A not so new anything anymore

January 2016 – The terrible now is a like calendar quick sand. You blink and your shadow stands in front of you shrugging and taunting saying in an echo- Will you at least try and keep up with me ?

List of the End of January

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8OKiuHPpp4

(audio version)

Snow coal cone lump ashtray pustule
shrinking in the corner of the parking lot.
(Ah….early spring)

Sound of clogged carburetor gagging on itself.
(Great…now you’ve flooded it)

Lost key trunk eyehole with yellow handed
long nick Phillip’s screwdriver protruding.
(Nope that didn’t work either…keep swearing)

False dawn slapping wind ganging away
slamming cheap tin bed frame freight train
ready to orgasm and derail.

Centipede shadow crawling measuring spoons
scurrying across the dingy white moon soaked linoleum floor
looking like a pool of quicksand.

Brown plastic garbage can rolling down the block
yawning in the gutter.

Air raid siren blast exploding
in a razor blade cable running through your ears
jerking your head off the sound sleep pillow.
(This was only a test)

Child’s dream speak night talk back lit in
orange dragon space heater steel teeth
hissing at the bars on the crib.
(Some childhood memories are best forgotten.)

Fresh creme of the New Year
curdling in the calendar’s carton.
(Who’s face is that on the side?”

-Another Rubber Eden 1/89

A New Law for Murphy

-Quatroche’s Postulate

If you are looking for something specific
You will never find it.
But while digging in stuff
Run across any number of things
You didn’t want
And further more
Never wanted to
Have to look
At again.

*
New Year Fragments 2012

My Disturbing Presence

Remember….

Phones don’t kill drunks

Drunks kill phones

and

Friends don’t let drunks use phones….

Call me ?

Deconstructing Un-decorating

She took down
all the Christmas lights
in me.

You Must Remember This……

You-
Maybe us…
were at our best
when it was at
someone elses expense.

I guess the fundamental
Things really do apply
as time goes by.

January Letters 2012

So soon the light struggles to return
to fill the new year wolf ticket sky
in a lingering tentative twilight
towards some vague promise of Spring
merely a rumor of rejuvenation
left in a hand written note
taped to a bus shelter on the corner
of 33rd St. and Lexington
asking you in rhyme by name

What did all the years mean….. …… ?

I recall writing those January letters
imploring you to reconsider
that annual ritual of tossing
the poet out of your life.

Now as you have finally succeeded
you still read this in stubborn justification
safe in the distance from these words afar
telling you exactly
what you never had the heart
to tell me
to my face.

Mute the voice
Blind the eye
drain the last pool
of affection dry.

What is written here now
has a place beyond words
where language is the
shallowest of vehicles
for sequestered emotions
scattered to the four corners
of isolation, exile
estrangement and banishment.

Distance now is the key
after you have left another
in so very deep
that the hope of a journey back
to all the lost moments are everything
that you can no longer keep.

-From Got Abstract 2014

NEXT !

–For R.B

The wonderful life Christmas is over
One tries not to be depressed.
Maybe re-read the Bruatigan piece
From 1963
Where he and his friend were
so depressed over Kennedy’s public execution
that they took pictures
of discarded Christmas trees
abandoned in the gutter
and then proceeded to get drunk
while watching a slide show of them later.

I get that.

All those rolls of left over wrapping paper
all about the place.
The lights that need to be taken down
before the neighbors start with
the “white trash” wisecracks

One thing you can say about Christmas
in this post modern area,
Once it’s over.
It’s dead.

A lot of build up.
A product orgy climax

And the day after ?
Forget about you

The day after Christmas
is like nailing a wood screw
into the back of an old friend
Who shows up once a year for a visit.

And as he walks out the door.
You slam and lock it on his heels
Hissing, “and don’t come back till next year,
You pain-in the-ass bastard.”
Thankful ?
Sure.

This year I was thankful I didn’t end up
in the paraplegic chair
in a nursing home in Baldwin
after that nasty fall
down the Cold War stairs
back in your hometown
that ended up with you
kissing some concrete.

Instead I made it back here on Christmas Eve.
Just in time to have a good cry
With Alastair Sims.

Greetings from Gridville 12/03

The Dybbuk Dreams

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfHi4NQZeTk

(audio version collected on Vanishing Breed)

It was in the first few nights of the New Year
when all promise and disaster were as unopened mail
that the past had a walk in his sleep.

The Dybbuk’s hands opened old draws
shuffled through forgotten pages
Pausing to repeat a line of a letter
here and there.

Ashes were stirred and long dormant old flames set free
to flicker. Then the night faces could dance once more.
Night faces coming back to visit shining
eyes to glow back into.

Another year rolling itself out like an immense black wing .
Your sleeping form swept along in this night flight,
those waking hours, now the specter, this was the soul
strolling hand in hand with the eternal freedom of
time asleep.

She walked once more upon the mores, in a chilly thick fog.
Here where she had always known that he waited for her
In between anger and consequences,
in this dreamscape of quicksand recall where mushroomed
marsh islands of what might have been.

They both returned to this shadow realm of still photographs
hung and propped in the endless stark arms of winter.
Here where the past stood naked and true.
Both came with small hands grasping deep into the heart’s
pocket. Each visited at different points
along the dream curve, with separate dependencies and
versions of the same story.

They left messages here for each other.
The last word over and over. The promises of reconciliation
and forgiveness. The sensation they shared of never being
able to meet face to face again, outside of this place
of half light sand deep grey pools. Always to return to
the same beaten path, in the corner of the dream.
This place where the images of each others face
in those frozen photos snared arrested looks
and eyes of love and delight that once were shared.

They both returned to this place, every so often
to get a face full and
look down at the others footprints
left in the path
from the night before.