First Beads of Sweat From Hunting Season
For Gregg Norman
(1)
My grampappy stirred his coffee with a fork, my daddy too,
I see no reason to interfere with this natural order, how stars harness silent electrics,
yet disappear in muddy backwoods puddles.
(2)
I never watch much TV, hardly sip
a drop of booze.
I have become a monster. Ponder on that one, John : I h a v e b e c o m e a m o n s t e r.
(3)
Tempting freckles of dusk
lie heavy, make fools of my eyes
in noise of dreamy aeroplanes my lovers imagine sailing on window panes.
(4)
Atoms in the stone
are signifiers music's hidden from the sun.
These are words and sounds, a hurried blood-bitten
path there are other stones on, fallen foul of foot and rat since giggling centuries
declined a truce from a map I've left in the cabin behind me.
(5)
Out in the desert people are making a tv show,
cars pass as a blurred relic of humanity on a camera's sorrows,
children in these cars ask parents what's happening, elders have no words to put in these children
(6)
There are millions of these unavoidables;
we are chalky piles of mourning,
millions more await us.
(7)
Magpies weathering rainy days
clamped their toes on telephone tongues beside a classroom
Mrs. Macklin used to prod her sickly fingers in me, circa 1986.
She was a ghastly thing
illness drained its lifeblood for
(8)
High wind, salt splattered spray, blistering blue;
I have become Neil Young, beach umbrella, hair well-kept, yet uncaring.
I mutter the blues in swollen music left behind, when the beach became independent of our being
(9)
Of all those cars my daddy drove
I’d a good feeling about that car like a horse I’d watched frighten shame from midnight.
The horse had eyes made of sapphire
from a planet my daddy was the first soul to wander on
(10)
Baby’s watching Fargo wondering how many could make their death a work of art -
I am overwhelmed by the presence and grace of the Lord;
I am happy this song has not yet been written; yes, imagine that.
(11)
She followed me through the vines of the moon
on a horse made from lightning
and its bones wet and courageous from sapphire serenades,
from the wars on Neptune. How different she was from the beast she'd been,
breathing fire at the Oriental woman,
pouring vinegar on the district of her lives
(12)
A question mark shape of stars and stars nearby
sure of their place near Heaven
told me that God blesses the sinner who starts to see the light
(13)
Snow came as slow as she'd came and went
working an afternoon's matinee between
dreams of a ghost teasing decisions on her dress;
the guitar solo is invisible and sacred while she flickers away.
She doesn't speak that much to me since junior made state senator,
smiling, shaking hands, avoiding her ex-husband who seems to like me a lot.
So too do the philosophers losing their grip on our beating hearts.
(14)
The afternoons and their jagged prayers
and their people not fearful of death but ancient and flattened in groovy cinemas
and their hurried stitches glueing telephone calls to patchwork planets
sitting close to girls who sit close to poets who expect them to say nothing
which they scream so beautifully prayer softens like sandstone Sunday
(15)
Orange music and moustached
dictators sitting in old fashioned bathtubs
sitting on Greco-Roman jigsaw puzzles
(16)
People forget that Johann Cruyff played for Feyenoord.
Back home my dream for a cosmopolitan life finds a weak-jawed witness
in several packed lunches these binary days
this lost-luggage week denies.
People forget a lot of things.
I believed in fiction for a reason, that part in the contract I regret,
but belief in darkness is simply my excuse to ignore myself
wandering in the crocodile's teeth,
or the trenches we'll call them for simplicity.
No-one forgets those times I tried to kill or love them, it seems to be an opposite and equal sin
(17)
The spider dreams a halo doused by a burning truth,
no one looked at their diaries to see it was time to laugh,
they'd been murdered by people who’d been drugged by death.
(18)
He sits before us, shuffles in his seat,
sips his glass of still and lonesome water delivered in blue transparent drums
by a man who four years ago couldn’t speak English.
He sits before us, promotes the principles of a chosen few
who promote mayhem, hatred, lies, and the end of all time.
He sits before us, snake-like lisp,
and an aftershave scent that betrays his stern and odious spine.
He didn’t even have the evangelical grace to die his hair anything other than ginger
(19)
A machine they believe is haunted
became a boy weeping daydreams in San José
on someone's flight path to a planet primed for real estate;
it's business casual starting tomorrow.
I'm sorry.
Breakfast today has been extra and ordinary. I pretend I'm me
until this shadow beside me learns how to dream,
his mouth nearly electric and frozen
when a hawk made from diamonds sets fire to the moon.
(20)
My wheels got so angry with the road, rain sprinted towards the sky
until Rock N’Roll ceased to be anything more than a way of killing the immortals.
The road is sleeping now. The road was sleeping every night this week, it pretends it doesn’t
hear me swearing. Crazy Electric Blue is a mysterious swear word it whispers
when civil war breaks out in the suburbs
(21)
I dreamed of a child who said one line of profound wisdom
who fell into a hole I called morning and consciousness
who could be worth more in death to me than in life to himself. I’ll call him Romeo, a lover
How Chairs Fit on Top of Each Other
How chairs fit on top of each other in underused corners of public places
like libraries or public service offices
determines how deep I'm willing to delve into the structures of my passing lives
while I watch how, with inane ease, function and order
wallow in this archive of mathematics
and I soon feel everything should collapse
as it sometime will -
here or within the mindless numbers of space-dust it's all destined to be
and ripped apart to roam eternity
by another cataclysmic explosion
triggered by regrets within
surrounding a whipcrack chain reaction from a hurricane
that began when I watched how other children could fit chairs on top of other chairs
so easily
Big Mama Thornton Died Penniless in a Shithole in Los Angeles
And all sorts of health issues prevail :
Denied, denied. DENIED!
of a place on the lips, song follows songs to a zenith
of a place on a tongue; butchers tip vultures handsomely, not handsome as a movie star,
not hands in see-ment laughing up to click with the camera. No. No. NO!
What we got ourselves is heavy without,
heavy within,
Ill in the pocket department,
shredding machine's sure gotta way with her song,
nothing knows better than a whole sweet blooming nothing -
what's dat?!
she sings to struggle to waddle to the latrine,
someone saw light go out
today
in some shithole.
Coming up we hear the tragedies of beautiful Elvis. Fancy dat...
What we got is mystic muscle music;
Fast gone;
Flushing can -
a taxi stalling, kids giggling, carburettor symphony gargling on the overpass
Lone Motorbike on the Lincoln Highway : North Platte, Nebraska
“...every impulse of light/exploding from the core/as life flies out of us”
Adrienne Rich
And you told her roses were limitless,
sunflowers were seashores, stars were hurricanes imploding in black holes,
you told her music was a theatre of lies, a snake in a basket that danced for credit cards,
cash in the hand was a bend in a river
a mattress floated down,
flung from a teenager's stolen pick-up,
you told her Willie Nelson was President, Jesus was your cousin,
cars were dragonflies with expensive engines
walking on the skin of the waters your leather jacket burned on.
You told her lots of things.
Time to turn around,
tell her what she needs to know, be cool.
The Man With the Most Slappable Face in the World
And, as I shut his office door away so hurriedly, I felt I could’ve slammed it too,
and blown a James Joyce sized hole in his face where his tongue
wriggled like a piggie crowned in his universal prayer of shit-brown mud,
and as his Dean Pritchard face sucked his glasses back to outer space
I saw a void appear in the gap it left
where art and love and paintbrushes with tips made from poets' mittens
set a bonfire to burn around him, but his gasses and his spirit and his appearance fee
combined, couldn't burn fast enough on the fees he charged to hear his tongue wriggle some more
on the combined corners of the academy floors
where we'd fallen out of of love and in a post-modern something or another trance
just hoping that someday Jeremy Piven would arrive in his time-machine
from a number of years before
to start his study of this teflon cut-out of a proletariat kind of man
who'd wait an hour 'til time died from tedium and the neglect of love expired
within the written word
he'd dragged from a stage and drugged within his book
on the history of the art of soulless bastardry in the murky sinful dregs
on a charlatan's academia - oh, and the fees, yes, he keeps reminding us of the fees!
Kerouac and Joyce and his lovely lovely boys wouldn’t want to starve!
Brian's Formative Years
His t-shirt was knife-fight red,
a wounded shade
saying something sexual
beneath his liaison
with adulthood too soon,
his piece de la resistance being "mosh" in gold letters on that kinky shade of red,
clawing to his Ba'al-serving body,
sweaty balmy dusk,
Grace his apprentice groupie -
Brian was cool,
too cool for school he was,
his dad sacked from security guard duties
telling everyone he ran the college
where Brian would sell his soul
to be something useful
to civilized folk,
Ba'al's dreams exorcised by an empty
end to this metallic ghost of Summer
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