Ehrmehgerdicron! A poem:

When will it end?
Plague blown on panic wind
To fall on man and dirt the same
Dust and droplet in fogging haze
To end perhaps
Perhaps in shame
As fools fly to evade
Ever comes the big charade
The show, the tent
The acts unfold
Bought and paid
With tickets sold
By men of means
To foster all their evil deeds

Liberty falling

We bleed liberty

Her lifesblood

Spattered and pooled below

Grasping reason reaches

In vain

To understand

The meaning of the pain

With weakened limb

And fading brain

Quickly darkening sight

Closes in

And

She succumbs

Without a sound

And fades away

Death of the hero

He lay beneath the cold

Dark roots reaching down

As dead as the day he died

He lay beneath the cold

His dreams untold

In the light and warm sunshine

As dead above as down below

He lay beneath the cold

He couldn’t tell with lips of stone

His dreams unknown

A hero gone in hate

Alone in the cold down below

His heart now as still

As his hope

Shit on a shingle

It was a brief respite

The warm comfort of home

Steaming into the cold night

It was Shared ’round low fires

That reflected off the rolled wire

Glinting like stars in the darkness

Amid the raucous din of the mess tent

The clank of tin cups and mess pans

Replaced that of rolling treads

The rumbling death

That hunted down the small groups of men

Praying under the Aspen

Laughter, that medicine so rare

Played like wind through the camp

And peace for a moment was here

The food, always to be remembered

Was the only reminder

That they were still men

For a night

If only for a night

They could sleep

But tomorrow

It was back to the fight

Dedicated to my Father Lee Roy Jarrett, 359th Co. engineers U.S. Army, 1941-1946

Cuban missile crisis

When the pale blue sky

That blankets the gulf

Turns rippling red

In orange hue

And thunder rumbles

Without abate

To the shelter!

To the shelter!

Before it’s too late!

Steel doors and canned goods

All below ground

Tuck and cover and pray

You don’t hear the sound

Is the world that insane?

How far have they Gone?

Say another prayer

And hope you see dawn

D-Day of love

And all that time
And all that love
In the end
Came to mean nothing
And the dreams of the young
Oh, those passions
Died on the beaches
Shot down storming life
Killed as surely as any man
Put to their end
And they bled out
All that they had
Tattooing the sand
With all their crimson hopes
Until the next tide
Erased them all
In shifting colored eddies
And washed them out to sea
To be gone forever

Shades of Amber

I’m hoping that she lives now in the green pasture
That’s nestled into the curve of the forest
Outside of the dappled dewy shade
And hued moistness
The blue sky running like water above
And the lazy trickling creek running it’s course below
All the red clay gone
Cut through to shale and rock
By the water that cares nothing but to run
I hope that she has a place here
A place in the meadow in the Sun
A place to be warm
After all the cold she had in life

Shine, perishing republic

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening

to empire

And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the

mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots

to make earth.

Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence;

and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly

long or suddenly

A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:

shine, perishing republic.

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening

center; corruption

Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there

are left the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,

insufferable master.

There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught – they say –

God, when he walked on earth.

Robinson Jeffers

Hate poem written for a friend

Succubus

Love is a lie
Because she makes it that
Sordid and dirty
Drunkenly whispered into the ears of other men
Dingy sweated sheets
Makes the temple
She preaches her lies from
Love cannot be truth to her
Because love gives
And all she can do is take
She has greed in her heart and soul
That makes her claw at anything she wants
Like gold
She consumes men and sex and passion
Like Dionysys himself
But there is no love in her
Her still heart is cold and dead
And all she has
For the one who waits at home for her
Are lies of love

Rain

The last piece” The drought” is a sequel to this earlier piece

She sits in the cold rain
And lets the dark night weep onto her skin
She does the only thing that he can’t
Which is to feel
She is as cold as him now
But she breathes
Weeping into the night
But breathing nonetheless
Still having life
Even as the cold sting
Robs her of her warmth

The drought

It was like waiting for the rain to come

Waiting for the drops to strike the parched dust and feed the earth

Hoping into blue skies and cotton clouds

That something would form

Would come

Given by grace or God

And it was that God awful wait

Not knowing from day to day

If she would live or die

It was as bad as the wait at a death bed

Waiting into the dawn for the dying gasps

And then one day it came

The skies opened

She told him that she wanted to decorate for Christmas

No tree or gifts and not even the inside of the house

But he knew

As soon as she said it

The wait was over

The rain had come

The water would run in the fields

She would live

Simple pleasures

 

She had become a pale wraith
Just a ghost of the girl gone
Blondness and whiteness faded into one
Dead already
But not yet really
Still breathing
But with no heart beating
Nothing warm or filled with love
Just the pinch of the needle
Stinging in her arm
Her only smile
For that pleasure
But that too would soon be gone
And she would be cold and still
And she would wait in her bed
Frozen like a statue
Waiting for someone to find her
And consign her to the ground

Yo Yo Ma – Soul of the tango

I remember

When we still danced like we were young

Under the silvered moon ’round the crackling fire

Spilling wine and laughter

Late into the night

Our own private party

Until the dawn of the day

When we still danced

Like we were young

The deep end

I should have stayed in the shallow end of the pool
Getting nothing wet but my feet and legs
Risking nothing more than a chill
But I’m drowning
Choking on all of the right choices I’ve made
I’m drowning on all my loyalty and love
My lungs are filling and I die
I die
The air that I try to breathe
It’s not air
And my lungs fill while I panic
Clamping,biting and heaving
And I’m in the deep end of the pool
Drowning
Feet trying to find the bottom
Drowning on people dying and hurting
Drowning in all the pain that they are not willing to face
And I’m under the water with no way out
And I don’t know what’s worse
To die and stifle and suffocate
Or to wade in the shallow end of the pool
And not care and just watch
While everyone else
Slowly goes under

R.I.P. Little Brer

I have courted
her for years
showing her
kindness
and love
She in turn
has evaded me
like a ghost
gone
just out of grasp
never there
when I reached
I have longed to
touch her
feel her warmth
her softness
comfort her
in my arms
But she was
never there
until today.
I reach for her
and my hand
finally finds her

The day after Monday and reasons to still get out of bed

My sweetheart

And to the boy who keeps breaking her heart

I will drive 2000 miles to break your left leg off and shove it up your ass

Don’t be a dick and piss Uncle Jay off

It sucks to be a poet

Some days it sucks

To be a poet

To have words

Softly banging

In your head

Clouding your sight

With visions

Of things pictured

Or perceived deep

Within your brain

Incomprehensible

And duplicitous

Swirling and straining

To chain

Into verse or prose

The Goddesses of words

Unasked and uninvited

Laboring in your mind

Squatted down and

Birthing broken strings

Of words

That linked correctly can

Make them demi- gods

Half God

And

Half lyric

Spelling out the Iliad

Perhaps…

But you are left

Walking through the day

In a daze

Quietly tasting words

As they flood

Into your mouth

And onto your lips

From the jumbled maze

Inside your brain

Vote from the rooftops

When tyranny sings
And gunshots ring
Then it’s time to cast my vote
From rooftop high
To mountaintop
I will make every vote count
In the  mean time now
And the mean time here
I am sitting this one out

 

Haha!

Not A-mused

Maybe I have nothing to say today
But you won’t accept that
You secretly slip words into my brain
Like a tongue sliding between closed lips
Suddenly and unexpected
A moment of shock and surprise
Yes, I went to peck you on the cheek
And you slipped me the tongue
Maybe I don’t want your words kissing me
Your passion pouring in my mouth
Hot and torrid
Sliding soft and wet on my lips
Maybe today I want to be left alone
But you won’t accept that
You are always nagging me

 

Yeah, my muse slipped me the tongue

It can suck sometimes to think in poetry

Really, think about it

 

The dogs

The dogs have all had a piece

They lay and eat their bloody feast

Yet still he does, still he stands

That tattered remnant of a man

With just enough flesh to go around

To sate the slavering red eyed hounds

But they’re almost done

They crave for more

Not this sorry motherf@cker

He’s out the door

They stop and howl

‘What have we done’

They’ve put their food upon the run

They snap and snarl

All in vain

Aught to stop their hunger and pain

They cry with sorrow

To the empty wind

‘Please come back we’re famished again’

 

@1992