The Ivy Cottage

The paint flakes as the ivy turns

around the nail and between the planks.

It pulls

It pulls down

and apart

It thrives

thrives and spreads

A self destructive counterpart.

A strangle and a struggle behind the shed.

In the shadow of this corrugated wasteland.

The truth will not fall on this mitigated blight.

The shallow home is an irrigated fate and,

The roof, the wall, and the deconstructed life.

IF

Claustrophobic mirage of tangled webs,

Caustic thoughts and mangled heads,

Electronic voices call,

Broken hearts they fall and fall,

Unspoken choice is no choice at all. . .

Each way is a wrong turn,

Each word is the wrong thing to say,

Each sunny day is a burn.

I don’t know how it will end,

’till then, IF is my only friend.

Invisible You

Somewhere down the line,

my vision will be mine,

like the owl in the light of the moon,

there’s nothing but invisible you.

Somewhere in the incense smoke,

your prayers, in layers, float,

like the fire burning in my eyes,

there’s invisible hope in disguise.

Somewhere I’ll be waiting,

Somewhere I’ll be holding on.

With my eyes closed and breathe baitng.

With invisible you leading on.

Try

What if I could hear myself think?
Would it make a sound?
Would it make any sense,
out of everything?
Everything that I’ve put up, shut up, hidden,
and lit up,
Showed and been shown,
Had and had taken,
Took and then gave away?
What about the things I caught, and saved
or those I let fall, destroyed, and fade away?

Will anyone catch me?
Because I’ll be falling trying to hear myself think.
Trying to bring it back from the brink.
Trying to think it through the future and back to the past and bury it with ink.

The Den of Pestilence

The pools of muck mock the road,

Shopping bags haunt the tree,

Sulfur pierces the air,

Industry everywhere.

Violence wins the losers,

Vulgarity speaks all languages,

There will always be places like this.

There will always be sirens, stenches, and sharp fences,

in my den of pestilence.

Drop the smile and tell the truth.
You’ve been dancing around it for years.
I can see it in pictures from our youth and the fear falls to the floor like an old woman’s tears.
Like that time I said that thing that I could never take back.
Like that day my heart attacked, and you kept it on track.
If we could remember all that moved,
all that crushed,
all that flowed uphill,
Then that would be something worth remembering.

2-25-00

Soft warm water washing against it,
Lapping up the knees of some timeless animal.
Living the lives of all souls ever incarnated.
A ghostly reminder of history.
of posterity.
The creature of our past.
Ever wandering the shore where the land of our reality,
touches the ocean of life’s truth.
the ocean no ship has crossed, no soul has transgressed with consciousness.
Ever shrouded in a fog we create.
Some divine transcendence might allow a realization,
but the strength of our reality, our land, our hologram, billows choking blinding clouds.
Yet it still walks, swims, and crawls on the edge,
where the ocean meets the sand.

From ‘97

Sadly sitting somewhere,

sifting through stuffy sacks,

of soggy stacks,

of photographs.

Mountains of monotonous memories,

molding more me than you.

Reading red inked backs,

recalling rusted revellings,

rolling under to renew.

Falling fictitiously,

for fear of finding,

a forest of facts,

missing any laughs.

regret

somewhere there’s a reason. somewhere beneath my excuses. but you might as well push down the plunger, ’cause you’ve already lit the fuses. something that used to be so easy. something that I was so used to. well if you find the point let me know. ’cause I’ve always refused to. I’ve been trying to find the bottom, Diving over and over, each time finding a reason to surface. sometime it won’t be there. sometime I won’t care. someone will forget. someone will remember. I will regret.

7-9-00

You are all that is still good in the pools of June, and all that is sweet in the cinnamon thrown and strewn. I am the unkind word which needs a talking to, like the Wednesday morning which won’t turn blue. Everyone tries to make something. Everyone tries to tie two and two together. Everyone tries to gather the falling pies of life and make them sing. Everyone tries. But a few have only to roll over in a bale of cotton candy on a November evening in New York and say “I love you”. But just a few. A few like you. Because you are all that is still lovely beneath the hungry twists of grain in August and everything after.