Flay Me Down

Charlie woke most abrupt-

choking down the chyme

of wine and cheese

on which he'd supped.

Three hours of tortuous

ad nauseum later

all up he violent threw it

wishing he'd taken

time to sip and chew it.

Thrashing sweatliy in fevered dreams

upon the dawn's broken light

all awash in call of

duck, duck and goose

tore something from

the dark deeps loose.

No rhyme or nearly clever line

could wash the soot from

off his scarred heart's rime..

for despite and beside

all desires, wants and needs

the most of what's left, glacially adrift,

(a moraine of sorts)

he knew, we not words or lines,

but the embrace

of that smallish pile of

righteous acts and deeds.

Riverside Contemplation

a byproduct of

togetherness

suggests a fancy flight

a wing's edge, lift-

and thus, a featherness.

unsought therefore

the more appreciated,

a gift of sorts, unregistered

but recognized,

yet all uncalculated.

How It Is

From the very day his unsane,
vagrant course was charted,
to this was our Charlie
nearly drawn, did keen incline
all natural and, thus, without fear:

The white-hot and smokeless
flame that fueled the ardent hearted.
Who the world shot-through,
bejeweled, with art, love, pain
and such beings, things
which knew not shame.

There but for the Grace of God

Seemed the over-bright afternoon
a blight upon his private darknesses.

Charlie, quaking to the quick
ambled about on benumbed legs,
feeling most mortal,
doing no good,
those around him
seeming but vane, blind
vessels to eventual carcasses.

Himself a kind of opened,
weird, walking wound,
throwing off the smell
of pain and beaten-down blood.

Morning # n+1

Morning lifted its head,
leaden, impenetrable-
and Charles,
contemplating coffee,
the cold commute,
rote work awaiting
him with perfect patience,
felt his drab dreams,
hewn half-assedly,
slowly eroding as he pushed 50.

Of late, a second-rate
irksome exercise
he'd concocted
burbled in his muzzy brain.
Whether one could
consciously remember
the millisecond moment
when one slipped in
Sleep's sweet surrender,
guard-officially down,
a dear, sad clown
awaiting dreams-
all crystal clear
or fuzzy with clouds,
fog, forgetfulness and rain.

Blast

Charlie was considering distance,
the tick of the odometer
on his way through Pennsylvania
through the wee hours of the night.

Each tenth clicking by-
528 feet, 528 more...

and it brought to mind
certain blithe claims
of Mickey Mantle clouts
of over 600 feet.

Improbable.

Kingman at Wrigley in 1976
measured in at around 530.
A tenth.

Either way he found himself yawning,
fascinated.... and a game,
with himself and the road
he, on the spot, created.

Peering into the rear-view
he found the lines guiding him,
and decided to see if he could
drive a tenth of a mile without
looking ahead, or ending up dead.

He never made it,
eased up on the gas,
had a palpitating heart..

THAT was a blast.

No sleep O Nights

Yon Cassius done gone and croaked,
cashed in his chips, paid the cost.

( no big surprise )

When Charlie heard
his throat all up and choked,
then, never really ever wise,
down deep, something snapped,
all ruined, wronged and warped and broke.

So he stopped and stooped to eulogize
a guy whose eyes never more
to be seen all welled
with emotion over some thing,
small, obscure, but bright
with life's thin brilliant thread-
a line, a song, a laugh, a look,
birdcall and wingflap,
books, broads, loves and lives
fought hard for and lost.

No, nevermore
(besides in dreams)
for lean Cassius
been found quite dead.

Aegean Blues: Tangent on an Homage

Charlie, draped in cool, loose linens,
leaned on his elbow,
solitary, smoking dreamily
on the port poop deck-
contemplating the Ancients, the Aegean-
riffling through a catalog of colours
in ‘is well worn mental microfiche.

Long ago New York’s
Lake Minnewaska had impressed,
but that wert vastly more violet
than what presently his
much amazed eyes caressed.

Cerulean, he thought, but
quick-rejected it in a logic
most non-Boolean.
Simply, it’d been used to death,
become modish, hip and
like “eclectic” years ago,
such terms he avoided
with every step and breath.

Profligate with what few
shekels he could cobble together,
he laughed to think that
he’d himself strongly chided for
a pilgrimage to a poet’s home
on the ozone-poor Chilean coast,
felt ridiculous viewing the shoes
of that noble Nobel Laureate’s
long dead mistress-cum-wife.
Now he’d extended himself to
an homage once removed-
to sail seas voyaged by a vagrant
Cypriot central character in Alvaro Mutis’
adventurous and mad imagination.

Gulls wheeled overhead and screeched,
Charlie lifted a sweating glass
of iced and milky ouzo,
toasted Maqroll the Gaviero,
his own crazed, peculiar life,
then moseyed on over to where
a crowd had gathered round
a boisterous group playing tavli.

The rowdy enthusiasm,
once near, he noted, contained
a strange, quite ragged edge.
The soldiers’ whoops
betrayed a banal brand
of male dismay/alarm,
as, in their sweaty midst,
an intriguing interloper was
hand’ly defeating them,
all deft, swift decisions,
her hands floating fine and fem’nine
amid the dice, their derision
and the odd forest of
their hairy forearms.

Charlie stayed on
while they played on
and, one after another,
like lemming leapers
they fell before her
bright, British laughter,
her elvin, dev’lish reveling
in their brute, brotherly squirming,
fixed in absurd and ancient sexism.

Turning then, cabin-bound,
to read, reflect, surmise and write,
a common closure to many
a past and future night,
when, sudden as a sneeze,
glimpsed he her green, green eyes.

Away he wobbled,
a jolted clown on jellied knees,
his so-susceptible mind awhirl-
peepers the exquisite emerald
of warm, remembered tropic seas-
a mermaid, unhobbled and wholly free
in the form of a tan-brown
shining, English girl.

Insomniac Imaginings

A week without sleep
and twitch-eyed Charlie
teetered on the brink
of construing Oblivion
a black boat-unsinkable-
keel carving out beyond
the roiling, infinite width
of all cosmic confluence-
therefore actually unthinkable.

Ode to Ye Ol' Olfactory

Cassius, lead-hearted and leery,
left a thread of tobacco smoke
wound among the sidewalk jasmine
where a mature couple kissed quietly,
mostly shadowed by oaks all
aloof and large, a hush in their canopies.

Passing, Cassius squirmed,
for as their shoulders shrugged sexily
felt he an interloper impotent
next to their exchange so sighingly
and obviously mutually munificent.

And so, through the over-hot April,
twilit with entropies and couplings colored,
with recollections plenty o' previous
fucked-up failures, like an exhaust
behind him, blending their bitterness
with the hot, honey-hung air
did Cassius up and quell by
smartly whistling William Tell.

Capacity

Cassius hunched slightly,

unwound his thought,

months bundled up,

where it had hibernated,

burbling, dark-brightly brooding.

Cummings was right,

imagining for his mom

“a garden of blackred roses.”

Judy Garland, broken,

jittery with amphetamine dreams

was righteous too,

or at least our man so supposes.

The delicate bones

of her inner ear a mere

a heart to hear, to hurt and heal.

Whose songstress lips

did part to bare her spirit in a kiss.

‘S not just San Franciscan fags

who lament the demise of a starlet

in the end-

certain tuneless songs, dirges,

sharp with laced regret

and lamentation depend as well

upon the empathetic descent

into such precise, bathetic

forms of lovelorn hell.

Cursing Chaucer

Cupid, bloodied to the elbow,
smearily dragged his arm
across his sweat-soaked brow,
grinned and watched the carnage
just off the starboard bow.


There, a pinkish frothing,
replete with Great White dorsals
and the disembodied limbs
of would be lovers,
straight suckered to the stupid site
of there own demise before
that Cupid's dev'lish eyes.

Later, Charlie, obtuse as ever,
contemplated the empty chum-bucket,
stinking in the bleak-bright winter sun.

Something akin to mock-horror arose,
a note of light-noir burbling up
through his obstinant lightness.

"A smorgasbord of stupidity,
sad, rote pseudo-romance,
coupled with dumb consumption
most certainly conspicuous..."

was what his once taut mind,
slackened over years of yearning
and unctous attempts at
understanding whispered weakly.

Piano, Piano...

A fellow more fully fucked
Charlie could not fathom.


Billy leaned heavily on two
horribly calloused and
bursitis bloated elbows,
gustily throwing back
Irish car-bombs-
reciting obscure Yeats.

His family, mostly buried,
with cancers riddled,
mowed down by amphetamine fueled
lorry drivers and, gen'rally,
victims to all manner of
spirit rending disaster.

Gen'rous William was-
and then some;

most notably
to the poor, unfortunately homely women
who themsleves threw,
without remnant of shame,
at unsuspecting non-locals
every fortnight or so.

In this saw our sentimental Chas
the trueness of his torn
but undefeated gallantry.

For, much to the surprise
and contradiction of the local
and much muck-minded local folk
Billy intervened in these pathetic scenes
and escorted them home himself.

And though the town was rife
with bawdy suppositions Charles'
few and discreet inquisitions in to
the few facts of these matters
confirmed his bleary, best
and hopeful suspicions-

all the lasses swore ( swearingly)
that nary a hammy hand was
ever laid upon them and
no fumey kisses e'er were attempted-

Old Billy just left them wobbling
at their front stoops with whatever
little dignity that hadn't managed
to throw away quite publicly.

Retrograde

Fattened Cassius croaked awake-
at hours deemed ungodly by his
previous, more profligate life.

Living, now,
among the vines
his ample, if only venal,
appetites ran almost amok
for the first few months
of a tumultuous matrimony-
made waking most nightmarish.

Careened he toward dissolution,
of mind and marriage,
and stung by schemesters
on his honeymoon,
he was plagued by paperwork,
creditors loomed, darkly large,
circling in his immoderate imagination.

He sucked slow, thick coffee
on the way to work,
scowling silently,
steeped in stupidity,
himself upbraiding unrelentingly.

Detritus Dance: A Prayer

Cassius nearly cooed,
then actually crooned
with unexpected pleasure-

well-read, unaffected poetry
miraculously piped into his car radio
while he wound his way through
the sensuous and undulating hills
of Sonoma County on the way to
visit his bosom brother and
his wacky new wife.

And there amid the new grass,
the striking sun now unstuck
after a three day rain,
a calf suckling sweetly at the udder,
and farther along a plastic bag
dancing fleetly and forlorn
in a barbed-wire embrace...

then ..

something akin to rhythm
drove his inner voice.

It was the first time
in many months.

And he was happy-
gave prayerful thanks
while rain clouds in the distance,
toward the sea,
gathered, darkening.

Choo-Choo Cha Boogie

Breached our Cassius
forcefully from the cold, dark
briny deeps of dream-
as if drunk and by a
cruel and rage crazed
Sandman cudgeled.

Wearily wobbled he
into the relative warmth
of more common consciousness,
his psyche shaken and bruised
by the blunt blows of imagery incarnadine.

Ill-lit and rattly trains transporting
fearful families into vague danger,
some grappling with grim Big-Brother types
dividing the desperate alliances formed
wordlessly, instantly, wild-eyed
and, in the end, weakly
against the true, inhuman terror
of the unspoken destination.