Cave Lux(e)
Fancy splinters down at foot level -
Microscopic timbers, deadfall in dusky sloughs.
They lie mong the boulders of the night's dishevel,
Daggers, stingers, punji ambuscades for toes
Curled back as if in flinch against the coming unseen stub.
Paleo-slimey things, cousins to the eel,
lurk midst hexapodal entities of mustard/mayo mixed, a bug or grub,
God knows it's no place for an atheist to kneel,
dally, tarry, hesitate or stop when just another stride
Might reach the switch and drive the demons back and bore
A tunnel past necrophagous things with scales that abide
In fossiliferous lairs of darkness left from yore.
This we must remember in the luxe of modern caves:
Mankind lives in light just as long as dark behaves.
Ode Ocean Ours
Excuse me,
Mr. Manatee,
would you kindly move your butt
from the deep blue sea?
And try to stop looking so idiotic
floating in your sea so amniotic.
Dumb as blubber, a flipper for your feet,
snacks, we're sure, is all you eat.
We know some people like you, in fact,
recumbent, roly-poly, oversnacked,
stuck in the tub, often as not,
under the water, but not a lot,
with belly high, a hairy isle
with crater navel and subaqueous smile
from which occasionally will bloop
a little bubble that smells of poop.
But you, our graceful tidal cow,
happy as a clam in your cup of tea,
our human efluvium you must allow,
so move your butt, we have to pee.
Come And Get It
How about a double-plus-good
jalapeña lollapalooza
with whipped cream
and a cherry retro-charged
turbo-resonated zip-injection
dynamo ram siliconated
lipogourmet melonslut
tattooed-kazoo gigameg
whoosh-cache wiz-doodle dot-com
hyperventilated 401K-plus
derivatives decoder ring that shines
in the dark, eighteen cup holders
standard, and a secret compartment
starter home, no frills,
no windows, six feet long,
one entrance, no exit,
except maybe?
Blank Verse
This space reserved
for a poem never written,
never would have been,
never ought to be, a poem
dead from the get-go,
better off as white space,
better never to have lived
than to have died trying
to do what white space
has always done so well.
Everything Screwy
A kid I knew, now grown
(but crazy still, like kids)
who wrote that brief, sly book
of dubious topic titled
Ventriloquism for Dummies.
When I phoned for an autograph, he said
I could sign it myself, put his name
in rounded script with donut
dots on the i's, a swirly tail
on the end of Screwy, and underline it
with a crosshatched scroll.
I thought that cute and did it,
practiced, even,
going for the John Hancock of someone
wild with irony, an Evel Knievel
in a station wagon who mowed his lawn
in bare feet and kept a rooster
just to crow at.
Screwy soon got busted for internet fraud,
hacked into a federal agency, issued himself
a Purple Heart or a pilot's license or something,
did community service at a school for the deaf,
coached acting there and himself
learned sign language.
He married one of the teachers, a homely thing
with sagging cheeks and peach fuzz
in her oblong dimples, an amateur puppeteer
who could read his lips but never knew
he was always saying something else.
Ode Alone on a Stump
Dump. Jump. Hump. Clump.
Some mighty nice words
can rhyme with Stump.
So gimme some bourbon
(hic) and a handful of snow
and something to stir with,
maybe this stick - hey, whaddya
know - it's hemlock! How aptly
Socratic, for bourbon and sap's
like dope to an addict:
It's pleasant and kills
and eliminates pain, and for some
reason's better on a log in the rain.
It's certainly better than a Brooklyn Bridge jump,
to drink and think all alone on a stump.
But wait! Hold off! Admonish me not!
I won't do it, it was only a thought.
It all rhymed so sort-of, so easy and quick,
I won't do it, I swear, at least not with a stick.
A Nice Drowning
I love you, whatever,
your eyes, Roy G. Biv,
your tongue of the infinite
staves, your feverish toadstools,
tree sap, the way stuff gurgles.
Did you know your navel's
like a fingerprint, yours
yet in the same swirl as all
conchs and galaxies, the same
way toilets flush, too?
Do galaxies flush or collect
cosmic lint, I wonder. And how come
I can't check my own bellybutton
for a tiny black hole deep
in the back in the dark?
Explain this to me: fire.
And blue. And where
the forgotton goes. And
Do cows get earwax?
Is anybody in charge?
I feel like a bee drowning
in gallons of honey, a ton
of sweet gold sap, all
I could want and
way too much of it.
Listen:
I could stand a little silence
around here. Stumps moan,
you know; a pond flat as glass
hums with not-rippling,
and the deadest of possums
on the backest of roads
speaks.
So shut up and listen.
Yes, you heard me right:
Shut up. Listen.
Hear that hiss in your head?
That's vacuum.
Ever heard your tooth
under your head,
beneath your pillow?
That's a chunk of
childhood whimpering.
Church bells unstruck
by their own clappers
all but unhearably toll
the yammer and rattly-clunk of
the town below.
A pile of dead
Christmas trees down
at the dump, glazed with sleet,
streaming with tinsel -
imagine what they're saying.
A new stick of chalk,
slick and cylindrical, squeaks
more but speaks less than the stub
word-wittled at each end.
And a brown wheelbarrow rolled
over, riddled with rust,
says more than all the chalk
in the world and all its dust.
If you didn't think
you were so goddam smart,
you'd know stuff like that.
Wet Your Pants
Go ahead.
Do it.
Just once in your hot-shot
so-called big-deal adult life.
Cut loose. It won't kill you.
Nobody has to see, to know.
You can wash the pants,
or just chuck 'em out the window
on some dark backstretch of the interstate.
Worst case scenario, you get a fine for littering,
not for what you really did.
So go ahead.
Do it.
See if you can hear
that softest of all sounds, feel
that lava emanating like a nice memory
stretching itself at dawn. Watch
how it lubricates the mind. You'll know
by the way your eyes waver, seeing
nothing, knowing all, as data feeds up
from the frontiers of acceptable perception.
You can do it right now.
You can do it later.
You could do it never, but then you'd never do it.
You could go the rest of your adult life
wondering if you'll ever do it. For a while,
you'll know you never will. But soon
you'll know you've been holding it too long.
Then you'll know you really are going to do it.
And then you will.
And then you'll know.