Sins
anemone tentacles
on the throat of a dove,
or threads unwinding
from a beggar’s coat,
they barely bind,
hints of jail or guilt,
a trace that won’t sleep.
adulterous silence.
when it’s dark enough,
they chant, soft as dew,
patterns in clammy octaves.
the wards of skeleton keys.
an armoire opens. who guessed?
grandparents pine there,
their frowns turn thumbscrews.
hands secretive as moths.
==========================
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 lies of men,
smiling still,
wanton as she goes,
shack to shack,
or mansions of the heart,
every accident or bed
beleaguered.
ants to lions, none remark.
but humanity, profuse,
gasps to curse when lungs stall,
cashiering chains and chores.
elephants, they dwindle down tusky roads.
but ill to violent crowds
beat on misunderstood ground,
mawkish as they sink,
clutching their wasted lives.
birds chirp last fermatas.
insects chirr in choirs.
these, the widow feels,
never turn to dust.
only those tethered to tombstones,
or ladderlike prayers,
or who cling to lists of what wasn’t or was--
because because because …
and so it goes,
shack to shack, bed to bed,
mansions of the heart,
wherever desperation lies naked.
=======
I would prefer to use "wym" instead of the male-aligned "men." "Wym" escapes gender. But the neologism would be distractive.
===========
A Love Poem
my dawns and heights,
the mansions of my throat and heart and breath,
the rootstock of my life,
my laughter and reflections,
each molecule and aura--
her hands a sextant. such hands!
the lockpicks of my evolution.
and her eyes redolent healers.
her body swoops and slopes with my avalanches,
agile over my cordillera chest.
my tides, my fault lines, my fails,
lean into her oceans.
i float in her fluent bed.
candles serenade us, those wooed stars,
multi-celestial, unfathomable, irreligious.
this mystery of her.
this fair hypnosis, she
melts protean under my kisses,
shivers a rain of pleasures
through a lack of my secrecy.
her whispers write crescents of music.
within our love, its scale of hourglasses,
nocturnes or sun-burnished,
whether chasm or pinnacle,
seasons that sprout or sink,
aloft or wept, rough-clad or satin,
i need not search
sculptress of my muscles,
weaver of my moved veins,
she
seduces as art, as lost inspiration,
this hurt magic that i am, or forgotten,
so in each other’s arms to play,
seamless in this theater of senses. alive
pulse by pulse, motion by motion,
where tempests behold what must be,
revealed in us, to form stairs.
=====================
Still Life Late
wafer
of pearl and eve,
dim,
soon to fade,
i see myself
in its weak depth,
this gloss
that daubs my thoughts,
this nimbus, this depression,
this puddle,
a dusky last offering
of communion bread.
all hue wanes
from such tender heat.
my fingers
mimic wax,
slow yet fluid,
melted then caught
in reflection.
=====================
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.
=================
Alder and Deer
a doe in the woods
shies from an effortless signpost
of thorns.
none of the thousandth
scrape her.
hasteless
she flows,
snaps no twig.
brittle jags of shadblow
comb her fur
in quiescence.
drops of sun glister,
sifted by noonday birches,
when she cranes
fair.
============
Quiet Bay
azure basks in slack breezes.
it's hard to tell reflection
from lobster boat.
water scolds skipped rocks
with successive brief mouths.
nothing is supposed to be quick.
clouds are origami.
rocks gargoyles.
the sway of an arm
unwanted flame.
=================
At the Keyboard
fingertips. bishops and rooks
primed to slide.
diagonal.
orthogonal.
hostage to a rash hopscotch,
obsessed and servile
over sleek tiles glisteny,
troublesome as Darth Vader’s chest.
eyes track mumbo jumbo.
ears dog a ridicule of clicks.
hours of this.
hands now
twin crabs in a shuffle.
fingertips--now--
a faltering clog dance.
heart yanked
as if in a time machine.
from Z’s to ampersands,
drowsy then aroused.
commas are chores, but then semen.
hyphens are hymens
losing innocence.
how long can this length of repeated period marks
last?
fingerprints erode, now, drip by drip.
they lose face on the geo-topo-creative-conversational
map;
and so ponder whether to retreat,
satisfied enough with the mission,
into video games.
===================
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
and 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 sent a shovel, not a scalpel,
to extract the corpses.
==========
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 corolla's curves
to dance a spell, whirl it, flourish it,
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,
ascending in a helix.
=====================
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 cars on an asphalt abacus,
and squawking at the blur
which bakes their onyx.
only seven jacaranda maidens
redeem this hell-tinged town,
drizzling soft flakes
to dust the curbs an ephemeral purple.
a fat owl hides
in the crook of one trunk,
same as bark,
face more of a knothole
than the gourmand it will be
when night unveils
a banquet of espionages:
a prosciutto of gophers.
a platter of voles.
=================
7/19/23 ... 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
eyes slay,
razors of gleam
that open the heart without
removing clothes.
naiveté made them weapons.
a gash in the hideout of my chest.
such is the pain
of emotions that bubbled,
once revealed,
innocently enough
forsaking odds.
so brash in my foolhardy leaps.
unprepared for the swift
pleasure that fled,
faster than the giddy race
of ridiculous pulse,
fallen into the oubliettes
of an unkind stare.
======================
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,
i dive in, immerse, in sync with the imp,
vivid, such verve, so vivacious.
photons frolic and paragons flow.
a hypermath of hula hoops.
i skip to strum the chords of Saturn.
a tweed jacket turns to psychedelic ocean,
the ocean a bulbous aurora borealis.
this orb, it holds every coronet in the world,
adoring atop its stand of brass.
if light plays keen, the colors web:
paisleys whorl into jewels, and galaxies nova,
merging with hubbell dewdrops
in a big-bang rendezvous.
how the crystal blossoms,
born from spaceless specks.
cosmic, impossible, this language of comets--
only to collapse, fated once more
to render the nothingness
=====================
Mosquitoes on Screen
bashing 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 generosity
but shriveled quests to guzzle.
such is the legend.
yes. and now
dozens of skinless wraiths
scrape on the cold, threadbare sieve,
poking any drop of warmth.
any aura of contact.
any picayune of touch.
before seeking comfort
in the dark.
===============
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,
flies through his memory,
its refugees,
till they incandesce
and then collapse.
the past now
a possessed accordion,
playing a song never composed.
this daredevil in his arched veins,
it streaks to push the rollercoaster
to higher fervor and flight.
(this EKG wave, this oscilloscope ...)
as if mental extremes
are prisoners of a dull conformity.
and only by freeing them
can the jail crumble into blameworthy bricks.
(so much of his life was spent between bricks...)
bricks, cubes, gravestones,
he buried so much of himself long ago.
but now
(but now ...)
the ghost offers a tortuous path:
fresh rubble, new steppingstones,
back upward,
toward some wounded yet dependable
joy.
===================
Crows in Wheatfield
flecks of pepper
in saffron stipples,
summer dreams
atoss on straw beds.
a scythe might reap through
if it writhed like a snake,
feverish implement,
stroked to obsess.
i can hear the labor,
vaporing off the canvas,
a chain song that could
overwhelm my lobe.
it wavers, this scene.
a stung pond, a façade troubled.
peace,
perturbed by pigment,
ripples.
================
Election Day 2008
the people had their swill,
and now throng the troughs,
not to digest more, but to vomit up
what they were told to know.
each face reacts to the caricature
of the one in tandem,
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.
big-bellied clichés
with beer-red neckmeat
bluster and swagger,
while dog-fierce kids
fetch to return, return to fetch,
the hate tossed between sighs.
the unamerican elites.
round them up.
brand them.
force them to leave.
hours of this.
a vexed parade of the bitter.
how it bristles,
as if to constrict the schoolhouse,
raring to get inside.
==========================
Obama vs McCain 2008, 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 colors known,
crumbling like the foothills,
a fuzzy kind of real
thick with blurry waves.
caffeine for cold-blooded veins.
they 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.
a romance so fast
it could disappear, flee to blink.
gone to some nowhere
to slip the pluck of a kestrel.
other times the fence wizard
sits like speckled dough,
impossible to snatch
in its oven-brave magic.
could it though, at long last,
choose the talons, as a sage
might glance the world
from a final height?
such has always been
the beautiful strategy:
staccato reconnaissance
from hairline eyes
to reap the truth
from fragments.
========
"Fence wizard" is a play on "western fence lizard," a common species in the chaparral.
Rainy Intersection
beads on phone wires slide fat to drip,
numb as the drool of an infant,
bald deformed pliant dome.
it stares down with mock horror
at the slanted trajectories:
how they end in hot water, empty as run off,
a fizzle on a char of roads.
tires slice through with the polite manners
of dutiful butchers.
commuters,
those metal-cloaked lip-biters,
come and go, roll and smoke, chug,
sit at attention, roll and come to go, peel-out, honk,
jerk, chug, screech, cuss, stress
to come and roll and stop to go and roll to stop and go to come,
roll stoplights, lines, math, laws (something's coercive
here!),
this organized but not-so-cooperative nor friendly mathematics,
such as it is, this come-stop purgatory
for each and every flesh-nucleus.
this watering hole of the city’s motion
sickness.
this glut of selfish pop music drama/mine.
what would a last prayer look like,
splayed open on these never-ending slabs,
vivisected by streetlamps, cleansed by polluted
rain,
picked over by claws of wrecked tin
under the starless Shadow?
=============
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, both scrutinous,
demanding proof that the blackness
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 vivid backs,
harrumphing about the short shrift
of amphibian orgies.
=======================
Deselection
it was an age of wired golems,
the construct of humanity's cold electric nest.
cell by battery cell,
smiles became bytes of a vampire,
screens the concierge
of dreams.
it was a marketplace of mothlike hearts
sorted by googol spiders
in fire-fast webs.
a savior of pixels
on a pedestal of rush,
colorful ghosts
risen from luminous crypts
to agitate eyes.
arrow-magic captured flesh:
a seduce of mouse idols
lightspeed in icon lines,
jingle, prattle and seethe.
sex-bloated orgies, murders,
lurid in networks of thigh.
panem et circenses.
it was contagion
no psalm had predicted:
the great new servers of the temples
hunting quick to infiltrate far--
far, far, who knew this death?--
urgent to perform and hawk
a new sort of mind.
==============
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