No longer believe in beliefs.

Doom is a belief.

Attitudes change.

Doom is an attitude.

Be set free.

(Brought to you by the no matter no mind, no mind no matter lineage).

Trash day is Wednesday

In this neighborhood

Though it used to be Thursday

Arguing with it is as sensible as

Forgetting it

Just ask New Romans

So trash day is a cadence

A bloodletting of our bloated lives

One best accepted

And embraced

So it doesn’t use you

It might be helpful to call on childhood slumbers

Sweat and grit, sand and sun screen,

Slivers of hay and the occasional ant

We’ll lay our tattered bedding to sun

And inquire about old tanning techniques

The kids will see it as camping out

Which it is, but due to empty gas cans

If the perturbed locals sink into their cacophony of dreams

More of us will see the stars

So sentry-duty, rotating like menu-prep, gets a night off

Long ago I was given a young logger’s bed for a night

Dirt clods and splinters meant he slept in his boots

I can’t say I was comfortable and thought for sure

I’d have lice by morning

You see where this is going

We vow to fill in any bunker, silo or missile chamber, for the only things that should be “put in the ground” are vegetables and yield signs. 

my card table, holding up

a soldier’s care package

returned to sender…

Mostly because life is like an unremitting rope burn

And my hands are tired

Memories of when I nearly died

Nearly excite the rocking chair

That exposed canyon stone, wobbling

Beneath my ankle

The skidding dirt bike halted one foot

From the cliff edge

The dumb antics involving trains

That I won’t mention here

It’s too bad the jabbering schizophrenics

Don’t listen to themselves

The way I’ll ignore

Every kindness mailed

To overseas soldiers

As you trust not your neighborhood ground

You are already lost

Whose embrace will cradle you

As you chill slowly, bleeding out

Alienated, this dirt unknowing your name, Uncaring of your story. 

How grave

Man o man your estrangement

Bled out to shiny things. 

Absorption takes time and 

Feeling tendrils

You did not allot yourself…

May there be some novitiate 

In far off land 

hearkening back 

Your whispered mention. 

Spain Untitled #1

My lungs will be far afield

While my yearning holds its breath

On your shoulder and your neck

Like a gecko. 

If you look for me

Remember when we first held each other

Our pineal glands lipping and smacking

Towards each other from across continents 

Teenagers, such surging reverence

Halting my breath cold

The memory now so confabulated after endless replays I’m not sure whose throat bore itself openly in perfect trust

Here, take my bones and stir 

Whatever needs stirring 

My spine to pry open any needed treasure chest

If you call me

I’ve already answered 

I’m your favorite shirt

Dreaming you back to your fiercely, fervent hounds, and the most exquisite dessert of my hungry, loving regard

Fists called out reflexively 

As all caresses now reduce to poker hands

It matters that we no longer

Matter

Storage rooms holding more rights 

Than the mayor’s daughter standing at the community well

Well. Tears may fall in a blade’s revenge

Cheer it on? it’s hydration of sorts

It’s what you settle for

A few seconds of cool marble

In the blurry heated abyss of night

What’s bargained for blood

What’s stolen from fatigue

The ash of your boy

Melted into that scream upward cutting

Below your jawline

Between this, the pneumatics of desolation 

And desiccation of well water 

Count the butterflies 

And jugs of petrol 

New lessons for kindergartners 

Curricula cycled back to story

(Since the book burnings 

We lost our spines)

Boldly kids decide our new currency:

Guitar picks

Like salmon some elders

Swim back upstream - east

Beginning the long haul work

Parting out the dioceses 

(Pews to desks)

For reclamation

Law had its run, now

Its toll-keepers aslumber 

Old wolves supervise again

As billboards and cinema screens

Oblige the flinty seasons to

Rust…

Yes. Yes you do. You just don’t like the answer. Because given similar circumstances we know we might likely do that same dark or crazy thing. Or at the very least, that we are capable of it. If you think you wouldn’t, that you’re so different or special, then you have not truly wrestled with your shadow. 

To your side humming our soliloquy

Before we deafen to beauty

To steer you to all that is radiant

Before our retinas burn through from dopamine

Until the sun warms these stones again

“Lights out!” Means darkness

Shall we not walk with both legs?

One of import, the other of urgency

Because we’re all playing it now

This ground game of a new era,

Pretending to calmly stroll

Off grid, forever bartering for good will.

Though all known wise councils are undone

You stand eager, like a mother, for my questions

Yet I come to say

The saplings have lost their drip and

Our weeping willows left whilst we slept

You don’t quite speak, but your eyes

Ask “How can this be?”

And now I inquire

When and why the harvest seeds were bought?

The soil unspooled, licked clean by winds?

The water a latrine of scorn

Pissed in while your neighbors

Warmed their infants’ milk

Though all known wise councils are undone

I come to you a seeming supplicant…

Yet we continue to float to the bottom

Lake Mead bares old bones

Like a child’s first bicycle rusting in tall grass

This is my anger now, salt tried tears

We hope you’ll cough on

To the kindness in your eyes

Yet they were so discerning 

I settled as an escarpment 

Around your speech and breath

I guess you could say

I was ill prepared 

For such piercing gaze

So I blanketed your heat

In our subsequent days

Know I strived 

But also know that longing

Never stretches far enough

When it comes to you

And your kind discerning ways. 

Skidally against the robot backdrops 

Keep em guessing

Before algorithm gets your number

Are we variable enough?

Creepy, no?

That digits begot digits that now 

Don’t need our digits?

Watch that robot backdrop

Be the jackrabbit 

Keep em guessing

You, poet, be the last to die out. 

Like a tight rope walker 

with no safety harness

Like every few rockets self-combust

And a few good men 

fall to their deaths 

for any decent skyscraper

Older folks still save it for puppies

Teenagers every Saturday night

Drag race in bucket seats

So ER nurses know us by name

Kiss me with all abandon

It’s only death that cheats

The patchouli in Berkeley 

Spoiled into thyme

The crimson light of sun bends around you

Well, I pretend it does.

Then I recall

No sun near us is crimson

Must be the blood in my eyes.