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.

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.

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”

I love you, Mom,
As you panhandle for golden lollies
and scab cigarettes off passersby.

You were beautiful, once.
You were as pretty as the faded floral dress,
hanging, gimbaled, off your bony shoulders.

Unlike most sons, I see you every day.
I watch you bleach and fade and loosen.
I watch your flowers go a little more gray.
I pass by your usual bench
as I walk to work.
You still wear the fuzzy, mint green slippers,
From a Christmas,
eight years ago.
You occasionally bark crude solicitations at the young men.

Yet, you never solicit me.
Even, if your milky eyes only perceive
a motion blur of pinstripes and briefcases and silver wrist watches.
You never bum a smoke.
You never ask for change.
You never say, “Thank you,”
when I press a fifty into your thin hand.

I love you, Mom.

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.

Immortalized silicone
I’m simulated dystopia
Erasure immune

Forty Two Poems

No reason, no real rhyme
Just attempts to encapsulate
Little vignettes, bubbles of time.
Gaseous things.

Some quirky, some foul
Some droll, some stupid.
You know, poems about life.

They say right what you know
And I really know a good cosmic fart joke
And the pointlessness of worry

Forty two songs about things falling apart
Cosmic order that, the arrow of time
Ever to that great Entropic goddess
Singing that eternal knell

The music of the spheres
My cosmic ass to your celestial ear
The heavens sing
With forty two explosions of the gut.

They are the good time gals.
They are the women who make the world,
Who come in many forms,
Who cross all boundaries,
And struggle against stacked odds.

They are mothers born and goddesses chosen:
Some warriors, some healers,
Some brutal, some savage,
Some kind, some rude

• All equal.

This is an ode to the feminine form
in all its guises,
To the women who made my world.
Not all of them birthed me
But all shaped me
All equally,

Equally beautiful
Equally monstrous
Equally stormy
Equally righteous

Some were a passing light
Flittering across smokey windows
Some were lingering lanterns
Guiding the way down twisting corridors
Some were pragmatic nurses
Closing the dead eyes of fathers.

They are the good time gals
The women who remake this world
Who propelled us as a species
And might help us tear it all down.