====
When a psychotic, such as a malignant narcissist, rises to become the leader of society, it establishes a verdict of psychosis for society itself.
--Khyrina Vyyrheart, Soulful Solutions
====
(fictional quote related to my novel, A Future of Angels (unpublished)
Trying To Be Dead
who wasn’t dead or trying to be dead?
the load was easier. less heavier.
no tears like in crystal balls
which foretold the many ways you
would fail to try.
you could be a lot of things
in the quest for decomposure.
you could be harsh, fast and erotic,
or sedative and trinket-gamed.
you could be apron-dutiful
or march to the gun.
you could blow servile in the castle
which forced the original split
while standing erect
over those who serve you.
you could pray
to the god of gone nomads
who wandered deserts like sheep and goats.
and you could choose which side
of the flag to worship--white, black-and-
blue or carpet red.
but
it wouldn’t be the first time
you wanted to be exorcised,
the numerical sacrifice
of your identification card:
how it stored your computed behavioral soul
in various assimilated, acculturated
files.
=====================
9/10/26 ... "blow was a typo (freudian slip?) ... I am going to keep it in for now (forever?)
decomposure = play on decompose (death), breaking out of conformist composure, etc.
less heavier = always oppressive no matter what
=====
Eva Umlauf, a survivor of the Auschwitz Nazi concentration
camp and president of the International Auschwitz Committee, was dismayed.
"As Holocaust survivors, we never would have thought it possible that a far-right party would once again take its place as the largest parliamentary group in a German state legislature," she said. "This election result frightens us!"
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/far-right-afd-courts-conservative-support-after-historic-german-state-election-2026-09-07/
=====
Quest
day one
every fray of rot a tress.
the afterlife is here, right here,
this understory of vestiges.
life itself is entombed.
and yet they all continue to feed,
from sprig to trunk.
still, everyone knows
the dead lurk in the humus.
day two
more terrible than ghosts,
i could peel noses or pare lips,
ignoring the pleas
of the faces in birch bark,
or a toadstool’s lament.
it’s far too lucullan,
too awful what is demanded of us.
i ...
i am Saturn.
day three
the spruce are vicious gossips,
passive-aggressive of hiss and creak.
and yet they are not the damned.
day four
to rule the damned
is to be what they have been,
what they hate still
and yet also now envy--
and will serve if only for the chance
at a sprinkle, a fleet moment
of dawnish light.
day five
i could walk forever here,
among the corpses of moss
which lack all flesh,
far under the callous towers
of a few overlording oaks
and never seek
to return to this place, if i left,
‘in a while.’
===============================
Midnight On the Bridge
near a dunce-cap cone of light
an occasional car
slingshots down bottomless
highway,
the drivers not urgent
to find out how roofs
fell to populate the earth:
how some noble ideal had crowded itself
and shattered.
a mind is a molecule,
the city thick with them. so many swarm
that only collective purpose
combines to matter.
the chemical pulls
that bond us in grids
are also the traps that encase us
alone.
you can write about it on paper, on your arm,
in blood, or into the ghost-ocean of a screen.
god did this
for a reason,
you could state.
but the ekg
that the angels watch,
while listening to prayers,
is the New York Stock Exchange.
======================================
This poem was originally published in Halfway Down the Stairs in 2014. I am republishing past poems for I feel it could all end soon. I am old. I am experiencing grief at the steep decline of the USA. My heart literally twangs, now and then. And I have no money or insurance to see a doctor.
I have a love/hate relationship with my poems. My lover is in there, somewhere, and she’s
probably the only one I am ever going to have, and she remains as satisfying as
she is elusive.
Coachwhip
elevate through grass
like a flexible wand,
you supple ripple,
cast your spell on me,
until i too dance so well
in the liquid of a field.
coil within my mindheart-sense
you lithe creese
till we spiral together,
twin galaxy sleek of jewel,
onyx, pale and red,
when we twist
to devour and become
again and again and again
the throb of our own tails.
===========
creese = kris
ouroboros theme
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masticophis_flagellum_flagellum
====
In Albert Camus’s postwar novel “The Plague,” when dead rats
appear on the streets of the Algerian city of Oran, and people fall ill with a
mysterious disease, the local government and most of the citizens ignore the
signs until it is too late … Today, there are dead rats all around.
Margaret Macillan
"A New World Order Is Coming. We Aren't Ready."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/01/opinion/world-order-international-relations.html
Thoughts Of a Fly
the bumpers and slots
only pretend to let me steer.
i’m a ricochet
in a mischievous pinball show.
loops of strength
flirt with stretching velocity.
one lust-fed weekend zooms to enfold
the crisscrossing haze of time.
the game lacks horizon.
complex tumblers fail to resist.
i open the gate
everyone else thought tricky--
sure, agile, indefati-
gable and smooth--
to conquer on a rollercoaster
many mountains of feast.
Jacob’s rungs loom
in a honeycomb of prisms:
i ascend through acceleration,
through vector, through fraying yips.
a last green-fired blaze
of tensor and orgasm
burns away my crimes.
================================
This poem was originally published in Crack the Spine in 2013. I am republishing past poems for I feel it could all end soon. I am old. I am experiencing grief at the steep decline of the USA. My heart literally twangs, now and then. And I have no money or insurance to see a doctor. Getting medical help is not a right in my country. You have to earn it. And, frankly, I am tired of jumping through bureaucratic hoops, like a circus pony, to get money to see a doctor from the government. "You want to see a doctor? First, jump through this hoop. And then this one. And then maybe we will pay for you to get medical help. Maybe. Down the road."
Oak Springs Trail
musk of yerba santa,
rosemary and sage,
young yuccas erect
and sun-drenched
below spirals
of ochre-black hawk--
a single feather to fall,
my hand its candlestick,
wand of speckled flame.
lifting fingers high,
waxy with glistens,
i watch quill flicker
hot in july wind;
then release it to fly,
a soar on a wish
extinguishing us both
with glee.
=======================
Foothills off San Fernando Valley, 1990s
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