost confidence in America. They have lost faith in our principles. Many are ready to follow a new kind of leader, one who would change everything by acting as a monarch.
We should all, in fact, despair at the decline that has taken place. We should recoil at the kleptocracy. At the sucking away of middle-class life into a grotesque distribution curve. At the obvious, brutal grift that has wrecked families and homes, and cost lives, health, and hope.
Are we now, even somewhat, that City on a Hill? The Democrats need to do much better. Heroically better. They cannot be as weak and compromised as they have been, or we will continue our worsening decline.
=======
Lily and Spider
tarweed, bindweed, shorn plots of grass,
they know nothing of the nine blossoms on the hill,
gold and purple crowns
of the mariposa lily.
they do not know
the secret name of the chalky spider
poised like a cross inside the fifth lily.
guardian pure as pearl,
a navel in a tiara,
portrayal both pentacle and christ.
this sacred vigil
mates with the corollan curves
to dance a spell, a whirl, a flourish
through the texts and bends of things.
don’t ask pesticides and ragweed to explain.
they haven’t watched ravens
soar to make love in a moebius strip;
or seen the coupled butterflies, festivals of sylphs,
twine in purple yaw to ascend in a helix.
=====================
10/3/24 eds.
"corrolan" sounds better than "corrolate"
107 in Sunland
the sun gnaws on sprinkler-fed lilies.
it pinches ants till they riot,
irascible manic flames.
crows gloom the phone wires,
cursing at the cars on the asphalt abacus,
squawking from the blur
which bakes their own onyx.
seven jacaranda maidens
redeem this hell-tinged town,
drizzling soft flakes
to dust the curb ephemeral purple.
a fat owl hides
in the crook of one trunk,
skin same as bark,
face more of a knothole
than the gourmand it will be
when night unveils
its banquet of espionages:
a prosciutto of gophers.
a platter of voles.
=================
9/3/24 ... eds..
7/19/24 ... edits for flow and quality
Thank you for looking at the poems!
A quick note. I often edit a piece quite a bit after it goes up. The more-or-less final version, the one that settles in, arrives after a few days of the initial posting. (It's almost fair to say that a true 'final version' is like the Holy Grail and not likely to ever materialize).
Admittedly, this is a feeble strategy. I use it simply because it gets me to edit faster and more attentively than if the poems were merely tucked away in a folder.
The big downside is that readers who visit right after a work goes up are often met with a less-than-stellar version. For this I apologize. Again, my only excuse, albeit feeble, is the quirkiness of my own craft.
If you have comments or suggestions, or potential topics you'd like to see, you can email me:
owlwholaughs@gmail.com
Again, thank you for your time,
OWL
====================
Swift Pleasure
razor gleams of eyes
open my heart without
removing clothes.
naiveté made them weapons.
there's a gash
in the hideout of my chest.
whwere emotions bubble forth,
pain revealed,
forsaking the odds of innocence.
how brash
my foolhardy leaps,
unprepared for such swift pleasure,
faster than the giddy race
of ridiculous pulse
to stumble, trip and fall
into the oubliettes of unkind stares.
======================
Oct 4 2024 eds
Crystal Ball
an upside-down imp stares back,
leans left for my right,
stretching into befuddled rainbows.
leans right for my left,
till auras split into ribs
and circle round to live larger,i dive in, immerse, to sync with the imp,
vivid, such verve, so vivacious
photons who frolic and paragons which flow.
a hypermath of hula hoops
i skip to strum chords of Saturn.
tweed on a peg
bursts into a psychedelic ocean
bulbous and copious with aurora borealis.
this glossy orb,
it holds every coronet in the world,
adoring atop its stand of branching brass.
when light plays keen, the colors web:
paisleys into jewels, galaxies, novas
emergent amid hubbell dewdrops
in a big-bang rendezvous.
the crystal blossoms,
somehow born from spaceless specks.
cosmic, impossible, this language
of anti-predictive comets,
only to collapse once more,
fated to render the nothingness
beautiful.=====================
10/5/24 eds
Mosquitoes on Screen
which bash stitches of tin.
an argot of bloodthirsty whines,
forever obsessive, sharp
and lean.
it is whispered
they once gave too much.
too honest.
too intimate.
nothing left in the aftermath of failed love
but a shriveled quest.
now dozens of skinless wraiths
scrape a cold, threadbare sieve,
poking for any drop of warmth.
any aura of contact.
any meager touch.
before seeking comfort
in the dark.
===============
10/6/24 eds ... I am the mosquito
6/16/24 ... more edits, somehow fascinated by this poem but never getting 'the prestige'
8/28/22 significant mods ... never get it right
A Ghost Leads Him
this elder he
touches but does not,
this psychopomp
who exists but no,
it flies through his memory,
salves its refugees,
until they incandesce
and collapse into a past now a
possessed accordion,
playing a song never composed.
this daredevil in his breath, his arched veins,
it streaks to push a rollercoaster higher and higher
through fervor and flight.
(this EKG, this oscilloscope, this cardiac peak ...)
as if his passionate extremes
had always been prisoners of a dull conformity
and only now by freeing them
can the mortar of the cells of his jail
crumble into blameworthy bricks--
(so much of his life was spent in brick ... )
rectangles of wood and stone.
he buried so much of himself
in a sturdy habitat long ago.
but now
(but now ...)
an aerial path flies through the rubble,
a new kind of steppingstone,
back upward,
toward some long-ago wounded
and yet dependable and honest
joy.
===================
10/7/24 eds
Crows in Wheatfield
flecks of pepper
in saffron stipples,
summer dreams
atoss on a straw bed.
a scythe could reap through
if it writhed like a snake,
feverish implement,
stroked to obsess.
i can almot hear the labor
vaporing off the canvas,
a jagged song that could
overwhelm my lobe.
this scene, it wavers,
a façade troubled,
a stung pond
perturbed by pigment
trying to ripple
back home.
================
10/6/24
My brother Gudger much liked the works of Van Gogh
Republicans Vote 2008
the people had their swill
and now throng the troughs,
not to digest but to vomit forth
what they were told to know.
each face puzzles at the caricature
of the one in tandem
as they stand in a cordoned assembly line
of the anguished and the grotesque.
a man holds a noosed monkey.
three women wear the same t-shirt:
a baboonish candidate
who sucks a banana and gloats.
there is talk
of terrorist homosexuality,
of negro delinquency,
and a liberal anti-christ
urgent to outlaw prayer.
but mostly guns.
and Barack Hussein Obama.
big-bellied clichés
with beer-red neckmeat
bluster and swagger,
while dog-fierce kids
fetch to return, return to fetch
the hate tossed when an adult sighs.
'unamerican liberal elites.'
'round them up.' 'brand them.'
'force them to leave.'
hours of this.
a vexed parade of the bitter.
it bristles as it circles,
as if to constrict the schoolhouse,
raring to get inside.
==========================
images based on news footage.
This poem is a way to get out my own hate and rage, focusing on racism. The enemy is not people. The enemy is racism and its effects.
Fence Wizard
nervous dagger,
no caesar to slay,
heat will not die
and it surely is king
of alabaster and tan,
the only flag known,
crumbling like the foothills,
a fuzzy kind of real
thick with blurry waves.
caffeine for cold-blooded veins,
which simmer more fervent
than any mammal,
making love to burning stone,
chest to chest;
one heartbeat enough for both,
the squamous belly sleek
against coarse, mummified clay.
it's an alliance so fast
it could flee in a blink,
disappeared to some nowhere,
evading the pluck of a kestrel.
other times
the fence wizard
sits like speckled dough,
impossible to snatch,
camoflauged by its oven-magic.
might, at long last,
the wizard choose the talons?
to witness, as a sage might,
the world from highest perch?
such has always been
the beautiful strategy:
staccato reconnaissance
from hairline eyes,
a snatch of clues
to surmise the truth
from fragments.
========
"Fence wizard" is a play on "western fence lizard," a common species in the chaparral.
Rainy Intersection
fat beads on phone wires
slide thick to drip,
numb as the drool of a monstrous Infant,
whose grey deformed pliant dome
stares down with mock horror
at the myriad slanted trajectories:
nothing but fizzle on a char of roads.
tires slice through the ceaseless slaughter
with the polite manners of dutiful butchers.
commuters,
those metal-cloaked lip-biters,
come and go, chug and roll, smoke and chug,
sit at attention, roll and inhale smoke
and chug and come to go to honk and brake and jerk to
peel-out screech cuss stress.
they come and roll and stop and go to roll to stop and go to come
and roll stoplights lines limits laws of a
not-so-friendly legalized mathematics.
such it is, this come-and-stop/go geometry
which enfolds the tin metal cloak
of each and every flesh-nucleus.
at least
so it is here, this intersection.
this watering hole
of the city’s motion sickness.
this particular hollywood hub-glut
of narcissistic pop music drama/mine.
what would a last prayer look like here?
splayed open on the never-ending concrete slabs,
vivisected by streetlamps, cleansed by polluted
rain,
picked over by the crashed claws
of wrecked dented shreds of tin metal
under the smog-plump Shadow?
=============
10/7/24 eds
San Fernando Valley, circa 1990's
Tujunga Arroyo
willow and nicotiana
hobo along the arroyo,
leafy plumage of anemic jungle birds.
strata stash squashed stones in the banks,
catastrophe upon extinction,
sabertooth pupils, long-slitted in black veins,
gazing above shark teeth.
my sandals, lost in the aftermath,
sink into dry quicksand
to kick up blossoms of dust.
empty orchids and not-really-there mallows
ogle me with their two-seconds of life.
i come to a place
where crows interpenetrate shadows,
both seeking shelter, scrutinous,
demanding proof that their feathers
will not soon die.
the gulch has ruptured here,
warded by the fronds of an old pepper--
a place where coyotes come to take rabbits,
and burrs cast hooks,
anglers at a waterless stream.
not so deep in the sand-hissed heat
minnow eggs bide their time.
yes, one day, algae will wave, the real thing,
victorious in immersion,
while frogs swell their sleek backs,
harrumphing about the short shrift
of amphibian orgies.
=======================
10/12/24 removed a word, modified a word
9/5/24 ... slight mods
Deselection
it was the age of wired golems,
the construction of a cold electronic nest.
cell by battery by cell
human smiles became bytes while
screens transformed into the consiglieri of dreams.
it was a marketplace for mothy hearts
seduced by googol spiders in fire-fast webs.
colorful saviors on pedestals of pixels
rushed to rise from luminous crypts and
commenced to flagellate transfixed eyes.
mouse idols invoked arrow-magic,
that clickety-prattle-quack-and-seethe of lightspeed lines,
so lurid in networks of conspiracy-
massive-multilayered-online hives.
no old-world psalm had predicted
such a contagion of connectivity.
hunted quick to infiltrate far
far far far far far far far
urgent to hawk a new kind of mind.
==============
10/10/24 eds
mmorpg
clickety = mouse clicks
etc.
Posts
All Comments
