Ode to Strauss

Ode to Strauss

Running my fingers across this new territory,

Each pump in breath and forceful figaro of your figure,

I am lost in the breath of your mouth in my ear. 

My hips set and grind out your leading rhythm, 

each lingering note of time impregnating anticipation, 

the expectation of a dénouement worthy of 

this patient and adolescent foreplay. 

The tendrils of touches, left by your lips

along the valley of my waist - I wait face down

in the blankets as your sound and sweetness 

Fills me like dye in an hourglass of water. 

The mushroom clouds of chemical ecstasy that 

expand 

           and 

                 expand

           and 

                 swell

           and 

                 swell

Until they hang there, the universe's marvel for this

fleeting second of perfection that will soon

absorb back into reality

              

             Oh this! This is the dénouement I was looking for

when I lowered the needle into the groove of your vinyl. 

Your vinyl, oh Strauss. 

Sea-stream of Consciousness with Mary

I think if there is a god (s)he must be the ocean, ya know? this thing you can see and swim in and be fed from but if you fall in or get lost somewhere in its vastness you’ll just die or be eaten by creatures the likes of which are the true sources of the devil and leviathan. i think that god this super conscious all knowing never horny being - i think that we gather at its shores, on the curling back turned wave that laps sapient saline and sour onto our coast and the grains of our universal human conscious if sucking at it down to the bottom but it always runs out back to the big body unknown. partly known, but only partly. how many minds and pens and exploring ships have sought you out pushing ever further the boundaries of the map. your trenches run deep and your sulfuric spews change thermals and currents and the way of things. we as humans gather on the shore of the massive water-mind-machine-god-meta-alpha-omega. we bring our folding chairs and kites, content to just be beside it and hear its echoing surge. God, if the sea, must be share the human tendency to anger for we’ve been chased away, sand castles abandoned and stilted condos vacant. kites folded chairs folded blankets folded and quiet while god makes up his-or-her-who-knows mind. the storms subside and calm draws us back to him like those muses and sirens. Back we crawl across interstates and cheap gas stations and expressways and tollbooths - I fucking hate tollbooths but we come back, and we almost always bring joints and beer cans and liquor bottles so we can slurp ourselves into a primitive enough state to simply walk your morning beaches sit around a sea star night and campfire and look over at the sun kissed and salt stained body beside me, his jaw line sharp and orange as his eyes lose themselves in the fire and lunar lulling lapping of the tides. no shirt and lats defined as his arms hug his knees into his golden chest where flowers bloom with simple safety and our collective conscious knows that time and time again, throughout the history of humankind, man and woman have sat around a fire on the shores of the Infinite and, despite creed or origin, find safety in the warmth and light and limits such a scene can provide, and just breathe warmly into the neck of him, the boy with flowers in his chest and fall asleep at the lowtide and, if we’re lucky, be gently folded into the infite sea of god while we’re sleeping, the high tide our hearse into that which we’ve always sat beside.

Bloody Hammer

Shoved on oak and secured with a spike,

attached with a  purpose to build up a house.

The round of its head crowned with thorns,

halo of abuse, splintered story of beatings and falls.

Strike after strike after strike after strike

reaching resonance of ricocheted reverberations 

that reached my ears like heartbreak with a purpose.

Pow. 

(Pow)

((Pow))

Constructing, chapels, children, chairs, chimneys

whose smoke sings sweet, serpentine in minds and trees,

wrongly righting wrongs 

never wrong in the first place. 

Boarding up windows of introspection and inquiry.

Erecting walls between them and themselves,

hanging up idols, perpetual panopticonic policing.

Pow. 

(Pow)

((Pow))

Fastening the facades of faith fortresses, 

within which to hide from reflection and self.

Pounding, pounding, pounding pious penny nails 

into personality, resounding roars of repression within. 

Age remarkable, endurance imposing,

handle grain worn smooth with frequent use. 

Its head, metal miraculous, a mallet of merciful malice.

Christened by crimson, dried up from the dead

whose selves met its head in a meeting of difference.

Tell me, please, and try not to stammer,

What, make you, of the blood on your hammer?

Pow. 

(Pow)

((Pow))

Pow.

(Pow)

A Silent Rescue

Drinking and surfing all day, our skin

salty and sunned, my chest rubbed raw 

from the surf board and sand – Santa Catalina.

Midnight, leaving the cabana bar of our camp,

walking by the glow of our headlamps 

toward hammocks we hung carelessly 

under coconut trees. We couldn't afford a room.

We’d hung yours above mine, stashing gear, a decoy,

lest anyone know we were tangled underneath. 

The owner of the camp told us to move, warned 

prophetically of falling coconuts - I was headstrong.

Laughing over patacones and atún, we tried to forget

that fight on the beach – opening our meager toolbox

again,  patching and plugging sober conflict

with dark, aged rum and cheap, stale pot. 

We left the bar happier than we arrived. 

Perhaps we'll make love, I thought. 

Halfway back to camp, you grabbed me, pulled me from mid-step – 

I hadn't seen them, that exodus, but your attention to life

saved a fragile shell from my bare, drunken foot – before us hundreds 

of tiny turtles, drafted and deployed from egg to sea.

They were crawling toward the lights of huts on the beach,

confused and naive, inching en masse away from the moon.

Their bright siren left them wanting, piled-up, clawing against 

the foundation of the hut - insane survival instincts not adapted

to a world changed - to a coastline of electricity. 

Giddy and united in purpose, we shed our shirts, stuffing

them with turtles, then sprinted toward the foamy surf. 

Whizzing past each other we grinned wildly, shouting 

how many we carried, how many more were left behind.

Wave after wave, swirling saline embraced them like a hug, 

softly whispering – hold on tightly, little ones … here we go.

  

Finally, naked chests heaving seaward, we imagined them making it –

yet – our silence makes me wonder if it ever happened at all.

A Map of Self-in-Progress

Vantage Points of Self

Imagining our psyche as a landscape - full of memory, experience, knowledge, questions, etc. - poetry is the arena we create in which we explore that landscape, searching for different high places from which we might get more information about our selves, our world, and our meaning. This first poem, then, is a rough draft playing with the idea of setting out from the center of our Self and exploring its periphery, which may indeed be more than periphery and more like bedrock or atmosphere.

Map at home, under old letters unused unread,
stick in hand for thick brush and beasts lurking
this new landscape - well, old - mine - my mind - 
stumbled upon, discovered, sections unexplored.

Yesterday stopped by a garden and sat on a straw bale to watch. 
Aged scotch and rain steadily changing the soil, softening crust. 
It's wet with no clouds - that happens, here, I reckon.

Rain rhythm, bull frogs, pond pomp and circumstances 
of not picking beetles off the potatoes, damn things died. 
"Till your fill, stake and fence, but beauty ain't shit
if bugs eat your fruit," I suggested, gently that it may arrive
labeled "Epiphany, General Delivery". Spray spray spray, 
the little monsters come back like every goddamned sin 
casually flicked aside by well-kept fingernails of a vain 
gardener in Spring. Fruit longed for is torture without
patience enough to wait and tend, so get to it, go - 
lest you have no potatoes when winter wanders wither.

Garden fades behind, its keeper keener on those noetic 
effects of beetles. I leave my boots at the front door
of myself - wash dishes, put away notes, redraw map later. 

Potato Bugs & Mommas

I'm afraid of committing. I'm not really sure why but it seems as though any time I come close to an opportunity actualizing itself... I throw a grenade at it and run away. It's frustrating really, the number of times I should have just stuck with something, but it seems to me like there's always a chance of something better being out there. This, of course, can't be a healthy way to approach life or relationships. Thus far it has been my M.O.

My father is the epitome of commitment. That man has been waiting for eighteen years for his lesbian wife to come back and reconcile with him. I'm not sure how much he believes it's actually possible, but he does believe that the "lord can restore the years that the locusts have eaten". I swear, I got so tired of hearing those words as a child. Over and over again, he would tell us about our "situation", how it was all his fault that our family was broken. "But son, the years can restore the years that the locusts have eaten." I surely wonder about this.

I was picking potato bugs off my plants in the garden this evening. Those damn things are reducing my potato plants to bare, green skeletons of disappointment. I pick them off and treat the plant, but they come back like every goddamned sin of my adolescent nightmares. I thought about my dad. Problems can be treated one of two ways, gardening has taught me: organically and chemically. Now, I'm not trying to sprinkle a bunch of highly chemical shit on my food. Consequently, the alternative is a very laborious and time consuming organic battle -- nature against nature, fighting bug with bug and disease with disease.

My dad, he always chose to stay in that church rather than be near us and an active part in our lives. Of course, he was 'praying for us and thinking about us every moment of every day', but damnit if he wasn't around. My mother - she may have made some questionable decisions but she was there. She was there, at the end of a long day covered in coal dust and inverted by a swing shift schedule that taught my sister and I to tip-toe with the stealth of your deepest secret. Somehow she managed to pursue whichever job she took a notion for. Massage therapist, river rafting guide, football player, three branches of the military. She was all over the place, but she was providing for us in the best way she could as a young, single, human mother. I suppose my point is that my momma was around to swat off the potato beetles everyday.