heretical tall tales

life is not poetic
wonder is owner misspelled
the more you try to dissect it
the less you let it live

your fragile gasp is heard twelve light years away
magic is not articulatable.
the washing machine also folds.
poetry is not the center of life
you are. not! i am. not. and 2
what 4 the foo

the difference between you and i my friend
is the difference between a rose and an orchid.
a very small orchid. a very florid rose.


when the morning sun comes up
buhdda squats if the rice bowl was full
after the poem he recited to the villagers
yesterday afternoon one which is dead
now; he must find a new one. and if the rice
bowl was empty he must find a different one.

he watches the line of ants busy marking
the tree with today's path. this takes half
the morning and at the end of it, he rises
pisses, stretches and heads off to the circle

you would like to know what he's going to say.
he has no idea. this is a cheat. make up your own
stories he tells the village, lowers the bucket
into the well and drinks. what did we do

the villagers wonder, to make the buhdda leave us that way
and will it work on the others?













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mind meld requries a meditational point
which you did n ot introduce jack
otherwise each of us will see the elephant differently.


()()()()()()()()()()()(****90909090909090990















stone timber of the west
the judas tree's benediction
how your apt is my trailer is finch's house is the top
floor of eshcer's first house whose balcony stairway leads
directly to the shores of a river in lachine where djuana
watches the winter birds picnic on the crumbs she spread
like a swinging psalter's smoke over the lack of snow
and coldness and quiet of winter. where are the frozen ponds, now?

















899*(((


patterns

~i have lost my faith in science

bette davis



what should be the next sequence of characters.
sunday afternoon when you send the kids outside
the laundry spinning out the rinse, sleep holding its own
in her room where she shelters some strange
street boy who could fondle her anywhere.

all the winds come up at once and empty the landscape.
you try to talk to him about the future but you dont' want to me hear.
i'll be dead then, morbidly alive, zombie, fruitfly of your past
you close the door and listen to my typing. some minds
don't need a group. the last of the crows lines up on the tower
and begin to shit a new one. landscape. follow the logic please.
this is creation we're witnessing



















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after the dispossesion- accomplished
with handbills and scraps of papers, signatures
acceding the future-we wandered the land
picking crops. cotton first, then the dry thistles
of the mojave, aroyo, agave, saguaro. we lived on peyote
and tequilla till we got to the promised land
picked peaches and oranges, our backs pelted with
ladders, our stomaches full of pits. there was no one
to rescue us, we were not rescued. after wards
a marble statue was erected somewhere, in memory.
but the memory was a lie. did you get all this? still we loved.
we gave even the dog a ride in our truck. you can call us stupid
but you don't know love like that. ignorant, but you haven't tasted
our blood from the inside, yet you believe in your nobility.
i have met you in the caves of altamira and you spilled my intestines
for the gods you create. still, i keep bearing children.
still i persist in creation. eat lime chalk on the borderland of starvation.













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there are groups and there are
groups. a watering hole with arsenic
statically formed in long cylinders not bisecting
or intersecting with the sweet water.
depending on morphology, you must lick the right spot.
to drink of this is to risk death.
but you are so thirsty.