Red As a Graveyard Rose,

Mean As a Junkyard Dog

I’ll be your paper-

maché Mephistopheles,

your house of two-way

mirrors, your stud-bull

weened on Kali’s teat. I’ll be

your thimble of soil

where the seed of the

tree of knowledge was planted,

your lone spark from the

sacred fire, your sea

the color of lead, your sky

the color of smoke,

the ever-shifting

variable to your un-

wavering constant,

red as a graveyard

rose, mean as a junkyard dog.

I will be the wind

hoarse with howling, the

bee feeding on the nectar

of the dark flower

of night, the lie for

the lie, the truth for the truth,

the blue moon in the

window, the wolf at

the door, the cigar-smoking

monkey at the type-

writer, if only

you would be my daisy, my

huckleberry, my

angel to rattle

the cage of my dreams with your

shiny black nightstick.

The Shipwreck of Our Arrival

Reality is

an interesting concept:

a haunted machine

of many moving

parts (with no clear instruction

manual to help

us assemble a

working model, even, and

all our tools lost in

the shipwreck of our

arrival, here, in this world

of fleeting moments

and passing clouds and

swiftly flowing rivers (that

are never the same

river no matter

how many times we dip our

empty cup into

it)), and here we are,

situated somewhere in

the universal

spectrum between gods

and insects: half angel /

half beast, and all too

human, with only

the many ghosts of the wind

to sing us to sleep.

There Be Monsters Here
The mosquitos are

     buzzing madly and the blood-

hounds are baying for

     blood, the tents of the money-

changers are being

     folded up and here’s just a

few of the latest

     headlines pulled from our ever-

streaming stock-market

     ticker-tape of post-post-post-

modern times: among

     other things we seem to some-

how be both fatter

     and fitter than ever, some-

how dumber and more

     clever, standing ever less

and less united,

     yet sleeping, poorly, more and

more alone, somehow

     richer and poorer, walking

taller but falling

     shorter, and more jacked-up on

ever-more fucked-up

     artificial stimulants

and responses, like

     never before. And the lights

are dimming, and the

     CEOs are skimming-off

the sweetest creams (and

     honeys, too) and, if you would

care to adjust your

     viewer, there, you can see we

seem to be swimming

     in a human stew of our

own brewing juices

      and goos (hey, just add liquor

and / or some other

     variant of painkiller,

mood stabilizer

    or mind altering substance;

we make our own rich

      au jus). Yes, loan sharks, lawyers

and chiropractors

     are calling in their marks of

due, cockroaches are

     crawling out of the sinks and

the streets are lined with

     the left-overs of last year’s

distractions and post-

     warranty applications

and word has it from

     the most holy and on-high

of authorities,

     that our big American

cock has been offi-

     cial-ly nailed to the floorboards,

for real, this time. And

     the wily, one-eyed captain

with the faint cocaine

     moustache and the sour bible

breath is steering our,

     once proud (but now, just kinda

creepy and creaky)

     old gal through a dense pea soup

purgatorio

     of toxic greenhouse gasses

and effluvial

     propagandas, closer and

ever closer to

     that forbidden zone that reads,

     clearly, there be monsters here.