Tarnish Town

The potentates are marching from St. Paul,

Wearing the hats they stole from desert kings, 

More of them stuffed inside a tiny car 

Than Billy has Spaghetti-Os. The nurse 

Flaunts her prosthetic sword, says Opioids, 

And all fall down. In wheezing lungs, shaved heads, 

And intubated families they fail 

Of faith. The potentates ride in, clean up 

The tarnished town, a sink of billyclubs 

And graft, and scrub the spangled bedroom doors—

They manage with panache and housemaid’s knees. 

The little children smile and pack their bags 

And hide under the porch until the bus, 

The friendly yellow bus with plastic seats, 

Opens its doors and swears it is today.

The Book of Simple

The Book of Simple teaches you how to make

Your gut behave. It tells a tale of long
And distant. How, without it, can you steep
Teabags of Life? Would you like her to be bleached
And buxom, do you need to make her love
The man you were, unlikely as that seems?
You've got to go there. Really. You go there.

Of course it isn't cheap, not having been
Online auditioned or a paperback
At Harold's Half-Price Inwits. There's a crone
In Crawford with a stack in her Tuff Shed,
Guarded by gargoyles and a papillon;
And drop-ins she doesn't like are mostly dead
And numerous. When Lifetime tried to shoot
A movie version there, the black was white.
I bought one at her jumble sale last May.
It changed me round. Now I can call to mind
The minor dramatists I never read,
And then some. And the foxes stop to stare.
They catch some scent, a brief response to pain.

It can't be memorized. It must be read
Each time as though from scratch. The crone once made
A golem in a golden-thread sombrero
Who danced at her command. The April rains
Reduced him to a plaster statuette.

Made in Crawford, it says there on the sole. 

Epic In The Making

  

This was the edict: When the snow first fell,

He headed for the High Country, to stay

Until the bears took out their winter trash

And mockingbirds regained their higher range.

Meanwhile, he’d cover one royal family

In hexametric verse—Plantagenets

One January, Hapsburgs, though he fell

Asleep, spilling his ink, in staunching them.

The lynx, extinct, as all good families knew,

Admired declamation, and he fed

The shrews his extra feet. I say, he said,

Attempting the Romanovs, when comets fell,

Or airplanes, on his field of vision, there

Between his clothesline and the Finland Train.

Pluvial Morphology

Someone has painted letters on the walk.
The rain invents a ouija board. It points
LQK ATT, precatory and sibylline.
And soon effaced in promiscuity.
The walk now stands for everything at once,
Like dreams and abstract artifice. The rain,
It raineth only some days here, a treat
Of dissolution. Carry me away,
Its strain, its burden. We must quite forget
We all go somewhere: somewhere in the sea
O REASON NOT THE NEED is spelled in kelp.
The silt holds every sound that can be said.

Cartoon Love

  

1

Ye Olde McDuck notwithstanding, swimming

in shekels never seemed much fun—the crunch

and jingle of a pool? No, maybe not.

But think about the Beagle Boys voyeuring,

the salivating nephew in his sailor

blues, the troika jabbering like woodchucks;

and every ducklette Duckburg knows is damp,

ready to peel her thong off in the bullion.

Throw the poolboy a grand gratuity

and drive Miss Daisy off to the cabana.

Under a smiley moon Donald sings love

songs to the jangle of the ukulele.

No one can understand a consonant.

Is pain more painful when you're bottom duck?

2

Beep beep. Boop boop. The flapper runs full tilt

at the canyon wall, perspective in her head

enough to carry her though paint and stone.

The coyote follows, thinking her the bird,

the acme of his hope, dinner. Sees stars.

They say that men get off on buxom drawings,

pulchritudinous bunnies, collagened.

Granny passes on bulldogs stuffed with pecs.

She's holding out for tabloid zillionaires.

You dream of Tweety with the light brown hair?

Consider life insurance and tuition.

The coyote runs, his legs a blurring wheel,

and falls for lack of faith, the canyon floor

rising. He passes the anvil on his way.

Classical Education

 Greek to me, it was just as though I read

A language I had never known, but wanted

To understand. Black squiggles on the page,

A scent of frat boys drinking beer on Sunday—

Pindar, Sophocles, and the Kappa Sigs.

I filled my mouth with pebbles—well, more like

Gravel: it lined the sea millennia

Ago, when I was still invertebrate—

Orating made me sound like I was mumbling,

Oatmeal and not Demosthenes. I thought

Of those of my friends who had studied Latin

While I picked Russian for its false prestige

And didn't learn even that. They could read Virgil

And think of Homer. I now read the funnies,

Laugh at them, too. I orated some oatmeal

And thought of slave girls, of the spoils of purchase,

How I could compliment in my own tongue:

Hey, baby, want to dance? I once knew Russian.

I thought, there must have been some Greek louts, too,

And they spoke Greek, even when they were toddlers,

But didn't say, It's all English to me.

They didn't know the stuff they didn't know.

Under the olive trees they thought of maples

Not even a little, wished to grasp the form

Of The Infield Fly Rule not all, nor thought

Of leaving home for Hollywood. Not once.

That made them classical, even with acne,

Even when sure they were misunderstood,

Phallically challenged, or divinely sent

To free the boy next door from some damned girl.

Mendocino

 

Mendacious mendicants of Mendocino,

They partied hard, men all, until they failed

To do without their women, then they left.

Turned right, and marched into the hinterlands,

A mess of diphthongs, if I ever saw one.

The women hadn't noticed they were gone

And didn't feign that it was otherwise.

They'd all been cracking goobers, drinking tea—

Tea was what they called it— telling whoppers,

"Love makes the world go bonkers"— crap like that.

The men claimed they'd been powered by the Lord,

If offered sex, to cleanse the blackened heart.

No one believed them. No one even smiled.

Their hearts beat on beneath the soot and ash,

And Mendocino never noticed nothing.