Valentino Pier

White caps cresting,
Liberty's torch alight.
Puffy clouds,
The wind that kept Roebuck at bay
And pylons, rest stops for gulls.
Infinite shades of green
Gripping my squinting vision.
Today, the outside reflects my yesterday's inside,
rendering it beautiful, and public.
I will keep my inner, and lash out only to the peers I know,
lashing like waves spraying
the old docks, the worn rocks.
One day, they will all be worn away,
and the waves will have no one, no where, to play

Protest Song

Days slipping through my fingers

City in flames

What if my life

Has been a crying shame?

​

Too old for the game

Too young to go insane

​

I look into my mother's eyes

I see love and I see fear

What world will she leave her children?

​

Innocent beautiful men murdered

(Police boot, hand in pocket)

Shop windows shattered

And youth pouring into the street

​

The old have made their peace

With violence and sadism

And left what little's left of anything left

To us, eyes downcast

​

What is your fight song my friend?

What keeps you in the fray?

What song will you sing your children?

What song do you sing today?

Coronavirus

Old flames

A half-remembered kiss

Love-making, naked

Memories of moments

To carry you through the empty times

Cumpulsion

Solitude

So much technology

And no one has a cure for lovesickness

The kind where you feel like you’re in withdrawal from a feeling you may have never contracted

Love love if you can

Love not the style, love the man

Frankly

There are really only a very few things

And even then, who knows

I hope I catch one of them

Odes to Sleep

One

​

“I would like to sleep,” said I.

Sleep replied, shaking her tousled head, “not for a while.”

And so I wept,

As along the night crept.

​

Sleep combed her hair

And I kept her in my stare:

I here, Sleep there.

So unfair

​

Two

​

“Night night,” I said to myself.

“Not quite,” Sleep replied.

“I’m tired,” I said to myself.

Sleep said, “I do not know this feeling, for I am it.”

“Ah fuck you you insensitive prick,” I said.

Sleep chuckled, and walked away, giving me the finger.

Three

Protagonist: “Oh that I may droop

my weary frail body

that hath toiled all the day long

in thy wondrous dream embrace,

that I may find succour in thy

bestarred and ephemeral charm.

I beseech thee, Morpheus,

claim thy worthy suitor

as my love and limb are yours!

My eyelids yearn for your kiss!”

Sleep: “Fat chance of that”

Epilogue

[Two minutes before an 11 am Zoom meeting]

Sleep: Hey! I’m here

Protagonist: Oh NOW you show up. Fuckin douchenugget

When the Saints
(Remembrance of a Bridge in Harrisburg)

When the saints

By the river

Stare their faces

In the stone

By the bridges

In the basking

Shows a twinkle

In the wave

I ask you

What makes you?

Have you thought it?

Is it true?

Carry on

Over bridges

Cross the river

Stone by stone

Show your faces

To the saints

At the end

You will be known

Remember

We don’t have to remember

In this vision of life

Just consume and produce

Make the rich richer

And ourselves smaller and more insignificant

In a world where people remember

We are all a little poorer

And all vastly richer

Richer for the ability to remember

And richer for the lessons that memory serves

Millenial

The mute books taunt me
They on their shelves
Me in my bed, on my phone
A mausoleum to antiquated values
A testament to the ignorance of the now
And here I am
Blathering away on my phone
When I could be reading Chomsky, or Langenscheidt, or Zinn, or Vidal, or Kevin Young, or anyone
No, the backlit screen, touchable, manipulatable, is plenty for the alcohol-soaked lizard brain infesting my being with apathy, seething hatred, and inaction.
For this is what we value, now, the now, however valid and irrelevant and small.
Now, not then, because then sucked. It was, and shall always be, the now.
Now.
Now.
Ow.

Solitude

Gehry’s great dragon jaw drips with drops of rainfall loosened from the billows of the approaching storm that frames the metallic sinews of the Fisher Center’s arched back.

Ensconced in the monster’s maw, I watch a documentary on Holbein and note approaching vehicles on their way to deliver various and sundry necessaries in an otherwise blank campus.

Even the Magic Crystal is shuttered.

Yet a scraggy little bird, as if painted by Rubens, hops under the overhang, alights on the other bench, nibbles food, and, awkwardly determined, sprites out to a predetermined spot looped up on a higher branch of one of the facing trees.

I am kept company now by the steadily winnowing patter of water as the green of the grass slowly creeps into yellowed tones, leavelettes quenching their thirst for sun and sending their energetic rays into my tired eyes.

And I am not alone, for a time, though I am but with myself, and architecture, and nature, and weather, and the birds, and the cellular, battery winnowing away as I type the text you read now, and perhaps again, if it bears repeating.

Maybe you will be kept company for a time by this, my record of solitude in your own moment of self-imposed exile.

Words Without Song

As I walk through life

And I find my self

Half foot in heaven

And half foot in hell

I have me a lady

She is so fine

Half mother, half caretaker

Half out of her mind

I have big dreams

I have petty thoughts

Half realized

Half traumatized

I got a good family

I got a good brother

Half out of touch

Half too much

I gotta find an answer

I’m fresh out of juice

I got no direction

My house had no roof

I’m about a third the way through

And shit ain’t getting clearer

Surrounded by death

Only gets nearer

They don’t tell you in school that it only gets harder

That if you want more you gotta run farther

Death doesn’t kill you

It’s usually life

Half full of joy

Half full of strife

I need me a woman

To sow my seed

I want to have no wants

I need to have no needs

When you meet a man of words

When you meet a man of deeds

You’d have to be a magi

Who’s good at reading beads

When you do, could you tell me?

Capitol Hill

Heavy spring air

Sun bathes all

Darts of nature flit

And squeak their mating squawks

Midway upon my late afternoon walk

I inhale the fresh glory

Of health, and, briefly perhaps,

Of being content

The sun begins its graceful descent

And I look forward to music,

To the radio

To poetry

And perhaps, to fireflies

Umpqua River Valley

Glowing tree tips impossible green 
Feather fingerlings feel photosynthesis juice into the misty moat
Grey feels the craggy river flow flow
And moss!
So much moss!
Cresting fingers slowly peel back winter’s clammy cold 
Light brown and green matrices
Latticework brush the sky
The breath fills lungs with vapor
And droplets on car windows
Winding through
Silent
Alive

The Time we Spend

The time we spend
Untangling headphones
Could be spent
Calling a grandparent
And relieving them
Briefly
From the monotony
Continual pain
And poor medical care
They are receiving
In an understaffed home
The one you suggested
To stretch their monthly benefit
And your inheritance
Once they winnow away
The body just barely nourished
Keeping alive
A failing mind

Caravan

One million shoulders kissed
and a million feet planted themselves
one after the other
in an endless river
of hope, perseverance, and determination

Useless Dichotomies
(Or, Racism as Distraction)

The South eats (and drinks) its feelings

While the North points and laughs

Meanwhile the bigots gather for the coming storm

And the oppressed gather what little is left around themselves and patiently wait for more of the same

Can't we all just drink a beer together?

No, not all of us. Most of us don't have the time, or the money, or even drink beer

The North runs its marathons and its gentrification machine

While the South tries to forget it all and simply live

Meanwhile the earth ever warms

BQE

the sun's acid rays reflected in monolithic warehouse windows searing their photons into jaded retinas that squint as much against their intensity as against the counterintuitive beauty of the commute's winding metropolitan course, left, right, stop, go.

Cadenza

Rushing, gushing, liquid bliss cresting, troughing, laughing, spraying, jesting:

Notes fly from fingertips flashing down string length to wiggle their joy into the ears of eager expectant listeners, their minds perked to glimpse a peak of the mysterious unknowing, if conditions are right, the magician-musician calling to life ideas of bygone centuries to resonate the souls of today.

Ideas springing forth from calloused hands to feverishly scratching quill etching for posterity the shivering rush of truths that for a nanosecond cross before the open ones ready to grasp them, catch them and unlock their secrets before their gleeful interstellar boomerang back to their shrouded source.

An unending sea transcribed in a narrow wavelength of sound to mold hieroglyphs that will shine once complete as talismans of an experience shared, a communal bond forged of stronger alloys than human sweat, minted in the fires of love.

feelings ekphrastic

untethered, unmoored, at sea, in the air, below the moon, above the clouds,

a star wiggles its ancient, silent, torment as my gaze drifts down across the muted fields, river, and town, domestic lights a-twinkle,

as if in a Gary Wood painting made animated.

Water and Remembering

water and remembering

living by a body of water

forgetting

land being solid memories being of the land

water ever flowing things come and go so why memory? harder with water, unless very bored

land solid memories

water ever flowing

lake erie

alzheimer's

dementia

seasonal affective disorder

is it sad that in sad is the vehicle for the "affect?" more commonly one doesn't speak of affect

as it may affect production

and we need good christian soldiers and god hearty red meat workers

to be led to the slaughter

ever for the man

the greedy man

the big man

man

and where is woman

grandmother

S.O.N.N.E.T.

my ten-year old son has a nose for sonnets.
Teo's toes wiggle et the tones of nonets.
though i've sent him to net tonnes of fish,
i advise him not to leave snot in his dish.
he prefers a Middle Earth tale with an Ent, so... take note(s).
(these rules aren't set in stone, but there are a ton of them, tens at least.)
Love you tons.