Haiku, 5/16/26

 I waken early

To half-darkness half-daylight --

A mourning dove sings.

Pandemonium

Hortus, a suburban devil of Pandemonium,
Is lonely tonight for want of a loyal friend:
Anyone, sick or foul, human or fiend,
Even a specter enriched with plutonium.
The lights glare like angry souls at the palace,
And the burning rivers between here and there
Drown out the sweet, anguished tintamarre
Of endless victims of his own so-called malice.
Cold comfort for Hortus, who once boasted
The brightest shield and the longest spear,
Who stalked the palace halls without fear,
Now to stand out here, alone and untoasted.
"Curse you all!" he cries, "I don't deserve this!"
But knows there's no leaving Satan's service.

The Power of Babble

Their hero made sentences not drawings

With crayons and one day broke in half

Eighty-eight in the box (for no reason),

Leaving little pieces for the cawings

He scribbled so his friends might read and laugh.

No judge would banish him for this treason.

He built a tower to gild his language,

Then praised their god when his hate made them spit

At words others spoke and rip up the page

They'd written, substituting bullshit.

The tower still stands, rotting and silent,

But for the greatest of men who scribbles

On a clapper-less bell senseless dribble. 

Asleep, he mumbles alone in his tent.

Joker Jokes

“Now, my dears, keep watching the ace.

My favorite card — it has no face

And just one itty bitty heart.

Hee, hee! It can’t squeak out a fart

The way the queen of spades

Will to call forth some dainty maids

To please her king of diamonds,

Who’ll grab one with a showbiz mons.

Now, see? Your lazy eyes don’t peel

On the ace! It has disappeared!

Where’d it go? It’s as I feared,

Some joker has stolen the deal.

Why, that’s me! I rule the whole deck.

Every card’s at my call and beck!”

On T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Sonnet #617

One hundred and four years ago

He diagnosed our vertigo.

His scalpel cut beneath the skin

And removed original sin.

He held it in his palsied hands —

The nothing he left on Margate Sands.

It’s only gotten worse since then —

The commandments are ten times ten. 

Dust is fear and the unreal real.

Now it’s not what you think, but feel.

A cacophony of voices

Warns us to forget all choices.

As night falls a whimpered prayer

Confuses the canting slayer.

Death and the Miser

There’s one bastard that Death doesn't yet want --
A man He's content to smilingly haunt,
To assure that he hasn't forgotten
What comes. "Maybe when your mind's most rotten,"
He whispers from behind the sickroom door.
The man, a murdering conquistador,
And raper of the widows of the poor,
Cut a priest's throat to settle an old score,
And sold babies to feed a king's prize boar.
Delectable crimes for Death -- no reason
Not to take this human in his season.
His disgust is with the miser's grasping
Love of Death’s own hot and eternal sting.

Another War

I drew a high number the last year of the draft,
But a childhood disease would have kept me 4-F.
I have a misshapen hip and couldn't force-march
Or negotiate a pitching deck, fore to aft.
I lost no friend or brothers to war; no one left
My high school to volunteer; no triumphal arch,
No memorial was erected in our town,
No first-hand accounts of battle were written down.
The nightly news showed all there was to see of death
And defeat: we lose each war the minute one man
Fails to open his eyes or to take a next breath,
And new wars start soon enough, because they can.
We launch and drop bombs and bombs and more bombs,
Generously, Samaritans offering alms.

His Majesty

He’s demanded they support his habits

Of frothing, striking, biting, and killing.

His followers, all mice, rats and rabbits,

Beg his mercy upon them, his willing

And most abject obedient subjects.

“What?” he soothes them. “I’m only kidding.

Act as you believe, not at my bidding.”

His cringing rodents think he suspects

Some treachery. Their leader, a wild hare,

Steps forward, bowing low, and says, “Please, sire.

We pledge ourselves to your every desire.

For you we would run with our asses bare!”

“Do so! As I am all you’ve ever feared!”

They ate each other when he disappeared.

Unbridled Folly

He liked to ride bare-assed on a stallion,

Which he left unbridled and unsaddled.

(Some said his mind was idled and addled.)

He thought he commanded a battalion

Of shiny battleships and rugged tanks,

Would tolerate no genius in the ranks.

He commanded the firing of blanks

To force the surrender of cash-stuffed banks.

Clutching golden mane he charged the fray,

Screaming “Follow me, suckers!” at his troops,

Spanking with his crop his poor mount’s sore croup,

Reducing that proud steed’s neighs to a bray.

The exhausted beast reared, bit the golf shirt

Off our hero and tossed him in his dirt.

The Age of Aggravation

I can handle anxiety today

With a pill and a sip of water.

It comes from nowhere

And has little reason to exist.

Yea, I worry about this and that,

The bomb and global warming,

Without thinking, concentrating,

Like a deer in summer hiding

Its does though hunting season

Is an unrealizable future.

I like to think that all is well —

I mean the essential things,

From family to home and work —

I could explain why I’m right.

Then why is everyone so angry?

I refuse to recite the reasons.

They are invisible chimeras 

Of fear, corpses of inconsequence.

A few mad apples, rolling, legless,

Without sense or innocence,

Which won’t die before they rot.

What we used to call ideas

Are now ravenous ouroboros.

Oh, such satiety in aggravation! 

Memento Mori

I found the image in the attic,

In the half-light blurred, static,

Like a votive, intensely vatic.

In a shadow box, five white stones

All shaped like finger bones

Arrange in a question mark,

A gesture beckoning a dark

Something beyond conceiving

Into the emptiness of believing.

I took it and nailed it to a wall

Downstairs, only to watch it fall,

Its glass crack, the stones scatter.

I think they no longer matter,

But I’m wrong. I see them still,

Years later. They won’t, and will.

They're like ghosts no ghost can kill.

Opposition

At the point of the intersection

between the theoretical line

and point, there’s a dimension,

not of space, nor of time

(those have been imagined

more thoroughly than I’m

imagined by myself), but of sin.

Not the brand to trouble God,

this sin is words that begin

without being misunderstood

(because the speaker winks!)

and conclude that bad is good.

I think the pine trees think

in theorems, plane geometry;

their sap is magnetic ink,

and the splash of red I see

in rose, cardinal and Mars,

is blood escaped from my body --

as if I had come from a star

to civilize this wilderness.

The beach is the registrar

of every grain of sand. Mass

is energy’s conscience

and confessor. The soul is a gas.

Yet, right angles, in defiance

of the circle’s perfection,

assume the world, and science

escapes reality’s detection.

Violence in Peacetime

How orderly the mowers sound,

blades mincing, round and round,

the tender blades of grass.

I hear the boots of killers pass

beneath my curtained window —

look out to know where they go.

Curse

Can a country be under a curse, 

A few words of malignant verse

Chanted inside a racing hearse?

To hell with superstition!

A man, cults, and institutions

Have turned our nation sour.

The Mind has forgotten the hour

Can grow late

Growing hate,

Like an ocean filling with plastic

Leaving life crippled and spastic.

The curse is proliferating thought

That the future can be bought

And as quickly taken away —

Only the loudest given a say.

Will the worst curse have its day?

The Death of Galileo

Galileo is gone and forgotten.

The earth is again as flat as a coin

Around which the sun is quickly slowing,

Nourishing all that is raw and rotten.

A feather falls faster than a lead ball.

Beelzebub erases your recall.

The bald liar is our new scientist;

There is no proven fact he cannot twist.

Poor Galileo was forced to recant:

Today we have the canting sycophant.

Hence it’s obvious that the earth must cool;

To think differently proves one a fool.

I’ve seen a bald eagle flying backward.

A plague of fat rats invades my front yard.

Haiku, 2/3/26

A walk in deep snow —

Think of nothing but troubles —

Rabbit tracks just stop

LIGHT

A beam of light cutting the skin of space

travels at the speed of time to the beginning,

the end of things, seeing everything between,

without being seen.

Or a single photon released into a sphere

lined with silver, instantaneously covering

all of space, repeating that cold cycle endlessly,

as if someone might see.

It is a discrete miracle, like a man’s soul,

a point on a continuum proliferating one day

to saturate the universe with something better

than gas, heat, matter. 

It is moonlight, the boxes sketched on the floor

at two thirty three in the morning, a lighter 

shade of light. Watch it turn the earth.

It is promiscuous,

infecting its neighbors, or looking to.

It stretches across the sky like an eyelid

and proliferates color like a drug dream.

It splits the prism

into living spectra, dulls the magnifying glass,

blanches the dead leaf, burns the cloud white; 

it is nothing at all—until it strikes something.

Holy Blood

Here is Purgatory too: vines and flowers
Extend from a woman's neck, but her legs wander
Away beneath a shower of black holy blood.
A chemo spirit struts, though she's lost her powers
To console or restore the faith others squander,
Lost all but her rage to escape the coming flood.
Little live hands reach through the clouds yearning to touch
What they can't comprehend, like the Klein-bottle-brained
Devil with the tied shoestring eyes, who knows too much.
He is no god, this clown, though he has often reigned.

DONkey Wrong

The old Donkey, at his prayers,

Ignores his betters, those brayers.

His missal is the alphabet,

Which he hasn’t quite mastered yet.

His teachers wield a paddle of wood

That stings him like gold donkey flies

When he don’t learn his lessons good,

Like mistaking his “Green” for “Ice.”

“Shouldn’t the pupil know more?”

We wonder, “perhaps he’s an Ass?”

His brothers honk a mocking snore

And let a mephitic cloud pass.

The pupil thinks, They will be damned,

But first I need my cranium crammed.

The Truth Well

Both the Truth and the liars are hidden

And will not come forth to speak unbidden

By necessity’s will or convenience,

Unless called for by fakery of sense.

At the bottom of a stinking dry well —

Half way, the easy half, from here to Hell —

Where nakedness — dear Truth — shivers and sighs —

Will Emptiness stitch golden clothes of lies.

He emerges to strut in his glory.

Every sentence he spouts is a story.

The Truth, her bruised body cleansed at least,

Climbs out to the reception of a beast.

They beat and rape her, drag her by her hair,

Throw her back into the well, her dark lair.

The Murderer

 The job is done, the murder weapon stashed;

A beautiful young woman bashed and slashed.

The killer and his partners listen intently,

Moved to inaction by a simple song

A woman sings with soft intensity,

As if her passion could efface a wrong

Perpetrated with mountainous cruelty.

Will speechless bystanders be sufficient

To subdue the heartless secret agent?

The song is over, yet they hesitate.

Three observers, representing the State,

All alike, unblinkingly accuse us

Of the action's unconscionable causes.

There is much more for us to do than wait.

The Reversal of There

I rarely walk beyond that tree

That is home to birds —

And air — too close

To the undermined

Riverbank.

I’ve tried holding

The tree — hands uncertain—

Taking a step —only one —

A test of courage —

A test of foolishness.

Even at flood height 

The water invites —

And seems — at times —

To flow in reverse — back

Up between its banks —

I follow from here.