Dollies

 Mama dress you all in lace

smack you hard across the face

loves to seem so fair and fine

serves your dollies turpentine

Daddy left by fast express

to take up with a baroness

who cries because her roses died

watered with formaldehyde

Chalking signs on sidewalk blocks

a bloody hen, a happy fox

when it rains the neighbors say

the chalk sticks rise and walk away

Now you're grown with one desire

to set your mama's house on fire

and dance across the blackened beams

to serve your dollies cakes and creams.

Salty

 We meet one last time

reluctantly, like castaways

not quite resigned to a diet of bugs

and scrawny seabirds.

I take an astrolabe out of my bag

and you dangle a sextant from your hand

as if it were the neck of a dodo.

We ignore our plates and order no drinks

though the room pitches and yaws in the gale.

I lift my peg leg right up onto the table.

It's made from a piece of my mast

that fell before your showy cannonade.

The yellow parrot I have engaged

is out to take you for all you're worth.

he argues elegantly in curse words and patois

while doing an inventory of every rolling doubloon.

"You Shanghaied me!" we accuse in unison,

pointing fingers like surgeons probing a wound.

Nice try, but I brought an extra eye patch just in case.

So here we are, sitting at Mike's Deserted Island Cafe,

gaunt, weak, half delirious, brandishing the tableware

and setting fire to our own grass huts, because

we are both angry, and gutshot, and flailing in the water,

shoving each other off the last floating barrel

still redolent of the wine we once shared with a smile.

An Older Gentler World

 It's an older gentler world

inside this song,

given birth by a Herco Flex 75 pick

with sleepy monkeys in the trees

waiting for enlightenment.

I'm high from a bass line,

going downstream on religious waters

where nuns and parrots appear and disappear

above and beneath the somnambulant surface,

casual whispering gods whose guitars

are touched

with sweet divinity.

Poet

 You asked me where I live.

I said I live in someone's garage behind a cat's ear.

I live inside a book where the pages smell of furniture polish.

I live at the edges of a memory of your aunt's house years ago.

I live on the surface of the sun and the appliances keep blowing up.

How about you?

You made a weird face and walked away curling your lip.

So, I answered for you.

You live in a graveyard and lick the frost off tombstones.

You live in a dog's mouth and bite the postman to taste blood.

You live in a penny on the train track and kiss the wheelsets.

You live in an auctioneer's gavel and catalog the successful bids. 

I say these things at your back. You're cute when you flinch.

___________

An almost total reworking of a poem from 2017.