They are the bad time boys.
They are the men who broke the world,
Who come in many derivations,
Who created all boundaries,
And stacked odds against the others.

I sing a song of my self
and it is the dirge of my people.
One life’s mistake
fixed with a searing snip
and the smell of well-handled steak.
End of the line.

Buck stops here, Bucko!
I won’t be making all of my father’s mistakes -
just most of them.
I won’t die loveless
but I will die alone.
A ghost,
a memory,
a story,
an impression.

Oh, I will leave an impression.
Prep your RVs and tin foil satellite dishes!
Conspire in tattered lawn chairs
and anticipate my arrival.
For I am the meteor’s crater.
I will be a Roswell rumor
and a desert song,
told in the dunes of Barstow,
unchecked by the checkpoints
on roads traveled only by cargo -
human and otherwise.

Never go to Barstow.
It is filled with people like me.
A mecca for the dropouts
and the burnouts
and the sellouts
and the down-and-outs
lost in arroyos flooded
with unexpected doubts.

The pumps are as dead as the denizens -
the bleached bones of Morrison covers
and rusty rallies and journalist pilgrims,
gone gonzo on things worse than ether.
They are my people.

The people who sing the songs of themselves -
Sonnets of sadness,
long life lines
and tragic love lines,
Slanted rhymes and broken times.
The unkillable,
The unlovable,
The alone,
The free.

We used to value grit.
It served a coarse purpose
In the hands of the maker.
It built bureaus and cut curios
and wore away the excess of elephants,
revealing only the polished products
creating something
by removing everything unwanted.

Of course, we valued grit.
It takes a rough hand
to move mountains
and to clear forests.

There is a certain destruction in creation.
A time to be as loud as a blasting cap.
A time to bite like the edge of an axe.
A time to split the core and get to the heart.

We selectively sheer the accumulated layers
Wood and stone,
Blood and bone,
House and home.

We will always need grit
when it comes to the finishing.
That pernicious insidious scraping
The stubborn scouring of the surface
Until all that remains is someone’s conception,
who saw something beautiful and useful
and set to work destroying.

I’m already packed.
I’m ready to go.
I left this place.
Weeks ago.

I live out of a makeup case.
Use a backpack for a suitcase
I have paired my wardrobe
Down to indestructible accessories.

This time I leave a life line
This time I leave a trace
I got my compass
I found my north
A gentleman’s spirit
And an explorers worth.

I had to connect to both sides to do this.
For I contain both my father and my mother.
Both wanderers in their own way
One in the Navy
One in her life choices.
Both settled after the fray

I lead to follow the footsteps of my forebears
To reconnect with things abandoned long ago.
I don’t know who I am any more.
I lost it along the way.
Every baggage dropped
was a thing forgotten -
A little piece of myself
discarded into dust.

I go to find them.
I hear their call.
Each a treasure
Once a curse
Bags on my back
Hands on my purse.

I clutch my instrument in hand
In all the meanings of the bards of old
I go forth with a clarion voice
And a story needing told.

I am an interloper.
On this island
That’s one convenient flight away.

I am worse than the colonists.
For I am a post capitalist.
They conquered.
I vacationed.
They killed thousands
My life style kills millions.

My Luis and Clark
Are Apple Maps and Yelp
I am here because I bought a ticket
An all expense paid excursion
Born on a litter of injustices
And the paths by the same racist imperialists
Who figured out this is a pretty nice spot.

They decided to keep it.
I decided to rent it.

Yet, passing islander
With your smile and your compliment
Your direct approval me propelled me
Better than any trade wind

I am sorry I came
Sorry I intruded
Sorry I made things worse because I was bored
Because the pills had stopped working
Because my therapist quit
But, thank you
That smile was almost worth it.

Immortalized silicone
I’m simulated dystopia
Erasure immune

Two forklift drivers and their families
Splashed in the turgid waters of a Puerto Rican jungle tour.
They bonded over an ass-busting slide
Down well-rock rocks and scraped coccyxes
Their interaction, verbatim,
For not even a poet can make it up.

“I’m from Brooklyn. Where you from?”
“I’m from the Bronx. I drive a forklift.”
“Get outta here! I’m a forklift driver too!”

From the tide pools, the wife smeared in zinc
Rotund in her stripe one piece, shouts
“Manny! Come get your kid!”

“Be right there, Cheryl, sweetie. I’m talking.”
Remember to swallow the G
And somehow stress the unstressed syllable.
In a lilt so iconic, imposters are easily spotted.

“Now where was I? Oh, yah, forklifts.”
Don’t go to Philadelphian with it.
It needs to rattle like a passing subway car
And sell bagels, newspapers and heads of cabbages
From the back of panel vans.

“Hey, you know Vito Badacunni?”
“Yah! He’s married to my sister’s third cousin!”

With a Marlboro dipping from sun-burned lips
Beneath a sun hat with broken reeds and frayed brim
That screams second hand Soho summer,
She snaps her fingers
“Manny, come get your fucking kid.
I need a cigarette.”

Like a prima donna orca,
Called by the ring master’s click,
Manny exits his wading pool
Increasing in volume
But never in anger
“Be right there, Cheryl!”

This legendary formula of two parts,
Sought by the golden and the lead,
Is wrought by gathered celebrants
With alchemy in their hearts.

We start with the diamond -
The cutting clarity
And faceted philosophies.
He contains compressed secrets,
The carbon component needed
To form the living bond.

We add our reagent,
gleaned from the heavens
flowing elegant and beautiful.
Clad in billows of white,
draped in the gossamer of the clouds,
She is a lattice of storms
And radiates the wave forms of grace.

For generations, we have practiced this careful formula.
We take one part diamond,
One part ivory,
We gather in a sacred place
And we all watch the union.

We are honored to behold the transmutation.
In this crucible, we stand sentinel.
We are the heat and the billows,
The tinctures and the alembics,
The catalysts and the stabilizers.

We watch them combine,
And, in their reaction,
we, too, are transformed.
The old are reminded
Of their own formulas.
The young divine a glimpse
of an elemental happiness.
The broken are mended.
The blind revealed.

We are all enlightened,
as conjoined rings are formed.
Made anew.
By this legendary formula of two parts,
Sought by all men and all women,
Gifted now to those with love and wisdom.

Take that, E.
E.
Cum
mings

-D-
-I-
-C-
-K-
-E-
-N-
-H-
-Y-
-P-
-H-
-E-
-N-
-S-
sung to the tune of the “Yellow Rose of Texas”

In response to Yeats

When you are stoned, faded and full of cracks
sprawl cross the floor and continue to puff -
Till your walls begin to deconstruct -
Smoke till Jericho falls and your face slacks.

How many have been bettered by you,
Improved the world by following your lead?
The drugs will show you your every deed
Your ego turned off and your vision true,

Cry out, laid humble, how your self is dead!
Confront your constructions high over head
It’s time; hide no more and face the real you.