Apartheid

Uninhibited fertility rites rent asunder

The filmy strands of coercive restraints,

Violations of something sacred, European,

Not squalid heathenish events,

Scant tribute to the anthropologist

Laboring years to complete an orderly autopsy

Of a living tribal village structure,

An inspired idea gone down the drain

With six hundred tribals fucking for rain.

A chain reaction to the drought,

Someone, some laborer, somehow or other,

Broke through the links that kept him comatose,

Grabbed the first prancing girl he saw

And danced off with her through dusty fields.

Ineffably resourceful villagers,

They came excreting clothes and sweat

And monotheism and screaming threats.

Hospitalized for inchoate shock,

The mission director and his wife

Were offered, without detriment

To their retirement fund, a new life

In Uruguay amidst natives

With higher moral, social ranks.

The army mopped up the savages with Sherman tanks

And took hostages where law and order failed.

That night, to everyone’s surprise, it hailed.

Artifice

Underneath the emperor in coitus

A pariah woman's nipple.

The Imperial Zoologist was sympathetic.

He crooked and snuffed the wick,

Having in mind the necessity of

More drizzle and wind before the end organ would discharge.

A breach of promise by the guards on duty

To be alert for sufragettes

Resulted in the curreent scenario:

The total ensemble: guests, the court,

Gentlemen-in-Waiting,and

The Keeper of the Cold Cream

Would the act be consummated

Before the shock troops jumped

And the Camel Corps broke ranks?

The wench would bear an heir.

A fresh supply of horsemen

Stood ready to escort her where,

In the care of nuns,

She would burgeon, preordained,

To detumesce, at last,

On the frontiers of Spain.

XIX

At Bay

From the window of my muggy cell

A summer sunbeam rips the covers off

My passive hibernation. Up, I hug

The wall with care and balance for the washstand

Where I gargle my pneumonia, the old

Poet laureate cat, incognito

Behind the eight ball with a sideways sneer.

I'm sick. My bones are mush, my shoulder bruised,

The tissue 'round my toenails decomposing.

My gallstones won't dissolve, my calcium uptake's

Small and they refuse to measure out

My lithium prescription. Well, so what?

It's rough to be incurably indisposed,

Reduced to petulant and trivial groans.

I crouch like a midwinter groundhog in his den,

Dedicated to incongruous showers and

Watchful for a weather aberration.

A woeful presentiment of renewed cold

Rescinds the starlings' primal merriment

High above the administration's roof

With bandages of snow upon the earth.

I gum up oatmeal, dredging for the raisins,

Scoring losses for my common colleagues'

Winsome sentiments. They squeal against

My claims in prophylactic twosomes and

Pronounce me a nonfatal reprobate,

A hypothesis the doctors share with copies

For the office in quadruplicate.

The question is, can I rejuvenate

Myself, transform their maneaters' avarice

For death into an augury of strength?

Through sorcery and congenial stubbornness

Induce a buoyant cure in time for August's Azimuth?

I'll assume my agelessness

And mainline an armful of euphoria.

David's Jailhouse Poems

IX- X

Alphabet Song

A is for aspirin, the poor man's Anesthesia we roll up in cigarettes.

B is for bondsman, the baleful Bloodsucker of hearty handclasps.

C is for cliffhanger when the Fretful jury sways in the breeze.

D is for destruction, the wildcat's physical therapy .

E is for exploit, the journalist's propaganda game.

F is for fix, the butter in the recipe of legal arrangements.

G is for grunt, the pit boss, the solemn, implacable flatfoot.

H is for hearing, the litany of our back-and-forth bereavements.

I is for injury, the eagle's Tattoos upon our naked scabs.

J is for joint, the latrine Where recaptured brothers meet.

K is for keeping radicals inside, Regardless of their natural rights.

L is for last straw, the aggregat e Of heavy superficialities.

M is for manhood, the cellblock's obstinate determination.

N is for namelessness, the number upon our denim shirts.

0 is for OR, a chance to break for Lisbon or Saskatchewan.

P is for permission, a token to walk, to congregate.

Q is for quota, the monthly Compendium of license plates.

R is for regulations, the ghastly book of compulsion.

S is for subpoena, whose lettering is seamless.

T is for time, the monkey Of our jungle monastery.

U is for unwanted, the period after our sentence.

V is for visionary, the dancer on the tapestry's fringe.

W is for warden, the bellhop Of the turnkey syndicate.

X is for Malcolm, the beloved Vantage point of trust.

Z is for zero hour, the moment on the clock we're free!

David's Jail Poems

Apartheid

Uninhibited fertility rites rent asunder

The filmy strands of coercive restraints,

Violations of something sacred, European,

Not squalid heathenish events,

Scant tribute to the anthropologist

Laboring years to complete an orderly autopsy

Of a living tribal village structure,

An inspired idea gone down the drain

With six hundred tribals fucking for rain.

A chain reaction to the drought,

Someone, some laborer, somehow or other,

Broke through the links that kept him comatose,

Grabbed the first prancing girl be saw

And danced off with her through dusty fields,

Ineffably resourceful villagers,

They came excreting clothes and sweat

And monotheism and screaming threats.

Hospitalized for inchoate shock,

The director and his wife of the mission

Were offered, without detriment

To their retirement fund, a new life

In Uruguay amidst natives

With higher moral, social ranks.

The army mopped up the savages with Sherman tanks

And took hostages where law and order failed.

That night, to everyone’s surprise, it hailed.

Artifice

Underneath the emperor in coitus

A pariah woman's nipple.

The Imperial Zoologist was sympathetic.

He crooked and snuffed the wick,

Having in mind the necessity of

More drizzle and wind before the end organ would discharge.

A breach of promise by the guards on duty

To be alert for sufragettes

Resulted in the curreent scenario:

The total ensemble: guests, the court,

Gentlemen-in-Waiting,and

The Keeper of the Cold Cream

Would the act be consummated

Before the shock troops jumped

And the Camel Corps broke ranks?

The wench would bear an heir.

A fresh supply of horsemen

Stood ready to escort her where,

In the care of nuns,

She would burgeon, preordained,

To detumesce, at last,

On the frontiers of Spain.

XIX

At Bay

From the window of my muggy cell

A summer sunbeam rips the covers off

My passive hibernation. Up, I hug

The wall with care and balance for the washstand

Where I gargle my pneumonia,

the old Poet laureate cat, incognito

Behind the eight ball with a sideways sneer.

I'm sick. My bones are mush, my shoulder bruised,

The tissue 'round my toenails decomposing.

My gallstones won't dissolve, my calcium uptake's

Small and they refuse to measure out

My lithium prescription. Well, so what?

It's rough to be incurably indisposed,

Reduced to petulant and trivial groans.

I crouch like a midwinter groundhog in his den,

Dedicated to incongruous showers and

Watchful for a weather aberration.

A woeful presentiment of renewed cold

Rescinds the starlings' primal merriment

High above the administration's roof

With bandages of snow upon the earth.

I gum up oatmeal, dredging for the raisins,

Scoring losses for my common colleagues'

Winsome sentiments. They squeal against

My claims in prophylactic twosomes and

Pronounce me a nonfatal reprobate,

A hypothesis the doctors share with copies

For the office in quadruplicate.

The question is, can I rejuvenate

Myself, transform their maneaters' avarice

For death into an augury of strength?

Through sorcery and congenial stubbornness

Induce a buoyant cure in time for August's azimuth?

I'll assume my agelessness

And mainline an armful of euphoria.

David's Jailhouse Poems

Scatter Poem* XVI from the collection "Secret Raptures"

Cajun Drums

(pace Vachel Lindsay)

Down in the bayous the alligators play

Their glossy tails carbuncular, arrogant, cantankerous

A full moon floorshow in a cavalier ballet.

My lady is a gypsy, all-around fastidious,

She inhales her opiates with toothsome gravity.

Her knock-kneed parrot is very misanthropic,

He sings calypso ballades in a Middle Eastern key.

Down in the bayous the alligators hiss.

They spin in greasy labyrinths oleaginous cadenzas

While I careen my tattooed queen of elephantiasis.

We benumb our elbows in pools of perspiration,

Chamomile and cinnamon aromas on the breeze.

The predestined conclusion is a Niagara of frustration,

A neurasthenic twitch framed in a midget of a sneeze.

Down in the bayous the alligators dance.

Beady-eyed, shortsighted, they gorge their gory faces

And rip with crimson teeth the drowned remains of sycophants.

Condemned to dysenteries. we reap the swampy places

And navigate the spaces of hellish autopsies.

A deathly superstition enervates our vision

And haunts our low-voiced murmurings with fluent sophistries.

Down in the bayou the alligators shriek.

They shake the lightning from their snouts while water spouts to windward

From their Mesozoic nostrils in a murderous critique.

* Scatter poems were invented by poet and teacher Jean Pumphrey (1931- 2014), and described in her Poetry: The Way Through Language (Harper Studies in Language and Literature (1975). Cut out some random words and arrange them in various ways on a page, adding and subtracting other words at your pleasure. By coincidence, almost at the same time she was teaching at the College of San Mateo. I cut op a dictionary into fortune-cookie-sized slips, put them in a bag and occasionally dipped a pinch onto the table to create my own scatter poem. This one is a sample. Thank you, Jean!

Coca

Down in a jungle place, light and playful,

A chimerical white-gold protects us against hyena-burn.

Ice lands sheathe our regions and imps puff radiances into nimbus clouds.

Palatial doodles, ideograms, blister our extremities,

Seemingly omitted from interpretation.

Aberrations satisfy for a time before the hyphens extinguish into perihelions.

Sirens squelch through isthmuses of slime

And steal my odyssey through nebulas .

Congealed danger flashes against the moment,

Permuting my center of gravity, leaving me tusked and chromosomal.

Pythagoras's rock garden points at Polaris while ravenous bogs gnaw atrophied pearls.

Smells of parsley and insecticide on tbe wind,

A splashdown of phosphorescent tribute to the evening's hallucination

Harried, lanterns wavering, our frugal clansmen embark

To search for the Godchild, stained wishbones held against their lethargy.

IV

Death Row Complaint

Bitter, bitter, basilisk,

Crucify and crush

The black shrine of inconsolable desire.

Wrack the wraith of judgment

Swiftly in the psychopath,

Variegated in the motorist.

Bring together the rogue and the valedictorian,

The jack-in-the-pulpit and mountain goat,

Irregardless of the tributary frame.

Bitter, bitter, basilisk, Crucify and crush

The black shrine of inconsolable desire.

Inflict the bankrupt on the bloody,

The indefatigable knight on the harlot,

The zodiacal circle on Christianity.

Besot the bibulous, the indomitable,

Teach the hobo dependence on the hymn,

Show up the swift and bolt their boots

To the millennium.

Bitter, bitter, basilisk, Crucify and crush

The black shrine of inconsolable desire.

David's Jail Poems

Energia Sancta Est

The catalyst had run afoul of alien energy siphons

But the Pope's conversion to treadles forestalled

A comeback attempt by the female workers.

Birdseye aftereffects winked through the banquet hall

Which the Jesuits photographed while

Torsion winches powered crustacean saws.

The Vatican was dismantled by servomechanisms

Resembling lime-colored gibbons.

Stones were coded for reassembly in Sao Paulo

While a plexiglass dome revealed the College of Cardinals

Electrostatically preserved in convocation.

There were bound to be repercussions,

Aftershock among the faithful, but it was

The only way to avert ecological doom.

Energy was sacred and must be preserved.

The move to Brasil would be accopmlished in triremes,

The oars manned by acolytes.

Ramon Sender

Occidental, Sept. 17, 1975

Equinox

Cheekbones glistening with deer fat

They squat for the beginning of the ritual,

Speaking the true names of the trees,

Hi-ya-la-wah-hah-la-wah.

Gather, ancestral spirits,

Gather for the harvest feast.

Gather for the roasting corn.

Hear us in the darkness.

Stand still in your true place.

Keep your arms raised beyond endurance

To the east where the mists part

To greet the Morning Star.

Bring power to heal the forests,

Power to change the hearts

Of sheriff's deputies

Waiting with their guns.

Courage, flow to us.

Breath, strengthen our bodies

So we can speak with one voice

The truth that penetrates all barriers.

In this harvest month

We chant for the good of all people

And all living things.

Hi-ya-la-wah-hah-la-wah.

Erudition

The scribe incises rocks,

Explains his marks

With decorative spells,

Knowing full well that it's

A monotonous trick,

An inheritance steeped

Spiritless in wit.

Crippled by the chisel,

His band moves in jerks.

Fumbling, disabled,

It averts decades of sudden death,

Obsessed by the melody

Of what be wrests,

Eyeballs bursting,

To drum upon the stone.

An 'au revoir' to saints,

Ascending and descending.

Relics are pounded fine,

Milled and basted into amulets

Auctioned to the faithful.

It's all skill and expertise,

Making holy bones go 'round,

Covering catastrophes.

Jump, You Fool!

Idealism is things the way I think they ought to be.

It provides a trestle from The Real

Across the roaring chasms of affliction.

It yokes the future to my needs

And keeps me dry above the dew-soaked weeds.

Reality is the 8:47 express

Hooting when it rounds the curve.

I've got exactly 3.2 seconds to jump –

No time to run ahead or back –

Or be splattered on the track.

What am I doing out here?

Crossing in my sandals, ranting at the sun,

Solemnly homeless, a vagrant on the run.

Afloat in my chagrin,

I swim ashore to try again.

January, 1978

XXV

Freedom!

So long, pal, I'm going to make it out of here!

I've shot the chute of their persistent animosities!

I've loosed the noose that knotted me to their formulas

Of unworthiness that before long would have wrapped me

In the stale sardine can of their standardized holocaust,

The pale blue light of death anonymous from an 'unknown cause.'

I'm riding my wheelchair out that malevolent door at noon

No matter what I need or where the wavering compass needle

On my chart of medical indoctrination reads.

I'm in the catbird seat! I'm free! I managed to wheedle

Probation for reasons of health from the prison administration!

Thanks for nothing, Doc, I'm going on vacation .

I'll last a whole lot longer if I don't have to wrestle

With your and others' prognostications of disaster,

A litany of diseases I don't have to hassle

Or a despairing rope slung high across a rafter.

A sudden thrombosis could hit me anywhere

But I'll take my final breath in the open air.

My cordovans are shined, my clothes freshly pressed

And Jack is meeting me outside the gates with a tuba player

Friend to pipe me through! You understand, they say

I've got to live on idiot crutches for a day or

Two, but still it's more than worth a belly laugh

To think how ready I was to write my epitaph!

David's Jail Poems

Just A Cosmic Cowboy

(to the tune ' Home On The Range")

(verse)

Oh, give me a home

Without paratroops or congressmen ,

Where our daughters are equally paid,

Where religions are amiable

Celebrations and festivals

And young men can get easily laid.

(chorus)

We're way due for a change

From the harsh savagery of the race,

From the rockets red glare,

The bombs bursting in air,

To a nurturing, motherly grace.

(verse

We're living at the dawn

Of a new age of light,

When our homes will be powered by the sun.

Our children will play,

In the gardens all day,

Not God's will but the Goddess's done.

(chorus)

We' re way due for a change

From the harsh savagery of the race,

From the rockets red glare,

The bombs bursting in air,

To a nurturing, motherly grace.

Livelihood

The compensation paid for sobriety

Is a pad against the disconnect notice

' Five days until we turn you off, '

A cash cushion that provides relief

To the editorially flattened ass.

It returns to its original size, trimmed and tight,

Only upon wallowing in hot baths.

A thorough scouring with stammering presumptions

Helps ease the atrophy of media-bum

And sphincteral cramps .

It's more than tempting

To throw the body into the scale,

Blood by the pint, a brain for sale.

The economies of life annul our youth

With deeds of trust and computerized untruth.

Local Color

Links of a chain across a labyrinth,

Hard to distinguish, see for yourself.

Treasures are kept there, underground,

But the tendency is to read the sign –

'Entry only To Qualified Personnel’ – and turn around.

Ancient runes spike the gate

While beyond the perimeter, untamed savages

Deny passage. Pathogenic bacteria

Are said to lurk in food and drink

Where glassy-eyed, the hierophant sits.

The warning signal of the sect

Is pressed upon captives with a tool.

Authoritative texts are used

To specify the number of times

The thigh or arm is bruised.

Things can be exchanged at the boundaries,

Anything appropriate or attractive,

Bits of metal, shells, dried berries,

Deer teeth or scavenged bones,

For items equal in sacred value.

As far as we know, they work in relays

On a vitreous heap, scorched by the sun.

The tones of their chant console and bless

Those who wait with shaven heads for the whisper

Or the sign that will allow them access.

Local authorities ignore the rocky place.

They inoculate their youth, confusing

Immunity with innocuousness,

It’s just a temporal fault where space and time

Have tipped unstable, out of line.

Ma Che?

The futile pursuit led to rain-drenched Venice

Where Narcissus whetted his profession

On a dusty-keyed harpsichord.

The surly shopkeeper stood aside

Under a panoply of maces.

Bored, he knew nothing of the search

But lived in a cluttered bypass

Of the destitute piazza.

She for whose presence Narcissus yearned

Lay staring through wet windowpanes,

Lashes turned against the burden

Of her fantasies, her thoughts

Circling with the clouds of birds

Upon the tolling of the bells.

From the lower floor she heard

Sonatas of Scarlatti played with quills.

Tiring of the tumultuous storm,

On the third day he left for Vienna,

Imagining her slim form somewhere

Ahead of him. As the train

Uncoiled and stretched, the sun emerged,

Sparking rooftops, mirrored in puddles.

Like a flower she awoke at last.

"Who was the tireless harpsichordist?" she asked.

Venice 1953

Ode To A Threshing Machine

Hazardous flail, I refuse to support such actions.

A diehard ancestry keeps me unleashed and independent.

When dawn unlocks the day I walk,

Unattended, the boundaries of the field.

Trampling the stalks, I peck enough seed for my use.

Then I sit on my heels and rattle the cats.

XVIII

On His Way

Scotty capitulated yesterday,

To a catalog of bacilli and lumps

Too complicated for the physician's reference book.

Immobilized, long-suffering , he passed

Without a moan, a virtuoso stud

Who cut in silent mutiny the tow lines

To his pulse, the anchors in his arms,

And sunk without flamboyance into liberty.

A transatlantic half-blind engineer

Incarcerated by his lawyer's plea,

He raided one too many banking colonnades

That photographed him in armed robbery.

An all-points bulletin advertised his snarl

To a stool pigeon where they snared him

Gamboling with a pair of omnivorous nymphs,

An obstreperous romantic but a gregarious lout.

A reliable comforter, whose bark of a laugh

Paid tribute to the author's expendable design.

His presence collapsed my cynicism's

Unconventional non-fiction barrel

Rolls and hectic lexicons into

A contrapuntal antiphon and trumpet blast

Against the sense of nullity,

The gibbering overcast to which we all succumb.

We were first-rate equals among the cliques

That punctuate our stay with deviant cracks,

Irksome nonentities that strive to emulate

The hip and hetero heat of classy actors'

Jailhouse equipoise, the strict conventions

Of the hothouse bungle and interceding

flashy dicks, the hustlers' beat,

That overcharge the neural corridors with noise.

Well, I'm broken-hearted, damn his were-wolf hide.

We coexisted equitably

Since last April with a stockpile of cannabis

To laze away the bull's-eyes on our veins,

The brutal urinary enemas.

A tray of organs sectioned by a knife

In the coroner's deep freeze is all that remains

Of him who cold-turkeyed the monkey on his back called life.

David's Jail Poems

One Last Time

The consequence of a body

Is being put somewhere

To get the hang of it all.

It's an enchantment, really,

From which we emerge

Like swallows from a crack in the barn.

This has a sort of righteous ring

But more important than the passage

Are the songs we sing.

XVII

Out Of The Blue

Death is a transcendental boomerang

That adolescence throws upon the wind

It wheels centrifugal within the galaxy

Fated to return with foolproof surety

And stab us in the ventricle or chop us on the shin.

The stunt takes sixty years or so, depending on the cast

The spaciousness of depth and range.

The ambidextrous follow-through’s a fair technique

Inclined to slope the pull-out’s anticlimactic peak

Into a dimensional movement on the fabled field of change.

It's hard to second-guess the course or plot the hour

When time's foreclosure searches out the owner

Of the duplex lot, the runner down the street.

Even a desert foxhole cannot keep the whirring beat

At bay from the aboriginal eye-opener.

David"s Jail Poems

VIII

Peace Or Else!

To abolish the Bomb we'll have to penetrate

The language of the prime time press,

The confidence of the lawful evildoer

Who pronounces sacrifice upon the poor.

The tomtit head of state bows low to place

The garland upon the grave of the unknown immigrant.

In keeping with the true depths of his trust

He emits a burst of gas – a smelly gust.

The treadmill arms race of the superpowers

Is a reciprocal patriarchal massage,

A measuring of cocks and sexual analogs,

Cheaper to demonstrate in peepshow catalogs.

Women! Here's your chance to emulate

Lysistrata's revolutionary stance!

Refuse your warrior access to your bed.

He must either go without or disarm instead.

David's Jail Poems

Poet In Residence

Belles Lettres depend upon the spellbound

Descent of the master from the wave’s crest

To exhort the seals woofing on the ice with easy fluency

Or exhume the vestal virgins from their spectral hiding place.

He combines blood, lymph and milk

To form a funeral cake with overtones of tears,

Imagining the effects of his utterances

Upon celebrities and provosts, blue-stockings and Mouseketeers.

Translucent cemeteries enshrine the aristocracy

In sunbursts of broken glass, places where great-grandchildren

Come for snacks, seatbelts across their calico laps,

To snort essences pianissimo through flared nostrils.

Supreme charlatans, confiders of insatiable lusts.

They emit splashes of toxic confidence in sniffs and squeaks

Making off with daybreak’s viola livery to their rooms

In cold dormitories piled with snow and conjured innocence.

The poet combines brackish nostrums to release the violence

Of pent-up truth and takes advantage of the cacophony

To weave the mix, confident of his prize

Of tumors on the eyes and, when he dies,

Tenure at the Institute of Sighs.

Seafrain

Trundle, mollusk, trundle

Hard to handle

Let him stand.

Impulse drillmaster

Frizzled squid-song,

Original expander,

Fragile sea-crow,

Great flesh telescope

Strangest curator of tendons.

Show Window

To engage in the act of talking

Suspends regret and excuses growth.

Oh groovy rutabaga,

Breathe through your viola snorkle

Unwitting platitudes.

Toxin of Mahomet, Hera's hemlock,

Fanciful, fossilized facsimile.

The King Must Die

The rebels gathered drought-scorched pods

To feed the victory fires, patches of radiance

Embossed upon the turmoil of the city.

From a balcony hung slogans:

‘Abolish the hierarchy!’

‘Bayonets for correspondents!’

‘Freedom to the Black Leopard People!'’

Bedridden, a cloth around his neck,

He eyed his captors, a thwarted lion at bay.

Behind the villa, lanterns flickering, the soldiers

Passed jokes as they dug a shallow grave.

His successor checked the list of visionary schemes,

A harvest to salvage, levies to impose.

A maze of governmental scandals to unwind.

Wheezing from the smoke of a victory cigar,

He sealed his mind against the burst of bullets

As the old man died, smiling in the yard.

The Runner

Stumbling splayfoot on the course,

Unburdened by secular enterprises,

Insensate to his fate,

The adept adjusts his stride

According to the lunar cycles.

If only there was a place to rest,

A cell with instruments for measuring stars

Or the angles of the sun,

Giving some sort of direction,

A curve to the coastline.

He bends forward, sifting sand,

A person set apart from zeal,

Free from disturbances,

Naked of desires,

The whims of the season pervade him.

Fortunate and blessed are the wrecks.

Cramped in burrows, they eat

The white rind and green flesh

Of time's muskmelons.

But the grief of their hesitations

Plays leapfrog in their brains.

Munching algae from the tidal pools,

Our hero schemes how to fill his craw

With burrow-dwellers’ fare.

Beach-bereft, with things the way they are,

He never manages his plans that far.

Three Songs

1.

Oh, the lid on the improbable is a poor fit,

The cover charge on the miraculous

Doesn't apply on weekdays.

The boycott on happy faces fell apart

When the ceiling on revelry was lifted.

2.

Beside the Promised Land

Is a place for mounting dragons.

Gushing springs, gurgling in glades,

Distill their presence, drop by drop,

Upon the tired wanderer.

3.

Unique, beclouded councilor,

Apex changer, weather king,

Lead me to the summit trail

Of my dream mountain.

Ramon Sender

Occidental, Sept. 17,1975

To Muriel Rukheyser

Written upon reading “Double Ode” Oct. 20, 1977

I love you moving towards new form,

Strong and brave you are,

Strong and brave

You stride through dark sea and sand

Singing into new form

Those words you helped me remember,

Words I had been told to forget.

I heard your mother voice

Sing the note of pure awakening,

Washed by awareness of you

Everywhere, in all things.

Great singer of battered dawns,

All these things

I never told you.

Written upon reading your Artifact

Sweet, mysterious female animal,

When your warmth, your hands, are gone,

I will follow through the groves you trod,

To feel your touch on redwood bark,

On the smooth skin of laurel.

Like our swirling earth

You balanced sun and moon.

Palms up,

Balanced sun-moon opposites.

Vak,

The great word cow,

Ut,

The sparkling sky,

You are all of these,

In these you never die!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5pajr1mwra6oscx/Water.docx%20-%20Microsoft%20Word%20at%2021.09.2020-15%3A43%3A49.png?dl=0

VI

Yard Conversation

Got a match, friend?

Reform school paid for this program,

Pinned me like a sailor

In a hurricane

And rewrote me into their

Theology as a sceptic.

They labeled me a bushman

Who denounced in forcible rhyme

The meaning-origin of their fatal lists,

An inebriate tornado strafing

Their nose sockets with indiscriminate odors.

But I got me a lifeboat.

I've girded myself with hyacinths

Against their anemic broadsides.

I crash-landed causation,

An offender who cancelled-

Their feeble contradictions in literal strokes.

Twin brothers of the she-wolf,

We'll swing downstream sputtering

In reverse to cancel the calliopes

Of dread, of chastisement,

To smite with angry angel wings

The worm gears of contradiction.

We'll derive satisfaction

From the creaks of their delusions,

Their donkey pastimes, their moving

Picture lips inflated with paternal dread.

We'll prolong the deluge,

The mucilaginous litter on the altar,

With improper chants that underscore

The alluvial discharge from their mouths.

The corporal punishments

Invest our lines with blood,

Our lives with slender prohibitions

That murmur, 'wait, wait for spring.'

Wait for the snowfall

Of strict denouements,

The highway rains that sling

Pails across the lawns.

David's Jail Poems