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.

When They Come For Us

 In a cramped gov't office

let our affair begin. 

I shall publish my passion

on an illegal press in the basement 

of an abandoned apartment complex

run by a nice foreign couple.

They had to flee

one step ahead of an inflamed mob,

but who now tend window boxes

and play cello duets.

Undress for me

like a chrysalis.

Speak to me

through a paper cup

and down a long string to my heart.

When they come for us--

having already disposed of the foreign couple--

we will sing,

our song enhanced by the ropes

around our throats,

Our dignity flying proudly

like a banner

or a prayer flag

or a balloon man at a car dealer

Until we kiss,

infuriating our tormentors

and made to dig our own graves beforehand

with love trinkets,

and our bare hands

as if making love or committing homicide.

Be Good

 You know,

how does a person get to that place?

I mean,

you're born,

someone loves you,

you find a place in the world and take each step until

there you are,

looking like GI Joe,

blowing the brains out of a smiling woman in a mom-car

then sauntering on

like a cool breeze.

Bad as it was

bad as the lies about it are

bad as the blood all over the stuffed toys and the airbag were,

the thing that made me finally cry, and scream,

and not know how to contain what I felt

was the "before" image

of the pet dog in the back seat.

How does someone get up in the morning,

slip into their army man bullshit,

and go blow away a smiling woman with her dog?

Jonathan Ross, how did you get there

with a gun in your hand,

her death on your head,

and a pet dog rolling away with its dead mom at the wheel?

Moon Rocks

 I've been thinking about moon rocks.

Are they dark gray like the walls of your bedroom?

Silver like the cuffs you gave me

   back when I loved chokers and cuffs?

These days I don't even wear scarves anymore.

What do moon rocks remember, when they think back?

Harsh white, like a cop's flashlight

   shining in the driver's side window of their memories?

Or endless darkness, a constant turning way

   the way you used to do once you'd decided to move on?

I wonder, what if I had built a circle of moon rocks

   on the table underneath a calendar for the year 1996?

A circle of salt keeps negative spirits at bay, but 

   I wanted you to stay. like a fluorescent star on a ceiling

or a passage in a gnostic gospel that only poets ever memorize.

What happened to the moon rocks, I wonder?

Are they the kissing cousins of spring tulips or bright pansies

   in some retired NASA wonk's side garden?

Or do they sit forever in a silent room like bus station ghosts,

   with no ticket home, feeling melancholy and missing it all

even though it was nothing but rocks and dust, bright light and darkness?