Mexico

sidewalk to pavilion

inside we are waiting

music and dancing

a movie a boatride

not work nothing waiting

just escape and safety

heaven in mexico

Magical Ship

To a place
where we'll go
where no one ever knows

and we'll show them

and we'll show them

You and I brother
We're gonna take on the world
(take on the world)

We'll show 'em what we've got
show 'em that we're hot
break 'em til we've got what
we want / what we want

we're not gonna take it
we're not gonna fake it
this time,
we're gonna make it this time

so fire off the cannons and
batton the hatchets,
this ships pulling out in
the moat

to New York!

We're setting sail on
a Magical Ship
to New York
Christmas time in New York

In Seriousness

Much more Mick
Jagger than Rod Stewart
more Martha Stewart
than Martha Washington

even more Bill Gates
than Steve Jobs
and more jobs
than poetry

much more a stripper than
a dancer, more a taxer
than a free-lancer, an
argument than an answer

more like a rottweiler
than a retriever, an infection
than a fever, the quarterback
not the receiver

you get the picture?
the play-maker! the pirate!
the taker! the anthem-writer!
the soul-shaker! the orgasm-faker!

they will be the one's shoveling
the dirt on your casket long
before it's lowered, so let them,
let them, let them do it.

Tug-a-war

take my face, right off my skin
and put in on yours, tuck it in

take my voice, from off this page
dip it in your throat, without my rage

like the limpness of a teabag
arising as Atlantic Sun

like a image of Jimmy Carter,
on a Popsicle stick, with no eyes.

An Argument

I am the trumpet
and you are my clarinet
and you wail like woodwinds wail

from Fresno to Bakersfield
from Boston to Seattle's heals
we wail! Oh we wail!

and yes! I knew you might
have been right somewhere
near Delaware or on the Biloxi Bay Bridge

and my Ocean Springs reply
was no match for your Lafayette,
no excuses in Houston, you'd

hooked me in Las Cruces and by
Tuscan, I'd knew you'd won
and I forgotten how it had begun

but then by Vegas, we made love
in the back of the bus when I
remembered your affair in Dover,

Delaware. Oh Los Angeles came with
a breeze like winter orange trees
from the 1930s; some Pacific sneeze

onto our faces, then we'd laugh
at all our old places, baptized
on our knees in Venice Beach.

Sonnet for Sleeplessness

when everyone is sleeping sound at night
and your awake to click and clack; to write
to script a shallowness in lack of sleep
that search beyond the "interesting," the "deep,"
this kind of worn out passage one will find,
the steps, the marble treated so unkind,
and doors that swing so smoothly during day
will creak of untuned violins' decay
and yet, the lucidness of beat and meter
arrives as fast for author as for reader,
so read alloud these verbally-minded phrases
between the two, at least the one sings praises
for as the dark brings lightness to your dreams
this poet's rhythm sings, or so it seems.

Caught

teenagers in the window
children with the cookies
executives and their taxes

caught
caught
caught

oh the priests and the widows
the jailer and their pillows
the sailor on the bottombunk


caught
caught
caught

the Mayans and their scarific
the scientologist's advise
our Christian brethren; jesus CHRIST!

CAUGHT
CAUGHT
CAUGHT

to language in finite degree
to sigmund freud, shock therapy
and all your known psychology

caught
caught
caught

my sleepless night of poetry
where words will get the best of me
my muse, my fish, cast out to sea!

caught, caught, caught.

On Stillness

white noise
seems more gray
to me, like the

song of fog
scotch mist

like caskets closing

a noise not of
ghosts but of choices
chosen crudely like

burnt morning muffins
ten lords a leaping

ashes and ashes in snow

oh oh, slow, no slow
hello hello, like a white
afro, touched with picks

or fingertips
little licks

not like a TV with no signal

no, not a radio with no answer
a musicbox with no dancer
not a vixen with no pancer

oh no, just just maybe a
river of garbage or plastic

yes soothing, yes moving.

Rain Dog

Ho Ho
I've left high and dry
my son

like a cadallac
margarita with no
salt or

a nun with no
nightly prayer,
no way to hear

those silly
slick tongued
answers, not our

gold green dollars
or our agapantha
moonlit glancers

you've been to the
park, with the lighthouse
the silverlake echo place

ho ho,
I've known you before
you fat-faced little breader

you slender slung
hung
little reader

your eyes like thighs
and milk and cream
pushed desperate on the screen

simple answers nothing
mean; imagine my children
shaking hands and heads

look what he said!
Look at what the OLD MAN
SAID!

Light (and his dance on our eyes)

Fred Astaire
no one spoke about his rug,
his slick toupee tucked tight
Nono, not Fred's fake-hair

We stare at Fred, at his other
end; we watched the wonder of
his feet. That magician's touch
like air is his medium and

those tap-shoes are only
choosing when to grace the
ground; our Fred was free
from gravity and school dances

and awkward glances.
Christ, he could have had
a Davy Crockett Coon-skin Cap
or a stinking slicked-down skunk

but no living soul would care
about one hair on Fred Astaire.

2am

It's been about a month since I understood
what it meant to write a poem, or thought it could;
the conditions, the fluttering, the sleepless brain
the hunching the leaning the mild backpain

an A-typical assortment of words and phrases
orphan children of semantics: "who knows who raised us"
this callused singlemindedness, staggering graceless
like an man who fishes after youth with adult braces

Oh now! I'm not that kind of man who fains at sonnets,
the silly heartless blatherer pretending he's on it;
only a fool could think that he could sing his own praises,
but 2am has come again and I know she's faceless

My lord can you give me the tongue for speech,
cuz words and poetry seem out of reach.