Terror Alert: Level Magenta

The mist-gift that was morn
came replete with impractical
compunction to make song
before the sun-pulse
on the pave-stones beat.

Charlie’s gummed-up chakras
made the getting out of bed
an unfun game of crusty decrepitude;
so he pressed fresh the coffee,
assumed certain sure-fire asanas,
dialed up international news
on the radio,
and made his paltry parry-thrusts
at the sublime just the same.

So long was the misfit mired
in intentional obliquity
(by root-deep timidity engendered)
the he sighed in straight-forward fear
to raise his bender-rattled voice
and actually speak.

So, stepped he through the door,
shut, per habit, locklessly
the loveless, luckless night before,
looked up and out direct into
a cerulean sky-wrapped sun,
closed his moonshined eyes,
recited some warmed-over lists
of so-well-thought-out,
well-wrought wrongs
by power-drunk,
non-Herculean,
pseudo-humans
geared to gurgitate
and sew great dread
into the hewn hearts
of impoverished persons,
send them over hill and dale
and sea to get their young,
glory-hungry guts/brains/bones
all split/blown/torn
on this self-same earth
(distant, tis true)
where other hymns are sung,
prayers intoned, rites enacted,
where other clothes and cloths
are woven and worn-
the self-same earth which
contracted his mothers worthy womb
til he was humbly born,
the self-same earth
which grows the very food
he chews each damned
and blessed day/month/week.

He writes this down then,
‘stead of saving, shreds it
for Carnival confetti,
heaves a sigh and sits
and meditates naively.

He will not lock his door,
can’t exactly pin the point
at which this habit happened;
can’t much feel the fear for loss of things,
can’t quite conceive the why.

Attempts he to discern
if this is deeply true,
if this idyll bird-idea
has Pheonix-wings enough to fly
or is simply daffy, dodo.

He dreams himself a butcher,
malapropos and blundering on
with dumb-dull, rusty blade,
feels, sharply, rue,
all dopey unredeemed.

Elsewhere, it so seems,
handsome couples of
re-tread revolutionaries zealous,
clear a future’s pathless path
with tried and trusty machetes.

The well-honed blades,
on cutting tender jungle tendrils,
emit the sweetest “ting.”

He ope’s his eyes
to curse the day
his Ego bade him
wag his too-rough,
wrong-sounding tongue
in unmelodic attempt so sing.

About Every 2.5 Years

Twas a bluely lunar
confluence of paths.
Not crossed,
but by bodies stellar
delightfully directed.

On that fine February day
just the thing,
the very what
some -celestial- one’s
weariest ear was
distantly wanting,
maybe mildly aching to hear
was what, all over-earnest,
itched in the scurrilous tip
of charmless Charlie’s
poor pen’s nib;
what, of late,
he basfhully burned
to chant/write/sing.

Tabula Non Rasa

A steadfast one was who
he dared himself to dream to be,
with flame-kept strength
unobscured by some sad, sick shadow;

And should he grow and live to see
the war-blood overboil'd,
spilt and steaming,
a one who'd not,
despite the quaked-quick,
sit still and timorous,
but would calm
and stir by turns
his curdled courage-
rise and fight and die
if might and cunning
had he not enough...

So did our child-Charlie's
Teutonic roots grab his
immature imagination;
so much and enough
for the over-trite
3rd grade composition of
the dreary dirge his widowed wife
would sobbingly sing while
his battle-broke bones were
inspiringly interred in
his Burgs best bulwark.

Sentence For A Once Met Friend

Cold evening langour- Every subtle thing eventually slows; outside delicious eternities roll by, effortlessly returning young.

Ode to a Cherry (Busted)

Who, draped in grace,
might deign to drop,
from eyes that see past
the barbs and wires
which in interiors do lurk,
a couplet of sun’s rays
redirected, a sinuous smile,
that wordless wings beyond
both sex and sensuality,
that dashes illusions of duality,
upon our tired Charlie,
thrice derelicted ?
Yet skips he whistling
after days of much rough work
burning ‘way the wastes,
inspired by a goodly, ancient
recollected vision of
an undefiled Way
that once was called,
without derision, chaste.

Fly Right

A so-small space,
but barely there,
downed Charlie saw-
an infinitesimal interval
twixt hem and haw,
where a hummingbird
hummed and hovered,
brief-fixed in space,
about a pear blossom.

An admonition adequate enough
to redirect clowny Chuck's
old-hat, centripetal stuff,
a drone most noisome 'bout
how many sons he'd seen
grow gray and old alone.

Breakfast

By brute, dray-horse force
(turned earth and dust-devils
in their wide wake left)
did Sleep’s sweat-sleek dream steeds
draw dishevelled Charlie
from bundled/bereft bed
into the wracked,
foul-winded world-
eloped eternally, verily wed
to high/holy Dreamsong visions
still miraculously intact.

With plow-horse power,
raucous, rampant,
with full-flared nostrils
did they froth-mouthed haul
our once-wastrel, tough-tyke,
half-wit, half-waked, hope-doped bloke
into the blown-out blue and
dew-draped frissons of magic morn
while sunrays rent the sea-mists
and the world’s warped width
welcomed seers and saps alike.

To be, again, this way born,
(from Sleep-depths thrust up)
into such a morn,
now stumbled-bummed
into the dingy diner,
by the day’s start still
silly, startled/shocked a little,
grateful Chuck ordered Belgian waffles
almost ashed into his coffee cup,
and built an igloo facsimile
with sugar-cubes and spittle.

Bookends

Charlie in greatcoat and hobnails,
returns ambly/scuffily from a movie,
whistling Simon and Garfunkel tunes,
feeling, despite, arthritic hips
and hangnails (kind of) funky/groovy.

His arrival home,
(a place quite shambly
though not in ruins)
lands him in favorite chair
with favorite book,
a feeling a bit too self-satisfied
his whiskey-warmed wattles assails
as he runs a meaty paw through thinning hair
and round him takes a blear-eyed look
at the books which mark his life.

The merely meagre library gives him pause,
though it’s keeled evenly enough,
draws honied strife from varied straws-
Tao, Wilber, Williams, Whitman,
Emerson, Neruda, cummings, Marquez...
all sweet and dusty, not too neat,
nor too musty, available for the odd peruse,
not evidencing too grave neglect/abuse-
(though begging for the featherduster)
and holding them all together,
clustered, upright, compiled-

on the left;

a firm, fascia-wielding fist,

on the right;

an open hand,
palm up,
love and life lines
long and longing-

so that one get’s the gist-

for all past and, alike,
all future days and nights
our Charles a sucker stays
(whose eyes do easily overmist)
for opposites reconciled,
the way that tense and
restive melody rolls and sways.

Write On

Wrongs cannot into rightfulness be writ,
nor can even earnest attempts be wrought
without much stale stench of self-righteousness
left where it’s author did recent sit.

Such a trepidated train
of thought leaves soot and such
upon the jacked-up tracks
in Charlie’s rail-yard heart.

Still, he thinks and jots,
caring not not a bit for
right, righteous, wrong,
earnest, stench and all that shit-

“To sing like certain birds
in alert, ascending major thirds
might a happier, healthy habit be
for a measly man of
too-damned-many words-
a simpler self oft lost
in labyrinths tripwired
for boobs like me
who make byzantine pacts
with their(inner)selves
and ennervate the birth
of more plucky, natural acts
at the cost of ad-lib opportunities-
things unsaid for shyness
stay on proverbial shelves
and Time goes down the fuckin’ tubes.”

“Better he whose deep-dredged heart
(an excavation executed for
the pseudo-scientific sake of
exhuming that oft-rumoured, sacred part)
will a happenstance harbor be
for trav’lers bold and meek,
of sleek and leaky, world-worn hulls
with vims and vigors old and young,
either mere adrift or those who
‘neath purposed sail do active seek
some shelter from the lonely rigors
of the sun-scorched, storm-tossed sea.”

Cirque Du Lit

While waking
Charlie's chuckling easily
being, ( yes, rare) as he is,
cozily companioned-
though not well rested.

His nerves already half bested
as a garbage truck prowls
the back alley wheezing hydraulically
and the neighbor dog performs
the morning micturation
as per hilarious habit, sneezily.

A night spent navigating
the ungainly geometries
of foreign elbows, knees and hips
beneath a quilt,
patch by patient patch,
assembled by someone's
probably grandma,
leaves both her and him
not quite refreshed,
their individual patiences tested
by surprising snores,
unintelligible, midnite muttering quips,
the somniferous ramblings
of two brains dreaming
in precarious proximity
which, though not calamity,
might be dubiously dubbed
tragi-comedy.

The exigencies of the morning
being dictated by variants
on wage-slave drudgery,
half unconscious mumbles he
"We needs must get to work, us!
Damned be our rest-deprived
and over-cooked noodles!
Though we both be sleep-bereft
arriving late's employee theft!"

And so to this nonsense
two sleep-wrinkled mugs
bootstrap themselves into action
leaving the floppy-shoed,
jug-eared, honking knob-nose,
pillow juggling performance
(badly clowned,
still off by fractions)
to become more
professional protagonists,
now persnickety in pursuit
of a goodly cup of morning drug-
leaving behind a single rectangular ring
of their most unreknowned sleep circus.

A Byproduct of Commerce

Oh, the drear idea-
"beauty products"
does suck
rich winds
from Charlie's
simple sails.

To wit-
beauty's not produced
but born/bestowed-
this much our Charles
yet quaintly avers
and whatsmore
pious prays is true.

What he feels, he practices,
but does not preach-
to walk unflinching 'cross and through
a world hammered hot with hates,
where dead-hearted men
go unimpeached and
asphyxiated forests cough out
dirty verses for flocks
of bald and songless birds,
high plains pocked and puddled,
wronged with painful, radioactive rain
as unearthed crude congeals
along the bastard beach-

Thus Charlie's charred,
disenchanted conscience
squirms and churns.

He counts himself humbled
possessor of an awkward
and ungainly faith wherein
Love's omnipotency yet teaches
those limber enough to learn-
yet his horrific hesitancy has
oft left him stumbling several
stupid steps behind and betting
blind while twothree sawbucks short.

So, while psuedo-surgeons,
ply their pathetic plastic
and siliconize the valley
more rightly populated by
pendant, peach-fuzz and perfume,
Charles' maddened mind fumes
and sears with nightmarish themes
of the world by man undone,
his song stung and glutted with
garish/ghoulish imageries-

post-apocalyptic ghost-towns
where groups of coyotes,
gutted, fill a roadside ditch
'mid the stink of feral feline piss,
the rabid hiss of scavenger birds
on various carrion enriched
beneath a stunned sky the
gun-metal gray of a groan,
and hard by, the prayer tree
by man-made lightning smote...

these things by rote our
rent-hearted bloke recites,
all rosey visions gone out-wiped
while direct unto his unguarded part,
by spheres celestial, is piped a dirge,
an ancient ache whose primal surge
by dark-winded instruments is blown.

Charlie: Uncut

A head-shakingly
constantly unconstant focus,
a vagabond vision,
an arrant knave’s attention
that stops and follows
a startling series of unwritten,
careening characters
(man/dog/bird/star
cat/kid/wind/woman whatever)
as they slide and slice
nicely cross his cross-haired lens
which zooms and pans bizarrely
(oh-so nearly/farly)
taking hummingbird sips
at life’s nubile nectars-
the seven-holed head
a camera that shoots to shoot
having naught to do with cinema,
with Cannes , with actors' glitz,
Paparazzi (turds), red carpets out-rolled.

This inner reel of his wheels
with bold words/sounds/images
through grabby eyes/ears/nose
(an operant blessing-curse)
a crazy collage in starts and fits collected-
both impressionistic and precise,
having naught to do with virtue/vice,
an actual furious festival of filming
fit to throng a cutting room floor...

unless, of course, it’s fickle force
could rearrange, repeat, congeal
and somehow yield a song
both true enough and strong
to resuscitate just one torpid heart
asleep/benumbed too long
to the ticklish ubiquity
of heavenly handiwork,
the shift of sacred,
timeless sands-

this little much of hope
our chummy Charles,
the darling dope,
though oft stuck in the above
described mucks and mires
still strugglingly
scribbles towards,
awkard and ungracefully aspires.